Chapter 4
four
CALLIE
The porch was empty when I looked out the next morning. Part of me was disappointed that Hudson was gone, though I knew it was to be expected. He wouldn’t want to be around me much when I was pregnant with some other guy’s baby. Bears were possessive of the people they cared about, despite despising commitment.
He'd probably gone back to his security team already. He hadn’t ever left me without saying goodbye in the past, but being a bear, goodbyes were pretty much unexpected.
I padded over to my fridge and opened it up, staring at the desolate shelves.
No breakfast for me until the breeding money came in. Just more beans and rice.
Lovely.
The money wouldn’t come in until I had a positive pregnancy test at a doctor’s office, but that was fine. From what I understood, the bear would most-likely knock me up after screwing me once, since I wasn’t on birth control. I’d stopped taking the pills when the lawyer told me she didn’t think she could get me out of my dad’s debt.
When she confirmed it, I put them away in the back of the drawer.
I looked at the time—only an hour until the first of my multiple doctor’s appointments—and headed back to my bedroom to get dressed. I’d nearly reached it when someone knocked on my front door.
I frowned.
No one had knocked on my door in weeks. The casseroles and freezer meals had been great around and after the funeral, but they’d tapered off pretty quickly.
I padded to the door, surprised when I found a freshly-showered Hudson on the doorstep in a tight gray shirt and a pair of jeans that fit too well. He had a bag of takeout food in one hand, and two cups of coffee in the other.
Before I could ask what he was doing there and what the food was for, he’d stepped into the house and put one of the coffee cups in my hand.
“You still drink it with more milk and sugar than coffee, right?” he asked, on his way to the kitchen table.
“…Yes.” I finally shut the door and trailed into the kitchen behind him.
“Still prefer bacon over sausage, and hashbrowns over roasted potatoes?” He opened one of two to-go trays.
I blinked.
He remembered all of that?
“And—”
I interrupted him. “What are you doing here, Hud? You should be back with your security team by now. You don’t live here, and you rarely visit for holidays. You should be on a plane.”
He handed me a fork.
I accepted it, even though I had no idea what was going on.
As he opened the second tray, he said calmly, “The clan chose me.”
“Chose you for what?”
“To breed with you.” He met my gaze steadily.
Way too steadily.
I went still.
He captured my wrist and gently pulled me toward the chair next to his, where he’d set up one of the trays. I didn’t sit down, though he clearly wanted me to.
“You think of me as a sister,” I finally said.
“I think of you as my best friend.”
“You’ve never been attracted to me, Hud. Even in high school. I tried to kiss you at the beginning of sophomore year, remember? You completely shut me down.” My face warmed with memories of the one time things had been weird between us. “I’ll call your dad and ask him to find someone else.”
“He won’t,” Hudson said. “Eat your food. We have a doctors’ appointment soon.”
“That’s not…” I dropped the plastic fork he’d given me and stepped back. “You are not breeding me. You’re not even attracted to me! We’re not?—”
He stood again.
Then he calmly stepped closer to me, and put his hands on my waist.
I sucked in a breath at the sudden touch.
He’d never held me that way before.
And I could feel his erection against my lower belly, already proving me wrong about attraction.
“I shut you down when we were sophomores because I’d been fighting the urge to claim you for more than a year, Cal. If I’d kissed you that day, I would’ve ended up biting you.”
When a bear shifter bit a woman, he was hers for the rest of his life. He could never be with anyone else, physically or mentally.
That didn’t make him stay, though. It just made him loyal no matter the distance between them.
“You’ve told me everything about bears, remember? I know exactly what it was like for your mom. I saw it. I’m not doing that with you ,” I said firmly.
“Why not?”
“Because it’ll break me, Hudson!” I tossed a hand toward his chest. “It’ll be hard enough dealing with a flaky bear I barely know. But you? I actually care about you. So, no. I’m not doing it.” I closed the lid on the takeout food he’d brought for me and put the container on top of his. “You need to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” His voice was still calm.
Calm enough to make me want to rip my hair out.
I pushed his hands off my hips and stormed back to my room, pulling my phone from my pocket and lifting it to my ear.
It rang four times before Hudson’s father answered. “Hello?”
“Hi, Mr. Claw. It’s Callie again.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, it’s just—” I let out a short breath. “Hudson is in my kitchen, claiming that he’s the one who’s going to breed with me.”
“That’s what the clan decided,” he agreed. “It’s standard to pair a woman with the male she’ll get along with best, for the sake of the child. Considering your history, he was the obvious choice.”
“Respectfully, I disagree. Because of our history, Hudson and I won’t be able to coparent peacefully. He spent most of the day, every day, with me for more than thirteen years. I’ll never see a reason he can’t give his child even more dedication.”
“That’s something to discuss with him. The assignment has been made and the contracts signed. Hudson is the only one who can cancel it now. Have a good day, Callie.” He hung up.
I groaned, shoving a hand through my hair.
Hudson knocked on my bedroom door. “We need to leave in twenty minutes, Cal. Come out here and eat.”
I crossed the room and yanked the door open, my face as hot as my temper. “Why are you doing this? This isn’t what you want. This isn’t what I want. I can get along with almost anyone, so there has to be someone else in the clan willing to breed with me.”
He stepped up to me and wrapped his hands around my face, tilting my head back as he leaned his toward me. “I chose this, Callie. My dad asked me who to assign to you, and I couldn’t let anyone else have you. This is what I want. You’re mine. You’ve always been mine.”
“That’s not true. I?—”
He kissed me.
It was just a brush of his lips to mine at first. A whisper of desire.
Then his tongue was in my mouth, and he was kissing me like it was the only chance he’d ever get. Like he was burning, and I could put out the fire.
Like he’d wanted me since we were teenagers, and had finally decided to do something about it.
And I couldn’t help but kiss him back with just as much intensity.
I was gasping for air when he finally pulled away, my heart pounding like a freight train.
“You need to eat while you can,” he said. “Growing a bear cub is extremely hard on a human body.”
“You kiss me like that, and all you can think to say is ‘eat your damn breakfast’ ?”
His lips curved up in a grin. “It was either eat or take your clothes off . Considering I’m supposed to be making sure you don’t fuck anyone before breeding, taking you to bed isn’t exactly a good choice.”
“If you’re the one who’s going to breed me, what would it matter?” I stepped out of his arms and strode back to the kitchen, my heart still beating hard.
“It’s just the way things are done.”
“Like leaving your mate?”
He grimaced. “Yeah.”
I sat down in front of the food. “I find it hard to believe that there aren’t any bear shifters living with their mates. If you guys are willing to pay a woman such an insane amount of money to have a kid for you so bear shifters don’t die out, wouldn’t it make more sense to settle down with her for the long run and have multiple kids?”
“Logically, yes. But most bears can’t stay in one place for that long. Living with your mate while knowing you’ll eventually leave her is crueler than not living with her at all. I don’t keep in contact with anyone in the clan, but there was always one guy who lived with his mate. He was the only one, and is very much an outsider for it.”
“Do you guys just not understand commitment, or what? Because commitment means knowing you might want to leave, but choosing to stay anyway and figuring out a way to enjoy it in the process. Because you made a promise. Or a vow.”
“We don’t make promises or vows.”
“Because you’re all too afraid to commit, and too much of assholes to stay.”
“Eat your breakfast, Cal. You still need to get dressed.”
I was wearing a pair of pajama shorts and a sleep shirt. “If we do this, we’re not going to be friends anymore, Hud. I won’t think positively of you. I won’t be able to stop myself from pointing out your shittyness to my son, so that one day he might grow up to be as good a man as the outsider in your pack who stays with his mate. Tell your dad to pick someone else, so we don’t have to hate each other.”
His jaw set. “I’m physically incapable of letting you mate with anyone else, Callie. There’s no other choice.”
“As long as you understand that it will change everything.”
He jerked his head. “I get it.”
“And I’m going alone to the doctor’s office. We’re not together. Since I’m going through the pregnancy and delivery on my own, you’re not going with me like we’re a couple.”
“I’m your guard right now.” His voice was clipped. “I have to go with you.”
“You can follow me, like the last guard did.”
His chest rumbled with a growl, but he didn’t argue any further. I think he realized I wasn’t playing around. He’d kissed me, and it was even better than I would’ve imagined, but our situation was still the same.
He was a bear shifter, I was a human, and our different cultures when it came to relationships weren’t compatible.
No matter how desperately I’d wanted him for much of my life.
We ate together in silence.
When we were done, he waited on the porch while I got ready. Afterward, he followed me to the clan’s doctor’s office in the truck he’d brought to my house that morning. I recognized it as the one he’d driven when we were teenagers, but didn’t bring it up.
We weren’t a couple.