her stomach. She glanced at Ursula and then away. She wouldn’t look at him.
He put out his hand and took hers. “Come with me, sweetheart.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE—HOLLY
Johnny guided Holly out of Ursula’s room. They left the baby sleeping. Holly suffered a moment of stark terror when he shut the door and tried to lead her away. She didn’t want to leave Ursula alone, even for a second. What if the baby needed her? What if she woke up crying and Holly didn’t hear her in time? Would Ursula think her mother had abandoned her?
Johnny didn’t give her a choice. He pulled her downstairs, through the crowded living room to the stairs leading to his basement. He shut that door, too, and Holly’s skin crawled. She definitely wouldn’t be able to hear Ursula from here.
He didn’t stop until he took her all the way down to his private cave under the house. The familiar smell of sawdust, lacquer, and pine sap seeped from every corner.
She gazed around at the familiar carved columns and furniture. She spent a lot of time here over the last months, but it looked different to her now. She shuddered rubbing her arms. She couldn’t get warm, and she couldn’t stop shaking.
Johnny pushed some stuff around on his workbench and returned to stand in front of her. “What’s wrong? What’s bothering you?”
She said nothing. She looked all around her. She didn’t want to be here, and she didn’t want to talk about what was bothering her. She wanted to run away. She wanted to hurry back to Ursula. Ursula never asked awkward questions like that. Ursula never asked for any explanation of anything.
His eyes found hers, and she realized in an instant that he already understood without her explaining. She wasn’t a bear shifter anymore. She lost the maniacal energy that made her feel so amazing during her pregnancy, but this sinking feeling of hollow, broken agony didn’t come from that.
She tasted the wild abandon of being a bear. She experienced the heady rush of power running through the woods. She smelled the tracks of animals and shifters displayed on the land itself. Now she was just a normal woman like any other. She lost the thing that made her special—not that she was the first female shifter in history. Still, she felt deflated and empty as though some unknown force robbed her of the purest essence of her soul.
That wasn’t strictly accurate. She was human. She never should have been a shifter. Now she returned to her true self, but she couldn’t help aching that it could be otherwise. She wished like anything she could be a shifter. She wished she could become a shifter and stay one. She wanted to be the same thing as these men she loved. She didn’t want to be a different species from them, even if they could love her just as well like this.
He pushed her toward the bed, tucked into the corner. She rubbed her arms even harder when she saw what he intended to do. She concentrated on the quilt folded back and pressed flat against the mattress. New, clean pillowcases covered the pillows. The bed looked cleaner and neater than she’d ever seen it. He definitely wasn’t the same wild, rugged mountain man she had first met. He changed irrevocably. She couldn’t decide if she liked him like this. That wasn’t right. She liked him, but she liked him the other way, too. Her thoughts tumbled in a thousand confusing directions.
Why did everything have to keep changing? Why couldn’t everything stay the same? Things worked fine before. She wanted to petrify everything in time, so nothing ever changed again. She didn’t want Ursula to grow up. She didn’t want herself or the guys to age. She wanted everything to stay like this—peaceful and harmonious.
He sat her down on the bed and took his place next to her. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders the way he did upstairs, but the unwavering steel of his expression told her this wasn’t going to turn into another rabid sex scene after all.
No, he knew exactly what was wrong with her. She became a tenant in her own body when Ursula moved out. She didn’t know herself.
He kissed her once, but not even that contained any hint of escalating to something else. He eased back to regard her. “Do you want to know something weird?”
“What?” she asked.
He sank in on himself and hunched over. He turned to look in front