Can't Bear To Run (Kendal Creek Bears, #1) (14 page)

At long last, after running my hands along the smooth wood of the darkened hallway, I found the doorknob and tried it. When I found it locked, I knew where to go, but not why I was going there. I nestled down in the slightly-smelly dirty laundry and braced the door shut with an outstretched foot. The scent of moisture and mildew tickled my nose, forcing me to stifle a sneeze.
Great. Dust, mildew and scented laundry detergent. It had to be the two things in the world that make me sneeze.

As more shouting outside came and went, I closed my eyes, not to sleep but to concentrate my thoughts. And, unsurprisingly, the only thoughts that came to me were of those golden eyes, that smile, those dimples and that laugh.

Good God
, I thought.
I’m in one of the dumbest predicaments of my life, and the only thing I can seem to think of is a guy. My, my, oh my how times have changed
. I thought about what Jack had told me – most trustworthy bear in the woods. Of course I still had to come to terms with the fact that I was in love with a giant hunk of man who happened to turn into a bear, and that I was apparently caught up in some kind of bizarre power play. “Just my luck, huh?” I asked the empty closet as I clicked off the safety on my pistol.

“I ain’t seen her! I told you once, I’ve told you ten times. I seen her on the road, I asked who she was, and she went on her way. I don’t got any need to keep my rival’s human girlfriend locked up in here, Wyatt. If you can tell me what the hell I’d want that for, I’ll give you a thousand dollars right now.”

“I can smell her,” he stated flatly.

“No, what you smell is her scent on me. I done tol’ you I talked to her on the road.”

I pressed my ear to the door while carefully opening the package of dry detergent I felt with my toe. If this stuff can hide the smell of tobacco juice on clothes, I was willing to bet it could hide the scent of a girl from a bear.

“I don’t need your money, old man. I need revenge. I’m going to take that asshole down for what he did to my brother, and you’re going to help me.”

“Hog spit, Wyatt!” Jack spat back. “He didn’t do nothin’ to your brother, your brother got himself tied up in all kinds of shit and ended up payin’ for it. Why can’t you just leave us the hell alone?”

“Because you are a part of this council, aren’t you? You’re part of my territory?”

I didn’t understand much of anything they were talking about. I mean, I understood the words, I’m not an idiot. But the idea that there was some kind of weird, shape-shifter illuminati running a show that I didn’t even know existed was a little much.

The shouting outside died away and a few moments later, three knocks at my door. I used my foot to turn the knob and pushed it open with a toe. “Jack?”

“C’mon,” he said, reaching down to grab my arm and help me to my feet. “Things are worse than I thought they was, I didn’t ‘spect him to try and start a war, but here we are. We gotta go find your boyfriend.”

“Dax?” I asked with a flush. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh, like hell he ain’t,” Jack said with a smile, and then his eyes began to twinkle with mischief. “I just had a thought.”

I laughed. “Why does that scare me?”

Jack shook his head. “Well, you know how us old folks are. Sometimes we come up with ideas that seem really great at the time, and then we end up wondering where the hell our watch went.” He paused for a moment. “If we don’t end up finding him before Wyatt and his crew gets to town, things are gonna blow up. I don’t know what’ll come of it, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen anyway, but I get the feeling we ain’t looking at a long vacation in the Bahamas either way. What I’m gettin’ at is that we ain’t gonna get to Dax faster than he can get to us. We’d have to use roads, but a bear can just go straight through the woods.”

I cocked my head to the side. “How are you gonna get him here? Do you even have phones?”

“This ain’t the dark ages, sweets,” Jack said. Something was bothering him though. He fished an ancient flip-phone out of his back pocket. “Only thing is that, well, I ain’t sure how to use this.”

“Well if you’d tell me what you’re trying to—oh wow you’re going to keep this kidnapping charade up, aren’t you?”

“You’d be a hell of a detective. Can’t you take a softy of yourself?”

“Softy?”

“You know, like them girls you see on the beach makin’ those funny faces with their lips.”

“Oh!” I laughed. “A
selfie
?”

“Sure, whatever you want,” he said as he handed me the phone. I flipped on a light and craned my neck and my wrist to snap a picture of myself.

“Do I need to look more scared?”

The old bear shook his head. “You been in our laundry closet, I doubt there’s anything you could do to look scareder than you do. But, could you send that to ‘im? And put some words to it.”

“Something menacing?”

“We want ‘im here quick,” he said.

“This might be the strangest thing anyone ever said to someone that kidnapped them, but I kinda like you, old man.”

Jack cracked a half-smile. “Well, we’ll see how long that lasts. You gotta stay back here until Dax shows. God only knows if Wyatt’s comin’ back.”

Finally, I let myself sneeze as he hit the button to send the message.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we will.”

––––––––

W
ith his fists balled up so tight he could feel his nails biting into his palms, Dax stepped out onto the deck behind his house that overlooked the biggest lake in town. On the other side of the lake, just clear of a huge green field, was the courthouse.

It had been almost half a day since he’d heard from Raine. Normally, that wouldn’t bother him, but he knew the dangers out here in bear country. He looked across the lake in the midday sun, watching a pair of geese fight each other. Or, maybe they were on a date. With geese, he laughed as he thought, it’s hard to tell.

“What the hell am I doing?” he laughed again, taking a long slurp from his lukewarm mug of coffee. “How am I this mixed up in something I don’t even understand? How have I managed to fall for this girl in the middle of the biggest mess the Creek has seen in twenty years?”

His phone rang, as though to save him from talking to himself too much. “Yep?” he answered without bothering to look at the number on the front. Dax, for all his thirty-three years, had been used to not having fancy things – expensive smart phones, hell, even caller ID. He kinda liked it that way. Also, he refused to use GPS when he went somewhere – he thought it made people’s brains mushy to rely too much on robots to do things they could do themselves .That’s what he called them, too – anything he didn’t really understand was a robot, whether it was the screen on his phone, or the “robot” at CVS where he could fill a prescription without talking to anyone, they were all robots.

“Dax?” it was Fletcher, and she sounded worried. “Heard from Raine yet?”

“No,” he said, taking another drink from his cup. “I figure she’s gone. I figure I screwed up somehow, turned it on too heavy, or—“

“You didn’t,” Fletch cut in. “That girl is scared of something, but it isn’t you.”

“How do you know?”

“Believe me. I’ve been in the same place she is. At least, something like that. You have to give her time to figure out her own head. But in the meantime, you should know that something’s going on with Wyatt.”

The name hit him like the chime of a bell before a funeral, after all the pallbearers are at the coffin’s side, but before they pick it up. That first ominous clang of eternity that puts a knot in everyone’s stomach. “His brother’s gone, Fletch. What the hell does he want here?”

“I think that’s the issue. Jack Creighton called in late last night and said he’d showed up at the ranch.”

“Ranch?” Dax laughed sarcastically. “That place is more like a Play-Doh factory with the lid left open after a heat wave.”

“What?” she asked.

“Uh, nothing. Anyway, what does Creighton have to do with any of this?”

“I dunno,” Fletch said, “but I think he’s in the know more than he’s letting on. He said Wyatt showed up at his place last night shouting about how he was going to take care of you for what you did to his brother. It’s weird, I guess, but I thought all that was gone without a hitch.”

Dax stared at the geese again, wondering again if they were on a date or having a fight. “You don’t get away from running off a council attempt at a takeover that easy. Just because things were quiet for a while doesn’t mean anything, Fletch. I guess the big boys finally got time to sit around and come up with a plan.”

There was silence on the other end of the line for a few moments. “Dax, we gotta do something. I got the sick feeling in my stomach that Raine is mixed up in this somehow.”

Daxon clenched his teeth together so tight that his jaws ached. “It makes a terrible amount of sense. When that whackjob was here, it was to try and take over the town. But now that I have a human mate... or girlfriend or whatever she is, then I guess they have a legit reason? God I hate all this political shit sometimes.”

“It’s funny, Dax,” Fletch said, “but I think you just got flustered trying to categorize a woman you met. Mate, girlfriend, how do you see her?”

Dax chuffed a laugh. “I’m being straight with you when I say I can’t wrap my head around it. A week ago I was going to some stupid concert to blow off steam and relax a little. And then I end up bringing back the girl that could turn this town into a flaming wreck.”

“Oh now, Dax,” she said. “It won’t be Raine doing it, and you know that. It’ll be the council and that psycho Wyatt. But the first thing we need to do is find her. I think Creighton would be a good first place to look.”

“Really? Why? Jack hasn’t ever done anything like this before. He’s straight up, you know. No matter what kind of bullshit he gets himself into, I don’t think he’d kidnap anyone.”

Fletch clicked her teeth. “Come on down to the courthouse, Dax. If nothing else we need to meet up with Rollins and come up with a plan. You know, we also need to get ourselves a sheriff. I’m sick and tired of playing cop on my days off.”

“What do you think about,” he trailed off before he could complete his thought.

“About what?”

Raine taking over the job. It’d give her a damn good reason to hang around here until I can convince her to take me
.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking out loud, I’m trying to come up with solutions and nothing’s coming to my head.”

“Anyway, get down here,” Fletch said. “We need to talk.”

Dax grunted as he hung up the phone. He hit the wrong button first, and accidentally pulled up the contacts on his phone. Then he sent a text message to someone named Alyson that he didn’t know. Then he managed to call a pharmacy and accidentally order a refill on a prescription he hadn’t had in four years.

“Goddamn robots,” he grumbled.

As he finally managed to hang it up, he didn’t hear Fletch laugh, or hear her say, “Oh Dax, someday you’ll get used to it.”

––––––––

“R
ound up a goddamn posse! We’re going to get her!”

Daxon slammed his fist against the wall of the courthouse, with the result being a slight scuff on the side of his hand, and a little moss rubbed off the wall.

Rollins, the bowlegged, ancient deputy sheriff, looked at him askance and cocked an eyebrow. “Posse? I mean, I get what you’re saying, and I know why you’re upset, but I don’t think anyone’s raised a posse since Wyatt Earp. Maybe we could just go talk to Creighton?”

Fletch had her hand on Dax’s shoulder because she knew if she said anything, it would come out very wrong. This was one time she wanted to keep her mouth shut and her opinion to herself, if nothing else, just to show him that she could. At last, as he sat there stewing, she couldn’t help it any more. “Maybe we should wait and see? I know what she means to you, or at least—”

“No you don’t,” Dax growled. “You don’t know how it felt to hold her hand, to shove that punk out of the way and let her use the Porta-Potty and see the way she smiled. You have no idea what it’s like to want someone you don’t know for six years and then find them.”

“I’m sure there’s a helluva story there,” Fletch said – Rollins held his laughter – and then she exhaled. “But look, what choice do we have? We can’t go charging into another clan’s territory on a vague report that they kidnapped a woman. And remember, she’s
human
, Dax. She’s not even a member of the clan. We can’t invade Creighton territory without a reason, or the council will definitely get wind of it.”

Rollins was tugging the corner of his long, horseshoe mustache. “You know,” he finally said with his lazy drawl, “I think maybe we could figure out a loophole in that whole business. She’s not just a human, she’s his mate. Right?”

Dax looked at the ground. The other two could tell from looking at him that he knew what Rollins was about to say. He mumbled something incoherent under his breath.

“What was that?” Rollins asked.

“Well, uh, what I mean is,” Dax looked away, studying a small, red and blue insect that was making an epic trek up the side of the courthouse. “Not exactly.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Rollins said. “You brought her here, right? That means you were planning to take her as your mate. I mean, why else would you bring a human woman to Kendal Creek?”

Fletch sensed tension mounting, but didn’t react quickly enough. Before she could say anything, Dax had grabbed Rollins by his collar, and lifted him off his feet, pressed against the courthouse wall. “Because,” Dax started in a sneer, but couldn’t find the words. A moment later, as Rollins was just about to stick a thumb in his eye, Dax sighed. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

“Put me down, Dax.”

“Oh right, sorry.” Gently, the enormous bear put the smaller one back on terra firma. “I didn’t mean anything by that, you just got to me.”

Rollins ran a pair of fingers along the red line on his neck. “Next time, watch yourself a little closer. I know you’re a good kid, but I can’t promise I won’t stick this Taser in your ass if you try it again.”