Dancing Bearback (BBW Shifter Cowboy Western Romance) (Bear Ranchers Book 3)

by Becca Fanning

  Lila stared down at the glove and froze. Panic overcame alcohol, and she bolted upright, suddenly and terribly sober. She rubbed her thumb over the little orange bear on the back of the glove, hoping it wasn’t real, that it would disappear with one clean swipe.

  But the bear stayed, and Lila thought of the glove abandoned deep in that empty untouched wood, and she said with a calm she did not feel, “You remember the bears we saw, Henry?”

  He smiled, proudly. “Sure do.” Then, to the rest of the table, “See, I took Lila up that trail behind—”

  “I’m not done.” Lila squeezed the glove hard in her hands, her mind racing. She let her gaze move slowly around the table. She’d never looked close enough. Never noticed their eyes were all the same inhuman tawny color, not until they were all lined up like this, staring at her in the murky bar light, waiting for her point. “How’d you know the bears would be there?”

  “I didn’t. We just got real lucky.”

  “Then where were you taking me?”

  Henry opened his mouth and shut it. He looked at Matt as if he could find the right thing to say in the older man’s gathered scowl. “Up the mountain. I just happened to find them.”

  “What else was up the mountain?”

  “What? I don’t know. Trees, I guess. What are you trying to say?”

  “I found Finn’s other glove.” Lila knocked the last of her whiskey back, slammed the glass down, and continued, “I found it in the snow a hundred feet away from that clearing.”

  Henry stared at her, wordless.

  “We’d been walking off-trail for almost an hour before we happened to find those bears, so how did Finn’s glove happen to be lying all the way out there?” She turned on the rest of the table, her insides burning with the acerbic sting of betrayal.

  No one said a word.

  “Okay,” Lila snapped, “I’ll be direct. If Finn was one bear, which one of you was the other?”

  Sherman, Colt, and Matt exchanged unreadable glances. Henry just sat with his face buried in his palms, his elbows on the table, slowly shaking his head back and forth.

  “I’m not an idiot.” Lila shoved her hands and that terrible glove between her knees, leaned away from Henry’s once-comforting warmth. “I know about shifters.”

  Finally, Matt growled deep in his throat and half-heartedly raised his hand.

  “And you knew.” She turned on Sherman and Colt. Her throat was so tight her voice cracked. “Every single one of you knew, and none of you said anything.”

  “Lila,” Henry said.

  “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t say another word to me.” Lila turned to Colt and muttered, “Can you move, please?”

  “Lila, wait, please,” Henry started. “Please.”

  Lila didn’t so much as look back at him. “Colt. Move.”

  Colt looked warily at Henry and Matt, then eased out of his seat.

  Lila pushed off the booth and stormed out the door, the glove still trapped in her fist. The sky was black, but Sitka glowed white-blue from the snow. It was enough to see by.

  She blustered down the sidewalk, past Finn coming back from whatever wall he decided to use for a bathroom, and he smiled at her. “You gotta go too?” he joked.

  Lila shook her head and tried push past him. Her heart pulsed in her throat. She didn’t know if she was going to sob or scream.

  “Wait, where’re you going?”

  She turned and hurled the glove at him.

  “What the hell was that for?” Finn cried.

  “Your other glove is in my camera bag.” She pressed her lips together in a trembling line. Her eyes ached with a sudden rush of tears. “You dropped it in the forest.” She inhaled hard and spat, “You tell Henry that him and every last one of you can go to hell.”

  With that, Lila fled.

  Nothing in Sitka was even open this late, except the bar. So Lila went to the only place she knew. She followed the now-familiar path to the harbor, stamping and seething and smearing the wet away from her nose and eyes. The road was pale and empty the whole way there.

  Lila crept down the dock. The boats rocked listlessly in the water like babies in a crib. She stepped soft, afraid of disturbing them.

  She climbed up on Henry’s boat and tiptoed down to the boat’s pointed bow, clutching the ropes overhead. There was no more rage in her, no more tears, just a great violent ache throbbing in her skull, her throat, her belly. Under her skin, she was all hollows, and that relentless vibrato he lied he lied he lied resonated through every part of her like a scream in a cavern.

  Lila sat, dangling her feet over the edge. It was cold, but not that cold, and the alcohol sloshing in her belly kept her warm enough not to think about it. She looked out at the bay, the water that stretched on forever. She remembered Henry pointing at the horizon and telling her that beyond these pebbly islands and clusters of atavistic pine, there was nothing for miles, just water black and shiny as obsidian, from the gulf to the Bering Sea, all the way to Russia’s barren easternmost coast.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she whispered to the water.

  By this time tomorrow, she’d be home again anyway, and real life would pick up its bleak staccato routine, and out in her bustling gleaming city, there were no whales and no dimpled fishermen and no silences. Just Lila. Lila alone.

  She was so sick of being alone.

  Behind her, the dock groaned. Lila whirled to see Henry, red-cheeked and wild-eyed. He looked, for all his bigness, like a scared and desperate child.

  She turned away from him again. Scanned the darkness like she was waiting for something. Behind her, Henry’s boots scraped against the boat’s edge, but he didn’t move, just stood there wordless and breathless behind her, rooted to the stern.

  Lila would not turn. If she turned, she would cry, and she decided she was done crying over him. Over anybody.

  “Lila.” Henry’s voice split like old wood. Something deep inside her twisted sickly at the sound.

  Lila shook her head.

  “I’m so, so sorry. I just kept waiting to tell you, because I didn’t want to do it wrong, but I never wanted it to be this way. I never wanted you to find out like this.” Henry made a sniffling sound, muttered a curse like a prayer. “I just need you to listen to me, Lila. Please. Just five minutes.”

  Lila turned to glare at him. She looked Henry up and down, trying to find something else to resent him for, looking for soft spots to drive in words like knives. But his eyes were so red and so wet. He looked just as scared as she felt.

  She wanted so badly to hate him. She wanted it to be that easy.

  “Five minutes,” he repeated, “and if you’re not convinced, I’ll go rent you a hotel room right now and bring your things to the front desk in the morning. You’ll never have to see me again.”

  She stood and clung to the rigging overhead. “Three minutes.”

  Henry nodded fast. He sank down on the bench and gripped the tiller with one hand. Lila wasn’t sure if it was for instinct or comfort.

  “I want to tell you something nobody knows,” he said. “Not even Matt.”

  Lila examined the toes of her boots, feigning disinterest.

  “My dad raised me. It was just me and him until I finished up high school, and then it was just me. I told everyone here that I don’t remember my mom and she died in a car accident when I was really little.

  “But, um.” Henry wiped at the corners of his eyes. “My mom’s alive.” He held the tiller so tightly Lila could see every tendon in his hand rise like tributaries. “I remember her. I remember everything about her. She and my dad met on Kodiak Island, just a little ways out there.” He pointed toward the water and paused. Breathed in shakily.

  His eyes were far away from her. From everything. “So the first time I changed, I was two years old. My dad told me we were in a grocery store, and I was just this toddler throwing a fit over something stupid, and then all of a sudden there wasn’t me anymore, just this little bea
r cub.” He squared his hands around some invisible shape only he could see. “But I’m still me, when I’m like that. My brain’s still there, you know? That doesn’t change.”

  Lila watched him, unsure of what to say.

  “That was the first time my parents moved because of me. Shifters didn’t even get full citizenship until I was ten years old. 1995. So every time I shifted in public, we’d get evicted, or I’d get kicked out of preschool, or word would get out at my parents’ jobs, and then we’d have to find somewhere else to go. That’s just how it was back then. I think we lived in ten different cities before I was six years old.

  “My mom left when I was seven, I think. Maybe six. She said she couldn’t handle me anymore. Couldn’t handle all the moving and everything, I guess. She left after she picked me up from school. I remember because she was crying, and I’d never seen my own mother cry before, and she was throwing all her shit in bags and apologizing like crazy. I helped her carry some of her stuff to the car, then she sat me down on the couch and told me to stay here and watch movies until my dad got home from work. And then she was just gone.”

  Lila’s stare softened. “Just like that?”

  Henry snapped. “Poof,” he said, his smile small and blank. “We all have stories like that. Me and the guys. When we moved up here a couple of years ago, we decided we wouldn’t tell anyone. We wouldn’t give another town a reason to kick us out.”

  “That’s not legal anymore.”

  “Lots of things aren’t legal, but people like me scare people like you. Out here, that means more than any law.”

  “You don’t scare me,” Lila said, softly. She eased closer to the center of the boat, closing the space between them. “I read you guys can be all different kinds of bears, right?”

  “Not just bears. But, yeah.” Henry looked at her like he was afraid to move. As though he’d shatter the moment like porcelain. “I could show you, if you wanted.”

  Lila’s chest tightened. “Show me?”

  “What it’s like when I’m the other guy.” He patted his chest like the bear could claw its way out any minute. “You know. When I shift.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to make things right. Because you’re stunning and brilliant and no one in the world is like you, and I’d hate myself every day of my life if I lost you over something like this.”

  Lila rubbed the wet away from her eyes. “I haven’t decided if I forgive you.”

  “You don’t have to. You don’t owe me anything. Just let me show you.”

  Lila, her chest full and heavy and uncertain, nodded.

  For once, Henry’s house was empty.

  Lila sat on the front steps, bundled up, holding a cup of tea just for the warmth of it. She jiggled her knees, nervously. Henry had disappeared behind the house a few minutes earlier in nothing but a T-shirt, sweats, and his ratty house slippers.

  She sipped her tea slowly. She imagined Henry shirking his clothes and standing there in the midnight cold, goose bumped and trembling, willing his human self away. She wondered if swapping one skin for another hurt.

  Then she heard it. Heard the heavy shuffling footfalls, the snuffling muzzle, the little growls and grunts of Henry the bear muttering to himself as he rounded the corner of the house.

  Lila’s spine stiffened. An innate, primordial voice deep in her own skull urged her to run run run. She took a deep breath, set her tea down on the porch, and stood.

  Even on all fours, the top of the bear’s head reached the top of her sternum. He made human-Henry look so small. In the porch light, Henry watched her with those same amber eyes, but his head was enormous and full of teeth, his ears round and alert. He was huge and lumbering, but his thick and unkempt winter coat made him look lovably absurd, like a teddy bear made real.

  Lila stepped toward him. “Henry?” she whispered, feeling foolish.

  The bear bobbed its head up and down and pranced in a little circle, as if Henry were proving his self-control.

  She smiled, fascinated despite herself. She came right up to Henry, so close that his muzzle was up against her chest, his breath warm and hot against her jacket. With both hands, she cupped the thick and unexpectedly soft fur on either side of his neck, brushed along the velvet edges of his ears.

  “You’re marvelous,” she murmured.

  Henry leaned his head into her, gently, and Lila closed her arms around him, twined her fingers into the thick coat of his chest. He smelled damp and foreign. Like a wild thing.

  She kissed the spot just above his eye and whispered into his fur, “I wouldn’t know how to tell me either.”

  Then Lila pulled away, staggering a little, feeling surreal and bewildered and amazed. She looked at the bear—who wasn’t just a bear, who was Henry, who helped her and listened to her and held her when she needed it and gave her space when she didn’t, Henry Henry Henry—and said, “Let’s get inside, okay? Let’s get inside.”

  Lila waited for him in the entryway, pacing, chewing at her cuticles. There were a dozen pairs of shoes stacked haphazardly against the wall, some tennis shoes, but mostly huge rubber boots that made the whole room smell faintly fishy.

  A few minutes later, Henry opened the door, shivering and sheepish. “You forgot this,” he said, holding up the tea cup.

  “I don’t care about tea,” Lila murmured. She rose onto her tiptoes, put her hands on the back of Henry’s head, and pulled him down to kiss her.

  Henry pulled away only to smile, set the tea down on the floor, and tell her, “Me neither.”

  They kissed and they kept kissing, all the way from the entryway to the living room couch, up the stairs, down the hall, along the wall, until at last they got to the door of Henry’s room, and he held her pressed up against him, fumbled with the doorknob, and lifted her up like she was nothing but light and air. Lila wrapped both her legs around him, circled her arms around his neck, and buried her face into his shoulder.

  Henry shut the door and leaned against it, his forearms cupped under Lila’s ass, his breath coming fast and needy. She wanted both his hands on her. She wanted to know every inch of him.

  “I forgive you,” she whispered into his skin.

  He nipped her ear, kissed the sweet spot where her lobe met her jaw. “I like you.”

  “I like you too.”

  Then Henry pushed off the door, brought her to the bed, and dropped her squealing on the mattress. He looked at the bedside clock. “We have twenty minutes left in this year, Lila Ellis. What do you want to do with it?”

  Lila looked up at him, at his gorgeous flushed cheeks, at the bulge of his pants, the clean line of his belly. “I want you. I want all of you.”

  “Oh. Oh.” He opened the bedside drawer and pawed around until he found a little accordion sheet of condoms packaged in silver foil. “I have some of these, if that’s what you mean.”

  A thrill shot through Lila’s lower belly. She put her hands in her lap, as though Henry could see her through her jeans. “I’m kind of hairy. It’s gross.”

  Henry dipped down the band of his boxers to show her the tuft of curly black hair nestled between his hipbones. “Me too.” He pinched at the barely noticeable paunch of his belly. “And I get fucking fat in the winter. It’s all that hibernating I do.”