BEAR WITH ME
A BBW Paranormal Romance By..
JASMINE WHITE
Summary
A routine camping trip for Helen and her mother turns into drama when Helen's mother goes missing without a trace.
Enter the hunky and handsome David. He is the forest's resident Werebear and he advises Helen comes with him if she ever wants to see her mother alive again.
But can she trust this mysterious stranger? Is he really planning to help her or does he have motives of his own?
Copyright Notice
Jasmine White
Bear With Me © 2014, Tia Archer
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
Contents
Chapter1
Chapter2
Chapter3
Chapter4
Chapter5
Chapter6
Chapter7
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Chapter1
I pulled up alongside my mother’s house and plastered a smile on my face. I checked my smile quickly in the rear-view mirror for authenticity. It wasn’t perfect – there was something in my eyes that refused to cooperate with my lips – but it would have to do. Now to go inside and see if she notices my fake grin.
For the hundredth time that day, I asked myself exactly why I had thought it a good idea to suggest that my mother and I spend the weekend together in a small tent, in an isolated part of the forest, with only each other for company.
Then for the hundredth time that day, I told myself sternly that it was madness. I was as crazy as she was. I should make up an excuse to get out of it somehow – I was sick, I had suddenly remembered a deadline I had forgotten about, anything! Then I could turn my car around and drive a hundred miles in the opposite direction.
The lace curtains in the front window twitched and caught my attention. There she stood - her round, pale face peeking hesitantly in the tiny crack in the curtains. Seeing me, she wiggled her fingers in the tiniest, most inconspicuous of waves, and grinned broadly. The stark relief on her face made me cringe inwardly and, for the hundredth time that day, I yelled at myself for being so damned selfish. Despite the endless phone calls I had made, reassuring her over and over again that yes I would be picking her up on Friday at four pm, she had still doubted me. It was as though she had read my mind and knew how much I didn’t want to spend time with her.
But, at the end of the day, she was my mother. She drove me nuts. She made me question my own sanity. She made me want to scream and tear out my hair. But, in the end, I love her and I would do anything for her.
Baring my teeth into an even wider smile, I waved back, braced myself, and opened my door to welcome her. Little did I know this would be an interesting weekend in more ways then one.
*
She dipped her head in that apologetic little bow she always did, hesitated, then leaned up to kiss me on the cheek. Her lips were cold and hard, and it was all I could do not to wince.
Seventy-two hours and counting, I told myself with gritted teeth.
“You’re looking well,” Mom told me earnestly, pulling me into the lounge. “It feels like forever since I last saw you…” her voice trailed off in reproach.
“Yeah well.” I shrugged awkwardly. “I’ve been busy with school. Sorry. Anyway, I figured this would give us time for a decent catch up. Just you and me, right?” My own voice – bright and fake – was painful to my own ears.
But Mom didn’t seem to notice. She squeezed my hand tightly, delighted with my enthusiasm. “A proper catch up,” she echoed, smiling at the feel of the words on her tongue. “Yeah, it’s been long overdue. I’ve been looking forward to it for ages.”
Every word sounded like a reproach; every word a criticism of me as a daughter. I could feel my head beginning to ache with the strain of it already. It would almost be better if she yelled at me – telling me how much she hated me for not doing more, for not being better, for being the selfish bitch that I knew I was. Anything was more bearable than this pathetic, scraping gratitude. It was like she was a whipped dog, begging for scraps of affection, no matter how sparse. I wished I had never come. I wished that I had the courage to say ‘fuck it’ and just leave.
I glanced past her to the old, blue plastic clock mounted above the door. Seventy-one hours and fifty-five minutes to go… I was pretty sure that this was going to be the longest, most excruciating weekend of my life.
*
My car was so full, with the door of the trunk practically straining from the ridiculous amount of camping gear I managed to stuff into it. I can feel every single bump in the road on our way to the Vanderwhacker Mountain Wild Forest. I chose our destination based on my roommate’s recommendation – apparently she’d been going there every summer without fail for the past decade or so. I figured, if she can stand to spend time with her whole family with going completely stir crazy and want to keep going back, it must be something pretty special.
So far on our road trip, Mom was doing a pretty decent job of driving me mad. We’d been sitting in the car for two hours straight and she had not shut up for a single second. And it wasn’t interesting, two-way conversation, like you’d expect from your mother who you only saw once in a blue moon – she never once asked me anything about myself, about school or my friends or guys – it was just two solid hours of inane babble. She seemed to take great pleasure in providing a running commentary of our trip, like a broken discount GPS, pointing out everything from gas prices every time we passed a station to reading the number plates of the other cars around us, as if somewhere it contained crucial information.
Never had I been so grateful for the Delilah Show.
Everything was pitch black by the time we turned off onto the gravel road which lead us far away from the clamour of the highway and down into the secluded valley where our home would be for the next few days. As the rumble of cars grew quieter, so did the hum of silence thicken around us, broken only by the odd howl of coyotes and the eerie hooting of owls sounding high above us from the canopies of trees over our heads and the frost-capped mountains in the near distance. Even though it was no later in the year than mid-October, this far north it was practically winter. Thank god for thick fleece-lined sleeping bags is all I can say!
Even my mother had finally fallen quiet, her eyes wide as she peered out of her window into the darkness – perhaps as stunned as I that we had undertaken such an absurd trip. Camping in fall… even the voice in my head was derisive and disbelieving.
But we were there now and by god! We were going to make the best of it. Even if we killed ourselves in the process.
Mom hovered a little way off, her arms wrapped tightly around her thick middle in a useless attempt at warding off the
night’s sharp chill as, by myself, I hauled all our equipment out of the trunk and began assembling the small pyramid of a tent – a relic from my school days when my class would be dragged out on the annual camping trip in a bid to make us well-rounded and self-sufficient individuals. My fingers were numb and stinging within seconds handling the thick metal poles. None of your new-fangled fibreglass nonsense for us! We were going old school here! Speaking of which…
“Hey,” I called out over my shoulder to my mother, who was still doing her startled deer impression. “Go and find something we can make a fire with if you want to be useful.”
She hastened to obey, almost tripping over herself in her eagerness to do something that would make me happy. It was excruciating, the way she would grovel for praise. It was definitely for the best that she had never managed to have a man in her life, he would be able to trample all over her. For the millionth time, I gave sincere thanks that I was not like her.
But, still, I kept one ear sharpened for her as she shuffled off into the forest, quickly swallowed by the density of the trees, listening out for the crunch of paws that might signal danger. My friend had assured me that she had never come across a wolf or a bear or anything of the sort in all the years she had come here. The fiercest animal she had ever seen had been a fox snapping at the heels of a rabbit. But, nevertheless, I didn’t want to get complacent. You only get one mother in your lifetime and, no matter how annoying mine was, I wasn’t about to lose her to a four-legged freak.
*
The silence around our makeshift camp fire was almost tangible. I sat silent and fuming, staring avidly at the flaming lump of molten marshmallow on the end of my two pronged stick – far beyond edible at that point – trying and failing to not feel my mother’s eyes boring into me, desperate for me to break the unbearably awkward silence which was growing thicker and thicker with every wasted moment. Already, even this early, I could not summon the energy to force the conversation. Already, I could not bring myself to be bothered. Instead I tortured my marshmallow and bottled up my boiling guilt, seething silently until every muscle in my body felt like it had been sculpted out of cement.
“Anything bothering you, Nellie?” my mother asked me in her soft, mousy voice.
“I told you already,” I snapped back, rounding on her. “Don’t call me that! My name is Helen, remember? You’re the one who called me that; you could at least bother to use it!” I was being unnecessarily cruel, I knew it – I was painfully aware of it with every barbed word that sprung from my lips – and when she flinched and ducked her head, cowed, there was nothing else I could do but apologize. “Sorry,” I muttered, looking back into flames and letting the heat burn my eyes in some sort of self-punishment. “Sorry… I don’t mean to snap.”
“It’s okay-“
“No.” I shook my head vehemently. “No it really isn’t. I don’t know why I’m like this. I really don’t want to be. Especially not to you.”
And it was true. Of anyone I had ever come across in all the twenty-two years of my life, she was the one who deserved the most and received the least. She had never spoken a single angry word to me – even though I’m certain I deserved a thousand of them – she had never been bitchy with any one of the countless people who had screwed her over. She possessed the kind of unlimited patience that I had always been crazy jealous of but could never ever hope to achieve. She was amazing. She deserved so much more than me.
Shaking my head, I tossed my gooey stick into the middle of bonfire and shoved my hands deep into my pockets. “I think I’m going to turn in,” I muttered, addressing the worn toes of my boots. “It’s been a pretty long day…” It was the lamest excuse but, of course, she didn’t call me out on it.
“Okay,” she said placidly. “I’m going to pop back to the car. Don’t want to forget my meds. That would certainly ruin the mood…” Her voice trailed away in an awkward titter.
I shrugged. “Sure. Do what you like. I’ll probably be asleep by the time you get back.”
“I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.”
I’m sure you will, I thought to myself with clenched teeth. “Good night then.”
“Good night, Nellie.”
Despite my certainty that I would fall asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, as soon as I had managed to find a reasonably comfortable place on the ground and had wriggled down into my sleeping bag all the tiredness I had felt deserted me and I was left wide awake and staring up at the crooked seam in the room of the tent, listening to the wind humming through the trees outside. I heard Mom throw sand on the embers of the fire and then felt the crackle of dead leaves and twigs next to my head as she passed by me on the way to the car.
I closed my eyes and counted backwards from a thousand, not wanting to be awake when she got back – I knew that I’d never be able to relax myself enough with her snuffling one foot away.
I was asleep before I reached seven hundred and fifty.
Chapter2
The early morning sun had was bathing the tent in a balmy orange glow, fending off the chill, as my eyes opened. I yawned and twisted around, not quite orientated yet. My sleeping bag was soft and warm and as comfortable as any real bed I had slept in, and I had absolutely no desire to leave it. Blinking several times to bring my eyes into some sort of focus that could see further than hazy orange shapes, I glanced over at Mom’s side. Or, at least, the space that was supposed to be Mom’s side. It looked as though it had not been touched; her own sleeping bag was still tightly rolled up in its little canvas bag by the zipper door, and there was no imprint in the ground to suggest that anyone had been there at all. I know my mother was quiet, but she could hardly be called waif-like – she would most certainly have left a fairly deep mark behind her if she had been there at all.
Images of fanged, man-eating bears flashed through my mind and I shuddered. It was ridiculous, of course it was, to even so much as entertain the possibility. This was not a Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale with wolves in human clothing. This was real life where the worst thing that could happen was wondering off and getting lost. The car was a way away after all – it was entirely feasible that she’d walked off in the wrong direction and misplaced herself. Without her meds, she could go pretty cuckoo. I’d seen her ‘that way’ before, where she’d just sort of forget herself and start walking around in a day-dream dream, believing she was a little girl again or a character in one her books. She read a lot, did Mom. Maybe fantasy was much more palatable than real-life. Anyway, it was easy to imagine her wondering off into the forest and getting caught up in her own head without her meds to keep her straight, thinking she was in a fairy-story.
I groaned out loud, forcing myself into a sensible state of consciousness and readying myself to deal with yet another of my mother’s ‘episodes’. Being an only child to a single mother really truly sucks the ninety-nine percent of the time.
I pulled on a sweater over the top of my pyjamas – not quite willing to give up the cosy warmth that I had accumulated during the night – and tugged on my boots, adding a hat and gloves for good measure. God only knew how long I would be out searching for her!
The ground was sparkling with frozen dew and my breath frosted before my face as I crawled out the tent on my hands and knees, the freezing damp was soaking through my jeans within seconds. I blew on my hands, stomped my feet and braced myself to face the adventure awaiting me, then set off at a brisk, marching pace – the crisp grass crunching satisfyingly beneath the soles of my boots.
My first port of call was my car to which I sprinted – convincing myself along the way that she absolutely would most definitely be sleeping soundly on the grass besides it. She was not, and this discovery was like a punch to the gut. I had been so sure. I had managed to convince myself so well… My heart racing and my stomach twisting in fear, I fumbled for my keys and somehow managed to gather my wits together just enough to get the trunk open. It rose with a painful leisureliness, so much so that I wrenched
it open with a snarl. I did not have time for this!
The trunk was a mess. We had not bothered to unpack completely last night, only troubling with the essentials, and as such it was almost impossible to make a decent judgement as to what was still there and what was missing. I dealt with this problem by practically digging my way through the junk, throwing out everything onto the grass behind me until I finally struck gold; Mom’s purse. My heart gave a sickening lurch as I reached out to take it. I pulled open the zipper with trembling fingers and pulled out the old polythene sandwich bag Mom had kept her meds in ever since she had first been given them. Inside, there was a new packet – unopened and untouched. She had not even made it this far. She never even got her meds.
I didn’t hesitate. Pocketing the pills and stuffing the bag into my pockets, I slammed down the lid of the boot, wheeled around and raced towards the mouth of the forest, praying that if I looked long enough and hard enough I would come to her soon.
“Mom?” I called out to her every few minutes, half-heartedly at first, then louder, “Mom!” and more urgent. “Mom!” I was freezing, I was exhausted, and I was pretty damn certain that I had passed that tree at least a dozen times. I had no idea where I was, let alone where she was. Hope and stamina was fading rapidly with every leaden footstep. But as they decreased, so did the panic in my gut intensify. I had to find her, there was absolutely no question of that, but I was fast beginning to doubt myself. But there was no question – I had no choice. I was actually getting worried now.
Bear With Me (BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance) Page 1
