Chapter 8
Brandy couldn’t sleep.
When they got back to the house, Aster had run around the old Victorian exploring—it was his first time there on two legs—and then collapsed like an exhausted puppy.
Except he wasn’t a pup, or a cub. He was a little boy.
Though her sisters had tried to get her to take a nap, she hadn’t been able to let him out of her sight, terrified if she glanced away, even for a second, he would be a bear again. She’d had herself a good cry instead, silent and wrenching.
On the drive back, Gin had tried, subtly, to ask him what he remembered, but he’d only grinned at her and said, “Up!” And then managed to almost spill Rita’s spell bag because in any shape he was a handful.
Brandy had given her sister a hard headshake after that. She didn’t want to know, didn’t want to jinx it. Even though that wasn’t how magic worked.
Rita had disappeared into the spellatorium when they returned, mumbling something about reviewing the spell. What, like a supernatural Yelp?
The urge to tell her to leave it alone churned in Brandy’s stomach, with the same slightly queasy feel of the too-sweet drink Mac had given her, but she wouldn’t leave Aster long enough to go downstairs. Instead, she sat at the foot of his crib—no longer a cage—and kept watch while he slept. She rested one hand on his not-furry belly, holding back the hitching breaths that were the aftermath of her crying jag so she could listen to his peaceful snuffles.
Even after the old house quieted and night arrived quicker than usual with a thick blanket of clouds—Mac hadn’t been wrong about how quickly weather on the high desert plateau could shift—she stayed with her son. Who stayed a boy.
Was it over? Had they really banished the bear? And just in time. Aster had changed right before Mac appeared; if Mac had seen the little cub…
She clenched her fists, all her maternal instincts rising to the fore again, ready to rip through any threat. Her folded knuckles pressed against her palm, and she winced at the twinge of scrapes and splinters in her right hand, the hand that had crushed the talisman.
She should’ve trusted in the spell. Everything was going to be all right.
Rain pattering down from the clouds made soft music on the tin roof, as if lulling her to sleep.
But then a louder pounding brought her to her feet.
A quick glance at Aster—still a boy, still asleep—and she hurried downstairs, righteous outrage burgeoning. Who dared threaten to wake her child?
She flung open the door with a snarl on her lips.
And realized somehow she’d already known who it would be.
She tried to push the door closed again, but Mac blocked it with one big hand splayed across the heavy, solid wood. His work boots were spread wide, as if bracing himself against a powerful gale. Which was ridiculous. It wasn’t raining that hard, and she was barely half his weight, so it wasn’t like she was holding him at bay.
No, he was braced against his own inner storm. He was holding himself back.
For the first time with him, her heart pounded in a bad way. He looked…not like himself. Not like the nice guy she’d impulsively chosen to launch her post-college new life. His dark hair glistened with sinister gloss from the raindrops, like a movie villain with too much gel. Once upon a time, she might’ve thought the amber flames in his eyes were just a reflection of the Victorian’s vintage lamps, but now she knew better.
He was already half bear.
She licked her lips to unseal her suddenly parched mouth. “Mac.” Her voice sounded hoarse in her own ears.
“Is he mine?”
Even more broken than hers, his voice cracked, and the tears she thought she’d drained coalesced again, like the rain clouds outside.
“Mac,” she said again helplessly.
“I know who I am. Just a small-town guy who digs in the dirt, not some fancy big-city businessman in a suit asking you to find me a loophole in my taxes. I can do the simple math here, Brandy. Is. That. My. Son?”
Hissing out a breath to quiet him as his tone rumbled deeper with each word, she took a menacing step toward him.
To her surprise, he stepped back, his hand sliding away from the door and clenching into a fist around nothing. “You’re not saying no.”
She closed the door behind her, trapping them on the porch together, the rain just an arm’s length away erasing the rest of the world. “Aster is my son.”
He lowered his head between his shoulders, glaring at her. “It takes two.”
“Two to tango,” she snipped. “Only need one to parent.”
He spun away from her, raking both hands through his hair and scattering silvery droplets everywhere. “You have no idea. Jesus, Brandy…”
“Okay, that one was immaculate.”
When he spun back to face her, expression incredulous, the movement was so fast she almost gasped. At least the urge the cry was gone now, evaporating in the rising heat of her anger. He thought he could just rage over here in the middle of the night and interrogate her?
“This doesn’t concern you, Mac.” Even as she said it, she heard the lie. She’d needed his blood to save Aster. “Not anymore,” she added. There, that much was true.
The caution-yellow amber in his eyes was even brighter. “It concerns me very much. You have no idea what could happen—”
“Like my son could turn into a bear?”
He reared back so fast he almost fell off the porch. She couldn’t hold back a little smirk at ending his sanctimonious tirade.
His gaze narrowed on her, the muscle in his jaw clenched so hard it made a lump under the dark scruff of his late-o-clock-three-days-ago shadow. “What do you mean by that?”
With a flippant wave, she went to the porch rail and wrapped one arm around the spindle column. The Victorian’s eaves protected her from the rain, just as her mother-love would protect Aster from Mac. “I mean Ursus arctos horribilis. Grizzly. Big, stinky, monstrous brutes.” She glared at him.
He half turned his head. “Not monsters.”
Oh, that was the word he objected to? “The kind of monster who would stomp muddy boots all over the porch of a nice lady’s house in the middle of the night, yelling about things he doesn’t understand.”
The sidelong glance he shot her was much less yellow. “Not even midnight,” he muttered. “Wasn’t yelling.” He faced her straight on. “And you’re the one who doesn’t understand what this could mean.”
She met his gaze directly. “He’s not a shapeshifter. At first I worried when I figured out what you were, but… Well, anyway, he’s not. He’s not like you, Mac.”
His mouth flattened and his big shoulders hunched back as if she’d hit him with something much sharper than mere words. “What do you know about shifters? Your aunt isn’t one, and she’s not one of the pack’s allies either. She’s lived here for years and never hinted about knowing.”
A quiver of uncertainty straightened Brandy’s stance away from the porch rail. Someone else to protect. “Leave Aunt Tilda out of this. She came here because she just wanted to be herself. Live and let live.”
He huffed out a harsh breath through flared nostrils. “Let live? You think it’s that easy? If shifters want to live, that’s exactly why we have to keep our secrets.”
“Aunt Tilda knows how to keep secrets,” Brandy argued. Hoo boy, did she ever… “You don’t have to worry about her. Or me and Aster. We’re doing fine without you. Just go back to living your life, like we were never even here.”
He pivoted away from her again. For a heartbeat, she thought he would charge out into the rainy night. But he only paced to the end of the porch. The old Victorian wasn’t huge, but the normally spacious and airy porch suddenly felt much too small as Mac swung around to face her from that inadequate distance.
“You think I can just walk away?” His voice was low.
“Lots of guys do.” She swallowed hard. “My dad did, less than three months after my sisters and I were born.”
No man could stay with a witch. Even if he didn’t know about magic, even if he never saw the circle in action, he’d sense the power that wasn’t his, not by birthright, never by force. Most men couldn’t accept it. Witches who wanted a lasting relationship had to hide what they were for as long as they could.
Maybe not so different from being a shapeshifter.
Brandy steeled herself against the twist of empathy triggered by Mac’s stricken expression. “But this isn’t about the past. My sisters and I didn’t need our father, and Aster doesn’t…” She heard the cruel slam winding up in her words and deflected them. “He’s happy with just us.”
Mac was silent for a beat. “I’m not like ‘lots of guys’.”
“Exactly. Which is why I think you understand why it’s better if Aster and I go back to Manhattan, you keep enjoying the, er, freedom of Angels Rest, and we pretend this awkward reunion never happened.”
The rain chose that moment to stop, and her blithe proposal hung in the nighttime silence like a rude belch. But she knew she was right. Aster wasn’t a bear, not anymore, and he didn’t need some man who wouldn’t stick around. Nor did she. Their lives were just too far apart.
Except for that first time when she and Mac had been so perfect together…
She squelched that memory. After she’d left Angels Rest, their day had been first a hot fantasy, then a sweet dream, then a nightmare when she discovered she was pregnant and hadn’t known what to do. The only reason she was thinking about it now was because the rain had soaked Mac’s T-shirt to near transparency, and she couldn’t help but remember how that big, hot body had moved against hers, not the wary circling they were doing now, but an intimate dance of pleasure and release.
Pleasure and release she hadn’t had time for since then.
Though the afternoon heat that had overcome her earlier in the day had dissipated in the rain, some sultry breath remained like a tease of the high summer months to come.
When she’d almost fainted, he carried her so easily. She’d never quite shed the baby weight, her hips wider, her breasts still bigger even after Aster had weaned himself when he discovered the delights of blueberries by the pint, but Mac had lifted her into his arms like she was a featherweight lichen tuft, bearing her as gently as she’d carried Aster. And that was after she’d so recently stabbed him! Though Mac charging to her door, huffing and snorting, had angered her, maybe he had a right to be shocked.
God knew, she’d been shocked herself to find out she was having a child. That terrified part of her that she’d had to wall off, knowing she’d just made her life a thousand times harder by becoming a single mother, softened in the night air, facing the father of her child.
“I didn’t want to make this your problem, Mac,” she murmured. “It was just a crazy chance. When I stopped through here last time, I was on birth control to regulate my cycle, and you and I only did it the once…”
“More than once,” he reminded her. “And half my problem.” Just the slightest bit, his lips quirked. “But who’s counting? I thought you were the brainy accountant.”
“Well, it all worked out greater than”—she lifted one eyebrow to make sure he appreciated her pun—“I could’ve hoped.”
He grunted, not quite a laugh, then leaned back against the porch rail. “This is pretty hard for me to wrap my head around. We—shifters—don’t have a lot of offspring. Especially not outside our own kind. The change in our blood makes us incompatible with normal people.”
To her surprise, she bristled at the offhand way he said “normal”. Which was ridiculous. Normal was all she’d ever wanted. Almost against her will, she asked, “Do normal people ever become your kind?”
“That’s even more rare than shifter babies. And good thing too, since it’d be harder to keep our secrets if there were a bunch of everyday suburban kids randomly turning into wolves and bears and thunderbirds.”
“At least I didn’t boink a dragon,” she mused.
He shook his head. “You know about them too? Geez, I sure know how to pick the troublesome ones.”
She wanted to correct him—she had picked him—but technically, he had seen her first when he pulled up his truck behind her on the road to Angels Rest. A little pang went through her at the awareness that he hadn’t intended anything more to come of their joining than she had. “I would never betray your secrets or your people,” she said softly. “I know the risks.”
Bracing his hands on either side of him, he stared down at his boots. “Yeah. I’ll wear a condom next time.”
Next time. She frowned.
Before she could run down the idea of a next time, he angled his head to gaze at her. “Tell me about it. What happened after you left here?”
Why did that even matter? There wasn’t going to be a next time or ever again for them.
For some reason, her anger returned. Unfairly, she knew. It wasn’t his fault he hadn’t been there when she’d been burning through graph paper making lists of how her life was going to change—again. Angels Rest was so small she could’ve found him again in a heartbeat if she’d chosen. Heck, she’d proven that just last night, hadn’t she? But her unjustified antagonism added thorns to her response. He wanted to know? So she’d tell him.
“I got to Manhattan and it was great. My boss was wonderful, the work really interesting and challenging. And the city nightlife…” She spread her fingers, jazz-hands style, to demonstrate just how un-Angels Rest it was. “And then I had a couple weeks of throwing up in the morning.” She wrapped her arms over her belly. “But it was the end of flu season, so I didn’t get it checked out. And by the time I realized I didn’t have the flu, it was too late to do anything else.”
He looked at her. “Do anything?”
She met his gaze. “I was new to my job, with school debt to pay off. And nobody around to help. I talked to my doctor about an abortion, but she said I was too far along. Even though it hadn’t been that long since you and I…” The memories of that day and the lonely months after swept over her, and she couldn’t hold his stare.
“Shifter pregnancies follow their own schedules, depending on the genetic mix. At least you didn’t boink an elephant-shifter. Their gestation is like a year and a half.”
That brought her gaze up with a startled laugh.
All glimmer of bear amber in his eyes was hidden, and only the dark shine—so like Aster’s—returned her attention. “It must’ve been hard for you, being alone.”
She swallowed. “I wasn’t, not for long. When my sisters found out, they dropped everything to come to New York. Rita had all these potions…uh, remedies for morning sickness and swollen ankles and whatnot. Gin set me up for freelancing when I was let go at work.”
Mac growled under his breath. “They fired you for being pregnant?”
“They suggested maybe another career would be ‘a better fit’ considering I wasn’t fitting in my pencil skirts anymore.” She shrugged easily, something she hadn’t been able to do back then. “I knew it was going to be hard, whatever I chose, so Gin finding me a way to stay home with the baby was actually brilliant.”
“If all black can be called brilliant,” he muttered.
She chuckled at the note of bewilderment in his assessment. But she sobered just as quick. “Yeah, Gin isn’t much for the bright lights big city. And neither is Rita. Now that Aster is getting older, I know they need to start getting back to their own lives.” Her throat tightened, as if her sisters were walking out the door right this second.
“Have you thought about moving someplace else, maybe someplace more open, where a kid can run around and play freely?”
“Kids can play in a city.” She raised her eyebrows. “Or do you mean Angels Rest?” Before he could answer, she said, “I need high-speed internet and good lattes to do my work, so no, I’ve never considered moving here.”
But she frowned to herself. When Aunt Tilda needed someone to watch the house while her circle journeyed, Rita had jumped at the chance. And Gin had pointed out she needed a place to stay while she finished her last stages of initiation into the circle.
Brandy swallowed hard. She wasn’t making other people’s choices; she was just living her own life. But maybe her sisters hadn’t so much walked out as they simply weren’t coming back to Manhattan with her after stealing Mac’s blood.
“Can I see him?”
The question nailed her out of nowhere, even though Mac hadn’t moved from his stance at the end of the porch, and she had to hold back a startled grunt. “He’s sleeping now.”
“I won’t wake him.”
She chewed her lip. “Why?”
“Because I know mamas punch people who wake their sleeping kids.”
Maybe she needed a glint of murderous bear in her own eyes. “Why do you want to see Aster?”
He straightened. “I can come back tomorrow morning if that’s better—”
“No.” It was one thing for Mac to see her son, but did she want Aster seeing his father now that Mac knew who he was? “You can come up, but…” She tried to think of something to wrench back control of the situation. “You have to take off your boots.”
He gave her a sidelong eye roll that said she was being difficult—as if she needed the reminder!—and obligingly kicked off the steel-toed boats. Oh geez, and she had eighteen years of paying for ever-expanding boy shoes…
“Don’t wake up my sisters either,” she hissed as she eased open the door. She definitely didn’t want to explain this intrusion to them.
“I’m not sure why you think I’m so loud and bumbling.”
“You are a bear.” As if he needed the reminder.
Wondering if she was making the second biggest mistake of her life, she let him inside.