Page 28 of Next Door Midlife Alpha
Will put his hand out. “Thanks, Dill. You’re a much bigger man than I’ll ever be. I’m sorry about all this, and I’m sorry about what happened with Stacey and her kid, too. I’ll find a way to fix it.”
As he looked into his brother’s face, Dylan knew he meant it. He didn’t even mind Will calling him Dill this time. “I know you will.”
Turning toward the ladder at the back of the boat, Dylan glanced toward shore. He spotted a familiar figure out on the beach, looking in his direction.It was Stacey. She stood stock-still, and even from a distance, he could tell she’d seen far more than two men on a boat. His stomach sank as he lowered himself into the water and began to swim back.
He might’ve handled his issues with Will, but now he had a whole new problem to contend with.
15
Stacey blinked.She took in everything else around her, trying to figure out if she’d just had some sort of wild hallucination. There was no way she just saw two bears on a boat. And there was definitely no way that one of them had suddenly turned into Dylan. She gripped the fence around her yard, noting the way the wood felt under her hand and how the bits of sand that’d made their way into her flip-flops were grinding against the balls of her feet. That sense of grounding and pure reality could make her feel better on all sorts of occasions. She’d even used it when she’d been recovering from her injury back in Newton, when she had nightmares about falling off that ladder or when she woke up thinking she was still in thehospital. Right now, though, she wasn’t sure if anything would help.
Dylan, a very human man whose body she knew quite well, stepped out of the water. He’d been watching her ever since he’d left Will’s boat, distracted only by the swim back to shore. Stacey’s eyes traced over his frame. It, like everything else around her, seemed very real and familiar. So what the hell had she just seen?
“Can I talk to you for a second?” she called. Stacey wasn’t sure it was a good idea. Something was obviously happening that she didn’t understand. But her earlier visit with him had shown her that she still had such a deep attraction to him, and he felt the same for her. If it hadn’t been for that, she might’ve just gone straight into the house and poured herself a stiff drink. Or maybe she would’ve called her therapist.
“Of course.” He stepped into his yard to snag a towel from the line. His mouth was a hard slash in his face, turned down slightly as he rubbed the water droplets from his torso and hair. “Come on over.”
She would’ve really enjoyed watching that show if it hadn’t been for the other, more bizarre one she’d just seen a moment earlier. Her stomach jumpedrope with her intestines as she crossed through the gate and into his yard. She pushed out a deep breath, reminding herself that Dylan had shown himself as a safe person to be with. He loved his daughter and had been kind to Stacey’s children. He would listen to her explain what she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—and wouldn’t criticize her for it. He was a man who relied on the logical root of things, and it would be fine.
Right? Or was that all just as much of a delusion as everything else? Her balance was off as she made her way up onto the patio, as though all the thoughts pinging around her mind were keeping her from walking steadily. She lowered herself into the padded chair next to him, crashing into it much harder than she’d meant to. “Is there a gas leak around here?”
“What?” He draped the towel around his neck and leaned forward.
She closed her eyes firmly for a moment. “I mean, that would at least make some sense, right? If there were a gas leak, this would pan out. That does things to people. Perfectly sane people.”
Now it was Dylan’s turn to take a deep breath. He reached out, his fingers gentle against her skin as hetook her hand. “You’re not crazy, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“You only think that because you didn’t see things from my perspective.” Stacey gripped his hand, trying to find some basis where she could truly start this conversation and build it up. This felt harder than the most pivotal presentations she’d ever had to make at Martin Marketing. There, she only had to convince a client to buy an ad campaign. Here, she had to convince Dylan that she’d seen something so completely out of this world. “I was just standing at my kitchen sink washing dishes. I looked up, and I saw Will’s boat rocking wildly in the water. I don’t know much about boats, but I knew that something had to be wrong. I stepped outside, thinking maybe I should get you, but then I realized there were twobearson that boat. Bears, Dylan. Big, black, furry bears like the ones that belong in the woods.”
“I know there were,” he replied softly, much to her surprise. “And you saw more than just that, didn’t you?”
He believed her. Stacey hadn’t been entirely sure that she’d believed herself up until this point. The air rushed out of her lungs as the scene replayed in her head, and it took her a moment to get up enoughbreath to continue. “And then the bears were gone. Or, not gone. They changed. They changed into humans. One of them…changed into you.” It still sounded crazy, especially when she said it out loud.
“Stacey.” He paused and cleared his throat before continuing. “Wow, this is a really hard thing to tell someone. I never have before because people like me have been fighting for hundreds of years to keep our secret under wraps. But yes, I changed into that bear, and then changed back. I’m a shifter.”
She let her eyes glide over his body, studying the hard curve of his strong shoulders, the long lines of his arms, the smattering of dark hair on his chest. “I don’t understand. I saw it with my own eyes, but I...”
His dark eyes were wide and worried as he pulled her hand over onto his knee. “I was born this way. I spend most of my time just as you see me right now, but that black bear is always a presence inside me. It’s the opposite when the bear form is what you see on the outside. I can control it, too, so I can be whichever I want, whenever I want.”
It was a good thing she’d already witnessed this, or she might not believe it. She might think this was just some ploy on his part because he was too chicken to break up with her, or that he needed a one-way trip to the nuthouse. “There’s no…reason behind this? It justis?” Her brain was searching hard for some practical cause.
“Yes, you could say that. I know it’s a lot to take in, and that’s precisely why we don’t tell anybody.” He swallowed as he looked down at their joined hands.
“We?” she asked weakly.
Dylan nodded. “There are shifters all over the world, Stacey. We’re not all bears, either. Some of us are lions or wolves, or even other animals. I told you I was born this way, and I meant that quite literally. It’s genetic. All the rest of my family is like this, as well.”
“Lila.” She said the name more than asked it, holding a mental image of Dylan’s daughter in her mind and trying to imagine the sweet teenager who’d been so loving with her children as some wild beast.
“And all the rest. Will, too.”
Her throat was growing tighter. Hearing him not only admit that what she’d seen was correct but explaining how much more there was behind it all wasn’t making her feel any better. With her free hand, she gripped the arm of her chair so tightly that the metal dug into her palm. “The other bear on the boat.”
“Yes. My other brothers, too, but the one you would’ve seen just now was Will.”
Two nearly identical men. Two identical bears. The ratio worked, but the math still didn’t quite add up in her head. She’d convinced herself only a moment ago that Dylan was a safe person to come talk to, but that was when she’d expected soothing words about being overstressed or worried. This wasn’t at all what she thought would happen. “They—you—were fighting.”
This earned another long sigh from Dylan. “Yeah, we were. It was a long time coming. My brother and I have some issues that go way back. I won’t bore you with the details, but we’ve patched things up now. I’m sure it looked scary, but everything is fine.”
