Goldie and the Three Wisconsin Bears

After stepping out of the shower, I plait my blond tresses into two long braids. A warm memory of my Canadian-Senegalese mom doing the same thing when I first started getting weaves for beauty pageants washes over me. God, I miss her. I don’t think I’ll ever stop regretting that she died of cancer before she could see me win the Princess Georgia pageant. She would have been so proud.

But not so much now…another stab of shame replaces the warm memories.

I should put on some clothes. But looking down at the dress and underwear I left outside the shower, I decide against it. I don’t want to dirty the bed’s clean sheets. So I leave the clothes in the bathroom and return to the bedroom wrapped in the towel I found hanging on the back of the door.

Ugh, it’s even colder in here than before. But I’m dead tired, so I don’t bother to go searching for a thermostat. I just dive straight into the queen-sized bed, hoping the blankets will be enough to keep me from freezing.

They are. I sigh into the pillow, feeling safe and warm for the first time in…I don’t know how long. The warm part was simple in Georgia. But when was the last time I felt safe? So long ago. Too long ago.

No matter what, I need to figure out how to make this warm and safe feeling last. For the sake of my baby.

First thing tomorrow….

And on that hopeful thought, I drift off to sleep.

Chapter Two

MITCH

“Sonofabitch broke into our cabin!”

Jeb curses.

And Nico says, “One of us should have stayed behind to look after the cabin when we towed that car.”

He’s right. But I blame myself. They’re both from other parts of Wisconsin, but I grew up in these woods. I should have known better when I saw the abandoned car just a few meters away from our private road. I was so concerned about getting it off our property and towing it back to town that I didn’t wonder where its owner was. I assumed, from the looks of it, that somebody must’ve just abandoned it.

But you know what they say about assuming, and I feel like an ass right about now.

“He might still be there, if that was his car we towed,” Nico points out.

“Yeah,” I agree.

Jeb, as usual, didn’t bother with words. Just stalks back to the truck and returns with his hunting rifle.

Hunting season hasn’t nearly begun yet, but Jeb has that glint in his eye as he shoves past the both of us and through the front door.

He doesn’t talk much about his Army Ranger days before joining Nico and me on the Wisconsin Bears football team. But I can read his training loud and clear as he stalks silently through the front room, a deadly shadow with his gun raised.

Nico runs around the side of the cabin. Soon after, the front room lights come on, letting me know he found the Tesla powerwall switch and turned on the house’s main power.

After Nico rejoins me, we follow behind Jeb to the kitchen. No guns. But we know how to fight on and off the football field. We keep our bodies tight, and our fists clenched, ready to handle anything or anyone that jumps out at us.

In the kitchen, we flip on the light. No intruder, but there are three items drying on the sink counter. A pot, a plate, and a fork.

“Made himself right at home,” I whisper.

“And cleaned up after himself,” Nico whispers back. He sounds impressed.

I roll my eyes. Nico—or Saint Nic, as his teammates call him—has a bad habit of seeing the best in everybody. Technically, he’s the same age as me and a couple of years older than Jeb. But Jeb and me consider him the younger brother we’ve got to protect because he’s too damn trusting.

Jeb doesn’t have any commentary to add. He just continues out of the kitchen and down the hall, flipping on lights as he goes.

Jeb kicks open the first door, which leads to my bedroom. He storms in with his rifle pointed. The light comes on, and a few beats pass. then he comes right back out a few moments later.

So nobody behind door number one. That’s a good thing, but disappointment tightens my heart when I glance at the empty bed. We’d thought we’d be sharing that bed with Charlotte when we started renovating my old family cabin during the last off-season. But she dumped us on account of Jeb. Said she liked Nico and me, but Jeb was too intense. Then she got upset when we didn’t offer to cut our foster brother out of our package deal, just because she said so.

Last I saw on Instagram, she was dating some douchebag banker, who looked like he didn’t know what a clit was, much less how to give a woman multiple orgasms.