ROMANCE: SHIFTER: Shifter to the Max Collection (Dragon, Bear, Wolf and Panther Shifter Romances) (Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection) (34 page)

“I hate being wrong,” Elie muttered.

Five days had passed since she’d drove past the city limit sign, and beautiful spring-turning-summer days, at that. Elie had spent the last two rooting passively through the usual tracks to procure some sort of summer work. A babysitter. A gardener. A part-time sales clerk. She didn’t need the money, per se, but she hated sitting around. There was the impatience in her, again, stirring her to frantic motion.

Even in a tiny town like Hemford, there was work to be had somewhere, Elie reasoned. The mill would take her for something (with her father as a foreman, of course they would), but relying on that connection left an unpleasant taste in her mouth. Elie was beginning to think, however, that she wasn’t going to have a choice. She’d been stumbling over more rumors and gossip than job offers.

“I’d be careful about that Mosley boy, if I were you.” This advice came from Mrs. Fredricks, an elderly manager at the local Jo-Ann fabrics. Of course Mrs. Fredricks knew Elie, remembered her from years back, and wished she had an opening at the store, but she just hired another girl, so sorry. However, even in the absence of a job opportunity, advice was always free-flowing.

“He don’t work, I swear it, I don’t know where his money comes from,” Mrs. Fredericks sighed, shaking her head; she looked like a sewing-and-crafting version of Mrs. Claus. She looked up at Elie meaningfully. “He goes down to town and I think you can imagine what sort of trouble he gets into down there, especially after he got that poor Langland girl pregnant. Oh, but you didn’t hear that from me. Poor girl—she lives down in a mobile home on third, now…”

Elie peered over the steering wheel. If it was, in fact, a mobile home, it hadn’t been mobile in a long while. The lattice siding around the wheels was broken down, and Elie could clearly see tires that looked a century old beneath. The whole place looked a little sideways.

The trailer door was open, as if the place were abandoned, but Elie had seen someone passing back and forth in the cool shadows within. A toddler played out front, in shorts and a tiny Ironman t-shirt. The clothes looked like the only things within twenty yards that had been purchased new in the last year.

Elie put the Outback into reverse. There was nothing more she wanted to see here. True, she had no proof except the gobbling chatter of a few ladies around town, but she knew. There were men, and then there were Bryan Mosleys. Elie had seen enough of both to know.

Before the car could move, an adult came down the steps of the trailer, a baby on her hip. She stopped beside the toddler, looking down at him in something like fondness. Really, she just looked dazed. Her faded sundress rippled listlessly in the breeze.

Elie recognized Brittany Langland right away, mostly because in almost ten years, she’d tried to look exactly as she had in high school. Brit was even thinner now than she had been then, and her pretty face was worn by the rough years, like sandpaper. Thick, dark circles hung under her eyelids and her skin had taken on a pallor.

Thank God for birth control
, Elie thought sadly.

At that moment, Brittany seemed to notice Elie’s car, but she was too far away to do anything but stare; she seemed too exhausted to even try. She reached up and tucked a lock of blonde hair (light brown roots quite visible at her scalp) behind her ear.

Her arm was skeletal, but that wasn’t what Elie noticed. It was the dots. The splotches of blackened scars against the once-tan skin.

“Is that how it is,” Elie whispered out loud. She took her foot off the brake and fled without a backward glance.

Elie’d never done meth, but she knew it when the signs were so obvious. Just like she knew the Bryan Mosleys of the world.

You were right about that bastard. I thought I’d make it up to you, tonight around ten. I’ll get the beer, this time.

Elie looked at herself in the mirror again.

Too much make-up? Not enough make-up? She turned her head, trying to catch different light at different angles. After scrapping the project and starting over twice, she elected to just go with light accentuation. She doubted Jake was into contouring. And it didn’t feel right, meeting up for a lakeside, midnight rendezvous with a quart of foundation and a bottle of mascara on. It felt unnatural and feigned.

That wasn’t what Elie wanted. No, no. What she wanted was to apologize for yelling at Jake, maybe even apologize for... the other thing. She paled a little thinking about that conversation, but if she was going to run from it forever, she might as well go pull up a trailer right next to Brittany Langland’s. Running blindly always led to sharp cliffs—or at least, it always had in Elie’s experience.

Why was she even putting make-up on? Elie hesitated again, this time with her hand on her bedroom door. Was this supposed to be a date? She looked down at her clothes. Jeans and a blouse and tennis shoes.

Should she dress up? With what? She hadn’t exactly brought an array of outfits to choose from.

No, she decided. Firmly, she opened the bedroom door and shut it behind herself. This wasn’t a date. This was an apology. Meeting a chiseled, smiling, bone-meltingly sweet lumberjack in the middle of the night on a lakeside, so near a full moon, no less, might look like a date, but it wasn’t.

Alison and Brent Barner were in the living room on the couch, watching a movie; it looked like
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
, but then, all Roger’s and Hammerstein’s pictures looked pretty much the same to Elie.

“Going out?” Alison asked sleepily. She was reclining on one end of the sofa, against her husband’s shoulder. Brent was already snoozing against the back of the couch.

Elie opened the fridge and pulled out the six-pack of Narwhal she’d driven down the mountain to retrieve. “I’ll be back later,” she answered. She swallowed back the desire, the
need
, to avoid the question. Why did that happen? She waved to her mother and ducked out the door before any further inquiries could be made.

Out on the front lawn, the silver darkness of a clear night wrapped her for just a moment before the motion light over the garage caught her and flooded the driveway. She hurried to the Outback; the darkness seemed thicker when the light was blinding her, and beyond its safe halo Elie couldn’t help but see bear-shaped shadows. Maybe she was just used to the city lights.

Had Jake ever gotten used to them? She thought about Jake in the city, and couldn’t quite picture it. He seemed like such a country creature, and he himself had admitted that living among the hustle hadn’t really worked out for him. No, she couldn’t see him in anything but boots and jeans. Or out of them…

Elie started the Outback and reversed out of the driveway, hopeful that of all the people to have a real adult friendship—or anything—with, Jake Framer would be the one to try.

It was a long walk, but a short drive to Hidden Lake, and Elie found herself there too soon; she parked the car, shut off the ignition, and waited, blinking in the glow of her gas and RPM gage while the battery idled in accessory. She looked at the pack of Narwhal stout and wondered if he’d tried it before.

Jake wasn’t here yet; the gravel parking lot was empty. Elie hoped he’d found her note.

Sudden doubt gripped her by the throat, and she pushed her hair, black in the darkness, off of her face nervously. She’d left the note right on his front door, wedged into the door knob. He couldn’t possibly have missed it.

The two minutes of accessory ran out, and the Outback flipped into dark silence. Elie didn’t turn it back on. She could wait a little longer in peace and quiet.

It dawned on her that Jake could have walked; the house his parent’s had left him was even closer to this lake than the Barner’s. He didn’t seem as concerned about the bear as Elie was. The more she thought about it, the more certain it seemed. A big strong man like him wouldn’t worry about a mile’s walk.

Elie got out of the car, now worried that he, also, had been waiting and had decided to leave. She still hadn’t exchanged numbers with him, and it seemed stupid to have forgotten now that she was wandering around in the night hoping he’d be here. The forest was blacker than oil and full of soft sounds as she went; at a half-jog she reached the picnic area, where the park lights had shut off an hour ago. Moonlight filled the space instead, the world was white and black, and the lake lapped with the wind against the rocks of the shore.

Jake wasn’t here, either, and Elie didn’t really like to wait alone. She set the Narwhal on the ancient table and paced.

What was taking so long?

She should’ve gotten his number. She should have driven by his house first, before running out here. Rubbing her temples, Elie looked out at the water, listened to it. With a sigh, she ruefully wished she was a better planner.

“Ten more minutes,” she promised herself. It was already gaining on ten thirty.

To keep herself occupied, Elie walked down towards the water. The picnic table was about twenty feet from the shore, and she was soon standing with the toes of her tennis shoes just at the lake’s edge, so Elie turned and began to circle a little ways around.

Would it be so bad, here? Slow, yes, but bad? Elie twisted her lips and tried to answer, but her thoughts were sliced off mid-kilter as a shuffling, huffing murmur came into earshot.

Elie muttered something highly unladylike. It was too late to even back away; the bear was coming right this way! It hadn’t seen her—she hoped—but it was already sloughing along through the brush faster than she could back away from easily.

There was no time! Through the dense, black trees, Elie could make out its shape, fur ruffling and undulating as it hurtled towards her. She was backing up, backing up… should she try to swim away? Would the water cover her scent? Elie took deep, slow,
quiet
breaths, watching the bear approach.

What do you do when a bear is rushing your way?

It was coming for the lake. Coming for a drink, or whatever bears did. It still hadn’t seen her, and Elie was still retreating as slowly as possible.

The bear was slowing, now, as if it had been running to get here and was drained upon arrival. Its last few steps toward the water dwindled into a crawl. Elie’s ears were hyper-aware of the sounds her shoes made as her weight filled each step, displaced rocks, shoved dirt aside…

Out in the open moonlight, the bear was enormous. Elie’d never seen one so big—was this Old Ironhide, or some monster grizzly out of folklore? He was the size of a Goddamn pickup truck. The narrow strip of soil between tree and lake couldn’t even contain him; he stood with his front paws dipped in water.

She hadn’t made very much progress; Elie was trying to step lightly and make as little noise as possible, but the bear was still, as if it were listening…

And then he started twitching.

How else to describe it? Fur and bone started a mad dance under the moon, and Elie watched in horror and fascination. The bear’s skin seemed to be berserking, trying to leap off its bones in defiant rebellion. A terrible, guttural roar of unmistakable pain bellowed out of the bear’s jaws. It rippled through Elie’s flesh, and she knew the panic of a deer before the hunter. 

And then the bear started shrinking. It was like origami folding, smaller, smaller. Fur shed out like wisps of smoke, and white skin caught the moonlight.

The ground came up to meet her; Elie’s legs folded as if they had no bones. It wouldn’t be fair to suggest Elie Barner was the fainting type, but her head did spin in a whooshing whirl of moon and lake. Her skin felt cold, and the night wind seemed to rush through her clothes as if they weren’t there.

There was no longer a bear, or any trace of one. Elie blinked several times, trying to persuade her eyes to see right. Time seemed to be skipping like a scratched CD. The bare human form that lay where the bear had stood was moving in slow jumps—first sitting up, waist deep in the lake. Then struggling to his feet, water streaming down thick muscular legs. He was standing in the shallows, now, looking this way, and Elie was beginning to accept that this was in fact a hallucination.

“Elie?”

She shook her head. If the hallucination talked to her, she might be convinced it was real, and that was a dangerous road to tread on.

But it was walking closer, and worst of all, Elie thought she recognized the voice. “
Elie
?! Jesus! What—?
How long have you been here?!”

Her mouth moved—Elie wasn’t really sure what she planned to say, since even one comprehensible scrap of a response was not forthcoming. She held up a hand in a vague gesture toward the lake, where the bear had withered into… Jake.

Naked as the day he was born, Jake splashed towards her to the shore. This was one shock after another. Under normal circumstances Elie might have avoided looking blatantly at the prominent areas of Jake’s body that were normally hugged into old denim, but staring at his dangling junk seemed like the least abnormal part of the evening.

“Elie! God almighty—get up, you’re scaring the hell outta me!”

Scaring the hell out of him? Elie giggled as Jake helped her to her feet.

Jake seemed to realize suddenly that he was naked, and turned Elie back towards the picnic table. He helped her with an arm around her waist at first; her feet stumbled over the first patch of loose dirt and she almost toppled forward. Impatiently he picked her up without ceremony and carried her.

“Stay here,” he muttered, and propped her on the picnic table. “Just breathe for a minute, I’ll be right back.”

Elie turned to watch him storm away, the moon casting white speckles across his shoulders, buttocks, and legs through the branches.

Alone again, she swayed a bit and waited for the feeling to come back to her hands and feet. They were tingling. She wondered idly if she was having an MI. Twenty-seven was too young for cardiac distress, wasn’t it?

Crunching gravel sounded in hurried steps behind her, and she looked back to see Jake returning, dressed now in jeans with his other clothes and his boots in one hand. His face was difficult to read in the shadows, but he didn’t look happy. Muscles in his chest and arms were tense and veins stood out all the way up his neck.

“
What are you doing here?
” he asked in a hiss.

“Meeting… you.” Elie nudged the six-pack that was sitting beside her on the table; this seemed to be the first Jake had even seen of it. His shoulders slumped at once, and he dug his fingers through his hair.

“Oh, man… Look, Elie, what did you see? What all did you see?”

Elie was coming back to her senses, and looked up at him warily. “Nothing. I didn’t see nothing. Nothing at all.”

He leveled a glare at her. “Don’t tell me you
didn’t see nothing
. What, did you faint because an owl spooked you?”

“I’m terribly afraid of them, you know.”

“Elie!” Jake threw down his boots and clothes and spun away in frustration. He made an inarticulate sound, something between anger and despair. He spun back towards her; she’d never seen him so upset, not since a day eons ago when a dumb high school girl had shot down a hopeful more-than-friend. “This isn’t a joke!”

“That’s disappointing. I’ve been thinking I might be on hidden camera.”

“That isn’t funny,” Jake snapped. “God knows, if anyone caught this on camera… I’d be… I’d be in some… government lab, or somewhere like that.”

Elie swallowed past her dry throat and looked at him, really looked at him, the curve of his great shoulders heaving and fear plain on his face.

Invisible walls seemed to tilt inward like a funhouse, mirrored realities bouncing each other back. This was impossible. Elie sprung to her feet; adrenaline pumped through her veins. The world jolted but didn’t spin, not quite—she still had to reach out and catch a hand on Jake’s arm. His skin was clammy, like the aftermath of a fever. The hairs on his arms were coarse over the hardness of the corded muscles beneath.

“Elie, don’t—”

“Just leave me be!” Elie shouted, snatching her arm away.

He raised both hands in a peaceful gesture. “I’m not going to hurt you, Elie!”

Elie stalked away. She took long strides, devouring the distance to her car. This was impossible.
This was impossible
.

Afraid to find Jake following, Elie didn’t look back until she was unlocking the driver-side door. The moon was higher now and she could see him still standing shirtless next to the picnic table. She stood there staring. It wasn’t too late. She could still close the car door, go back to him, try to figure out whether she or just the entire situation was completely crazy.

They could still sit together in the moonlight and drink and remember what it was to be blameless. Hopeful. Free.

But the next second she door was open and she dived into the safety of that which was real and solid and safe.