Page 16 of A Bear's Secret

He’d come close to starving to death. Not even real wolves went to those heights in the winter, and he’d ended up scavenging human food from campgrounds at night like some kind of coyote, doing his best not to be seen.

To that day, he couldn’t stomach Doritos or potato chips.

“How long?” Trevor asked.

“Tonight and tomorrow,” Austin answered.

“She know that unconscious kid?”

“She says no.”

“You believe her?”

“Yeah. You should’ve seen her when I found her, she was totally freaked out, running down the trail to the ranch. There’s no way she did it, and I don’t think she’s hiding anything.”

Trevor believed Austin and trusted his judgement. Austin was the only person he felt that way about.

“Your people know anything about it?”

“They say no.”

“You believe them?”

“Not really.”

Trevor moved his arm slightly under Austin, rearranging his mate’s head so his hand didn’t fall asleep.

“I don’t think they did it, but I think they know more than they’re telling us,” Trevor said. Just talking about his family made him tired and made him half-want to escape again.

The other half knew that leaving wasn’t going to help anyone, either him or them. They were family, and they had to find a way to make that work.

“I hope the kid wakes up,” Austin said. “Barb told the hospital to call her when he did. He’s got to have some idea what happened.”

Trevor just nodded.

“I wish we could just stay here,” he said. “Run away to this cabin. We could hunt deer and garden and just be like this every night.”

“It would never work,” Austin said. “We’d get found and strung up. We’d miss our families too much.”

“We have to do something,” said Trevor. “We could just tell them and then leave.”

Even though he was the one suggesting it, he knew it wouldn’t work. Whatever fantasies they had of running away together were only fantasies, and it was his own family who would be the most opposed to their union. If he ran away, he was just leaving his niece and nephew alone with his increasingly unstable father and a mother who got deeper into the bottle every day.

Maybe if Papa were alive, he thought, but he didn’t bother finishing the sentence. He wasn’t. The end.

Instead, he kissed Austin’s warm hair.

“You have to meet her,” Austin said.

Trevor frowned.

“We can’t be with her,” he said. “We can’t subject her to this, to fucking in a cold cabin once a fortnight and sneaking around. Let her go, she’ll finish her hike and be happy somewhere else.”

Austin shifted, looking up into Trevor’s eyes.

“I can’t,” he said.

“You can,” Trevor said.

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