by Edith DuBois
“What kind of name is that?”
“I didn’t choose the name.”
Marina didn’t let go but pulled back on the guitar, not relinquishing her hold on Abednego.
“It’s dorky!”
“It is not dorky. It’s a traditional name. It’s from the Bible!”
She snorted with laughter. “Abednego!”
“The guitar chooses the name. You should know that.”
She rolled her eyes, tugging, then said, “Give me the guitar.”
He glared at her, tugging back. “Not until you apologize.”
Suddenly her whole demeanor changed. Her pouty determination melted into a glowing smile, and she looked down at Abednego the way a mother looks down at a darling child. “My apologies, Abednego. You have a lovely name.” Then she leaned in closer and whispered to the guitar, “And I suppose, being played by someone named Jeremiah, you should consider yourself lucky.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
She giggled as his indignation distracted him from their struggle, and he lost his grip on Abednego.
“It means sit back and listen to a pro.” She cradled the resonator, turning an ear to it and plucking experimentally, tuning and listening to its tone. “Well, that’s interesting,” she said as Abednego answered her with his usual twang. She strummed a few notes and then went into one of her more popular songs.
Jeremiah let her have two verses and a chorus before he stopped her. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t be playing stuff like that on Abednego.”
She paused, frowning. “What do you mean ‘stuff like that?’ I wrote this song.”
“Play something like what you played at Catdaddy’s.”
She lifted a brow. “Didn’t you hear what I said before I played it? I said that was the first time I’d ever written anything like that. I wasn’t lying. I probably won’t even send it to my label.”
“Why not? That was your best song of the night. The crowd was eating it up.”
“Come on. I was just messing around.” She shook her head and started heading back into the pop song she was playing.
Jeremiah put his hands on the strings, muting the sound. “Marina.”
She yanked the guitar away from him. “Don’t.” Her eyes flashed, and her voice was low. “I mean it, Jeremiah. Don’t push me.”
“Look, I’m not trying to upset you. Truly, but—”
“Drop it.” The anger he’d seen in her eyes from moments before faded and was replaced by a sort of pleading sadness. “Just drop it, okay.”
He shrugged. “I can’t.”
“Well, then here you go.” She tried to shove Abednego back into Jeremiah’s arms. “Take the guitar, damn it.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Nope.”
“Jeremiah. Take the guitar.”
“Or what?”
“I’ll throw it across the fucking room.” Her voice was even and she met his eyes dead on. They glared at each other for a long moment.
When she raised the guitar over her head, though, Jeremiah held out his hand for it. There was no way in hell he was chancing that. “Fine,” he said. “Sell yourself short.”
“You and your brothers, you don’t know a goddamn thing.” She shook her head, and for a second he thought he saw moisture gathering in her eyes, but she shoved past him and headed for the door. Before she could move through it, Jeremiah had Abednego in a playing position. He took a deep breath and then plucked the opening strains of “Mama, Don’t Fly Away from Me.”
She froze in the doorway but didn’t turn to face him.
He couldn’t remember the verses, but some of the chorus had been stuck in his head ever since he’d heard the song. It had given him chills when she sang it to the crowd, and it gave him chills now as he sang her words back to her. “Mama, you taught me these lonesome chords.” His fingers danced over the flickering notes of a tremolo that she’d fit between each of the lines. “And, Mama, you gave me these broken words.” His guitar vibrated with her haunting melody. “So, Mama, I need you to stay with me. Mama, please don’t fly away from me.”
He struggled through the bridge, fumbling on a couple of the chord patterns, but he did make it. As he neared the end of the song, as it moved to its quiet finish and his fingers fell gentler and gentler upon the strings, he heard her let out a slow breath. After the last note faded, she turned to him.
“You know the song?”
He nodded. “I told you. I think it’s damn good.”
“I thought you were just saying that to get in my pants.”
He shrugged. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
She shot him a wobbly grin, the corner of her plump lips quirking up. “Scoundrel.”
“I wear it proud.”
She tossed her hands on her hips and shot him her notoriously sassy glare. “All right. Say I do stay. Say we spend a crazy week together, me and you and your brothers? Say I write more songs like that? What then? My label isn’t exactly looking for musical integrity. All they want to know is, one—does it have catchy lyrics with a generous amount of oh-ohs and la la las? And two—does it have a hook for its melody? What you’re talking about, that kind of music, they’ll never go for it.”
“How do you know? Have you tried sending stuff like that to them?”
Moving a few steps closer, she said, “No, but I know how these major labels work. They are first and foremost a business, and they have to make sure their product is gonna sell.” She shrugged. “I’m a product, marked and branded. What I am now, that’s all I’ll ever be. That’s just how it is.”
“Tell me. What’s so important about pleasing your label?”
She shot him an annoyed look as she walked over to a chair and pulled it in front of him. “Don’t be simple. You know why.”
“No, I know why your label thinks it’s important. But I want to hear it from you, Marina. I want to know what you think.”
“This is my life, Jeremiah. And you can look down your nose at it or whatever, but I have fans. And they’re people. They are real people who genuinely love my music. They love what I do. They come to every show and sing every word. They give me their hard-earned money so that I can afford to keep on singing and playing my guitar for them. How can I suddenly decide, ‘You know what? None of this matters to me anymore. I’m better than this, and I’m better than you.’ I can’t do that.” She shrugged. “I can’t.”
“Marina, those people don’t love you because you have a catchy melody or because you sing about frivolous things. Those songs came from who you are, and that’s what they love. As long as you’re singing about things you care about and writing songs that are important to you, people are gonna respond to that. They’re gonna love you. They won’t be able to help it.”
She shook her head. “Now you’re really being simple.”
Letting out a frustrated growl, he had to stop himself from grabbing her and shaking some sense into her. “Okay, what do you say to this? Why don’t we do exactly as you said?”
“What’s that?”
“You spend a week here. We see what kinds of songs we can get out of you, and then at the end of the week, if you still feel the same way, you go back to the old stuff.”
She crossed her arms but appraised him out of the corner of her eye. “And at the end of the week if I say I want to go back to the old songs, you’ll let me go? Just like that?”
He nodded. “I’ll let you go.”
After eyeing him for a long moment, she held out her hand to him and said, “Shake on it and we have a deal.”
Propping Abednego up against the wall next to the bed, Jeremiah grasped her hand, gave it a firm shake, and then yanked her to him on the bed, making her giggle.
“What do you think you’re doing, Jeremiah Greenwood?”
He held her body tight on top of him, entwined his legs with hers, and pressed a kiss to her full lips. “I’ve been wan
ting to kiss you since you sashayed out of that bathroom. You finally got close enough for me to snatch you up, and I wasn’t gonna let that opportunity sneak past.” He kissed her again, and she wiggled against him, making small noises in the back of her throat as his tongue slipped through her lips and delved into the warm depths of her mouth. He splayed his hands across her back, holding her, and then slid them slowly down. He slid them until he had a palmful of plump cheek filling each hand. “I do love this ass,” he murmured against her lips.
“You and James both.” She caught his bottom lip between her teeth and teasingly pulled on it, watching him with an impish gleam in her eyes as she did.
“Damn, that’s sexy,” he said when she released him.
“Jeremiah?” she asked as she pressed tiny feather kisses across his cheekbones and then on his forehead and then on his neck.
“Yeah?”
“How did you get this scar?” She sat up, straddling him and tracing a finger over the line on his face.
“It happened a long time ago. I was only about five. I don’t really remember much about it.” He tried to make it sound casual. He didn’t want to talk about the bear side of him. He knew it made her uneasy, and, more than that, his cock was straining toward her. He wanted to move inside her, wanted to feel her all around him. He didn’t want to scare her away, at least not at that particular moment.
She frowned, and he almost cursed aloud, knowing she’d somehow caught the false note in his nonchalant tone. “But surely you’ve heard how it happened. Your parents must have said something? Or James? He would have been old enough to remember, right?”
With a sigh of resignation, he rolled her off him.
“What? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“James!” he called. “Johnny! Get in here.”
As he heard his brothers clomping through the rest of the house, he tucked a piece of hair behind Marina’s ear. “We might as well get this conversation out of the way.”
“What conversation?”
“Now who’s being simple?”
She bit her bottom lip, and a small crinkle appeared between her brows. “Did you get that scar because you’re a bear?”
“In a way, yes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It means yes, I got it because I’m a bear. And it means yes, I got it from a bear.”
“A wild bear? Or like, another bear-shifter?”
“Bear-shifter.”
“Who was it? Do I know him?”
“No, you don’t know him.”
She slapped him in the chest. “Quit being coy. Who the hell was it?”
Johnny and James appeared in the doorway, and he sent them a “look at the mess I got myself into” quirk of the brow.
Then he looked at Marina and answered her. “My dad.”
Chapter Eight
“Your dad did this to you?” Marina reached out and ran her finger along the scar, feeling its smooth, elastic texture compared to the healthy skin next to it. “Was it an accident? What happened?”
“Can’t this wait?” He lifted up, kissed her, and then rolled her off and over so that he had her pinned beneath his hips. “I was hoping to get a little more than a kiss before you got to poking and prodding about the bear stuff.” As if to illustrate, he poked and prodded against her with his pelvis.
“Nope,” she said, glaring up at him. “I want to know now. I may as well know what kind of weirdos I’m dealing with.”
“Hey, I take offense,” Johnny said. The bed dipped when he and James climbed on and snuggled up next to her.
“Well, this is cozy I guess.” She rolled her eyes as Jeremiah moved so that he was closer to her hips but still right up next to her.
Johnny squeezed her thigh and kissed her.
“Okay, yes. Thank you for—”
James’s lips cut her off as he also pressed a hot kiss to her lips. Before she could utter another word, James broke away, and Jeremiah took his place, his mouth hot and skilled as he dipped his tongue in for a few swirls.
“All right. Everyone get their kiss?” she asked after Jeremiah released her. “Are we all good here?”
“Yep,” Jeremiah said.
“Good.”
“Wait. Nope. One more.” He kissed her and grabbed her breast for a squeeze or two as well.
“Knock it off!” She pulled back and glared at him but couldn’t keep her lips pouted for long. All three of them looked at her with hungry black eyes and with grins peeping from beneath their beards. “Y’all are too much.”
“Thank you,” Johnny said, kissing her cheek.
“That’s enough.” She shoved Johnny’s laughing face away. “I want to know how Jeremiah got that scar, and I want to know now. Who’s gonna tell me?”
“Okay, okay, Miss Impatient.”
She scuffed his cheek, and Jeremiah smiled at her. It was a strange smile, though, oddly tilted and hollow. “So what happened?”
“Like I said, it happened when I was very young. I don’t really remember it except for flashes of images and sounds, but James and some of the other bear-shifters have since filled me in.
“The members of our family have always been excellent trackers. Even before the curse, the Greenwoods were the family with the fiercest pioneering spirit. Our family found the valley first, tracking game and discovering this little haven of life and beauty. And then after the curse, when our family became bear-shifters, ever since then, we have always taken pride in our communion with nature. Our fathers and mother loved mountain climbing in particular, and they were free solo climbers.”
“Which means no ropes, no protection system,” James filled in at Marina’s momentary confusion.
“They would go on weekend-long expeditions up the mountain,” Jeremiah continued, “and on one of these, everything that could have possibly gone wrong did. They’d already been up on the mountain longer than they’d intended, so they were tired and running low on rations. They came to a difficult section of the descent, and it began to storm, lightning and thunder and torrential rain.” Jeremiah paused, staring off into the room for a moment, and Marina put her hand on his. “The rain caused a lot of mud to form really quickly. Some rocks and boulders above them came loose. One of my fathers, Papa William, looked up and noticed the falling debris. He grabbed my mother and shouted a warning at our father, but Papa Dan lost his footing and was hit by a boulder. He was gone.” Marina jerked at the finality and then held on tighter to his hand.
“When Papa William grabbed Mom, she stumbled and fell. She was dangling off the side of the mountain, held only by my father, but the rain made their hands slippery. They couldn’t hold on to each other, and”—he closed his eyes—“she fell.”
The room was quiet for a long moment. After Jeremiah had regained his composure, he went on. “Understandably, Papa William was crazy with grief for a while. Johnny was barely one, and James and I were sad, but we were boys. We just wanted to create mischief. It was something like that. A couple weeks after the accident, I had gotten into Papa William’s toolshed and broken something, I think. He came out there to see what had happened, and he got so mad. I was scared when he yelled and threw things, but that was nothing to how I felt when he crumpled down to the ground and started sobbing.
“I didn’t know what to do. I almost crept out of the shed, but I didn’t think Mom would want me to do that, so I tiptoed over to give him a hug. When I touched him, he just exploded. There wasn’t any time for either of us to react. His bear paw caught me in the face.” Jeremiah reached up and touched his cheek. “He never really got over it. He lost too much. It was like he just gave up, and a few years later, he passed.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then she did something she had never done before for anyone. She reached up and stroked his hair. She gave him comfort. She gave him solace. She was gentle.
The four of them sat on the bed for a long while, snuggled into
each other and breathing slowly together. She let Jeremiah’s story sink through her skull, feeling a great empathy for what he and his brothers had been through. Eventually, she started humming a low melody. Jeremiah picked it up and began to hum a countermelody. James and Johnny added little bits of harmony in here and there, and Marina felt such peace settle over her.
“Tell me about the first bear-shifters in your family,” she whispered when their humming had dwindled away. “Do you know much about them?”
“Oh yes,” James answered, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “The first thing you should know is that the bear-shifters and the lion-shifters have always gone for the ménage way of living. Like Jeremiah said, we had two dads instead of one and three grandfathers instead of two. In fact, the very first bear-shifters in the Greenwood family were three brothers, like us. Abednego—”
“Abednego!” Her eyes flew to Jeremiah.
“It’s an old biblical name,” James answered, but Marina’s eyes were still locked with Jeremiah’s. The corner of his mouth quirked up, and he shot her a wink. He’d given his guitar a family name, like she had done with Ethel Rose. Something about that comforted her, and she gave him a nod and a little “my bad for making fun of you” smile in answer to his wink.
“The other two were Bartholomew and Christopher,” James continued. “Our family, along with four other families, came to this valley during the fur-trapping days. Now, I don’t know how much your sister told you about us.”
“Not much.”
“Then you’ll not know that our family has been a part of this valley since the 1830s. Now if you ever meet anyone who tries to tell you different, that person is most likely a mountain lion, and you can ignore him.”
“That’s generally a good rule to follow,” Johnny said, patting her leg. “Just always ignore the mountain lions. You can pick ’em out of a crowd real easy by their freaky blue eyes and pungent odor.”
“Anyway,” James said, shooting a quelling look to his younger brother, “the point is, the lions like to claim that they were the founders of this town, but they didn’t get here until the 1860s.”