Bear With Me
(a novella)
As a ranger at the remote Peninsula National Park, Mira spends her days observing Kodiak bears, interacting with park visitors, and achieving low-level Internet fame as the face of Big Bear Week, the park’s annual competition to crown the fattest Kodiak. She’s famously great with the bears, even better with park visitors, and perfectly happy with her life in Sockeye, Alaska—as long Lauren Sorrell’s not around.
Mira’s closest neighbor is an arborist, a successful novelist, and unbearably hot in a way that tangles Mira’s smart tongue in knots. It’s such a problem in a town of three hundred people.
When a bear visits Mira’s porch late one night and leaves a gift, it raises questions she can’t answer that upset her comfortable routine. Worse, Lauren keeps showing up at inconvenient moments, and Mira’s favorite bear and closest confidante, Darling, isn’t acting like herself. With Big Bear Week in full swing, Mira finds herself questioning the world she thought she understood—and falling fast for a woman whose secrets threaten everything Mira believes she knows.
Content Warnings: on-page sexual intimacy and sex between cisgender queer couple; adult language; mystical/spiritual shifter storyline without explanatory lore; human-bear interaction with implied threat of bodily harm to human; cisgender white male coworker secondary character who has no excuse not to be farther along in his ally journey, but who makes progress via genuine respect for main character and listening to consistent callouts.
* Low-angst, low-conflict romance
* Focus on character triumphs and gifts
* Fluff/steam/relaxing and humorous read
* Bears, park rangers, & small-town Northern Exposure vibes
* Found family
Mira’s closest neighbor is an arborist, a successful novelist, and unbearably hot in a way that tangles Mira’s smart tongue in knots. It’s such a problem in a town of three hundred people.
When a bear visits Mira’s porch late one night and leaves a gift, it raises questions she can’t answer that upset her comfortable routine. Worse, Lauren keeps showing up at inconvenient moments, and Mira’s favorite bear and closest confidante, Darling, isn’t acting like herself. With Big Bear Week in full swing, Mira finds herself questioning the world she thought she understood—and falling fast for a woman whose secrets threaten everything Mira believes she knows.