“Probably not.”
“That is where you are wrong, my love. If you have holes in your leggings, I’m pretty sure I’m interested.”
* * *
The moms were surprised when Gabriella insisted on joining the clan to help out Jack’s cousins from Yakima Ridge roofing their house in Portland. They rightfully considered Berkley, California rather a long way for a sophomore to drive for a weekend project.
“Don’t you have assignments due?” Jools growled into the phone.
“I’m all caught up. But Art’s not coming. He has three papers due next week.”
“We’re always glad to see you, honey. You know that. But we can manage without you.”
This was true. Winnie Malcom was a big bear of a woman, and roofing was her living. Jools was nearly as large, and between them they had whelped two litters of cubs who had all grown up with a hammer in each hand.
Jacob, Caleb and Gwen were Jools’ triplets and six years younger. They were all handy with tools. And they had all volunteered to help with the project.
The explanation for Gabriella’s presence at Len and Joe’s roof raising was provided when Roman roared up on a motorbike. He had borrowed it from a pal. The pal who had given him a ride in his Air Force helicopter so Roman could spend his weekend furlough roofing. The moms both greeted him with identical scowls.
Gabriella had volunteered to take care of the coffee breaks and lunches for the crew onsite. The moms had assumed she spend the day at Maddie’s house giving her a hand with the preparations for Saturday night’s supper, and visiting with pregnant Hannah. They were not amused.
Her younger siblings, Jacob, Caleb and Gwen glared at Roman as if his tall, lean muscularity was a sign of depravity. Their glares matched the ones on the faces of the moms. Winnie, who had assumed control and was delegating with the ease of a woman who had spent a lifetime bossing roofers, immediately assigned Roman the nastiest job. Her face dared him to complain or shirk.
Roman hopped right into the dump bin with a pitchfork and began spreading the discarded shingles and rotten lumber into tidy layers. He set himself an easy rhythm. It was a cool fall day, but he soon worked up a glow, and had to strip off his shirt. Sweat pooled underneath the face mask Winnie had handed him, and ran down his filthy chin and neck in rivulets.
Roman just kept plying his pitchfork and leveling the debris, packing the maximum into the bin that Len and Joey had rented. It wasn’t the hardest thing he had ever done by a long shot. And he wouldn’t have turned up if he hadn’t expected to work.
He knew the Malcoms were watching him closely. He put his back into his labors so that they could see that he was a hard worker. A man who would provide for his mate and their kids. But the scowls on Gabby’s mothers’ faces didn’t let up.
He figured that this was Aunt Katy’s fault. She had poisoned them against his courtship. Well, Gabby knew the truth. Vanessa was not his sweetheart. It would all come right in the end.
Roman forked splintery and rotten wood into a level layer over rotten asphalt shingles. More scratchy black grit accumulated on his sweaty torso. This truly was a hot and miserable task, but compared to Joint Special Forces training? Not so much. Later there would be a hot shower, or a cold one, and supper with his lady. Let the good times roll.
It was a good meal too. Lots of great grub. Plenty of laughing and catching up. Gideon and Asher Bascom had backed right off from Gabriella and treated her like she was spoken for, which was exactly right. Lenny and Joey Benoit talked to her as though she was already their kinswoman. Only Winnie and Jools Malcom were stubbornly refusing to accept reality.
First off, Gabby would be sleeping in their Winnebago with her kid sister. No way could he call her tonight and talk dirty to his darling if she was bunking with innocent little Gwennie. Secondly, Doug had given their one of their two spare rooms to Jack and Hannah and the other to the Bascom twins. He had been assigned the living room couch. No way were they going to get alone for some real loving.
After all those years of hero worshiping his older cousin Douglas Enright, his hero had pulled a bait and switch of monumental size. Doug wasn’t even bothering to conceal his smirk.
The only chance Roman had to catch a moment with his darling girl, was while he was helping with the cleanup. He followed Gabby outside onto the deck and kissed her there in the crisp, cold night air. “I love you,” he told her.
“I love you too.” One of her hands cupped his jeans where his dick was a spike ready for her sweet honey pot.
“Gabriella, what’s taking you so long?” bellowed Winnie from inside the kitchen.
“I’m coming.” Gabriella picked up the pans she had been sent for, and gave Roman one last kiss on his square jaw.
“You have beard burn,” he whispered. “They’ll know.”
Her answering giggle was music to his frustrated heart. But for all the way she had come, that was the sum total of their time together that weekend.
* * *
“I’m sorry, honey, my leave’s been canceled.” Roman didn’t sound sorry to Gabby’s sensitive ears. He sounded jubilant.
“Why?” she asked.
There was a pause. Roman cleared his throat. “You know I can’t tell you that, Gabriella,” he reminded her stiffly.
So she was correct. He had been assigned some wonderful mission that he was looking forward to. And she was going to miss seeing him at Christmas as she had at Thanksgiving.
“Gabby?” Roman’s voice was hesitant.
“I’m here. I’m disappointed,” she said. “It’s been a long time since Portland. Maybe I should be looking into transferring to Florida.”
“I don’t know,” Roman mused. “I’m pretty busy.”
Was this code for, ‘I’m not really based in Florida,’ or was he reluctant to have her nearby? Gabriella wished she had more experience with men. But she had never really dated.
She had felt apart from other kids at Berkeley. Shifting was her secret. But it was also an integral part of her nature. Something she could never deny but had to prevent normals from discovering. It made her wary and standoffish around non-shifters.
Until she met Roman, she had never had a real boyfriend. Sure she had gone on dates—she got asked out a lot in college—engineering school was still two-thirds male and most of them were interested in women—but she had never allowed a relationship to progress to intimacy.
How could you make love to a guy who might run in horror if you told him you were a bear? How could you respect a man who didn’t understand the rush of running naked in bear? Well she couldn’t. And when you were a plus sized woman, boys judged. But as a bear, she was pretty picky herself. She had never met a man who she wanted to tell about her bear. It had always seemed too risky.
Even though Roman was only a sort of hybrid shifter, from the moment he took her hand in his, she had felt a zing of connectedness. But now that Roman seemed to be pulling away from her, her inexperience had left her feeling like a non-swimmer tossed into the white water of the Columbia River. Going down and possibly drowning.
“Will you be able to call at least?” she asked, trying not to sound needy and plaintive. She was pretty sure that was unattractive. Besides she hated feeling insecure and clingy. She had never in her life been a droopy female. But Roman’s last mission had left them incommunicado for weeks.
A pause. “I think I’m allowed letters,” he said.
“Email?” she asked.
Another pause. “Snail mail. With censors and black markers and everything.”
She felt like crying. “How long?” she asked.
“Classified,” he returned briskly.
“Merry Christmas,” she said. She felt no inclination for their usual hot conversation. She felt bruised and sad.
Roman didn’t seem to pick up on her melancholy. “It’s not that bad,” he assured her. “We’ll talk again before I’m deployed.”
“I have to finish reading tomorrow’s assignm
ent,” she told him. “It’s a mad dash until the end of the semester.”
“Oh.” Now he sounded deflated. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said trying to convey how much she truly did. But she wasn’t sure she had succeeded.
* * *
My darling Gabby,
I got your care package. We all enjoyed your cookies. Chang especially enjoyed those chocolate and coconut squares.
The hat and gloves will come in useful sometime. I like having things you made yourself, sweetheart. It’s like having you close. I don’t know when you managed to knit with all your papers and reading to do, but I sure appreciate it.
I mailed your Christmas present from Boulder although it wasn’t the one I really hoped to give you. But it’s not the sort of gift you unwrap with your family. I still have it handy for the next time we meet.
I expect I will be granted leave in February. You can be sure that I will be on my way north as soon as I can.
Please pass on my good news to my folks. I’m allowed just this one short letter.
I do love you more each day.
Your devoted,
Roman
The thick black lines of the censor’s marker were a vivid reminder that Roman was on a top secret mission. But she really wished she knew what his good news was. Apparently, even her circumspect Roman had given away too much with that short sentence.
There was so little in his letters. She supposed that pouring out your tenderest feelings for the unsympathetic and judgmental eyes of your superiors was totally inhibiting. She certainly found it harder and harder to respond with cheerful good humor, let alone passion, when every word would be scrutinized twice before Roman ever saw it.
The worst part was not knowing if Roman’s reticence was due only to the censors or if it came from a lack of real feeling. Did he truly love her as she loved him? Totally and forever? Or was this just a romantic episode in a life of constant adventure?
She had believed that finding her mate was the hard part. But this waiting was beyond hard. She was lonely. She was worried. She didn’t know if he was deployed in a war zone, or was endangering himself stateside. She still loved him with all her heart, but she was tired of being lonely and scared.
At least since Vanessa and Robert Waukau had announced their engagement, the moms had eased off on their objection to Roman. Now they just disapproved of her long distance relationship with him.
Only Jack truly understood. But then Jack Enright was only lately retired from the Marines. He had been deployed lots of times and lots of places when he couldn’t tell his loved ones anything.
“Rome’s young yet,” he had told her at Thanksgiving. “He’s enjoying his adventures. Give him a little time, he’ll apply for a more mundane posting now that he’s found you.
“But just remember, as long as he’s in the military, they can and will deploy him. And where there’s action there’s always danger. It’s unavoidable.” Which was Dutch comfort.
CHAPTER FOUR
The stealth fighter streaked through the skies over the Pacific rain forest, rising and falling in response to the instructions from central command. The pilot in his G-suit and helmet was flung hard against his seat by the enormous force of the plane’s momentum.
Fifteen hundred miles away in New Mexico, at Joint Special Forces Headquarters, a battery of equipment tracked the plane’s flight. In Washington State, high above the trees, the few winter hikers looked around in bewilderment when they heard the thunder above them. But against the lowering winter skies, not even a contrail gave the aircraft away. Only the sonic boom as it passed directly overhead betrayed its presence. To all intents and purposes it was invisible.
Roman Zhadanov was enjoying himself immensely. This was the fastest he had ever gone and he was relishing every second of this test flight. He moved his stick a fraction and the plane rolled and righted itself without fuss. This was one grand thrill ride. Best ever.
Instructions poured into his headset, and he continued to make an elaborate series of maneuvers. He executed each turn and dip, every stall and recovery with flawless precision. This was the most amazing bird. His fuel gauge read more than half full when he was told to return to base. He turned the plane one hundred and fifteen degrees and set his course for New Mexico.
The equipment tracking the plane continued to show its position. Then the dots began to wink out. Screens went blank or flared with patches of light.
The pilot’s calm voice crackled into headsets. “Fire in the panel. Will attempt landing.”
There was a roar as if a fireball exploded, and then the sound of the pilot’s seat ejecting. The bomber had activated its automatic failsafe. Thirty people stared at their screens in utter disbelief and watched as radar, infrared and sonar showed them their top secret experimental aircraft falling out of the sky.
“I think I’ve got Zhadanov,” one person said crisply, scrutinizing the mess on his screen. “Might just be debris.” He called coordinates into his phone and instantly mobilized the considerable resources of the U.S. Air Force to find what if anything was left of their plane and Capt. Roman Zhadanov.
Fighter jets took to the air. Helicopters were deployed. The Washington National Air Guard deployed every available man. The Forest Rangers organized a search and rescue party. But as night fell over the snow covered forest, the searchers became less certain that there was anything to find.
More snow fell. The local Forest Rangers began with the last known coordinates of the fighter plane. They took the Air Force team on foot and by snowmobile through the wilderness to the exact spot on the ground. Not even a scatter of debris rewarded their efforts. The snow covered forest seemed to have swallowed the stealth aircraft and its pilot.
Three weeks later, fragments of the fighter were discovered by hikers more than three hundred miles from the original search location. The military closed the area, and moved their search. Wreckage began to surface in bits and pieces. The black box was located. The long, arcane process of determining the cause of the crash began.
Of Capt. Zhadanov there was no sign. The Air Force regretted extremely to have to inform the Zhadanov family that their son, Capt. Roman Zhadanov was missing and presumed dead. Arrangements were being made for a military funeral.
* * *
The man roused again and realized he was so cold he could no longer feel his feet. The sun was low in the sky. He was dangling. Snow was falling lightly. He looked around but all he saw were tree limbs that had lost their snowy covering. He moved his arms. The right one protested. He tried to move his legs. A fierce pain followed. He bit his lip against his shriek of pain. Training and inclination enjoined silence.
He managed to raise his legs slightly and brace them against the tree branches. His right leg didn’t want to cooperate. Pain again shot from knee to ankle, but he was ready for it this time and ignored it. He looked up. He was suspended from thick black webbing and above him a mass of flimsy white fabric was caught in the bare limbs of the tree.
He was mystified by his predicament. How or why he was suspended from trees eluded him. His head throbbed. He touched the back of his head and felt dried blood. A dim memory flickered. I have a concussion. What was he supposed to do. Rest.
If he rested, he was going to die. He was cold and growing colder. If he didn’t get to shelter he would die here in the tree. He needed to be warm. He needed to get out of this tree. He could figure out why he was hanging here in the first place once he had descended and made a fire.
He blacked out again reaching for the knife he thought ought to be strapped to his right ankle. When he swam back to consciousness he was still hanging in the tree. The wind blew through his clothing. He resigned himself to death. He didn’t care. But from someplace he remembered he had to find and protect his life-mate. The thought of his little mate galvanized his entire body.
A watcher would have seen the man’s jumpsuit split and the harness snap as if the sturdy nylon was
so much rotten string. The Black Bear that emerged from the wreckage of the man’s clothing and destroyed parachute climbed slowly and clumsily down from his perch in the branches. He was big and heavy, but his lack of agility was due to an injured back leg.
Once the bear hit the forest floor he looked about him groggily. He padded away from the debris flapping in the tree looking for a place to sleep. He probed the snow and sniffed. He heard the distant sound of water and headed towards it. Many miles on, the snowy forest gave way to snow covered rocks. Carefully, favoring his painful right back leg, he investigated.
He found a narrow opening that stank of coyotes. He entered and found the little cavern empty. The stench of coyotes was old. He turned around to face the opening and curled up to go to sleep. He snuffled into his forepaws and relaxed as he fell into winter torpor. He would not wake again until spring came to the North Cascades.
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