by Roxie Noir
“Where did you even get those?” Kade asked, raising his eyebrows.
Daniel looked down.
“I thought they were yours,” he said.
“So you’re just borrowing my stuff again?”
Daniel had the grace to at least try to look sheepish.
“Sorry,” he said.
Kade rolled his eyes and shrugged.
“She made it through,” he said.
“I told you.”
Daniel poured himself a cup of coffee into an ugly mug that looked like the first attempt of a novice potter, brown and lumpy.
“I wish I could just let the wolves get her,” Kade said quietly.
The only sound was Daniel replacing the coffee pot on the machine.
“No, you don’t,” he said.
He walked over to his mate and slid an arm over his waist, resting his chin on the other man’s shoulder, looking out the window with him.
“You’re right,” Kade muttered. He took a sip of his coffee, leaning back against Daniel’s warm body just a little. “But it would be easier.”
“Since when has anything worthwhile been easy?” Daniel asked.
“It would be nice if it happened just once,” Kade said. “Don’t most bears find their third mates by going on, I don’t know, wine tours or speed dating or whatever that website is that I see billboards for all over the place?”
“Shifter Sex Maniacs?”
“Yeah,” Kade said. “Why couldn’t we try that instead of rescuing a federal agent from a wolf pack?”
In response, Daniel kissed the side of his neck, and Kade felt the heat begin to gather in his lower belly. Since they’d brought the girl home, they hadn’t exactly been getting it on — there had been bigger things to worry about.
“It’s more of a hookup site,” Charlie’s voice said from the doorway.
Kade froze, leaning into the counter a little more to hide his half-erection. Daniel’s lips moved away from the side of his neck.
“How are you feeling?” he asked Charlie.
The girl looked wobbly and slightly unfocused, but she was miles better than she’d been the past few days. For one thing, she was awake, and for another, she was on her feet and talking.
“I’ve been better,” she said.
All three of them paused. Kade felt like all the words he could think of had simply dried up.
“Is that coffee?” she finally asked.
Kade nodded.
Daniel moved away, grabbing a mug from a high shelf and pouring her some.
“Kade was just putting pants on,” he said.
Charlie moved past him and toward the coffee maker, her movements awkward and shuffling but better than he’d hoped for.
He didn’t move. The very last thing he wanted her to see was his erection.
Really? He thought to himself.
Even though she was moving stiffly and wearing a bathrobe, he could just barely see her shape: generous bosom, cushioned hips, narrow waist.
I could be very, very gentle, he thought.
It didn’t help his erection.
At last she was past him, and while her back was turned, he strode to his bedroom as quickly as he could.
He had to get out of the house, away from her, or he might just lose his mind.
7
Daniel
As Kade rushed to their bedroom, stomping his feet as he went, Daniel suppressed a smile. Kade said things like give her to the wolves, sure, but he’d also spent four nights on the cold, hard floor of their back bedroom, watching her sleep.
He could tell that Kade hadn’t been doing a lot of sleeping himself. If he knew his mate, Kade was waking up every hour or so to listen for her breathing.
Besides, he’d watched the look on Kade’s face as Kade checked Charlie out from behind. It had been a look of pure, unadulterated lust, and just seeing it there on his mate’s face made Daniel’s heart thump in his chest.
He poured Charlie a mug of coffee and handed it to her.
She held it up in front of her face, reading it carefully.
“Ewe’s not fat, ewe’s just fluffy?” she asked, her eyebrows raised.
The mug had a cartoon drawing of a sheep wearing lipstick and heels. Daniel was dimly aware that they owned the mug, but it wasn’t like he looked all that closely at their dishes. They were just a means to an end.
“I think it’s a hand-me-down,” he said. “Someone must have been cleaning out their kitchen. Kade’s mom, maybe?”
“She’s the one who made the stew?”
Daniel nodded.
“It’s really good stew,” Charlie said, blowing on the top of her coffee.
“She used to catch all the rabbits herself, but now that she’s getting older, all the cousins take turns bringing her stuff.”
The look on Charlie’s face said that she didn’t quite know what to make of that, so he charged on.
“Do you want sugar or anything?” he asked.
He had no idea whether they even owned sugar.
“Do you have milk?” Charlie asked, still blowing on the coffee. She looked grateful that they were no longer discussing hunting.
“Maybe,” Daniel muttered. He opened the fridge, a small, old clanking thing that was probably older than him. It had an enormous dent in the front but seemed to work just fine.
There was no milk. There was mustard, the very last of the rabbit stew, a wilted bunch of greens, a bottle of water, and a bowl of eggs.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s ok,” she said with a shrug. “I’m just glad I’m awake again. I had the weirdest dreams. Mostly of wolves chasing me.”
A tiny tremor moved through her body, and Daniel had to fight the urge to squeeze her tight and tell her that the wolves would never, ever get her again.
Instead he walked back across the kitchen, motioning her to follow him, and he sat at the table that had been stained with her blood.
“You got the stains out,” she said, a little surprised.
“I had to sand it,” he said. “It took a while, but while you were asleep I sanded it and refinished it and now it’s as good as new.”
She ran her fingers along the grain as she sat, her back very straight. Pain flashed across her face, but she fought it off.
“You made this?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You made everything,” she said, like it had just occurred to her, her eyes roaming over the furniture, the ceiling, the walls, the shelves in the kitchen.
Daniel just nodded again.
“It’s beautiful,” she went on. “We had no idea.”
Daniel took another long sip of his coffee, trying to parse that sentence and finally failing.
“Who’s ‘we,’ and what did you have no idea of?” he asked.
“The task force,” Charlie said. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, but kept running the fingers of one hand over the freshly sanded wood, the ewe’s not fat mug in the other hand. “And we didn’t know that Kade had a mate.”
Daniel swallowed coffee, watching her finger trace patterns on the table top.
“It isn’t a secret,” he said. “Not that I’m aware.”
“I don’t know how we missed it,” she said. “It makes me wonder what other intelligence we got wrong.”
Before Daniel could think of and then articulate a response, the bedroom door opened and Kade walked out, wearing both pants and a shirt, though he was barefoot.
“I’m going to go grab a deer for dinner,” he said. He only looked at Daniel, practically pretending that Charlie wasn’t there. “Back in a couple of hours.”
Daniel nodded once.
“Watch for wolves,” he said.
“They know better than to come for me,” he said, and then he left through the front door, still barefoot.
Charlie shook her head slightly, still looking down at the table.
“Not used to shifters?” he asked.
She chewed on the ins
ide of her lip like she wasn’t sure how to phrase what she was about to say. It took her a while.
“I’m not used to... bachelor pairs, I guess?”
She paused.
“Do you have a female mate somewhere?”
As she asked, her cheeks turned a pleasing pink color, and Daniel found himself fascinated by it.
“No,” he said quickly. “Definitely not. Not even a little. Zero.”
Could you be more awkward? He thought.
Briefly, he had the urge to shift and run off into the forest, where beautiful human girls weren’t sitting across the table from him in nothing more than his dead mother’s bathrobe.
Charlie just turned redder and drained her coffee mug, like she was trying to hide her blush.
“I actually grew up with a lot of shifters,” she finally said. “Back in Cumberland.”
“What are you doing out here?” Daniel asked. His coffee was finished, too, and he itched to do something with his hands.
“Figuring out who killed those wolves,” she said. “Shifter-human relations are fucked up enough as it is. We don’t need shifters killing other shifters over territory disputes to make things worse, you know?”
Daniel stood, unable to contain himself anymore, and walked to a workbench across the room. He grabbed a few tools: a whittling knife, an exacto, and a half-carved, half-round wood sculpture of a mountain lion.
“They sent you alone?” he asked.
“They didn’t want it to be a big deal,” she said, and he could hear in her voice that she was nervous, on edge again.
There was something she wouldn’t tell him. Whatever she was really doing there, it wasn’t just information gathering, like she wanted them to believe. He turned the lion over in his hands, holding in it one and considering where the next cut was going to be.
“At least, that’s what they told me,” she said. “They picked me because I had the most experience with shifters, growing up with them and all. Though there weren’t many wolves or grizzlies in Cumberland. Lots of lions and foxes.”
She spun the mug between her fingers, the ceramic thumping against the wood.
“They told me Kade was feral,” she said, suddenly.
Daniel cut a small chunk of wood away from the lion’s tail. It wasn’t the farthest thing from the truth that he’d ever heard. The other man certainly didn’t have a lot of human graces, that much was for sure.
“That’s not hard to disprove,” Daniel said. The knife hovered over the wooden lion and he looked up at Charlie. “He forgets to wear clothes a lot, but he’s sure not feral.”
Charlie shook her head. “I wish I knew why they told me that,” she said, slowly. “Whether it was an honest mistake or something else.”
“He spends a lot of time as a bear,” Daniel said. “That’s his job, after all.”
“What is?”
Daniel looked up.
“He tracks down feral shifters,” he said.
Charlie blinked. “That’s a job?” she asked.
“Sure,” Daniel said. “Can’t have a bunch of smart, deranged bears and wolves and lions roaming the countryside.”
“I didn’t know there were other shifters who... did that.”
“Who better?”
Charlie slumped a little in her chair but straightened immediately, sucking in a breath through her teeth, pain flashing across her face.
Daniel half-stood, dropping his tools on the table, ready to do anything she needed.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just moved funny is all.”
She went quiet for a long time.
“So he saves other shifters from being feral,” she mused, talking almost to herself. “Wolves, too?”
“I think most of his work is bears, but he’ll take on anyone.” Daniel cut another chunk off the lion, slowly freeing the wooden animal from its prison. “Last year he caught and helped an eagle for the first time. It was terrorizing people’s pets. We were afraid it was going to start going after babies.”
Charlie paled a little.
“Babies? Why would it do that?”
Daniel licked his lips and very, very carefully positioned the knife along the lion’s jaws, delicately cutting away the wood to reveal its snarling fangs.
“When you’re feral, some really fucked up things make sense,” he told her. He couldn’t look her in the eye, so he just stared into the eyes of the lion, his knife resting on one of its teeth. “Your human brain starts to fuse with your animal brain, and you have these urges that you can’t understand, but they’re so powerful that you act on them anyway. But you don’t know how anymore.”
He had a fuzzy memory of a shack in the middle of nowhere, burning down. Then the sound of sirens, then him hightailing it into the woods.
Daniel swallowed, pushing the memory back into the box where it belonged.
“So all you can do is destroy things you used to love.”
Like the house where you grew up, he thought.
Finally, he looked up. Charlie’s mouth was slightly open and she was staring at him.
He swallowed hard, knowing what was coming next.
“You were feral,” she said, slowly.
She didn’t move, but he could tell she was thinking about it. The concept of feral shifters terrified humans. Most had never met one.
“I’m not anymore.”
Silence.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was even, and she held herself perfectly rigid.
She knows she can’t run, he thought.
“Don’t be,” he said.
Daniel reached one hand across the table and slid it over Charlie’s. He could feel the tendons in her wrist, tight and jumpy.
“Was Kade feral?” she asked.
Daniel shook his head.
“Not Kade,” he said.
Charlie finally looked down at their hands, and Daniel thought he saw her shoulders relax a fraction.
Slowly, she turned her hand over in his so they were palm to palm, and warmth spread through his whole body.
“Kade saved you,” she said.
Daniel could feel her pulse under his fingertips, strong despite everything, and it almost made him dizzy.
“I was the first one,” he said. “He’d just gotten his discharge from the army, and I think he was in a pretty bad place. He found out about me, somehow, someone told him that there was a shifter in really bad shape, and somehow he decided that since he was in bad shape, too, he’d come talk me out of it.”
“That’s an insane thing to decide,” Charlie said.
Daniel smiled, tracing circles on the inside of her wrist, his heart skipping beats.
“Kade makes decisions very quickly and very firmly,” he said. “And somehow, he decided I was his project. So he tracked me down, found me in the woods, wrestled me to the ground, and shifted back to human.”
Charlie’s eyebrows went up.
“He knew my name and he wasn’t afraid of me,” Daniel went on.
He paused.
“In retrospect, I don’t think he was afraid of anything then,” he said. “I think part of him wished he were dead, and it made him fearless. But he got me to shift back.”
“And now you’re mates.”
“From that day.” He tapped the inside of her wrist, then took her hand in his, rubbing his thumb over the back of her knuckles. “Kade likes to rescue people, he likes to fix things. He likes to feel useful and like people need him. That’s his curse.”
“What’s yours?”
“You know mine.”
“That you were feral?”
“That my strongest instinct is to run away from my problems. Usually by turning into a bear.”
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Electricity charged through his veins.
I wish Kade were here to share this, he thought. But I don’t think it would work if he were here. She’s still afraid of him.<
br />
Charlie’s eyes were wide, her mouth open, her breathing fast. She still sat perfectly upright in her bandages, like she was trying not to move.
Daniel had absolutely no idea what he was doing, alone in his cabin with this girl. His only real experience was with Kade, and that had been completely different.
When Kade had saved him, the moment Daniel had shifted back to human, he’d pushed Kade to the ground and they’d half-fought, wrapped in each other’s naked limbs, until it was perfectly clear what was happening.
They’d mated before Daniel even knew Kade’s name. It had been that primal.
Charlie was human, though. She was human and female and had been half-dead only a few days ago, so she probably needed a different approach.
“Can I kiss your hand again?” he asked, his lips hovering over her.
She nodded.
His lips touched the cool back of her hand, the sensation jolting through him. He felt shades of him and Kade naked in the forest, all those years ago.
Daniel flipped her hand over, her palm below his lips.
“Can I kiss your palm?” he asked.
She nodded again.
Her palm was warmer, and he thought he heard her inhale sharply.
“Your wrist?”
“Yes,” she whispered. Daniel could feel her pulse beneath his lips, the strong thump-thump of her heart.
He looked at her and raised his eyebrows, standing from his seat and leaning over the table. Charlie nodded again, and Daniel let his lips travel up her forearm, the inside of her elbow.
Then, suddenly, he found his face in front of hers, only inches away. He planted one hand on the table and she sat, perfectly rigid, unable to bend or move for fear of hurting her back again.
“You can say no,” he whispered.
“Kiss me,” Charlie murmured.
8
Charlie
As Daniel ran his thumb along her cheekbone, she didn’t dare move. She wasn’t afraid of him, even though she knew that she probably should be.
She wanted to arch her neck up, to bring her own lips closer to his, but she could barely move her back against the bandages, so she stayed still, her lips tilted up, and waited.
