Juliet

Mason looked even better than I remembered. His dark hair was slightly longer than the close-cropped, Army issue haircut he’d had when I met him. The chiseled jaw and strong, bulky build were the same.

But his eyes and his mouth had changed. Before, his dark eyes were stony, they didn’t give away even a tiny flicker of emotion. His mouth had been a sharp slash. When I’d managed to tease a small smile out of him, I’d felt like I’d been given a gift.

Now, his eyes crinkled in the corners. His mouth tipped up a tiny bit, as if he was just waiting for an excuse to smile. There was an ease about him here that had been missing when I met him in New Orleans.

And as impossible as it seemed, that ease, that smile waiting to break the surface and share a joke, made him even more attractive than he’d been eight months ago.

I couldn’t move. But that didn’t seem to matter. Mason scanned the room and as his gaze landed on Chief Martin, he stepped forward. Mid-step, his gaze found me. He paused for less than an instant before his long legs ate of the distance between us.

He reached us and didn’t bother acknowledging Chief Martin. His hands came out and slid over my arms, pulling me closer until only inches remained between us.

“Juliet, what are you doing here? Are you looking for me?”

I jolted at his touch, every nerve-ending coming to life as if I’d been waiting forever for this contact. I couldn’t find the words to describe the look on his face. If I had to give it a label, I’d say it was wonder. I braced my hands on his forearms and stared up into his too-handsome-to-be-real face.

I managed a nod, but had trouble finding the words I’d painstakingly planned the entire time I was riding across the continent.

“Are you okay? Is everything all right?” His big, warm hands, hands that were well acquainted with every inch of my body, moved up and down my arms as he spoke. I shivered and goose bumps rose along my skin.

I nodded again, and then realized I must look like an idiot. “I’m sorry for just showing up here like this. I know it’s not what you…um, signed up for.” I slid my eyes to the side, very conscious of Chief Martin standing there. Spitting out a string of lies to explain my presence would be hard enough without the overly suspicious police chief listening in.

Mason followed my gaze and grinned. “Sorry, Chief. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was just taken by surprise.”

“So I see,” Chief Martin said drily. “I didn’t want to send Miss Bellamy to you in case you wouldn’t be pleased with her unexpected visit.” The chief’s eyes travelled to his hands on my arms and she pursed her lips. “But I can see that’s not an issue.”

Mason laughed and maneuvered me even closer to his body. “No. Not an issue at all.” He shook his head and returned his attention to me. “More like a surprise. A very welcome surprise.”

Warmth shot through me at his words, and without conscious thought, my body melted into his. I moved my hands up to rest on his chest and he pulled me tighter to him, linking his arms around my back.

“Apparently.” Chief Martin’s dry tone caught my attention and I couldn’t miss the smirk and the raised eyebrow she sent Mason’s way. “I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted. Somewhere not in the middle of my department,” she said pointedly.

A glance around showed me we were the center of attention. I could feel my cheeks heat, and something down deep inside me felt restless and snarly.

Mason just laughed it off. “Don’t worry. We’ll clear out.” He turned back to me. “Where are you staying?”

I shrugged and nodded at the suitcase I left next to the chair I’d been sitting in while I waited. “I hadn’t exactly gotten that far. Is there a hotel nearby?”

I sank my teeth into my lower lip and silently cursed my own stupidity. Why hadn’t I planned this part? I’d spent so much time thinking about what I was going to say to him and how I’d break the news of my pregnancy if I decided to tell him, and not one thought on the logistics involved in taking off across the country. Not like me. Not like me at all.

Mason released me only to grab my hand. He snatched the suitcase and tugged me toward the door. “No worries, gorgeous. You can stay with me.”

I stood stock still, yanking at Mason’s hand when he kept moving. He turned to face me. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t stay with you, Mason. I don’t even know you.”

He grinned a grin that made my panties more than a little damp and closed the distance between us. He towered over me, smiling down into my face.

“Beautiful girl, I’d say we know each other pretty well. Biblically, you might say.” His voice was low and growly, inviting me to join his joke, teasing me at the same time he turned me on.

My breath left me on a huff, and I didn’t want to smile, but I could feel my lips twitching. “You know what I mean! How do I know you’re not a mass murderer or a psycho or some kind of perv? I can’t go home with you.”

His grin only grew. “There are lots of things I can imagine doing with you, beautiful. Murdering you definitely isn’t one of them.” His head tipped to the side. “Perverted might be up for debate. But I promise, you’ll like it.”

I blinked up at him, my eyes going wide and my lips parting. My head was spinning and all I could think about was what it felt like when his hands were on me, his mouth was on me, he was in me. And he was right. I liked all of it.

“This is not going at all how I expected,” I whispered.

“No? ‘Cause I think I had a few fantasies about you that went just like this. You showing up, me taking you home with me…” His words trailed off leaving me to fill in the blanks with tantalizing images.

I shook my head, a sad attempt to shake away the mental pictures. I pulled in a deep, not quite steady breath. “As tempting as your fantasies are…” and oh my, they were tempting beyond belief and under any other circumstances, I’d take him up on them in a heartbeat. But right now the little peanut came first, “…I need to slow this down. This isn’t why I came here.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To…to…” Oh, shit, what was I going to tell him? “To take a vacation,” I finally blurted out. “You made everything sound so great here, I thought it would be a nice place to spend a week or two.”

Yup. That’s the brilliant story I managed to come up with in the days I spent on buses and a ferry and in cheap motel rooms.

“You’re here on vacation?” His eyes narrowed on me.

I nodded emphatically. It might not be a great story, but it was the one I had and now that I blurted it out, I needed to stick to it.

“You came here on vacation without making any hotel reservations?”

“Um…” I shrugged. “Yes?”

He eased away from me slightly and my body instantly missed the heat of his body next to mine in the air-conditioned room. And that restless something deep inside me growled her displeasure. I sensed it rippling through me.

“I mean, I guess, I just thought it would be fun to do something a little spontaneous. Take off somewhere new and let the vacation sort of unfold.” I lifted a shoulder, going for nonchalance, but probably looking more awkward than anything. “I guess I got a little nervous as I got closer. I came up with the idea of looking you up and…” I gestured around the police station. “…here I am.”

And that’s the story I’d be sticking to. No matter how stilted and practiced it came out. Because spontaneous trips across two countries and a continent were so like me. Not.

Mason wouldn’t know that, though. He knew me as the girl from the bar who went back to his hotel with him a couple hours after she met him. So for him, my spontaneous vacation might seem in line with what he’d expect from me.

And I wasn’t going to spend too much time examining just why I acted so out of character every time he was around.

He looked at me for several long seconds, his expression inscrutable. He looked more like the soldier I’d met the night at the club, and I found myself mourning the loss of his easy grin.

I tilted my head to the side. “I don’t want to put you out,” I said softly. “I just…you seemed like a nice guy when I met you. I’ve thought about you since then. And when I got nervous about traveling on my own, I felt safer when I thought of getting in touch with you.”

I might have left out a bunch of the story, like the teeny, tiny fact I was pregnant with his baby, but I realized as soon as the words left my mouth, they were true. Since the moment I found out I was going to have a baby, I’d been scared out of my head. The one thing helping me keep it together was the thought of getting to Mason.

His expression cleared and he smiled at me. “Then come home with me. I have a meeting in a little bit, but after that, we can have lunch and I can show you around town.” He moved in close to me again. “I’ve thought about you, too, since that night.”

My toes curled inside my black Converse and I shot my gaze to his mouth. I think I might have had a little mini orgasm just from his words.

“Ready?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He snatched my hand and the handle of the suitcase and herded us out the door.

Before I knew it, I sat next to him in the passenger seat of his truck. I twisted my head to catch the sights we passed—the boats bobbing in the bay, the busy downtown area, a meadow of wildflowers, the green mountains acting as a backdrop to it all.

“Do you live in town?”

“No, but not too far from here. I live in my family compound.”

I turned my head toward him. The words “family compound” set off an alarm in my brain. On one hand, I knew some wealthy families referred to their estates as compounds. But out in the wilds of Alaska, I was picturing something more like a commune out in the wilderness where you’d find groups of people waiting to suck down some Kool-Aid.

He glanced at me and grinned as if he could read my mind. “Don’t worry, beautiful. It’s kind of normal around here. People from the local…families…often build their homes close together. My family owns some acreage out near the park. Enough so we can live close, but not right on top of each other.”

I narrowed my eyes on him when he stumbled over the word “families.” Nothing else he said raised any red flags, but that one word made me suspicious.

Then I remembered something I read in one of the nine million online searches I did to find more info about shifters. “By family, do you mean den?”

He glanced at me again before turning his attention back to the road. “You know I’m a shifter.”

“I kind of guessed. When I researched the area, it mentioned the large shifter community.” And that was true. There weren’t too many places in the United States where shifters lived so openly the way they did in the Alaskan Dens. “The way you just referred to your family made me put two and two together.”

Yeah, that and the fact I was turning into a shifter and had one growing inside me.

He gave me a hard look and I offered him a close-mouthed smile, hoping he’d buy it.

The rest of the ride was pretty quiet. I spent it looking at the breathtaking scenery and praying I hadn’t given myself away.

“We’re here,” he said quietly as we turned off the main road onto a long paved track only wide enough for a single car.

I peered out the windshield. There were several houses dotting spots along the tree line. But he had been honest. They weren’t right on top of each other.

He drove us for about a mile, past several homes—a couple of large log cabins, some low ranches painted in bright colors. He finally pulled into a driveway that led up to a sort of nondescript two-story home. The siding was beige and the shape was decidedly boxy. The back half of the house was lost to the forest behind it.

“Let me show you inside.” His voice was quiet, and I knew he was regretting his offer to bring me here.

But he hopped down from the truck and hefted my suitcase out before coming around to help me down. I glanced up at him and noticed his smile was gone. The laugh lines beside his eyes were gone.

I sighed as we took the steps up to his front door. Obviously my story hadn’t been as believable as I’d hoped.

I closed my eyes for a brief moment before I opened them again and followed him inside. How stupid could I be? The man was a trained Special Forces soldier and claimed ancestry with bears. His natural instincts had been honed and harnessed in ways I probably couldn’t even imagine. And I’d hoped to tell my stupid, stupid story and get away with it.

“I’m an idiot,” I shared as we stepped into his entryway.

“What?” He dropped my suitcase near the door and gestured me to walk in front of him into the house.

I stepped through the entryway…and straight into something from a storybook.