BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (107 page)

“I lost it,” he said. He kept moving, and a moment later he went back to Bruce.

“Your lady got in the stream and followed it down. That’s my only guess. There’s no blood, no sign of distress like something got to her. And there’s not scent. Nothing at all. I can’t see what else she could have done. It’s almost like she didn’t want to be found.”

Bruce looked down into the trees. Jenna was in there somewhere, getting further and further away from him. He didn’t understand why. All he knew was that half of him was gone now, and he was struggling to find his balance with a lopsided body.

Dwayne appeared a moment later, out of the dark like an apparition.

“Don’t bother,” he said grimly. “You’re not going to find her if you keep looking.”

“Why not?” Bruce asked, alarmed. He walked to Dwayne and Cleveland stepped in front of the psychic, giving Bruce a hard stare. Dwayne wasn’t going to survive being strangled the way that a shifter could.

“She’s gone,” Dwayne said like he hadn’t noticed Bruce’s threatening display.

“What do you mean she’s gone?”

“She left Williamsburg,” Dwayne said. “For good.”

Chapter 1

Life without Jenna seemed pointless. In the weeks after she’d left, Bruce had stayed in the cave where he’d hidden her from Williamsburg. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know how to go back down there and face the towns’ folk without her, how he was going to explain why they weren’t together anymore, or where she was. That would be horrible in itself, but it wasn’t about that. It was more about the fact that he couldn’t bear living in his cabin without her. It had been her home for such a short time, but it just felt like it would be empty.

He also wouldn’t be able to walk past her place, the cabin where she’d been living the five years he’d known her, and know that someone else was living there now. He wouldn’t be able to pass the salon or the café, or any of the people that knew her so well.

Living a life without Jenna was empty. But he wasn’t going to go out there and find her, ask her to come back. Bruce was well aware that life with him was hard. Life with a shifter was near impossible, even if you knew what you were letting yourself in for. Jenna hadn’t known what she was signing up for. Bruce regretted losing her, but what he regretted more was not telling her what her life was going to be like.

He regretted not being able to protect her from the truth. From himself.

He didn’t want her to come back to Williamsburg and carry on with her life there, either. He could have stayed up in that cave and never seen her again. He could have let her have the life she’d always had and forced himself to stay out of it – which he should have done in the first place. That idea, although it seemed selfless, wasn’t a good one. Because even if she did go back to her life as a normal woman in a normal town full of normal people, she would miss him.

No, Bruce didn’t want her to come back to anything of him that would hurt her. Not even her memories.

When night fell he left the cave and stretched himself out, almost like the small space had cramped him, even though the ceiling was high enough and there was no reason to feel so stiff. He took a deep breath and smelled the mountain air. It was ice cold and burn his lungs on the way in.

The first snow had fallen the week before. It was just a light dusting, a sprinkle of white that he melted again so quickly it almost didn’t count. But winter had come. And so did the knowledge that he was going to have to pull back soon.

He was a bear shifter, not a bear. That meant that he didn’t hibernate, but he retreated. He came out less often, he was less active, he hunted less. He could feel the listlessness settle in already.

Bruce walked into the trees, navigating his way through the tangled branches that surrounded his cave like a fence. He knew where to step so that it wouldn’t make it sound, skipping over the narrow stream and walked toward the side of the mountain where the trees straightened out and he felt like he could breathe again.

Everything about his life was tainted by Jenna’s presence. She was in the trees in the gaps where the sunlight fell through the leaves, in the dapples on the ground. She was in the oranges and yellows of the few trees that changed color. She was in the evergreen of the trees that didn’t.

The mulch under Bruce’s feet crunched as he walked, a sound that was almost inaudible to a human but it thundered in his ears. The ground was freezing over, the mulch was lined with frost.

An icy wind cut across the plateau where there were no trees. Bruce gasped for his breath when a cold rush of air blasted past him. Tara stepped out of the trees almost the same time he did, and in the almost-dark her eyes were white. The past couple of weeks she’d been tame. There hadn’t been many fights, and Bruce knew it was because Jenna had left. The threat was gone.

But something was up. Tara had something on her mind, something that wouldn’t wait long before it reared its ugly head. She nodded at Bruce, a normal greeting, but somehow it felt more like a warning.

One by one the other shifters appeared from the trees. Cleveland first, so silently that Bruce didn’t hear him until he saw the bird dropping into human shape like a drop of water sliding from one surface to the other. Stephen and Rosa came next and they both looked more animalistic than they used to. Being isolated from humans seemed safer, but it let them forget what it was like.

Lori followed, stomping around like the bear shifter she was on the inside, and finally Dwayne arrived without ceremony.

When they were all gathered in a circle the earth came alive under Bruce’s feet. The circle of power was dormant when they weren’t there, and unless the moon was close to full – which it wasn’t – the power didn’t wake up until they shook it to life.

“It’s going to be a hard winter,” Tara said, stating a fact they all knew. Already there were fewer animals to be had as if they creatures had decided it wasn’t worth the struggle for food this year. The shifters all nodded.

“There hasn’t been any news of Assassins for a while now,” she said, moving on. She looked at Dwayne as she said it, and the psychic nodded. He checked for activity daily, and since Jenna had left, the Assassins had disappeared too. Until then they’d camped out in Rhodestown, waiting for something, making the shifters nervous.

Bruce didn’t know if it was a coincidence. He hoped it was. He didn’t want any blame on Jenna for what had almost happened, even if she wasn’t there anymore.

“I’m worried about that human of yours,” Tara spoke again. Bruce had missed some of the conversation, but at that sentence, he snapped his attention back to the topic of discussion.

“Why?” Bruce asked. She was gone, after all. Bringing her up was only cruel.

“She can sell us out. She knows too much.”

There was a ripple of recognition among the shifters, an agreement. It made Bruce feel uncomfortable.

“She would never do that,” he said. “She’s not going to tell anyone about us.”

“How can you be so sure?” Tara asked.

Because she loves me, Bruce thought. “Because she knows we’ll kill her if she does. She’s not stupid.”

Tara narrowed his eyes at Bruce as if she wanted to challenge the pronoun ‘we’ he’d used in his sentence. She knew he wasn’t included if it meant they were going to kill Jenna. But the blow didn’t come. Instead, Lori hit him from left field with something that hurt a lot more.

“She didn’t love you enough to stay. Why would she love you enough to protect you?”

It was like he’d spoken his thoughts about her love for him out loud. He glared at Lori. He could take her in a fight, he was sure of it. They hadn’t fought in awhile, but he’d been hunting a lot and spent time working out because there was nothing else to do now that he didn’t have friends and a job. The last time he and Lori were at each other had been weeks before, when they’d wanted to kill Jenna.

“She would want to protect herself, I’m sure,” Bruce said with a flat voice and it was as emotionless as he’d intended. “She’ll die if she tells, and she knows it.”

He sounded convincing enough, he thought. Lori glared back at him, but she didn’t say more. Bruce hadn’t risen to the bait.

“I don’t think we should trust her. She still knows. Even if she doesn’t mean to sell us out, she knows.”

“The woman was married to Bruce for a week before she found out he wasn’t who he said he was,” Rosa spoke up, and Bruce snapped his neck around to look at her. She hardly ever said anything. “If anything, she’s going to actively forget. That should keep them out of her head.”

The words were supposed to be a good thing. They were supposed to defend Jenna. They were supposed to help Bruce. Instead, it just made it so much worse. The hollow feeling in his chest suddenly spoke up, throbbing around the edges, echoing with despair. Why did she have to go and say that?

Bruce rubbed his chest with his hand, palm on his sternum, trying to force the hole shut. But despair burned between his shoulder blades and he took deep breaths, trying to fill his lungs with air that didn’t seem to do anything.

Dammit. He’d been coping well enough until Rosa had said that. He’d even managed to force himself not to feel anything when Lori had spoken up. Anger, yes, but nothing that was going to floor him.

But what Rosa said… it had the capacity to make him have to start all over again. What if Jenna’s only goal was to forget Bruce now that it was all over? Somehow that hurt so much more than losing her.

He’d always thought that at least she still had something of him, something that she could never lose. She knew him. They’d been together. She loved him. Bruce’s love for her was something he could almost hold in his hand, solid and heavy. Eternal.

If it wasn’t the same for her?

“Bruce,” Tara said and he realized they were all looking at him. He’d missed another question or a conversation.

“Where is she?” Tara asked again.

Bruce hesitated for a moment. Was he going to admit that he’d lost her completely, that he didn’t even know where she was? Tara’s eyes were on his, willing the information out. He could feel her long fingers prying into his mind, trying to tug at his thoughts. The other eyes burned into his skin. Finally, he shook his head and gave in.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know where she went. The bond is broken. I won’t be able to find her.”

The words were sour on his tongue and left an ugly aftertaste. He didn’t like admitting defeat, but these were the facts. The bond was gone.

“If the bond is broken she might not be able to lead them back to us,” Tara said. It was supposed to be a statement, but her tone of voice lifted at the end, making it another question aimed at Dwayne. They were talking about a failed marriage, a broken heart, like it was the order of business for the day.

Dwayne glanced at Bruce and there was a strange expression on his face. It was gone so quickly Bruce wasn’t sure if it had been there to begin with. When Dwayne looked at Tara and opened his mouth to answer, his face was an expressionless mask and his words were chosen carefully.

“If there is no bond, they will struggle to trace her knowledge back to us. They will find it, there’s no doubt. But they won’t know where it leads.”

Tara nodded. That was a good thing, Bruce knew. The only good thing.

Tara spoke of other things, covering a few topics like it was a business meeting. It was only possible for everyone to be this calm and collected when the moon was almost non-existent. Two more nights and it would be new moon. Two more nights and it was going to be the darkest time of the month for shifters. Literally and figuratively.

Shifters were always drawn out by the moon. It was irritating because it was a kind of control, and it only let up during New Moon. But when the moon did disappear, they felt untethered. There was nothing worse for Bruce than fighting control his whole life, so that he felt unbalanced when there was nothing to fight.

The shifters started dispersing one by one once the meeting was dismissed. Tara was the first to stalk into the trees, and her shift started before she disappeared between the trunks.

Bruce was surprised she’d held out for so long. Her eyes had been beastly from the start. It was like the pack was subdued. The combination of the onslaught of winter and the lack of moonlight made everyone feel drained.

Dwayne stayed behind. He always did. As a human, he didn’t need to hunt. Bruce didn’t know where he disappeared to when the others went out to find fresh meat, but the man was a closed book.

“The winter won’t be as hard as Tara thinks,” he spoke. Maybe he knew that Bruce didn’t feel like leaving.

“There aren’t a lot of animals,” Bruce said.

“But there is a lot of promise in the air. We will survive it.”

They always survived it, Bruce thought. Dwayne nodded as if he’d heard the thought.

“Will you survive it?” he asked Bruce.

“Why are you asking me? You’re supposed to be the psychic,” Bruce said, and his voice was more hostile than he’d intended. It creeped him out when Dwayne was inside his head, reading his thoughts.

“I can see reality, but I can’t see your will,” Dwayne said. “If you don’t want to survive, you’ll die. All I’ll see is the death.”

Bruce shook his head. He doubted that Dwayne could see only that, but he didn’t say it. If Dwayne really was inside his head, he would hear that thought too, and talking would be pointless.

“Of course, I’ll survive,” Bruce said. “I’m the biggest creature out there.”

“Physically,” Dwayne agreed. “But you’ve gotten a lot smaller than you used to be on the inside.”

“What the hell do you know about my inside?” Bruce asked and his voice was raised. He was angry. Dwayne was creepy, and Bruce was indebted to him for helping him out in the past, but he’d never had conversations this long with the man, and now he knew why.

“I know it’s dying,” Dwayne said softly and those four words hit Bruce so hard he almost doubled over. The pain in his chest flared up and he took to rubbing his sternum with his palm again. He took a step to the side, and then another, and found the movement didn’t help. Stopped again.

He took deep breaths, counting on the inhale and again on the exhale because if he didn’t he was going to breathe faster and faster until he was going to hyperventilate, and he couldn’t afford to lose it.

“You trust her,” Dwayne said.

“I married her.”