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

  Lila had never slipped so seamlessly into a group of people before. She usually stalled and stuttered, terrified of saying the wrong thing. But these men—boys, really, Lost Boys in a wintry Neverland—made her smile, made her feel like she was in on some kind of inside joke. Like she was right at home.

  They were the kind of grown men who still threw themselves around and got bruised up like witless and immortal teenage boys. But under all that grit and gristle, she found herself learning all these brilliant hidden things about them. Like how the tattoos engulfing Matt’s arms and back and belly recounted the events of The Bhagavad-Gita, beginning at the base of Matt’s left wrist, looping around his body, and finally ending at his right. And that Finn spent lazy weekend afternoons knitting everyone socks and scarves and hats, listening to sports on the radio, cussing his head off and banging his needles together when his side lost. And that Colt could spell any word you threw at him without a second’s thought.

  She wanted to stay here. She wanted to excavate their quirks and charms like diamonds. She wanted them to keep hooting and hollering when Henry invited her to sit on his lap. She wanted December 31 to never arrive.

  Sitka-time was elastic, but it still crept inexorably forward, one protracted second at a time.

  Lila woke on the last day of the year with a stone in her belly. Her room—no, she reminded herself, Henry’s room—was as cool and clear as a bowl of water. The sky was lilac and lightening fast.

  She stood and went to the window to watch the sun come out.

  Tomorrow, she thought, would be her last day to enjoy the cathedral-quiet of that sliver of time between night and day, as though the world was holding its breath, waiting with her for the sun to finally rise.

  And then after that she’d be back in Toronto. Back to her sink full of unwashed dishes, back to a sky that would never go quiet, not really. Not the way that Sitka’s did.

  Lila turned away from the window. She tugged on her fleece leggings, then her jeans, and threw on the softest sweater she could find in Henry’s dresser. She tiptoed down the hall, past the long row of shut doors. Today, she decided, she would be the one to wake up Henry, and they could go out and watch the sunrise together.

  At the top of the stairs, she paused.

  She heard Henry and Matt downstairs, but they weren’t carrying on their usual morning banter. They spoke in hushed, urgent tones, like they were having the world’s quietest shouting match.

  “You haven’t told her yet?” Matt hissed, and then he made a sharp sick sound of disgust through his teeth. “Are you joking?”

  “There was never a good time.”

  “A good time was three fucking days ago, buddy.”

  Lila winced back and leaned against the wall. She’d never heard Matt sound severe before, or even any mood worse than vaguely annoyed. Anger was almost too astonishing to process.

  “I know. I know.” She imagined Henry sitting with his head in his hands, the line of his lips going tight.

  “You gotta say something, man. If this is a real thing.”

  “Of course it is,” Henry snapped.

  Matt said something else, something low and inaudible, and she heard Henry scoff like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

  Then the scrape of a wooden chair moving as someone stood, and Henry muttered, “I’m gonna go see if Lila is up. Don’t tell her anything. I need to be the one to do it.”

  “C’mon, Henry—”

  “Not one goddamn word.”

  The floorboards creaked under the weight of Henry’s approach.

  Lila darted on the toes of her feet to Henry’s room. She shut the door behind herself as quietly as she could, then sat at the desk, grabbed her camera, tried to look like she’d been flicking through photos for ages.

  Henry opened the door gently, peered inside, and smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “That’s cute.”

  Lila looked down at her sweater and said, “Oh. Thanks.” She looked away, at the window, a dozen questions poised on the tip of her tongue. Most of all, she wondered what could get Matt of all people so intense.

  “Listen, Lila.” Henry sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed his face with both hands. His eyes looked heavy and sleepless. “Maybe we should talk about something.”

  Lila raised her head. Her heart started rabbiting in her chest. “Talk about what?”

  “What you wanna do tonight. I mean, it’s Lila’s first grownup New Year’s Eve. That’s something worth planning, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” She turned to sit sideways in the chair, resting her chin on the chair’s back, and searched Henry’s face for a hint of his secret. She wasn’t sure how to feel about it. There were things she hadn’t told him, things she kept locked away in the deepest catacombs of her heart. Things even she didn’t want to bring up.

  “You know,” she said, finally, “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Henry laughed humorlessly at the floor. “It sucks.”

  Lila nodded.

  The first few rays of sunlight peeked through the window, almost shyly. Lila crept to Henry’s side and sank down into the warm and total embrace of his arms. She didn’t know what to feel.

  They sat there and watched the sunrise in silence, neither willing to voice the impossible question that hung between them, souring the dawn.

  In the end, Finn and Matt wanted to spend New Year’s Eve at Pioneer Bar, though they had two entirely different reasons for it. Finn liked being drunk in public, and Matt hated cleaning up after everyone at the end of the night.

  So Lila and the boys packed themselves into both trucks and rambled down the mountain. Finn even persuaded Colt to come along. The brothers rode with her and Henry, and she’d never seen them so opposite. Finn was in a state of eternal motion, like he was positively vibrating with kinetic energy. He kept jabbering and shaking Lila’s shoulders to “make her feel more festive” and lurching over her lap to change the station every minute or two, hunting for something better. And Colt, his younger mirror image, sat calm and soundless in the back, pressing his nose to the window to look up at the stars.

  Lila just held Henry’s hand as he drove. They shared small, bemused smiles with every one of Finn’s excited outbursts, like they were his exasperated parents.

  Pioneer Bar was a madhouse. Matt and Sherman had managed to arrive early enough to secure one of the lone booths, but all the bar’s standing room and scant stools were full to the brim with drunk exuberant fishermen and high school kids trying to sneak liquor in the mayhem. The bar was all music and joy and free-flowing booze.

  Maybe it didn’t count as a party, but it was the closest Lila had ever been to one. She had to shout for anyone to hear her, and Henry insisted on paying for her drinks—“You’re so small,” he’d told her with a mischievous grin, “that you’ll be smashed after three drinks, so don’t you worry about my wallet, lady”—and men eyed her for the sole reason that she was young and attractive and unfamiliar.

  The year dwindled to its final hours, and she didn’t care about whatever memories Henry still kept from her, or that her flight was set to leave in less than twelve hours, or that this may be her last night to see her only friends in the world.

  Instead, Lila sipped whiskey and told stories and made people laugh, and Henry held her like she was the most precious thing in the world. She had never felt so alive.

  By ten o’clock, Finn was eight beers deep and stumbling drunk. He pushed himself up from the table and shouted, “Holy Jesus, I’ve never had to pee so bad in my life.”

  Colt scooted out to let Finn go by. His cheeks were rosy, but he still had his motor planning. “Don’t break the seal, brother,” he said as he sat again. “You’ll piss every fifteen minutes if you do.”

  Lila felt blurry but rational. She was Lila gone soft at the edges. She was Lila grinning like an idiot at Finn and Colt, Lila who suddenly found talking about pee enormously funny.<
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  Henry leaned his head down and said in her ear, “You okay, Lila?”

  “I’m great. Drunk, but.” She smiled blissfully up at him. “I’m really, really great.”

  “Good.” He kissed her nose, and Lila giggled in delight.

  Finn grabbed his coat from their pile of jackets and tugged it on. “You know what’s irritating as hell though?” he said suddenly to the table as a whole. He pulled a lone grey glove from his pocket and shook it like it had wronged him personally. “I ordered these brand new nicer’n hell goddamn gloves off the internet, and it took them some, I dunno.” Finn staggered and grabbed onto the edge of the table, making their glasses shudder. “Like two weeks to get here. Two goddamn weeks. And I ain’t even got ’em a full forty-eight hours before one of these little bastards just up and disappeared one day. Right out of my pocket.”

  “Great story, Finny.” Sherman held up both his thumbs. His glasses were so smudged they couldn’t possibly be useful anymore.

  “You’re goddamn right it’s a great story.” Then Finn slapped the glove on the table, turned, and flounced out the door.

  Colt took his spot again and sighed, heavily.

  Lila frowned at the glove. “Let me see that.”

  “All yours.” Colt tossed it over to her.

  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.