Maybe it was because Thorn sucked as an apex. He eyed the beautiful body beside him, glowing in the moonlight. As a cougar, she had put up a good fight. If she wanted to take him out of the picture, she had half a chance. He knew cats liked to play with their food. Felicity could be playing with him right now. Thorn didn’t know if he had the coldness of heart to take her out first.
“I meant what I said about taking me out.”
Her words jarred him. “What?”
“You owe me at least another date.”
“I suck at dates.”
“Yes you do. You just need practice.”
She rolled over leaning on her elbow, her hand supporting her head. It was difficult to meet her eyes. “I don’t really date much.”
“You don’t say.”
“Maybe you could just come over to my place.” That didn’t sound good either. His dump was a disaster.
Lithely, Felicity sprang to her feet. “Your turn to come up with something. Make it romantic, Lumberjack.”
With that, the gorgeous woman rolled her neck, twisted her body, pulling a cat shape from her flesh like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. When a beautiful animal took her place, it snarled over its shoulder at him before bounding into the trees and out of sight.
“Romantic,” Thorn said to no one. He’d have to google that.
In the meanwhile, there was an injured moose to take down. Thorn beared-up and followed his nose toward his prey.
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Chapter Twelve
Felicity returned to the clearing where she’d left her warm-up suit, her excuse to go cat. Tying her sneakers, she thought back on what had turned out to be a productive Sunday. After the disastrous ending of brunch, she Ubered to her office.
For her project, she had gathered copies of plat maps that dated to 1854, back to when the county extended all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Pouring over it, she discovered a two-thousand acre plot that today would extend from the unincorporated town of Ripple to the national forest. The layout was a rough triangle. Using this as a reference, she flipped through more recent maps. The wedge of the land grant remained intact.
Wow.
Other than the number of the lot, 13, she found nothing about the original grantees. Had it really been in the same family for over a century and a half? Like many of the people in the area, Felicity came from a pioneering family who had braved the Oregon Trail so long ago. Had Thorn’s as well?
If she ever hoped to get ahold of the Lumberjack’s land, she needed to know more about him—perhaps more than he knew about himself. There was one man who could dig up what she was looking for: Oscar León, private eye.
But she had a history with Oscar. They had been lovers a few years ago. Could she use a former paramour to hunt for information about her current one? Was she even really in a relationship with Thorn? While she definitely enjoyed being with the Lumberjack, he might be a little too coarse for her taste.
Sighing, she made the call. It was Sunday, so she had to leave a message. At the sound of Oscar’s voice mail greeting, old feelings stole back. Felicity found it easy to keep it on a business level with thoughts of Thorn happily inhabiting the back of her mind.
She ended the message, keeping the phone in her hand. What she really needed to do, wanted to do, was to see Thorn’s range for herself. His descriptions of his home woods stuck with her. It was more than development that drove her. Her cat wanted to roam wild places. She pulled up her Uber app. It took a pretty big bribe to get a driver willing to go all the way out to Ripple.
Now, Felicity stood up, smiling. It had been worth it. She walked through the woods, breaking into a jog as she neared the back of the Shoats’ B&B. Awash in satisfaction, she had to wonder at her decision to invade the bear’s home. While she had fought with other large predators before, never had she intentionally attacked a shifter. The outcome had proved amazing, but what had drawn her to do it in the first place?
“You weren’t jogging in the woods alone, were you?” Emma Shoat stood in the kitchen washing dishes as Felicity entered the mudroom in the back.
“No worries. I know how to take care of myself.”
“You haven’t heard?” The round little woman dried her hands on a towel. Her face sagged in concern. “There’s a bear loose around here, a very, very large bear.”
Felicity had to keep herself from smiling. Not only did she know about the bear, she had taken him to a French restaurant.
“It came through town last night, got in everyone’s garbage. A bunch of cars were damaged. It even broke into the kitchen at the Squirrels Nuts. I just got a call from Helen Arborgast. A little while ago, the bear destroyed their chicken coops. Where am I going to get eggs tomorrow?”
Last night? Just tonight? Felicity felt a little chill run up her spine. She had been with Thorn. Another bear was stalking the area? Given the size and ferocity of Thorn’s animal, this invading bear was taking a hell of a chance.
Just like she had? Hell, Thorn didn’t know she was in his woods. It would have been nothing for him to kill her. What on Earth had compelled her to take him on? Something strange was going on in the woods around Ripple. Whatever it was, it affected her decisions, and twisted her instincts.
“I’ll promise to be more careful,” she told Mrs. Shoat on her way upstairs.
She thought it over in the shower. Why would a bear make such a ruckus in this tiny town? There were plenty of campsites deeper in the woods. Yet, this animal had chosen the only populated area for miles. It almost seemed to be showing off. But for whom? Why?
The only answer that made any sense was Thorn.
Dread filled her with ice as she dried off. Without putting her finger on a specific danger, her instincts were in full fight-or-flight mode. Dressing in jeans and a sweater, she thought about finding Thorn, asking him if he knew about this rival bear; perhaps warning him. But how could she find him? Supposedly, he owned a cell phone. He hadn’t given her the number. He’s said his house was on a road, that he had a neighbor. Several roads wound through or near all that acreage. It would take her hours to locate his home, if she could find it at all.
Someone at that crummy bar could probably direct her. It was still early, even for a Sunday. And, as Thorn would say, there wasn’t anything else to do around this little town. She might even find him there.
Inside of the Squirrels Nuts was the same sea of plaid flannel. The Sunday night game was wrapping up on the big screens. The bar owner, Sally, poured pitchers and offered Felicity a scowl. The woman looked a little haggard, her curly brown hair disheveled, her large shirt buttoned crooked. But the top few buttons were undone. Most of the men in the room had their eyes on Sally’s bounce. Was she not wearing a bra?
In the corner, the same four guys huddled at a table, whispering, eyes taking in the room with darting glances. She saw no chainsaw sitting on the table by the men’s room, nor a giant lumberjack in attendance.
She took an empty seat at the bar.
“I thought you were leaving town,” Sally greeted her.
Top notch service here. Felicity would have to make a note on Yelp. “I did. I’m back. I heard a bear broke into your kitchen.”
Sally made an odd gesture, placing her right arm behind her back. “I’m still not selling.”
“Okay, fine. You change your mind, you have my card. I’ll have a Mai Tai.”
Squinting at Felicity from the corner of her eye, Sally grabbed some rum bottles from the shelves behind the bar and dumped them in a shaker. Peeking from the cuff of her right sleeve was a bandage stained with dried blood.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
Sally dumped some orange liqueurs after the rum. “None of your business.”
There was probably no point in asking if Sally knew where Thorn was with her current surly attitude. Felicity tried a little sympathy. “You look a little pale. Are you sure you’re all right?”
Shaking the drink so
hard her boobs bounced hyperactively, Sally bared her teeth. “I’m fine. What are you even doing here? You’re a city girl. We don’t go for slumming around here.”
Fine. Let her have it. “I’m actually here looking for Thorn. You seen him?”
Sally sloshed the drink in an old fashioned glass and banged it on the bar top. “And you stay away from Thorn, too. He doesn’t need some slick, sweet-talking socialite type turning his head. He’s good and kind and you don’t deserve him.”
Oh-ho. The cat lifted her head inside Felicity and the claws came out. “And I suppose you do?”
“Yeah, I do. Heck yeah. And the next time I see him, I’m going to tell him that.”
“Really?” Felicity leaned back, sipping her drink. “How many opportunities have you already had, Sally? Do you really expect Thorn to go for some mousy bartender? The man’s practically a Greek god. Look at you, with your mussed up hair, that awful man’s shirt you always wear. Ring, ring, hello? It’s 1982. They want their stupid plastic eyeglass frames back.”
“Ugh! You’re so mean!” Sally moved to the far side of the bar.
Felicity had to agree. That was pretty mean. Was she really so into Thorn that she needed to verbally beat down the poor bartender? The thought nearly made her convulse. She really was that into Thorn. But damn it, she had to be convincing if she wanted to swindle the land from under his nose. Maybe that just meant she had to convince herself as well.
“If I see that fucking bear, I’ll shoot it.”
A man in an Elmer Fudd hat next to her said. Felicity turned up her keen feline ears to eavesdrop.
“Damn thing put claw holes in my truck door. What the hell was that? Wasn’t no food in the truck.”
His companion, a grizzled guy with a wattle chin pouted in thought. “This is like what them ads say on TV. If you spot unusual animal activity, you need to report it to the authorities.”
“Well, sure, I’ve seen those. But who are the authorities? Never heard of no bear police,” Elmer said.
“Fish and Game, I reckon. Maybe the sheriff.”
“What the hell is the sheriff gonna do, arrest the damn thing?”
“Animal went into my garage,” a man a couple stools down joined in. “Ripped my garbage cans to pieces and scattered trash everywhere. Took a big dump on my front porch, too.”
“Slashed two of my tires,” another voice joined in.
This was all very strange, Felicity thought. It wasn’t animal behavior at all. It was more like the activity of a gang of teenagers. Bears only interfered with humans when there was food at hand. They didn’t slash tires or punch holes in car doors for no reason.
“Ripped down my goddamn fence.”
“Busted the muffler off my truck.”
“Knocked a tree down on the roof of my new extension.”
“Saw the bear prints, big as day. Bigger.”
“A bear bit my arm.”
Felicity zoned in on this conversation. She saw Sally holding out her sleeve to a woman at the far end of the bar. “At least, I had a dream that a bear bit me. And then I found bear scat and footprints in the kitchen.”
Feline-sensitive eyes took in the entire crowd, backing up the audio. Felicity found that the only people not talking about bear vandalism were the four guys who looked alike at the corner table. From the narrowed and shifting eyes, murmured conversation, and a host of facial tics, they were talking about something else—but something related.
Concentrating, Felicity tuned in on their low words.
“If Thorn thinks he can get away with this bullshit, he’s fucking wrong.”
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Chapter Thirteen
“Whaddaya gonna do, Casper, the guy’s a freakin’ apex.”
Felicity’s interest leaped up a dozen notches. Watching the twitchy quartet in the mirror, she dialed into their conversation.
“Apex schmapex, Sheridan, it’s just this kind of wild-ass shit that’ll get all the shifters around here busted, capiche? You’re his neighbor, Laramie, I mean, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?”
“Hell if I know. I mean, once in a while, he walks around without pants, but he’s a shifter, right? We all get stuck without our pants sometimes. He does it around the wife, I get fucking pissed off. But c’mon, we all work with him. He’s a big moron, but he knocks down trees real good.”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s good at knocking down trees. So’s a bulldozer. The pack don’t need a light shined on us. None of the shifters around here do, you see what I’m saying? All the humans in here talking about them TV and radio ads about odd animal behavior. Call the authorities. That, none of us fucking need, am I right?”
She knew what the man was talking about. For the past few months, the spots had been all over the television and radio. Some mumbo-jumbo about climate change, loss of habitat, and animals behaving badly. Until now, it hadn’t occurred to her that the message wasn’t about wild animals at all, but shifters. She made a decision, and hopped off the barstool.
“You are right.” Felicity pulled up a chair to their table. “Wolf shifters?”
“Who the fuck’re you?” the one named Casper asked.
Laramie, Thorn’s neighbor, said, “The one who’s making all the work for us you moron.”
Casper sat back and studied her. “The real estate skirt. I heard you was a looker.”
“Before you guys go pack on Thorn, I can vouch for him. He was with me when the bear blasted his way through town.”
“And we should trust you why?” Casper placed his palms on the table and got into her face. “You smell like cat to me, babe.”
Casper was the obvious alpha at the table. Felicity gave him the stare. “Why would I bother lying?”
“Two reasons: one, you’re a woman; two, you’re a cat.”
“Nah, she’s probably telling the truth, Casper. Couple days ago, all them deer—you remember? They were outside Thorn’s trailer. Displayed, like.” Laramie looked at each of his pack. “A message—I’ll gut you like a deer, motherfucker.”
The pack, as one, looked over their shoulders before bending together again.
This was the first time Felicity had heard this. Her thoughts were drawn to her carefully overturned car. Was that a message from this mystery predator as well? “What did Thorn make of this message?”
“He didn’t know nothing. Man’s got no pack lore, or den lore, or whatever bears have for lore. I sent him to The Vet.” Laramie smiled. “I don’t know what he learned, but he came back with his ass hanging out of a hospital johnny.”
The wolves shared a chuckle. Apparently, they had all been to The Vet.
Sheridan, the smallest of the bunch, sobered the conversation up with a whisper. “What the fuck kinda monster would go after Thorn? The guy’s, what, a polar bear? He’s ten feet tall, two tons of him. I mean, shit, what are we dealing with here?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Casper said. “If there’s gonna be a fight over the apex position, we could all stand to benefit. We could be the apex around here.”
“You mean our wives could be the apex.”
Casper turned hostile eyes on the wolf who had been silent the whole time. “Shuddup, Cheyenne.”
“Casper’s right,” Sheridan said. “If the two bears take each other out, we could move on the whole territory. That’s basic pack lore right there.”
Felicity frowned. “On the flip side, Thorn doesn’t give a shit about wolves on his range. Will this new apex feel the same, or will he come after you? A bear won’t attack the pack—he’ll come at you one at a time. Can any one of you stand up to a brown bear shifter? Any two, or three even?”
The wolves exchanged looks. Casper nodded. “We don’t go against lore. The apex is the apex, and we respect that. If it came down to it, the pack could take out anything. Even a grizzly shifter apex. It would cost us big time, and there would be a lot of questions, a lot of scrutiny from John Law. We don’t want n
one of that.”
“In the meanwhile, we got a bear tearing shit up. What’s to stop him from wrecking one of our job sites? If he knows Thorn, he knows we work with him some time. Nothing gets a man’s attention like a claw to the wallet,” Sheridan said.
Felicity barely listened as the wolves laid out a plan to protect their work sites. She was just starting to understand what was going on in Ripple. At first glance, Thorn was involved, cognizant of the fact or not, in a territory dispute. But Felicity started to go deeper.
What had attracted her to this place initially? She couldn’t remember. She had started making offers on houses out here without even seeing the area. There wasn’t that much to see when she arrived. The potential in this corner of the world started out as fully instinctual. But was that instinct one of a profit-making developer, or a cougar drawn to a range with a troubled apex predator?
Giving it some thought, all of her recent decisions were suspect when viewed through a human framework. Would prospective buyers or tenants want to be so far away from civilization, whether they were priced out of their current homes or not? And what was she doing with a lumberjack whose ambitions went no farther than knocking down trees, drinking, fighting, and screwing? She had taken him to a fancy French restaurant, a place she took clients. Felicity doubted she could ever show her face there again.
Perhaps, like the wolves, she was drawn to fill the void of Thorn’s shirking his apex duties. That attack on him, while she thought it was all foreplay, was that just her instinct prepping her for a real fight for the bear’s territory?
Instinct was a funny thing, sometimes a frightening thing. It operated deep beneath her critical thinking, deeper than her awareness of her inner cat’s needs and desires. The combined psyche of human and animal was indecipherable, and at the same time irresistible.
There was an aspect of all this that the wolves couldn’t understand. Unlike Felicity and Thorn, these guys were social animals. Cougars and bears were solitary creatures. While her suspicions were unfounded, Felicity was fairly certain there was more to this than Thorn being a negligent apex.
The Apex Shifter Complete Set: Books 1 - 3 Page 7
