Out of the Woods

by Sophie Stern

  “Mrs. Worthington,” I said, swallowing hard. I took a deep breath. I didn’t need to hear about Matt’s ex-boyfriend. I didn’t need to hear about the fact that he may have had a mate I didn’t know about. All I needed to know was what this woman looked like so I could try to track her down.

  Ruby Rogers.

  Who was she?

  Stay focused.

  “What did the girl look like?” I asked.

  “She was kind of tall, honestly,” the woman said.

  “Tall?”

  “Yes, quite tall. A bit gangly. She said she works at a bookstore. I could see that, too. She looked quite bookish.”

  “A tall, gangly girl came over?”

  “Yes, and she had a little boy with her.”

  So there actually was a child.

  “How old was the little boy?”

  “Oh, he was probably four or five. Cute little thing. Said his name was Cole. Cute name for a little boy, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said. My mouth felt dry, all of a sudden.

  Cole?

  Matthew’s last name had been Cole. I wondered why this woman had chosen that name for her kid. I knew it wasn’t mine, of course, but I needed to get to the bottom of who she was and why she thought she had my child.

  “Anyway, there wasn’t much to her. She was pretty, but a bit plain. She seemed a little...bookish.”

  “Bookish?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, “bookish. She had glasses that she kept pushing up her nose, and there was a tattoo on the inside of her wrist.”

  All of a sudden, memories came flying back into my head at full force.

  A tall, gangly woman.

  A beautiful smile.

  Glasses that just wouldn’t stay on.

  A friend named Jake.

  A friend Matt couldn’t take his eyes off of.

  A night of laughing.

  A night of kissing.

  A night of making love in my car.

  “Mrs. Worthington, what did the tattoo look like?”

  “Oh,” she laughed, “it was the cutest thing. It was of a little bear. She told me that she loved books, and her favorite story was-”

  “Paddington Bear,” I finished.

  “Oh, that’s a good guess. So, you remember her, then?”

  She had a different name back then, but I remembered.

  I remembered.

  2

  Ruby

  I GLANCED OVER AT THE corner chair where Cole was reading a storybook. The sun was shining in, casting a soft glow over the books that filled the shop where I worked, but my little boy was curled up in a big armchair with one of his favorite books.

  Like me, he had a soft spot in his heart for Paddington Bear. He also liked a lot of other books with bear characters. Apparently, he’d known what – and who – he was before I had.

  “Doing okay, buddy?”

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “Just checking.”

  “I’m okay,” he peered over and nodded. “Just reading.”

  “If you need any help, let me know, okay?”

  Cole nodded and turned back to his story. I stood there for a minute, watching him, wondering how I’d gotten so lucky as to have such an awesome kid. He really was one cool little dude.

  He was an advanced reader for his age, but he still struggled to read some of the bigger words he came across in his stories. Cole didn’t mind just looking at the pictures, though, so he often spent hours losing himself in books.

  Mr. and Mrs. Rossi had been more than generous to let me bring Cole in to work with me over the last few days. The daycare lady who cared for Cole on a regular basis was upset to have to kick him out of her home, but she also was worried because she had three other children to look out for. She was worried that he would shift and accidentally hurt one of the other kids.

  I understood it.

  I assured her over and over that I understood, even though I really didn’t.

  A bear?

  My kid had turned into a bear?

  Patty had been so sure. One minute he’d been a little boy. The next, he’d been a bear. That was how she’d described it to me. She’d been nervous to tell me. She probably thought I’d try to have her daycare license suspended or that I’d call a mental health help line about her.

  She didn’t need to worry about any of that. Yes, it had sounded insane, but I knew that it wasn’t. Everyone had heard rumors about shifters. We all knew they were real. We all understood it. Only, most of us had never met one. At least, not that we’d known about.

  Now, I was facing a reality I didn’t know I’d ever have to deal with. My kid, my only child, might be a shifter, and I was totally, entirely human. There wasn’t a single ounce of shifter blood in me. I’d even called my sister to double check. She’d thought my questions were weird, but she’d answered them, anyway.

  When our parents passed away, she’d handled most of the details surrounding the estate. She’d gone through all of their paperwork and their files. She’d been the one who had scoured through their secrets, but she hadn’t found anything about them being shifters.

  Besides, wouldn’t we have known?

  If our parents had been shifters, wouldn’t that make Elizabeth and me shifters, as well?

  We weren’t. We were totally, completely human. Sometimes, embarrassingly so.

  That meant it had to be Cole’s dad.

  Of course, it had to be from his dad.

  My phone rang, and I looked down. It was a spam number, though, and I swiped “reject.”

  “Shit,” I muttered. Was he ever going to call? That was the question of the hour. I knew perfectly well why he hadn’t called me. He didn’t remember me. Why would he? It had been five years ago, and it had been one damn night. I was probably just one in a long time of women who had melted under those bright shifter eyes.

  And now it had been three days since I wrote to Mr. Dale Evans.

  Three days.

  I knew he’d received the letter, but he hadn’t called me, and that could only mean one thing.

  “Please remember,” I whispered, staring at my phone, but I knew it was futile.

  He didn’t know who the fuck I was.

  He didn’t remember.

  He didn’t remember the hottest sex of my life.

  He didn’t remember bending me over in the back of his car.

  He didn’t remember the fact that he’d made me fall apart, screaming so loud that my throat had been sore for days.

  How could the best sex in the world be so unforgettable?

  I didn’t know.

  I just didn’t know.

  Jake had been a dream. He’d given me directions to Matt’s apartment building. Even though he lived in Alaska now and couldn’t come with me, he’d given me as much information as he could about where to find the apartment. Cole and I had gone to the building alone. The brick apartment complex had been intimidating, to say the least, but we went in to try to find any answers we could.

  When the front desk manager had not-so-patiently explained there was no chance in hell that she’d give me Dale’s forwarding address, I’d gotten brave and had knocked on the neighbor’s door. I had never been to Matt and Dale’s apartment, but Jake told me the number of their unit.

  The woman who lived next door to them in apartment 8B had been very helpful. She’d lied when she told me she didn’t have Dale’s phone number, of course. Just because she was old didn’t mean she was good at being deceitful. She’d been very happy to give me his address, though, going so far as to write it both in cursive and in print to make sure that I really got it.

  I’d sent the letter the next day, and he’d received it pretty promptly, but then...nothing.

  He hadn’t called me.

  Okay, it had only been a day since he’d actually received it. The letter had taken two days to arrive, most likely because he lived in the middle of nowhere. From what I’d seen on Google Maps, his home was literally in
the foothills of a mountain. Still, I kind of figured that if someone wrote me a letter and was like, “What’s up? By the way, I’ve got your baby,” I would respond to that right away.

  That only left one possible explanation.

  He didn’t know me.

  He didn’t remember me.

  What now?

  I needed to figure out how I was going to raise a shifter kid on my own. That was the question of the hour. Could a human mother raise a shifter child? Could a mother like me figure out how to take care of a little boy who could turn himself into a bear at will?

  It wasn’t like there was a parenting guide for dealing with something like this.

  “Excuse me?”

  I looked up sharply. A man was standing in front of the register. He was scowling, obviously irritated that I hadn’t even noticed him there.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I blushed. I had completely spaced out.

  “I’d like to pay now,” the man spoke very slowly, as though I couldn’t understand him.

  It took all of my energy not to roll my eyes at him.

  “Of course,” I said. I rang up his purchase: two storybooks and a BDSM romance novel. I was a little surprised at his purchase, but one thing I’d learned since I started working at a bookstore was that everyone had their secrets.

  Even, apparently, military men who melted your panties off.

  There was a part of me that really thought I should have known Dale was a shifter. He had to be. There was no other explanation for what had happened to Cole, at least none that I could think of.

  The man in front of me had no time for dilly-dallying, and he certainly had no time for me to sit there daydreaming while he was trying to finish buying his books. I forced myself to pay attention as I scanned each of his books, bagged them up, and handed them over.

  “Thank you so much for coming in today,” I said politely. “I hope to see you again soon!”

  “Uh,” the guy stared at me, and then nodded. “Whatever.”

  He scurried away, practically running out of the store. Had I really been that scary? Yikes. Apparently, I needed to work on my people skills. That wasn’t exactly good news for someone whose job was selling books.

  “That was rough,” Cole said, looking up at me.

  “You’re telling me,” I sighed.

  If my kid could tell it was a bad day, then it was a really, really bad day. Things would get better soon though, right? They had to. I kept telling myself that because I needed to believe it. I needed to believe, more than anything else, that everything was going to be just dandy.

  I was going to be fine.

  Cole was going to be fine.

  Everything would be...

  Well, it would be okay.

  Cole went back to his story and I turned back to the paperwork and receipts sitting next to the register. I had a weird amount of paperwork to do for being a bookstore clerk, but that was okay. It kept me busy, and it kept me from feeling stressed out.

  The truth was that I didn’t need to do anything that was going to cause me stress or anxiety. I had enough problems to worry without adding anything extra to the list. Right now, for example, trying to figure out what I needed to do in order to help Cole out.

  How was I supposed to know how to raise a bear shifter? Raising a kid on my own was hard enough, but this was an entirely new problem that had been dumped on my lap. It was okay, really. I knew that it would be okay, but having Dale to help me would be so nice.

  Besides, the truth was that I’d missed him.

  We’d only had one night together, and perhaps the real reason I’d never tried to reach him before was because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay away. I knew without a doubt that if I’d let him back into my life after that night, that I never would have wanted him to leave.

  Now I needed him.

  I needed help.

  He hadn’t called me, which told me he either didn’t remember or he just didn’t care, and honestly, if Dale didn’t want to help me out with Cole, then I couldn’t really blame the guy. It was a lot of responsibility, and I knew that I was asking a lot.

  After all, we’d spent one night together.

  That was it.

  One night of passion and heat and wonder...

  It had been one night, but oh, it had been so damn wonderful, hadn’t it?

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t keep spacing off at work, but oh, everything about that night had been so damn magical. The way he’d touched me, playing my body like a harp, had been incredible. He’d made me feel more alive than I ever had before.

  I missed that feeling.

  “Excuse me.”

  Someone had come into the store, and I had been so busy daydreaming that I hadn’t even noticed. I was two-for-two now, and it was a good thing my bosses weren’t here to catch me. Mr. and Mrs. Rossi took their bookstore very seriously, and they’d be more than a little irritated to know that I’d scared off even more customers.

  I looked up sharply to see a man standing in front of me, and my heart stopped.

  This was no ordinary customer.

  He looked different from the last time I’d seen him. He was more muscular, and his hair was longer, but the eyes were the same. They were piercing and bright, and they held so much mystery that I could just lose myself in them.

  It was him.

  He’d come.

  “Dale.” I whispered the word like it was a promise. “You’re here.”

  “I am here,” he said.

  “You didn’t call...I thought...”

  Well, I had thought that he was blowing me off. I figured that it was his way of just completely ignoring the fact that I had given birth to his child, and that I’d raised Cole this far alone, and that our kid had a very strange, very unusual feature.

  Our kid was a bear.

  “What did you think?”

  Dale’s eyes sparkled. Had they sparkled before? Yeah, they had. Oh, they had. They had sparkled and shined and been perfectly pretty.

  “I thought you were blowing me off,” I said simply. It was the truth.

  “I received your letter...Ruby. I seem to remember that you had a different name the last time we spoke, though.”

  I cringed. Of course, that’s what he would focus on.

  “Um, yeah. I may have given you my sister’s name.”

  “And why would you do a thing like that?”

  “Because you were a stranger.”

  Because I hadn’t wanted to fall hard for the man.

  Because I hadn’t wanted any strings attached.

  Well, we had a pretty big cub-sized string attaching us now, didn’t we? So, apparently, I might as well have used my own name, for all the good that it did me.

  “Well, I think it’s fair to say we aren’t strangers anymore, love. I have to admit that your letter surprised me.”

  “It did?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “And I think we need to talk.”

  Talking. Yes. Talking was good. That’s exactly what we needed to do. We needed to talk about everything: what we’d been doing, what we were going to do. We had to make decisions. There was a lot to talk about.

  First, I had a question, though.

  “How did you find me?”

  That was something that was bothering me a little bit. I hadn’t exactly given Dale my work address.

  “You tracked me down, love, and two can play that game.”

  “You called your old neighbor.”

  “I did.”

  “And she told you where I worked.”

  I’d let it slip to the old lady that I worked at a bookstore. If Dale was clever, which he was, it wouldn’t take him too long to figure out which one I worked at. Damn. I should have expected that.

  “She mentioned you might work at a bookstore of some sort, although she didn’t tell me which one.”

  “So, how did you find me?”

  “I made a list,” Dale held up a piece of paper with a list of all o
f the bookstores in town. The first four store names were crossed off.

  “You’ve been using a list? Like, a paper list of all the places I might be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this kind of conversation is something we need to have in person.”

  “I, um...”

  Cole was sitting less than ten feet away. He was in a high-backed chair, which meant Dale hadn’t seen him when he’d come in, but Cole had wiggled around and was peeking over the back of the chair now. He could tell something was wrong or strange. He could tell something was making me uncomfortable, and he wanted to see what.

  “I don’t think this is something we should do right now,” I said carefully.

  “You’re right,” Dale nodded, “we should have had this conversation five years ago when you found out you were pregnant with my cub.”

  His cub.

  So, he knew.

  He knew he was a shifter.

  It was true, then.

  Cole’s eyes widened, and I cringed. Dale thought I was cringing because of him, and I could tell he was offended.

  “You kept this from me,” he said tightly, gruffly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I was, too.

  “I just didn’t want to burden you with that information,” I said. “Besides, I didn’t know how to find you.”

  “You seemed to find me okay once you needed something from me.”

  Harsh, but okay. I deserved that.

  “You were in the military,” I said.

  “So, what?”

  “You could have been anywhere, gone anywhere. You didn’t need people holding you back.”

  Dale reached across the counter and grabbed my chin, cupping it. The touch was gentle, but firm. It was familiar.

  Instantly, heat filled my body. Yeah, I remembered how I’d spent a night with this grizzly of a man. Apparently, he really was a bear shifter, too. He didn’t seem surprised that Cole was a shifter. He didn’t seem upset or worried about it.

  The only thing that seemed to bother him was the fact that I hadn’t told him I was pregnant, and that I hadn’t told him who I was.

  In retrospect, it did seem pretty shitty.

  “You should have given me a chance,” he murmured.