Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) by Lynn Red Page B

tell when something on your windowsill is a neighbor, and when it’s actually just a bird.
    One of them looked at me, cocked her head to the side and chirped. When I asked if I knew her, she hopped past the larger starling. When he dropped the beetle, presumably to go in for another peck, she grabbed it and flew off.
    That’s when it hit me – I hadn’t gone running in way, way too long. Not like jogging. I do that three times a week. I mean skin running.
    Hopping out of bed, I twisted back and forth a couple times, then bent over backward almost double. My back gave out a series of delightfully relieving pops.
    I pushed open my apartment’s bedroom window. This side of my apartment faced east into the mountain woods that surrounded Jamesburg. I’ve always loved skin-running, even though lately I hadn’t done it very much.
    Something about stripping off all my clothes – and as much as I love my pajamas, feeling the wind all over me is twice as good. Running around free with someone else? Three or four times as good. Easily.
    Just thinking about it got me to grinning and then of course it made me blush because I’m me. I can wrap my legs around a big, strong bear’s waist, but when I’m alone in my apartment taking my clothes off, I’m easy to embarrass. Makes sense, right?
    As soon as that first breeze hit my nose, the first cool whiff of early spring, I immediately forgot all about being embarrassed. Three seconds later, give or take, I was on the ground outside of my window, crouched down.
    I closed my eyes. The fur squeezing out of my pores tickled like hell, like it always does. I had a quick roll in the dewy grass, shook out my long, red coat and stretched my back.
    Downward dog , I thought, stretching my paws out in front of me and relishing the grass against the pads of my feet. More like downward fox, I guess .
    Through the forest I went, off like a shot. As I circled a tree, some cool dirt pushed between my toes. I grabbed a root with my teeth, yanked on it some and took off again.
    The deeper I went into the woods, the deeper my thoughts went into my own head.
    Why don’t I do this every day? I’d be the calmest fox in the whole state , I thought. And it was true – whenever I ran, things just rolled off my back. I figured things out, it all started making sense.
    And then, of course, my thoughts turned to Crag.
    How was he the way he was? In those precious few moments we were together I didn’t feel anything but warmth from him. Even in those blissful seconds before I pulled away when he had a handful of my hair and he was ordering me around and...
    Just thinking about it started getting me all worked up, which is a really, really bad idea when hopping between rocks over a roaring creek.
    I wheeled to a stop, putting on the brakes just as I came to my favorite place in the forest – maybe in the whole world. It isn’t much to look at, but there’s this part of the forest where the trees break away overlooking a creek. On this creek, which kind of meanders, but also has some quicker-moving places where the water swirls around rocks that have been there for who-knows how long.
    But, hanging above the creek is this little outcropping of rocks that I like to sit on. Have since I was a little cub. Whenever something bad happened, even the really silly bad stuff that little girls think is super serious but no one else on earth thinks twice about.
    I remember one time that I was out here, running around. It’s funny, but there isn’t a shred of my being that doesn’t remember. It was Tuesday, the eighteenth of March. Two days after my birthday, which I had at the bouncy-house place in the nearest town big enough to have one. I was in third grade, and my heart broke right down the middle.
    Chad Pensworth. His parents and my parents were good friends – the sort of friends that adults invite over when they need to spend time with other adults. Anyway, we’d always been around each other. He had the