Bear with Me Now

by Katie Shepard

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Love makes life a little wilder in this romantic comedy by debut author Katie Shepard.
 
After a panic attack puts him in the hospital, charity executive Teagan Van Zijl is dragged by his sister to a wilderness therapy retreat in Montana. Lost in the woods while absconding from midafternoon meditation, Teagan is nearly eaten by a bear before his rescue by a furious angel in muddy hiking boots: the program’s handywoman, Darcy Albano, who was mostly worried for the bear. 
 
Darcy thought she was going to work as a trail guide when she was hired onto the camp staff but ended up cleaning and hauling instead—merely the latest screwing-over she’s endured since her ex stole her car and her parents ruined her credit score. Teagan becomes the silver lining she didn’t expect, a man clearly going through something yet willing to commit to Darcy’s unique brand of wilderness education as the cure for what ails him.
 
After weeks in the mountains with Darcy, Teagan doesn’t want to return to New York without her. He hires Darcy as his sober companion—a position he doesn’t actually need filled and for which Darcy is completely unqualified—hoping she can help him figure out a way to move forward. But once they get to the city, all Teagan can think of is how to confess the truth without losing her. Together, they begin to imagine what their lives might look like if they could depend on each other for help—even in outrunning a bear.

Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 416

Sample

one

"Sloane, is this a resort?" Teagan asked his sister as soon as his confusion grew strong enough to overcome the inertia of his medication.

He didn't know where he was. But he knew that giant tents-if the word tent could adequately describe a canvas-and-wood structure larger than his condo back home-were found only in resorts. A luxury resort at that, because there were thick, soft carpets around the king-sized bed, a full living room set in rattan and batik-print cotton, and enough cheerfully twee Edison bulbs strung among the rafters to illuminate most of Williamsburg. It looked like a space specifically arranged to trend under the glamping hashtag or grace the front page of the Wall Street Journal travel section. "Are we . . . on vacation?"

Gracie Square Hospital had doped him up for discharge this morning, so he'd been high as a kite when he boarded the plane to Montana. And his sister had shut down his initial inquiries about their destination. But now that he was slowly swimming toward full consciousness, Teagan had a lot of questions about what he was doing here.

"No, this is a wellness retreat," Sloane corrected him, as uncharacteristically attentive as she'd been during the entirety of their journey from New York. "Wilderness therapy. It's run by a doctor." She emphatically flapped her hands in the sleeves of the oversized sweater she wore over her thin frame.

Sloane and Teagan didn't look very much alike. Sloane, slender and brunette, looked just like their mother, her father contributing just as much to her features as he had to her upbringing. It was startling, sometimes, how much Sloane looked like Teagan's earliest memories of their mother, even though worried was not an expression that had typically graced her face.

"But why am I at a wellness retreat? I'm not actually sick. I was cleared to go back to work," he protested. Under a cocktail of medications that kept all sharp-edged thoughts at bay, Teagan was having trouble following the reason that Sloane had dragged him to a wellness retreat in Big Sky when all he'd been instructed to do was enroll in outpatient therapy. He had not, in fact, had a heart attack. Physically, he was fine.

Sloane's eyes-blue to his hazel-welled up with concern.

"Oh my God, Tiggie," she said. "Your brain is like a bowl full of betta fish right now, isn't it? You can't go back to work like this. But don't worry. I've got it. I told your secretary you'd be gone for at least a month."

That too was hard to follow. Teagan didn't have a secretary or any kind of PA-he couldn't justify it, despite the swamping press of calls and invitations and correspondence that had threatened to drown him even before this current misadventure. The family charitable foundation he'd run for the two years since his mother's death was bleeding cash. He barely even paid himself a salary.

"You talked to Rose, maybe? The investment officer?" he clarified, heart beating faster. Who else knew by now? He wouldn't have willingly gotten anyone at his office-let alone his sister-involved in this painfully embarrassing situation. He'd thought he was dying. A heart attack would have been easier to explain than this. His not dying would be easier to handle if fewer people knew he was only struggling to cope with his very ordinary professional obligations.

"Whatever! Rose, yes. She told me you'd need a responsible person to be released to, then probably some outpatient treatment too. I said I'd take care of it. This is me taking care of it."

It took Teagan a minute to process that. It wasn't as though he'd left Rose much in the way of instructions during his ambulance ride to the hospital, but only someone who didn't know Sloane well would consider her a responsible person.

"This will be, like, so good for you," she told him, wrapping her hands into the slightly grubby cotton sweater he wore over his very grubby oxford. "This is a place where you can get healthy. You need to be somewhere you can relax, deal with your stress, maybe get some space to feel whatever you need to feel about Mom. Not the hospital, not your stupid little condo building that doesn't even have a fitness room."

Teagan ran a hand through his hair and looked around the tent where Sloane was proposing he stay. Great purple mountains towered over golden hills. The camp was on the edge of a sparkling blue lake ringed with gray pebbles and green fir trees. There were a dozen luxurious canvas tents with their sides rolled up to admit the sweet July breeze. Each tent had a wooden patio adorned with strings of fairy lights and tasteful groupings of cream-colored pillar candles. The big fluffy beds within the tents, set with half a dozen pillows and a faux sheepskin throw, promised hours of seductive rest. But Teagan didn't need any of this-he had prescriptions and a safety plan, and as soon as this last round of benzodiazepines wore off, he had a week of missed work to catch up on.

"I can't take that much time off," he protested.

"Rose said you could," Sloane insisted.

He really couldn't. His mother had left the foundation's finances in a shambles, and two years of drudgery spent cleaning up the books had only clarified its current dire straits. And even if it had been hubris to think he was qualified to fix that with no professional experience besides trading municipal bonds, he couldn't let everything drop now. He'd be no better than his mother.

"Sloane, this all looks very nice, but-"

His sister shoved him lightly. "Did you see there's horseback riding?" Sloane asked, eyes wheedling.

Teagan groaned and put his hand on his forehead. Horses. He needed ten million dollars in new endowment commitments and a direct flight back to LaGuardia, not horses.

"The last horse I was on was a pony in Central Park. I was eight."

"Forget the horses, then. There's plenty of other stuff to do. We need this," Sloane argued.

Teagan began frowning over we as Sloane pushed the admissions paperwork into his hands. Setting aside the question of why there were two admissions packets, he humored her by opening the folders and flipping through the glossy brochures.

There were pages of information on the nutritionists, physical trainers, and astrologers he might expect to encounter. There was sunrise yoga, sunset yoga, crystal-guided mindfulness, and-on full moon nights-full moon yoga. There were painting classes, jewelry-crafting workshops, canoeing, archery, and gourmet plant-based dinners served under the stars. Did this place even have therapy? Finally, Teagan reached the professional biography of Dr. Goedert, the program director's husband.

He was a clinical psychologist, which seemed like overkill. Teagan's own doctor would handle his medications, and he didn't think his other therapeutic needs were large. But when Teagan reached Dr. Goedert's professional specializations, he stopped. Dr. Goedert specialized in the treatment of addiction.

"Oh," Teagan said, feeling very confused again. "This is rehab?" Dislocation was becoming a familiar sensation. He'd gone to the emergency room for what he'd been certain was a heart attack. Somehow he'd ended up in the psychiatric hospital. Somehow he was in rural Montana with a questionnaire about his nonexistent drug use and a second questionnaire about his equally nonexistent skin care routine. He couldn't make the progression of events make any sense.

"It's not really rehab," his sister said, a little too quickly. "It's personal wellness, tailored for the needs of people with chemical dependency issues."

"Sloane, what I have is brain chemistry issues. And I'm already treating those."

"Well, even if that's true, maybe we still need to talk about substance abuse with a professional." Her face wrinkled in consternation as she wrung her hands. "Given everything with Mom?"

"But that problem is not the problem that I have," Teagan slowly explained to her. He rarely drank. He didn't do drugs-save and except for whatever he'd been prescribed during the past week. "I don't need to go to rehab, and I can't take a vacation."

Sloane snatched the admissions packets away from him.

"You're not listening to me," she complained. "They have yoga and mindfulness training, and all the food is organic and anti-inflammatory. Don't you think that would help you?"

"It probably won't hurt me, but I think twenty milligrams of daily Lexapro have it covered already."

Sloane grimaced. "We could spend some time together," she said, trying a different tactic. "I barely see you anymore."

"Of course we can spend some time together," Teagan said. "Anywhere. Regardless. School doesn't start back up for another month or two, does it? I can stay at the house in Irvington with you until you go back to Claremont."

"You'll just spend every day at the office if we do that. We could go hiking here. Don't you like hiking?" Sloane suggested instead, sensing that he was wavering.

Teagan squinted at her, more thoughts penetrating the gray fog shrouding his mind. Sloane didn't like the outdoors. Their mother had tried to ship an eight-year-old Sloane off to Teagan's childhood sleepaway camp in Vermont in the first year that he didn't come home from college for the summer. Sloane had bribed a staff member for use of her cell phone, called Teagan to inform him that it was hot, there were bugs, and she wanted to go home, then waited at the camp entrance with her suitcases until Teagan drove up in the middle of the night from Boston to collect her.

"Sloane, are we here because you need to go to rehab?" he asked, slowly working through it.

She licked her lips, considering.

"Sloane."

"I mean, everyone in our family had issues," she said. "We probably needed more therapy. All the therapy, for all of us. Remember when you got so mad that mom left me home alone while she went to Art Basel that you called CPS on her? Like, you should have probably talked to someone about that too."

"You were ten! And that still doesn't explain why you want to go to rehab." Teagan paused, stomach dropping as he began to imagine everything she could have gotten into out of sight in California. "What have you been taking, exactly?"

Sloane scrunched up her foxlike features. "Just pills. A little coke. But you know, given everything with our family, I thought maybe we could both stay at a place like this and work on ourselves . . ." Her voice delicately trailed off as she looked up at him in open appeal.

Teagan rubbed a week's worth of stubble on his cheeks, then ground his palms into his eyes. He should have paid more attention to how Sloane was handling their mother's death. He'd been too absorbed by all the estate work, by the foundation. None of it was more important than his sister. Jesus. He should have been on top of this too.

"Okay. Okay. How much does this place cost?" he asked. He hadn't worried about that so much until now, but he hadn't planned for a month of luxury accommodations for two people.

"What do you mean, how much does it cost?" Sloane asked, alarm visible in her eyes.

"I mean, how much does it cost? Or does this place take insurance?" Teagan was abruptly glad that he'd resisted his directors' suggestion that he cut employee health benefits.

"Why does that matter?"

"It matters because I need to figure out if I can afford it," he said.

"You have a literal trust fund. This is literally the reason why people put together trust funds for their kids-so they can go to rehab after all the shitty parenting."

"I don't have one anymore, actually. I poured it into the foundation when mom died."

"Jesus Christ. Why would you do that?" Sloane asked, appalled.

"I thought it would make me feel better," he said, turning and heading for the main building. He couldn't justify inheriting money from his mother when the foundation had been two months from missing payroll under her mismanagement. It had been a moment of triumphant moral clarity-but moral clarity was not a good and consistent source of serotonin, as it turned out.

"Doesn't look like it worked," Sloane called as she followed him. "And now you have to worry about paying for stuff."

Teagan put what he hoped was a soothing expression on his face and paused. It must have been hard for Sloane to articulate that she needed help. He turned to put his hands on her narrow shoulders. She'd always been small for her age, and it was still hard for him to consider her full grown now that she was taller than most women. "Don't worry about it. Dad left me some money too. I'll take care of this." His dizzy attempt to project reassurance must have worked, because she finally nodded.

He let them into the camp's main building. Everything was decorated in shades of white and cream, in travertine stone and pale wood, like a spa. He supposed it was a spa. "If this place is too expensive, I'll find a place we can afford. Rehab's important."

"But I wanted to go to this one," Sloane said. "They customize your diet to your personal immune profile." She waved the nutrition brochure, which depicted a soft-focus bowl of raspberries, pistachios, and what appeared to be . . . butter? Had to be margarine-the place was vegan. Teagan kept his skepticism of the therapeutic benefits of raspberries and vegan butter to himself. The best rehab program was one that Sloane would actually stay at; their mother had dabbled in sobriety, but never for long, or long enough. Better to get this right the first time.

Teagan halted on the plush sisal rug covering the pine-board floor of the reception area. Rachel, the program director who'd greeted them upon their arrival, was typing on a computer in a glass-sided office, but she stood up to intercept them as they approached the main desk. She was in her fifties, with one of those immobile, ageless faces achieved via high-quality medical intervention.

Rachel brought over two little copper cups of ice water as she greeted them. There were bits of unidentifiable red leaf floating in each cup. Possibly some kind of cabbage. Sloane smiled, the expression honest and delighted for the first time since she'd signed him out of the hospital. Some small knot in Teagan's chest loosened; he didn't feel like he'd delivered for anyone recently, and if Sloane's sobriety demanded leaf water and hot yoga, he'd liquidate investments to get them for her.

"Did you have any trouble filling out the admission paperwork?" Rachel tactfully asked, no doubt eager to get paid.