Page 13 of A Bear's Secret

Chapter Four

Austin

Even though hedidn’t need to leave for another half hour, easy, Austin needed a couple of minutes to himself. Whenever he was in the same room as Sloane, he felt like she was outlined in light, and he couldn’t pay attention to anything else, his bear growling and roaring so loud that he could barely focus his mind enough to make conversation.

The thought that she was only there for another thirty-six hours made him panic, a bone-deep, awful feeling that made him feel like he was walking on jelly.

At least you know she exists now, he told himself. You thought that she didn’t — okay, maybe you were hoping that she didn’t — but here she is, so deal with it.

He had no idea how to do that. His life was complicated enough without adding a female human to the mix. Wasn’t a half-dead human and a mate who he couldn’t admit publicly enough? Did he really also need to have a day and a half with a girl he knew he could never say no to, only for her to leave on the trail again afterward?

The half-moon shone through Austin’s window. Nearby, he could hear Sloane walking through the house, putting the plate of cookies back in the kitchen, putting a glass in the sink. Beneath his door, lights went out. 11:25. Her soft footsteps padded along as she walked back and forth, switching her laundry to the dryer, then a whisper of running water as she brushed her teeth.

He sat on his bed, sighed, and waited. On his bedside stand was a wedding invitation. His cousin Julius, the lawyer who’d fought for shifter marriage rights in the first place, was marrying his two mates.

On the invitation was written Austin Leeds and guests. He was supposed to have sent it back almost a week ago already, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Why keep lying to his family? Why keep pretending that he was single, watching all his cousins so happy in public with their mates?

He couldn’t bring himself to write the truth, though.

11:30. 11:35. He couldn’t go out while she was there. He could lie to anyone else, but somehow, he didn’t think he could lie to her. One second of those perfect brown eyes saying Hey, where are you going? No matter how casually she asked, he’d tell her.

11:40. Austin was going to be late.

At last, her footsteps died down, and the last light flicked off. As quietly as he could, he opened his door, walking barefoot into the hallway, then opened the back door into the garage. Through the garage and into the ranch house’s kitchen garden.

He hadn’t thought that someday he’d been thirty-two and sneaking out of his house, but he’d gotten a lot of his life wrong when he was a dumb kid. He also hadn’t thought that he’d be perfectly happy working on a ranch run by wolves, or that he’d wind up loving who he loved.

Hell, at fifteen, he’d have told anyone who asked that he was going to be a huge rock star, the next Eddie Vedder or something. That hadn’t worked out, not that thirty-two-year-old Austin minded. The tiny taste of that life that he’d had wasn’t what he wanted.

At the edge of the garden was a small toolshed, and Austin paused there and took off his clothes quickly, sticking them on a shelf behind a row of shovels. Then he stepped back out into the moonlight and shifted, letting his bear out, the fur poking through his skin as he got taller and then hunched over, his teeth growing points and his fingers becoming long claws.

Moments later, he stood there, sniffing the air. Even though he had pretty sharp senses as a human, it was nothing compared to him in his grizzly form. Now he could hear an owl winging through the night, a quarter of a mile away, the squeak of the field mouse that it grabbed in its claws. He could smell the stream running a mile inside the forest and all the smells of spring, leaves coming out of the trees, even the seedlings in the garden behind him.

Austin set off.

He usually liked to make this walk a little slower. Once or twice he’d come across fellow shifters — almost always wolves — and he didn’t like them to think that he might be heading somewhere in a hurry. Bears going somewhere fast tended to make them suspicious, and while Austin knew a lot of the wolves from the ranches around the Double Moon, he didn’t know all of them.

He did know that not all of them were friendly.

The relationship between bears, wolves, and lions hadn’t been outwardly combative in a long time, ever since they’d had to live in close quarters with humans. Now it was more of an uneasy truce. Bears and Wolves and Lions mostly lived apart, neither shifter trusting the others very much.

Austin knew that the other bears considered him eccentric at best and traitorous at worst for even working for wolves. Because of it, there were people whose homes he wasn’t welcome in, stores in Granite Valley where he couldn’t shop. He didn’t really care about that — Barb and Bill were wonderful people, no matter what kind of animal they turned into — but he also didn’t want to make it worse.

Inter-species mating, for example, was heavily frowned upon. It was the sort of thing that no one would ever say out loud, but it was true all the same. Even having friends from a different shifter species was considered weird. The only inter-species couple that Austin had ever heard of had been a lion and a wolf somewhere way up north, close to the Oregon border. They’d been run out of town, and Austin didn’t know what had happened after that.

He didn’t think it was anything good.

Then Austin could see the light through the trees, flickering and yellow, and he knew that the cabin was just up ahead. Just like every time, his heart beat faster, his steps got more urgent, and a tingle ran through his whole body, anticipating what was coming next.

The cabin was tiny: one wooden room with a stone fireplace. At one time, Austin thought, it had been a whole little homestead in the middle of nowhere, and some family had lived there, gardening, herding goats or something even in the fairly harsh mountains. But now, it was one simple room and a fireplace.

It was all they needed.

He stood in front of the door and shifted back to human, and then stood there for one more moment, just enjoying the anticipation.

I wish it was different, he thought. But sometimes I do like the thrill.

He pushed the door open, stepping into the warmth and light of the little shack where his mate waited.

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