Chapter 17
Alan’s thoughts were murky at best. He blamed it on the monster. He’d always been clearheaded before, right?
Wrong.
Tonya had always stirred up the muck from the bottom of his brain.
It wasn’t just that she challenged him intellectually.
From the moment she’d become a cop and he a lawyer, they’d argued different sides of the law just for fun.
Usually after a few beers, but sometimes not.
But she also stirred up feelings that were all the more confusing now that he’d been changed.
Love, hate, want, rejection—it was all churning inside him in a confusing mass.
He wanted her, but he had to push her away.
A relationship with a wrong shifter was just too psycho to contemplate.
He loved the way she made him feel but hated it, too, because it tempted him to think that he was normal.
That he could function when the truth was he couldn’t even imagine a life after Elisabeth was dead.
How did he walk into a courtroom when any moment he could turn into a stinking, hairy beast?
How did he go to the grocery store or pick up the mail when he might run into a shifter who scented him for the wrong thing he was?
He couldn’t. Jesus, it freaked him out that he’d made love to her. How had she allowed him to be inside her? He was repulsive! And yet no part of him regretted that. In fact, his little brain was all about doing it again as soon as possible.
He just had to focus on his task. Get rid of Elisabeth. Save those kids. End the bitch so that this nightmare never spread to anyone else.
“You want to keep brooding or do we talk now?” Tonya’s voice jerked him out of the black soup of his brain enough for him to stare at her. She was driving her patrol car, her long fingers tense on the steering wheel.
“I don’t brood,” he said, the words a reflex.
“Are you kidding?” she snorted. “Between you and Carl, it’s your family crest.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he retorted. “You sure you went to college? Or did you just spend all your class time getting painted by art students.”
She shot him an arch look. “It was a student, singular. And I was wondering if we’d wander over to that.”
He came back with a lascivious look. “If I’d known you were into paint-fume highs, I would have bought out the hardware store years ago.”
She turned back to the road, her expression blasé. “You wish.”
He did, actually. A lot. Just like he enjoyed the banter between them.
They’d been doing this horny guy–standoffish girl for a couple years now.
He wasn’t even sure how it started, but it was familiar now and grounded him firmly in territory labeled “before.” Of course that was dangerous ground to walk, so his lips had barely finished curving into a leer before the humor faded again.
He really needed to commit to feeling one way or another. This back-and-forth shit was messing with his brain.
“And there you go,” she mocked, “right back to brooding.”
She was so right and that made him cranky. “What do you want from me, Tonya?”
“So many things,” she said, her voice unusually wistful. “But for the moment, I’m going to settle for a serious conversation. What are your plans, Alan? After I arrest Elisabeth?”
And wasn’t that exactly what had set him to brooding in the first place? That he had no plans at all? “Let’s cross that bridge when we get there.”
She shook her head. “And to think I used to wish you could go more with the moment at hand.”
“What?”
“Your brother thinks things to death, looking at military and political strategies until I want to shoot him. And you’re always a half step behind him with a dozen legal arguments.”
“Good thing, too,” he retorted, “because you’re the one who usually wants to go in with guns blazing. Where’s Miss Action now?”
“Trying to keep you from committing suicide by cougar bitch.” She turned to look at him, her light blue eyes almost transparent from the sheen of wetness there.
“Alan, talk to me. I’m kinked up eighteen ways from Sunday, and you’re all about saying good-bye to your brother like you’ll never see him again. ”
He jolted, horrified as much by her tears as by her words. Damn it, he needed to focus, but like always, she was stirring up things that he’d rather kept quiet.
“Start at the beginning,” he said.
“Fine,” she huffed out. “Your whole story to Carl about Mrs. What’s-Her-Face.”
“Mrs. Morales.”
“Right. Her. You think I didn’t understand that story? You were pointing out how different you and Carl are.”
“Yeah. We are.”
“That you make your own choices.”
“We do.”
“And that sometimes you got the bigger stick, sometimes he did.”
“Yes! What of it?”
She huffed out a breath. “You were absolving him of guilt about your death.”
He frowned. “That’s a stretch.”
“Is it? Tell me I’m wrong.”
He stared at her, feeling acutely uncomfortable.
Self-reflection wasn’t something prized in the shifter community, mostly because grizzlies never thought deeply about much of anything.
Among the Gladwin grizzlies, Alan was known as a supersmart man because he’d gotten a law degree, but that had nothing to do with self-awareness.
It was his own inclination that had gotten him to a comfortable level of self-knowledge.
Until a month ago, he knew himself as a good lawyer who had a thing for the woman who’d wanted his brother.
Now that was all turned around, and he couldn’t find his footing.
Meanwhile, Tonya took his silence as agreement. “For a smart man, you sure can be a fucking moron.”
“For a smart woman, you sure have lousy instincts on when to push a man.”
“Bullshit. Seems to me we’re in this problem because I’ve been too easy on you.”
Easy? There was nothing in this situation that was easy in any way, shape, or form. But he knew her well enough to let her have her say. So he leaned back, folded his arms, and prepared to tune out an earful.
“You don’t say,” he drawled, just to prod her into talking. Best to get it over with quickly.
“You’ve been hurt bad. Not just the torture and stuff, but even before. Losing the beta position and all.”
“We already talked about that. Best thing for everyone.”
She nodded. “Maybe. Eventually. But that doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt by it. That I didn’t feel like a shit for taking that from you.”
“Best. Thing—”
“Whatever. So with everything, I’ve been trying to give you space.”
He snorted. “You chased me down, shot me with tranquilizer and suppressant, then—”
“I was trying to keep you from hurting yourself or anyone else.” She shot him a glare. “I should have just told you to get your head out of your ass.”
He wanted to be annoyed with her. She was absolutely talking bullshit, but it was familiar bullshit.
Tonya was a straight shooter. If she thought you were being a dickhead, she said it.
Usually in colorful language. That’s what she was doing now, and it was yet another return to the landscape of before.
“While you were telling your brother all about Mrs. Bakes Cookies—”
“Morales.”
“Do you know what I was thinking about?”
He couldn’t begin to guess.
“How you used to wear Axe body spray. To the point that our eyes would water.”
“That was once. I spilled the bottle.”
“That was your entire freshman year of high school. And that your hair was always just so. That you gave yourself manicures.”
Now he did scoff. Loudly. “Never.”
“Neatly groomed nails, Alan. Always.”
Well, that was true though it was a far cry from a manicure. “Nothing wrong with clean hands and nails.”
“Nope. I always liked that about you. And that you wore tailored clothes instead of baggy jeans and hoodies five sizes too large.”
That was because he wasn’t a shifter. Every Gladwin teen in the know about shifters wore baggy clothes.
Nobody wanted to change into a bear in skintight clothes.
They’d all heard stories about a first shift in jeans that refused to tear when the sudden bulk occurred.
For boys especially that was a nightmare.
But by the time he was fourteen, he’d known it wasn’t in the cards for him.
He’d still held out hope for a while, but in the end, he’d embraced the lack of hairiness.
The ability to speak his mind rather than growl.
And that left him free to wear clothes that showed off his swimmer’s body without the fear of an accidental castration from an unexpected shift.
“Your whole life, you’ve dressed and acted classy. You spoke clearly. You kept your life organized. Hell, even your sock drawer is tidy.”
“You have no idea what my sock drawer is like.”
She rolled her eyes. “I extrapolated. Am I right?”
Yes. Not that he was going to admit that.
“Exactly.” Again, she took his silence as agreement. “So then suddenly you’re abducted. They shove shit into your veins and, bam, you’re a shifter.”
“I’m not a real shifter,” he stressed. He was a laboratory experiment gone ugly. Like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
“Of course you are. You walk around human looking, then when you want, you shift into something different.”
“It’s not just when I want,” he snapped. It happened whether he wanted it or not.
“Welcome to shifter puberty.” She turned and pinned him with her own hard stare. “Get your head out of your ass and figure it out. Like all the rest of us did.”
Jesus, she did not just say that to him.
“It’s not the same! I don’t change into a bear or a cougar.
Or even a fucking dog. I’m...” His throat closed up and it was hard to repress a shudder of revulsion.
He became a stinking hairy monster that wasn’t man or beast but some hideous combination of the two.
“You hate it.”
“Yes!”
“Get over it.”