Bear with Me Now

BERKLEY ROMANCE Published by Berkley An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2023 by Katie Shepard Excerpt from Sweeten the Deal copyright © 2023 by Katie Shepard Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. BERKLEY and the BERKLEY and B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shepard, Katie, author. Title: Bear with me now / Katie Shepard. Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley Romance, 2023. Identifiers: LCCN 2022045377 (print) | LCCN 2022045378 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593549292 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593549308 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Romance fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PS3619.H45425 B43 2023 (print) | LCC PS3619.H45425 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220921 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045377 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045378 First Edition: April 2023 Cover design and illustration by Vi-An Nguyen Book design by Alissa Theodor, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. pid_prh_6.0_143231560_c0_r0 For my Chris: the best Chris, Chris of Chrises. author’s note This work strives to realistically depict issues of mental health and disability and includes depictions of ableism, including ableist language. This book also depicts substance abuse, prior death of a parent as a result of drunk driving, misogyny, an animal attack, explicit and graphic sexual content, and vulgar language. 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