“Lilly,” he said darkly. “You seem surprised to see me. Surely you must know I will always come for my belongings.”
Lilly said nothing. There was nothing she could say in response to that. She’d dreaded that would be the case. She’d done everything she could have to help make it impossible to be found. But it wasn’t enough. She should have known it wouldn’t have been enough. She steeled herself for what would be coming next.
The men flanking him were getting antsy, and Lilly could tell by the way they were looking at him and looking back at her, that they’d been promised something for their trouble. Something that wasn’t James’ to promise.
He flicked the butt of a cigarette to the ground. Freshly rolled. It was the only way James took his cigarettes. And he only smoked when he was agitated. The sharp tobacco odor always permeated the air when he was in one of his rages.
This time was no different. He stalked toward her, grabbing her arms hard enough to elicit an involuntary gasp, and yanking her body toward him. “How dare you disrespect me as you have. You worthless whore.”
Before she could prepare herself, his hand was reaching back, his full weight behind the open-handed slap. Her ears were ringing and her head spinning, her cheek throbbing where it bore the imprint of his hand.
A scream rent the air, and Lilly realized belatedly the sound was coming from her own mouth.
The scramble that followed was confusing. Another loud sound split the night’s quiet, scattering the men who had been behind James. Lights began to flicker on in the brothel, doors swinging open.
One of the men was rushing at her. She had time to process that before he tackled her to the ground. Her head hit the dirt with a resounding thud.
The last thing she remembered was the earth coming up to meet her.
When she woke, she was back in the bedroom. It was oddly dark — like it was still night — but she knew that couldn’t be the case.
But then she started to wonder what she really did know. What had happened? Maybe none of it. Maybe Eli had never come to her in the first place. It could have all been a dream.
It wasn’t, though. She knew from the way her eye was too swollen to open, from the tender mess that had been her face.
This was a feeling she was used to waking up to.
There was a lit lantern nearby, giving off a gentle glow. As she struggled to open her eyes and focus on what was around her, Eli’s face came close. His brow was furrowed. Concerned or angry, she couldn’t tell, his jaw hard and unyielding.
“Lilly?” he asked, his voice gentle and full of gravel. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, finally giving up on the struggle to keep her eyes open. She let them close, resigned herself to being in the dark.
She felt him take her hand, the pad of his thumb moving over the back of her hand.
“You should have told me,” he said finally, the slightest edge of accusation to his voice, his other hand reaching up to stroke her hair.
“I couldn’t tell you.” Her voice was flat, her words emotionless. She hadn’t wanted him to know how lacking she was. And even if she had wanted to tell him, how was she supposed to?
In the end, she didn’t need to. Everything had come together very quickly for Eli, when he’d heard her scream and had launched from his bed out of a dead sleep. It all made a terrible kind of sense. The way she would push down her own feelings. Her overly practiced sense of serenity and disinterest. The way she hadn’t known what she should expect from his touch. It had taken him so long to put it all together, and knowing he had failed her, had let her wade through all of that on her own, left him sickened.
He had wondered what had pushed her into an arranged marriage, and there it was. A man she had hidden from him. A man she had crossed a continent to escape from.
He let his hand run down across her hair and cupped her face, careful not to press into the ruined flesh there. “They won’t be bothering you again.” His voice was hard. His words left no room for interpretation.
He was grateful she had been unconscious for that part of the experience. He’d held nothing back. Not that he’d had any say in the matter. The view of her out there with those men had sent him shifting before he could even get out the door, and he had crashed through that bedroom window and torn into the men in a mere moment.
He had disposed of the others first.
The husband he had let run.
Not for long, of course, but long enough that he might believe he stood a chance.
It the frenzy, Eli knew the women of the brothel would be sending their men out to check on everything and he kept on going until he hit the base of the mountains, where the woods became dense and he could shift back to a human, and say the bear had made its escape.
But, truly, if he didn’t get himself together, he was going to have people on the hunt for a bear. This had to be the last of his visits, or Eli was going to need to uproot himself again and start somewhere else.
He’d stopped by his stash of hidden clothes before heading back to the mess. At least he wasn’t going to have to make his return buck naked. He didn’t even want to think about how he might explain that.
When he’d arrived, light was beginning to break and people were still scattered liberally over his yard. Mostly undressed ladies, men in various states of clothing and arousal. Lilly, already gathered and taken into the house, blessedly unhurt except for the bump on her head and the contusion on her face.
Eli told the others the bear had gotten away. Better that way than to say he had been wounded. They would think he would stay local then and might be tempted to hunt in earnest for him, hoping to put an end to the bear that would come so close to humans. Everyone knew if an animal attacked once it would be happy to do so again.
And he would have. If he could live the moment over, he would have done it exactly the same way. Maybe he would have allowed for more suffering, but the end result would be the same.
He gave them a modified version of the attack, that it had been a robbery in process, that one of them had tried to drag Lilly out with him and they had just happened onto the bear in the process. No one seemed to think anything was unusual about the tale, and Eli didn’t have to divulge any of the intimate particulars. Like he’d just had sex with his wife for the first time. Like she was actually not his wife at all and a woman on the run from an abusive husband. Like he had shifted into a bear and mauled the men in question.
Yes, when it was all said and done, it was much better to stay as far away from any of those facts as possible.
Someone had carried Lilly into the room and the women had set about fixing her up, producing cold water to clean her face and split lip, fluffing pillows, and covering her up.
Eli felt a wave of gratitude for them and their willingness to look out for one of their own. And for their willingness to consider Lilly to be one of theirs.
He had wanted the bodies gone before Lilly came to. Whether she hated that man or not, she didn’t need to see the mess Eli had made of him.
And, even more importantly, he didn’t want her to fear the bear. He couldn’t stand knowing that she might be afraid of him if she knew what had happened out there.
“I just couldn’t tell you,” she said again, drawing him back into the moment. “I didn’t want you to know how…dissatisfactory I was.”
Eli felt a knot rise up in his throat. There was something he found so poignantly relatable to her words. “Nothing could be further from that, Lilly. I find you to be beyond satisfactory.” Satisfactory didn’t even begin to cover how he found her, but he supposed it was a start. “Exemplary, actually. Incredible.”
She managed a little laugh, though it was far from convincing. “Kind of you.” She moved to pull herself into an upright position, and he helped guide her body until she was seated, stacking the pillows behind her so she could lean comfortably.
The new position enabled her to see why the room was so unexpectedly dar
k.
“What happened to the window?” she asked, fully distracted from what had happened to her just a short while ago.
Where the window had been was a single oversized board, held in place by a few strategically placed nails.
He hesitated just a moment. “Yes. Well.” He paused like he was debating what he should tell her, and then said simply. “I jumped through it.”
Lilly jerked forward, rewarded with the unpleasant reminder of her recent injuries. “You what?”
“It happened very fast, Lilly. You screamed and I just couldn’t stop myself. I…jumped through it.”
She inspected him closely, wishing the small lantern would give off a little more light. “How is that possible? It certainly doesn’t look like you jumped through a window.”
His laughter had an edge to it she couldn’t place. “What can I say?” he asked. “I’m a hardy sonofabitch.” He ended the conversation then, rising to his feet and preventing her from asking anything else. “You need to rest, now, Lilly. There’s no need to worry about me at all. And there’s no need to worry about you, either.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it and arranging the covers around her. “You are mine, and I will always protect you.”
The words reminded her uncomfortably of what James had said to her about his belongings, but she tried not to let that diminish what Eli was saying to her.
She felt her eyes growing heavy and knew he was right; she needed the rest. Gently, he guided her back to a lying position.
She was asleep before he left the room.
Chapter Nine
Lilly dreamt of the bear.
She hadn’t before. But since James had made his appearance, there wasn’t a time she closed her eyes that the bear wasn’t foremost in her mind.
She relived their meeting over and over again. The way his eyes had glittered in the dark. The way his mouth had morphed into that smile.
And then, suddenly, it wouldn’t be the bear at all. It was Eli, that thick, dark beard he’d grown, the crisp down of his chest under her fingers, the same hungry smile.
Then she would wake, shaken, sticky with perspiration.
Eli was always nearby. Almost never asleep, but not far away. It would take her a moment to remember that it had just been a dream, that it wasn’t the bear in the room with her at all, but Eli.
Lilly’s face healed. The window was replaced. Before too long, that night was a distant experience. In the physical sense, at least.
But they hadn’t touched since. Or, they had, but not in that all-consuming way they had before. It was hard for that to not weigh heavily on Lilly.
It was like Eli was keeping her at an arm’s length.
And she didn’t need to ask why to know the answer.
In the beginning, she had thought he was just giving her the space she would need to heal and recover. She had even appreciated how he could be so considerate, thrilled she had found someone who would let her choose her own pace.
But then, the days went by and nothing had changed. He was ever solicitous, of course, but he averted his eyes. His touch was always purposeful, never lingering.
It was obvious that her history had disappointed him; that he no long wanted to enjoy her as he had now that he knew the truth about her.
When she was feeling her worst, she worried it went beyond that — that maybe she hadn’t done something right the one time they’d been together. What if he hadn’t enjoyed her as much as she had enjoyed him?
She tried to consider that the less likely of the options. Somehow, it was the more devastating of the two.
Still, even if it wasn’t as good as she’d thought it might get, it was so much better than it had been.
Lilly straightened her shoulders, and smoothed her skirts, seeing Eli from the edge of her vision appearing near the front of the property line, kicking up little puffs of dust as he went. She resolved that she would be grateful for what Eli had done for her and how her life had improved, and not mourn what she couldn’t have.
It took everything he had to keep himself in check. The nights were long, and he paced the house, watched Lilly sleep, forbade himself from venturing outside. It was critical there be no bear sightings for the next few weeks.
If he were smart, he would hightail it to another corner of the state, let this whole thing play out while he was a safe distance away. They would kill a bear they’d attribute the attack to, or enough time would pass that the people would forget it had happened in their backyards.
But he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Lilly.
She still seemed fragmented — unsure. Like she hadn’t yet learned how to get her feet beneath her.
He spent those endless hours awake, pushing down the need to change until it was nothing but a gnawing nugget of tension in the pit of his stomach. He watched her when she thought he wasn’t looking, while she slept, while she sorted through whatever was weighing heavily on her mind. She no longer met his eyes, or when she did, it was just for a heartbeat, then she was moving away from him, redirecting her attention to something else.
He worried she knew. He worried she would have preferred it if he hadn’t killed her husband. He worried he wasn’t going to be able to keep it together for her, even though he wanted that more than anything else.
Eli was starting to feel like they were two ghosts occupying the house, moving past one another and through one another. He wanted that fire back, and didn’t know how to make that happen.
The sun had seemed to set earlier than usual, and the moon was out, high and full, a wind that promised bad weather whipping across the countryside.
Eli paced in the house. The weather had him on edge. The early night meant more hours of anxiety. The full moon was bringing everything to a crescendo.
Every inch of his body was on high alert. He felt like even the smallest thing could make him lose his tenuous grip on his self-control.
In the bedroom, he heard a muffled cry from Lilly, and he stopped his pacing, listening. When he heard nothing else, he moved to the door, pushing it open and stepping inside.
His vision was sharp, the dark doing little to hinder his ability to see.
Lilly was upright in bed, the quilt clutched to her, deep breaths shaking her shoulders.
He hesitated in the doorway. “Are you alright?” he asked, not wanting to move any closer to her. Just being in the same room with her seemed a stressor to his fragile state.
“I’m alright. Just a nightmare.” She shook her head, like she could shake whatever images had plagued her sleep.
He was moving toward her, not in control of his own body. “About your husband?”
She didn’t answer immediately. “About the bear,” she finally said.
It was like a knife twisting in his gut to hear her say those words, to know that he was the cause of her fear. He stopped en route to the bed. He wanted to defend the bear, defend himself, but he couldn’t. Knowing how she felt toward him was soul-crushing, he could barely open his mouth to speak, let alone put together a coherent argument for the bear’s sake.
Her eyes caught what little light there was to be had, and glittered in the darkness. “He reminds me of you.” She said it so quietly, it was as if she weren’t ready to say the words aloud — like the longer she kept them to herself, the less likely they would be to be true.
The air rushed out of him, the bear surged within him, desperate to come to the forefront.
She shook her head. “I know, it shouldn’t be possible, but he reminds me of you.”
There was that twisting in his gut again, so powerful it almost brought him to his knees.
He bent at the waist, cradling his stomach and fighting the urge to turn.
“Eli?” Lilly was swinging out of the bed, her bare legs on display and he had to close his eyes.
“Lilly, stop. Don’t come any closer.” The words were strangled, not properly formed, and he could feel everything slipping further away from him. He
could see she was still coming closer, she was close enough now that her scent was in the air, and he collapsed to all fours, putting one hand out toward her in a classic stop gesture. “Please. Stop.” Then, realizing it was far too late for him to try and pull the bear back, he cried instead. “Go. You need to go. Get out of here.”
She swayed in front of him, confused by the changing commands, unsure of what was happening to Eli and mostly wanting to throw herself down beside him and see if there was anything she could do for him.
The last words were garbled. So garbled, she couldn’t make them out.
But in a moment’s time, she was no longer thinking about what he’d said, because he was changing in front of her, his body heaving, unnatural snapping sounds, sharp growls of pain. It was too dark to see what was happening, but she didn’t need to see it to know it was something big.
A little tendril of fear slipped around her, moving up her legs and through her body, and she backed away instinctively.
When she did, she moved out of the light of the moon, and it fell fully on Eli.
Or what had been Eli. In his place was the bear. The dark eyes, huge head, and giant paws.
Lilly scrambled backward and onto the bed. It was impossible that the bear could be occupying the same space Eli had been just moments before.
Impossible, but definitely the case. The bear seemed to waffle between coming forward toward her and leaving the room. He was so big; she wasn’t even sure he would be able to fit through the door.
Which only served to highlight the fact that he hadn’t come through it in the first place. Because Eli was the bear.
He let out a loud, low sound — caught between anger and pain — that raised goosebumps along Lilly’s arms. Her heart was beating dramatically in her chest, but even with the bear so close, she didn’t fear it. Knowing somewhere in there was Eli, made it impossible for her to fear him.
He lurched forward, like he was readjusting to his new body. His eyes were on hers for one long moment, and then he was turning from her, heading right toward the oversized, hazy moon in the window. Without pausing, he leapt forward, his huge body suddenly agile, crashing through the glass and sending it splintering everywhere.
Bears of Burden: HUTCH Page 35