Page 2 of Bear's Rejected Love

“Of course I’m interested. That’s what I was doing in Maine. I knew that the clan didn’t exist anymore, but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t find anyone.”

“And that made you feel betrayed, after you walked out on all of us nearly a decade and a half and never looked back?” She shouldn’t snap. She took a calming breath and pursed her lips at him.

“If I hadn’t left, I would have had to reject you as a mate. It would have humiliated you. Your parents practically raised me. They never would have forgiven me, and Denver would have had my balls.”

“And running off was better? Everyone would have got over it, Roan. You didn’t have to leave. We were mated. That’s as good as being married to the rest of the world. We were allowed to find each other attractive.”

“You knew I could never love you.”

“I didn’t know that. Your leaving seemed to prove that you actually did feel something.”

She didn’t need to wind him up. She was just telling the truth.

He reacted to it by crossing his huge arms over his chest, the muscles doing a number on the limits of that fabric’s ability to stretch without tearing. “I was trying to spare you from being humiliated. You were in love with me. It was better for everyone if I just left. You were free to choose another mate and live your life without someone who could never be what you wanted.”

“How self-sacrificing. Did it ever occur to you that you broke my heart?”

Great. Just let it all out. He doesn’t care about what you feel. He didn’t then and he doesn’t now. This isn’t even about you and it isn’t about him. It’s about Corbin.

“We were both young. You could have picked another and found real love and happiness with them.”

“That sounds like an epic load of copping out shit. Don’t give me that ‘young’ crap, you were twenty-nine and I was twenty-eight.”

Roan’s brows went skyward. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” At least he looked slightly lost, but then, he always had when it came to anyone getting emotional around him. “If you spent all this time hunting me down just to get an apology, then I’ll give you one. You deserve it, truly. I knew I was hurting you by leaving, but I honestly thought it was the best thing I could do for you and for everyone. I had no living relatives. I was an adult. I could make it in the world.”

“You were leaving your own blood clan behind. What did it matter that they weren’t in your family line? You had friends. You never spoke to Denver again. Do you have any idea how hard that was—” She cut herself off. This wasn’t going the way she needed it to go. She’d promised herself that the past was the past and she was here to talk in present terms. She hadn’t done that. At all. “I didn’t come here for that. I came because—” A sharp, thin wail sounded from inside the house.

It was unmistakably a young baby’s cry.

What the hell? Roan had a home. A new clan. He had a family. And he had a child. Perhaps children.

The cry was cut off by a woman’s voice. Sweet and soothing, it erupted into a lovely melody high and loud enough to be heard through the closed door. The log cabin couldn’t buffer the pure loveliness of it.

Of Roan’s mate.

“I shouldn’t have come,” Tabitha gulped. Somehow, the knowledge that Roan had moved on made her feel as if she’d break into pieces. She turned and sprinted down the steps so fast that she nearly lost her footing and tripped straight over them into the dirt. Did it do nothing but rain in Washington? The gray, dreary, lingering winter months that eventually handed over to spring wasn’t apparently just a Maine thing.

“Tabitha, wait.”

Damn him and his easy ability to catch up with her in a few strides. Damn his insanely cut jaw and his body that still looked so good in casual, unimpressive clothing. Damn him for looking as fit and healthy and as hot as he had all the years she’d known him. In her memory, he was still twenty-nine, the age he was when he left. Aside from a few silver streaks in his hair and a few extra fine lines around his eyes and his sensual mouth, he was just as carved out as he had been in the prime of his youth.

Fuck you, Roan.

That wasn’t nice and she knew it. She had nothing to apologize for, but she did need his help and she wouldn’t get it by planting stingers and barbs into him. She’d had a decade and a half to make peace with the past. She wasn’t grudging or bitter. It was just… seeing him again was such a shock, no matter what she’d done to prepare herself for it.

So what if Roan had moved on and had a family? It wasn’t like she’d come here to strike up old flames. Despite that, she was ashamed of the words that sprung to her lips. “You know we’re still technically mates. You never renounced me or rejected me, and I never went through that after you left.” Having to blink hard to clear a haze of tears certainly didn’t lower her level of current humiliation. Her face was on fire.

Roan slashed a hand through the air. “Mates by clan law and nothing more.”

“Oh,” she whispered. “I see how distasteful it still is to you. You’re right. It’s not like it was by choice. Mates by law is different than mating with someone or finding your mate. I’m glad you found her. You deserve to be happy.”

Roan should have been nothing more than old faded out writing on the walls of her heart. Even if his name had once been etched there, she should long ago have shed that lining and grown a fresh skin that became scar tissue over the letters of his name and all the memories that went with his existence.

She suddenly felt bone weary. She was beyond physically tired, after searching for Roan for so many months. After trying to control her son’s wild behavior. She couldn’t do it. He was increasingly erratic. He was going to get out of control if she didn’t find a way for him to channel that energy. Someone was going to find out he was a shifter and if that ever happened, she couldn’t imagine what would happen to him. As a mother, it made her feel like a failure. It didn’t matter if teenagers were hard, and shifter teenagers, with that extra dose of hormones and that extra dose of trying to find their way through life in that body was doubly hard. She still felt horribly inadequate.

Roan hard blinked those icy blues at her. His eyes hadn’t changed either. They were still just as hauntingly lovely, as hard and as hollowed out as they used to be. “I never took another mate. I didn’t want to be mated the first time. It was a never again scenario for me.”

“You’ve remained a true martyr then.”