ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (104 page)

Slowly I brought my face down, inching closer to hers, until my lips met hers. Her lips quivered under mine, but then I kissed her. Her body shuddered against mine, and I could almost taste her hesitation. But she didn’t stop me. When I kissed her it was like there was a channel between me and her and it was open, flowing with something I didn’t know. I was attracted to her in a way I’ve never been attracted to a woman. And I could feel my bear move inside of me, too. Not threatening to shift, but he was aware of her, and drawn to her too in a way that animals favor some people.

It was the first time in my life I’d felt the bear respond to another human.

When I finally broke the kiss, her eyes were glassy and her pupils dilated.

“Do you feel that?” she asked. I focused on the atmosphere around us. Every fiber of my being hummed and droned. I was like a tuning for and I was set to her frequency. But around us the forest was quiet.

I shook my head.

“It’s like a thick fog, wrapping around us,” she said. “It makes it harder to breathe. It gets worse when I get closer to you.”

I smiled. “I don’t know what it is, but I like that you have that reaction to me.”

She smiled too, but her eyes had questions in them, like she didn’t trust what she was feeling. Finally she turned away from me, and we walked through the trees until we got back to the cabin.

Inside she made up a meal with berries and nuts, and a kind of root she cooked into a mashed mess. It was a bit bland, but the berries added tartness to it. It was good food. Interesting. But it wasn’t meat. My bear was starting to get hungry. I hadn’t had fresh meat in a while. I tried to remember when last I’d hunted. A couple of days before the fall. And I’d been here for two days. Perhaps five?

The longest I’d gone without meat was a week, and that had been dangerous. When the bear gets too hungry it shifts by itself, and I can’t stop it. And then it will take whatever meat it can find. I didn’t want to put Ivy in that kind of danger. She was too pure for that, and I would never forgive myself if I hurt her.

I had to get out when she was asleep, and hunt through the night so I would be back and human again by morning. It was the only way I could take care of the bear without causing a mess, and without leaving. I didn’t want to leave.

“I want to show you something,” Ivy said once we were done eating. She walked to a set of shelves against a wooden wall. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the shelves were all handmade. Everything in the cottage seemed to be. Even the clothes she wore looked like she’d made them herself – beautiful, but still wild – and her shoes were made of a thick material that I knew straight away wasn’t animal hide. After her outburst about animals earlier, it wouldn’t make sense.

She pulled book out of the shelf. It was big, the pages bound with strings. The front had four names on it, hers being the last.

“This book belonged to my great-grandmother, the first person to live out here in the woods,” she said, fingering the loopy lettering that had started to fade.

“Your family lived out here that long?”

She nodded. “We don’t do well among people. We were made for the forest.”

I thought about the myth Harry had told me about. If people have lived out here that long, it made sense that there were stories.

She flipped open the book. The pages were brittle, and she handled it with care. On every page there was hand-drawn images of plants, seeds and flowers, with neat descriptions and uses. Some had warnings.

“We learn from this book what we can and can’t eat, and how to work with it. Every plant has natural gifts to give us. And when we learn something new, we add it.” She flipped to the back of the book. The images were a lot clearer, with more modern handwriting. “I added these.”

I reached out and brushed my fingertips across the pages. There was something magical about a book that four generations have worked on.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I never would have believed a whole family of people like you could live out here.”

Ivy frowned. “Well, not family, really. Just us. One or two at a time.”

“But what about your father? And grandfather?”

She shook her head, and she suddenly looked so sad. “It has only been us. Me, my mother, my grandmother… men don’t stay. Or we don’t ask them to. Men are hard, they will make sacrifices for family, take care of children and women, and hurt because of it. We don’t do that. We don’t need men.”

“Not all men are bad, you know,” I said softly. She looked up at me with the bluest eyes, and I forgot everything I’d meant to say.

She was the one that reached up and kissed me this time. Her lips were soft on mine, almost a question. Her small hands reached around my neck, and her body pressed up against mine. She was tiny, and fragile. I felt like I wanted to stay and protect her.

When she broke the kiss, she said, “You are different than the others. You have something about you.” I didn’t know if it was a compliment. I didn’t know if her apparent aversion to men meant I would be unwelcome at some point. But right now, I could stay, and that was all that I cared about.

The cottage grew dark and Ivy lit up the hearth for heat. It was the only source of light. I settled on the couch, and she said goodnight and disappeared into her room. My fingers itched and I felt restless. I had to get out into the woods, but I couldn’t until I knew she was sleeping.

After a while I crept up to the opening that led to her room and listening. The regular sound of her breathing whispered through the dark, so I turned and slipped into the night.

Ivy

I woke up and pushed myself up in bed. What had woken me? I strained my ears, but the house was quiet. Too quiet.

I slipped out of bed and walked toward the lounge. The couch where Logan slept was empty. I looked around the small lounge and kitchen, but he was nowhere.

That same feeling that came with him hung thick in the air, thicker now than ever before. It was so heavy it made the darkness in the house seem blacker despite the hearth with its glowing embers. I reached out my hand. It felt it ran through my fingers like water.

The front door was slightly open, and night air streamed in, carrying the smells of the forest. I pushed against it, opening it gently, and stepped into the night.

It was strange night, with a hazy quality to it that the forest didn’t usually have. I closed my eyes and breathed in, calming myself. I listened, waiting for the scurry of small night creatures to come as they gathered close by. But there was nothing.

A twig snapped in the distance. I turned my head and listened, moving my hair away so it wouldn’t move in the breeze and change the sounds that came my way.

There was something out there. Something big. I shivered and tried to decide what to do. It was safer inside, away from the night life. But Logan was gone, and there was that feeling hanging around me, lacing the trees around the cabin. I could feel it.

I decided to follow it. It got stronger as I went, telling me I was on the right path. I followed it to a clearing in the trees.

In the middle of a clearing, a black bear sat, slightly turned away from me. It was doing something, grunting. I held still and watched, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. The bear whipped its head up and horror filled my chest, followed by a pain so great it felt like a stake had driven through my heart.

It was eating something, an animal, and the dark patch on the floor was blood. It had meat in its mouth, and it was chewing.

I clapped my hands over my mouth and cried out. I knew that animals needed to hunt. I’d ignored Logan when he’d asked, but the truth was that was one necessary evil I admitted to, and chose to avoid. But now it was right in front of me, and the pain of the animal’s death racked my body.

The bear looked up at me, its black eye intelligent. It sniffed the air, and then groaned. It was a sound I hadn’t heard before. I sank to my knees, hands clutching my chest. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

The bear stepped closer to me. The metallic smell of blood hung in the air, choking me. When I looked up at the bear, it was strange. I struggled to make sense of its outlines. And then it started moving, changing. He became smaller and the hair shrunk away, and suddenly Logan stood in front of me.

“Are you alright?” he asked. I tried to make sense of what I just saw, but I couldn’t. He looked like Logan, but something was off. The smell of blood was still in the air, and that heavy feeling that felt like it was crushing me. I curled on the ground.

“Ivy, what’s wrong?” he asked again. He was concerned. His voice was close to me, his face close to mine. And on his breath I smelled blood.

“No!” I shouted, putting two and two together. “Get away from me!” I scrambled backwards. He tried to stop me, but I managed to slip away, and I got into the trees  before I picked myself up and ran.

I didn’t run to the house. I ran in the opposite direction. He would find me at the cottage. I ran, trying to get away from facts. Away from what I’d just seen. Away from what I didn’t understand. He’d been a bear. How could that be? And he’d killed. Oh, how could I have been so stupid? How could I not have known? He was a man, and he was a stranger.

The feeling around him made sense now. It was the magic that let him change. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it.

I kept running. The muscles in my legs screamed and the dress I was still wearing tangled around my legs. But I had to get away. I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t bother to look. I just knew I had to get away. The forest changed as I ran, became lighter. I crossed two trails, and I could see moonlight filtering through the trees.

And then suddenly there were no trees. I was out in the open, with knee-high grass around me and the moon a big white disk in the inky black sky. I looked around me, frantically searching for something familiar, something I could hold onto.

A light turned on just a bit further down, and I made out the shape of a house against the sky. I stilled. Somehow I had ended up in a village. I couldn’t be here.

“Who goes there?” a gruff voice shouted form the house. “I’ll shoot, you hear?”

I panicked. My hands were numb and I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. Couldn’t make them move. The same voice shouted more questions into the night, but I couldn’t make out the words. Then a metal clicking sound filled the night air. I didn’t know what it meant, but my instinct told me it meant danger.

The next moment a bullet whistled past me and hit the earth with a thud to me left.

A dark shadow appeared from the woods, and I wanted to scream, but when it stepped into the moonlight it was Logan.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here,” he said. How had he found me? His voice was low and reassuring. I wanted to follow him. But he was a killer.

I shook my head.

“Come, Ivy. Let me take you home. If you want me leave, I will. Just let me get you away from the village.”

I took his outstretched hand, and his fingers folded over mine. It was warm, and it didn’t feel like death at all, even though I knew he must have touched that poor animal. A shudder traveled through my body.

“It’s going to be alright,” Logan said in soothing tones. He must have felt my reaction. He spoke to me the way I usually spoke to animals, and it was reassuring. I felt myself relax, the tension leaving enough for me to be able to move again.

We made it to the cottage, and Logan sat me down. He gave me some water, and he found nuts in the cabinet. When I didn’t eat it he sat down next to me, and took my hand.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said when the silence stretched out too long between us. “I’m sorry about everything. This is my curse, and I can’t stop it. I know you hate it. Sometimes I hate it too. But it’s a part of me.”

“Why did you come to find me?” I asked. The words were out before I managed to stop them or think about them.

“Tonight?”

I shook my head. “From the start.”

He looked at me and took a deep breath. “You took care of me when I was hurt.” An image of the bear flashed before my eyes. I remembered I’d felt him then, too, but I hadn’t made sense of it until now. “There’s something about you that draws me. That draws the other guy, too. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t want to leave.”

He didn’t look at me, instead he studied his hands carefully, like there would be something he hadn’t seen before.

“I’ll leave, though,” he said again. “I understand now what it means to you. Why you live out here. And I don’t want to hurt you.” He looked up at me and his eyes were dark pools. They looked right through me, like they searched my soul. When I didn’t answer, he got up and walked toward the door. I realized with a pang that if he was going, he wouldn’t be back. And that feeling would leave with him. It wasn’t the magic. That wasn’t what would leave me feeling so empty. It was the feeling that I got inside me when he was around. That I would miss. There was something about him that I didn’t want to walk out of my life.

“Wait!” I called out when he was almost outside. He stopped and turned to me. “Please, don’t go.” My voice was thin, and I sounded almost like a child. I realized I had my hand stretched out to him, and I dropped it, standing up.

“I want you to stay.”