Kodiak Chained

by Doranna Durgin

  He grumbled at her, a sound distinct from the rain that seemed to surround her in their enclosed space. In the wake of it, he rubbed thumb and forefinger over his eyes—and when he looked out at her again, his expression was more weary than she’d seen. “I’d be a fool to have forgotten. But I’m no less stubborn than you. And I need you in this—finding Forakkes, putting an end to his plans or at least to his cone of silence. I can’t do it alone.”

  “There’s no point—” But she sputtered to a stop when he put a finger over her lower lip.

  “Mari,” he said, “I don’t have to be a healer to see that you’re getting worse. All I have to do is care.”

  Instantly, tears prickled her eyes. “That’s not fair,” she said. “Don’t you dare make me cry again!”

  He lifted his shoulders in a hint of a shrug.

  She withdrew from him, pressing herself back against the rock. “All right, then. Yes. Obviously. This amulet thing isn’t going away. I don’t know if I can take the bear again, and I’d be stupid to try unless I knew for sure I could get back to the human, too. After what just happened and all.”

  He made a generalized noise of agreement.

  “But there’s no point in risking you, too! You’re already hurt—”

  “And I can work on that, too, if you help me.”

  She gave him a suspicious glance. “What do you mean, if I help you?”

  “I mean that you’re right,” he told her. “Every time I reach for a healing, I run into a roadblock that hits back.”

  “If that’s what you call bleeding from your damned ears and taking a dive,” she muttered.

  “It hits back,” he said distinctly, “hard.”

  She said nothing.

  For the first time, he looked somewhat abashed. “The problem is, I don’t see it coming.”

  She couldn’t help her incredulous reaction. “Ton of bricks, meet Ruger? You don’t see that coming?”

  He could have growled back at her; he merely looked bemused. “Healing doesn’t leave room for multitasking.”

  Mariska shivered. The sun slipped out through a big splash of blue sky and sparked over the wet ridge, and she longed to go lie in its warmth and bask the afternoon away, letting it bake out the chill in her bones that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the amulet damage...with the circumstances. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want,” he said, “to hold you until this whole mess passes, because I’m a selfish bastard. But since that doesn’t seem likely to help our friends or to stop Forakkes from wreaking havoc, I’d appreciate it if you would stand watch for me.”

  “Stand watch,” she repeated, by way of question.

  “Give me a nudge if things seem to be getting out of control.” He lifted a single brow at her. “A nudge, I said.”

  “But...how does that accomplish anything? You start healing...I stop you. Neither of us is any better off—and maybe we’re worse.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “But maybe I can learn where the line is. Maybe if I do, I can keep from crossing it—and maybe I can do a little bit of good from there. Enough to keep us going.”

  “Huh.” Mariska shoved herself past the emotion—past the conflicting impulses to protect Ruger from himself and the urge to let him take over. To let him take her pain away. She tried to think logically about it all instead.

  Because he was right—she was a mess, and getting worse. He was right that their friends needed help.

  And he was right that neither of them could do this alone.

  Chapter 16

  Ruger saw it happen—the understanding in Mariska’s expression, and the change from resistant conflict to...

  Resignation.

  Maybe even a little bit of hope.

  “Okay,” she said. “We can do this.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh out loud. She huddled shivering before him, skin pebbled and toasty complexion paled in a way that only highlighted the unnatural flush high along the strong bones of her face. He felt every inch of the slice along his back, every cut and scrape of their escape.

  But together, they possessed such an accumulation of stubborn determination, it was hard to imagine anything but success.

  “Just nudge,” he reminded her, and settled to sit cross-legged with his back to the rock and the slope spreading down before him. Overhead, the next round of rapidly shifting clouds rumbled a distinct warning; the rain wasn’t done with them.

  “Go slow,” she warned him. “So I have the chance.”

  In answer, he held out his hand. She took it, her fingers wrapping without hesitation around his. “Is it easier this way?”

  “A little,” he told her. “Mostly I just want to hold your hand.”

  She might have smacked him then; he saw it in the press of her lips, the spark of her eye. But in the end she squeezed his fingers—and maybe there was even a hint of a smile.

  Ruger closed his eyes, shutting out the world. He took a moment of indulgence to feel the nuances of her hand in his—the faint pressure of strong, short nails against his skin, the calluses on the knuckles and edge of her palm, the rough skin of a recent scrape. Her fingers twitched with passing restlessness, and that made him smile, too.

  From there he slid not to healing, but to awareness. He started with the sharp pull on his back—feeling it as a healer would, and practicing the balance of perceiving without acting.

  Harder than he’d thought, that balance.

  Harder yet when he sought out Mariska—deep aches, gripping chill, insistent wrongness—and especially at the ice pick of a headache clamped down in her head.

  Generalized healing. That’s what he needed. Nothing fancy; nothing too targeted. Nothing that would eliminate the amulet working from her system, and just enough to spill over to his back.

  Just enough to help.

  He groped for the energies, struggling for balance—struggling to push his way through the thick wall of dead energy—but without shoving. Without falling into lifelong habits of reaching.

  It used to come with such ease, this energy did. It used to flow like silk, not mud. It used to wash around the wounded like a cool balm. Now he grappled with sticky energy sludge, making little headway until in his impatience he yanked—

  He startled wildly at the stinging slap against his face, his head hitting the rock behind him. “Son of a bitch!”

  Mariska knelt before him, facing uphill with her knees nearly touching his, annoyance at war with grim concern. “You should have saved some of that shirt for your face.”

  “Nudge!” he told her, at a loss for words.

  She rose up on her knees, pulling the hem of her shirt high and wiping it beneath his nose; when she sat back she displayed the stain to him. “I did nudge,” she told him. “I nudged the hell out of you, and it didn’t help. What did you do?”

  He swore, and couldn’t keep the sheepish note from his voice.

  “You got impatient,” she said, and rolled her eyes. And then she rolled a knuckle against his chest. “That’s a nudge,” she said—and then added, “Don’t you growl at me.”

  Only then did he feel the residual vibration of that grumble in his chest. But by then she was stroking the spot she’d just knuckled, and his thoughts tangled on the sensation. He reached for her waist and tugged her closer, uncrossing his legs to make way for her.

  “It was worth a try,” she said. She didn’t tug easily—not with her knees pressing into the ground—but she inched forward between his thighs and hardly seemed to notice it. “We’ll just have to—”

  “We’re not done yet.” Not by a long shot. Her waist curved beneath his hands, tidy and defined; he smoothed his hands up her torso until his thumbs rested just under her breasts. As if they belonged there—as if he had the right to touch her so casually.

  Then again, the bear knew what he wanted. And so did he.

  “What do you mean, not done yet?” She leaned closer, and the flush on her cheeks, the b
rightness of her eyes—they no longer came of fever.

  He grinned. “How do you feel?”

  “Just because you have your hands where you have your hands doesn’t mean I’m going to forget—” But she stopped short, her mouth still open. She looked down on herself—at his hands, at her own; she put the inside of her wrist to her forehead. “Better!” she said in surprise. “Definitely better. But you didn’t— How—?”

  “Give me some credit,” he said, sounding aggrieved even to his own ears. “Or did you think I was the most active field healer in brevis just because I can take care of myself?”

  She pushed a hand off his shoulder in a quick shove, pulling back without managing to dislodge his grip in the least. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’d better know it.” She subsided when he made a noncommittal noise. “It just wasn’t long enough.”

  “It wasn’t.” He could still feel it in her—the wrongness, the lurking malaise. “I’m working with sludge. But now I know the sludge does something...and so do you.”

  “Sludge,” she said. “You put sludge into me.”

  He rose to it, would have tightened his grip on her—but saw the tiny little smile at the corners of her mouth, the way her lips pressed together to suppress it.

  “You,” he growled.

  She widened her eyes, clear enough. Want to make something of it?

  “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to sort you out.”

  “Oh, I think it was a very good idea. Imagine how annoyed Forakkes will be.”

  He couldn’t help it; he laughed. “One more time, then.”

  “Don’t get impatient,” she warned him.

  In answer, he closed his eyes. He skimmed quickly past the familiar feel of their needs, hesitated to ground himself in caution, and reached for the sludge.

  It was all wrong, that energy—all wrong that he should labor so hard for such a basic thing. He wobbled to find the balance—enough effort to move the sludge, not so much that he paid the price.

  He felt her nudge this time—knuckles pushing into his shoulder; he steadied himself. It was a crude thing, this healing—a barely directed flow of energy applied with a trowel instead of precision and finesse.

  But he felt the faint burn of his back, and knew his body had claimed the sludge for its own purposes. He felt Mariska stiffen in his grip, holding her breath on a gasp, and knew that this time, she felt it, too.

  Somehow, he kept that balance.

  But then she poked him—harder this time—and he thought he’d likely used up his luck. It was a relief to let go of the sludge, watching it drain away from his grasp; it was a relief to step back from the stringent self-control that kept him from going after more. Mariska relaxed in his hands, inching closer. Her touch brushed over his shoulders, stroked down his arms—a soothing thing, as if she understood he needed time to make the transition back out.

  Or else simply took advantage of the opportunity.

  All right, then. It went both ways, this touching thing. He followed impulse—following the warmth of her in his healer’s awareness, releasing his grasp of body and bone and wholeness to reach for something more personal. A place he’d never gone before, simply because his grasp of body and bone and wholeness had always come foremost.

  The heat of what he found stirred through his limbs, turning liquid—turning her touch into something that sent a shiver right down his spine. He stroked her with it, in tune to the thunder overhead.

  Her hands tightened on his shoulders; her words sounded strangled. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  He hadn’t known, either. He would have told her so, but he ended up murmuring her name instead, turning it into an endearment—a satisfied hum, and yet full of awareness that he hadn’t meant to go to this place and that he wasn’t sure he could stop now that he’d started. She moved closer yet, her knees nudging inside his thighs. Her breasts brushed his chest through a shirt still wet, her breath brushed his neck and her lips brushed his ear. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “We don’t,” he agreed, somehow managing those words in spite of his complete and total focus on simply being there with her. The tease of bear in her scent, her body both hard-toned and curvy beneath his hands; the very solidity of her, tangled with her lurking exuberance, the promise of unfettered enthusiasm. His breath came sharp on a surge of response, his balls tightening in anticipation. He grasped for words. “We don’t...but we don’t have much choice.”

  Her hands slipped over his chest, fingers scraping through crisp hair to wring a groan from him. But she shook her head. “Ian...Sandy...Katie’s vision... We have to—” She shook her head again, pressing it against his in regret.

  Just maybe she hadn’t noticed that the sky had darkened again, the clouds tumbling to darkness overhead—but when thunder slammed together all around them, they both jumped. Newly roused energies spiraled through their little shelter, rising in a slash of desire and encircling them both.

  “Not. Fair.” She was still that close to his ear; she clamped her teeth on his earlobe.

  His laugh was more of a gasp. “Not mine,” he told her, pulling her closer with no mercy at all. She settled in on him, her knees hitting the stone behind them, her ankles hooked back over the top of his open thighs—flexible, at that, and spread so completely open to him. Another peal of thunder rolled through as he reflexively thrust against her, a groan behind his words. “Not that time.”

  “We should...” She lost track of those words, her hands stroking his sides, skimming up to his chest and down between them again to hover at his jeans. “Our friends. Forakkes. We should—”

  “We can’t.” He lifted his hips to offer the wood buttons on the jeans, digging his heels into the thin soil of the slope below them. “Not until this storm passes. Or haven’t you had enough fieldwork to dodge a high desert monsoon before?”

  She paused with her hands on the top button and her teeth resting on his throat. “Are you messing with my temper? Now?”

  “Maybe,” he told her, as the rain started again, soaking into the legs of his jeans. He pushed her away, just enough to give her a satisfying and possessive once-over, not the least bit gentle inside. Wet strands of hair escaped her braid to wisp around her face; high color washed over her cheeks and brightened her eyes. The wet shirt clung to her skin, outlining every detail of the form beneath.

  “Maybe,” he said, and traced the line of her bra where it sloped close to the nipple, “I think I like your temper.”

  She swore and yanked at his jeans, then gave up and yanked at her shirt.

  “Patience,” he said, as if he wasn’t aching to do the same, “I’ve been told it’s a virtue. And we need what clothes we have left.” But his head dropped back as the energies he’d loosed wove between them, tightening around them; he grabbed her hips to push against her, the groan deep in his throat.

  She swore again; her voice rose in pitch. “You did that on purpose!”

  Ruger spoke through his teeth. “Not while I’m still wearing these pants, I didn’t.”

  Her fingers fumbled with the buttons to her shirt; he joined her, working from the bottom up so they met in the middle. She closed her hand over his, then, stilling him a moment; her dark eyes were full of conflict—passion and regret and the looming loss of control. “We really can’t—? We’re stuck here?”

  “We really can’t,” he said, and pushed back an errant strand of hair to cup the side of her face, holding her firmly. “We’re stuck here. Take the moment, Mariska.”

  She showed him her teeth, the wild flaring high in her eyes, her legs tightening around his thighs. “I’ll take,” she said, as much warning as promise. She yanked the shirt off and tossed it aside.

  He reached around for her bra fastener—only to stare at the sprinkling of pale lavender blooms over the swell of otherwise sporty material. “Flowers.”

  “What of it?” she said, stilling her hands to glare at him.


  “Like ’em,” he told her. He left the clasp alone to cup her breasts through the material, running his thumbs firmly over both nipples. Perfect. Her glare dissolved to grasping neediness, and he might have been smug about it had not the awakened energies surged up to include him.

  Mariska emitted a sound of despair and jerked away, hands at her pants even as she stood. The rain splatted against her back; she had to grab at the rock to maintain her balance on the slope, and by then Ruger had untied her shoes, pulling them off one by one as she lifted each leg to tug away the pants.

  “See?” he said. “We can work at as a team.”

  “Shut up and do something about those pants!” She threw herself back on him just as she’d been, leaving just enough room between them to reach his jeans. But he was erect against them, painfully so; he fumbled the wooden buttons as if he’d never handled them before.

  She shoved him back against the gritty angle of rock, leaving the whole of him sprawled out before her, and tackled the pants—more gently than he might have supposed, and with a whole lot more—

  A whole lot more—

  Touching. Stroking.

  He growled, just to let her know he knew what she was doing, and she laughed. The growl turned to a groan as he tipped his head back against rock and pushed helplessly against her hands.

  Wicked, wicked hands.

  She played with him long after she tugged his jeans aside, touching him everywhere—adding a nip and kiss, small hands clever and bold. His toes curled; his fingers clutched at rock and dirt. More than once he tried to drag her up across his body—to get his hands on her. More than once she interrupted him. It took nothing more than warm breath and just the right touch—and it didn’t help when she reminded him, “I owe you.” Her voice hummed with heat and satisfaction, the energies he’d roused taking a life of their own to wrap around them both.

  “You’re just trying to make me—” Cry, he would have said. Beg mercy. Just plain beg.

  But he didn’t have the breath for it, his body going tight, tighter—

  “Mari,” he managed, teeth clenched and control a thing of the past. “Mari—”