Riding Bearback (BBW Shifter Cowboy Romance) (Bear Ranchers Book 1) Read online

  Henry laughed and let her hand go. “Wait, wait. I’ll come back down. I’ll lift you up.”

  “You don’t have to lift me—”

  But before she could finish, Henry had already leapt down, landing heavy enough to make the dock shudder, and hauled her up by her elbows. Lila kicked and shrieked and held her camera bag for dear life.

  “Jesus, Lila! Grab something and pull yourself up.”

  Lila seized the closest rope she saw. She planted her feet on the solid edge of the boat and heaved herself upright. And immediately dropped to her knees, clutching the rope, fixing Henry with a stunned stare.

  “Are you sure you’re a wildlife photographer?” He swung up next to her and settled down, red-cheeked and preening. Like giving her a little scare absolutely delighted him. “Seem awful jumpy for it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve never had someone try to toss me on a sailboat before.”

  “I didn’t know your legs were that short.”

  Lila let go of a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding in. And then she started laughing. “You’re crazy.” She nudged her shoulder against his arm. “This is crazy.”

  Henry smiled up at the sky. She traced the ridge of his nose, the heavy line of his jaw. She looked at his hands, bare despite the cold. He had fingers so big they looked like they could rip a fish open easy as tearing into a wet envelope.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’ll show you something crazy.”

  Lila adjusted her camera settings while Henry started up the little boat’s motor, freed her jib and sail from their icy covers. She watched him through the viewfinder of her camera as he scuttled up and down the hull, loosening and tightening the rigging with cultivated precision. His eyes were soft and distant, completely absorbed in his work.

  The camera shutter clicked like tiny insect legs.

  Henry jerked his head toward her. “Are you taking pictures of me?”

  “Yeah.” Lila paged through the snapshots and smiled to herself. Imperfect, except for their subject. “A little.”

  “I’m not the wildlife.”

  She lowered her camera. “I know. I take pictures of other stuff too.”

  “Handsome sailors?”

  “No.” Lila watched him make his way back over to her side and settle down beside the tiller. “Just things I don’t want to forget.”

  Henry looked at her, looked at the rosy rim of dawn, and said, “You’d better get a shot of that too, then. It’s gonna be a beaut.”

  They spent the morning on the bay, Sitka’s whales ducking under and around her boat, like curious farm dogs crowding a new visitor. She crawled up and down the length of the boat with no thought but her camera and the next shot. The whales preened for her, flashed their tails and exposed their creamy underbellies as they turned their massive bodies around and around the bright orange edges of the boat. Lila snapped pictures until her battery finally gave out. Then the two of them sat side-by-side, enjoying the quiet and the fact that they had someone to share it with.

  Their empty yowling bellies were the only reason they came back to shore.

  Now, swollen and sleepy from lunch, feeling the time difference weighing on her very bones, Lila found herself daydreaming about beds and sitcoms and naps. About furnaces and places that weren’t currently pelting her with snow.

  Lila gripped her knees with her hands and gasped, “Is it much farther?”

  Henry, a dozen yards ahead of her already, turned to look at her. “You’re all the way back there still? Burning daylight, Ellis.”

  They were halfway up the mountain that flanked the back end of Sitka proper. Henry started them on a trail first—snowy and steep, but manageable—but soon went traipsing off the main path, leading Lila through a labyrinth of trees that he seemed to read like road signs.

  “I really,” she panted, trudging after him, “only came here for the whales.”

  “You wanted Sitka’s secrets too, didn’t you?”

  Lila groaned, lifted her foot up in that absurd half-march she had to use just to clear the top layer of snow, and kept on.

  “Almost there,” Henry said. He sounded so much further ahead than her already. “It’s okay. I’ll carry you back down if you’re beat.”

  Lila snorted. “Sure, carry me on the easy part.”

  She kept her eyes on the ground in front of her and followed the sound of Henry’s heavy clunking boots. Focused on keeping her breath even. Her camera bag felt heavier and heavier with every upward step. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something small, dark, and still. Something that made her pause and frown.

  There was a glove in the snow.

  Lila looked at Henry’s long lean back. He didn’t seem to notice that she’d stopped. She ventured over to the glove and picked it up. It was dry still, even a little warm, as though it had been dropped moments ago. She looked up at the sky—moody and gray, twinkling cascade of snowflakes—and turned the glove over in her hands. The outline of a small orange bear was stamped on the back. It looked like it could belong to Henry. It was big enough, certainly; she could fit almost her whole hand in the palm alone.

  Somewhere up ahead of her, Henry called low and urgent, “Lila! Lila, quick!”

  Lila shoved the glove in her coat pocket and hurried up, wrestling her camera out of its bag as she went.

  She found Henry at the crest of the hill, hunkered down on his belly, looking through the gap of two snowy bushes. When she reached him, breathless and bewildered, he started grinning like crazy.

  “What?” she said.

  “Be real quiet. Get down here.” Henry pointed through the gap of the bushes. “Look.”

  Lila ducked down next to him and took off her lens cap. She tried not to think about the inch or two of air between their shoulders, their hips.

  Then Lila peered through the opening and inhaled sharply.

  Beyond the bushes lay a small round clearing—a brief expanse of nothingness before the forest clustered together again, as though the land itself needed room to pause and breathe—and in the clearing stood a pair of black bears preening in a rare spear of afternoon light. They didn’t seem to notice them. The bears stood together in that impossible bright snowfall, surrounded by trees so tall the bears barely reached their proverbial kneecaps.

  “Oh my god,” Lila whispered.

  Henry just grinned and grinned.

  She hid behind her viewfinder, completely absorbed, her camera shutter clicking like a kind of heartbeat. Through the lens she watched the bears stir as if awoken by something, then lope to opposite ends of the clearing, their breathing loud and excited, and then suddenly they turned at once and charged, rose up on their back legs and collided, mouthed lightly at the soft skin of each other’s throats, fell to all fours, circled around to do it again.

  Then Henry’s mouth was against her ear, his voice as delicate and light as a dandelion seed. “They’re play fighting.”

  Warmth spread through Lila’s belly. She didn’t realize he had stubble. She liked the tickle of it against her earlobe. “Keep telling me stuff,” she whispered back.

  Henry chuckled softly. There was his mouth again, his hot divine breath raising the hairs on her neck. “Why?”

  “I like it,” she told him, and she realized as she said it that it was true.

  She and Henry lay side by side, heads inclined together, him whispering explanations as they watched the bears prance and preen and spar like they were nothing more than young boys in fur suits putting on an elaborate game of pretend.

  After a long immeasurable while, the bears stopped their fighting and trundled into the woods, their movement near-silent except for their rapid wheezing breaths and the husky, low growls they kept making to one another. It almost sounded like laughter.

  Lila didn’t know how long she and Henry had laid there, but her jeans were soaked, her thighs freezing, and somehow she’d pressed the entire line of her body against Henry’s. God, he was warm. She covered her lens again an
d looked up to see Henry looking at her, his stare soft and sweet.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, you.”

  Lila studied him. They had never been so close before; if she pushed up even a little on her elbows, they would knock their teeth together. But there was so much to notice up close. So many little details she’d never let herself look for. Like his eyebrows, thick and mannish and expressive, how they drew her stare to his eyes, more amber than brown. Almost golden.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking?” she whispered.

  The corners of his eyes crinkled in amusement, and something deep inside her longed to reach out and touch those perfect little smile lines. “What?”

  Lila glanced up. Her inhibition had fled her, as though it slipped from her pocket somewhere between here and Henry’s boat. It was something about the trees. These trees seemed to stretch up into eternity. Lila didn't think she'd ever seen trees this old. Not in person. These were trees that had seen entire geological ages, trees that outlived the evolution and extinction of countless species.

  “It just seems like Sitka got unstuck from time. Like it’s its own little bubble. Or like its own atmosphere, outside of the whole rest of the world.” She darted her eyes to his. “I guess that’s stupid.”

  “No, it’s not stupid.” Henry’s gaze wandered to her lips, along the curve of her cheek. He reached out, gently, and pushed her mussed black hair behind her ear. “That’s what I like about it. That’s exactly it.”

  The past twenty-four hours unspooled in her head like old typewriter ribbon. She tried to remember a time before she stormed out of that bar, before Henry followed her, before he shared this day and these places with her. Even her apartment was hazy, like a place she’d lived in when she was too small to remember anything but shadows.

  “You’re unreal,” Lila told him. She licked her dry lips, then reached out and dusted her fingers along the curve of his jaw.

  Overhead, a raven cawed, sudden as gunfire.

  Lila lurched away, scrambled to her feet, startled back to reality. She could still feel Henry’s side pressed to hers, could feel the long swath of shared heat spread from her shoulder to her thigh. “Oh god.” Her face was hot and flushed. “Sorry. Oh my god. We should get back. It’s late. And I’m… god, sorry, I’m never like this. I never do this.” She fumbled with the clips of her camera bag, blind with the white-hot burn of humiliation. “I’m so sorry.”

  She heard Henry stand, heard him sigh through his nose and step closer to her.

  “I just can’t, I mean, I’d never—”

  “Stop,” Henry murmured.

  “I—”

  He brought his bare hands to her cheeks, and Lila leaned up to meet his kiss halfway. She was frozen and melting all at once: her body stiff, immobile, trembling, but her lips were viscous against Henry’s, like they were dissolving into one another, inseparable, indistinguishable.

  Henry pulled away, but he rested his forehead against hers, his mouth curling in a sublime smile against her cheek. “You’re one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met, Lila Ellis.” His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “But I’m just about cold as hell.”

  He offered her his hand. Lila hesitated. Holding hands with boys in high school had always been sweaty and awkward. She didn’t date much after high school. Didn’t do much of anything after high school. Just traveled, took pictures of wild things, and disappeared further and further inside of herself. She claimed it was part of her grieving process, but after eight years, it felt less like grief and more like an inescapable rut.

  But Henry’s hand was so warm and large and careful.

  Lila slipped her fingers into his. He raised their gloved hands to kiss her knuckle, then gave her hand a little squeeze. “I’m ready if you are.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m ready.”

  They wandered hand-in-hand down the mountain, neither willing to be the first to let go.

  That night, Lila and Henry lay side by side in his bed, curved like two halves of the same shape, their hands meeting in the middle. This was after dinner with Henry’s makeshift family, after they’d sat on opposite sides of the table and tried to remember how they were before that first kiss. Most of the men didn’t notice, but Lila saw Matt watching Henry with his eyes narrowed, saw the older man follow Henry’s quick stolen looks at her from across the table.

  This was also after she went upstairs, and he followed with a dinosaur of a laptop, muttering something about going through the pictures. And it was after Henry shut the door and circled his hands around her narrow hips and pressed her hard against the door, his mouth on her neck, and then her mouth on his, while their hands searched the lines of each other’s bellies and backs and throats.

  But they had to stop, had to pause and breathe, because any more kissing would lead them someplace under clothes, under covers, someplace neither wanted to blunder into. So instead they lay still and silent and breathing, caught up in the wonder of one another.

  The laptop and Lila’s camera bag sat on his desk, untouched.

  Lila’s fingers traced his hand. Callouses ridged his palms like tiny mountain ranges.

  “I think Matt knows,” she said. The first real words between them since they had escaped upstairs.

  Henry rolled onto his back and laughed, the knob of his Adam’s apple dipping low. She wanted to lean over and kiss it. She wanted to kiss every precious new thing she noticed about him: the little twisted white scar on his wrist, the way he chewed at his lips when he was thinking, the port-wine birthmark speckling the back of his neck.

  “Of course Matt knows.” He turned his head toward Lila, his brilliant dark hair flipping back from his forehead. Lila couldn’t spend enough time looking at him. “He’s practically my brother. We can’t lie to each other anymore. We know each other’s tells.”

  Something turned in Lila’s belly. Not envy, exactly. Longing. She flicked her stare away.

  “Tell me something about yourself,” Henry said, suddenly. “Something I don’t know but should.”

  Lila raised her eyebrows, struck speechless for a moment. “Uh. Well. I don’t do a lot.”

  “I like biographies,” Henry offered. “Like, the kind where it’s a story with the history stuff. They’re like regular books, but they’re about real people and things that really happened, so it’s actually meaningful.”

  She giggled. “God, I don’t know. Um. I used to paint a lot in high school. Like, watercolor stuff. I was pretty good. I stopped practicing so I’m kinda bad now, but I won a couple awards back in the day.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a second.”

  They lay that way for a long time, trading stories like secrets, carefully reconstructing the high points of one another’s adolescence and young adult years. They talked until they couldn’t talk anymore, and then Henry kissed her temple, her mouth, her cheek, and whispered, “I’m glad you lost your luggage, Lila.”

  Lila smiled into his skin. “Me too.”

  The next few days were ethereal and endless, the way holiday breaks had felt when she was small. Sitka-time felt infinitely long, as though Lila could stretch out each individual second like a rubber band.

  She and Henry fell into a comfortable routine. They rose with the sun, made breakfast, made plans, and made out before any of Henry’s buddies even stirred. The early morning silence felt holy, almost church-like, and it made their kisses that much deeper and hungry and needy. Then they spent the day wandering Sitka and the little crumbs of islands near port. Lila took constant pictures, but her lens shifted gradually away from the edenic scenery and more towards Henry. At night, they would cozy up at Henry’s house—The Cave, they called it, like it was a college town bachelor pad—and play card games with his housemates, or they’d rifle through their stacks of worn VHS tapes looking for something they hadn’t seen in a while.