Wild in Captivity (The Captivity Alaska Series) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Content Warning

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more Amara titles… Written for You

  It’s Raining Men

  A Lot Like Love

  The Wedding Dilemma

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Samanthe Beck. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  10940 S Parker Rd

  Suite 327

  Parker, CO 80134

  [email protected]

  Amara is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Heather Howland

  Cover design by Bree Archer

  Cover photography by FXQuadro/Shutterstock

  [email protected]/DepositPhotos

  ISBN 978-1-64937-240-6

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition October 2021

  At Entangled, we want our readers to be well-informed. If you would like to know if this book contains any elements that might be of concern for you, please check the book’s webpage for details.

  https://entangledpublishing.com/books/wild-in-captivity

  To the bear daddies of the world…

  and the people who love them!

  Chapter One

  Isabelle Marcano was hard up.

  She freely admitted as much as she clung to her rattling armrests and clenched her equally rattling back teeth. She hadn’t participated in two-party, sheet-tangling, flesh-slapping sex in so long that her best friend Danny insisted she’d attained a second virginity.

  But no amount of dick, not even copious amounts of “bear-daddy dick” Danny had promised would be as rugged, untamed, and plentiful as the land in which it allegedly roamed free, was worth this…this…

  She couldn’t even call it a flight.

  This slingshot ride through seven levels of hell.

  While the cloud-packed horizon tilted sharply to the left, her mind flashed back to her discussion with Danny that morning after a client meeting. Before she’d rushed to LAX to catch her solid, safety-feature-laden commercial flight for the Los Angeles to Seattle leg of her journey.

  Danny, I object, on principle, to any phrase that includes the words “daddy” and “dick” in close proximity.

  Oh, honey, relax. A bear daddy is an archetype, not an actual father. He’s a big, bearded beast who will bend you into whatever position you like best and have you screaming “Daddy!” by the time he’s done with you. A place like Captivity, Alaska? That’s bear daddy central, Izzy. You could trap yourself a fresh one every night of the week. Go wild in Captivity.

  It had sounded too good to be true at the time, but a mere eight hours later she would happily forfeit Danny’s wildest bear daddy fantasies for solid ground. They weren’t worth the risk of becoming a small aircraft fatality statistic.

  Nor is a promotion, her frantic mind added as the horizon reeled back to the right. Not even a promotion to junior partner at the Los Angeles law firm where she’d dutifully put in eighty billable-hour weeks for the last five years.

  The vibrating sardine-can of a bush plane took a hard bounce, launching her stomach into her chest, then suddenly dropped, as if whatever magical forces which enabled flight had instantly and decisively evaporated, and the stunning freefall lodged her heart into her throat, choking off a scream.

  Sweet magnetic Jesus on the dashboard! A card-carrying member of all the major airline clubs didn’t scream out loud from turbulence. She might sweat through her favorite Max Mara suit. She might ruin her one-day-old manicure. And as soon as she could reach her purse, she would sure as hell dry swallow the ashwagandha-based natural anti-anxiety tablets she’d bought at the airport store in L.A. But she would not scream.

  The man at the controls beside her cursed under his breath, as if their plummet to earth amounted to a minor annoyance. He did something that shot them out of the downward funnel and put the craft into a shivering climb. She risked a full breath and a glance in his direction.

  Danny was the expert, but to her admittedly untrained eye, her pilot checked all the bear daddy boxes. His scent, an unapologetic combination of bar soap and testosterone, dominated her senses. His thick, black hair had missed more than one trim, and waved over an angled forehead, complimenting a complexion that boasted the all-season tan of someone who spent a great deal of time outdoors. A strong, straight nose punctuated his profile, and a beard-darkened jaw closed the deal. The man oozed bear daddy. Even the silver-rimmed aviators hiding his glacier-blue eyes failed to add a veneer of urbanity. His lumberjack build filled the cockpit just as fully as his air of raw masculinity.

  Unfortunately, he was her firm’s client and Captivity Air’s CEO, Trace Shanahan, which put him off-limits according to professional ethics. Also, when he’d met up with her in Anchorage to fly her to their final destination of remote Captivity, he’d looked her up and down with that riveting gaze that had struck her as a little sad. Then, his eyes had narrowed, filled with consternation and—unless she’d read it wrong—disapproval.

  What he might disapprove of, she couldn’t fathom. They’d only exchanged enough words to confirm each other’s identities and get her and her large, monogrammed trunk loaded into the winged coffin he currently labored to keep airborne.

  Maybe Trace distrusted a female attorney to handle his side of the proposed sale of his interest in Captivity Air and Freight to the larger, California-based carrier, Skyline Air? Whatever the reason for his forbidding demeanor, it factored into her determination not to scream, or otherwise embarrass herself, as she confronted her doom.

  It was a crying shame. A shame he was a client, possibly a chauvinist, and she was about to die a reclaimed virgin, because inhaling his down-market soap, or pheromones, or both, while watching him manhandle the little plane, made her imagine brawny, uncivilized Shanahan manhandling her. He wouldn’t even have to speak. He could just grunt heavily while fucking her brains out.

  All of the men in her world were highly civilized. They fell into two categories—attorney at law, gay, or, like Danny, they occupied that overlapping segment of the Venn diagram encompassing both. Such was her life as a single girl in West Hollywood.

  The plane leveled o
ut with a nauseating shimmy.

  Thanks to Trace’s rush to depart ahead of the storm now threatening to spit them out of the sky, she just might hurl a gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian Alaskan Airlines business class lunch all over the limited edition suit she’d planned to exchange for casual traveling clothes after her breakfast meeting. Sadly, the meeting ran long. Then she’d hoped to change upon arriving in Anchorage, but her flight had hit delays. Shanahan had stressed the need to get back in the air ahead of the blizzard, so she’d let it go. Assuming she survived this death-spiral into the Great North, she hoped her white-glove dry cleaner could erase an afternoon’s worth of abject panic from the suit.

  Another air pocket sucked the plane downward in two bone jarring drops.

  This is it, Izzy. Your abrupt and tragic end. She peered out the side window. A couple jagged, snowcapped peaks jutted through roiling gray clouds. You don’t want to be here for it.

  She didn’t. Eyes squeezed shut, she dug through the slouchy Gucci bag that had gobbled up a ridiculous chunk of her first-year bonus, now shoved unceremoniously under her seat. Finally, she snagged the supplement bottle. She didn’t need to read the label to recall the dosage instructions—one tablet, as needed, to restore natural calm and balance to the body. True, she’d consumed a glass of cabernet on her prior flight and the makers of the product probably didn’t recommend enhancing the effects with alcohol, but all bets were off in the face of impending death. Especially painful, terrifying impending death. She wrenched the cap open, brought the bottle to her lips, and let the jostling of the plane tumble a tablet into her mouth. The next sudden drop had her gulping it down with barely a gasp. She screwed the cap on and tossed the bottle into the purse that had once been a trophy of her hard work and accomplishments. Soon to be a burned, battered artifact of a bush plane crash on the crest of some godforsaken mountain.

  The aircraft went into another dive, perhaps deliberate this time, since the maneuver felt slower and more measured. Over the rattle and hum of the engines she realized Shanahan spoke. To her?

  She forced her eyes open and, from behind the protection of her polarized Persols, looked at his profile. “What?”

  The word came out a thin whisper, inaudible over the noise of the plane, but it didn’t matter because he’d been speaking into his headset, rather than to her.

  His deep voice and unhurried words seemed too calm for a mayday call. Was he speaking with a tower somewhere? Please God. Perhaps radioing their coordinates so a search party could eventually recover their bodies and give her loved ones the comfort of a proper funeral?

  For some reason the thought gave rise to an image of Danny standing at the head of the large conference table at the firm, delivering her eulogy to a packed house of staff, associates and partners. He wore a tuxedo—weird—and held a flute of champagne as he addressed the room with his patented look of dry amusement.

  Many of you claim you’d die to make partner, but our lovely, overachieving Isabelle actually did it. That fact might lead you to believe professional ambition guided her life, but Izzy had other goals and other reasons for making the journey to Captivity. She wasn’t just a top-flight lawyer, she was a woman, with a woman’s hopes. A woman’s dreams. A woman’s…needs. Needs that drove her all the way to the frozen north for the most prized and elusive of rewards—rugged, tireless sex with rugged, tireless men. We can only pray that somewhere in heaven she’s finally found the bear daddy of her dreams.

  He raised his glass. To bear-daddy dick.

  Everyone lifted their glasses.

  To bear-daddy dick.

  …

  As Trace finished giving Captivity Airstrip his who, what, and where, he heard an unexpected noise coming from his cockpit. Laughter? He glanced over at the little lawyer the firm had sent to help him navigate due diligence for the proposed sale. Yep, the Ariana Grande lookalike in the Devil Wears Prada wardrobe giggled, caught him watching, covered her mouth with her hand and giggled again.

  He cocked a brow. “Problem?”

  She shook her head, then firmed her lips into a serious line and dropped her hand. “Nope. No problem here. Please, don’t let me distract you from…” She gestured to the controls.

  Okaaay. She’d held her shit together the whole way through the kind of flight that left free-climbers, big-game hunters, and other wilderness thrill seekers clutching the airsick bag and crying for mommy, but apparently even a city-slick transactional attorney from the esteemed firm of Hecker, Hiltz & Reynolds had her limits.

  Still, not a problem. He’d flown in worse than the leading edge of the kind of late-breaking March blizzard Mother Nature occasionally decided to dump on them. They’d be on the ground shortly. That’s when his problems would start. Today’s problems, at any rate.

  He snuck another look at his passenger seat, where problem number one currently sat, and thought back to the conversation he’d had last week with Chuck Reynolds—longtime family friend and a founding partner of the law firm. Chuck understood how quickly news traveled in a town the size of Captivity and supported his desire to keep the prospective sale off the local radar until he’d come to a definitive go/no-go decision. Chuck had promised him an associate who would blend in and pass for one of those outdoor adventure enthusiasts Captivity attracted.

  The fashionista beside him did not blend in. From his position at the foot of the escalator at the Anchorage Airport, she’d caught his eye. He’d taken her in from the tips of her glossy, black heels that showed off truly spectacular legs, to the mouthwatering curves and hint of cleavage revealed by her sleek, red suit, to her Instagram-perfect makeup and smooth twist of thick, dark hair. And he’d enjoyed every second of the visual feast—more than he’d enjoyed anything for months—until she’d approached close enough for him to pick up her sophisticated, ruthlessly sexy scent, and asked, “Mr. Shanahan?” in a voice just as sophisticated and ruthlessly sexy.

  He’d considered asking her to change into something more appropriate, but their window of time for making the run from Anchorage to Captivity was simply too tight, given the coming storm. Besides, after getting a look at her oversized piece of designer luggage and the cashmere coat draped over her arm, he strongly doubted she had anything more appropriate. He doubted she knew the meaning of the word.

  So now, in mere minutes, they’d arrive at the airfield where a handful of staff would get a good look at Isabelle Marcano, extreme Alaska adventure seeker, and know something didn’t add up. At no time during their hour-and-thirty-minute flight had any flash of inspiration struck. He didn’t know how he was going to explain her to his team. Half the town already wondered about the purpose of his recent spate of trips to the City of Los Angeles.

  According to fellow pilot Maddox “Mad Dog” Douglas, the odds were two-to-one at The Tipsy Goose on Trace having a hot-and-heavy affair with at least one member of the bachelorette party that had spent time in Captivity last summer on a roundabout tour of Glacier Bay National Park. A party of seven twenty-something women—six of them unattached—garnered a legendary amount of interest around these parts. He honestly couldn’t remember a single one of them, probably because they’d known how to blend in, but he’d thought about dropping by the bar and putting a hundred on the hot-and-heavy affair option.

  At least Bridget had gotten stuck overnight in Anchorage on account of the storm, so his sister wouldn’t be the first in line calling bullshit on whatever explanation he offered for his guest, but still.

  He was screwed.

  Trace nudged his worry aside to concentrate on the landing. The plane cut through the lowest layer of clouds like a samurai sword through silk, bringing his hometown into sight. Though still shy of seven p.m. the coming storm brought an early, dense dusk to mute the view. Instead of a deeply blue curve of water ringed by a thin rim of sand the color of the littleneck clamshells that littered the beach, Captivity Cove was a gray, churning
soup. Lights from the small boat harbor, the standalone dock for the cruise ship shore boats, and the Captivity Air and Freight dock floated near shore. All those docks and everything else along the fringes of the cove would likely be coated in ice by morning.

  Streetlights dotted the perimeter of the cove, following the slightly meandering route of Coveside Drive. Smaller, dimmer lights sprinkled the hills overlooking the cove, where, on a clear day, passengers could see the painted ladies of Captivity. Those brightly colored, historic wooden storefronts in town mixed Old West durability with Victorian flourishes. Larger, equally colorful and historic—or built to look that way—homes nestled amongst the spruce-lined slopes that eventually climbed toward a five-thousand-foot mountain the locals dubbed Kat’s Peak. Their ancient and mighty corner of the Chilkat range backstopped everything.

  Normally, he spent this time pointing out the various attractions to his passengers, but visibility wasn’t optimal this evening, and the woman beside him wasn’t a tourist. He looked over to where she sat, staring straight ahead through unnecessary sunglasses, smoothing a hand over her sleek hairdo and licking the vestiges of red gloss from her lips with the tip of her tongue. She probably didn’t give a damn about any destination that didn’t have a Saks Fifth Avenue outpost and a five-star spa, but as he watched her pink tongue slide over those Cupid’s bow lips, he discovered his dick didn’t give a damn that she didn’t give a damn.

  Mentally, he sighed. What excellent timing for this particular bear to come out of hibernation now, at the most improbable of provocations. High-maintenance women weren’t his type, and everything about Isabelle Marcano, Esq. screamed high-maintenance, from her fitted suit and impractical shoes, right down to that absurdly sexy scent filling his cockpit.

  He banked the plane a few degrees westward, so Captivity Air filled his windshield. Beyond the dock, where they embarked and disembarked for water or ice landings, stretched the tidy Y-shaped runways, the red-shingled terminal capped by its distinctive crow’s nest, and metal hangars of the air and freight company his great-grandparents had founded almost eighty years ago.