Bearly Hanging On (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 6) (11 page)

In an attempt to figure out what was going on, Jamie asked him where he lived, thinking that would give her a clue, but the directions were so jumbled and odd that it took a few days of mulling it over before she was able to make enough sense of them to follow. But, when she finally did, what she saw was a mixture of completely unsurprising, and still unsettling.

How could something like this go completely unnoticed for so long?

A bunch of houses, most of them hand-built, and all of them made with a mixture of love and desperation.

"Jamesburg's forgotten," she said sadly. "So forgotten, that only a handful of people in town know they exist. Ryan's their saint, I guess, because without him, who knows how long ago they would have died."

Still, she couldn't fathom that the guy she was almost nightly fantasizing about was also a cow thief, and also knocked over a couple of grocery stores in the middle of the night. No one was hurt - as rough and tumble as he might act, he wasn't going to hurt anyone, but damn had he stolen a lot of cans of creamed corn.

Okay - alleged to have done all those things. Someone knocked over the town’s biggest grocery stores, stealing canned goods and apparently sacks of dog food and birdseed by the ton, and there was nothing to go on. Not a shred of evidence, not a hint of hide nor fur.

But Jamie thought it might be worth it to finally go and visit this bear who kept haunting her dreams.

She knew she had to do something before he went too far. But as she circled the deep forest compound, it became very obvious to Jamie that he wasn't making any of it up. There were a lot of forgotten people out here, and most of them were trying their best to cut wood or tan hides, or anything they could.

Jamie watched one very old man - she could tell by his crooked gait and slumped back - finish up a row of some sort of planting. He was chewing a stick that looked a bit like bamboo, but from her height she couldn't be sure. Even so, from all the way up there, and from all her speed, she knew Ryan was right. His methods might be wrong, but... then again, what else was he supposed to do?

Is that him?
Jamie circled slowly around someone hacking away at a pile of logs about half the size of himself. Pick one up, lay it on a stump, whack it with a big wedge, rinse and repeat.
He's even good looking when he chops wood.

It was him all right - Ryan was shirtless, covered in a thin sheen of sweat from his work. The hair on his forearms and his chest was thick, but not out of control. The slopes of his shoulders were defined by big trapezius muscles that flexed every time he raised the maul and exploded with each impact. She stopped the circling and bobbed up and down, about fifty feet off the ground, behind him.

"I know you're back there," he called out. "You make a shadow that's fairly unique."

Jamie felt herself blush - and she was not, in any way, a blusher. She settled to the ground, then tucked her wings back behind herself, and crossed her arms behind her back. Slowly, almost cautiously, like either a tentative lover, or someone who wasn't entirely sure how the person they'd just drugged was going to react.

Six of one, half a dozen raged-out bears of another, Jamie thought, still walking slowly toward Ryan.

"What are you doing?" he asked. "It isn't like I'm going to, I dunno, drop out of the sky and bite you on the neck."

There was a laugh after he spoke, though Jamie couldn't decide whether it was bitter or genuine. "Sorry about that," she said. "I just... I didn't want you to end up doing something you were going to regret."

His arms froze at the apex of the next swing. Muscles were all taut and primed to explode, but he just stood there, flexed, as flawless with his back turned as one of the eight hundred imitation David statues Jamie'd seen when she was in Florence, except with a pair of jeans that were hanging loosely on his hips. Well, and that he was tanned and not made out of plaster casting.

She came to a stop just outside the range of the maul's head, should he swing it. "You seem okay," she began. "Doesn't seem like—"

"Regret?" he swung, the tool thunking heavily into the wood, splitting it down the center in one strike. "What would you know about regret?"

All right, there's the venom.

"Ryan," she started, "I didn't know how bad it was. I’ve been after Erik to do something for a while, both Izzy and I have, but we had no idea it was this bad. How could we?”

"Care? Find out? It isn't like we're exactly hidden. Thirty little houses and two big ones, not even ten miles from your buddy's farm, or ranch, or whatever it is, and I'm supposed to believe the entire town has no idea we exist?"

Jamie shrugged, her wings unfurling in nervousness. She uncrossed her arms, and let them hang limp at her sides. "I don't know," she said. "That's all I can say is that I don't know how no one knew. There's a lot about these woods that no one knows. Hell," she took a breath, trying to come up with the right words. "I mean, it took six months before anyone knew Jenga had strung cable from the middle of town out to his place, and he's only five miles from town. This place may as well be the middle of the ocean."

There was sadness in her voice. Genuine upset. "Yeah," Ryan said, again gruff and cold and she couldn't blame him. "Well, let's not talk about what I will or won't regret, then, yeah? This is year six since my aunt and uncle came out here, followed by the entire contents of their rolodexes," he paused. "That was a joke. They're old, so they have rolodexes instead of phones."

Jamie nodded, but couldn't bring herself to laugh.

"Anyway, they and all their friends came out here, and then more came. Forgotten, old, broken people, Jamie. Look around you." He finally turned. There was fire in his eyes, but it wasn't just raw anger. It was something much deeper, more pained. She thought she understood why.

"What do you see?"

"Bunch of shacks," she said. "Pile of wood. You."

"What do you see aside from that?" Ryan dropped his maul in the thick, springy humus around his feet. "I'm going for something more philosophical, just to get to the point. I don't have much time for diddling around."

"What do you want me to say?" Jamie was starting to feel trapped, and when she felt trapped, she got defensive, prickly, and callused. "That I feel for you? That I feel for these people? I do, God damn it, I do. I'm not heartless, I just don't know what to do, Ryan!"

"That went to a place I wasn't expecting quite so quickly," he admitted. "They're not helpless. They're not pitiful and all that. They're old, some of them past a hundred. Hell, there's a tortoise up the way there," he pointed to a very small shack with an open roof. "He likes the sun, anyway, he's over two hundred. He saw the Civil War, and every damn thing else since. And you know what? About four this afternoon, he'll saunter down and have tea with my aunt and uncle. He grows it himself. Turtles are, you know, good at slow things."

Jamie sighed, a little more heavily than she might have meant. "You're not alone," she said. "There are people on your side. Me and Izzy for two, and I'm sure there's lots more, even Erik wants to help, we're just lost, and you stealing fucking cows and knocking over grocery stores isn't going to help anything."

"They need food, Jamie," he said.

Ryan’s gaze was so hot on her skin that she felt every breath, every thump of her heart. She was flustered, she was irritated at herself, but damn if she couldn't taste his lips without him even kissing her. She was burning hot, and wanting to feel him against her skin, to see if he wanted her as much as she did him.

And when he finally grabbed her shoulder, she knew. Those fingers, warm, strong, gripping her like velvet iron. She knew he felt the same thing, no matter how hard he was going to fight it.

He left his hand there for just a second before pulling it away, but even when it was gone, she felt the ghostly vibration of his heat on her skin. Ryan shook his head, slowly. "They need food more than I need..."

"Me?" she asked. "I can see it in your eyes. I felt it just now."

He turned away. "I can't," he whispered. "Not until I know they're safe. Not until—"

"You're a coward," Jamie said, coldly. "A beautiful, big-hearted, incredibly sweet, giant coward. You know what you're feeling. I know what I'm feeling, and I'm a big old wimp too, because I just let you turn away."

"You know what I am," Ryan said shortly. "You know who I am."

"I do?" she asked, stepping forward and grabbing Ryan. "The only thing I know about you is that you're willing to give up your whole life to help people, no matter what it takes. That's literally all I know about you, but for some reason, you got under my skin."

He chuffed a laugh, dismissively. "So you don't know me, but you're willing to make wild generalizations about my personality?"

There it was, Jamie saw, the grin from earlier. That cocky, slightly smug, absolutely disarming grin. She couldn't stand it, but every time he did that, it made her realize her own weakness. She recognized it, but had no idea where it came from, or why it was for him that she had these feelings.

The two of them stared at each other for a second, Jamie coming to grips with herself, and Ryan apparently wrestling with the same thing, judging from the way he kept moving his hand like he wanted to touch hers, but then backing away. Finally, he did, he laid his hand on top of hers, and let a grin crack his face. The corners of his eyes turned down as he squinted, slightly.

There it is, Jamie thought. His wall is cracking.

And for just a second, it did. The look on his face was pure. She could feel the passion radiating from his hand on top of hers, and then just like before, he clenched his eyes, smile lines wrinkling them at the corners. He shook his head and looked away before he opened them again.

"I need you to meet someone," he said.

"I shouldn't," Jamie started, but trailed off for a moment. "I shouldn't interfere with your life."

He turned back, one eyebrow cocked. "Who’s the coward now?" he challenged. "You're willing to talk about wanting to help these people, but you won't even meet them?"

The words stung. They bit deep, but underneath it all, Jamie knew he was right. She'd watched both her parents grow old and die, and it broke her heart. For a long, long time, she couldn't face reality. Her two years away from Jamesburg, to take care of them, were the hardest of her life, and when she returned, she was different. Everyone noticed, everyone asked, but she'd never let anyone in. She couldn't stand the fact that she'd gotten... scared.

Scared? Is that all it was? Was it just fear? Or was it seeing a little bit of that weakness they showed at the end... in myself?

"Come on," Ryan said, grabbing her hand.

It felt so good to hold his hand, although he was just leading her. This wasn't the sort of hand holding that happened at Sandra Bullock movies, or in the back of a car on a deserted road overlooking a river. But she wanted it to be so badly, and still, she didn't understand her own desire.

"No," she said, digging in her heels. "I can't. I just can't, I—"

His eyes were level when he caught her gaze. "You're scared," he said. "I shouldn't have called you a coward. That was wrong. I can see the fear in your eyes though. What is it? What's making you act like you just saw a," he trailed off, realizing that he'd stumbled upon the truth.

Jamie's mouth moved before she knew what she was saying. "My parents," she breathed. "They... I took care of them. They were so frail and helpless. They—"

"Frail, yeah," Ryan cut in, sensing that she didn't know what else to say. "People are frail. But helpless?" he shook his head. This was obviously close to home for him, too. "They're not helpless. Up until the very end, the very last, they aren't helpless. They've got spirit, they've got heart. Even if they can't feed themselves, Jamie, they're not helpless. They can give us strength."

She was just watching him. She hadn't even noticed that Ryan had taken both of her hands in his. But he was staying quiet, like he could sense that she had something to say, and he was patiently waiting for her to frame the feelings into words.

"I can't promise I won't cry," Jamie finally said. "And when we cry, it's a little weird. Blood tears, the whole thing."

“Trust me?” he gave her another one of those smiles. Those damn smiles with the dimple and the twinkling eyes and the whole thing. She wanted to hit him right in the mouth, or kiss him, but a lot of times for Jamie the impulse felt just about the exact same.

She took a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "Do your worst."

––––––––

T
he walk to the home of the couple - a pair of koalas who Ryan said had been together for about a half a century to that point, and, in the words of the big bear "will both die within a week of each other. They say it's because no one will hassle them to stay alive, but really it's because they can't imagine living without the other."

As soon as they rounded the well-worn dirt path to the small house, Jamie wrinkled her nose. "Next time I'm having sinus problems I'm coming here. What are their names?"

"Cora and Marmite," he said. "Or, well, Tom, but he goes by Marmite because... well, you'll find out."

Jamie shook her head, but couldn't help smiling as a very loud order to "fold the towels right or don't do it at all" wafted through the air and met her ears. That was accompanied by a very decided chugging sound from what she assumed was a washer or a dryer, judging by the noise.

"Cora?" Ryan called as he knocked on the screen door. The back door was wide open, and the closer they got to the house, the easier Jamie breathed. "Marmite? Cora? You two hear me?"

"Oh of course, you damn fool," came the voice of a very crotchety koala who sat with his feet propped up on the edge of a metal bucket.

"She's right about the towels," Jamie said out the corner of her mouth. "Gotta go lengthwise first."

Ryan snickered without an ounce of sarcasm. That was enough to lighten Jamie's spirits a little. The hand he had on her back, just above where the neck of her tunic dipped low, also had her smiling enough to be obvious.