Chapter 5 #2
“Please call me Carl. The Gladwin Maximus won’t give you anything. He can’t. It’s too big a risk for someone who hasn’t fully adopted our ways. But Carl might be convinced to share more.” And why the hell had he just told her that? He needed more formality between them, not less.
“Does it make it easier to split yourself into two people, Carl?”
Two? He was at least three—his human self, the Maximus, and his bear—all trying to rip each other apart. And every time he thought he’d negotiated a peace with himself, something happened to upset the balance. Or someone.
He looked at her in the dark cab, using his bear’s night vision to trace the contours of her face.
She had beautiful eyes, but that’s not what drew him.
It was something about the curve to her nose.
A little ski slope that ended in a pert tip that lifted into the air when she was feeling aggressive.
His bear loved that. The rest of him adored the smooth skin that he knew was softer than down.
He’d caressed her cheek often enough when she was unconscious. He hadn’t been able to stop himself.
And then there were her lips. Plump and red from when she chewed on them because of nerves.
Her mouth was always moving, not talking, necessarily, just expressing her emotions, even when she pressed her lips firmly together and refused to speak.
The man in him watched that mouth obsessively and had fantasies about what she could do with it.
There was the window to her soul, and that was what he wanted to touch, taste, and possess.
He was out of control.
“You can’t come, Becca. It’ll be hours just sitting.” They’d be right next to each other within touching distance. He’d be able to smell her every shifting mood while he created elaborate fantasies around her. Hell, he was already hard. “We’ll talk tomorrow. I promise.”
“Tomorrow happens in about ten minutes,” she said firmly.
Then she finished him off: she touched his hand in the barest of tentative caresses.
She didn’t know how rare it was for someone to touch him softly.
Bears, as a rule, were forceful creatures, shifters even more so.
She touched the back of his hand as if she were nervous but unable to stop herself.
The lightest of touches that felt like a whisper against his skin and sent reverberation everywhere through his body.
“Please, Carl. I’m crawling out of my skin with worry.
And being here with everyone makes it worse. ”
He sighed. He knew that feeling. Understood it to the depths of his bones. “It’s going to be really cold,” he warned.
“You’ve got my blanket back there. I’ll use that.”
It was what he’d planned to use. He’d wrapped her in it when they’d taken her from her apartment. It smelled like her and Theo, and he’d wanted to bury himself in it all night long. Now he’d sit beside her and smell so much more.
“This is not a good idea,” he growled.
“I’ll risk it,” she shot back, proving she knew absolutely nothing about what she was doing.
But rather than point out the obvious, he turned the ignition and headed out to the watch point.
He worried that she’d start to push her advantage the moment he put the truck in drive.
That’s what Tonya would have done. It was an animal thing.
The minute predators sensed softness, they went in for the kill.
Humans knew to take their time. To ease in patiently by degrees until everything was exposed.
Becca was all human and a woman as well.
She touched him again—this time in gratitude—then settled back into silence to let him get comfortable with her presence.
Both actions were guaranteed to intrigue him.
His bear liked that she hadn’t attacked, feeling intrigued by the atypical reaction.
And the man in him…well, he had a boner the size of Detroit.
He was pulsing with hunger after those two brief touches.
It took fifteen minutes to get to the lonely watch point: a huge weeping willow draped at the edge of a stream.
A platform had been built around the lowest branches.
The perch was high enough to see the distance, but low enough for a bear to jump down without problem, and the other trees had been cut back to give a good 360-degree view.
And, best of all, a cell tower stood near enough to keep all five bars of his phone happy.
He parked the truck at the side of the road, then grabbed the picnic basket Marty had packed for him.
Becca took hold of the blanket and thermos of coffee, then hopped out, peering all around her.
He waited, wondering if she could see the perch with her human senses.
She did, proving that she had spent at least some time out in the wild.
“You ever hunt as a kid?”
“Deer with my dad. It was about the only time I spent with him growing up. He went with his brother and let me tag along if I promised not to tell Mom what they did.”
“What did they do?”
“Drink and talk shit.”
“Ah. My favorite kind of hunter. Noisy and with lousy aim.”
She chuckled. “We never caught anything but colds.”
He narrowed his eyes as he studied her face. It was a mixture of emotions both bad and good. “What happened?”
She’d started walking to the tree, but stopped at his question. “What?”
“Something bad happened or you’d be glowing with nostalgia.”
She snorted. “Drunk middle-aged men are not the most considerate people. I learned to shoot and drink beer. I learned that men are gross and think a lot about sex. I also learned that my father loved my mother even if he couldn’t stand to hang around her for long.”
Ah. Abandonment issues. “So Mom was the stable one.”
“Nurses are there when you need them in the best possible way. Unless they’re at work earning rent money because Dad has wandered off again.”
“What did he do?”
“He was an electrician by trade. Get rich quick schemer by action. And…” She shrugged. “He had a big personality. Drunk, sober, at home or away, he was big in my life.”
“And now?”
“Gone. Bad flu that he ignored. It was too late by the time he thought to see a doctor. We didn’t even make it to the hospital in time to say good-bye.”
“Tough break.”
She was silent a moment, looking out at the dark horizon. “It’s how he would have chosen to go. Quick, dramatic, and without hurting anyone else.” Then she shrugged. “I was always terrified we’d lose him in an electrical fire or a drunk-driving accident.”
“How old were you when he passed?”
“Seventeen. Old enough to process it and perfect timing to quit hoping that Dad would help out with my college tuition.”
There was a wealth of disappointment in those words. Along with anger and all those things that come with an unreliable parent. “So you got your business degree on your own.”
She snorted. “Hardly. Mom paid, I worked at my aunt’s bakery. And then when it was time, I took over.”
“So which is your true love? The business or the baking?”
She frowned at him as if she hadn’t ever considered the question. “They’re both me. And neither. I’m also a single parent, a bad jazzercise dancer, and someone who likes to eat candy and read slutty romance novels. How do you separate one part from another?”
Good question. He’d been trying—and failing—to keep areas of his life partitioned from one another. But he couldn’t imagine being a harmonious whole person either. It just wasn’t in his nature. Good thing he was saved from answering by arriving at the tree.
Henry was already coming down, his nimble form dropping from the branches like a monkey. He might be small for a shifter, but the young father had always been deceptively quick. “Evening, Max,” he said, his tone neutral, his head tilted to the side in submission.
“Hello, Henry. This is Becca, Theo’s guardian.”
The man flashed his teeth in a warm grin. “My mom had to keep watch for me, too. But don’t worry. Instinct runs deep and keeps us safe.”
Becca flashed a grateful smile, but Carl couldn’t stop himself from correcting the young man. “It’s not instinct. It’s his good head that will save the day. Don’t ignore the man in favor of the animal.”
Henry’s eyes narrowed. “Seems to me the animal is what counts in situations like this.” He gestured around the dark land. “Open field, reacting on a dime, heading by feel to your home—that’s something that will confuse a man. Never a bear.”
Becca blew out a breath. “Why do I get the feeling that this is an old argument?”
“Because it’s all chicken and egg,” Carl answered. “Which is more important? Who rules what?”
“Max here is a thinker. His uncle was a doer,” Henry responded. And it was obvious Henry preferred action. But that’s because he was too young to remember Maximus Prime.
“But wouldn’t you want brain behind the brawn?” Becca asked.
The man’s eyes grew flinty at that. “’Course you do. But there’s a point where there’s only brain and no brawn, and that’s disaster.”
Carl barely restrained a growl. “You’ve been waiting a long time to say that to me, haven’t you?”
The man nodded with a quick slash of his chin. “I got children and I don’t want them Detroit assholes getting—”
“I don’t, either,” Carl interrupted, trying not to air all the political dissent in front of Becca.
“But before you start talking about brawn, ask your grandfather what he thinks. Oh wait. You can’t because he was disemboweled by my uncle.
And do you know why? Because your grandfather gave his best pumpkin to his pregnant wife for her craving.
” His uncle’s clan tax had declared that the best crop always went to Maximus Prime. “Brutality is never the answer.”
“You don’t have to go that far,” Henry countered. Then before Carl’s grizzly took over completely and disemboweled the young father, Henry raised his hands in surrender. “I’m worried. People are saying you can’t even keep Nick in line.”