by Zoe Chant
Patricia's pulse hammered in her ears, adrenaline coursing through her like fire. "Tell me what?" she managed. "Bear. There was a bear..."
"That was me," Lee said, ridiculously. "I'm the bear. I'm sorry, I didn't want to surprise you like that. I must have done it in my sleep. I was just... comfortable."
Patricia stared. "You were... comfortable? You know, most people, when they get really comfortable, they accidentally fart or something. They don't... turn into bears."
Lee blinked at her, then burst out laughing.
Patricia tried to maintain her stern visage and failed in the face of his laughter, falling forward with limbs that were suddenly utterly weak and shaking, face first into the bed, howling with hysterical laughter.
"Papa?" Clara's frightened voice and timid knock from outside of the door made them both sit up and silence their laughter.
"It's okay, kitten!" Lee said at once. "Nothing's wrong. I just..."
"Farted!" they said together, giggling like loons.
Clara was silent outside the door for a moment. "You woke me up! We have to make pancakes now! I'm getting dressed!" she said accusingly, and then they heard her little footsteps stomping back away down the hallway.
Lee rolled out of his side of the bed and grabbed the clothing that waited there. "You heard the little tyrant," he said, then sobered. "I did want to tell you a little less... uh..."
"Alarmingly?" Patricia suggested. "In a less heart-attack inducing fashion?" As weird as it seemed, now that the adrenaline was ebbing away, the idea of Lee being a shapeshifter was somehow comfortable. It was a tiny affirmation of all the magic she had clung to believing in since she was a small girl, and it suited Lee. All of his serious demeanor and secrecy, all of his riches and his enormous palace of a house; it fit that he was a shapechanger prince from a fairy tale.
'And you aren't a princess,' Patricia reminded herself, sorrowfully, pulling on her jeans and t-shirt. "So, is it some kind of curse or something?" she asked, as if it was perfectly ordinary.
"No," Lee said slowly, shaking his head. "I come from a line of shifters. There are a lot of around. I picked this town because it's usually... friendly to our type."
"That... explains some things," Patricia said, thinking about some of the odd people she knew at the diner, and the way she sometimes felt like there were topics that went silent when she approached, and so many of the stories she heard as a child that she had dismissed as fantasy.
"There's something else," Lee said hesitantly, coming around the end of the bed. He was wearing his pants, but not his shirt, and Patricia looked at his sculpted chest instead of his dear face, bracing herself for the rest.
Chapter Seventeen
AS REVEALS WENT, LEE suspected that it could have gone better. Still, Patricia seemed to be taking the shock in stride. She hadn't jumped out of the window, at least, and once the hysterical giggling had passed, she seemed to be surprisingly accepting of the whole thing.
"There's something else." Lee made himself keep going, knowing that if he lost momentum with this whole confession, it was only going to be harder.
Patricia made a conversational noise as she buttoned her shirt, smoothing the front down over her luscious breasts.
"Shifters... we have this thing, a mate, a soulmate. There's one person we're meant to be with, one perfect partner, that we–"
"I know." There was a serene smile on Patricia's face, still and deep, with an odd flavor that Lee couldn't put his finger on.
"It's just... this mate–"
"It's okay," she interrupted him swiftly. "I understand. I... already knew."
Relief flooded through Lee. Of course she knew. She had to know. How could she not have felt the incredible bond that they shared. He smiled, suspecting it was a ridiculously soppy smile, but he couldn't help it. "I'm so glad," he said simply.
"Clara's expecting pancakes," Patricia reminded him. She was so delightfully down-to-earth.
Lee swept up his shirt. "Yes! Pancakes!" He would stick to the original plan. A ring with her pancakes, and he'd have Clara there for the moment; all of the most precious people in his life together at once.
He rehearsed the moment in his head as they walked down the stairs to the kitchen, and imagined the words and Clara's laughter as he mixed up the pancake batter and heated the griddle. He was wrapped up in his busy mind until he brought the first stack of cakes to the table–and found Clara setting it for two.
"Where is Miss Patricia?" he asked, suddenly aware that she wasn't there, that he couldn't sense her nearby.
Clara looked at him with big blue eyes, alarmed at his surprise. "She drove away!"
Lee let the plate of pancakes fall the last few inches to the table and land with a clatter. "When? Where?"
"In her car!" Clara supplied helpfully. "She said she had to go."
Lee ran the distance to the front door in a matter of seconds, but the car was long gone, tracks in the snow showing her hasty escape. He stood there with the door open, cold air swirling over his bare feet. The sound of a car near the tree-shrouded bottom of the driveway gave him a moment of hope, but it moved away down the road.
He'd read her wrong. Finding out he was a shifter had changed her mind about him. Mate or not, she didn't want the complication that he was in her life. This was their goodbye then; a cold, empty driveway and uneaten pancakes. Lee stood there until Clara drew him back inside by the knees, complaining of the cold that he didn't even feel anymore.
PATRICIA FLEW DOWN the driveway much faster than she knew she should, trusting her Subaru to stick to the road and power her through the wet, drifting snow.
"I ought to have waited for the snowplows," she thought to herself, pulling out into the slushy, snowy road with the barest hint of a pause at the bottom of the driveway.
The snow had cleared and the clouds lifted, but given the tears that clouded her vision, Patricia knew she should pull over. She slowed to a safer speed, but there was no clear shoulder here in the hills. She wiped her face with the back of her coat sleeve, biting back a sob.
If she had doubted that Lee was still in love with his dead wife, his words had erased that.
A soulmate, a perfect partner.
She couldn't compete with that.
She turned the defroster higher as the window began fogging in the cold and she realized it wasn't all her own tears obscuring her view. Behind her, headlights through the snow she was kicking up showed a car coming right up on her tail, driving close in the poor conditions.
Distracted from her own thoughts, Patricia scowled at the other car in the mirror, dark in the poor morning light. It wasn't driving well for the winding road, and was crawling up at her trunk without care for the slippery conditions. She tapped the brakes just enough to light up her taillights in warning but not to slow, and was equal parts alarmed and relieved when they backed off just a little and pulled into the oncoming lane–it was a stupid move in a place with no shoulder and no clear line of sight to traffic that might be coming from ahead, but at least she wouldn't have them tailing her all the way into town.
"Idiot," she muttered to herself, slowing to give them the best chance they could around the curve.
She was looking forward, focused on looking ahead for oncoming traffic and keeping her Subaru in its indistinct lane as the dark car passed, throwing snow into her windshield.
Momentarily blinded, Patricia went too far into the soft snow at the edge, and lost whatever control she'd had. Tires spun in the soft snow, and her car tottered at the crest of the shoulder before finally plummeting into the ditch beyond. For a moment Patricia thought she could simply ride down, hoping against hope that she wouldn't hit a big tree at the bottom, but it was too steep, too slippery, and the world went into a crazy spin as the car finally rolled down into oblivion, the airbag exploding into her and slamming her back into the seat.
Chapter Eighteen
LEE TRIED NOT TO MOPE, eating too many pancakes with Clara and feeling the
burn of the jewelry box in his pocket. His daughter, at least, seemed oblivious to the fact that everything had gone perfectly sideways, and chattered gleefully about imaginary friends, and her plans for the weekend, which seemed to involve a ball with a prince, a baseball game, and a big party for her stuffed animals, all hosted in the swimming pool, apparently.
He was carrying the dirty dishes to the sink, not even cheered by Clara's requests to make the bubbles, when the doorbell rang.
He almost dropped the plates, and Clara went scampering for the front door.
"Slow down, kitten!" he cautioned her, putting the plates down on the counter before he followed her. Relief flooded him. Patricia had come back. She had just needed a little space to get used to the idea, and let the whole crazy idea of shifters and soulmates settle in.
Clara got to the door just before him, and flung it open. They both froze, confronted by the entirely unexpected sight of Patricia's preschool assistant Andrea, standing naked on the porch with her arms wrapped ineffectively around herself.
"Patricia needs your help!" she demanded, with no explanation of her nudity or how she'd gotten there–there was no car in the driveway behind her.
Lee only stared for a moment before moving aside so that she could come in. "I... uh..." There was no standard greeting for naked women in snow.
"You are not the only shifter in town," Andrea said dryly. "Though you may be the most unobservant."
"I'm... uh... sorry?" Lee grabbed the closest thing that might fit her, waffling a moment between Clara's little coat and his own quilted flannel shirt. The first might actually be closer to her diminutive size. He decided on the flannel, suspecting she'd prefer more cover.
Andrea took it in stride. "I know that I was always around a powerful distraction," she shrugged, accepting the shirt. "But she is in trouble now."
Shock gave way to a calm readiness. Whatever his mate needed, Lee could feel his bear preparing to supply it; it felt like adrenaline, but more focused. "What happened?"
"She drove off the road," Andrea said, a glint of anger in her golden eyes. "I was flying over and saw the whole thing. A car passed her on a blind corner, and she veered into a ditch about a mile just down the road."
"You left her there?"
Lee didn't think about how accusatory he sounded until Andrea rebutted angrily, "I couldn't get the door open, and I wasn't doing her much good, naked in the snow. I'm a hawk, not a bear."
Moving automatically, Lee was already pulling on his boots and shrugging into a parka with purpose.
"It's the curve past the guardrail right before town," Andrea said, nodding decisively at him.
"Clara, stay here with Miss Andrea," Lee commanded with a growl, reaching for his truck keys.
Clara had born witness to their odd exchange with eyes like saucers, certain something was afoot, but not sure what to do with it. She looked trustingly at Andrea, not in the slightest bothered by the fact that she had arrived naked, and nodded. She darted for one swift hug from her father, her arms wrapping briefly around Lee's leg. When Lee knelt to hug her back, she solemnly said, "Make Miss Patricia be okay."
It was that simple, in Lee's mind. He was going to go get Patricia and make her be okay. Even if she wanted nothing to do with him now that she knew his shifter secret, he had to save her. "You bet, cub."
Then he was out the door, bolting for the truck.
Behind him, Clara fixed Andrea with a curious gaze. "Can I make bubbles for the dishes?" she asked.
Chapter Nineteen
PATRICIA WOKE SLOWLY, aware first that her hands were cold. She moved to tuck them under her blanket, then realized that she wasn't in her own bed, that she was suspended by seatbelt straps upside down in the crushed cab of her car. Something on the dashboard was beeping weakly. Anger gave her false warmth as she remembered the dark car that had foolishly passed her, and she struggled out of the seatbelt before she could suspect she might be injured and possibly shouldn't move before she had determined the extent of her damage. Pain radiated from her left ankle, and the ache in her shoulders made her suspect she would find that she was black and blue, but Patricia's quick assessment was that she didn't have anything worse than a sprained ankle.
She wiggled it experimentally and had to bite back a cry. Maybe a broken ankle.
She righted herself in the wrong-side-up cab, and began to struggle with the car door.
The latch still moved, but the metal was crushed into a form that didn't allow it to open, despite Patricia straining against it with all her strength and weight. Somehow, the glass was still in place, though it and the windshield had shattered in place. She'd have to break out of one of the windows, she decided, winded, but the idea made her ankle throb. She found one of her gloves, which had been in the passenger seat, and switched them between her cold hands, trying to decide which would be easier to get out of. The enclosed space of the car was beginning to make her feel trapped.
She curled up on the upside-down roof of the car and closed her eyes, feeling tears well up. She took a deep breath, trying to damp down her terror and think of something peaceful. Lee's face came to her imagination immediately, and the feeling of his arms around her. She pushed it aside fiercely, reminding herself that the relationship was not going anywhere. He'd had his perfect partner already, and she opened her eyes, prepared to kick out the front windshield with her good foot.
Suddenly, Lee's face wasn't just in her imagination, but at her door, worry in every line of his face. "Get back," he yelled through the glass, and she obediently backed as far as she could into the inverted roof of the passenger seat.
Through the frosted and spider-webbed glass, she watched his figure blur and stretch and bend into the shape of a big, dark brown bear. His clothing ripped away into shreds. A huge paw crashed through the window, easily breaking the weakened glass with a ear-splitting crash. Not finished, the bear growled and fumbled at the door, finally ripping the entire thing off of the mangled car and throwing it away into the slushy snow. Cold air swirled into the car, and she crawled carefully over the broken glass towards the bear, grateful for her sturdy jeans and coat.
He was human by the time she had wiggled her way to the door, and strong arms pulled her out the final bit.
"Are you hurt?" he asked anxiously, holding her closer than was strictly necessary.
"My ankle," Patricia admitted, and she was amused when Lee shivered; all that remained of his clothing was a puddle of ripped cloth at their feet. Even his boots had been rent from the ferocity of his transformation.
"I can carry you back up to the road," Lee said firmly.
"You're naked," Patricia giggled hysterically, looking at the steep snowy slope up to the road. It was astonishing how far she had rolled in the car. "You don't even have boots."
"Not like this," Lee said, and right under her arms, he shifted again, flowing into his bear form.
This close, right in his arms, it was completely different than watching it through an obscured window or simply waking up to it. His entire mass changed as a thick coat of fur seemed to come from nowhere, growing into long fur under her very fingers. She had to let go of him as he rose above her, and gasped in pain as she put weight onto her bad ankle. As large as the bear had seemed that morning when they met in bed, he was much larger looming right over her on hind legs. He must be eight or nine feet tall, Patricia realized in awe. Then he was dropping to all fours next to her, growling conversationally as he came to lay directly in front of her.
When she hesitated, uncertain, he raised his head and whined like a dog, twitching his massive shoulders at her suggestively.
It was still a rather good climb onto Lee's back, but the long, coarse fur gave her plenty to hold onto. Patricia swung her good foot over the ridge of his back and was astride. Lee gave a growl of warning and surged to his feet. Patricia clung tight, and as he began to climb up the slope, had to lean forward further and further, until she was basically lying against his shoulder, arms
reaching as far around the bear's neck as she could. She continued to lie this way once they had leveled out on the road, cheek pressed into his fur. It was surprisingly comforting, riding in this fashion. He smelled like forests and wild things, and oddly just like Lee, and the rough fur felt just right under her fingers. The rhythm of the muscles striding beneath her was reassuring, and the snuffling growling noises he made as he walked were somehow familiar.
For just a moment, she was a princess in the fairy stories, rescued by her very own bear prince.
Then they were at his truck, and he was lying down again so she could dismount, carefully, hopping on her one good foot. She was opening the truck door when he was behind her as a human again, lifting her up onto the creaking bench seat.
"I should take you to the hospital," Lee said, sliding in beside her after a moment.
"You're naked," Patricia reminded him.
"They've probably gotten odder patients at the hospital," Lee said, but he looked embarrassed as well as cold. He cranked up the heat.
"Just take me to your house," Patricia said. "It's a weekend, and they'll only tell me to elevate it and get x-rays Monday when the walk-in clinic is open. It's not an emergency, and I'd rather call the car insurance company from your quiet house than a crowded ER."
LEE GROWLED, BUT DECIDED that Patricia was right. He didn't relish the idea of arriving at the hospital in his current state of undress, and Patricia didn't seem badly hurt. He turned back up the road towards his house rather than continuing into town.
"I'm... sorry I scared you," he said, after a long moment of silence spent squirming on the cold bench, trying to find a way to keep his seatbelt on without it pressing into his chilled flesh.
Patricia shifted on the seat, fumbling with her boots. "You didn't scare me," she said with surprise. "I was glad to see you, and being a bear shifter was particularly useful of you."