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Hired Bear (Bears of Pinerock County Book 5)

Page 11

by Zoe Chant


  There's another option, she told herself. She could sell the farm, pay off her family's debts, and move onto the ranch with Cody. That was a perfect solution, wasn't it? She would still have her mate and the rural lifestyle that had turned out to fit her like a totally unexpected glove. She really liked the other ranch women, and she would have them around her every day ...

  And she'd have to go through every day working on someone else's ranch, feeling like a guest—a welcome guest, but a guest nonetheless. She'd have to live right next door to her family farm while someone else tended these fields, someone else sat beside this spring.

  It would be torment. She'd rather live back in St. Louis, where at least she wouldn't have constant reminders around her every day.

  She opened her eyes again at a soft rustling. In front of her, the pool glistened, reflecting the pink-tinged sky, the trees and rocks.

  Across from her, a deer had just stepped out of the woods.

  Crystal held her breath. Every time she came to the spring, she'd been hoping to see the deer and fawn again. The little cloven hoofprints let her know that they came here regularly. But until now, she hadn't seen a trace of them.

  The deer looked around, scenting the wind. It paused for a long moment, then trotted to the water's edge and lowered its head to dip its delicate muzzle into the pool.

  Crystal didn't dare move a muscle.

  She wasn't positive this was the same deer until a fawn detached itself from the woods and made its gangly way to the water's edge. It waded into the edge of the water with its skinny little legs and leaned down, but its legs were too long and its neck too short to drink the way its mother was doing. So it tried to kneel down, and accidentally dipped its whole head in the water. It came up snorting and sneezing.

  Crystal couldn't help herself. A tiny giggle escaped her.

  Both the deer jumped. The fawn scampered back into the woods, herded by its alert mother. In a moment, the two of them had faded away as if they'd never been.

  Crystal let out her breath in a slow sigh. They had been so close. Her spine tingled with the magic of the encounter. She couldn't get too upset with herself for accidentally laughing at them. Until that moment, it was like they didn't even know she was there, as if they had accepted her completely as part of the scenery.

  Maybe next time, I'll manage to be totally quiet.

  What am I thinking? Next time? There's not going to be a next time. I'm leaving tomorrow.

  She looked up and realized the sun had set behind the mountains. It was always cooler by the spring than out in the pasture, but now a genuine chill began to creep into the air, chasing away the heat of afternoon. If she didn't head back to the farmhouse now, she was going to have to walk back in the dark, and she wasn't quite that familiar with the place yet. It would be embarrassing to get lost in her own woods and make Cody have to track her down.

  She wasn't scared, though. Even though there could be bears and mountain lions in the woods, a woman who was mated to a bear shifter needed to fear nothing. The biggest predator on this mountain was her mate, her Cody.

  "I want to stay," she said aloud, tears springing to her eyes. "Please, Grandpa, help me. Show me where your treasure is. Give me a way to stay here and keep the farm."

  A sudden gust of wind rattled the trees. Realistically Crystal knew it was only the evening temperature change stirring up breezes, like it always did at dusk, but it still raised the fine hairs on her arms. A leaf broke free of the willow hanging over the pool and fluttered down to dimple the surface, swirling around in the current before it was drawn into the rushing outflow.

  Another leaf fluttered down beside Crystal, landing lightly on her favorite flat rock. Layers of dead leaves had built up here over the years; she'd had to brush them aside to make herself a nice place to sit. Now she poked at the dead leaf layer, pushing it off the suspiciously smooth top of the rock, and her fingers brushed over a cleft.

  Wait ... there was something scratched into the top of the rock.

  She pushed more leaves aside. As she she bared the top of the rock, letters were exposed. They looked like they'd been cut with a chisel.

  T-R-E—

  One letter at a time, she uncovered the inscription.

  TREASURE

  SPRINGS

  "Treasure springs?" she murmured, and Cody's words came back to her, about the ranch being located here because of the spring. Worth its weight in gold, he'd said.

  She touched the letters with her fingertips, and a laugh bubbled up in her throat. Oh, the irony.

  "This is your treasure, isn't it, Grandpa? The spring is the treasure."

  I'd rather have the gold, she'd told Cody. But that wasn't true at all. She wouldn't trade this spring for a hundred gold mines. Without this spring, there would be no farm.

  But it meant there was no magic pot of money hidden on the property. No perfect solution that would allow her to pay off her family's bills and keep the farm too.

  She was going to have to sell it.

  Crystal drew a deep breath past the lump in her throat, and got up off the bench. "Thank you, Grandpa," she said to the darkening woods. "I guess you were trying to show me after all. I just didn't want to hear what you had to say."

  Hope wasn't lost, she told herself. There were still options. She would be happy eventually, living on the Circle B or in St. Louis, because her heart was with Cody and her home was wherever he was. Maybe they would be able to sell the farm to someone nice, who would let her come over here sometimes, and sit beside the spring like she used to ...

  Her head jerked up at a sudden rustle in the woods.

  All her earlier bravado deserted her, and now her head was full of thoughts of bears, mountain lions, enraged deer ...

  Crystal groped for something to use as a weapon. The only thing that came to hand was a rock, but she picked it up anyway—

  —then relaxed when Cody stepped out of the woods.

  "Crystal?" He relaxed, too, when he saw her. "You weren't back at the house. I figured I'd find you up here. It's getting dark."

  "I know. Thanks for coming to find me." She dropped the rock, and pointed to the disturbed leaves and the underlying inscription. "I'm glad you did. Come here, I want to show you something."

  Cody read the inscription on the rock, squinting to make out the letters in the dusk. "Treasure springs ... wait. The spring—"

  "The spring is the treasure. All this time we've been looking for something that doesn't exist. Or, I guess I should say, we already found it, we just didn't know."

  "Oh, honey." He pulled her into his arms. "I'm sorry."

  "I'm not," Crystal said into his shoulder, slightly muffled. "Like you pointed out, the farm wouldn't even be here if not for the spring. It really is a treasure. Just ... not the kind I hoped for."

  But she still wanted to cry. All that work. She'd fallen so completely in love with the farm in just two weeks. She wanted to spend the rest of her life here.

  Cody stroked her hair, and she relaxed into his arms and reminded herself that as long as she had him, things would work out, somehow.

  "Are you leaving tomorrow?" he murmured against her hair.

  "Yes, but only for a little while. I just have to go back to St. Louis, talk to Mom, start the proceedings to sell the farm—"

  "You're selling it?" He sounded as crushed as she felt.

  He loves it here, too.

  "I have to. There's no other option. We need that money. But ... once I get things settled with Mom and get my stuff packed up, I'm coming back."

  She felt something pass through him, some powerful emotion, partly from the way he tensed and then sagged very slightly against her, and partly in a way that went beyond normal senses, through the bond they shared. "You're coming back?"

  "Of course I'm coming back!" She tipped her head back to look up at him. The sky was still deep blue, with the first stars of evening emerging above the mountains, but it was almost dark under the trees; she couldn'
t make out his expression. "Cody, I understand how much it means to you, living here. When I let you bite me, I knew what it meant. I don't expect you to move to the city for me. I can live on the Circle B, if your alpha will have me."

  "Alec. Yeah." Cody laughed softly and pressed his face to her hair. "There's one conversation I've been ducking. I kept telling myself there was no point in talking to him until I knew what, exactly, I was asking for—whether I'd be telling him I was leaving the ranch, or bringing my mate back with me ..."

  "Well, now you know." She pressed herself against him, as if she could burrow into him, and told herself that she would be happy on the Circle B, even if it didn't feel like hers in the same way the farm did. It would come to feel like home, in time.

  "Maybe—" Cody began.

  "Shhh. Let's not talk about that tonight. All I want to do is go back down to the farmhouse, and make a nice meal; there are those steaks in the freezer that you brought over from the Circle B, and we need to use them up before I go. Let's just have a pleasant evening, and ... stay with me tonight."

  "Always," he whispered, brushing his callused fingertips across the side of her face. "Always."

  12. Cody

  He woke in the gray light of early dawn. It was habit, mostly, that woke him at that hour; he'd been getting up with the sun ever since he could remember. A rancher's day started early.

  But as he lay comfortable and drowsy, with Crystal's warm sleeping weight curled against him in her four-poster bed, his mind circled around and around the problems facing them—and an idea came to him.

  He knew a way Crystal could keep the farm.

  He sat up, careful not to disturb her, and looked down at her face in the growing dawn light. She was so beautiful, her dusky skin flawless. He stroked the backs of his fingers very lightly across her cheek, and even in her sleep, she turned her head in that direction, seeking her mate.

  Even though she'd told him she wasn't leaving forever and he believed her, the knowledge that his mate was going away, and the awareness that this was their last day together in the cozy little farmhouse, had hung over their entire evening together. They'd made love again last night in the master bedroom, gentle and slow, and then just wrapped around each other, as if they could soak up enough of each other's skin to get through the long days ahead.

  He didn't want to wake her with false hope. Instead, he kissed her gently, the softest brush of his lips, and then got out of bed and collected yesterday's clothes draped on the chair beside the bed.

  Her suitcase was open on the floor, half packed. In one of its pockets he found a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen with a motel logo, and he scribbled in large letters: GOT TO RUN AN ERRAND! DON'T LEAVE WITHOUT SAYING GOODBYE! -C

  He left this propped on the bedside table, and let himself quietly out of the room.

  The sun was not yet up, the windshield of his truck beaded with dew. He wiped it with his shirt sleeve and started the engine. It wasn't quite cool enough at night yet to run the heater ... but it would be getting there before too long. The seasons turned fast in the high mountain country.

  Cody drove out of the yard onto the short stretch of old road between their two properties. When he had first driven it to come over and offer to lend a hand to the new neighbor, there had been grass as high as the doors of the truck, and several fallen trees he'd had to use a bear's strength to heave out of the road. Now, between his twice-daily trips and the almost daily visits of the ranch women, it was looking well used.

  He drove through the back pasture and let himself into the gate leading to the ranch yard. The sun was just peeking over the edge of the trees in the valley below, gilding the dew on each blade of grass. When he stepped out of the truck and slammed the door, a rooster crowed hopefully, and some of the cattle lowed in the field behind the barn.

  It was early enough that it didn't look like the ranch was stirring yet, aside from the animals. Tara and Axl's curtains were drawn; no one moved at Remy and Saffron's place. However, one person was up. Alec was sitting on the front porch of the big ranch house with a cup of coffee, the scruffy little dog curled up beside him. He lifted a hand to Cody in acknowledgement.

  Well, it wasn't like he could put off this conversation forever, though he'd have preferred to talk to Tara first. Cody lifted an answering hand, hesitated for just an instant as he considered going into his trailer first under the pretext of ... and that was where it fell apart, because it wasn't like Alec was going to care if Cody went over to talk to him in yesterday's clothes.

  Yeah, anything that he did at this point would look like he was dodging his alpha—which would be entirely accurate. Crystal deserved better. Alec did too, for that matter.

  Cody loped over with his long, ground-eating stride. As he approached, Alec got up and went into the house, but by the time Cody reached the porch, he'd reappeared with a second cup of coffee. He held it out wordlessly and Cody wrapped his hands around the cup. He took a sip. Strong and black and hot—Alec always did know how to wake up a ranch hand with a good cup of coffee.

  They sat side by side on the porch and drank their coffee. The rooster crowed again, and in the pasture, two of the horses whickered to each other.

  The horses, Cody thought. He'd been neglecting them lately—neglecting a lot of his responsibilities here. Taking care of the horses had always been, for the most part, his job, and he was attached to them. He wondered what Alec would say if he took a couple of his favorites with him to Crystal's farm. The thought of teaching Crystal to ride gave him a delightful mental image of his beautiful mate on the back of a horse, her hair flowing free in the wind ...

  Slow down there, boy. First things first.

  "So," Alec drawled, glancing at him. "Hear you found yourself a mate."

  "Yeah."

  "You put your mark on her?"

  "Yep, sure did." Cody just barely managed not to tack on a "sir," although some part of him wanted to.

  Even without stirring a hair, Alec was pouring on the alpha dominance this morning. But Cody knew he had to strike the right balance. He had to be polite without being too formal; he had to stand firm without offering a challenge.

  He and Alec had never stood on ceremony with each other, even back in the days when a much harder, less relaxed Alec had ruled the ranch with a firm hand.

  Of all the bears in the clan, the two of them had worked together most closely. Axl had been busy with his sheriff's responsibilities, Remy away at various jobs in town. Gannon had been a dark and damaged newcomer who spent most of his time in the woods at his cabin. So it was Alec and Cody who had kept the ranch running.

  For a long time, they'd been so in sync that few words between them were needed. Alec gave the orders and Cody followed them, but that was understood as the proper way of the world. In general, they both knew their work so well that no orders were needed. Alec did the detail work of running the ranch—kept the books, ordered the feed, and so forth—while Cody supplied willing muscles and a deep love of the livestock. They'd both gone out in all kinds of weather to bring in the cattle, stayed up helping troubled cows deliver their calves, chipped ice out of the stock troughs in -30 windchill ...

  And Cody had never wanted it to be any different. He was happy here. He wasn't a dominant personality; unlike some of the others' bears, the bear in him was not a natural alpha.

  He had never had the slightest urge to challenge Alec.

  But now he was surprised to find that his bear wasn't settling down as it normally did in their alpha's presence. Instead he had the feeling that his bear was backed up against a wall. It wasn't going to pick a fight, but it also wasn't going to back down. That feeling surprised him; he'd never felt it before.

  Cody had never liked fighting. But now his bear had found something worth fighting for, and so had he.

  "I heard about it from the girls." Alec dumped the cooling dregs of his cup over the edge of the porch, but still held it in his big hands, as if to give him something to do. He t
urned his cool blue eyes on Cody, and it was all Cody could do not to look down in the face of his alpha's disapproval. But he didn't, and he saw something flash in the depths of Alec's eyes—surprise, maybe. "You should have come to me about it. I shouldn't have had to hear it from them."

  "I know," Cody said evenly. "I didn't because I wasn't sure what to tell you. Didn't know what I wanted to ask for. I need your permission to bring my mate to the ranch, but ..." He took a breath. This was the crux of it; this was the truth he'd been skirting around for the last week. "I don't need your permission, or your blessing, to take Crystal as my mate. I'd really like to have it. But I don't need it. That's out of either of our hands."

  Alec inclined his head in something that might have been a nod. There was a look in his eyes that Cody had never seen before, at least not directed at him, and he slowly realized that it was respect.

  It wasn't that Alec hadn't respected him before. But he had never seen this kind of respect in his alpha's eyes, the acknowledging nod of Alec's bear to his own.

  "My mate calmed my bear," Alec said after a moment. "It looks like your mate put some fire in yours. I'd like to meet her."

  "You will. In fact, maybe today." Cody finally felt that he could break eye contact without having it look submissive, so he glanced across the yard at Axl and Tara's place. There was now a small curl of smoke coming from the chimney. "I need to look into some things first. Trouble is, she's gonna lose that farm."

  "I heard that." Alec set down the empty cup on the step beside him and scratched the ears of the drowsing dog. "Hoping for buried treasure, I heard."

  "Yeah."

  "You find anything?"

  "Nothing that'd help," Cody said.

  "Never a good idea to pin all your hopes on a miracle."

  "No, but we might get one anyway. I've got an idea. If this goes through, though ..." Cody steadied himself and met Alec's eyes again, one bear to another. It wasn't a challenge; it was simply a declaration of his intention to stand firm, not giving an inch. "I won't be bringing her to live on the ranch with us."

 

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