“Yeah.” Crap. All I needed was my Alpha to scent the lust that was curling through me. There was nothing wrong with a hook-up between shifter breeds, but after that night Karl had walked back into the forest in typical bear fashion. No phone call. No flowers. Not even a thanks-for-the-sex text. Eleven months, one week, and two days. It was darned embarrassing. If I’d been like Zeph or Ella, known for keeping relationships strictly to one-night stands, it wouldn’t have mattered. I wasn’t. And I didn’t need the whole pack fussing over me, bringing over sympathy casseroles and chick flicks because they thought I’d lost my heart to an antisocial grizzly who probably didn’t even have running water in his den.
“Does he know he’s working with me?” Okay, that was pathetic, but I had to know. Did Karl volunteer when Brent told him he was sending me in? My stupid heart thumped at the thought.
Brent’s forehead creased into a puzzled frown. “I don’t think so. I told him I’d send someone down to Ketchikan to meet him, but I don’t remember specifying who. Why? Did you guys rub each other wrong at the barbeque?”
No, we rubbed each other right. And that was the problem. I leaned back in my chair, trying for a casual, indifferent posture. “Nah, we’re good. When do I meet him?”
“This afternoon.” Brent tossed me a set of keys. I caught them and blinked, wide-eyed. He was letting me take his boat?
“Dude, that’s an eighteen-hour trip. Did you put magical motors in the boat?”
The Alpha rolled his eyes. “Dustin is flying you down. That’s for a rental Jeep.”
Oh. That made more sense, although I liked the idea of magical motors. Someone needed to get right on that. Still, a flight down and a rental Jeep came in a close second.
I stood and gave Brent a quick salute and spun about to leave. “I’m on it, boss.”
“Sabrina?” I paused at the door and turned to face him. His normally cheerful face was full of worry. “Be careful. If things get out of hand, get out of the way and let Karl handle it. Understand? Leave him to kill the rogue while you get to safety.”
Grizzly shifters were brutal in a fight, and rogues even worse. I was hard to kill, but if a fight went south I didn’t have any problem with retreating. And normally I wouldn’t have any problem letting Karl take the lead, but I wasn’t about to turn tail and leave him to fight this rogue solo.
So I looked Brent straight in the eyes, and for the first time ever, I lied to my Alpha. “Will do, boss.”
Chapter One
The Jeep was right where Brent said it would be. I hopped in and headed out of town onto narrow roads that eventually became gravel as they slid into the lush green on both sides of me. After an hour of bumpy travel, I saw the signpost—a two-foot thick stump with a metal pole driven through the center. Bears. Go figure.
Parking the Jeep, I made my way down a well-traveled path marked on either side with clawed trees, their bark hanging in shreds. It made me shiver. Yeah, I’d had sex with this bear. Yeah, I was abnormally fascinated with him. Yeah, he scared the heck out of me—that was a good bit of the attraction.
There was a tiny clearing in the woods, barely big enough to accommodate the postage-stamp-sized frame house with plank siding. Outside was a man wearing faded jeans and nothing else. His light brown hair hung to his shoulders in loose waves. Dark blond scruff edged his jaw. Muscles flexed in his arms as he swung an axe. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he picked up the split log and stacked it neatly. Judging by the pile, he’d been doing this for a few hours.
Clearly he was busy, and clearly this wood chopping activity in late July was a critical activity because he didn’t even acknowledge my presence. He was a shifter. As quiet as I moved, he’d heard me before I ever came into the clearing, and even without that he surely smelled me. He was downwind of me. He knew I was there. And after our intimacy last year, he knew exactly who I was.
My face burned with shame. A bear. Why couldn’t I have become infatuated with a wolf shifter, or even a human. No, instead I was hot and bothered over this guy who felt splitting an additional five logs was more important than greeting the woman he’d had sex with, the wolf who was partnering with him on tracking down a rogue.
Karl stacked the last split log, and buried his axe in the stump. Then he turned to me, his jacked body glistening with sweat, those faded jeans tight. My eyes drifted lower, and I reluctantly forced them back up.
“Ready to track down a rogue, or do you need to split another cord? Winter is coming, you know.”
He grunted.
“Was that a ‘yes’ grunt, or a ‘no’ grunt?”
His eyes met mine. They were green with brown and gold flecks that I couldn’t see at this distance but remembered oh so well. “Want me to put a shirt on first?” he asked.
No. No, I didn’t. “That’s up to you, wild man. It’s July. Bugs are gonna be nasty out there.”
“Don’t care.” He walked past me and headed down the path. Sometimes sweat smells acrid and sour, but Karl smelled warm and wild with a hint of leather, clove, and pine. It was intoxicating and I turned and followed him like he was the pied piper. At my Jeep, Karl climbed into the passenger seat and sat silently, waiting for me to join him.
He didn’t care about being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Because he was so badass that even the bugs stayed away. I fought to keep my libido in check as I climbed into the driver’s seat and started the Jeep. Karl was freaking huge and my hand nudged against his thigh and knee each time I shifted. I couldn’t help myself from spreading out my fingers and brushing along the top of his leg as I dropped the Jeep down into second.
A soft growl rumbled through his chest and I hid a smile. That wasn’t a growl of warning, it was a growl of arousal. Karl wasn’t as unaffected by me as I’d thought.
“So you live here? I thought you were closer in to Juneau?” I asked, breaking the silence.
He grunted. Clearly that was his go-to communication. “Sometimes. Sometimes I’m as far north as Skagway. Depends on how I’m feelin’”
“What kind of feeling do you have when you’re in the Ketchikan area?”
“Summer’s nice here. I like to chop my wood for winter. Smoke some fish.”
“So what kind of rolling papers do you need to smoke a halibut? Extra wide, I assume?”
He shot me a puzzled glance, obviously not getting the pot reference. It didn’t matter since it afforded me an opportunity to see his beautiful eyes.
“Are you coming up to the barbeque in a few weeks?” I couldn’t help it. I’m sure I was pouring out all sorts of lusty pheromones right now. The guy might slap me down, but I needed to know.
“Depends.”
“Depends on what?”
Those hazel eyes with the gold flecks pinned me to my seat. I was lucky I didn’t wreck the Jeep because I just couldn’t turn away.
“Depends on whether I’m gonna get laid or not.”
Oh my. I swallowed hard and squirmed in my seat, every bump in the road ratcheting up the lust pouring through me, hitting the excruciatingly sensitive nerve endings between my legs.
Here goes nothing. “Karl, you could have been getting laid hundreds of times in the last year. All you had to do was call.”
His eyebrows furrowed and he tilted his head. “Don’t like using a phone. Don’t even have one. And sex is once a year.”
No. Just no. Please don’t have me lusting after a shifter with a sex drive that only kicked in once per year. But we’d done it in August, and bear shifters typically sought out a sow in March and April, so they had to at least get horny two or three times per year. None of that would be enough for me. I wondered if we could meet in the middle—as in every other day in the middle.
“You could have sent a letter, a courier, smoke signals. And Karl? Sex for me is ideally an everyday occurrence. Twice or three times a day if I’m on a roll.”
Desire rolled off him and I nearly wrecked the car. Dang it all, I was wet, and struggling to keep my attention on the road.
He grunted. And didn’t say one more word even after we arrived at the murder scene. The bodies were long gone, but nobody did a crime scene clean-up out in the middle of nowhere, especially when the local police knew we needed as much scent as possible.
The both of us hopped out of the Jeep. I did a slow half-circle of the area, careful not to cross any obvious scent trail—not that I couldn’t tell my own smell from that of others. There was blood, lots of blood. It was sprayed on the trees, soaked into the ground, splattered onto the bushes. This rogue had been pissed, and he’d slashed these five humans to ribbons judging from all the stains of red.
Blood. Urine. And that horrible smell that comes when large intestines get lacerated and all the half-digested food and bacteria hits the air.
“Someone shot him,” Karl said. I walked over to where he was and knelt down, sniffing. The human blood was still strong in my nose—overpoweringly strong, but this here was shifter blood.
“It’s not a lot,” I commented. But it was more than there should have been. Shifters healed fast. It was a mixed blessing when it came to gunshot wounds. As nice as it was to have your wound clotting and scabbing immediately, and healed within an hour, it wasn’t so nice when that happened with a bullet still lodged in your body. Getting shot worked better when there was someone nearby to quickly get the bullet out, otherwise, you had to go through it all over again once they cut it out of your healed flesh.
“Didn’t clot,” Karl grumbled, sticking his finger in the blood and eyeing it. “Smells weird too.”
I immediately thought about the shifter hunters up in Kenai. They were to blame for one grizzly shifter death, possibly two, and had shot both Brent and Leon from the Swift River Pack. Those wounds didn’t heal, and they festered, spreading a poison that would eventually kill a shifter. The only reason Brent and Leon had made it was because Kennedy had been there, and she was a quick-thinking trauma surgeon badass who was one of the best shots with a rifle I’d ever known.
Magically coated bullets were what we’d discovered when Kennedy dug the shrapnel out of Brent and Leon. But these five humans weren’t hunters out on a private, illegal, expedition to kill shifters. These were scientists. What in the world would they have been doing with the tainted bullets? Honestly, I was surprised they even were carrying a gun.
We both stood and looked around, having gained as much information as we could in this form. To better track the rogue, at least one of us would need to be on four feet.
“You or me, big guy?”
Karl grunted.
“That a ‘me’ grunt, or a ‘you’ grunt?”
“Your nose is better than mine,” he grumbled reluctantly. “’Sides, wouldn’t mind seeing you naked again.”
Oh, Lord. I wasn’t about to argue against that, so I walked back to the Jeep and peeled off my shirt. Karl leaned against the tailgate, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes glued to my chest.
“Want me to carry your clothes for when you shift back?” he asked.
The heat of his gaze was disconcerting, and I had to pause to gather my thoughts. “Yes, please. It gets cold at night and I might need to shift back before we return.” I hoped to shift back before we returned, because a wolf screwing a grizzly was kind of weird and I had a feeling we’d be doing it in the next twenty-four hours. At least, that was what I hoped.
“You won’t get cold at night.”
I caught my breath, then exhaled as I unbuttoned my pants and shimmied them down my legs. Karl’s eyes followed their motion.
“Take my clothes, just in case you change your mind.”
He grunted. “I’ll take your clothes, but I’m not changing my mind. You’re a damned fine lay, wolf. Been thinking about you all year, waiting for the next barbeque.”
Damn. Damn. I pulled off my underwear and my bra and began my shift, well aware of how horrible the whole long process appeared. Karl was a grizzly shifter. He wouldn’t be turned off by twisting bones and contorting muscles. Normally I was insensible with pain during my fifteen-minute shift, but I noticed Karl gathering up my clothes, carefully folding each item and packing them in my duffle bag, except for the underwear. Those he brought to his face, inhaling deeply. His eyes flared gold, glowing with a supernatural light. I didn’t even feel the pain of my shift, I was so turned on just from watching him take in my scent, watching the desire on his face and smelling the thick aroma of pheromones that filled the clean forest air.
But I was now a wolf, and as much as I wanted this bear, we needed to both be in human form to make that happen. I wasn’t a prude by any definition, but that was where I drew the line. Maybe. I’d never had sex with another shifter breed before. Some werewolves enjoyed getting it on in their animal form. But wolf-wolf was different than wolf-bear, and far different than human-wolf or human-bear.
And why was I even thinking about this? Having sex once in a year was clearly eroding my sense of morality.
Karl grinned, brushing the silk of my underwear across his lips before folding them and putting them in the duffle bag. “First time I’ve seen your animal.”
I’d never seen his. And I was suddenly very concerned what he thought of my wolf. Some shifters felt a strong division between themselves and their beast, almost as though they were suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder. Others were all one. My wolf and I were of the same mind. There was no division, and although I often referred to my wolf as a separate entity, she was merely a facet of my own personality—a more instinctual and physical facet. Although even in human form I tended to be more instinctual and physical than most humans.
“Silver with tawny streaks. Eyes like dark roast coffee. Muscular. Strong. I wouldn’t want to face you in a fight.”
I warmed at his praise, even though I knew he, as a grizzly shifter, could kick my ass in a fight. Then he walked over and stroked my head, scratching behind my ears. I closed my eyes and leaned against his hand, nearly toppling as he moved his fingers down along my spine to rub right at the joint of my tailbone. Oh, ecstasy. I danced my back legs, lifting my nose to the sky and arching my back as I pressed my rear against his hand.
He chuckled. “That’s the spot, huh? You know, like beast, like human. I’m gonna hit that ass at the barbeque. Or before, if you’re in rut. Although it sounds like you’re always in rut.”
This was so embarrassing. I sounded like a total slut by his description, and I could do nothing but groan and push against his palm.
“I like standing here and rubbing you, but guessing we best catch this rogue first.”
Yeah. That. I sighed and pulled away from his magic fingers, dropping my nose to the grass. Starting from the outer edges of the crime scene, I worked my way in a spiral inward. Karl waited outside the area, watching me with a hooded gaze. Everything was so crisp and clear in this form, every scent like a distinct shade or color. The odor formed trails extending outward. I sorted and catalogued each one, the humans with their distinct aromas—and the killer. As Brent had said, the rogue was definitely a bear, and from what my nose told me a brown bear. I wasn’t as savvy in determining the difference between Kodiak, grizzly, and the standard brown bear, but I could tell them apart from black bears and polar bears. This scent had a different tang than Karl, whose aroma I’d memorized with intimate detail, but I wasn’t sure if that was just an individual or a race difference.
Looking over toward Karl and tilting my head, I headed into the brush. He followed. I rolled my eyes hearing the crash of his booted feet on the branches and ground. Grizzlies. When you were an apex predator, you didn’t give a crap if anyone heard you.
Blocking out the background noise, I followed the scent, moving slowly to make sure I didn’t miss anything. By nightfall I was hungry and tired and ready to call it quits until morning. We hadn’t yet found the rogue, but as I’d tracked him I’d discovered a few things. And if I wanted to share those things with Karl, I’d need to change back into human form.
It was quite a dilemma. As a
wolf I’d be toasty warm and comfortable sleeping on the hard ground tonight, plus I’d be in the form best equipped to defend myself if the rogue doubled back and attacked us in the night. Human form meant I could tell Karl what I’d discovered and have a better chance of getting some action, although it probably wasn’t a good idea to be distracted with sexual activity when there was a killer on the loose.
Switching back and forth was an option, but a last-resort one. It took me fifteen minutes to change form, ten if I was rushing it. And shifting exhausted me. One or two changes I could deal with. Three and I’d be dipping into energy reserves I might need if we were attacked. So I needed to pick one or the other.
Karl had set my bag in a dry spot and stood beside it, his back against the trunk of a sturdy tree, his eyes glowing slightly as he watched me. “Come here.”
I pawed at the ground to convey my indecision.
“I’ll tell you what I know, then you can decide if you want to stay a wolf or not,” he said. “The rogue is a male grizzly, about fifty years old and I’m guessing seven hundred to seven fifty pounds given the tracks and the broken brush and tree limbs. His winding path makes me think he’s truly a rogue and not just a grumpy bear who had a bone to pick with a group of humans.”
In other words, the bear was crazy. Which meant an already dangerous grizzly was even more unpredictable and lethal.
“He doesn’t smell right. I can even tell that with this nose. From the trail, he’s probably a half-day out, but with a rogue there’s no saying he won’t come back around.” Karl’s expression was serious as he stared at me. “Wolf or human tonight, that’s your choice. I won’t run the risk that he’ll come back around and I’m not ready.”
And with a nod he turned and shucked his pants, giving me a breathtaking view of his tight ass as he strode off into the woods. I knew when he meant. He’d be in bear form tonight. And if he was going to prepare for an attack, I was too.
I was second to the Alpha, not some helpless damsel to stand by while Karl fought the rogue single-handedly. Brent had told me to hold back, to let the grizzly shifter deal with one of his own, but I knew that wasn’t how this was going to go down. I’d fight beside Karl. I’d always fight beside him. My dominant wolf nature demanded it, and so did the human side of me.
My Paranormal Valentine: A Paranormal Romance Box Set Page 44
