Alyssa kept her breathing calm. She inhaled and released in slow control and then realized that she wasn’t fooling anyone. Her hands gripped the steering wheel like it was her lifeline on the Titanic. And though her breath was steady, her pace on the accelerator was anything but. She’d already roared past three trucks only to slow down to grandma speed a moment later. She was losing it and all because of the crazy man sitting much too close in her suddenly tiny car.
She stole a glance to the right. He was watching her with the unceasing stare of a predatory cat. She knew he was a bear, but damn it, he was a predator and she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was about to pounce. Or break. Or do something just plain scary while she was driving them to Detroit. But first she had to feed him.
She’d gotten the directions off the flyer and now turned into the large parking lot of a small pizzeria. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw they had a drive-through and immediately headed for that. A moment later, a stunning redheaded woman with large white teeth grinned at her through the window. The name on the apron read Amanda and she winked at Simon. “You up to talking yet?” she asked.
Simon stared hard at her and said one word, “No.”
The woman chuckled and smiled at Alyssa. “He’s all grumbly for a few days, but then it’ll get better.” Then she disappeared.
A moment later, she passed over two thick cheeseburgers and a large pizza loaded down with a half inch of meat. This was Simon’s usual order? He ought to weigh five thousand pounds. Though how would she know how many calories it took to shift into a grizzly? Maybe all shifters ate like bears before hibernation.
Alyssa was about to pull away when Amanda held out her hand. “Hold on, sweetie. Let me bring out the case.”
Sweetie? Case? There was too much in that sentence to unpack, so she threw the car into park and waited. A moment later, Amanda came out with a case of high-end water bottles. She didn’t even know that water could come in glass bottles that looked more like wine than water, but she didn’t stop to ask. Just pointed to her backseat.
“Thanks,” she said when the water was settled and the car door shut.
“I’ll just put it on the tab,” Amanda said. Then after another lascivious wink, she waved them on. “Have fun!”
Not likely. Not since she was kidnapping a crazy grizzly man. But what other choice did she have? Vic said he was the only one who could help. But even knowing that, she couldn’t stop herself from asking.
“So are you and…um…the redhead dating?”
Simon shook his head. He took his time answering, forming the words slowly as if he had to dredge them up from deep in his memory.
“We dated. Twice. I have gone on two dates with most of the women up here.” He looked at her and lifted a shoulder. “We did not suit.”
He sounded like he was reading the words—badly—off a cue card. And then she understood.
“It’s another system, right? A dating protocol. Two evenings with a woman makes her think you gave her a chance. If you treat her nicely and talk awkwardly, then she doesn’t push it when you say you two don’t suit. End of story and they stop bothering you.” She snorted. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or appalled.” Then she tilted her head. “You could just tell them you’re gay?” She lifted her voice at the end hoping he would answer the implied question.
It worked—sort of. “Lying is too complicated. I don’t do it.”
Well, that answered that. The man didn’t lie. Big point in his favor.
Meanwhile, Simon continued to sit staring at her though the food lay on his lap in neat cardboard boxes. The smell must be driving him crazy. She could hear his stomach rumbling over the road noise. But he just sat there staring at her.
“What?” she finally asked.
“I cannot help Vic. I can barely help myself.”
She looked at him. Not just the hard cut to his jaw or the muscles that wrapped his frame. He was a powerful man to be sure, but it was the darkness in his eyes that cut her now. Blue like deep water but shadowed even though he sat in the full sunshine.
Wait. Hadn’t his eyes been green? She shoved that thought aside and focused on getting him on board with Vic’s plan.
“Vic says you can help him.”
“Vic is full of shit.”
Often. But she couldn’t admit that. If she did, then that meant there was no hope for her only brother. “He was right about you turning into a bear.”
Simon’s expression didn’t change. It was flat. It was emotionless. And it still held shadows of what? Grief? Fear? She didn’t know. And worse, she couldn’t afford to find out. She only had emotional space in her heart for Vic.
“It’s the only Hail Mary pass I’ve got,” she confessed.
His silence told her clearer than anything else that her brother was doomed. She didn’t care. She’d been trying for hours to get a hold of Vic and he hadn’t answered. Which meant it might already be too late. But she was going to do what she promised. She was going to bring Simon to Detroit. If he couldn’t help, if they arrived too late, if any of a thousand terrible things happened, it wasn’t her fault. She was doing her part now.
So she put the car into gear and headed for the freeway. “You should eat the food. Your stomach is deafening.” And it was. It hadn’t stopped growling since the scents of pizza and cheeseburger filled the car.
His gaze turned to the topmost small box and opened it. Thick burger, melted cheese, tomato, mustard. The sight made her mouth water. He lifted it up in both his hands, but he didn’t eat.
“Sometimes the food quiets the grizzly. It lets the man take control.”
“Good.”
“Sometimes the opposite happens.”
It took her a moment to process that. So the grizzly would take over? While they were in a car together speeding down a freeway at eighty miles per hour?
She shot him a terrified look. His head was tilted and a single brow arched. It challenged her to turn the car around right then and dump him at the nearest tree. Common sense told her that was the best thing to do. But common sense wasn’t trying to save her brother.
“Eat up,” she said, her voice ringing with challenge.
He nodded and chomped down.
Swell.
* * *
A short hour later the food was finished, the gas tank was heading toward low, and he remained exactly as he had been before: a predator watching her every breath. Eventually, she had enough. She kept her eyes on the road, but watched him closely out of her peripheral vision.
“So which are you now? Bear or man?”
“Both. I am always both.”
Not helpful. “I mean are you about to sprout fur?”
He looked down at his arms. All human normal, as far as she could tell. “Not at the moment. And I must not change again for at least a week. If I do, I will probably stay a bear forever.”
“Jesus,” she muttered. Like she needed more of an incentive to keep him human? “Can you just tell me if you’re about to kill me?”
He straightened as if insulted. “I am not.” His tone indicated he thought the question insane.
“Thank you,” she snapped, her anxiety coming out in a sharp tone.
He waited a moment, then spoke in that slow monotone of his. “Why are you angry? I am answering your questions.”
“Not really,” she groused. He was giving her literal answers to direct questions. But none of it told her what she wanted to know because she didn’t know what she didn’t know. How could she ask the right questions when she hadn’t the first clue how to start? Maybe at the beginning. “How did my brother find out you were a bear? Did he shoot you, too?”
“I rescued him. As a bear.”
She turned to look at him, annoyance eating at her already frayed nerves. God, she wanted to smack him. Instead she decided to bargain. “What do you need to talk to me like a normal person? To have a conversation where your answers don’t create a dozen more questions?”
He tilted his head, the gesture slower than natural. “Communication is hard after a shift. I will get better.”
“With practice?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “So let’s practice now. Tell me the full story of how my brother found out you were a bear.”
He looked at her with clear irritation. Not a studied movement at all but a furrowing of his brow and a peeling back of his lips. His teeth flashed white but she pretended she didn’t see it. She just kept her hands on the wheel, her gaze steady ahead. Part of her screamed that it wasn’t smart to poke at the bear, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“Talk. Now,” she ordered.
“You cannot command me,” he said. “Only my alpha can.”
“And now I have another dozen questions.” Okay. Ordering him around wasn’t working. She hadn’t really expected it to, so maybe it was time for logic mixed with a little begging. “It’s a long way to Detroit. It would help me pass the time and you need the practice. Please?”
His gaze shifted from her face to the road. Then he nodded. “A solid argument.” He pursed his lips. “I will tell you the story of your brother’s stupidity.”
Like that would be a rare story…not.
“We were stationed in Alaska near Mount Denali. He wanted to go climbing, but I said no. The weather would turn. He disagreed.”
“Really?” Her brother might be stupid but usually with people. Not with something like the weather.
“The reports said the storm wouldn’t come until the next morning.” Simon snorted. “The reports were wrong.”
She turned to look at him, only now processing what the man was saying. She remembered when Vic had been transferred to Alaska. She’d been thrilled. Sure, it was cold as hell, but he wasn’t likely to get shot at. But, of course, her brother would want to explore. Hell, he loved mountain climbing more than anything. And, of course, he would get in trouble. It was just how the boy’s luck ran.
“How did you find him?”
He grimaced. “I went with the rescue team. I knew where he meant to go, but the storm came in fast and hard. We were ordered back.” He shook his head. “Stupid. Stupid not to listen to me.”
“That’s Vic all right.”
He shot her the most human look she’d seen on his face: a wry almost-smile coupled with a shrug. God, how many times had she done that in response to one of her brother’s mad ideas?
“I was very angry. I fell behind the rescuers—told them I was going back—and shifted.” He grimaced. “The grizzly was very near to the surface that day. There is something about that mountain that draws it out. I don’t know why, but it allowed me to save Vic’s life.”
She blew out a breath. “You found him…as a bear?”
“Yes.” His voice was the same near monotone he’d used before. But she was starting to hear fluctuations in his tones now. And his next sentences seemed to imply curiosity as much as irritation. “My bear was very sharp then. Very smart in that place. Even with the snow and the storm, I could smell Vic.”
She felt her hands ease on the steering wheel. Her shoulders relaxed even though the danger had been months ago. Vic had survived and come back to Detroit only to be hit by whatever it was that was changing him now. “So you found him and both made it back to base.”
“I was a bear and he was hurt from a fall.” Simon looked down at his hands where they seemed to clench his thighs. Like claws digging in? She didn’t have the time to ask because the moment she noticed them, he stretched out his fingers until he could set his palms flat on the denim. “It was too cold to shift back to human, and I had already ripped out of my clothing.”
Right. They’d been in Alaska in a snowstorm. No way could he just shift back in torn skivvies and travel back to the base. “What did you do?”
“I carried him as a bear.” His lips curved and she was startled to see his smile. It softened the harsh angles of his face, but only in a small way. His mouth and cheeks eased, but not his eyes, which stared fixedly ahead. “He was terrified, but I gave him no choice.”
She couldn’t even imagine how that had gone down. “I’m surprised he didn’t shoot you.”
“He tried. It took a long time for me to convince him to climb onto my back, but then he did and we made it back to base.”
“But you were a bear.”
“There is much that can be expressed by pushing with my nose and a well-timed growl.”
She snorted. “Wish I had been there to see it.”
He flashed her a frown. “You would have frozen to death.”
Literal much? “Yeah, I know. I… It’s just a figure of speech.”
He didn’t respond at first, and when she finally glanced at him again, she was startled to see him grinning at her. Like full-blown grinning. It made his face look youthful. She did a double take and then finally figured it out. “You’re teasing me. Taking my words really literally just to see if I’ll roll with it.”
“No, I’m not.” His grin widened.
Holy hell, he was teasing her. She’d just gotten into the rhythm of the man’s hyper-literal speech pattern, and now he was turning the tables on her. Pretending to be more communications-challenged than he really was. Would she ever gain the upper hand with this guy?
“Don’t be a dick,” she groused, but without much heat. She preferred dealing with someone who had a sense of humor, odd though it might be. “So you’re a bear and you convince Vic to climb onto your back. Was he able to hold on as you went back to base?”
“His knee was hurt, not his arms. He held on tight and I was able to move fast.” He blew out a breath. “Very fast.”
Sounded like it was surprisingly fast, even for Simon. “That’s the part about your grizzly being close to the surface, right? Being especially strong?”
“Yes.” The word held a wealth of uncertainty. “I have never been that strong or that fast before. Or since.”
“Since you saved my brother’s life, I can only be grateful.”
He blew out a breath, clearly brooding on the experience. She let him do it for a while, hoping that he would talk out his thoughts. He didn’t. He was the strong silent type, which made him mysterious and attractive to her twisted libido. Why couldn’t she lust after someone who couldn’t shut up? Then she’d know exactly what drivel went about in his head.
Eventually she got tired of the silence. “So how did you get him back to base without getting shot?” She couldn’t imagine guards allowing a huge grizzly bear to zip up to the front gate.
“There were trees nearby. I shifted to human there, then carried your brother back to base.”
Carried? Vic must have been hurt a great deal more than a bad knee. But hell, he was talking about carrying a man through an Alaskan snowstorm while naked.
“It’s a miracle you weren’t frostbitten.”
“I was. But I fixed it on my next shift.”
“But there must have been questions. And video, right? Even if the guards didn’t see, weren’t there cameras?”
He turned and looked directly at her, surprise in the lift of his eyebrows. “I was seen.”
He seemed startled that she could think the scenario through. She shot him an arch look. She wasn’t just a pretty face.
Meanwhile, he nodded as if he accepted her words though she hadn’t said anything. “Enough people saw and then more when I refused to allow them to amputate my feet.”
What? Ouch.
“Among many shifters, that is a killing offense.”
And now she had another thousand questions, all of them ending in an exclamation point. So she started with the most obvious. “Killing offense because you didn’t want your feet amputated?”
He shook his head. “Letting the shifter secret out.”
Oh. Right. “So you’d be killed for telling? Or they’d be killed for knowing?” And how soon were angry grizzly-shifters going to come for her because she knew about the fur?
He sighed. “Both. Sometimes. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone.”
Oh shit. “So, um, the military knows about shifters now because you saved my brother’s life?”
“Yes.”
“And you haven’t confessed that particular detail to your alpha.” She was guessing at the power structure among his kind, but he seemed to confirm it all with a nod.
“Many human things are forgotten when being a bear. And they don’t come always come back.” He glanced at her. “It slipped my mind.”
Yeah, right. “I thought you said you didn’t lie.”
“I don’t. I came back home and everything about my clan had changed. We had a new alpha and new rules, plus there had been some sort of attack on the children.”
“What?” A very real surge of fury went through her. She despised it when kids were targeted.
“I was angry about leaving the army, and I would not submit to Carl. I decided since I had left the army, I didn’t have to take orders from anyone anymore.” He swallowed loud enough for her to hear. “I was very angry.”
She heard the pain in the very emptiness of his tone. Her brother had cost him everything, and here she was demanding he help Vic again. But rather than face his pain, she shifted to her questions. “Who is Carl?”
“The new alpha.” His gaze wandered out the window to the passing trees as he clearly longed to be outside as a bear. Which meant she had to keep him talking.
“That’s why you went bear for so long? Because you were avoiding a showdown with your alpha?” Another guess. Another nod.
“Carl understood that I needed to find control of something. He suggested I go to the UP to get away from clan politics. Control myself and my life up there. I don’t think he meant for me to be a bear for ten months.”
Yeah, probably not. “And now?” she pressed.
He shrugged. “Now I will have to submit to Carl. Or not.”
Great. Male dominance taken to animal extreme. Not something she wanted to contemplate. But that was tomorrow’s problem after he fixed Vic. Meanwhile, she still had to keep him talking. “So back in Alaska, people figured out you could shift. Not just my brother, but the doctor. And the guards.”
“Yes.”
“And that means your CO, too.”
“He said no one would tell. He certainly couldn’t put it in a report. Who would believe it? But he expedited the paperwork for me to leave the military. Didn’t like having me under his command.”
And they were back to how Vic had destroyed his life. “So my brother’s stupidity cost you your military career.”
“Yes.” A wealth of fury in that word. But a moment later, he started to relax back against the seat. As if he were consciously releasing each muscle one by one. “Maybe it was time for me to leave. My grizzly had been changing. The mountain was too close.”
It sounded like rationalization. Or the beginning of acceptance. She couldn’t tell and maybe he wasn’t sure either. She opened her mouth to ask, but he held up his hand to stop her.
“I don’t have an answer,” he said. “Mount Denali is just a mountain. But it had a wildness to it that my grizzly liked very much. It made him more aggressive. Harder to contain.”
That wasn’t what she’d wanted to ask, but she’d go with it. “The mountain made it harder for you to stay human?”
“Harder to keep from ripping your brother’s throat out for not listening to me.”
She heard that. Except whenever she felt that way about Vic, it was an exaggeration. She was pretty sure Simon couldn’t say the same.
“Then you come home, pissed off and suddenly without a career, and everything’s different. This Carl wants you to submit, but you’ve got anger issues. So off you go to UP to get your head on straight only to shift to bear and stay there. For ten months. And then I show up. Have I got that right?”
“Yes.” The word was clipped and angry, but he didn’t elaborate. Good because when he took that tone, he scared the shit out of her. Fortunately, he made no moves. He just sat there and brooded as the miles sped by.
She judged it prudent to let him be for a bit, but an hour later they had to stop for gas. He’d been pretty cooperative so far, but he hadn’t exactly promised to help Vic. In fact, even at his most uncommunicative, he’d said he’d be no help to her brother at all. But the gas tank wasn’t going to refill itself, so she had to take the risk.
“I need to get gas,” she said by way of opening. Typically, he didn’t comment so she was forced to ask the question bluntly. “Can I trust you to stay with me? That you’ll go to Detroit and see if you can help Vic?”
“I cannot help him. I’m sorry.”
“Vic says you can.” Then she held up her hand rather than rehash the same argument. “Just say you’ll come with me to see him. Please.” She hated that she had to beg the man, but what other choice did she have? When he didn’t immediately answer, she tried for a light joke. “Besides, what else have you got to do?”
“I have been out of touch for ten months,” he said. “There is a great deal I should do.”
Like have a dominance fight with his alpha? No way was she letting that happen before he saw Vic.
“But you can take a day or so, right? See Vic while you remember how to be a guy?”
She held her breath while he seemed to think about it. And while she waited, they passed a freeway sign. There was an exit coming up with gas and fast food. She’d managed to snag a piece of pizza before it was gone, but she’d kill for a strong cup of coffee. This was the perfect place to stop, but only if he promised not to run.
“Simon—”
“I cannot read yet,” he said, his gaze dropping to his hands. “Numbers have come back, but the words aren’t there.”
“So you need time to remember. I can help you, if you like.”
He took a deep breath, his nostrils expanding as if he were pulling in her scent. “I would like your help.”
“Deal.” Relieved, she headed toward the exit. “I’ll help you remember how to read. You see if you can help my brother.”
His lips pulled back into a dark smile. “I will kick Vic’s ass for worrying you with this lie.”
She’d take it.