Page 24 of Forget Me Not (The Shifters of Timberfall #1)
Bastien
A smile had permanently glued itself to his face.
Bas could not remember the last time he smiled this much.
After sneaking home to roll the Jeep out of the driveway so he could start it down the block and avoid having to talk to Cyrus, he drove across town to Thyme to Eat where he had been a little shocked to find three entire bags waiting with his name on them.
He slid out of the Jeep’s seat, arms laden with bags of food, and started up the walkway. He had taken advantage of the slowly warming weather and taken the doors off the vehicle, a decision which was now proving to be quite handy .
The door opened as he got closer. Syve was standing in the entry with a little girl on her hip and a genuine smile on her face. Her copper hair was in a messy ponytail—one that looked like it had started at the back of her head but was now well off to the side.
Bas deduced the reasoning for that when the child reached out and latched onto the dangling strands where they hung over Syve’s shoulder and began rubbing the hairs between her fingers absently as she stared at him.
He kept walking until he was directly in front of her.
“Hi.”
Why did he sound so out of breath?
“Hi.”
That smile.
“Hi! Are you mac and cheese man? Annie Sy, is he the mac and cheese man?” the toddler basically hollered, sending Syve into a giggling fit.
“My name is Bas, and I guess, yeah, I’m the mac and cheese man.”
He chuckled. Syve looked down at his arms, eyes widening and then jumped back a step to give him room to enter the home.
“Sorry! Come in! I didn’t realize I had ordered so much…” Her cheeks reddened and she spun around leading him to the kitchen. He smiled, shaking his head as he followed.
Bas was reclined into the couch cushions, waiting for Syve to come down once Kayla was asleep.
After demolishing some of the best pasta he had ever eaten, though he would never admit that to his mother, the toddler had proclaimed herself ‘Kayla the Unicorn Princess’ and demanded everyone play castle with her until bath time.
Which they did.
When Syve finally looked around, asking what time it was, it was almost eight.
“Baby girl!” she gasped. “We’re late for the underwater ball!”
Both girls ran dramatically to the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later they emerged, Syve nearly soaked through with a sleepy toddler blinking slowly in her arms.
“Nigh-nigh mac and cheese man.”
She had mumbled as Bastien backed out of the little girl’s room and switched off the light, leaving only the lamp to illuminate the room.
“Goodnight, Unicorn princess,” he had whispered back.
Soft footsteps sounded and then Syve appeared in the den.
“Thanks for waiting. She didn’t even make it through one whole page of her book before she was out.”
She made her way over and sat on the couch, not exactly the opposite end, but not quite next him either .
“She’s adorable,” he mused and she nodded with a smile. “You’re really good with her.”
Her smile dulled a fraction, her eyes looking suddenly unfocused.
“I’ve known her since she was about four months old. As far as she knows, I’m her aunt for real.”
Now she was studying her hands in her lap.
“Lack of blood doesn’t make you any less her aunt for real.
” He cocked his head, studying her as if he could figure out all her secrets if he looked hard enough.
“Four months old…I guess I just assumed, after all the stories you’ve told me, that you knew Cameron a lot longer than that. How did you meet?”
Syve shrank into herself, pulling her knees up to hug them to her chest.
Brows furrowed, he replayed everything he’d just said over and over again, failing to see what could have made her shut down.
After a long moment she finally whispered, “Long story short? Kayla is a week younger than my son. She needed a little help and I was capable of doing it, so our midwife connected us.”
Son .
Bas flashed back to the first night he had seen her, when he inspected the tombstone after she had left.
Her son .
He felt a crushing weight settle over his body, his heart aching from pain that didn’t belong to him. How had he not made that connection on his own?
Sitting forward and resting his elbows on his knees he whispered, “How?”
She took a shuddering breath and he immediately regretted his question.
“I’m sorry, don’t answer that. That was insensitive,” he amended.
Deep inhale in and slow exhale out, then she said, “You already know I lost Erhard, my husband.” Her voice broke.
Bastien waited patiently, understanding the amount of effort it would take to tell this story.
Syve cleared her throat.
“Noah…my son.”
It was impossible to miss the quiver in her words.
“Both of them—” She sniffled.
He wanted to stop her, to tell her she did not need to continue, then she looked straight at him, unshed tears filling her eyes—she needed to tell their story.
“There was an issue with our heater. We never had it serviced—didn’t even know that was a thing.
We’d only ever rented before the loft…They said there must have been a crack in the vent or something.
We must have had a small carbon monoxide leak for who knows how long and…
one day, it just broke— split wide open and flooded the house.
They couldn’t explain why it happened.” She shuddered .
“I wasn’t home that day. I had gone to Bozeman with Aimi—I just wanted to pick out some fabric.
It was really cold that day, the heater would have been running non-stop to keep the apartment warm—they told me it might not have happened so fast if it hadn’t been running so much.
” Tears were freely running down her cheeks.
“Routine checks of your furnace are very important, at least once a year, and if you don’t have any CO detectors in your house, you should really fix that immediately,” she concluded, sniffling and raising her arm to wipe her face with her shoulder.
No wonder she flinched when he joked about her keeping her shop cold out of spite toward her heater—and CO detectors?
He could honestly say he had never once even considered whether their house had carbon monoxide detectors.
Actually, he couldn’t be sure he even knew they existed before that very moment.
Well, he was absolutely planning to check for them as soon as he got back home.
It occurred to him that he was silently staring at her.
“Bambi. I am so sorry—I know that doesn’t mean anything, but still.”
He wanted to scoot over and hold her, to wipe away the tears that were staining her beautiful face.
“Is that why you don’t want to talk about your brother? He’s gone too, isn’t he?”
Bas ran his hands over his face and up onto his head, then sagged back into the couch .
“Yeah. He’s gone too.” He sighed. “His name was Desiderio. We shifted and went for a run…there was a poacher. I didn’t notice in time.”
Syve covered her mouth with her hand, a look of horror in her eyes.
“You were there?”
Leaning to the side, he pulled down his shirt collar, showing her the scar that covered the right side of his neck from spine to collar bone.
“I noticed something was off—I saw the glint from the gun…I was too slow. He gave me this trying to get me to leave him.”
He froze when he felt her trembling fingers tracing the scar. He hadn’t noticed that she had moved close enough to reach him. Without thinking he reached back, covered her hand with his and turned his head just enough to meet her gaze.
They stayed that way, neither moving an inch, until the sound of Syve’s phone vibrating on the coffee table made her jerk away before she reached for it.
Groaning, she swiped her phone open and began rapidly typing.
“Sorry, it’s Gunther.”
She aggressively finished sending her message and then slapped her phone back down on the table .
“I was going to ask the other day; how do you know him? Pardon me for being so blunt, but he’s kind of an asshole. He’s not exactly the company I would picture you to keep.”
Syve scoffed, “Oh, there’s no kind of about it. He’s a raging asshole, but he’s family, kinda. I guess that’s why I put up with him. He’s Erhard’s cousin.”
“You poor thing.”
They both laughed at that.
“But I get it. I told you we had a house guest—it’s my brother’s best friend. He annoys the hell out of me, but he’s basically family too. You know, he said Aimi baptized him in coffee the other day.”
“No way!” Disbelief slowing her words. “I can’t believe that’s who that was!”
The song of their laughter carried on, playing until Cam returned home, and then Bastien drove home, still humming the melody.