Page 8 of Coveted By the Bear

“Do you know, you don’t have a single gate in your fence line big enough for a truck? I had to borrow a horse from my dad’s barn to get up here.”

An antique looking chair screeched across the floor boards as she dragged it closer. Heavily, she sat. “That’s the way my uncle wanted it.”

“I won’t live through another horse ride,” I told her honestly. “It’s gotta be you. You’re going to have to put me back together. Do you have first aid?”

I expected her to pass out. Or to scream and clutch her chest, or I don’t know, a hundred other reactions that any girl in town would’ve had. Instead, she nodded and disappeared to rustle through what sounded like a drawer full of supplies. She returned and dropped a needle into some peroxide before threading it deftly with a package of sterile sutures.

I arched my eyebrows in surprise. “Have you done this before? Given someone stitches?”

Mira tied a knot in the end and nodded.

“Who?”

“I’ve stitched myself. Now hold still,” she said as she pinched the skin on my neck together firmly.

I gasped at the pain and squeezed my eyes as tightly shut as I could in hopes that it would help. It didn’t. I tried to imagine Mira having to do this to herself but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The pain made me dizzy, and I focused on breathing. Breathe in, breathe out, two stitches down, breathe in, breathe out, another two stitches down. Only a billion more to go if Mira was ever to put Humpty Dumbass, the horseback-riding bear victim, back together again.

It took her two days to sew me back together. That’s what it felt like at least. I waited to pass out from the pain, blood loss, and exhaustion, but I stayed miserably awake. I supposed it was my penance for hurting the girl who was working to save me. I watched her stitch the inside of my arm. I couldn’t move my jaw much with the fresh sutures, but the top of her head bent over my body in concentration, moving only when she wiped more blood away from her work. I didn’t understand how I had so much. How I was even still here, breathing.

I watched a bead of sweat run down the side of her face. It moved as if in slow motion, desperate to seek refuge in the wooden floor boards beneath her feet. To fall with a tiny moist sound to the earth, as drained of energy as I felt. I stared at it until a soft sigh escaped Mira’s lips, and she straightened up, stretching her back. She wiped her face, and the bead of sweat became a small moist smear on the back of her hand, never realizing its goal.

“Done?” I asked in a gravelly voice I barely recognized as my own.

She seemed startled by the sound, and her eyes turned black. She scooted her chair farther away from me and looked at the ground. “It’s the best I could do. I’m out of thread. The rest will have to heal, but you’ll scar. Or maybe not. I don’t know how it works for your kind.”

My kind? “We can match,” I said with a smile that held no humor. I don’t know why I said that. I could tell me knowing about the marks around her neck made her uncomfortable, but my mouth just kept bringing them up. A part of me wished she would just tell me about them already.

She remained silent, too angry or afraid to meet my eyes. Instead, she looked at my chest and abdomen. Her gaze dragged slowly, and I wondered if she liked what she saw. Would a wild and fiercely independent creature such as Mira Fletcher ever look at a man intimately? From the way she stared unashamedly at my body, I thought maybe she wouldn’t ever need a man. Not in the way a town girl like Becca Barns, who’d harbored a crush on me since the tenth grade, would need a man to coddle her, compliment her, and protect her.

“I need to go hunt,” Mira said. “We both need to eat.” She looked shaky and weak, but she stood with a fierce determination. A rifle clicked as she cocked it in the front room.

And just like that, she had answered my question.

Mira didn’t need anyone.

****

Mira

Caleb McCreedy looked a lot better than any man I’d seen in the three Seventeen magazines I had read in one of my foster homes when I was a kid. I put my left hand over my cheek to feel if the skin there was growing hot at the memory of Caleb’s shirtless chest. It was still cool to the touch. My body was apparently too hungry to waste energy on blushing.

No amount of filth or injury or blood could hide that Caleb was fit. Not the rail thin, emaciated look that I had unwillingly adopted in recent years, but the protein and veggies and heavy lifting kind of fit. His chest had flexed with every breath and every flinch of pain, and rippling mounds of muscle across his taut stomach begged for me to touch them, just to see if he was as hard as he looked. Shadows had hovered in the twin creases that dove over his hips and into his jeans, highlighting the light hair that trailed from his belly button down. Thank goodness I hadn’t noticed that before I was done stitching him up or I would have never finished. Instead, I would’ve been petting him like a handsy lunatic.

For some reason I couldn’t understand, the way he looked made me sad. Another beautiful thing I would never touch without it breaking or shuddering. He was a colorful glass-paned window in my black and white existence, and if I dared touch him, the shards would surely cut me deeper than any unkind words ever had. A man like him would never, ever want anything to do with a girl like me.

I knew all about Caleb, his brothers, sisters, and their father, an oil tycoon. Uncle Brady used to talk about them. They were the only family with real money in our sleepy little town. Caleb and I were unarguably from two completely different universes. That much had been made clear with his words at Jake’s Quickstop.

There was no room for someone like me in his world.

I was alien.

Searching the canopy above me for squirrels was the only thing that could pull me out of my revelry now.

There really was no use in mourning the loss of something that had never been mine to begin with.

Chapter Five

Caleb