a chance to fight for what we had.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing!”
When she looked at him, she only saw anger and that was too much.
“I have to get out of here,” she whispered.
“Lydia, no!”
“I have to…”
“Don’t run away again!”
“I just have to…” Hot tears came one after the other. “Just get out of here for a bit. I can’t take that look from you, Eric. Not from you.”
“All you do is leave,” he hissed. There was a ferocity in his voice that made it feel like her heart was shattering in her chest.
She wiped her eyes and nodded. “At least you’re not surprised.”
She shut the door behind her when she fled the suite. She didn’t stop running until she was outside the lodge, heading up into the woods beyond the slopes, shifted and free and far from Eric Strauss’s angry eyes.
25
Eric
Not again.
Eric had a much different feeling this time watching the love of his life run out the door. He’d screwed up. This time, that much was clear. For the first time, he truly realized how much he’d screwed up the first time around. He had always wanted to blame Lydia for breaking his heart. But the two of them had been young and stupid. It was obvious now. Lydia had been just as heartbroken as him.
“Lydia, wait!” He was mostly speaking to himself as she was already rushing down the hall.
This time will be different, he thought.
He ran after her. She was already out of sight by the time he ran out into the hallway, but she was well within range for him to follow her scent. He could have picked it out of a crowd of a million people. He had known it since he was a boy.
Eric followed her outside, chasing along the big paw prints she’d left in the otherwise pristine snow. As soon as he hit the tree line, he shifted, and continued tracking her. But he hardly needed to look at her tracks to know Lydia’s trail exactly as he bounded around firs and pines, a flurry of tiny flakes dusting his thick winter’s coat of reddish brown fur.
Eric gave chase, following that slightly sweet, warm smell that felt like home and also turned him on, all the way off the lodge’s grounds, through the woods, out beyond the ski slopes.
He could feel that he was on the righ track. It was that connection they shared, he thought. It was bringing them together.
I’ll find you this time.
He had never even tried the first time around. She’d vanished but if he’d tried, he might have been able to track her. He hadn’t tried. He was too angry.
He’d always been angry, more angry than he had even realized. But now it all seemed like such a small matter.
Eric found Lydia once she’d stopped running. It hadn’t taken him very long to catch up. Bears, especially shifters, were faster than they looked. Eric had always been a particularly good runner.
As bears, their fur was of a similar coloring. Eric had even joked when they were young about how they looked like a perfect pair. Lydia had dark brown fur with a lighter, auburn belly. Eric was just a couple shades lighter but he also had a reddish belly unlike any of his brothers.
Lydia was standing by a small creek, ducking her head to drink some icy water. She looked like a vision to him as she stood there in the snow. As pretty as a postcard. Her ears perked up. She had sensed him. She had likely sniffed him out a long time ago, but she’d stopped and she wasn’t running now.
Things felt fragile and yet much more peaceful than they had in the lodge suite. Nothing was resolved, but there was a truce, at least, for the moment.
Eric padded through the snow and stood with Lydia looking out at the small stream of water rushing over rocks and chunks of ice. She didn’t move, but he saw her glance up at him with eyes as tear-filled as her human pair.
They had lost so many years, he thought. They had lost out on countless runs and hunts together in the years they’d been apart. They’d missed birthdays and dates and cuddling on Sunday mornings and playing in the woods together. They’d missed reminiscing and bickering.
His bear, always more willing to be more emotional than he was, felt a terrible grief about it all suddenly. He leaned against Lydia, nudging her under the chin with