Sawman Werebear (Saw Bears #4) Read Online Free PDF Page A

mute, too, right now, just to save herself the embarrassment of her flapping tongue that wouldn’t shut the hell up.
    The job? he wrote.
    “Oh, yeah. I had about ten too many seizures at work, and I was scaring the customers away and spilling drinks all over everyone. I don’t know what set me off. I’ve been having them for six months now, but before that, I never had a one in my life. Can I tell you something?”
    He looked amused and nodded.
    “It’s really easy to talk to you.”
    Because I can’t talk back?
    “I guess so. But also, I don’t feel as awful around you. I feel…calmer.”
    You’re having those seizures because you aren’t letting your bear out enough.
    Everly read the words on the new piece of notepad paper three times, but they still didn’t make a lick of sense. “I don’t understand. Is bear short for some sort of disease?”
    He drew a rough outline of a snarling bear with big teeth and claws and arched his eyebrows. Then he wrote, I’m a grizzly, too. No use hiding what you are from me.
    “Like a grizzly bear?” A chill rippled across her forearms, and she leaned back in her chair, eyeing the distance to the door.
    Brighton might be a nice person, willing to help her through a couple of seizures and feed her after, but he was also showing signs that he was about three bubbles shy of a soda. She’d already dealt with crazy before, and she sure wasn’t doing a repeat of that.
    Gig’s up , he scribbled. It’s in the eyes. You can’t hide what you are in the last seconds of your seizures. You need to let your animal out, or she’s going to kill you.
    Kill her? Oh no, no, no. Everly was not stuck in the woods with a stranger in the middle of God knows where, and now he was turning out to be a serial killer? Fear clogged her throat, making it hard to draw a breath. “Thank you for the dinner, but I need to be going.”
    She stood and walked backward to the door, then snatched her purse that was sitting in an old wooden rocking chair beside it and held it against her chest like a shield. “It was nice to meet you.” Nice and terrifying.
    Brighton sat where he was, frozen as he watched her leave through narrowed eyes. With his dark lashes lowered like that, his eyes sure did look different. Feral.
    Everly clutched her purse tighter and backed out the doorway, then stumbled on the trio of stairs on the other side of the porch. Catching herself on the railing, she gasped as she realized she didn’t have a car or any other means of escape. And even if Brighton had left the keys in his truck, he hadn’t parked it in the front yard, and she had no idea where it was. Heart pounding as she searched the empty field adjacent to the cabin for anything that would aid her, she jogged toward the dirt road that led to the woods beyond. If she could just find a main road and flag down a car, she’d be set.
    A whimper wrenched from her throat as she began to sprint, her thick-soled boots clunking heavily against the gravel with each hurried step. Brighton didn’t seem to be chasing her, but that didn’t dissuade her rampant need to get out of here as soon as possible. She ran until her legs burned and her feet dragged the ground. She ran until she couldn’t see his house down the long road when she looked back over her shoulder. Until all she could hear were the crickets and the frogs and the wind through the branches above her.
    The road curved, and when she looked back one last time, all she could see was wilderness. She turned and smashed into a wall of muscle. When Brighton gripped her arms, she screamed in terror. The man hunched in on himself, as if she’d decimated his eardrums, and damn it all, her ears were ringing, too, but it gave her a split second when his grip loosened to make a run for it.
    Brighton grabbed her elbow and yanked her to face him, then reached over his head and pulled off his shirt.
    “What are you doing?” she cried, flashbacks and horrid, painful memories