Chapter 39 #2
A line formed between Bear’s brows. “I should go talk to him.”
She smiled at that. Two months ago, he would’ve avoided a heart-to-heart like the plague. Now he was volunteering for one.
“Good idea.” She stood on her toes to kiss his bearded cheek. “I think he needs a friend right now.”
Greta watched him go, then found a spot at the far picnic table, the one in the shade of the big ponderosa, and settled in beside Alice. “You okay?”
Alice nodded, then grinned when the still-unnamed puppy squirmed in her lap and tried to lick her chin.
The puppy’s name had become something of a running joke at the ranch. River had suggested Gerald, despite her being a girl. X had lobbied hard for Lieutenant Biscuit. Logan had offered Potato, which had gotten a surprised laugh out of Alice and a flat no from everyone else.
The puppy didn’t seem to mind its lack of a name.
It scrambled up Alice’s chest and shoved its entire face against her cheek, tail going like a tiny propeller, and Alice caught it with both hands and held it up to look at it.
The puppy stared back at her with black button eyes, tongue hanging out.
Alice’s expression went soft in a way that still made Greta’s chest ache.
“Any name ideas yet?”
Alice tucked the dog against her chest and shook her head.
“You’ll think of something. It took me a week to name Atlas.”
Summoned by the sound of his name, her dog appeared, circling the table twice before folding himself under her seat with a theatrical groan. His jaw was healing cleanly—Lila had confirmed it last week—and his new titanium tooth caught the last of the afternoon light when he yawned.
She reached down and found the warm velvet of his ear.
Good boy. Best boy.
“He looks like a Bond villain with that tooth,” Maggie said and ripped a roll in half, offering it to Atlas under the table as she settled onto the bench.
She watched her dog scarf it down. “He absolutely does, and he’s been insufferable about it. Keeps showing it off.”
“He does not show it off.”
“He yawns directly at people, Maggie. He aims it.”
Maggie laughed, the sound bright and easy, and Anson looked over from where he stood with Hatch at the far end of the table. Just looked. The way he always looked at her—steady and quiet and with everything he had.
“Your man is staring at you again.” Naomi appeared with two bottles of soda and set one in front of Greta without being asked.
Maggie glanced over at him, and her expression went all gooey.
“Ugh, I don’t look at Owen like that, do I?”
“You absolutely do.” Greta laughed and took a sip of her drink.
Naomi knocked her shoulder. “You’re one to talk. You get heart eyes when Bear looks at you.”
She searched for him in the crowd, expecting to find him near River. Instead, River had joined in on the water fight, and Bear had wandered away from the group, down the creek’s edge.
Why was he—
She started to stand, but then saw Logan with him.
Logan had his hands shoved in the front pocket of his hoodie, his shoulders hunched, head bent. Bear was talking. Greta couldn’t hear a word of it from here, but she could read the careful set of his body — not stiff, not controlled the way he got when he was managing himself. Just open. Patient.
She sat back down slowly.
“Heart eyes,” Naomi said.
“Shut up.”
Alice made a small sound beside her that might have been a laugh.
Logan turned and threw his arms around his father, fast and hard. He buried his face in Bear’s shoulder.
Bear’s arms came around him without hesitation, one hand at the back of Logan’s head, the other spanning his shoulders, and they stood like that at the creek’s edge with King circling once and then sitting beside them in the long grass.
Naomi took her soda bottle and nodded toward them. “Go. You know you want to.”
Alice waved her off with one hand, the other still keeping the puppy anchored against her chest.
Greta went.
She crossed the yard at an angle, skirting the water fight—Jax and X had turned their guns on River, who was retreating toward the grill with his hands up and absolutely no intention of surrendering—and cut through the gap in the fence where the grass went long and soft at the creek’s edge.
“Hey, everything okay?”
Logan stepped back from his father, swiping quickly at his face with the sleeve of his hoodie.
“Yeah,” Bear said and cleared his throat. “Just needed to ask him something.”
Logan kept his face angled away, watching King plow into the creek, sending up a flock of geese. “I’m okay with it,” he muttered.
Greta blinked. “Okay with what?”
Logan grimaced like he regretted speaking already. “You. Staying. Or whatever.”
Her throat closed entirely. Before she could find a response, Logan turned and walked down toward King, hands back in his pockets. King bounded toward him, shaking water across his jeans, and Logan made a sound of protest that had no real heat in it.
She turned toward Bear. “What… was that about?”
He took both of her hands. His thumbs moved across her knuckles, back and forth, slow. “I had a whole thing planned. Dawn hike out to the ridge.” He looked at their hands. “But this is better.”
The creek ran softly behind them. King barked. Geese honked. Somewhere up the slope, River whooped at something in the water gun fight.
“What?” she breathed. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew exactly what was coming, and her heart hammered as he knelt in front of her.
“Greta, I’ve loved you since the first time you called me Sasquatch. Didn’t have a name for it then. I thought I was annoyed.”
She choked on a watery laugh. “You were annoyed. I wanted you to be annoyed. It was safer.”
Bear looked up at her from one knee in the long grass, his dark eyes steady.
“I spent a long time telling myself I didn’t deserve this,” he said.
“A future. A woman who looked at me like I was worth something. I almost talked myself out of asking.” His thumbs stilled on her knuckles.
“Logan talked me out of talking myself out of it.”
He reached into his pocket. The ring was small and simple in his rough fingers—a thin band with a single stone, pale green, the color of the creek in spring. The color of her eyes.
“I want to build a house here.” He nodded past the creek. “On the south meadow. Ours. Dogs underfoot and Sunday dinners and Logan coming home to it for the rest of his life. I want forty years of you, Greta. If you’ll have me. Will you—”
She said yes before he finished the sentence.
“—marry me?” he finished on a laugh.
“Yes,” she said again.
He closed his eyes for one brief second.
Then he slid the ring onto her finger and stood, and she was already reaching for him, already closing the distance, both hands fisting in the front of his flannel.
He came down to meet her, his forehead dropping to hers, and she felt the long slow breath leave him — all that held tension, finally gone.
She stroked the back of his neck where his short hair met his nape. “This is why you were nervous.”
“Yeah, this is why.”
She pulled him the rest of the way down.
The kiss tasted like relief. Like coming home from somewhere very far away. His hands came up to cup her face, careful as he always was, and she went up on her toes to close the last half-inch between them and felt him smile against her mouth.
A cheer went up behind them. Someone whistled, someone else made a whooping noise.
Greta broke away laughing, her face pressed against Bear’s chest, and felt him shake with laughter.
His arms folded around her, and he tucked his chin on top of her head.
She turned just enough to see the crowd that had materialized at the fence line.
Walker with his hat in his hands. Johanna with both palms pressed to her cheeks.
Naomi with her arms crossed and a look of profound satisfaction on her face.
X with two fingers in his mouth, was the source of the whistle.
Even Alice was there, puppy in her arms, Jonah at her side, grinning with tears in her eyes.
Logan let out a sound of pure betrayal from somewhere near the fence line—“Oh, come on—” which set off another round of laughter from the crowd.
Bear’s arms tightened around her for one moment, then he shifted his grip and she was off the ground entirely, scooped up like she weighed nothing. One arm under her knees, one at her back, her feet dangling somewhere below his elbow. She grabbed his shoulder on reflex.
“Put me down, Sasquatch!”
“Absolutely not, Tinkerbell.”
Another cheer went up from the fence line.
She looked out over his shoulder at all of it— at the string lights warm and gold across the tables, at the whole loud, lit-up improbable family they’d all stumbled into.
And for the first time in fifteen years, she realized she was not looking backward.