For the moment.
“Then you should call me Jonas.”
She would call him anything he wanted, as long as he stood where she could look at him. Okay, stare at him. And if he wanted to keep talking to her in that deep, rumbly baritone that sent shivers all up in her belly, that would be great, too.
Yespleasethankyou.
She shook her head, trying to clear the fog, and the motion must have clicked something into place.
“Browning?” She remembered the receptionist’s earlier mention of lumber and replanting trees. “As in Browning Industries?”
“Guilty.” He grinned. “Family business.”
That was one word for it. Browning Industries had made a name for itself as one of the biggest lumber concerns in North America. And that was before it expanded to become the best-known and most respected name in conservation and reforestry. It also still produced huge quantities of lumber and paper products, all from rigorously managed model forests.
Jonas Browning managed the company now that his father had retired. He was a multimillionaire and known as a playboy in shifter circles. You know, in addition to being so sexy he made her drool.
Annie was so focused on the breathtaking bear that she’d almost forgotten anyone else was in the room. When the mayor’s voice cut in and reminded her, her wolf snarled in her head. It did not appreciate the interruption.
“Hey, why don’t we all sit down and make ourselves comfortable,” Jaeger said. “Then we can get down to business.”
Ignoring the impulse—fueled entirely by her wolf—to take her seat right in Jonas Browning’s lap, Annie forced herself to perch in one of the antique armchairs positioned in front of Jaeger’s desk. Jonas took the other, and the mayor reclaimed his own on the other side of the cluttered surface.
“Now, Dr. Cryer,” the cougar began. “As it turns out, Jonas is the reason I contacted Graham Winters about getting in touch with you. That’s why I asked him to be here for our meeting. It’s really a meeting for the two of you. You could say I’m just the broker here.”
The wolf could care less about the cat’s words. It just wanted to draw in the bear’s scent like some kind of high-test liquor. In fact, it acted as if it were intoxicated by something. Annie had never experienced anything like this, but when she tried to sort out the strange sensations, her wolf only got more agitated.
What is wrong with you?
She got another low, purring growl in response. Great. Maybe the mayor had given her some kind of kitty cooties. How was that for using the science?
“I have to say, you haven’t been the easiest woman in the world to find.” Jaeger leaned back in his chair. “First time I talked to Winters was nearly six weeks ago. Took him this long to track you down. Apparently, you’ve been a bit of a wanderer since you left New York.”
Okay. Like a bucket of cold water, that reminder of her past cooled Annie down enough that she was able to look away from Jonas Browning’s sexy, smiling face and at the patently amused one of John Jaeger.
“That’s true,” she admitted. “I have moved around a bit.”
She didn’t mention why, or where, or how often. If they wanted to know, Graham would have told them. In fact, he’d probably considered himself duty bound as one alpha to another to tell the mayor everything. She imagined the mayor knew all about her previous work and the danger in which she had placed her pack with her carelessness.
The thought had her stomach clenching. She preferred not to dwell on the story. Not anymore. For the first six months, she’d practically set up residence in her own shameful actions. Since then she had discovered that things like eating, sleeping, and basic hygiene were a lot easier to manage when she didn’t waste all her energy on self-loathing.
With that in mind, she told herself to concentrate on the here and now. As in, why was she here now?
She cleared her throat. “Ah, I only spoke with Graham quite briefly. He told me that you had called in a favor he owed you, and that you were looking for a scientist with expertise in shifter genetics and gene expression, as well as a solid background in biochemistry and shifter biology. But, um, he didn’t tell me why.”
Not that Annie had asked. She’d all but gone deaf to everything after she’d heard those magic words: You’ll be free to come back to New York.
“Yeah, I guess he figured we’d better explain that ourselves.”
Jaeger stuck out his chin and scratched at the underside. His gaze slid toward his friend. “You care to do the honors, buddy?”
Jonas Browning seemed to twitch, as if the other man had caught him by surprise. He spared Jaeger a quick glance, then shifted in his chair to face Annie. Wow. The force of that direct attention almost made her dizzy. It definitely made her wolf squirm and whimper like a puppy looking to be stroked.
“So, here’s the thing, Annie.”
She stared into his dark eyes, and her wolf squirmed harder. It wanted to rub up against him like a cat to mark its territory.
Territory? Annie demanded.
Mine, the wolf replied.
While Annie reeled at that declaration, Jonas Browning continued to talk. Even through the haze of shock and the madly possessive mate claim of her inner wolf, his words managed to get through. Maybe because they came within an inch of causing a cardiac event in the chest of a perfectly healthy thirty-year-old Lupine female.
“The truth is, I need you to save my clan.”
Chapter Three
Jonas Browning didn’t believe in being taken by surprise. As far as he was concerned, it meant he just hadn’t done enough to prepare himself for the future. But none of his careful research had prepared him for the stark reality of Dr. Annie Cryer, MD, PhD, DCLS, FAAM, FACMG, and other assorted alphabetical wonders that left him feeling about an inch short of clinical idiocy.
He’d been prepared to find her sharply intelligent, perhaps socially awkward, and undoubtedly difficult. Wolves were pack animals, after all, and from what he’d heard of the Silverback Clan in Manhattan, that particular group wasn’t known for banishing members without a good reason. Jonas had assumed it had something to do with the dark-haired doctor possessing a propensity for making trouble. All of that he’d been prepared to deal with, given that he required use of the woman’s genius mind and extensive scientific background.
He hadn’t expected to find her sexier than a naked lap dance by an enthusiastic lover.
Standing with his back against the window of Jaeger’s office, he’d watched her enter the room with the wary sort of grace he associated more with prey animals than with wolf shifters. Lupines tended to be more confident, even the lower-ranking ones. But this woman looked ready for either one of the men watching her to spring forward and attack.
His bear chuffed in the back of his head, more than willing to give that a go. Jonas frowned. It took a second for the subtext to register. The bear didn’t want to hurt Annie; it wanted to taste her.
Shock sent his mind reeling while Jaeger performed the introductions. He’d never had such an immediate reaction to a woman before. Or rather, his bear hadn’t. For some reason, it had taken one sniff of Dr. Annie Cryer and snapped to attention at speeds he hadn’t been aware it was even capable of. Hell, it practically sat up and begged like a damned dog.
While Jonas tried to pull himself together, the bear was the one trying to take over. It urged him to do whatever it took to make the female look favorably on them. Whatever humans usually did. Smile. Shake hands. Be friendly.
Which was why he found himself offering his most charming expression and inviting her to call him Jonas. The bear grumbled, unsatisfied with the stilted pace of human courtship. It preferred the ways of its own kind—approach, sniff, pin, and mount. So much simpler.
But probably inappropriate in their friend’s office thirty seconds after being introduced, Jonas warned.
The bear wasn’t entirely certain. It had noticed that the female’s gaze kept straying from Jaeger to Jonas. The lit
tle wolf wasn’t entirely uninterested in him. It had the bear preening and focusing on inhaling more of her scent.
“Hey, why don’t we all sit down and make ourselves comfortable,” Jaeger said. “Then we can get down to business.”
At the moment, the bear insisted their only pressing business was taking a good, long look at—and sniff of—Annie Cryer. Even while Jonas sat in the chair beside hers, all of his senses were attuned to the Lupine woman.
If she stood more than two or three inches above five feet, he’d swear off pie for the rest of his natural life. And fruit pies were one of the chief reasons for living, as far as he was concerned.
She had a tumble of curly brown hair that appeared to spring from her head in whichever way it felt like, and skin so pale he wondered if she was routinely mistaken for a vampire. She certainly looked skinny and delicate enough to make a person wonder whether she ever ate, which just added one more reason why the surge of lust that rolled through him when he raked his gaze from her head to her toes made not a single, solitary grain of sense.
Annie Cryer was so not his type.
His bear didn’t give a fuck.
It sat up and stretched in the back of his mind, nose lifting into an imaginary breeze and twitching as if catching the scent of ripe berries and dripping honeycombs. The reaction only became more annoying when Jonas considered that the bear generally took no notice of the women in his life, preferring to sleep through sex and save its attention for more important things. Like Danishes.
His bear focused so hard on Annie, and Jonas focused so hard on keeping his bear from scooping her up like a juicy salmon that he almost missed when Jaeger gave him his cue.
“ . . . the honors, buddy?”
Jonas tried to mask his instinctive jerk at being caught with his mind wandering. All over the little wolf.
He forced himself not to clear his throat revealingly, and instead, tried another smile. “So, here’s the thing, Annie.”
She had told him to call her by her first name. His bear had liked that.
“The truth is, I need you to save my clan.”
Because he was watching her—okay, because he hadn’t been able to take his frickin’ eyes off her since she stepped into the office—he saw the way she almost jumped out of her skin when his words registered. Maybe he should have tried to soften the phrasing? That’s what happened when he let his bear do his thinking.
“Ex-excuse me?” She stuttered.
It was adorable. Almost as if her tongue had tripped over itself in its hurry to speak. He hoped it hadn’t gotten hurt. Maybe he should check it with his own. Just to make sure.
Get a fucking hold of yourself, he growled at his bear. Now is not the time to be thinking with your dick. Or with your stomach.
The bear disagreed. It thought the female would taste delicious. And then after maybe she would cook for them. Or, even better—bake.
“I-I’m sorry,” she said, her skin even paler than before. “I think I must have missed something important. You want me to what?”
Ruthlessly, Jonas seized control from his bear, shoving the animal back with a force of will honed from years of practice. He was making a muck of this. Clearly he needed his human brain in charge to get them through this conversation.
“No, I’m the one who should apologize.” He gave her a softer smile this time, one without the bear’s lust sharpening the edges. “That was a lousy way to introduce a complex topic. But it wasn’t that much of an overstatement. My clan is in trouble, and from everything I’ve heard, everyone I’ve spoken to, you are the one person in the country who’s most likely to be able to help us.”
He saw the confusion still clouding her features and pushed on. His bear sat impatiently behind the barrier he’d erected in his mind, and he knew that as soon as he got this business out of the way, it was going to crash through and not stop until it got its paws on the sexy scientist. Jonas has better not waste time.
“What it boils down to is a fertility issue. The women in my clan have been unable to have children. They can’t conceive. Several of them have been trying for years. They’ve even tried seeing medical specialists. They’ve been through several different treatments, all of which have failed. It’s beginning to affect the whole clan. We have too few bears, and none have been born yet since my generation. If we don’t discover the root of the issue, I’m afraid I won’t have any bears left.”
Annie looked from Jonas to Jaeger and back again, her confusion obvious. Both of them looked 100 percent serious. Frankly, the expressions they wore were grim. But why?
“I don’t understand. I haven’t heard anything about a sharp decline in the bear population. I admit, I’m not familiar with the ecology of this part of the country, but the last numbers I saw estimated several thousand bears in New York State alone.”
“They’re wrong.”
“Black bears,” Jaeger clarified. “That’s all you’ve got back east, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Jonas and his clan are brown bears.”
Annie’s eyes opened wide. Jonas tried to ignore the way her soft lips parted in shock. It only got his bear riled up.
“Brown bears. You mean grizzlies?”
His bear chuffed in arrogant agreement.
“Brown bears,” Jaeger reiterated, softening the correction with a half smile. “Grizzly only covers a small subset of the brown-bear population. There are actually several varieties of brown bear around the world, but they all live separately from other Ursines. And they’re vastly outnumbered by the smaller black bears most people are familiar with.”
Jonas tightened his control and nodded. “As brown bears our animal forms, temperaments, and habits don’t mesh well with others. But while black bears continue to grow their population, ours has been in decline.”
That sparked a definite curiosity in Annie’s light brown eyes. “For how long?”
In his mind, his bear moaned in grief and helpless anger. It almost made Jonas soften toward the beast, but he knew better than to give it an inch.
“At least five generations.”
Annie sat up straighter. “Familial or historical?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you talking about five familial generations, or five historical generations?”
Jonas just blinked at her. When had she stopped speaking English?
Jaeger cleared his throat. “I think the terminology is tripping us up, Annie. Try using plain English on us ignorant males.”
“Oh, right.” Her cheeks turned a fascinating shade of pink. “Sorry. It’s a time measure. A familial generation is basically the time it takes for a person to grow from birth to the point of having their own children. So, about twenty-five to thirty years. Shorter for women, longer for men. A historical generation is more like a measure of shared lifetime memory, so more like a century. Which means three generations could refer to seventy-five years, or to three hundred years, depending on which definition you’re using.”
Okay, those were words he could understand. Jonas nodded and thought back. “For the moment let’s say somewhere in the middle. At least a hundred and fifty years or so.”
“Okay then.” The doctor nodded absently, her gaze going unfocused, as if her mind were already racing. “In that case, you might be edging into something I can help with, because that means you’re looking at something larger than individual fertility issues. This could have a genetic component.”
“That’s exactly why I sought you out. I didn’t pick your name out of a hat, Annie. I talked to a lot of doctors and researchers and scientists before I decided to try contacting you. They all told me you were my best hope.”
When Annie nodded this time, it was full of purpose and determination. The tension Jonas and his bear had sensed in her before disappeared, and a mantle of calm and control settled over her shoulders. In the blink of an eye, she went from a shy, wary, almost wounded-looking werewolf, to a poised, confident scientist.
Why on
earth did his bear find this side of her even sexier than the other one?
The bear just hummed and leaned into Jonas’s mental barrier. It figured the human had gotten enough time. It wanted another turn in charge.
Fat chance.
“Well, then,” Annie said, pushing to her feet and slinging her backpack onto her shoulder. “I suppose we’d better get started. Is there someplace I’ll be able to work while I’m here?”
Jaeger nodded and stood, his brisk air indicating he was back in mayor mode. “I spoke with Dr. Kirby. He’s the head of our medical clinic here in town. He said you’re welcome to use a spare office in their lab, as well as the laboratory facilities themselves. Naturally, they do a lot of the testing for the community in-house, rather than sending samples out to a human company.”
“That sounds great.”
The cougar checked his watch, and started to round his desk. “I’ve got a few minutes free. I’ll walk you over and introduce you to—”
A low growl stopped Jaeger in his tracks and had Annie whipping her head around to track the source. Jonas just shoved his hands in his pockets and cleared his throat.
“Ah, actually, there are a few things I should take care of,” Jaeger said. His grin looked just as wide and friendly as it had earlier, but Jonas had known the man long enough to see the traces of smug along the edges. “Why don’t you let Jonas show you to the clinic? Maybe you can even get a head start on things?”
Oh, the bear liked that idea. Quite a bit. But its “things” and the doctor’s “things” might diverge in the details.
Chapter Four
Annie had hoped—prayed, even—that once she settled back into science mode, she would be able to brush aside her strange and disturbing reaction to Jonas Browning. After all, the whole thing had to be a fluke. A one-time aberration in a life of logic and order.
It had to be.
Now if only someone could get the message to her endocrine system. Preferably before she drowned in her own hormonal overload.
Something to Howl About: An Alphaville Story Page 2
