Gabby left to find a place to wash the young ferns, leaving Van to keep guard. By the time she had got the fiddleheads tender, Roman had been asleep for many hours and the shadows were long.
“Should we wake him?” she asked.
Van grunted. “I do. He may be grouchy.” He went into the tent humming under his breath. Presently she heard the rumble of two deep male voices. Human voices.
Van came out. “He put clothes.”
Roman sat cross legged on the mossy tree trunk they were using as their sitting area and wolfed down a huge pannikin of stew. He seemed ravenous and when he had finished his meal held it wordlessly for more. Gabriella gave him what was left in the stewpan and added the remains of her own meal to this.
He ate everything and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The uncouth gesture, so unlike her polite Air Force officer, was a shock, but neither she nor Vanya said anything.
Roman seemed moody and uncommunicative. But he followed Gabby around as she tidied away their food and took their utensils and cooking vessels to the river to wash up. He didn’t offer to help. He kept guard. He watched with interest as, in the waning light, she strung up their food supplies and dishes above bear height. And he chivied her back to the tent when she had finished.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“You go to bed,” Uncle Van told Gabby firmly. “Roman and me, we sleep tonight in bear. Keep watch,” he added sternly.
It must have been the correct thing to say, because Roman’s balkiness vanished and he looked more alert than he had done all day.
Gabby went into the tent, closed the flaps and prepared herself to sleep. Outside she could hear a deep low humming that throbbed in the air and sent her swiftly into deep restful sleep.
* * *
Gabby had made and drunk her coffee and eaten breakfast when Roman strolled out of the woods. He was in human form and fully clothed.
“I overslept,” he told her and looked hopefully at the camp stove.
“Where’s Uncle Van?” she asked pouring him coffee and handing him his tepid reconstituted eggs.
He tucked in with a hearty appetite, and swallowed the hot brew in a single deep draft. “He went hunting. He’s coming back soon. I am to stay a man.” He spoke like a child who has memorized instructions it does not really comprehend.
Soon? What could Vanya be up to? Where was he?
“Do you remember the Air Force?”
Roman’s air of complete perplexity shut that line of questioning down.
“Does your head hurt?”
He touched his forehead and left temple with his right hand. “No.” He sounded surprised.
She decided not to press him. To let his memory return naturally.
They spent the day idling in the woods, picking and eating berries and foraging for greens companionably. Together they secured their food for the night. Night had fallen when she suggested they should retire.
Roman was bare chested and in the moonlight he looked big, tough, mysterious and sexy. His bronze eyes glowed and she heard him suck in a breath as though he too found the air thick and dense. The hard blunt planes of his face were concealed by his rippling beard, but he still looked like a hardened warrior. Roman’s hot eyes were kindling a blaze within her.
His arms seized her and he lifted her triumphantly into the air and bore her off to the tent. Moonlight flooded through the open flaps and the sleeping bags looked chaste and sanctified in its pale light.
Roman laid his prize tenderly on the bedding, and stepped back a pace. Asking permission with his distance. To his relief, his Gabby opened her arms to him. He crushed her into the bags with his weight and felt the sensuality and solace of her abundant, resilient flesh, like balm to his wounds. He sighed as he claimed her mouth with his own.
All his longing, all his confusion at being both bear and man, was allayed by the passion with which she returned his kisses. She writhed beneath him as his tongue tangled lovingly with hers. Gabriella wound her arms around his muscular shoulders in a fierce grip that betrayed her fear that he might slip away. The rough caress of his beard against her lips and cheeks was her reassurance that her lover was alive and virile. This was no lonely fantasy such as occupied her nights since the crash.
He raised himself on his powerful forearms and keeping their mouths conjoined in the little dance of love, he sought and found the soft place between her legs. Her soft giggle made their kiss all the more delightful. He probed and found the hot, slippery passage he needed.
He remembered her voluptuous curves. The firm roundness of her big breasts. The coral colored nipples, dark now in the pale moonlight. Soon the hot suckling of his mouth made them stiffen and distend like points against his palms when he moved his mouth lower to her belly.
Gabriella’s hands were busy learning her lover again. He was wider, harder even than he had been as an officer on active duty. His chest was even hairier. Only his cock was as she remembered it. Heavy, thick, and long. He jumped a little when she took it in her hand. She squeezed lightly. Life oozed from the broad, mushroom shaped cap.
“I’m on the patch,” she whispered. He growled whether in disapproval or pleasure she couldn’t tell. She didn’t mention she took birth control to help control the grief of coming into season without her mate.
Roman hoped his beloved had not taken another lover. Every muscle stiffened in rejection of such a thing. Well he would have to drive other men from her thoughts. He tested her soft folds with a long forefinger and finding her petals already wet and swollen, pushed two up inside her and thrust lightly against her tightness.
“You are perfect,” he whispered into her neck, biting her where her collar bones formed a little hollow, then sucking hard to sooth the small injury.
She wasn’t perfect. But he made her feel so. In Roman’s adoring arms she felt like a queen—a powerful and sexy queen. “Now,” she urged him, “Now.” She didn’t want to wait. She didn’t want more foreplay. She had been too long bereft to want to prolong their play.
Roman thrust his cock into her hot and slick depths, bringing his hands down to cup her round buttocks and use them to press her pubes up against his. He could feel her little bud as a hard stiff button against his sensitized flesh. He pressed deeper into her with every thrust. Surely she could not still be so tight if she had had a lover?
Gabby fell the ripples begin deep within her. Her clitoris was pulsing. She brought both legs up to hug Roman’s hard waist and enjoined him to a faster pace. Her climax stole her breath so that she almost let go of her brawny lover. Roman clasped her even closer and growled low in her ear, “We’re not done.”
He kept up the great dance of love until his body was bathed in sweat both from his exertion and from his formidable self-control. He was holding back until her body was so replete that all her senses, all her thoughts would be of him. Her little gasps, her musical shrieks of delight, were consolation for his sacrifice. But eventually he was forced to join her. His climax flooded her core with a hot gush and he fell onto her with a loud, exultant shout.
Gabriella was a limp cushion beneath his streaming body. Her hair was tangled and damp. Roman kissed her sleeping cheek and rolled off of her. He was squashing his little mate. He sought for and pulled off the patch on her belly. She had no need of it.
He pulled the quilted bag over Gabby’s nude body, pausing only to pat her pretty, curly delta. His headache had gone.
* * *
They fell into a rhythm of camping life that Gabriella found familiar and reassuring and which Roman also seemed to find entirely normal. They set traps in the river to catch plump trout and scaled them before pan frying their meals. The foraged for berries and tender spring greens.
They made love with fond ferocity. Gabriella was certain she was pregnant. How not? Her mate was virile, strong and lusty. She was in season and had no form of contraception. On the evening of the fifth day since Vanya had left them alone, she had discovered that her birth control p
atch was gone, but she couldn’t seem to care.
She had longed for his babies, and it seemed she would have the litter she had craved. Be careful what you ask for. What if Roman never did recover his memories? At present she could see no way he could return to live with people. Not while he had no control of his shifts. Not while his memories of his human life were so vague and patchy. But surely that would change as he healed?
Once he was home, well they would see. If as seemed likely, his head injury had altered him irrevocably, she and the Zhadanovs and the Enrights were going to have to accept that fact. It would be sad if his essential personality and memories were unrecoverable—if he was a fundamentally a different, lesser man.
But they would have to find ways to deal with that dismal reality—just as so many families of wounded service men all across America had had to.
This man was her mate for better or worse.
* * *
As they sat companionably in the fading light one evening, Roman asked his first real question, “How did you get lost?”
“How did I get lost?” Gabby was astounded. “I wasn’t lost.”
“But I searched for you. I know I did.” Roman was insistent—and anxious.
“Perhaps you did. Do you remember how you came to be out here?”
He shook his head vehemently. She had hacked his shaggy hair and beard into some semblance of order with her nail scissors, and now he looked less like Robinson Crusoe and more like a man on a prolonged hunting trip. He thought.
“I looked for you in the spring—every spring—he looked around him in amazement. “How long have I been out here?”
“Three years.”
“Three years!” He looked down at his broken fingernails, they were black and cracked even though Gabby had cut them and shown him how to scour them with soap and sand. “As a bear?” His voice was tentative, shocked.
“I think so. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember looking for my mate. Patrolling my territory.” He paused. “Three years!” A sudden thought. “Am I AWOL?”
“From the Air Force?”
“Special Forces,” he corrected automatically.
“MIA believed dead,” she informed him.
“Did you think I was dead?”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t understand.” He rose from his spot and picked her up in his arms. “It makes me antsy to think of it.” He kissed her as if the cure for his amnesia was hidden in her mouth.
She returned his kiss lovingly. Maybe Van was right. Maybe loving was the way to cure her airman. Worth a try anyway.
“We have to clean up first,” she told him laughingly, pulling her lips away from his and resting her forehead against his damp brow. “Or we’ll attract bears.”
Their little campsite was ready for inspection in record time and they were making the beast with two backs in nothing flat. Bear love. Nothing like it.
After that, the gaps in Roman’s memory began to fill in in bits and pieces. He still did not recall his accident. But he remembered Hanover. He remembered meeting her in Wesheno.
“I couldn’t believe my luck. There you were, the sweetest, prettiest girl I’d ever seen—only you were a bear.”
“Which was a problem, because?”
He frowned. “I’m not a real bear,” he said haltingly.
She laughed so hard she almost fell off his lap where he had placed her, the more conveniently to fondle her bare flesh.
“I guess that sounds weird, but all my life, I’ve been afraid my family would find out I’m not really related to them.” His hesitant voice sounded sincere which only made it worse.
She took his face between her palms and shook him lightly. “Are you stupid? Your whole family adores you. Losing you has aged Vanya, and almost destroyed Klara. The Enrights stand around at family gatherings looking grim and angry. The Ukrainian cousins all hold a midnight vigil on the anniversary of your death. Outdoors in the snow.
“Why would you think you were not one of them? That’s so foolish, I can’t tell you how much.” Gabby sputtered to a halt.
“But I know I’m not,” he confessed. “My mother lied to them so they would give her money. The guy they think fathered me didn’t.” His arms clutched her tightly as he told her his deepest secret. “I didn’t want them to send me back.” His voice trailed away.
She turned slightly and thumped him hard on his shoulder. “Don’t you dare suggest that the people who raised you would discard a child they’d adopted—for any reason. Do you really think that of your Uncle Van?
“Of Klara? Or any of the Enrights?”
He rocked her and chuckled sadly. “You’re right. But it feels as if that worry has been the defining fact of my whole life, as long as I can remember.”
“How old were you when you were adopted by Uncle Van?”
“Five.”
“I think that even if they wanted to adopt you because you were family, they’ve known you long enough that it’s you they love. And you they’ve mourned.
“You can talk to Vanya about it. But I doubt he’ll care. He’ll just tell you some Ukrainian fairy tale and carry on as usual.”
“Probably.” He picked her up and they started another round of his favorite therapy.
* * *
Roman was frustrated with the random gaps in his memory. Vanya had said little before he went—just told him it was time to leave being a bear and stay in human form. Gabriella had told him confusing snippets. It seemed each time he asked her a question that her answers doubled his befuddlement.
All he knew for certain was that he had fulfilled his quest. He had located his lovely mate. He had claimed her. She was faithful, fruitful, and endlessly fascinating. Thinking about her made the craziness in his head subside—at least for a time.
He was starting to remember more and more—at least he thought he was. Yet he could not seem to think what came after finding and impregnating Gabriella. He had recalled fragments of his previous life. Hunting in the woods with Vanya and his cousins. Playing football, basketball, baseball. Flying.
Well not much about flying. He thought he had been obsessed with flying. Always had been. An absurdity for a boy destined to be a bear. But now when he thought about taking wing, the intense stabbing behind his eyes robbed him of all reason. And the fog always returned with the blinding pain. Then he needed to be in bear. In bear the pain was endurable.
He thought Vanya was lurking in the woods. Or was that part of his dreams? He could remember very little of those constant, fearful nightmares. Where before he knew he had dreamed of soaring high above the world, now he dreamed of falling, falling, falling. When he closed his eyes, the abyss loomed.
What shameful crimes did his dazed and muddled memory conceal? What horror haunted his dreams?
Gabriella was somehow the key to his memory. If he stayed near her, eventually he would recall. Surely even if he had done something terrible, she would still love him? He had to believe that, because if it were not true, only terror lay in wait for him.
When he had articulated the inchoate fear that had plagued him since childhood, she had shown him his terror of being sent away was a disrespectful fantasy. How could he ever have thought that Uncle Vanya—the strong, brave, kindly man he had always tried to emulate, would return a small child to his abusers for the crime of being a Gypsy? It was indecent to imagine his Aunt Klara, or Aunt Katy caring about, or agreeing to such a cruel act.
It was far more plausible, that his shifter relatives would have tracked down the abusers and taken their revenge on the culprits. Not for lying, not for pawning off some unworthy child—there were no unworthy children—but to avenge his bruises. He knew that with deep certainty, because it was what he would have done.
Relief from this childish bogeyman, led him to hope that Gabby could alleviate his other terrors and give him absolution. Thinking about Gabby calmed him, gave him peace of mind, helped him to remember. That was what Van had
said, placing his hands on Roman’s temple and staring into his eyes, “ Remember, boy, remember. And enjoy your honeymoon with your woman.”
He told Gabriella what Van had said in parting and her soft brown eyes first widened and then narrowed. “Honeymoon. He said, Honeymoon?” she asked.
He nodded warily. But her annoyance soon passed and his mate burst out laughing.
* * *
Gabby thought Roman was making progress. For the most part he remained in human form. But he was not in full control. When he slept he would shift from man to bear and back again unless she was holding him. Also he was subject to sudden bouts of extreme weariness when he would just collapse and fall asleep.
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