I could right now. This was just a dream, so she wouldn’t wake up and find herself marked. My lips peeled back, revealing my fangs, saliva pooling in my mouth. Maybe this would ease her into the bond, make clear how good it would feel. A snarlbuilt in my chest, the bear at war with me. He knew exactly what we needed to do and I…
The muffled sound of a child crying had me jerking my head back, searching the darkness for its source.
A door had formed where there wasn’t one before, and for some reason that had me pulling free. I padded over, the sound of crying growing louder the closer I got. It soon became obvious why. As I opened the door, I saw a little girl with a familiar halo of dark hair. Harper. She clung to her pillow, shoving her face deep into it, hoping to mute her cries.
But not muffling them enough, it appeared.
A woman with Harper’s eyes strode into the room, a bathrobe hastily wrapped around her.
“What’s going on?” There was no softness in the woman’s face as she surveyed the room. “Why are you making all that noise?”
But she wasn’t. Even when Harper peeled the pillow from her face, revealing a tear-streaked mess, her sobs were mostly silent.
“Harper…”
For a moment, I thought the woman would act appropriately, because she walked over to the bed and sat down, then wrapped an arm around the child. Child Harper scrambled closer, pressing her face into her mother’s shoulder.
“Da—Daddy…”
Harper was hysterical and unable to hold any of this back anymore. The floodgates opened and her sobs grew in sound and intensity. The woman, who I assumed was Harper’s mother, shook her head and held her daughter close.
“I know, sweetheart. I know.” She rubbed big circles on her daughter’s back, her dressing gown getting more and more sodden as time went on.
“I want my daddy!”
The woman held Harper closer, rocking her back and forth, so the little girl was spared the look in her mother’s eyes. They stared into the darkness, unfocussed and yet hardened.
“He’s not coming back, Harper, I told you that. He’s just not.”
I don’t know how long the crying went on for. Grief had a weird timelessness about it, misery stretching on and on. Then a masculine voice came from beyond the door.
“Honey, are you coming back to bed?”
When the mother pressed a kiss to Harper’s forehead, I discovered just how hard it was to control dreams. I couldn’t keep her where she was, comforting her child. I couldn’t step forward and tell him to piss off. Instead, the woman pulled away from young Harper, even as the girl tried to claw her mother closer.
“Go back to sleep, Harper,” she said in a firm voice as she stood in the doorway. “Everything will be better in the morning.”
But it wasn’t, I was willing to bet. Child Harper curled up tightly in her bed, wrapping her limbs around herself, hugging her own body in the absence of a caring adult. She didn’t sleep, her breathing didn’t even out. Instead, she just lay there, wide eyed and alone in the darkness.
I couldn’t even stay with her. The sound of my alarm had me sitting up in bed. With a blink, I reached for my phone and turning the alarm off, only to find a message had come in overnight.
Remember, the fair is on tonight, Mum said.Come and bring Harper. Your dads are about ready to stage an intervention.
Maybe we had it all wrong. Maybe introducing Harper to our families was a smart thing. Her mother’s treatment of her had my teeth grinding together. Maybe if she saw she had a wholemassive extended family network to step into, that might have her letting her guard down.
Only one way to find out.
I tapped out a quick message, inviting Harper to the fair the bear community was holding to raise money for the shifter school we had built.
Chapter 21
Harper
It was only the mornings I was running late for work that shit went down.
First, I slept through my alarm. Getting multiple orgasms, even if they were in a dream, would do that to a girl. I was simmering in a warm haze of pleasure when Daria staggered into my room to wake me up.
“Your bloody alarm has been going off all morning!” she grumbled, because we had very different hours. The bar had her working nights when I worked mornings, so this was the equivalent of me being woken up in the middle of the night. With a mumbled apology, I turned off my alarm and stumbled into the shower, right when I saw what time it was. I had the world’s fastest shower, dragging my still damp uniform on before making a run for the door, only to find my mother standing there.
