Ryan looked down into the giant bowl that comprised the super pipe he’d be riding for this competition. Oh yeah, he’d made the right choice. Coming back here for an early winter tournament was exactly what he needed to get his mind straight after the hectic past few months.

Two brothers mated and married. Even Riley, a movie star who was the most reluctant and had never had a committed relationship that Ryan was aware of, had found a beautiful bear shifter mate who was almost exactly what Ryan had pictured as his ideal. And Ryder had found a gorgeous, loyal human who accepted everything Ryder was and didn’t care about his billions.

It wasn’t that Ryan was in a rush, he was at the top of his game in his sport, a household name, and he could hear the crushing cheer of fans even at this small, pre-season tournament. But it would be a good warm-up. Already he could hear the announcers commenting on his height, his appeal with the female fans, the upset to the snowboarding world that he’d been when he launched onto the scene three years ago, medalling despite being inches taller than the next contestant. No one knew how he had the strength to rotate such a tall, long, muscular body.

No one knew he was also a bear.

And he liked it that way. But he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t hoped for something in Bear Mountain. It had felt like coming home. He’d loved the small, remote ski resort behind the lodge. Had loved the thought of finding another bear shifter and making a home in the mountains there. He could train new and upcoming snowboarders. In his mid to late twenties, he was older than others in the sport, and after taking a gold in the big air event at the last X Games, he felt okay about retiring. He’d take a gold in super pipe hopefully at this next X Games with a new trick he hadn’t seen anyone else do, and then he’d be even more set to retire if he wanted to.

Even though his body was better at taking injuries and recovering than a human’s, he still knew this was a tremendously dangerous sport that was getting worse every year. Not something you could do for the rest of your life. And his dad had left him enough money that combined with his endorsements and the investments Ryder had made for him, he could live without working a day in his life.

Which meant he could live doing whatever he wanted.

But he was glad to have an excuse to leave Bearstone Park. He’d done the training he could there, but been bogged down with weddings and prep and settling his father’s estate. He’d had to fly to Australia during the summer to train on the snow there. But every time he came back, all that was waiting for him was his two sickeningly happy brothers and an empty lodge.

And a stalker. A very pretty, perky, blonde stalker who was all wrong for him.

He shook his head, making sure his helmet was perfectly adjusted. He stomped lightly on his feet, feeling the perfect fit of the board to the bindings and the bindings to his boots and the boots to his feet. The board felt like an extension of his body, which would be important in a moment, when he went racing down and then up the high wall and into elaborate spins and twists in the air.

He took a moment to breathe deeply and visualize the upcoming run. He could almost feel the delicious thrill of nothing but cold winter air all around him, weightless above the pipe for a moment, spinning above the earth. There was nothing in the world like being in the air on his snowboard. It was all instinct, pure feeling and adrenaline, and yet controlled, the effect of countless hours of training, practicing in the foam, jumps on the trampoline.

He’d been scouted as a teen. The wild bear side of him had naturally loved escaping to the mountains after his mother’s death. He’d started lessons, but it was wasn’t long till he was dropping off cliffs, doing runs far more difficult than anything marked. He’d been born a thrill seeker, and his bear strength and reflexes had only enhanced his abilities with the board.

A visiting snowboarding coach had seen him in the backcountry and waited to talk to him. He’d spoken to Ryan’s father, who’d been more than happy to see his youngest son finally find a place in the world.

And it was a world Ryan loved. The blurred faces screaming his name, the rush of his body doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing while everyone else wondered how it was possible, and the admiration of anyone who recognized him.

He could have been a player if he wanted to, but he didn’t. Snowboarding and winning was its own rush. The most enjoyable thing in the world because he’d always been good at it, and years of work and training with the best coaches had only enhanced it.

So he didn’t need girls. Sure, one day he’d need the right girl. And he knew exactly who she would not be. She would not be like Kylie Rogers, a small, chubby teacher with delicious curves and a gentle, mischievous smile.

No, the woman for him would have to be a snowboarder, an athlete like him who loved the thrill of adrenaline. If he was going to settle down, he needed to at least know his wife would support his backcountry runs and hopefully come with him.

More importantly, he’d prefer she was a bear. Tall and strong and, well, durable.

But that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon, which suited Ryan just fine. He could wait for the right one. And the right one was definitely not that cute little blonde that insisted on following him around back at Bearstone Park. She was a distraction he didn’t need, and when a deep part of him seemed conflicted at the thought that she wasn’t the one, he brushed it away.

He heard the starting beeps and then pushed out of the starting position. With a rush of air he dropped into the pipe. He carved up the side of his first run up the pipe, braced himself through the tranny and then threw his body back into a rotation as he left the lip of the pipe and soared into the air for his first trick. Something small and simple while he was still building up speed and air. He could hear the announcers, only vaguely.

“If you know anything about Ryan Hart, you know that this guy has a style that you just don’t see with any other—”

He focused back in on his run and landed back in the pipe smoothly, but felt an edge grip slightly where it shouldn’t. It made him wobble minutely. Just enough to make him slightly shaken as he started up the other side. He was switch now, and would be pulling of a cab invert to his good side. He tried to relax and let his body just do it, but he was too straight and had extra speed, and he knew as he went into the air, even as he initiated the invert, that he was going to over-rotate it. Was going to land on his head, and it was not going to be good. He desperately tried to pull back but the turn was going to happen as it had been initiated.

Everything happened in fractions of a second, the gasps of the crowd as they realized what he already knew. The snow coming closer in a way it shouldn’t, and Kylie’s face, looking horrified. For some reason, it saddened him to think of how it would affect her.

That was his last thought before everything went black.

---

Kylie was staying after school grading papers when she got the call. She eyed the vibrating phone and thought that Leslie could probably wait until she got off work. It was girls’ night after all, and she’d be picking her up soon. Then again, maybe she needed to change times or something.

She sighed and unlocked her phone with a swipe and put it on speaker. “Les?”

“Ky.” Leslie’s voice was oddly hesitant. Sort of nervous, like she was about to break something to her. Odd.

“What’s up? I’m just finishing up grading and then I’m headed over to get you so we can go up to the lodge.”

“What are you doing at school so late?”

“I ended up talking to one of the kids at recess so I’m behind on grading. I don’t want the teacher to have a pile of extra work waiting for her when she comes back.”

“I swear you’re more than a sub at that school. You should think about it full time. Especially since you’ve been working at the flower shop less.”

Kylie had used some of her considerable wealth to invest in the only florist shop in the small town, but she’d hired other locals to work there. She liked coming in to do an arrangement sometimes, but mostly she was just glad that there was a place to buy flowers in this sleepy little town.

“It’s enough for now,” Kylie said. She liked teaching but she doubted she could stand in front of a class all day, nor deal with the stress. She liked doing it only when she chose to. She was just doing it a lot more often lately because it was an excellent distraction and kept her busy.

Too busy to think about the ridiculous, stubborn snowboarder who was determined to ignore the fact that they were perfect for each other and had flown off to Australia for most of the summer and was now at a tournament, supposedly. Next up would be the X Games. Unlike his brothers, Ryan hadn’t found a suitable mate in Bearstone Park, so he’d left.

At least he wouldn’t have to bothered by her anymore. She grumbled nonsense to herself as she angrily marked a question wrong and then realized Leslie was still on the phone. She really should work on not zoning out so often. “Les, what’s wrong? I said I’d pick you up in—”

“So, if you were at school, then you weren’t home, right?”

“Nope,” she said.

“So, then, you weren’t watching Ryan’s competition.”

“I don’t have cable anyway,” she lied. Truthfully, she didn’t need to watch him risking his life out there on the dangerous slopes. And she didn’t need to see him being so incredibly hot and powerful doing what he did best now that there was no chance of anything happening between them.

But she had really given it her all. That was the only satisfying thing about the whole endeavor.

“Kylie. Riley just flew out there.”

Riley was Ryan’s brother and Leslie’s husband. Kylie set her red pencil down slowly, a wave of unease mixed with shock moving through her. It felt oddly fuzzy, like it couldn’t be real. “What do you mean, out there?”

“Out to Ryan.”

She sat back in her chair with a sharp exhale of air. Her heart beat a steady rhythm with the ‘no, no, no’ pounding through her head. “What happened?”

“Where are you? I’ll come get you.”

“What happened?” Kylie asked hoarsely, running a hand through her hair. Memories came back to her. Bright lights, screeching tires on metal. “Tell me now.”

“No, I’m going over there,” Leslie said. “I don’t want you to be alone. I know how much you care about him.”

“He’s okay, isn’t he? He has to be okay,” she said, feeling the familiar tightness at the back of her throat. “It can’t… I can’t…”

“No, don’t think about it, not till I’m there. You don’t need to be thinking about it, not with…”

“I know,” she said, saying it before Leslie could. She had a difficult time hearing about accidents because it brought up memories of her own. The pain, the shock. Though it was years ago, sometimes it could feel like only yesterday. But she would just have to deal, because she wanted to know immediately about Ryan. He had to be okay. He had to. She knew that what he did was dangerous, but he seemed so strong, so invincible, as athletes always did.

But it had to be serious or Riley wouldn’t be flying out there. “Is Ryder going?”

“He’s on a business trip, but I’m assuming as soon as he knows, he will. Or he’ll stay put waiting for news. To see if they move Ryan.”

“Move him? But…” Her mind was starting to go blank so she gave up trying to make sense of things and just let herself give into the feeling as she forcibly relaxed against the chair. “Okay. I’ll wait until you get here,” she said. Then she hung up. She didn’t even feel like she had the strength to hold up the phone. Not until she knew what had happened.

As long as he was okay, that was all that mattered. She could help him through anything else. After all, she’d been there before. She’d gotten through it and so could he.

She’d often wondered if that was part of why she admired him so much, because he was everything she’d wanted to be but couldn’t be. He was living the dream she couldn’t have. Not that she’d ever had a shot at something like world class snowboarding, but before her accident, she’d had more of a chance of being like him in just being so adventurous.

Maybe it had felt like if she could be with him, some of that aliveness, that adventure, would rub off onto her and she could live vicariously.

When the door to the classroom opened, Kylie gathered her few things and stumbled toward Leslie, who caught her in a hug. “I know, hon. I know,” she said.

She wrapped her arms around her very pregnant friend. “But I don’t.” She looked up into Leslie’s face. “Tell me.”

Leslie pressed her lips together. Kylie envied her friend’s beauty. Unlike Kylie’s plain, pale features, Leslie had beautiful large eyes and lips and gorgeous hair. But right now, all Leslie looked was worried. “Maybe I should show you.”

“No,” Kylie said, pulling back and putting a hand up. “I can’t…”

“No, I mean, we can turn on the news at least. That can catch you up. I don’t know if I can say it. I mean, I don’t even know how much I know. Riley was out of it, babbling, and after the cab took off to take him to the airport, all I knew was that you’d need to know. Not just because you were practically in love with him, but well, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s okay. Thanks for coming. Now, tell me everything you know, and we’ll go to the lodge to figure out the rest.”

Leslie nodded and as they walked out into the cold winter air, Kylie took a deep breath and started to feel fortified. Just like before, the more steps she took to put one foot in front of the other, the more she was rewarded and strengthened for it.

She was a strong person, and she could be strong through this. Ryan would need all of them to be. Once they were in Leslie’s car, which was warm from having already driven down the mountain, Leslie started to speak.

“He was in the half pipe.”

“Super pipe?” Kylie asked, knowing the difference in height, and the difference in danger levels as well.

“Yeah, whatever they compete in when they’re that good. He crashed. On his head.”

“Wow. Thanks for sugar coating it,” Kylie mumbled, trying to joke to keep the seriousness of it from crushing her.

Leslie laughed but it was dry and more like a bark. “Janna’s waiting for us up at the lodge. Lots of people are watching the TVs inside. A lot of people knew Ryan here. Liked him. We were all watching when—” Leslie’s voice choked and Kylie knew if she had the strength to look over, she’d see tears glistening in Leslie’s dark eyes. But she didn’t have the strength to look over. If she did, the emotion welling in Leslie would take over her as well. She couldn’t afford that until she knew more about what was going on.

“Ryan’s strong, unusually strong, so if anyone can survive, it’s him, but they were… They were saying…”

“What were they saying?” Kylie asked, when Leslie had parked the car and was just staring straight out the windshield, like her composure had lasted just long enough to get them up to the lodge and now it was just sinking in that something so awful had happened to her brother-in-law.

Kylie wanted to be angry with Ryan, for hurting her friend, for scaring his brothers, for abandoning her and running away to do something so dangerous. But at the same time, this was his life. It could have happened regardless. But she couldn’t help thinking of the careless way he’d gone, the feelings he’d hurt on the way out, including hers.

She wished they’d had a different kind of goodbye. And she wished he hadn’t seemed so eager to bail on his brothers, who were clearly enjoying catching up with him after years apart with their different careers. It wasn’t a good ending, so this couldn’t be Ryan’s ending. It couldn’t. She convinced herself of that and held onto it as she took Leslie’s arm and walked toward the lodge, where a crowd was gathered in the lobby around the TVs.

They turned as one to look at Leslie and Kylie as they walked in, and Kylie ignored them to pull her friend along the side of one wall so they could get upstairs and get some alone time in the room they liked to use for girls’ night lately.

But as she walked, her eyes caught on a TV playing nearby. And her heart cracked right down the center.

They were replaying Ryan’s crash, the awful fall, the paramedics rushing in, the terrible murmur of the crowd, a few screams and yells, and the dire looks on the faces of those in the pipe with his unmoving body.

The blood spilling onto the snow from under his helmet.

And the subtitle beneath the picture, scrolling across the bottom of the screen with macabre certainty.

“Champion Ryan Hart suffers traumatic brain injury, at hospital in critical condition.” She blinked back tears as the words scrolled.

She felt her knees buckle and didn’t allow Leslie to catch her. Instead, she sunk to the ground and just waited there, hoping and praying for the strength to get back up.

Leslie’s phone went off and Kylie snapped her head around, hoping against hope it was Riley with an update. Leslie answered and her eyes went wide and she turned to Kylie. “They have news. Let’s go upstairs, I can’t hear in here.”

Hope flooded Kylie and she pushed to her feet and went with Leslie up the stairs. Anything to know more about what happened. To know he was okay.