Christmas with the Bear by AJ Tipton

Author:AJ Tipton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Savvy Storytelling, LLC

Cabe ran his fingers through his hair and concentrated on plastering a smile on his face, for Ralph’s sake. The last week since the fight with Megan had been hell. Why did I say all those awful things? He'd never given a shit about the damned feud.

"That smile of yours could use some work," Jeff said from next to him. "Try this." His face opened up into a rapturous grin. Jeff called out to Ralph in the practice area where he was warming up with the kids whose races hadn’t started yet. "Go get, 'em, kid. You can do it!" Jeff raised a fist in the air and whistled.

Ralph turned to wave at his dad, and got nearly run over by Paige McPhee who hadn't noticed his sudden stop. Cabe held his breath, braced for an explosion of tempers between the latest generation of McPhees and Gabels, but Paige just helped Ralph to his feet and then took off grinning, Ralph on her heels.

Since the kids competing were all between eight and ten years old, their way of "warming up" was to run around in an elaborate game of tag where only the kids seemed to understand the rules. Cabe felt a crick in his neck forming from the stress of not turning to where the McPhees were lined up a little further down the course, cheering Paige on. So far, Cabe had managed to avoid staring at Megan since he arrived at the games, and he intended to keep it that way.

"They're all just going to wear each other out before the games even start," Emile approached and looped his arm through Jeff's.

"Yeah, but they'll all be equally tuckered out, so it’ll still be a fair race," Cabe pointed out. "And if Ralph is any indication, they’re not likely to get tired any time soon."

“At this point, Ralph’s too amped up to listen to us, anyway. I don’t think we could get him to stop running around, even if we wanted to,” Jeff said.

Cabe's mind immediately flashed back to breathlessly running through the woods with Megan as a kid. No matter the homework and after school activities which kept them busy, or the punishments they feared if they were found out, they always found the breath to run the trail together to their treehouse.

"Ralph will sleep like the dead tonight." He turned to Jeff. "You know, that means we could…" He whispered something into Jeff's ear that made the man blush, and then nod enthusiastically.

Cabe decided to give his brother some space and wandered toward where his parents stood watching the game with Grandpa Frank. Frank was glaring at the McPhee family with such an overblown look of menace, Cabe had to suppress a laugh. But this feud isn’t funny. Not really. He'd only reconnected with Megan a week ago, but already there was a Megan-sized hole next to him. She was like a missing limb, and knowing that he was the one who had done the proverbial amputation just made the ache worse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.