Chapter 3
Chapter Three
REESE
I've been on her porch ten seconds when the door opens.
I freeze with the carving still in my hand.
Smaller this time, an owl, two nights' work by lamplight in my tower.
Came down at dusk because I wanted her to find it in moonlight, not at dawn.
Stupid. Sentimental. Something I'd have laughed at any of my brothers for, except none of them have ever scented anything like her, so what do they know.
She stands framed in the lamplight, barefoot, wool blanket pulled around her shoulders. Hair down her back, dark against the white of the wool.
She looks right at me.
"You're real," she says.
Her voice is low. Steady. French underneath the English, a softness to the consonants that catches in my chest in a way I don't have the wherewithal to fight.
Up close her scent is something I cannot survive. Glacier and woman and ink and something older than the mountain I'm standing on. My grizzly comes up so hard behind my ribs that my hands shake.
The owl goes on the railing.
"I'm real."
She steps onto the porch. Doesn't close the door behind her. Smart. Whatever she is, she's been alone long enough to know how to read a strange man on her boards, and I don't move because I don't want to be the reason she stops being smart.
"You've been leaving me things."
"Yes."
"Why."
The honest answer takes more words than I have. So I give her the one I've got. "Because I scented you. And I haven't been able to think about anything else since."
She goes still. Whatever she expected me to say, that wasn't it. Her eyes move over my face, the beard, the shoulders, the loose way I'm holding my arms because anything tighter would be a threat.
"You're shifter."
"Yes."
"Grizzly."
"Yes."
She exhales. Long. Like she's been holding it for two weeks. "I knew. The bone was bear and the wood was bear and nobody who isn't would know to leave a deer." Her voice drops. "But I haven't met another bear in four years."
There's a question in that. Not asked. I answer it anyway.
"There are thirty of us in Bear Creek Valley. Grizzlies. My family's run this country a hundred and forty years." I watch her face for something that tells me she knows what I'm circling. "I don't know what you are."
She laughs. It isn't a happy sound.
"No. You wouldn't."
The wind shifts and her scent rolls over me again and my bear presses hard against the back of my skull, asking.
I don't give him permission. There's a woman in front of me with her arms wrapped around herself and grief written into the shape of her mouth, and my grizzly's wants are not the right tool for this moment.
A step back to the rail. Room.
"You don't have to tell me," I say.
She blinks. Surprised.
"You came down off your mountain in the dark to leave me an owl." Her chin tilts. "And now you're telling me I don't have to tell you what I am."
"I'm telling you we just met."
The corner of her mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "Reese Redwood."
That stops me. My name in her mouth, the consonants rounded by the French underneath. I haven't introduced myself.
"Mabel," she says, reading my face. "I went down for supplies on Tuesday. She fed me biscuits and told me there's a Redwood who runs the fire tower up the ridge from my cabin. Said you've been a hermit since you were twenty and she's been worried about you for thirteen years."
"Mabel talks."
We're standing four feet apart in the dark and her scent is in my lungs and my bear is roaring quiet behind my teeth, and I have not wanted anything this much in my entire life.
"Gabi," she says. "Laurent."
I taste the name. Say it back. "Gabi Laurent."
Her breath catches. Small. I hear it because my hearing is what it is and because every cell of me is tuned to her right now, and the catch goes through me lower than I want to admit.
She closes the four feet to two.
I do not move. I cannot move. My grizzly has gone so still inside me that the man I am can hear my own pulse in the soles of my feet.
"Reese." Her hand lifts. Stops short of my chest. "I'm the last polar bear shifter in the lower forty-eight."
Polar.
The word lands in me clean. My bear knew. He's known since the wind shifted two weeks ago, even if I didn't have a name for it. Cold and old and far north, exactly what he'd been telling me, and I didn't believe him because I hadn't known there were any of her kind left to believe in.
The last.
I want to say something useful. What comes out is, "You're alone."
"Yes."
"Up here."
"Yes."
"Writing."
"My grandmother's stories. My mother's. Mine. Somebody should know we existed."
Her hand is still hovering between us, palm down, not quite touching. I look at it. Look at her face. Look at the place where her shoulder meets her neck because I am not strong enough to keep looking at her face.
I am going to kiss her.
The thought arrives quiet. I'm going to kiss her and it's going to ruin both of us, because once I do, my bear is not going to let me unmake it.
I have spent thirteen years content alone in a tower and the woman in front of me is the last of a bloodline that has been dying for a hundred years, and I do not know how to be what she needs.
A man who's been alone that long should pull back. Should set this woman down gentle and walk up the mountain where he belongs.
I take her hand instead.
Slow. Deliberate. So she can pull it back if she wants.
She doesn't. Her fingers close on mine, cold as her scent, smaller than I expected, and the touch goes through both of us like a wire pulled taut.
My bear roars mine.
I bend. Stop with my mouth a breath from hers. Close enough to feel her exhale on my lower lip, close enough that one wrong move on either side and we're done.
"Reese," she says against my mouth.
That's all it takes.
I kiss her.
Soft. Hold of her hand. The other hand braces the rail behind her because the second I put it on her body, I'm not going to stop. Her mouth opens under mine. Once. Slow.
And the woman who came to my mountain to write the only record her people will ever have makes a sound against my lips that my grizzly has waited his whole life to hear.
I pull back before I can do something I can't undo.
Her eyes are open. Pale. Looking at me like she's trying to decide if I'm a problem or an answer, and I can see the moment she decides she doesn't know yet.
"Goodnight, Gabi Laurent."
I step off her porch into the dark.
Don't look back. Can't.
Behind me the door closes soft, and the lamplight in her window stays on a long time after, and I climb back up to my tower with the taste of glacier in my mouth and a grizzly inside me who is never going to be content alone again.