She had always found such a tactic worked before, but not this time. The bear just came closer, still not charging but still intent on her. Then it got close enough that she could see his eyes, and she froze. There was no mistaking that deep golden color, and she could have sworn the bear was smiling at her.
In another moment, the bear morphed into something else, and she stood facing Mark Saint.
“Your granny sent me this way,” he said, though she hadn’t asked. “She told me to look for the biggest sugar maple.”
He paused and let his eyes roam over the gigantic, old tree.
“Sure is pretty,” he said.
Addy just stood there, wringing her hands and glancing around, looking for a way out of this encounter, a part of her wanting to flee but another part fascinated by what she had seen.
Mark took a step closer, and though she refused to take a step in retreat, she swallowed hard.
“Your granny also told me to look out for a mountain lion,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “Turned out that wasn’t necessary, ’cause I saw you Shift as you climbed the hill.”
Her eyes snapped to his, then, and hers were wide with fear.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said, as though reading her mind. He kept his tone soft, his stance nonaggressive. “You’re not alone, Addy, though I got the feelin’ you think you are.”
It wasn’t quite a question.
“I didn’t…” She stopped, not having a clue as to what she wanted to say.
“You didn’t know there are others like you, did you?” He sounded surprised.
She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself tightly.
“Granny tells me my daddy did, but there’s no one else in the family. Then Daddy died, and...”
“How old were you?”
“Not quite two.”
“How old were you when you started Shifting?”
“Is that what you call it? About three, I guess. One day I, well, I just found this new game. Granny was surprised but happy for me—I think—then she told me I shouldn’t tell anyone, even my cousins, ’cause they couldn’t do it, and they might tell on me.
“I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t even control it. Granny tried to help, but she didn’t know how to help me.”
“She didn’t remember what your daddy did?”
Addy shook her head. “She’d married Granddad, knowin’ about him, and it was Granddad who taught Daddy. But Granddad died before I was born. There wasn’t anybody else.”
Mark cursed softly under his breath, but when she looked up at him again, he was only shaking his head.
“Let’s sit down a minute,” he said, reaching out to her.
When she didn’t take his offered hand, he didn’t try to touch her but just gestured toward the ground. Addy let herself drop to the soft turf and brought her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them protectively.
“First off,” Mark said, “you gotta know there’s nothin’ wrong with you. There are a lot of Shifters in the world, though most people’ll tell you they don’t believe in ’em.”
“Are you the only one in your family?” she asked, her curiosity overcoming her fear for the moment.
“No. Gosh no. There’s all three of my brothers, our dad, our Uncle Bart. Grandpappy and Great-Grandaddy were both Shifters. There’re some cousins, too.”
“Are you all…I mean, do you all become…”
“Bears?”
Addy nodded.
“Yeah. We’re a bear clan. They tell me Grandpappy and Great-granddad looked more like grizzlies than black bears, like us, but they were both pretty big men.”
Addy snorted in disbelief. She couldn’t help it. “And you’re not?” She dropped her eyes, then, embarrassed to have him know she’d noticed anything about him.
“They say that Great-granddad was almost seven feet tall,” Mark said, stretching out his legs and leaning back on his elbows, “though I’m guessing that’s probably an exaggeration. Sort of like Paul Bunyan.”
She smiled in response to his tone of voice and started, finally, to relax. Then she thought of the way he had morphed—Shifted—right in front of her.
“How do you control it?” she asked. She looked up to meet his eyes once more and prayed he would understand how much she needed to know.
He sat up again, and reached for a nearby stick, worrying it between his fingers as though trying to find the best way to explain it to her.
“You don’t, at first,” he said. “I was about three when I started, too. Course, I had the advantage of a father, uncle, and big brother to walk me through it. At first, it was just fun—a game Matt and I played with our daddy and uncle. But then, they started to take us aside and teach us how to focus, how to control what was happenin’ to us—and how important it was to keep it a secret from anyone outside the family. Truth was we kind of felt sorry for the other kids in school, on account of they couldn’t Shift.”
“I never went to school,” she said. “Granny had to keep me home and close, because I couldn’t ever choose not to change—Shift?” He nodded. “So I was home-schooled, which turned out okay. I mean I probably learned a lot more than the other kids did, since I earned my GED when I was fifteen. I don’t think I missed much.”
Mark raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Fifteen? Wow. I’m impressed.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Addy said. “We have a pretty big library, and Granny’s a terrific teacher. Plus I had one-on-one instruction all the way through, and I’ve always loved to read. And anyway, just look what you can do.” She gestured down the slope toward where he had been standing when he’d Shifted. “Are you always in control that way?”
“Heck, no,” he said, sitting back up. “You remember I said our band avoids all that glitter and bright lights, pyrotechnics and smoke crap? We avoid really big crowds, too, ’cause if any of us start feelin’ cornered, well, we can sometimes Shift without thinkin’ about it, and that can be more than awkward.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Course, sometimes you have to take a chance. That happened to us just last spring.”
“What happened?” This Addy wanted to hear, since these were the times that really scared her.
“Well, me and my brothers and Uncle Bart were playing pool at this place in Nashville. It was a real dump, but we’d found it a good place to hang out on account of they had a bunch of illegal gambling goin’ on.”
“You and your brothers gamble?”
“Heck, no—I mean Ma would kill us, if she ever thought that—but we figured we could really relax there, ’cause no one was likely to ask too many questions.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, we didn’t know Mel was tryin’ to find us.”
“That agency woman?”
“Yeah. Turns out, she’d heard us play, and was trying to track us down. Somebody told her where we liked to hang out.”
“Uh-oh.”
Mark snorted. “You get the picture. See, Mel came in, and we were in the back room. Before she could come find us, some low-life in the bar started hittin’ on her. When she said ‘no,’ he got really mad and started to hurt her.
“That’s about the time Matt went back into the bar to get us some more beer. Well, he heard Mel scream, and jumped in to help, and before we knew it, we’d all Shifted, Matt to handle the guy on Mel, and the rest of us to keep the biker crowd off Matt.”
“Was Mel okay?”
“Oh, sure. A little shaken up—and I’m not sure she would’ve taken us all home with her, iffen she hadn’t been—but everything turned out okay. The thing is, Matt left the guy pretty bloody, and we were lucky nobody in the bar wanted to attract the attention of the police, so they just let us go.”
Addy had mangled a wildflower, while Mark was speaking, and now she tossed it aside.
“How did Mel handle…well, what did she think about…what you can do?”
“I won’t say she accepted it as normal or anything—not right away, that is—but Matt did save her, and we all pitched in to help her keep her job at the talent agency, so it gave her a couple of reasons to be open-minded about the whole thing.”
“And now she’s really goin’ to marry your brother?”
Mark grinned. “Yeah.”
Addy shook her head. “I hear what you’re sayin’, but I don’t know if I can do what you do. I’ve never been to a city before, and I don’t know if I can face all that…well, that newness, all those people…and still stay myself. I can’t just turn it on and turn it off like you seem to be able to do.”
Mark shifted to his knees and held out his hand.
“Let’s see.”
“What?”
“Let’s see if you can ‘just turn it on and turn it off’ if you try,” he said, straightening and offering her both his hands.
“I can’t just…”
“I’ll be you can, Addy. I’ll bet if you just relax and let yourself go, you can do it.”
Addy’s gaze flickered between his golden eyes and his offered hands, uncertain, then she took a deep breath.
“Do you really think I could?” she asked, incredulous.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Screwing up her courage, she moved to her knees, and after only a moment’s hesitation, she laid her hands in his.
She pictured the mountain lion in her head, and in another moment, she felt the change—the Shift—begin deep inside of her. She looked up to see Mark’s golden eyes sparkle as his form began to waver, and then they were standing head to head, on four legs instead of two. Addy felt suddenly intimidated—Mark as a bear was not only more than a foot taller at the shoulder than she, he now probably outweighed her by two- or three-hundred pounds. She shied back, warily. Then the bear proved he was still Mark by rolling over on his back. Belly up, he looked back at her, grinning.
Addy let out a not-quite playful scream then pounced on him, and the tussle was on. First one then the other would pounce and roll over. She would run away, but Mark had no difficulty catching her. Addy knew from experience that bears were much faster than mountain lions—she had once only just managed to escape a real one, because she had been light enough to climb out on a limb, cross to another tree, climb down, and run away before the bear could get back on the ground—but Mark would let her get ahead of him, just so he could circle around and “attack” from another angle.
Almost an hour passed before, exhausted, Addy returned to collapse under the big maple tree once more, panting. Mark lumbered up and plopped down beside her. He wasn’t even slightly winded.
“That’s not fair, you know,” she said, as she Shifted back to herself without any noticeable effort. It seemed suddenly so easy, and she realized it had a lot to do with how relaxed she now felt about the whole thing, thanks to Mark’s presence and understanding.
Mark was laughing as he, too, Shifted. “You started it,” he said, lying beside her, propped up on one elbow. “You’re a pretty good pouncer.”
Addy blushed, embarrassed by how good it had felt to physically play with him. Another “first” in her day.
“And you didn’t have any trouble Shifting in either direction,” he said. “Did you?”
She met his eyes, then, as golden as her own. “I guess not. It’s never been like that for me before. Did you pick it up that fast?”
“Shoot, no. I was three when I started training, but real control didn’t come until I hit puberty. It was like that with all of us. Since you’re a mature adult, who’s had years of experience Shifting without any guidance, it makes sense that you should pick it up faster than we did. After all, you don’t have to learn how to Shift. You only have to learn how it feels to control it.
“And to not be afraid of it,” he added, gently cupping her face in his hand.
Addy wanted to pull away from him—or at least, she thought she should want to pull away from him—but she had never been able to trust anyone—other than Granny—the way she already trusted this almost stranger.
When she didn’t pull away, Mark leaned in to lay his lips on hers. His kiss was as gentle as his touch, but she felt it all the way to her toes. He didn’t push her, but she suddenly found herself kissing him back.
When he finally ended the kiss and sat back, she thought they were both trembling. She sat up and turned away from him, confused.
“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve done that,” he said, and she heard regret in his voice.
She took a deep breath and glanced over her shoulder at him.
“Why did you?”
Mark smiled. “Because I like you. I think you’re beautiful. And so far, it’s been a really good day.”
Honestly shocked by his words, Addy abruptly stood, not certain if she believed him or not. When he came slowly to his feet beside her, she looked at him again. There was nothing in those deep golden eyes that offered anything but complete honesty, and after a moment, she surprised herself by reaching for him and kissing him back.
This time it went on longer, and as the kiss deepened, she felt something inside her shift, which had nothing at all to do with mountain lions or bears. This time, when they broke apart, they were both short of breath.
“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve done that,” she offered shyly.
He smiled. “Why did you?”
She took a deep breath. “Because I like you, too.”
Mark’s smile broadened into a grin, and he kissed her once more, hard and fast.
“We should get back.”
“Definitely.”
He took her hand, and their fingers locked.
“Shall we Shift or stroll,” he asked.
“We’d better stroll,” she said, glancing at his teasing eyes. “Bear hunting season is only a week away, and I don’t want to take any chances.”
Mark laughed and pulled her along.
“So, does this mean you’ll go to Nashville with me?” he asked after a time.
Addy sighed. “I think I want to. I think I have to try, anyway.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you, Addy,” he said, his voice sober, now.
“I know.”
She glanced up, and their eyes met once more.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For trusting me. It means a lot.”
“Okay. Then you’re welcome. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For believing in me,” she said. “For believing I can really do this. And for offering to be there to pick me up, if I fail.”
He stopped and pulled her close to lightly kiss her brow before taking both her hands and stepping back. “You’re not gonna fail, Addy.”
“You haven’t even heard me sing, yet.”
Mark smiled. “I don’t have to. I’ve heard you speak, and I’ve played your music. That’s enough.”
Amir (BBW Bear Shifter Moonshiner Romance) (120 Proof Honey Book 3) Page 53