So Much To Bear (A Werebear Erotic Romance) (11 page)

After the mayor’s visit, Jennifer had
mostly been left to her own devices. She knew that she was the
subject of gossip in the town, but since she fully intended to
leave—and leave as permanently as possible—she didn’t care. No one
had the courage to say anything to her face, even when she made a
quick trip to the supermarket to grab a few items for her
dinner.

The trip made her remember Damon and
his daily routine—the clearing of his snares, washing his clothes,
gathering wild vegetables. She felt a pang in her heart at the
thought of him going about his chores. She wondered—and discarded
the thought—whether he might have recovered enough to go about his
daily duties. She bought lamb, thinking of the rich, succulent
rabbit stew. It was the closest she could come to game meat, and
though she tried to duplicate the rough recipe that Damon had
thrown together, it didn’t taste anywhere near as good as what the
man had made with her help. It was hopeless, Jennifer knew. Nothing
tasted like wild vegetables and game. Nothing would ever make her
as happy as the brief time she had spent with Damon. She had to
know what had happened to him.

Jennifer let her friends throw her a
going-away bash, managing to keep her composure and even pretending
to be pleasant. While none of her close friends, save for Robert,
had been in the mob, she still felt uncomfortable in their midst.
She let them believe that she was making an early return to the
university to get a head start on her last semester; it was much
easier than admitting what she really had in mind. Robert attended
the party and Jennifer danced with him—though she didn’t enjoy it
nearly as much as she would have a week before. It was too
difficult to dull the memory of him plunging a knife in Damon’s
back. If Damon had been killed, it was still Robert’s fault, and
something she could never fully forgive him for. If Damon lived,
she might be able to completely forgive him one day, but she still
thought that things would never be quite the same between
them.

When she left the party by herself,
walking home in the darkness, Jennifer said silent goodbyes to all
of the landmarks of her mostly happy youth. She had hugged her
friends goodbye, not telling them that regardless of what happened
with her degree, she had no intention of ever returning to the
town. It was nothing but ashes to her now, dull and gray from what
she had seen in the woods. Jennifer climbed into her bed, knowing
what she had to do the next day and uncertain as to whether she
felt more hope or dread at what she might find.

Chapter Eight

That night, she woke up again and
again, plagued with dreams both tantalizingly pleasant and
terrifyingly upsetting. In one, she came to Damon’s cave and found
it just the way she had the day of the mob, empty of his presence
save for a smear of blood on the floor. Jennifer climbed down from
his cave and ran through the woods, searching for any sign of him.
Her heart pounded in her chest the same way it had the day of the
mob, and she felt the same urgency to locate him. He had to be
somewhere—she would know if he had died, would know for certain
instead of feeling the deep pangs of uncertainty.

Jennifer ran through the woods until
she felt as though her heart might burst, tears streaming down her
cheeks. She had to find him.

Jennifer heard something moving up
ahead and turned to try and see it—but just when she thought she
might catch sight of Damon, instead she saw Liam, leering at her
the way he had the night she had first met the werebear. “You
really are an idiot, you know,” Liam said, coming out of the
darkness of the trees. “You should have known better than to think
you could just turn me down.” He came towards her with the knife,
and Jennifer scrambled backwards, more frightened than she thought
she could ever possibly be by Liam. Before he could reach her, she
woke up, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding.

It took her a while to fall back asleep
after that, but Jennifer plunged immediately into another dream.
She felt warmth, and yellow-orange light filtered through her
closed eyelids. Opening them, Jennifer found herself once more in
Damon’s cave, wrapped up in blankets on his bed. She trembled,
lonely and aching for him. As a soft whimper left her lips, she
felt Damon’s warm, strong arms wrapping around her and inhaled the
smell of lemony, earthy musk that made her whole body relax. “Where
have you been, Jenny?” Damon asked her in a low voice, and Jennifer
felt the roughness of his beard against her neck, the soft
counterpoint of his lips caressing her sensitive skin. Jennifer
moaned, turning her head to catch sight of the man she hungered
for.

Damon pulled her close, and Jennifer
let her hands dance over his body, shaking from the feeling of
relief that flooded through her. There was no sign that he had ever
been injured; Damon looked the same way he had the last night they
had spent together. Damon pulled her around on top of him, settling
her body against his as his lips dragged along her jaw before
sealing her mouth. Jennifer traced her hands over every inch of him
that she could reach, touching and caressing; he was both utterly
real and oddly insubstantial at the same time. She rocked her hips
against Damon’s, somehow knowing that it was a dream and denying it
with every fiber of her being—knowing that it couldn’t possibly
last but wanting to do everything she could to prolong the sweet
satisfaction of the moment.

Damon’s hands worked along her body,
slipping her clothes away, stripping Jennifer down naked in a
matter of heartbeats. He buried his face against her neck, nuzzling
and nibbling, holding her tightly against him as they both writhed
and twisted against each other. “I’ve missed you so much,
Jennifer,” Damon murmured lowly, his voice growling, tight with his
desire.

“I’ve missed you too,” Jennifer
admitted breathlessly, turning her head to kiss him hungrily. She
could feel the ridge of his hard cock pressing against her and in
that moment Jennifer couldn’t think of anything she wanted more
than to feel him deep inside of her, filling her up the way he had
so many times in their night together.

“I want to know every inch of your
body…” Damon told her, his fingernails scratching lightly along her
spine, making her shiver. Jennifer heard the whimpering moans
leaving her lips, felt the hard, hot, muscular bulk of Damon’s body
underneath her; she had no idea when he had gotten naked, but she
was glad he was. Jennifer fell into an ocean of sensations, hearing
Damon’s voice, feeling his body, tasting and smelling and seeing
him as they moved together in bed. It was so satisfying, but she
wanted more every moment, wanted to really be with him, wanted to
feel him taking her.

Jennifer woke up from the dream right
before she would have had real satisfaction, her eyes opening in
the darkness, her body drenched in sweat, shaking with the desire
to feel Damon inside of her. It took her a long time to go back to
sleep once more, haunted by images of their time together, by the
sound of Damon’s voice and the feeling of his hands on her body. It
was difficult for her to figure out what sounds and touches were
the product of her actual memories and which were the product of
the intensely vivid dream she had had of him; Jennifer stopped
trying and relaxed into the sensations, wishing she were in the
woods already, that she had never left the man that she had to
admit to herself she had come to—at least a little
bit—love.

It seemed strange to her, waking up
reluctantly the next morning that she could fall in love with
anyone so quickly. With Robert, her feelings had developed over
time, based on his patience and the gradual unfolding of his
charms. With Damon the reaction had been almost immediate; even
before she had understood what he really was, she had been
intrigued by him, drawn to him like iron filings after a magnet,
pulled towards him through the dark woods and up a cliff. She
hadn’t been able to avoid noticing his attractions even when she
had been concerned at Liam’s apparent desire to possess her for his
own—before she had ever seen him transform into a bear.

Was she crazy? Jennifer considered it
seriously as she began putting the house to rights, moving the
boxes of things she wanted to keep to the side. Whether Damon had
died, simply escaped, or was in the woods, waiting for her,
Jennifer knew that she never wanted to come back to the small town
she had grown up in. It would take a lot of work, but Jennifer
fully intended to sell the house and everything she didn’t want in
it, and move on with a fresh start as soon as she graduated. She
might stay in touch with Robert, or she might not; she might
maintain some of the friendships that she still had in the town, or
she might make a clean break and just pretend that part of her life
had never happened. Jennifer knew she was reacting, that she should
probably take her time and figure out what she really wanted, but
for the moment, she was unconcerned by the need to be
rational.

Jennifer set off for the woods in the
early morning, wrapped up against the lingering winter chill. She
knew that once she got to really hiking, she wouldn’t need the
insulation, but she was grateful for it as she made her trek
through the town, looking at the plumes of smoke that rose from
chimneys, the almost-eerie quiet of the not-quite-awake
neighborhood she lived in. She passed the town center, glancing at
where the bonfire had been, and shivered at the memory of the angry
mob, at the senseless thirst for murder she had seen there only
days before. Jennifer set her jaw, taking a deep breath and
consigning that ugly day to the past. She would never live in the
town again; as soon as she found out the truth of what had happened
to Damon, she would never think about the town. Jennifer moved
quickly into the tree line, darting into the dappled light and
shadow of the forest, and felt a rush of both apprehension and
relief.

She had always enjoyed the woods; even
before she’d had any connection to the forest through Damon,
Jennifer had liked to explore, had held onto the memories of her
father guiding her through the deeper parts. She wondered at the
fact that they had apparently all been totally unaware of the fact
that a clan and a tribe of werebears inhabited the woods; there
were legends of men that became bears, but they were so old they
practically had cobwebs on them. Jennifer looked around, finding
her way through the green depths, breathing the fresher air and the
smell of evergreen trees, the loamy soil underfoot. For a few
moments, Jennifer thought she might have gotten herself lost once
more; the trees around her seemed unfamiliar, new to her eyes. But
she found the trail and made her way along the path, trying to
decide how she would deal with the possibility of Damon being dead.
Her hands trembled and she felt a rush of cold through her body. He
couldn’t be dead, she told herself firmly. He had disappeared from
the ground below the cliff, and the brook wasn’t strong enough to
carry him away, in spite of what she had said to the
contrary.

Jennifer finally found the cliff that
housed Damon’s cave and stopped, taking a few deep breaths. Even if
he wasn’t there, she told herself firmly, she couldn’t assume the
worst right away. He could be going about his normal routine. She
wouldn’t know for sure until she had checked every one of the sites
she knew about, until she had seen no evidence of his activity in
the forest. Jennifer climbed up slowly, pausing frequently to still
the trembling of her hands as she made her way towards the cave.
She didn’t want to discover that Damon might be dead. She almost
decided against trying to find him, almost decided that she should
just go back to college and have done with the whole thing, consign
Damon to a corner of her heart and move on with her
life.

But somehow, she thought, if the
situation were reversed, Damon would have sought her out. The idea
of Damon searching for her in the town was slightly ludicrous; but
if he had seen her attacked in the forest, and had known she had
disappeared shortly thereafter, Jennifer thought that he would have
begun searching for her right away. He would have come to her
assistance and taken care of her. But then, she thought, doubting
herself once more, Damon was used to taking care of himself. He
might have just written her off entirely.

She came to the landing and the
entrance of the cave and steadied her breathing, trying to suppress
the rapid, rabbit-like fluttering of her heart. She had to look,
she had to know. Jennifer took a deep breath and reached out,
pulling aside the curtain in one quick jerk, like ripping off a
band aid. The sight that greeted her was not what she had
expected—not in her wildest hopes or most desperate fears. The cave
wasn’t just empty of Damon; it looked as though it had been
entirely cleared out. The furniture was gone, the planks that had
made up the floor absent, even the hearth cleaned out as if it had
never held a fire before. There was no sign at all that Damon had
ever lived in the cave, barely a sign that it had ever been
tenanted. Jennifer bit her lip; she knew for a fact that Damon had
lived there, she knew from the curtain that she hadn’t missed his
cave, that she hadn’t come to the wrong place. It was clearly
Damon’s cave, and just as clearly, Damon was no longer living in
it.