Baby It's Cold Out Bear Holiday Bundle

by T. S. Joyce

  Lena stopped and snorted, blowing steam out of her nostrils like a freight train. Her ears twitched back and forth, and I smiled, and looked up into the branches above. Perched on a thick pine branch was a man with long, straight, whipping, raven-colored hair. His cheek bones were high and sharp, and his lips were full. He wore deer skin leggings and thick soled boots under those, but the shirt he wore was thin, cream-colored cotton. His arms were much bigger than I remembered. His shoulders threatened to rip out of the threadbare linen.

  “I should’ve known you would be in the trees,” I murmured.

  Ukiah jumped down, down, down, and landed with little impact near the wagon. Lena pranced and whinnied, but Ukiah padded over to her silently and rubbed his hand down her neck. “Shhhhh.” He took his eyes off the horse and slid his attention to me, and I was struck, like I’d been so many times, by the light glow in his gray eyes. He would smell like a wolf right now. It always happened when his eyes glowed.

  “I…” What could I say that would make any sense right now? I brought cornbread for Lucianna? He could hear lies in a voice. Truth had always been best with him. “We found the rabbit, and I wanted to see you.” Why did I feel like crying? He hadn’t even said a word to me, and already my throat was tightening up.

  “Was it good?” he asked, in that deep, reverberating voice of his. He’d been raised by Gable and Lucianna since he was six, but he still had a slight accent from his native language and his time spent on the reservation. I would never admit it out loud, but I loved the way he spoke.

  “The stew was incredible. I would’ve brought you some, but my father ate three helpings and there were only scraps left.”

  Ukiah broke out in a big grin. He’d always had the best smile, so white against the dark tone of his skin. “Elias eats more than any human I’ve ever seen.”

  I laughed, because he was right.

  Lena was completely calm under his touch now, her ears twitching with curiosity and her steaming breath coming steady.

  I studied the ground under his tree. “How did you get up there? I don’t see any footprints.”

  “Perhaps I was waiting for hours and the falling snow covered my prints.”

  “Really?”

  Another smile. “No.” He pulled Lena’s halter and led her toward his cabin, and I was struck with how different he looked. Ukiah had always been thin as a whip, no matter how much his parents had fed him. But while I’d been away making changes on myself, he had been doing the same. Changing. His back was broad, and he looked even taller than Gable now, who was already a monstrous man. Ukiah’s waist tapered to a V where his shirt tucked into his tanned leggings.

  “You don’t wear braids anymore,” I observed.

  “I do sometimes.”

  “Why not right now?” I’d rarely seen his hair down like this.

  “Because the wolf takes my body away too much. The braids don’t stay when I Turn back into a man.”

  I was shivering in the cold breeze now, and moved to secure the blanket over my lap better, but Ukiah turned suddenly, and hopped up into the wagon, yanked it off me and wrapped it around my shoulders without missing a beat of time. I was captured by his eyes. Gray like dawn light and glowing from the inside out, searching mine as I existed ensnared in his charisma. Releasing a shuddering breath, I uttered something I’d sworn to keep to myself. “I missed you.”

  Ukiah’s hands were clasped on the blanket, cinching it to me, but he lifted one hand and pulled his fingertips down one of the curls that had escaped on the drive here. He leaned forward and sniffed it, rolled his eyes closed and rested his cheek against mine. I couldn’t help the sigh that escaped my throat. He lingered there, warm and comforting for three breaths, and then he released me. I’d said three words, and he’d said a hundred more with just a touch.

  “You never wrote me back,” I murmured, still stung by the pain of the separation those years ago.

  “You didn’t need to stay in your past, Maya. You needed to focus on where you were.”

  “It felt so cold. Like you didn’t care or—”

  Ukiah cut me off with a look. With fire in his eyes, he shook his head once, hard. Don’t.

  Fury boiled right through my blood. “I’m not the same girl who left here, Ukiah. I learned how to speak my mind and I’ll say what I want, and what I think. You didn’t talk to me for weeks leading up to my leaving. Over and over you would cut me off and leave until you didn’t talk to me at all. I left here with a sadness that weighed my whole heart down to the ground, and I still got the courage to write to you. You never wrote back. Not once. And I was the silly girl who checked the post religiously for a whole year, hoping one of my letters touched you and you would respond. Did you get my last one?” I asked.

  Ukiah pulled Lena to a stop in front of his cabin, the one he and Luke, Jeremiah and his father had built the summer before I left this place. He scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “I remember.”

  “Do you? Did you even open it up?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed audibly. “It was a Christmas card with a hand-drawn red bird on the front. Dear Ukiah. I assume that you are busy at the reservation now. You always go there in the winter, during the holidays. I always missed holidays with you. When I was younger, I would imagine spending thanksgiving eating all day and playing chess with you while our parents and your uncles and cousins caused happy chaos around us. And I imagined getting a Christmas tree with you, and going to Christmas Eve services, and the celebration at Cotton’s on Christmas Day. I really, really miss how the whole town would show up to Cotton’s and give tidings to friends and family and loved ones. I always imagined giving you a gift when you showed up to Cotton’s on Christmas day, even when I knew you were at the reservation. It was a fantasy for me. And now mother and father are giving up the restaurant and those imaginings can never come to fruition. The holidays were strange for me, Ukiah. I feel like I can tell you all of this now because you’re silent and sometimes it feels like you’re so far away, maybe you don’t exist at all in my life anymore. There is a sensation of safety in that distance. I was always surrounded by love. By my parents, and yours, and your uncles and aunts. But I was always, always, year after year, lonely during the holidays because I missed you. I miss you. I’ll stop bothering you with these letters. This will be the last one I ever send you. I just wanted you to know you were thought about when you spent time at the reservation. You’re thought about now. Love…Maya.”

  By the time he uttered the last words, to say I was shocked was an understatement. He’d recited my last letter. I didn’t remember exactly what I’d written, but I had no doubt he’d just nailed every single word. How many times had he read my card to memorize it like this?

  Ukiah angled his face, and the evening shadows caught those sharp cheekbones. “I opened them all.” The corner of his lips turned up in a smile. “Are you done skinning my hide now, woman? I want to get you out of the cold.”

  Well hells bells, I parted my lips to say something intelligent and witty, but nothing came out. I tried again. “It’s…well, it’s improper to go into your home now. Unchaperoned.” Oh good one, Maya, you’re a delight.

  “Don’t worry, Maya. I’ll make sure the big bad wolf doesn’t get you.” Ukiah jumped off the side of the wagon with such grace, I was dumbfounded. Smoothly, he held out his large, calloused hand, and the smile was reaching his glowing gray eyes now. Even standing on the ground, he was still just as tall as I was, sitting on the seat of the wagon, and his straight black hair whipped to the side in the wind. No man had ever looked as striking as Ukiah Dawson.

  When I hesitated touching his hand, he reached forward and gripped my hips, lifted me easily out of the wagon before I could react. And there his strong hands stayed while I looked up at him and was bombarded by a hundred memories. He’d always been taller than me, and six years older. More mature. Quieter, but with this sturdy presence that made me feel so safe. Nothing could harm me when
I was near Ukiah.

  He released me suddenly and took three quick steps back, then gestured for me to go ahead of him inside.

  Hot and cold. Hot and cold. And here I was, just as confused as I’d been the last years I lived here. I had to know. “Is she here?”

  “She who?” he asked in that deep baritone timbre.

  “Tomotu.”

  His eyes went round and he ducked his gaze to the snow. “How did you hear about that?”

  “Gable told my father. You were seeing a Ute woman named Tomotu. He thought you would settle down with her.”

  “She wasn’t real.”

  The frown in my brows deepened so much, my face hurt with it. “What do you mean?”

  “Tomotu means winter. I told him I was leaving here for winter, and he thought it was a name, not a season. And I allowed the mistake. He stopped asking me about you when he thought I was going to the reservation to visit Tomotu. Stopped talking about you. It was a relief. You were already…”

  “Already what?”

  Ukiah straightened his spine and pushed his shoulders back, clasped his hands behind him and looked around his woods. “You were already everywhere.”

  “Memories of me?”

  He nodded once.

  In that way, I’d been lucky. Ukiah had never been to Boston, and there were no memories of him there. I didn’t have flashbacks of us taking in a show, or eating in restaurants there. I didn’t have to avoid any places that we’d spent time together when I didn’t feel like thinking of him. But me?

  “You marked up every inch of this place,” Ukiah said, as if he could see right into my thoughts. And maybe he could. Over the years, I’d thought he had magic in him. Werewolf with the knowledge of his people, both Ute and Dawson.

  “It’s so strange standing here with you again. You’re…you, but different.”

  The snow was falling in earnest again as he canted his head and smiled at me. “Different how?”

  “You’re a man now.”

  “I was a man then. I was twenty-nine when you left. Old bachelor.”

  “Oh, foot,” I cursed gently. “You aren’t old. But now you’re…I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “The wolf is different. That’s what you can’t put your finger on. Human senses know there is something wrong, you just can’t understand what.”

  Softly, I asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

  Ukiah shrugged up a shoulder. “He needs the body all the time. Every night now. Sometimes deep into the day. He will win eventually. He never gives up, and it’s impossible to fight something that never stops hunting you.”

  Well, that wasn’t good. That wasn’t a life at all, having to give up his skin so often like that. “Have you talked to your father about it?”

  “Yes. And Luke. And Jeremiah. And my cousins. And my grandfather, Kicking Bull, and no one can fix a broken wolf, Maya.” He looked up at the clouds, and his dark brows drew down. “Storm is coming and it’ll be bad tonight.”

  “I should get home then,” I told him, turning for the wagon. But before I could climb in, he was there. Just a blur of movement and then he was in front of me. Gads, he was fast now. Much faster than I remembered, or perhaps he’d hidden some of his power in The Before. Before I left for Boston, before I reinvented myself and made a life outside of this place.

  “You’re different, too,” he murmured.

  Curiosity would someday be the killer of this cat. I should’ve just made my way around him to the other side and got the reins and ushered Lena out of here before the snow really hit, but I wanted to know. I was hanging on every word he said, my heart beating for the chance that he would utter my name again in that deep, silky voice. “How am I different?”

  “Your hair is longer,” he said, pulling gently on a curl again. “You’re a woman now.” He traced my collar bone, eliciting a shiver that trembled right up my spine. His light touch travelled down my arm to my wrist, where he gripped it. And then he touched my waist. “You were always a string bean, and now look at you. I bet every man in Boston turned his head when you walked by him. How could they not?”

  My cheeks heated when an embarrassing blush, but I was too trapped in his glowing gray eyes to look away and hide it. “There was no one for me in Boston. I confused people with my thick hair, and my skin color, and my light eyes. I might be a trinket to look at, but no man is going to bring me home to his mother. And I didn’t look for one to.”

  “Mmmm,” he rumbled. “I think you sell yourself short. I think you are a rare beauty there. If men didn’t approach, it wasn’t because you were unattractive to them.” He snarled up his lip and a feral expression washed through his face. “It was because you intimidate weak men.”

  The smile on my face felt so good. What a beautiful thing to get a compliment like that from a person like Ukiah, who didn’t give them easily, and never just to blow smoke. He only said exactly what he meant—nothing more, nothing less.

  “Your eyes are the same, and your smile is, too,” he said. “I like that you wear your hair long and down now.”

  “I don’t in Boston,” I admitted. “It’s not the style, especially for hair like mine. I always keep it pinned and off my shoulders. I only wore it down today because…” Don’t admit that. Don’t tell him you wore it down because he once told you he liked your hair wild.

  He smiled like he already knew what I’d almost said. “Go on inside.” He jerked his chin toward the cabin. “I’ll put the horse in the barn with mine for the night.”

  “Oh, I can’t stay the night, Ukiah. What would people say?”

  “Maya,” he rumbled, leaning in. Oooooh the shivers on my skin that my name on his lips drew. “Look around. We aren’t in Boston where every move is watched. We’re at the Dawson Ranch, where you have spent a hundred nights. You can have my cabin tonight. I’ll sleep in the woods.”

  “In the woods? You’ll freeze to death.”

  “The wolf wants the skin,” he said over his shoulder as he made his way to Lena. The horse whinnied and reared the second he got close to her face, but he settled her down. “See?” he asked. “Even this old nag can smell the predator.”

  I looked around. There was nothing out here but us and the horse and the snowdrifts. He had a point. This wasn’t Boston, and really, I wasn’t doing anything wrong per say. I was sleeping in a shelter offered by a gentleman on a blustery night. There. Excuses made, I lifted my full skirts and made my way to his front door.

  “Ukiah,” I asked before he got too far leading Lena to the barn behind his cabin.

  He turned and stopped, waiting. He looked so strong and handsome in the blue evening light. Now this was a Christmas card I wished I could draw. Ukiah in the snow, broad shoulders pressing against that thin cotton shirt, his hair unbraided, the buckskin horse motionless behind him and the wagon. And the woods I’d fallen in love with as a girl.

  I wasn’t ready to give him up to the night yet. I liked being around him. Truth be told, I liked myself when I was around him. I liked the person I was with him, and it had been a long time since I’d felt her. That familiarity was addictive. “Will you come inside and warm up for a little while before you Change?” It was selfish of me, and it pushed boundaries, I knew. But I couldn’t help myself. Improper or not, no one was here to shame me, and Ukiah would always keep me and my reputation safe.

  He nodded and said, “As you want.”

  “Ukiah,” I asked again, before he could leave.

  “Yes?”

  “You said I was intimidating to men, but you were never intimidated by me.”

  “I said you’re intimidating to weak men.” His slow smile was positively wicked before he turned and walked away. Without looking back, he said, “I’m not weak, or a man.”

  A long growl punctuated that sentence—a feral reminder to me that Ukiah was so much more than he appeared.

  Chapter Four

  Ukiah

  She was here. Maya was in my cabin, and I
felt as if I was walking in a dream. The wolf inside of me was quiet, and watchful. The animal had missed her more than any human man could understand. More than even I understood.

  I put Elias’s horse in a stall next to the pair of flashy paint ponies I’d been breaking to earn extra money. They always fetched a pretty penny in town, because I’d built up a reputation for my horses. I was good at this. A better hand at the horses than ranching with my father and uncles. I did that too, though, because it made my father proud, me working beside him.

  Maya was really in my cabin.

  I fed and watered Elias’s horse and closed the barn door, made my way to the house. I could see her through the window, so I stopped to watch her for a minute. She was walking around the den, hands behind her back, spine straight, shoulders back. Her mother had always stressed manners and being a lady, and proper posture was part of that. It wasn’t until she reached the mantle of my fireplace that she unclasped her hands and reached out to touch something. It was the little glass wolf she’d given me one Christmas. I was never here for the holiday. It wasn’t one the Ute celebrated, and I was always with my grandfather, Kicking Bull, and his people on the reservation during the winters. But Maya always, always saved a Christmas present, and gave it to me when I returned home.

  The glass wolf was my favorite, though I’d kept her other ones too. I kept everything.

  Beautiful Maya. All of the shadows and highlights on her face were stunning. Her cheek bones, her jaw line, her long, elegant neck. I adjusted myself, and forced my attention to the woodpiles to think of anything other than rucking her dress up her thighs and thrusting into her like a rutting animal. A woman like Maya deserved chivalry, but the things I really wanted to do to her? I would corrupt her completely. I wanted to. I wanted to hear her panting breath and pleading for more.

  Come on, Ukiah. Get your head on straight. The wolf growled inside of me. He liked when I was a beast. Piss off, Wolf. The snarl grew and there it was—the tingling in my fingertips that spread to my hands, wrists, forearms…