On his first night renting a cottage on the Cornish coast, widower John Tennant comes face to face with, of all things, a grizzly bear. Fearing for his life, John tries to convince the animal he isn't worth eating, and is relieved when the bear ambles away. Maintenance man Mitch Benjamin is two hundred years old but doesn’t look a day over forty. As a werebear, he needs to stay under the radar. The new renter is making that difficult. Not only is John attractive, but his vulnerability triggers all of Mitch’s protective instincts. If that wasn’t trouble enough, Mitch is struggling with his inner bear’s desire to befriend John. He knows what his bear is up to, but Mitch doesn’t want another mate. His last one was murdered ninety years ago, and he’s still grieving. John is confused by Mitch’s mixed signals. Physically, Mitch -- with his bulging muscles and hulking frame -- is a gay man’s wet dream come true. But emotionally, he keeps closing down. John discovers more comfort with the magnificent grizzly bear he occasionally meets on his evening walks along the beach. In an effort to help, Morwenna, the owner of the cottages, uses her psychic gifts to give John a message from his dead lover, George. Far from helping, it adds another layer of strangeness to what’s already turning out to be the strangest summer John can remember. Can a well-meaning medium and a determined grizzly bring John and Mitch together? Will Mitch come clean about his werebear nature? If he does, can John accept that a man and bear exist in the same body?

Summer's Lease

“Oh, okay.” John looked crestfallen. “Later then.”


Mitch watched John close the cottage door, wishing he had the same courage as his bear. But then, Mitch concluded, his bear didn’t have to deal with the same responsibilities that he did.


Letting himself into his own cottage, Mitch could tell his bear was disgusted with him. “If it’s any comfort, Teddy,” he said aloud, “I’m disgusted with myself, too.”  11


John sat in a window seat in the cafeteria at the further education college in Newquay. He tried not to stare too often over at the classroom on the other side of the quadrangle, a classroom where Mitch and six or seven other people were having their first adult literacy lesson.


It had taken Mitch two weeks since his moonlit confession in the pub car park to raise the subject of maybe learning to read.


Chapter 48