Handcuffed to the Bear: BBW Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance (Shifter Agents Book 1)

by Lauren Esker

  "Do you actually have a plan, or are you just acting like you do to make me feel better?"

  "I'm developing the glimmerings of one," Jack said, helping her over a boulder. "Hiding our scent trail is the most important thing to start with. That's most likely what they'll be using to follow us."

  "How are you going to do that?"

  "Water," Jack said. "Flowing water will kill the scent better than anything else."

  "I didn't see any from the hilltop."

  "Maybe not, but there are usually streams in hilly country like this. We just have to find them."

  "How?"

  "By listening, for one thing." He stopped and tipped his head to one side. Casey paused too, holding her breath. All he could hear was the whisper of wind in the trees, distant birdsong, and the little rustles Casey made as she tried to stay still. Jack shook his head and started moving again, taking them down the side of the ridge at an angle towards the saddle where it joined to the next ridge.

  "Valleys," he said over his shoulder to Casey, picking his way around a tangle of thorny scrub. "Valleys and ravines. Water carves them, so it stands to reason there'll be water at the bottom of them, at least some of them."

  There was a brief silence while she digested this bit of information, during which Jack hustled them around another cluster of boulders, tucked beneath a cape of moss and young trees. Then she said, "You're not just a federal agent, are you? No way you learned all this stuff as a fed."

  Jack wasn't sure how to respond. He knew this topic would come up sooner or later; she was bound to want to know how he learned all the tricks he was going to have to use to keep both of them alive. But he'd hoped she'd have a little more time to get to know him first, because the last thing he needed was Casey being as afraid of him as she was of the Fallons.

  His silence, and the signals it clearly sent, made her hand go a little looser in his. "I'm sorry. I hope I didn't bring up something painful. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

  "It's not really that," Jack said. "I don't mind talking about it." I just don't know how you'll react.

  "Well, I think I've figured out it out anyway. You're military, right? Or former military."

  "You're half right. I did a tour in Iraq, yeah. But it turned out life in the Army wasn't for me. Too many rules, too much 'yes sir' and 'no sir' and having to deal with bureaucratic bullshit. I hated it."

  "So what then?" she asked, holding a branch aside for him.

  "You've heard of Blackwater, right?"

  "I guess so," she said. "I think I remember news stories about that. Some kind of scandal in Iraq, right? Wait, are you telling me you worked for Blackwater?"

  "Not Blackwater specifically, but something similar. After I left the service, a buddy got me a job working for a similar outfit. They're called private security companies, but what it comes down to is, they're mercenaries. I was a merc, Casey."

  The look she gave him wasn't scared or worried, just thoughtful. "I didn't even know mercenaries were a thing anymore. I guess I think of that as something that went out with the Revolutionary War."

  "Nope, they are definitely a thing. Oh, they have to run around under the radar of the Geneva Conventions and various other international treaties. You can't just go out and hire yourself a private army anymore. Well, most people can't. But private armies still exist, and I was part of one."

  "What kind of things did you do?"

  This was one area where censoring himself for civilians was second nature. Maybe someday he'd tell her some of the hairier stuff. Avery knew most of it. But not right now. "Guarding places, mostly. The U.S. employs a lot of private security to do things like guard installations and convoys overseas, so they're not stretched quite so thin."

  "Sounds boring."

  "It mostly was. I mean, like anything else. Moments of excitement punctuated by a whole lot of boring."

  He waited for more questions, but instead she said simply, "Thanks for telling me."

  "You're welcome. If you want to know more, just ask. I can't promise to tell you everything, but I'll tell you what I can."

  She looked up at him with those startling gold-flecked eyes. "Jack, I—" she began.

  And then she stopped. It seemed to him that she hovered on the edge of something she couldn't quite bring herself to come out and say.

  "Yeah?" he prompted at last.

  Her face was very near. Her lips were parted, her eyes locked on his. He was suddenly all too aware that it would only take a bend of his neck, a dip of his head, to brush her lips with his.

  He hadn't meant it to come to this.

  But she was the one who pulled away, blinking like a woman waking up from a dream.

  "Nothing," she said. "Sorry. We'd better move."

  She slipped her hand into his as they started walking again. It was definitely easier to move with their hands linked together like that.

  Expediency—the only reason. Of course.

  Chapter Six

  Casey knew she couldn't keep hiding the truth from Jack. She was still shaky and stunned from the emotional intensity of her reaction. And she couldn't even explain to him that it hadn't been fear, not really. He probably thought she was a coward, but it wasn't fear that had hit her like a hammer between the eyes.

  It had been grief.

  Oh, Wendy. Did you stand on this same hilltop, looking down at the forest, making escape plans of your own?

  She knew she should probably let go of Jack's hand, but she didn't want to. Even that small amount of human contact made her feel better, calmer, stronger. And he had a very nice hand for holding, callused and strong and just enough bigger than hers that she could tuck her fingers neatly inside his grasp.

  And she couldn't stop thinking about the way he'd been looking down at her earlier, the warmth and support in his dark brown eyes, and maybe a different kind of heat as well ...

  "Hey!" Jack said. "Hear that?"

  Casey looked up quickly, a jolt of adrenaline blazing through her body like an electric shock. But he didn't seem alarmed. In fact, he was grinning, and that gave her a jolt of an entirely different kind. Jack looked stern and forbidding when he was solemn, but his smile—a true smile, wide and happy—lit his whole face and filled his dark eyes with light.

  She only got to enjoy it for a moment, because it dropped away at the alarm on her face. "Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. I hear water; don't you?"

  Casey listened, and now she heard it too—the musical tinkle of water falling over rocks. It was distant and muffled, but seemed to be coming from somewhere off to their left. Her mouth was suddenly desert-dry; she had been too distracted with all her other hurts and worries to even notice how thirsty she was.

  This time she didn't need Jack's urging. Hand in hand, they followed the sound of water through stands of pines to the edge of a narrow, deep ravine. Here the sound was much louder, echoing off its confining walls in a way that reminded her of the hollow tones of a pipe organ.

  The steep rocks leading down to the water's edge were wet and slick. Casey hesitated.

  "Turn around and go down like you're climbing a ladder," Jack suggested. "Here, I'll help you down."

  He lay down on his stomach. Feeling a little silly, and suddenly more aware of her naked state, Casey crouched down with him and then cautiously put her bare legs over the edge, one at a time. Her toes found purchase on the rocks. Jack gripped her hands and supported her until she gasped at the sudden rush of cool water around her feet. Once she had solid footing, she kept her arms upraised, hands resting against the rocks, while Jack carefully turned himself around—keeping his handcuffed hand level with hers—and climbed down to join her.

  Casey looked around. Here at the bottom of the ravine, it felt like being in their own private world: dim, cool, and private. A narrow sliver of blue sky above them, framed by pines leaning over the edge, were the only vestige of the world they'd left behind.

  She'd never realized that water
had so many sounds, splashing and gurgling and a delicate tink, tink, tink that sounded like the plinking of piano keys. Despite all the noise it made, the stream was a small one, just a couple of feet wide and deep enough to cover her ankles. The cool water felt wonderful on her sore feet.

  "Can we drink it?" she asked, gazing yearningly at the clear cascade tumbling over a waterfall just upstream from them. As a lynx she usually didn't worry about it, lapping water from whatever source she found, and it had never harmed her. As a human, though, she knew just enough about hiking to know that drinking untreated water in the woods was a good way to get sick.

  "It's a trade-off," Jack said. "Dehydration will start weakening us pretty fast after a day or so, and we're probably a little dehydrated already from the drugs. So you have to weigh that against the chance of picking up a bug." He leaned over and dipped his uncuffed hand under the waterfall, bringing up a palmful of clear water.

  "It looks okay," Casey said.

  "The stuff that'll get you isn't what you can see. Bacteria and parasites—those are the real problem. Still, somewhere this remote, and this high in the hills, the chances are better that the water will be all right to drink. At least, they're the best odds you can get for unfiltered creek water."

  "So what's the verdict?" She held her hand under the falling water and let it run tantalizingly through her fingers. Even though she knew it hadn't been that long since she'd had a drink, her mouth felt dry as sand.

  "I don't really see we have a choice," Jack said reluctantly. "Under these circumstances, with the threat as immediate as it is and a pretty good chance of rescue, it's worth taking the risk. And we don't have anything to build a still or catch rainwater, so this is pretty much it."

  They took turns cupping their hands and drinking. Casey thought it was the best water she'd ever tasted, clear and fresh and slightly mineral-flavored. If it was going to make them ill, there was no way to tell from the taste.

  She was starting to shiver now, though. It had been easy enough to stay warm with exertion, but with her feet in the cold water and more of it in her belly, she could tell that her body temperature was falling dangerously.

  "Ready to go?" Jack asked her. There were goosebumps prickling his arms, too. It was nice to know it wasn't just her. And he didn't have the option of turning into a lynx for a little while to warm up.

  She nodded.

  Once they were moving again—hand linked to hand—she worked up her courage and finally spoke.

  "Jack," she said. It was easier to talk to him when she wasn't looking at him. "There's something I need to tell you about me, too."

  "All right," he said easily.

  "About two years ago, my roommate Wendy went missing."

  She darted a look at Jack under the edge of her eyelids. He gave her a supportive smile, as if he was interviewing a slightly nervous witness.

  "Did she work for Fallon too?" he asked.

  "Yes. She did. At that point, I didn't. We shared an apartment. She wrote software for the company."

  She groped for what to say next.

  "Before she disappeared, she told me she thought there was something going on at Fallon's company that wasn't right. She wouldn't tell me what. She said if she was wrong, she'd be slandering innocent people. And that was the last conversation I ever had with her."

  "What happened?" Jack asked quietly.

  "She didn't come home that night. I was working night shifts at my shitty waitress job, so I wasn't entirely sure until the next day. I called Lion's Share Software and asked to speak to her. After getting shuffled around between different departments, because I wasn't exactly sure where she worked, I finally got a person who said she'd quit.

  "That made no sense to me. She hadn't said anything at all about quitting her job. And why wouldn't she come home? I couldn't reach her on her phone; it just went to voice mail. She didn't answer her emails. I waited to see if maybe she'd show up that night, but she wasn't there in the morning when I came home from work, so I called the police."

  "What did they say?"

  "They said they'd look into it. I kept checking back, made a real nuisance of myself I guess, and a few days later they told me Wendy had moved to Colorado Springs and was just fine, so I needed to stop worrying about her. And you know the really crazy part?"

  "What's that?"

  "I went on Wendy's Facebook, and sure enough, it was updated with pictures from her trip to Colorado. I went around for a while feeling like I was going crazy, 'til I got to thinking, why would she leave without taking anything at all? I mean, neither of us had a whole lot of stuff. We were both orphans, we'd both moved around a lot when we were kids, and neither of us had a lot of keepsakes. But you'd think she'd come back and get her books and things. She didn't even take her shampoo!"

  "Besides," Jack said, "she didn't have a fight with you or anything, did she? Why wouldn't she tell you where she was going?"

  "Right!" A smile broke out across her face. "You believe me! No one believed me. Everyone thought I was making a big deal out of nothing."

  Jack raised his uncuffed hand to indicate the woods around them. "I have some pretty good evidence here to vindicate you. So what happened then?"

  "I got on a bus to Colorado Springs. Stupid, huh? I didn't even have an address. The police said they'd talked to her, but they wouldn't give me her contact information. I think they thought I was stalking her. Then I came up with what I thought was a pretty clever way of getting her address."

  "How?" Jack asked.

  "I called the utility company in Colorado Springs. See, when she disappeared, I went to the library and got a bunch of books on skip tracing. I couldn't afford to hire a private detective; they cost too much. So I figured I could learn how to do what they did from books. I looked up the number for the Colorado Springs electric utility online, and I called them and pretended to be Wendy. I told them my bills were going to the wrong address and I needed to verify where they were sending them. I figured I would ask for some kind of identity verification, but I still had all her old mail in the apartment, so I had her social security number and driver's license number and everything."

  "That's smart," Jack said. "Did it work?"

  "Yes!" She still remembered her amazement that her plan had actually succeeded. "Well, kind of. They wanted the last four digits of my social—I mean, hers—and then they looked her up in the computer and found an address, but she wasn't the current customer. Someone else had moved in a month ago. I said thanks and hung up."

  "Did you go anyway?"

  "What else was I going to do? I sure wasn't gonna find her sitting around in Seattle. I did go to the address I got from the electric company, but it was true, she wasn't there. It was a family who had just rented the place. They seemed nice, I mean like a normal family, not like people who were being paid off or anything.

  "And that's when it hit me, I guess, that I wasn't going to find her. I mean, I could keep doing what I was doing, going from lead to lead, playing detective. But I don't think she was there at the end of it to find. Because Wendy wouldn't just up and move to Colorado Springs for no reason without telling me. And her Facebook stopped being updated after those photos from the move."

  "And that's when you started working for Lion's Share."

  "Yes," Casey said. "It was the only thing I could think to do. I mean, it's not like my waitress job was some kind of great career opportunity. And the thing is, me and Wendy—we were all each other had in the world. She came out of the foster care system, and I was raised by my grandmother, who died the year I turned eighteen. We met working this stupid fast-food job that both of us hated—I'm sorry—"

  She paused to rub at her eyes. Jack hesitated, then put his uncuffed arm around her bare shoulders. Casey tensed.

  "Is that the best friend whose cleavage you threw up in?"

  This got a small, choked laugh out of her. She began to relax against him, just a little. "Yeah. It is. I'm surprised you remember me tellin
g you that."

  "I'm a good listener," Jack said. "Or so I've been told. So you started working for Lion's Share to find out what happened to Wendy?"

  Casey nodded. "I wasn't going to abandon her. So I put in an application to the company. All I could get was a job in the mailroom, because I really wasn't qualified for anything else, but I threw everything I had at that stupid job. I took night classes in typing and computers and accounting, and I covered other people's holiday shifts, and I worked my ass off making myself the best, most useful employee they'd ever had. Every time something opened up higher in the company, I applied for it, and eventually I worked my way up."

  She gave a miserable little laugh.

  "What's really ironic is that I've never put that much dedication into anything before. I think that's when I realized how much of my life I've spent just spinning my wheels, not really knowing what I wanted, and not ever getting anything because of it. The first time I gave a hundred and ten percent was to get a job I didn't even want just so I could figure out if my new boss killed my best friend. I did that for two years. And, well ... I guess I found out, didn't I?"

  Jack looked down at the dark, tangled top of her head. "Why didn't you tell me this before, though? Here I've been thinking you were a civilian caught up in something you knew nothing about. But you've been preparing for this for a long time, haven't you?"

  "No!" she said, scrubbing at her eyes. "That's the problem! I thought I had. But now I know I never understood what I was getting myself into. I thought I could find out what happened to Wendy, collect evidence on Fallon, and go to the police. I thought I'd be a ... a hero."

  The last word was twisted with self-loathing.

  "Casey, listen." Jack raised their cuffed-together hands and touched her chin, lifting her face to meet her gaze with his dark forest eyes. "You are a hero. You spent two years working as hard as you could to find out what happened to your friend and get justice for her. In the end, you moved too fast and got caught, but that happens to professionals too. Look at me. I've been doing this a whole lot longer than you have."