Page 35 of Bear's Rejected Love

New being the key word. The cabin had been so freshly built, the place still smelled like the forest. All the furniture was also so newly constructed that the wood was probably still a living, breathing entity.

Wait. No matter how old or stained or sealed, wasn’t wood always living still? Not the way people did, but in its own mysterious way?

She smiled softly, but he could tell that it took some real effort. He and the girls and Honor had been at her cabin for just about a week. Oddly enough, once he’d given his word not to run out on them in the middle of the night and disappear like the spring-scented breezes that swept down the mountainside, things hadn’t even been that tense. The cabin was small, but during the day, the kids went to school and when they got back, they cleaned up, helped make dinner, and entertained Honor. They took him for walks, caught and studied bugs with him outside, found him leaves and twigs and other interesting nature to study. They all seemed perfectly content.

All of them except for Tabitha.

She hid it extremely well.

So well that he sometimes thought he was imagining the occasional shadows in her eyes.

She’d taken the day off work when his new cabin was ready in order to help get it prepared. The girls didn’t know that it was finished yet. They’d agreed to keep it a secret. That was Tabitha’s idea. She’d collected up the things on their list, and the people of Greenacre had gone above and beyond to make their cabin a home again. It was her suggestion that they put up the artwork and fold the girls’ new clothes, and get their room ready as a surprise for them. She’d also arranged it with Silver, getting her to watch Honor for the afternoon so that they could make quick work of the project without having to worry about interrupting his routine of snacks and naps.

Honor also loved Silver’s boys, Andrew and Zane, half to death, and he’d been so happy when they dropped him off and he hadn’t even realized they left.

“You’re right. It hasn’t. Denver used to call me a brat because I was always speaking my mind. It was really annoying to him when we were kids. I guess my truth wasn’t all that interesting to him and I wanted it to be. I wanted my older brother to think I was awesome.”

He wasn’t imagining the shadows now. They stormed her face, taking over. His chest pinched. There was something wrong with him because seeing her upset made him want to take her into his arms and comfort her. Not that he had the faintest idea how. Thinking that only reinforced what a selfish bastard he was.

He set the hammer down on one of the pine dressers. He liked making and fixing stuff, it was one thing that he was really good at, anything inanimate he could polish up and make as good as new. When he’d first left Maine he’d taken on numerous jobs, each one more different than the last, and he could pretty much turn his hand to anything. You name it, he’d done it from construction to sales. He had a smooth tongue, and he could be very persuasive when he wanted to be. He’d even persuaded Silver to come to Maine with him last year—he’d needed to get away from Greenacre. Not that he disliked the place, but the more he was starting to feel at home, the more he started wondering if anything of his home remained.

After arriving, he’d learned that the clan had broken up, and there was no trace of any of his old friends. He’d not told Silver the real reason for wanting to go back, there was a lot she didn’t know about him. But in Maine she’d discovered what had been done to him in the lab and she’d finally persuaded him to return to Greenacre with her, it was the closest place to a home, shifters like them would ever have.

He turned his attention back to the dresser, focusing on the girls would keep his mind off his own problems. Ora would have her own dresser, and so would Helena. Given the size of the new cabin, both girls could have had their own rooms, but they still insisted on sleeping together and Roan was not going to stop them doing something that brought them comfort after what they’d been through. Glendy had a store on main street, and she’d been in charge of going to the city and finding the art for their cabin. She had good taste and had chosen mostly relaxing nature-based work that the girls would love. There was no pink in sight, but then, the girls were basically adults already, and they never had liked pink, so instead the room was in shades of green.

He had two more pictures to hang. It was asshole reminder number two, because who made it to middle age and hadn’t ever hung a scrap of artwork in any home before?

“What did you…” He trailed off. She’d volunteered, but he knew he didn’t have any right to ask her for her thoughts.

The room wasn’t all that small, but he felt like the walls were closing in on him. he brushed a hand over his throat, like he could dislodge the lump stuck there.

Tabitha swung her braid over one shoulder. She was wearing a pair of old jeans and a t-shirt tucked in, clearly anticipating a day of hard, probably dirty work. Even dressed down, he found his breath catching when he looked at her. He had no right to the thoughts that kept appearing in his brain. Memories of their one night together before he’d acted like the giant asshole he was and fled town after the mating ceremony.

What he’d done was unforgivable, he’d thought it was the right thing, the only way to stop whatever shit he attracted from fucking up her life. Instead he was the shit who fucked up her life.

“I was thinking about grief.”

He stared at her and let the silence unfold. He was an expert on that subject, and yet he knew nothing at all. What he’d done since his parents died in that accident was grieve, but it hadn’t been healthy.

“I was thinking about how it never ends. Obviously. That’s not news to anyone, but it’s painful. I guess I just didn’t realize what that pain was actually like until I lost my parents. Until the clan broke up. Until my life kind of fell apart. When you left, it made me sad.” Her lips pursed and she looked at the curtains fluttering over the open window. It was letting in more heat than it was letting out, but at least the air was fresh. “It made me a lot of things, actually, but what I didn’t do was grieve. You left, but you weren’t gone for good. It wasn’t final. I thought that one day, it would be reversed. But death? There’s no undoing it. I miss my parents all the time, and it’s kind of insane how I can still function, and then sometimes it just hits so hard. It’s like all that pain lies dormant until that moment when it sneaks back up on you and comes for you and you feel the full force of it as fresh as you ever did. I used to resent it so much, that pain, coming back at me when I thought I had it figured out, but now I take it as a sign of love. I was blessed to have my parents for as long as I did, and I was ultra-blessed to be loved. The grief is just me missing them so hard, wishing they were here, knowing that nothing will ever be perfectly okay again because they’re not and that’s always going to be an unfixable hole inside of me.”

She studied him, her eyes a paler shade of spring green than they usually were. Make no mistake, they were still intense.

A bonfire burning inside of him on a cold winter’s night in the middle of a barren clearing.

That’s the kind of fire she was. Not the kind that burned down cabins and threatened people’s lives. The kind that invited people closer. The kind that warmed and mystified.

“I don’t avoid thinking about my parents. I have so many keepsakes of theirs. Christmas ornaments. My mom’s favorite mug. The quilt she sewed me for Corbin when he was born. There’s so much more.” She gave him a sidelong look, as cautious as if she was approaching a wounded, skittish stray animal she didn’t want to scare away because it clearly needed help. “But you… you don’t have anything from your parents, do you?”

“No.” He hated the reminders. He’d hated that they physically weren’t with him. When the accident happened, he hated how the grief paralyzed him. How he couldn’t process it. How it felt like it was going to hurt and hurt and hurt forever until it destroyed him. He was almost fourteen when it happened, still a child but not a child. And like it or not, his childish brain had tried to rationalize it the best way it could. It was his fault, he must have been a bad person. Maybe he loved too hard? Maybe loving had attracted bad luck? It was silly, it was superstitious, but it was what had shaped him to be the man he was today, and he was trying… fuck was he trying to process everything that had happened to him, his parents, the lab, whatever—as an adult.

Her nose scrunched up as her face caved in. She looked like that before she cried. She’d never been afraid to do that before, but he’d noticed how much she kept in check now that she had Corbin. She didn’t want to fall apart in front of him, even if she’d be the last person who would ever tell their son that it wasn’t okay for adults to cry. She used to ugly cry, and she was never ashamed of it. Not the way he felt ashamed over any emotion he used to feel.

“I thought about finding you since the day you left.” Asshole reminder number three. She didn’t slam a finger in his face, though. She didn’t even look accusing. Her nose just had that adorable wrinkle in the bridge of it. “But I never thought that it might wreck you when I finally did. I thought that you’d want to know your son. I thought it would be a great thing. I didn’t realize that you’d have a life and that me coming here would just blow it all up.”

“That’s the last thing it did.” He wished he could be more convincing, but all she’d seen was the worst of him since she’d arrived. Okay, she’d seen the worst parts of him for a lot longer than that. “Really.”

She didn’t look convinced. “Why don’t I believe that?”

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