by Anna Lowe
“See you later!” Janna called cheerily.
“See you later,” Jess waved.
“See you later,” Sarah mumbled from the front seat, studying her feet as Soren pulled wordlessly out onto the street.
Chapter Twelve
Soren drove, thinking of all the different ways he’d kill Janna the next chance he got. He’d kill her, then Jessica, then move to some place in Alaska where he could shift permanently into bear form and never, ever have to deal with shit like this again.
Taking Sarah to a doctor’s appointment for a baby that wasn’t his?
His bear, however, was suddenly concerned. Deeply, deeply concerned. Biting-his-claws-nervously kind of concerned.
Doctor? Is something wrong with the baby?
There’s nothing wrong with the baby, he growled back.
How can you be sure?
I’m sure, he snapped.
But what if? Babies need doctors, right? the bear fretted.
Mom didn’t go to a doctor. Grandma didn’t go to a doctor. Aunt Lucille didn’t go to a doctor.
The bear paced in the mental cage Soren kept him locked inside. But Sarah is human. Humans need doctors.
She’ll be fine! he growled back.
What about the baby?
The baby will be fine, too, damn it!
“Did you say something?” Sarah, who’d been awfully quiet, asked.
He shook his head and hurled a curse at his bear, but the damage had been done. Now he was nervous, too. What if the baby wasn’t okay? Sarah had been awfully thin when she’d first come to the saloon. That couldn’t be good for a developing baby. What if there was something really important that had to be caught right now?
He drove a little faster. And damn it, a parking space opened up right in front of the doctor’s office, so he didn’t have an excuse not to walk her in. And — double damn it — he didn’t have the heart to abandon Sarah in a waiting room full of strangers, either, so he ended up waiting with her, too. Eyeing the clock. Praying for salvation. Planning twenty different tortures he’d subject Victor Whyte and the Blue Blood leadership to when he finally got his chance, because they had set this whole mess into motion. They were the ones to blame. Jesus, he ought to be out hunting the enemy down, not sitting in an air-conditioned room praying for each stubborn second to pass.
Shit, shit, shit.
He looked out the window. Checked the laces of his boots. Stared at the ceiling then at the back of his hands. Jesus, how was he supposed to last five minutes there?
Somehow, he lasted fifteen and was about to make a hasty escape when an attendant came in and called Sarah’s name. When she led Sarah to one room and him to another, he relaxed a little bit, figuring they’d have mercy and leave him in peace for a while.
But no. The door popped open a second later, and in came Sarah with a cup of urine and the same attendant as before. The woman ignored him completely, put the cup on a tray, and took Sarah’s blood pressure and pulse.
“Um…” he tried, measuring the distance to the door with his eyes. He could go now, right? He wasn’t the father. He wasn’t exactly a friend. He was in that no-man’s-land in between.
“The doctor will be here in a second,” the lady said.
He didn’t want the doctor. He wanted out.
But it was too late, because the doctor hustled in — an older lady with a scary upswept hairdo and a very white coat — and shook everyone’s hand.
“Mrs. Boone? Mr. Boone? Hello.”
Boone? Boone was Sarah’s father, not him. He was a Voss, for Christ’s sake!
But Sarah looked so lonely, so lost, that he couldn’t help but clear his throat and whisper when the doctor turned away.
“Maybe I should go now.”
For a split second, abject fear crossed her eyes — an emotion his tough, übercapable girl never, ever showed — until she blinked and hid it away.
“I’m fine. You can go,” she said, straightening her shoulders in a move he knew was just for show.
“Um, I can stay if you want,” he offered — really, really quietly, so that maybe she wouldn’t hear.
“Um… That would be okay.” The forced nonchalance in her voice couldn’t cover up the note of hope. So, shit, his fate was sealed.
The doctor turned back to them and then the questions started, followed by the examination, and things got progressively worse, culminating in the moment when Sarah had to strip from the waist down and climb into an elevated chair surrounded by instruments of torture of some kind.
Soren made himself as small as possible — next to impossible for a bear — and tried really hard not to look, not to think, and preferably, not to exist. To clear his mind and think of anything, anything but this. Sarah naked and turned on was the most beautiful thing in the world. Sarah spread out in an examining room was…was… Well, it was just wrong.
“Now, let’s go back to conception,” the doctor said, snapping on a pair of gloves.
Sarah sucked in her lips. Soren ground his teeth.
“When do you estimate it would have been?” The doctor started spreading goop over Sarah’s stomach.
When? Sometime when he’d been two thousand fucking miles away.
“October third,” Sarah whispered in a sad voice full of infinite regrets.
His head snapped up.
Sarah looked him straight in the eye and nodded. “October third.”
His birthday. His fucking birthday. He rolled his foot over a power cord lying on the tiled floor.
“Now, it’s rare to know the exact date,” the doctor commented with a smile.
“It was the only time,” Sarah whispered. “The one time.”
If that was supposed to make him feel better, it didn’t. She’d slept with someone on his birthday? Great. The very night he’d been dreaming of her, she’d been with someone else.
God, the past couple of days had gone so smoothly, he’d started wondering if they might patch things up. But now…
The doctor looked at Sarah in surprise, then looked at him. “October third?”
See? He wanted to yell. It wasn’t me. It should have been, but it wasn’t.
“Well, well,” the doctor murmured, clearly wondering what was wrong with their sex life. Then she pulled out a penis-shaped contraption from her toolbox and brandished it under his nose. “The better to see your baby with.”
Not my baby, he wanted to growl. But it felt wrong to even think such a thing. The baby deserved better. The baby deserved to be loved.
I love the baby, his bear whispered inside.
“Let’s have a closer look,” the doctor said, turning on a screen.
Soren squeezed his eyes as tight as he could. Look? How could a guy be expected to look?
“So, there’s the head…”
God, he was starting to feel sick.
“The kidneys are developing well…”
Kidneys? He blanched. He figured this would be a girl/boy, five fingers/five toes kind of thing, not an anatomy lesson.
“This is quite a big baby for thirty weeks,” the doc went on. “Big hands, too.”
Soren looked at his own hand, scowling. His mom had always said that about him. It seemed like her favorite thing, sharing too much information about him as a baby. She’d laugh and smile and go all misty-eyed and babble on about embarrassing baby things. My big baby bear with his big bear hands, his mom used to say.
Yeah, he used to grumble. She said that about Simon, too.
And wait a minute. Hadn’t his aunt said the same thing about his cousins?
He sat a little straighter, trying to remember the last baby to be born to the clan. It had been a good long time ago. He’d been about twelve and couldn’t have cared less. All he vaguely remembered was a group of excited women gathered around a cradle.
That’s a good bear baby, one of the older women had said. You can always tell a bear. Big body, big hands.
“Oh, what’s this?” the doctor said, s
ounding concerned.
Sarah looked up in alarm. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing,” the doctor said quickly. “It’s just that I caught a glimpse of something…”
Soren glanced at the monitor. The doctor turned the probe around Sarah’s private parts, panning the view. “Hmmm. Let me get my glasses…”
He clenched and unclenched his hands. Big baby, big hands…
Fuck. What if the father wasn’t human? What if the father was a bear?
He looked at Sarah, who was studying the screen in concern. The image didn’t resemble a human or a bear so much as an alien of some kind.
His mind spun. Surely Sarah hadn’t slept with one of the guys from his clan? His cousin Todd had promised to keep Sarah safe while Soren was gone, and Todd had never said anything about Sarah showing any interest in another bear shifter. Not that Sarah would know the difference between a shifter and human, but still.
The doctor stuck a pair of glasses on her nose and turned to the screen.
Soren had no clue if the baby was a shifter or not, and he had no clue if shifter babies were recognizable in ultrasounds. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to find out the hard way. He wrapped a foot around the power cord to the monitor and yanked it out of the socket.
“Oh!” the doctor cried, watching the screen go black.
“Oh?” Sarah looked at the doctor, more anxious than ever.
Soren kicked the cord out of sight as the doctor went around the room, flicking the lights on and off.
“We didn’t seem to lose power,” she murmured.
God, Soren hoped she was better with babies than she was with circuitry.
Two more women hustled in and started rooting around. And Jesus, there was poor Sarah, high and dry on that damn examining chair, worried and helpless and alone. He grabbed her hand and shoved her clothes at her.
“We’re out of here.”
“Soren!” she protested.
“We’re out of here.”
“But…”
“We have to go.”
“But why?” Sarah pulled back.
He ground his teeth. “We have to talk.”
“Talk?” she gaped at him. “You want to talk now?”
* * *
He drove clear out of town and up into the hills, wondering desperately how he’d start the talk neither of them wanted to have. His inner autopilot led him to the state park he usually headed to when he needed to let his bear out, where he parked and led Sarah — tight-lipped, angry Sarah — out to the first of two lakes. The water was blue and calm, reflecting a gorgeous Arizona sky, the red rock outcrops, and the green of the pines on the surrounding hills. It was one of his favorite places — so calm and serene. Which didn’t seem to help, though, because after pacing for a few minutes, he ended up blurting it out.
“Who’s the father?”
Sarah closed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Sarah, I need to know.”
Her eyes flew open, and boy did she look mad. “Why would you need to know?”
God, he wished he could just speak the truth. Because if that baby is a shifter, it changes everything.
If the baby is a shifter, there’s nothing stopping us from getting to keep you forever. Both of you, his bear added breathlessly.
Soren kept his mouth shut and waited her out.
A bird sang in the bushes, and a light breeze whispered through the trees. A fish splashed at the surface of the lake, sending ripples in ever-widening circles across the wobbly reflection of the sky. And for some strange reason, he thought of the baby, bumping his hand.
If that baby was a bear shifter, it was his to take care of as part of his clan.
If the baby was human, he would have to stick to the original plan of finding Sarah a place far away to live her life without him. It would be safer for her and the baby not to mix with shifters and draw the attention of the Blue Bloods.
I want it to be a shifter, his bear whispered inside.
I want it to be, too, he found himself agreeing.
But if it was? Crap, how would he ever explain?
“I’ll tell…if you promise to listen,” Sarah said quietly. “You have to promise to listen to everything.”
He stuck out his jaw. Shit, he didn’t want to listen to how she’d screwed some other guy.
“All of it,” she insisted. “From beginning to end.” She waved a hand. “I mean, why. Why it happened.”
He stared at her. What did she mean, why?
“Promise,” she insisted.
His heart ached, because they’d never made each other promise anything before. They’d always just trusted each other. When did that end?
He figured out the answer a moment later. It ended the night he’d told her he was leaving. The night he’d forced himself to tell her it was over, even though he wanted her more than anything else.
God, what a mess.
“I promise,” he said in a choked voice.
Sarah stared a minute longer, then started pacing along the trail at the edge of the lake.
“A little while after you left for the East Coast, my cousin Ginger came to visit. You remember her?”
He scowled, walking alongside her. Yeah, he remembered Ginger. The one with the bad dye job who’d come on to him the second Sarah turned her back. As if he’d be interested in anyone but his mate.
“Ginger said I’d done enough moping about you, and I needed to have some fun. That it was your birthday and you left me alone and you were probably out partying with someone else…”
He scowled deeper. He’d spent that night alone in the woods, longing for his mate.
“…so I should have some fun, too. So she took me to Lafayette. To that techno bar.”
He stopped short. “Dart’s?”
She nodded.
A thousand alarms went off in his mind. “Jesus, Sarah, don’t you know how many women get their drinks spiked there?”
She looked straight at him without saying a word, and his heart sank. Her drink had been spiked while she was there?
“No, I didn’t know. Well, I didn’t know at the time,” she said bitterly.
Well, Soren knew all too well. He’d heard of the place through a friend of a friend. A place to keep clear of, from the sound of it, if guys were slipping women who knew what kind of drug. Not just the usual date rape drugs, but aphrodisiacs, too, according to the rumor mill.
“These guys kept coming on to us, buying us drinks,” she started.
Jesus! Todd was supposed to keep an eye out for that kind of thing. Where the hell had Todd been?
“They were totally not my type.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “But they were Ginger’s type, apparently.”
“Ginger,” he couldn’t help cursing. He’d never liked her.
Sarah gave him a sharp look and spoke in a hushed voice. “Ginger was staying over at my house when it happened — the fire. She died in the fire.”
Soren ran a hand through his hair. Shit. It’s not like he would wish that on Ginger. Not Ginger, not anyone.
His mind flashed with an image of the smoldering remains of the shop and the body bags being carried out. Three of them, making him think Sarah had died.
“Well, Ginger eventually took off with a guy that night,” Sarah said, resuming the story. “The other two guys…” She spoke so quietly, he could barely hear. “Well, I don’t know. Somehow, I…”
He clenched his fists to keep his bear claws from breaking out.
“Anyway, the whole thing was a mistake. Ginger went off with one guy, and there were these two other guys and I…I…”
Soren kicked at the ground, scattering gravel.
“God knows what I would have done if Todd hadn’t come along—”
His heart screeched to a stop. “Todd?” His cousin and best friend, Todd?
At first, he was elated. Todd had prevented a terrible crime. But then it hit him that Sarah wasn’t done with the story yet.
Soren flexed his fingers and clawed at thin air.
“But I pushed him hard enough that he wanted it, too. God, Soren. I missed you so much, and I don’t know — with the full moon and the drinks and missing you so much… I wanted you that night more than ever.”
He’d wanted her that night, too. Bad enough that he’d jerked off, pretending it was her. And for a while there, he’d convinced himself it was. It felt that real, that good. Until it ended and he was left empty and alone.
“I had my eyes closed the whole time,” she said, barely above the breeze.
He squinted at her. She’d always kept her eyes on him, every time they’d been together. Every single time.
“Pretending it was you… For a while, I even believed it was you, touching me. Whispering to me.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “And afterward, all I could do was cry, because it felt so wrong.”
She walked a few more steps, but Soren stood rooted to the spot as his mind spun.
Not about Todd. Not about spiked drinks. About something completely different.
What was that old legend he’d heard told, long ago? What did they call it?
Moonlust, that was it.
“Moon what?” Sarah spun around.
He hadn’t realized he said it aloud, but now he was stuck.
“Moonlust. An old legend.” An old bear legend, but he left that part out. It happened to mates, they said. The closest, truest destined mates. But how could he tell her that?
“What legend?” she asked, irritated.
“When two people…when two people who are destined to be together think of each other at exactly the same time on exactly the same night, and they… Well, they…”
He let that part hang, because surely she got it by now. When destined mates dreamed themselves right into each other’s arms and made a connection that erased the space between them.
“Tell me,” he said in a raspy voice. “Tell me what I said to you that night.”
She tilted her head at him. “What you said?”
“Tell me what you heard, Sarah.” He was speaking too loudly now, and his voice carried across the lake. But it was important. God, everything hinged on what she said next. Had she really heard his thoughts despite all the distance between them that night?
