Bear's Gold (Erotic Shifter Fairy Tales) (18 page)

“Probably a good choice. I never did
like him much when I came up to visit you last year.” Stevie gave her a
supportive smile, her lips stretching wide.

“Good riddance,” Molly chimed in.

Riley agreed but stayed quiet and
worked.

“Danny said the factory is looking
for a new secretary.” Molly scooped out the bacon that was now crispy and brown
and laid it on a plate then added more to the pan.

Dumping the chopped onions and bell
peppers into the bowl, Riley started on the tomatoes. “I don’t think the
factory is for me. I’ll see what the school board has open. If nothing here then
I’ll broaden my search.”

“Then what?” Her mother’s voice
helped a bit as Lacey stopped her biscuit cutting.

Damn it.
Couldn’t this discussion wait until
tomorrow? Couldn’t she and her mother just last twenty-four hours without a
confrontation? At least her father, Raymond, had given her a fierce embrace,
kissed her on the forehead, and said ’welcome home’ when she walked in twenty
minutes ago. Her mother had stomped off to the kitchen without even a hello.

“I don’t know, Mom. I just got here.
Can I have a little time to breathe, see what my options are?”

“Options? You’re twenty-seven years
old, Riley. When are you going to stop wander-lusting all over God’s creation?
Put down roots somewhere and stay put.” The silver cutter went flying from her
mother’s hands and clattered onto the island counter top.

The other two women stopped what
they were doing and stared from her mother to her.

Riley wasn’t tucking her tail and
slinking into the corner as she always did when her mother berated her. “It’s
my life. I can choose to do with it what I want. You have dad, both Stevie and
Danny have their spouses, besides work I am trying to find—”

“Find what, Riley? You’re always
searching. Ever since you were younger. If I didn’t keep my hand firmly on
you…” Her mother slapped her hands together and then pushed one forward in the
action of something shooting off. “There you’d go in a flash.”

“So, I was an adventurous child.” Riley
looked from her mother to the other women’s faces in the room, seeing pity. She
steeled herself against it. “Okay, maybe even a wandering adult, but I’ll find
my place somewhere.”

“When?” her mother countered.

Den County
. Her heart reminded her. Riley
wanted to agree but that wasn’t an option for her.

“I don’t know.” Riley answered
honestly as she stared down at her unfinished work on the cutting board.

Molly and Stevie went back to their
breakfast jobs. The room was quiet for a while, until her mother’s voice broke
the silence.

“You know, Riley, I thought when you
were seven and you’d gone off while we were camping and got attacked, it would
have kept you grounded.” Her mother shook her head. “It didn’t. Seems as if
once you became well you were even more restless.”

“I remember that day. You scared
us.” Stevie stared across the room at her.

Riley was glad her sister remembered
it, because she sure didn’t. Like always, she recalled camping with her family,
chasing an early morning butterfly through the woods, a twig snapping behind
her and then nothing until she awakened in her own bed. Her family telling her
she’d been feverish for almost a week. “I don’t remember.”

“Still after all these years?”
Stevie frowned.

“Nope.” Riley picked up the knife
and started in on the tomatoes again. “If it wasn’t for the scratches on my
wrist I would think it didn’t happen.”

“Not scratches…a bite,” Stevie
informed her.

Perplexed, Riley turned her right
hand over and stared down at the mark on her wrist. For the first time she noticed
similar impressions, combined with longer marks on both sides of her arm as she
rotated it back and forth. Rarely did she look at it, always hating that it
reminded her that there was a hole in her memory.

“I told your father not to take you
to the reservation. I’m sure that sha-woman put some kind of voodoo hex on
you.”

Riley set the fork down. This was
all news to her.

“Mom, Native Americans don’t
practice voodoo. Just herbal healing and blessing of various spirit gods.”
Stevie sighed as if she’d had this discussion with their mother more than once.

“Doesn’t matter what they do, Riley
should still remember. Maybe it would make her see things differently.” Her
mother placed the rest of the biscuits on the pan and set it on a rack in the
oven.

“What sha-woman? When was I taken to
the reservation?” Riley asked, moving her gaze from her mother to her sister,
waiting for whoever wanted to fill her in.

Stevie began. “We took you to the
hospital. You were there for days. They couldn’t get your fever to break and
said you suffered from severe shock. After a while, Dad became frustrated and
carried you out of the hospital against medical advice. But dad told them
frankly to go to hell. That if they couldn’t cure you, he’d find someone that
could. Next thing I know we were driving into the reservation.”

“Only thing that quack did was put a
thick poultice and wrap on your wrist and gave your father some wooden coin. She
told him to take you home, put the coin in your hand, and allow your body time
to heal.” Her mother stared out the kitchen window toward the backyard with her
arms wrapped around her waist.

Stevie crossed the room and placed
her arm around their mother’s shoulder. “But, she woke up, Mom. That is what’s
important.”

“But different.” Lacey glanced up at
her oldest daughter and then over at Riley. For the first time Riley noticed
the sadness in her mother’s eyes.

All the years of her life Riley had
thought it was only disappointment in her that her mother felt, now she saw it
was something more, much more. Riley wasn’t sure what her mother meant by
different. She walked over to where her mother and sister still stood. “How,
Mom? How could some attack and illness change me?”

Riley held her arms out, showing her
mother and sister that she was still the same person she’d always been.
However, a part of her heart seemed to align with her family’s words.

“You were always adventurous, but
you seemed restless after you awakened. Always staring off in the distance as
if your soul was somewhere else.” Her mother reached up and cupped her cheek,
stroking it briefly with her thumb.

The first compassionate touch from
her mother in years almost caused Riley to break down. In that moment she was
beginning to understand why it seemed that her mother was trying to restrain
her life. Lacey Gold was only trying to reclaim the daughter she felt she had lost.

Not knowing what else to say, no way
to refute the words, Riley followed the women back to the center of the kitchen
to complete the breakfast.

~YH~

“Here’s my little girl.” Raymond
Gold, a tall thin man with cinnamon brown skin tone stepped out onto the front
porch, two drinks in hand and gave her a warm smile.

Riley could not help but return his
grin even though she didn’t feel much like smiling. She and her father had
always had a better relationship than she and her mom. Her dad always seemed to
“get her” even more than her brother.

“Hi, Dad.” She scooted over so he
could sit down on the antique white swing beside her.

“I brought you a glass of lemonade.”
He passed one to her and sipped his own.

They sat there for a moment, just
staring out at the street as cars drove through the neighborhood in the
afternoon sun. Her siblings and their families had already gone home shortly
after the breakfast meal. Now there was just her and her parents. Her mother
had gone to lie down for a nap and she’d left her father watching the Game Show
Channel.

Lifting the glass to her mouth, she
took a slow drink and enjoyed the familiar taste of her mouth’s lemonade,
however she couldn’t help but think about how much better it could possibly
taste with honey instead of the traditional simple syrup her mom used. Maybe
later she would look up on the internet and see which of her local chain stores
carried honey from Den County farms. Her mouth salivated with the thought.

“So, what’s on your mind?”

Lowering the glass, she traced the
condensation with her free hand. “Nothing much.”

“Ah, come on, baby-girl, who do you
think you're fooling?” He bumped her shoulder with his and caused the seat to
squeak and rock.

She glanced at him then to the
street again. “Not you, I guess.”

“Nope.” He drank liberally and made
a loud sound of satisfaction. “You know I married your momma because of her
lemonade making skills.”

A small laugh came out and she
didn’t attempt to restrain it.

“Now, there’s a sound I like to
hear.”

The smile she gave him the second
time was more genuine. They were silent again as both of them used their feet
to propel the swing into action. In the quiet, the thoughts she’d tried to sort
out all morning, things she’d heard from her mother and sister, rose back to
the surface. The person who sat beside her now held most of those answers,
Riley had to determine if she wanted to ask the questions. Maybe her father
would reveal more things about herself that she didn’t know. Didn’t want to
know.

Hell, she’d just discovered that her
family believed something was off from her after the attack in the woods. Did
she really need another bombshell in her lap today? Yes, a little voice inside
of her whispered.

She leaned back in the seat and took
a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Your Mom tells me you all had an
interesting conversation this morning.”

Thank God for dads. Riley was so
relieved she wasn’t the one that had to bring the conversation up, because she
still wasn’t sure where to start.

“Yes. I learned a lot of things I
didn’t know and frankly hadn’t bothered to ask.” It shamed her to admit it, but
she had to be honest.

“Why do you think that is?”

She shrugged, a silly childish
response, but she felt like a little girl sitting with her father like they did
when she was younger. “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe a part of me was too afraid to
face the truth.”

He grabbed her free hand from her
thigh. “Hey, my daughter isn’t a coward.”

Looking into his eyes, his light
brown gaze held hers. “Are you sure, Dad? I seem to have spent my life running
from things. What is that if not a coward?”

“Maybe you weren’t running away, you
were running
to
something.”

The first to break the eye contact,
feeling unsure of his confident words, she drank more of the lemonade. “What?”

“You’ll have to be the one to
discover that part.”

She knew he was right, but she
didn’t even know how to find those answers. Especially when she couldn’t see
past the ache in her heart from leaving Theo and the boys.
Not my life.

“Dad, will you tell me about what
happened the last time we went camping?” Maybe understanding when and how she
had ‘changed’ would go a long way to helping her establish what she was in
search of.

Her father took hold of her hand,
rubbing his thumb along her knuckles. He was quiet for so long, she figured
like her mother it was something he didn’t want to discuss.

Then he began, “Back then your
mother and I would go into the mountains camping every spring when you kids
were on break from school. Nothing was particularly different that last year.
Except you had awakened before all of us in the camping trailer and had decided
to go adventuring. That’s what you and Danny would call it when you’d play
around the backyard or neighborhood park. However, you were alone this time.
When your mother awakened to start preparing breakfast you weren’t there. She
awakened me in a panic.”

He squeezed her hand; Riley could
feel the slight tremble in her father’s touch.

“We woke your brother and sister and
went in search of you. When I found you, you were lying against the side of a
tree, you were pale, cold, and your hand was bleeding. In the distance I saw
two bears, one large and one smaller. I could only assume that maybe you had
come upon them and one had scratched you.”

He took a breath and drank more than
half of his remaining drink. Her father had become a little pale himself
beneath his brown tone. She wondered if he would have preferred to have a stiff
drink over the tangy-sweet beverage.

“What happened at the hospital?” she
prompted.

“The doctors gave you shots, treated
you for shock, and watched you for two days. They said they didn’t see any
infection or any reason why you were not waking up. I couldn’t take it.
Haunting those shockingly white halls and not having any answers about my baby
girl.”

She imagined that it had to be an
unbearable situation for any parent.

With a heavy sigh, her father
continued, “As you know my great-grandfather was a Karok Indian. Even though I
was raised with modern medicine, my family also held faith in the healing power
of herbs wielded by a shaman. So, when the doctors at the hospital ran out of
options I took you and left. It wasn’t easy but I got you out of there. I took
you to the reservation. Your mother was pissed to say the least, but I wouldn’t
listen to her reasoning. I was willing to try anything.”