Bear My Heart (Virtue Shifters #14)

Chapter 1

Someday soon the train line would be back in Virtue, and the first day it ran, Shanti Davis intended to be on it. She would take the train south to New York, and from the city, she would go west, and then...

...and then her dreams, small as they were, always fell apart. She didn't know anyone outside of her little home town, and after years of caring for her ailing grandparents, there wasn't much money left. Shanti told herself the same story every day, though. Step one was always 'leave Virtue.'

Half the town seemed to know about that one, but that was Shanti's own fault.

Like everyone else, she'd spent the past few months watching the new train station go up, and although it hadn't had the official grand opening yet, it had been available to the public for a week now.

Shanti had come down to see it the day the doors first opened, and had found herself out on the platform, gaze following the torn-up earth running north and south, waiting for the rail workers to finish the line.

She had come every day since, too, walking out from beneath the high, peaked ceiling of the platform toward the uncovered end, where she brushed snow off a bench and sat to wait, as if the train would be there in a minute.

Every single person who came out made some sort of jovial, repetitive comment, asking if they'd missed the train, or when it would arrive, or something else along those lines.

Shanti smiled along and responded politely every time, making the necessary small talk, and by the third day of that, everybody knew her plan was to take the first train out of town.

Nobody knew that step two always became 'turn around and come back.'

Shanti exhaled heavily, watching her breath puff on the cold air.

She was bundled up against the weather, with ear muffs and a fluffy scarf and a winter coat that went to her knees, almost brushing big warm boots that covered her calves.

People thought she was crazy, sitting out there.

Shanti thought they might be right, since there wasn't anything to even watch, except the falling snow which slowly gathered over half-frozen, over-turned earth.

In another day or so the rail workers would be here, though.

Then she would probably be joined by half the kids in town, because they'd want to watch how the workers coming from the south would meet the ones coming from the north, and the line would be completed right there in front of the platform.

It was beautiful, Shanti thought. Even if she couldn't yet see what they were doing, she knew there was a sense of purpose in the work being done, and that was beautiful. She envied that sense of purpose, since hers was gone.

So she sat and watched nothing, glad to be surrounded by little more than the quiet snowfall and the cold air as she waited for the purposeful rail workers to come together and finish the line that would finally let her leave town.

A bell rang down the platform, and someone else joined her.

Shanti glanced toward them and put on a small, polite smile when she saw it was one of the station employees, a young woman called Tammy who looked crisp in her new uniform, and apologetic at interrupting.

"Ms Davis? I'm sorry, but it's almost five.

We're closing the building down in a few minutes. "

"Nothing to be sorry for," Shanti murmured. "Trains won't be running for a few weeks yet."

Tammy smiled. Grinned, actually. "Two weeks. I know the line's almost done but it doesn't seem real yet because it's not done here! And then we'll be open later, but I guess you won't be waiting on the platform then, huh?"

"I guess not." Shanti smiled back and rose.

The floor underfoot was textured concrete, damp with melted snow, but not slippery, thanks to heat exchange coils that kept the snow from freezing on its surface.

The whole building was heated and powered with renewable energy, including some kind of new solar roofing that were almost indistinguishable from the shingles Shanti expected on a building that reminded her of an old Victorian-era train station.

The care for the future shown in the new build gave her a strange little surge of pride in her town, even if she dreamed of leaving it.

Tammy held the door for her, still smiling. "I guess I'll see you tomorrow! And by next week they should be laying the line where we can see them. That'll be cool."

"It will be. Thanks for letting me sit out there all day.

" Again, Shanti thought, but didn't say.

She went inside, the warmth of the station's interior so intense it fogged her glasses.

They were such a fixture on her face she forgot she was wearing them until they fogged, and on one hand, she'd be back outside in a moment and they'd clear on their own.

On the other, they were probably dirty anyway, so she pulled them off and found a corner of cloth to try to clean them with as she glanced up, judged the pathway clear, and turned her attention to cleaning the glasses as she headed for the exterior doors.

Her vision wasn't that bad, and another glance up ensured that the path remained clear.

She got her glasses back on her face just before she went outside again.

They fogged up a second time and she sighed, turned toward town or the walk home, and instead nearly walked into a barrel-chested man who she swore had not been there a heartbeat earlier.

Shanti yelped apologetically, stumbling back even though she hadn't really made contact, and the big man's hands shot out, shaping themselves around her shoulders without quite touching her.

When it was clear she wasn't going to lose balance, his hands returned to his side and he rumbled an apologetic, "Sorry about that," in one of the deepest voices Shanti had ever heard.

She looked up, and he came into focus smile-first as the fog cleared from her glasses.

It was a great smile in a strong-jawed, wide-cheekboned face.

His skin was lighter brown than Shanti's own, and his long hair just as black, though he looked Native American to her eyes, rather than being of south Asian descent like Shanti was.

His eyes were dark enough brown that the reflected light they caught looked like starlight, and he was not, despite the weather, wearing a hat.

Or a coat. He wore an open flannel shirt over a t-shirt that stretched across his broad chest like it was straining to do so, and jeans, and heavy brown leather boots.

He was breathtakingly handsome, and Shanti was absolutely sure he was new in town.

No way could she have missed seeing a man like this one, otherwise.

"You okay?" he asked. His voice stayed in that deep, rumbling register, low enough to send shivers over Shanti's arms despite how bundled-up she was. He could read her the dictionary in that voice and she would spend the rest of her life happy.

It had been a long time since she'd thought about spending any of her life happy.

The very idea made her catch her breath.

Then she let it out again, of course, because there wasn't that much excitement in her future, and she knew it.

Not for a woman who didn't even know how to get out of town.

She smiled, though, trying to make it polite.

"I'm fine, thanks. Sorry. I wasn't looking where I was going. "

"You were," he said, still in that wonderful rumble. "But your glasses were foggy."

Shanti made a feeble, surprised gesture at her face and nodded. "Well. Yes. Sorry anyway."

"I'm not." The big man was smiling down at her. "I'm sorry I almost ran you over, but not sorry I met you, at least. Peter. Pete Baranov." He offered a hand, and Shanti, faintly bewildered, shook it.

His hand completely enveloped hers. He was big, though an awful lot of that was in breadth: he was only about six feet tall, several inches taller than Shanti herself, but he also looked like he was about three feet wide across the chest. And despite the fact that he wasn't even wearing a coat, he was so warm he radiated heat that Shanti could feel coming off him in waves, like she'd just stepped up to her own personal radiator.

She couldn't exactly imagine why he was bothering to introduce himself, but she did want to step even closer and just sort of melt against him.

She thought she might relax for the first time in… ever, if she did that.

Peter Baranov hadn't let go of her hand yet, and now he was smiling again. Or still. In that low, wonderful voice of his, he prompted, "'It's nice to meet you, Pete. I'm…?'"

"No, you're Pete—I—you—oh, I—oh. Um. It's nice to meet you, Peter," Shanti echoed, flustered. "I'm Shanti. Shanti Davis."

"Shanti Davis. That's a new one for me. Shanti, I mean.

Davis is pretty common. It's pretty." He grinned.

"Shanti is, I mean. Davis is fine, too." Peter had a very faint accent, a very slight way of cutting off words and vowels that Shanti couldn't place regionally, but which made her want to listen to him even more carefully than his deep, deep voice did.

"It's Nepali. My mom was from Nepal. Thank you. Peter…Baranov? You're not Russian, though, are you?"

Peter still hadn't released her hand, which would have seemed strange if his hand wasn't so warm. Or rather, it was still strange, Shanti supposed, but she didn't mind. His body heat was as appealing as the rest of him. "Alaskan. Tlingit, if that means anything to you."

It didn't mean much more than a vague idea that Tlingit was a Native Alaskan tribe. Shanti felt her eyebrows rise. "Are there a lot of Native Alaskans with Russian names?"

Pete Baranov grinned at her. "You'd be surprised. If you'll let me buy you a cup of coffee I can tell you all about it?"

Shanti said the first thing that came to mind, which was, "At five in the evening?

I'll be awake all night!" Only after that did other conflicting thoughts crash together: that she'd just refused a casual date with the first person who'd asked her on one in longer than she could remember, that she'd just refused a casual date with an extremely attractive man, that she couldn't go on a date with a total stranger she'd just met, and for that matter she couldn't go on a date anyway because she had the most boring life in the world and didn't want anybody to know how pathetic she was—

"Dinner, then," Pete said easily. "Or out for some other kind of drink. You'll have to tell me where, though. I'm new in town."

"I'm…" An overwhelming sense of exhaustion rose in Shanti's chest. She carefully took her hand out of Pete's, tucked it in her pocket, and said, "I don't know much about where to go out, either. I don't really get out much, so maybe—"

She'd been going to say, maybe another time, knowing that she didn't mean it, knowing that she would never ever try to see this big handsome oddly kind man again. Instead, somehow, she heard herself say, "Maybe Hold My Bear. It's a newish gastropub in town that I've never been to?"

"Sounds perfect. I have a truck. I can meet you there?"

"Oh." Shanti's gaze darted toward the parking lot, then returned to Peter.

"There's not much parking in town. If you've got a space here you might want to just keep it and walk over, except…

" She made a vague gesture at the big man, who still wasn't wearing a coat.

In December. In Virtue, New York, which had gotten colder and snowier over her lifetime as the climate had changed.

Peter glanced down at himself, then smiled.

"I run warm. If you're walking, I can walk with you?

Or I can just happen to be going in the same direction you are, and meet you there.

Or I can take another route." He palmed his phone long enough to indicate he was prepared to look up a town map and find a way to the gastropub on his own, which made Shanti smile.

A real smile, not just the polite one she usually used.

"Might as well walk with me, if you won't freeze.

It's not that far. Nothing in Virtue really is.

Unlike Alaska, I guess?" Shanti was proud of herself for creating an opportunity for a conversation.

She was out of practice, but she thought that had worked.

And it meant Peter Baranov talking about himself, instead of her having to admit anything about herself.

He chuckled as they went down the station steps and across the parking lot.

The sun had set almost an hour earlier, leaving the parking lot and streets to be lit by pools of amber light from the streetlamps.

They crossed from one pool to another, walking on mostly-cleared sidewalks with snow piled up at the edges.

Pete's breath steamed on the air, but he certainly didn't seem cold.

"Everything in Alaska is very far apart, but everything in Shkalnik, my village, is pretty close. Except the airport. And the dump."

"Sh—" Shanti didn't even try to repeat what he'd said, not before asking, "Say that again?"

"Shhh call nick," Pete repeated, drawing each sound out, then saying it again the way he'd said it first, with shorter vowels: "Shkalnik. Derived from a Tlingit word, shkalneek. Pretty, isn't it?"

Shanti couldn't help smiling as she echoed, "Shkalnik," to get it right. "Yes, it is. Is it…it's a Native village? Left here," she added as they reached School Street, before the town square, which would let them cut across to the gastropub.

Peter veered left. "It was a Native village, but these days most of the people there are white. Smaller than Virtue, and you can only get there by boat or plane."

"Oh. Oh, wow. That sounds…" Terrifying fought with wonderful in Shanti's mind, and Pete suggested, "Isolated?"

"That too. So how on earth did you end up in Virtue?"

"I'm working on the railroad," Peter said, and for some reason, all at once, he seemed like the very embodiment of Shanti's dreams.