Can't Bear To Run (Kendal Creek Bears, #1) (11 page)

And that was that. I hit the ground as the light in my eyes went out.

*

I
woke up in a big bed – a really big one, almost comically large – and blinked away the remaining dizziness that clouded my addled brain.

“Hold still,” I heard a distant voice. “Don’t move, honey.”

I reached out, hoping to find Dax, but instead, closed my fingers around a much thinner wrist. I still wasn’t seeing straight, and through my fuzzy vision, I thought I could see a woman.
Oh great
, I thought.
I came all this way just to faint and wake up in Dax’s house being nursed by the wife he said he didn’t have
.

“Oh lord,” the woman chortled, “wife? Don’t be ridiculous. Daxon wouldn’t want an oldie like me. Good as I may be.”

I rolled over onto my back, despite her protesting, and pushed up onto my elbows. The long, soft-looking white hair was the first thing I saw. “But...?”

“You were talking out loud, honey.” The woman laughed again, a soft, kindly sort of chuckle. “You were pretty rattled, so I imagine you thought you were thinking?”

I managed a smile. “Yeah, I guess so,” I finally said. “Where am I?”

“Daxon’s house. He’s our alpha,” she immediately fell silent, like she’d used a word she wasn’t supposed to use.

“Your... what?” I sat up and scooted myself back to the headboard, where I flopped backward, thankful for the support. “I thought he was the mayor? Or... something. I don’t quite remember what he said.”

“That’s more or less true,” she answered. “Things are a little different around here.”

“I noticed. I saw the weirdest thing. When we got into town, Dax was showing me the courthouse, and I swear I saw a bear walk up to the door and turn into a guy.” I laughed, nervously. “I let my imagination get away with me sometimes, I guess. It’s kind of a defense mechanism. You know, how some people talk too much, and others laugh a lot and—“

“You do both of those things,” the older woman said. “I’m Fletcher, by the way. Daxon’s... well I guess I do just about everything for him. You weren’t imagining anything.”

Before I could register exactly what she’d just said – confirming that I’d seen what I guessed was a hallucination to be real – there was a loud banging sound from the front of the house. I heard Dax curse, I heard something hit the floor, and then the telltale creak of a couch accepting a very heavy body.

“She awake yet?” he called.

Fletcher got the first Y in her affirmative response out of her mouth and about a half-second later, heavy footsteps stomped down the hall and Dax appeared in the doorway. “Oh my God!” he cried out. “You’re okay!”

Quickly, he gathered me up in his huge arms, holding me tight against his chest.

“Dax, she just fainted,” Fletch said. “I don’t think she was in any mortal danger. But you need to explain the whole bear thing to her, or I doubt that’s gonna be the last time.”

I looked up at him to see this huge specimen shaking his head. The tips of his curls brushed against the side of my face. “Not now,” he said. “She needs to recover, she’s fragile, and I have to protect her.”

Those words worked their way into my consciousness quickly. It occurred to me that he wasn’t saying any of them out of thinking I was some kind of broken china doll, but that he actually
meant
what he was saying. It warmed me to the core, but at the same time, yeah, not fragile.

“I am
not
fragile,” I muttered. “But the rest of that, I’ll gladly take. Though I don’t really need any protecting. After all, I
did
take a baseball bat and...” I trailed off, stopping my yap just short of admitting that I’d had a run in with attempted manslaughter. Or would it be attempted murder? Or actual murder. I was still trying to swallow that pill myself, and nowhere near ready to admit to whatever Dax was to me, what I’d done.

As time went by, I’d regret that decision more bitterly than anything in my life. But at the moment, it just wasn’t right. I wasn’t ready.

“I can take care of myself,” I finished weakly. The fact that I was pale, sweating buckets, and curled up in the fetal position against his chest didn’t lend much credibility to my claim. If Dax laughed, I didn’t hear him.

“I know, Raine,” he said. My name slipped out of lips like honey dripping from a strawberry. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but... well, I figured it might be a little hard to swallow.”

He was hugging me so tight that I could hardly breathe. I didn’t much care though, until it got so bad that I started getting a hot feeling in my lungs. I tapped him on the back. “Hey, uh,” I croaked, “you’re... choking...”

“Oh God,” he gasped, “sorry, I got kinda carried away.”

“Well, put her down you big idiot,” Fletch said. “Apologies are nice and all, but they don’t help someone breathe.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Sorry.”

I sucked a deep breath as a thunderclap crashed outside. “So,” I said, “the bear...?”

“Yeah, uh, it’s a long story.”

A flash of lightning brightened the room for just a moment before it faded away, back into darkness. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

After a moment’s pause, rain so intense kicked up that it was hard to hear myself think.

“We’ve been around a long time,” he said. “A really, really long time. For longer than there have been people here, there have been, well...” he trailed off, like he was searching for the right word to use.

“Bears,” Fletch said, helping him out. “You want me to give her the run down, or are you going to buck up and manage to give her the talk? Don’t remind me of when I tried to coach your old dad through giving you the birds and the bees talk.”

Daxon flushed so brightly that his cheeks looked about the same hue as a clown nose. “I thought you promised you weren’t going to say anything about that.”

Fletcher was just laughing. I could tell that there was something deep between these two. Something that reminded me of how an older sister takes care of her younger brother, but not without taking any possible opportunity to embarrass the hell out of him. She raised her hands defensively. “Now, now, Daxon,” she said. “I was just asking a question, you know. Just trying to help.”

“Yeah, well, I think you’ve been plenty of help.” He was still blushing and I was still biting my tongue. He hadn’t laughed at me, so the least I could do was not laugh at him, even if it took such effort that it hurt my sides.

On cue, the phone started ringing wildly in the other room. If I hadn’t been there, I would have though Dax somehow called his own number to get Fletch out of there. “Go get the phone,” he said with a smug grin. “Let me know if it’s anything bad.”

“Is it ever anything good?”

She trotted off down the hall.

“So, bears?” I asked. “You were saying something about bears?”

“Well, uh,” he stammered. “Yeah, like I said, we’ve been here longer than anyone can remember. And, uh, yeah so we turn into bears, it’s really no big deal. Everyone’s got their thing, you know? Some people really like birthday cake, and others really like burgers. I personally like both, but I like pie better than cake. Anyway, what I’m saying is that—“

“Dax?” I asked. “Take a breath.”

He did. “Whew. Thanks.”

“Go on,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “You were saying something about magical, shapeshifting bears?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, it sounds pretty crazy when you say it like that, but... uh... yeah, that’s pretty much the story.”

“I need to sit down,” I said.

“You already are.”

“Oh, right.”

I felt myself flop over backward. Before that night, I’d never once fainted in my entire life. Not even when I was a kid, and one of my friends and I did that thing where you cross your arms in front of your chest and your friend pulls on them until you black out.

But I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the second time in less than an hour that I went pale, pasty, clammy, and then hit the deck. At least that time I was in a bed, and didn’t end up with a gnarly skinned knee.

Luckily, that round of fainting only lasted a few seconds, and didn’t result in more room spinning when I woke up. But I did notice that as I came-to, Fletch had just run into the room and had a very clearly concerned, upset look on her face. Dax wasn’t paying any attention though. He had my head cradled in his arms, and he was showering my forehead with kisses and my cheeks with slow, careful, comforting strokes.

“What is it, Fletch?” Dax wasn’t paying a lick of attention to her at all. His entire attention was devoted to me, and the gentle touches he was using to soothe my nerves. “Can it wait?”

I looked in her direction. She was shaking her head, and was almost as pale and shaky as I knew I must have been. “I don’t think so. It seems like maybe someone got word about our visitor here.”

“Oh,” he said dismissively. “Is that all? What are you so upset about?”

“It’s not just anyone, Dax,” she said. As she spoke, Fletcher was getting more and more flustered. “If it was just someone calling to say they saw you with your girlfriend, I wouldn’t be acting like a scared little kid.”

He sighed, heavily. I think he didn’t sense exactly what it was she was getting at. I, however, immediately picked up on the tension in her voice, and grabbed Dax’s hand. “I think you should just listen to her,” I said. “You said this was an old place with weird rules, right? Well...”

He took the hint. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

After a moment, Fletcher cleared her throat, which seemed to signal that she’d made up her mind how to proceed. “I guess there’s no point to being sly about it, since she’s a part of this just as much as you are.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Hold on just a second. What am I a part of? I just got here... uh... how many hours ago? See? I don’t even know how long I’ve been here, how the hell can I possibly be a part of anything?”

It was Fletch’s turn to sigh. “You field this one,” she said.

Dax took a deep breath. “Well, it’s like this. Yeah, like I said, this is an old place with old rules. And we’re not the only ones like, you know, us. There are other clans that will pounce at the first sign of weakness. And I don’t know how else to say it, but this makes me look weak.”

I crinkled up my nose, trying to decipher what he’d just said. All I could manage to croak out though, was “weak?”

“It’s not like that,” Dax said, but I was already pushing myself to my feet. “Raine! Wait! I’m not sure why you’re leaving but I’m a giant moron and I always screw these things up.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t screw anything up. Somehow, I’m a sign of your weakness. What is it? My Womanly Wiles? My feminine charm? Some other macho bullshit like that? I don’t even know where I am, not really. You just dropped a steaming pile on my lap about a bunch of magical bears wandering around a town, and about how they apparently have rivalries and then how I’m in the middle of it?”

Dax moved to grab me, but Fletch held him back, shooting him a nasty look. She hissed something through her teeth, but I was so clouded with rage and confusion and my absolutely bizarre state of mind, that I couldn’t even think, much less listen.

He said some other things, but the main thing I remembered Dax shouting was “No!” over and over again. “Let me explain, please!” was another frequently repeated phrase. Looking back, I knew even then I was being brash, and more than a little illogical, but at that moment, I couldn’t let myself fall into something like that again. I couldn’t possibly get into a position where I didn’t feel like I was in control.

“I need to think,” was the last thing I said before I half-ran and half-stumbled down the hall and out the front door into the pouring rain. I opened my Jeep’s door and slammed it shut. There was a rattling noise behind me that I didn’t think about at the time, but as I backed out of the driveway and saw Dax standing there, soaking wet and dripping, I realized what had happened.

He’d gotten back there and unhitched the trailer, and then
moved his damn truck
out from behind me so that I could drive out.

Why I didn’t stop myself right then and there, turn around and run straight back into his arms I’ll never know. Then again, life has this way of always ending up where it’s supposed to end up. Maybe if I’d done that, it wouldn’t have turned out the way it did – the way it
had
to end.

The only other thing I remember thinking as I watched him disappear in the rearview after I turned around was that I had no idea where I was going, and the only thing I wanted to do was to be with him, one way or another.

But that, right then, I just
couldn’t
.

––––––––

“W
hy did I just let her walk out?” Dax slammed his fist into the wall, jabbing a hole through the rough-textured drywall. When he pulled it back, it was covered in plaster dust and flaked paint. “And why the hell did I just get so mad at my wall that I punched a hole in it? What’s wrong with me, Fletch?”

His old friend was just laughing. “She’ll be back,” she said. “As for what’s wrong with you, I could list a thousand different things. But the fact is, I’ve never, not in my entire life, seen you look at anyone like you were looking at that woman. And also, I’ve never known you to be right about anything like this.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dax was so hot and confused and worked up that he couldn’t gather his thoughts, but Fletch was still smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Her wide, toothy grin was almost as infuriating to Dax as his completely inability to stop acting like a pissed off baby. He punched the wall again, but that time instead of punching through a wall, it thudded heavily into a stud. “Son of a
bitch
!” he swore, recoiling and cradling his hand.

“Are you finished hitting walls, yet?” Fletch asked. “Because I’m about to lay a steaming pile in your lap bigger than the one you dumped on Raine.”

“Huh?” he grunted, looking up from his busted knuckles.

“Daxon Mark,” Fletch said with deep gravity. “I hate to tell you this.”