The Lumberjack's Baby Bear Read online

  “Alexis,” she finally says.

  Now it’s my turn to still.

  Alexis.

  Really?

  For a quick second, everything feels hot and cold and like the walls are closing in, but then I shake my head because it’s just a coincidence.

  Unless it’s not.

  “Alexis?” I ask carefully, trying not to let my emotions betray me. “That’s a sort of unusual name, isn’t it?”

  She shrugs.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Not really,” she says nonchalantly. “I mean, I’ve known a few other people with this name.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “That’s personal.”

  “I’m letting you stay here,” I point out the obvious.

  “Cantor,” she says. “Alexis Cantor.”

  Now I really know I’m in deep shit.

  Chapter Two

  Jace

  “What an interesting name,” I say quietly. “And your baby? What’s he called?”

  “Brandon,” she says.

  That’s it, then.

  Something is seriously wrong.

  That’s what we were going to call our baby.

  The baby we lost.

  When this woman, “Alexis,” wandered into my home, I knew something strange was going on. Now she’s given me the name not only of my ex-fiancé, but of the baby the two of us were supposed to have.

  Until they both died.

  I take a deep breath. Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation. Perhaps there’s an easy way to explain how this happened. Perhaps the woman just happens to have the same name as my former partner. Maybe it’s all a coincidence. Maybe this girl was in trouble and simply stole Alexis’ identity. I don’t know.

  All I know is that I need to get to the bottom of things, and it’s hard when she’s so very beautiful. This woman looks nothing like Alexis did. Nope. Not at all. She’s soft and curvy: not hard and rigid. Alexis always had to be in control, in charge. She always had to be on top of everything. This girl? Well, she seems lost.

  Like, really lost.

  And somehow, I get the impression that she’s completely wrapped up in something she isn’t prepared for.

  “Why don’t you try again?” I ask her gently.

  “Excuse me?” She tenses.

  The baby starts to wiggle and fuss a little bit, and she looks down at him.

  “He needs a bottle,” she says. “Here.” She shoves the kid into my arms, and I hold him as she makes a bottle. I look down at the little guy and I can’t help but smile at the way his fingers wrap around mine. He’s tiny: probably only a few months old.

  Is this what my son might have looked like?

  It’s a dangerous method of thought. I know that. It’s a bad idea to wonder about what might have happened or what could have happened if things had been different, but that’s me. I’m not always the cleverest person in the world.

  “How old is your baby?” I ask.

  Hesitation.

  “Um,” she says.

  I look over and see her staring at the bottle.

  “You’re either the world’s worst mother or the world’s worst liar,” I tell her.

  “Excuse me?” She whirls around, hands on hips, and glares at me. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You tell me,” I say. “Alexis.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she says. She turns back to finish making the bottle.

  “I think you do,” I say.

  I can see how tense she is. Hell, I can smell the anxiety and the frustration wafting off of her. Something is wrong, but she’s either a part of it or she doesn’t know how to ask for help.

  She turns around and for the first time, she looks scared.

  “Are you one of them?” She asks. “How could you be one of them?” Her eyes dart to the door and back to me. She’s thinking of running. Is that it? I’ve got the baby though, and besides, she won’t make it very far in the storm.

  “One of who?”

  “Them,” she says, and her voice sounds scared.

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but I want to help you.”

  She just shakes her head.

  “Why don’t we start with your real name?” I ask her.

  She looks up at me. Tears start streaming down her face and I can see how it must be completely overwhelming to her. No matter what happens next, everything is about to change. She’s about to change. It’s all about to change. I don’t know what she’s running from or what she’s running toward, but one thing is for certain: this woman isn’t Alexis Cantor.

  “Polly,” she finally says.

  “Okay, Polly, why don’t you tell me why you’re running around using the name of my dead fiancé?”

  Her entire body stills, and she shakes her head.

  “No,” she whispers.

  “I consider myself to be pretty patient, but this entire shock-and-awe factor is kind of wearing thin,” I tell her. “No? Again? What’s with that?”

  “You can’t be him,” she whispers. “Jace?”

  Instantly, my inner bear growls. My name. How does she know my name? More importantly, how does she know who I am in relation to Alexis? If she knows my name, then she knows a lot more than she’s letting on, and I’d be willing to bet that she’s about to tell me something I’m not supposed to know.

  I look down at the little baby in my arms, and that’s when it hits me. I realize, suddenly, why he’s so comfortable with me. Most babies wouldn’t let a stranger hold them. Not like this. Most babies wouldn’t want someone they didn’t know or trust to be the one rocking them, but this baby doesn’t seem to mind me one bit.

  Which means he knows me.

  And he knows me because he’s my son.

  “She didn’t die in the car accident, did she?” I ask. I don’t look up at Polly, though. I keep looking down at Brandon because if I look up at her, I’m going to have to find out the truth, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to.

  Six months ago, I laid my fiancé to rest.

  She died in a car crash while pregnant with our child.

  She died carrying the child we were going to love, going to raise, going to give our lives to.

  She died, and I left everything behind and locked myself out in the mountains.

  “No,” the woman whispers. “She didn’t die.”

  I swallow hard.

  “So, it was a lie?”

  “You have to understand, Jace. She did it to protect you.”

  “Where is she?” I ask. “Why are you here with our baby?”

  “She’s...she’s gone, Jace.”

  So, she wasn’t dead then, but now she is. How convenient.

  “How can I trust anything that you say?” I ask, and the woman starts fishing around in her diaper bag for a minute before pulling something out.

  “She told me that if there was ever trouble to come find you,” Polly says. “She said you’d be in the mountains, and you’d be angry, and that this would explain everything.

  She hands me something and I know even before I touch it what it is. It’s the locket I gave her as an engagement gift. Oh, she got a ring, of course, but I couldn’t leave it at that. I was too excited, so I gave her a locket with pictures of us inside, and now I’m holding it in my hand.

  I look at it, and my heart hurts, aching as I stare at the gift that I had so carefully selected for her. Then I look up at Polly.

  “Please,” I whisper, finally feeling myself break. “Tell me what happened.”

  Chapter Three

  Polly

  Alexis told me a lot of things about Jace, but she never told me that he was handsome, or that he was kind, or gentle, or hot.

  She didn’t tell me that he had loved her so very deeply that she had broken him.

  And she didn’t tell me that he would be staying in this tiny little cabin in the middle of nowhere. She’d directed me toward a town, and I’d b
een on my way when the storm hit.

  “She told me you’d be in Storm Haven.”

  “That’s on the other side of the mountains,” he says.

  “That’s where she thought you were living,” I tell Jace. “And she said that if anything went wrong, I was supposed to take the baby and get there and you’d know what to do.”

  He sighs and rubs his head like he can’t take any more of this. For a second, I think he’s going to hand me the baby and run outside and shift. That’s what he is, I know. He’s a shifter. He’s a bear. Alexis told me that part. She said that her son deserved to know his father and that if everything went wrong, Jace was the only person who could help.

  “Tell me what happened,” he says. “Knowing Alexis, it’s not what I thought.”

  “She loved her secrets.”

  “Loved them,” he agrees. Then he scoffs, almost angrily, but stops. “Okay, hit me with it. I’m not getting any younger, and waiting isn’t going to make this hurt any less.”

  “Alexis and I were childhood friends,” I tell him honestly, and strangely, the truth feels easier to share than I thought it would be. “We did everything together.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “It was nice. She was nice.”

  He smiles sadly, and I know he’s thinking about all of their happy memories. I know he’s thinking about all of the time they shared together. He doesn’t know what I know, though, and there’s no easy way to tell him the truth: the reality. There’s no easy way to drop the honest information on this guy without making it hurt.

  “Did she ever talk about her dad?”

  “Nope.”

  “Never?”

  “Not once,” he says. “I assumed he died.”

  “To her, he did. He was an asshole.”

  He chuckles.

  “Doesn’t surprise me. She was a tough girl. It makes sense that she was raised in a place where she had to be.”

  “Yeah, well, he was a little more than that. He was kind of...”

  “What?” He looks up at me. “A mobster? A serial killer? An abuser? Lay it on me, Polly. Can’t get any worse than this. Can’t get any worse than not knowing.”

  “He was a dirty cop,” I tell him. “And he controlled every aspect of her life. When she left, she left for good, and she didn’t tell anyone where she was going.”

  “Why would she leave?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Um, hmm, let me think,” he says. “Did Daddy want her to marry his second-in-command who was also a huge prick?”

  “Yep.”

  “No.”

  “Yep.”

  “That sounds like something from a bad movie.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Well, the truth kind of sucks. No offense.”

  “She left home when she found out what they were planning. She didn’t bother wasting time talking to her dad about it. She just ran.”

  “Where?”

  “Straight into your arms, apparently.”

  I think about everything she told me about the shifter man who swept her off her feet. He was perfect, she’d told me. He was perfect and kind and so very not like her dad, Greg, or her intended beau, Andrew. They both believed that a woman should be kept in a certain place, and that place was planted firmly beneath their heels.

  Jace seems distraught by this news and I know that what I’m telling him must be a complete shock. I mean, it’s been a complete shock to me, and I’m the one who’s lived the past 24 hours in this chaos.

  Brandon starts to fuss, and I remember the bottle.

  “Here,” I thrust it at Jace. “He’s hungry. You can be the one to feed him, but you need to do it now. Otherwise, he’ll just get more upset.”

  “Yeah,” he says, but he seems to sort of be reacting on autopilot at this point. “Of course. The bottle.” He gives the bottle to the baby, and Brandon instantly starts drinking hungrily. Soon he’ll pass out and we can make him a little nest or something to sleep in. We’ll figure something out. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.

  Jace looks at the baby like he still can’t believe this is happening, but I can’t, either. None of this seems real. It all feels like a horrible nightmare.

  “She didn’t die in the car accident,” Jace says.

  “No.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “Her dad found her,” I shrug. “What else?”

  She had been so careful. When Alexis left, she left. She walked away from our little world and she never looked back. She never told anyone where she was going, or even that she was going. She just walked away. Even I didn’t know where she had gone until it was too late. When she showed up on my doorstep six months ago, I didn’t know where to start, so I did everything that I could for her. I did everything she asked

  It still wasn’t enough.

  “She wanted to protect you,” I said.

  “By breaking my heart?” Jace looks up at me suddenly, and I’m surprised to see tears in his eyes. Sensitive guy, I see. No wonder Alexis loved him so much.

  “She didn’t want you to be at risk. They found her, but they didn’t find you. It was only a matter of time, Jace. She faked her own death, so they’d stop looking and they’d leave you alone. Her plan was to come back to you one day. Once it was safe, she wanted to come back to you.”

  “With guys like that, the only safety is in their deaths.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “So, you’re her friend?” He asks. He looks me up and down, and for a brief second, I wonder if he finds me attractive. I definitely, totally, absolutely find him attractive. He’s very handsome, but there’s something else there. There’s a certain charm when it comes to Jace. I can’t quite explain it. He just seems like he’s a genuinely nice person. He seems kind.

  He seems...

  Well, to be honest, he seems wonderful.

  Hot.

  Sexy.

  Sensitive.

  When I walked in the house and he fisted my hair for getting mouthy, I almost had a damn orgasm just from that. I need to watch myself or things could get very, very wild. Trapped in a cabin during a storm is a recipe for disaster, especially when you’re trapped with Mr. Tall, Dark, and Growly.

  “Yeah, we grew up together.”

  “Oh,” he smiles softly. “I remember.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She talked about you,” he says. “A lot.”

  “What?” She did? What did she have to say? Alexis and I had been close, once upon a time. We’d been like sisters. When she left and ran off to live among the shifters, something died inside of me. I spent almost a year looking for her before she showed up on my doorstep. That’s how much time she had with Jace. A year. She had an entire year to fall in love with this man, and suddenly, I realize that she must have cherished every second of it.

  “She called you Holly.”

  “Of course, she did. I always hated when people got my name wrong.”

  “It’s close.”

  “Not the same.”

  “She said you were like a sister to her.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “That you wouldn’t approve of her moving away from your hometown to come live with the bears,” he smiles.

  “She didn’t tell you that she ran off, did she?”

  “I kind of figured as much, love. Nobody shows up in bear country without being on the run from something. No human, anyway.”

  “You never asked her? You never wanted to find out what she was running from?”

  He shrugs and then looks at me carefully, considering how much he’s going to say.

  “Alexis, you’ll come to see that I’m a very patient man. I’m not about to get upset because someone doesn’t want to share information with me. She would have told me eventually. She would have told me once she was ready.”

  I swallow hard.

  Alexis really broke him, didn’t she?

  I can’t
imagine how scared or horrified he must have been when he found out she was dead the first time. I can’t imagine how he must have felt when he discovered that she had passed away and that not only was she gone, but their baby was, too.

  “Her dad found her,” I say, feeling the need to continue the story.

  “How?”

  “She got a new job,” I say.

  “At the call center,” he sighs, knowing what I’m talking about.

  “Someone recognized her and phoned her dad.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “You can say that again. I guess he came to her when she was at work. She took off.”

  “That explains why she left work early that day,” Jace says. “No one could figure out why. Not the people who worked there. Not the cops. Nobody seemed to understand why little Alexis would have left in such a rush or why she would have run her car off a bridge.”

  “They thought it was suicide?”

  He shrugs.

  “Nobody who knew Alexis ever thought it was suicide. We just didn’t know.”

  Chapter Four

  Jace

  “Let’s put the baby to bed,” she says gently. I look down and realize that Brandon has fallen asleep in my arms. He’s no longer sipping on the bottle and in fact, there’s a drop of milk on his cheek where the nipple leaked just a little.

  “I don’t have a crib,” I say, suddenly nervous.

  I don’t have anything.

  Not anything that a little baby bear might require.

  If I had been prepared, I would have set up everything my son could have possibly needed, but I wasn’t prepared. I’m not prepared. Not for this. When I woke up, I never imagined that someone like Polly would walk through my doors or that she’d hand-deliver my own kid to me.

  Then again, that’s life, right?

  It’s no fun if it doesn’t keep you on your toes every now and then.

  “Where?” I ask. “I don’t have a crib.”

  “We could put him on the bed,” she says slowly, gesturing toward the bedroom, but then I have an idea.