Page 5 of Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents #1)

CHAPTER 5

Now that it was light, Jack could see they were near the top of the ridge they’d been climbing. The trees were much sparser here, the ground rocky and broken under their bare feet. Once they got to the ridge crest, he hoped they’d have a good enough view to give them some idea of where they’d been dumped, if only in terms of the general contours of the land.

He glanced frequently at their backtrail, but could only see blurry trees. Anyway, he believed Casey when she said she hadn’t smelled lion. He knew how sharp a shifter’s senses were in their animal body. The lions weren’t close ... yet.

But they would be coming.

It was, unfortunately, also much harder to ignore their mutual nudity by daylight. Not that he was trying to look. He was, in fact, trying not to look. But Casey was an ample young woman, and her breasts in particular jiggled distractingly with every step she took. This made him unusually self-conscious about his own exposed state.

On the bright side, they were both getting better at pacing themselves to each other. The problem wasn’t that Casey was slow. In fact, he was impressed at how well she was keeping up. But it was awkward trying to move as a unit. And, worse, her presence kept him from being able to move freely without needing to keep the length of the handcuff chain in mind. Just having her there was a constant distraction, nagging at his mind, keeping him from being able to engage the single-minded focus that he normally used in a survival and evasion situation.

Like climbing the tree. It would have worked fine if he’d been on his own. But it had been stupid even to suggest it. He’d only made Casey feel bad about not being able to do it herself.

Avery’s exasperated voice echoed in his head: We all know you’re the ultimate badass, but you have to take your team’s limitations into account as well as your own, Jack.

The incident that had prompted Avery’s reminder, that time, was nothing more serious than a department paintball game. Jack had been deep in his own survival-evasion headspace, took out every one of his opponents, and then discovered that most of his team had been hit while he was off being a paintball commando.

The mood at the usual post-game drinking session was jubilant, with teammates buying him drinks all evening. But between rounds, Avery had taken him aside at the bar.

“If this was a real op, most of us would be dead, Jack.”

“It’s a game, man.” Jack slapped his friend on the back.

“Yeah, but you know we play this kind of game to practice for the real thing, right?”

Some of Jack’s cheerful mood drained away. “Avery, I’ve got your back. All of you. You know that.”

“I know you want to.” Avery looked down, idly making rings on the bar top with the wet bottom of his beer. “You’re a damn good agent, Jack. You’ve helped a lot of people. I’m not trying to downplay that. But there’s times to run off and cowboy through the opposition, and there’s times to hang back and take care of your team.”

It wasn’t the only time Avery had said something like that to him. Jack wasn’t a team player. He knew it. They both knew it. His strength lay in solo ops, in undercover work and anything else that allowed him to operate on his own, far from backup or help.

He glanced back at Casey, doggedly following him with her cuffed arm held forward at an awkward angle so the cuffs didn’t rake both their wrists at every step. Her dark hair was a tangled mess around her heart-shaped face, her lips compressed into a thin line as she concentrated on keeping up and not missing her footing.

You can’t forget your teammate now, can you, Jack? His inner voice still sounded like Avery, a little. At every step, you have to think of her. Every plan you make has to take her into account. You can’t leave her behind because she’s physically attached to you.

By daylight he could see that her legs were scratched and bruised. One of her toenails was clotted with dried blood. She hadn’t said anything.

Her courage made him suddenly ashamed.

Casey raised her head from careful consideration of where to place her feet. Her dark brows drew together. “What?”

“Nothing. We’re almost to the top, that’s all.”

* * *

They emerged from the trees after what seemed like an eternity of climbing. Up here on the ridge, the vegetation dwindled to shrubs and small, wind-stunted conifers. Their low, gnarled forms suggested high winds were a possibility, but right now, the air was calm. The early morning sun warmed their chilled bodies.

Casey whistled. “Look, it’s the ocean! We really are on an island.”

Frustratingly, all Jack could see was a green mass below them, blurring indistinguishably into blue in the distance. “Can you describe it to me?”

“Huh?” she said.

“This is a little awkward, but I’m going to need you to tell me what you see.”

“Why?” she asked, giving him a worried look. “You’re not blind, are you? If so, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you’re really good at faking.”

Well, it wasn’t like he’d been trying to keep it a secret. “I’m nearsighted. Bear vision isn’t nearly as bad as popular myth would have it, but a lot of us still have some vision problems in both forms. It’s especially noticeable as a human because we use our eyes so much. Normally I wear glasses.”

Her mouth shaped a silent oh . “That’s not good,” she said after a brief pause. “You can see more than just blurs, right?”

“Yeah, at close range I can see fine. It’s distances where I have trouble.”

“Okay.” She smiled hesitantly, bringing out dimples he hadn’t been able to appreciate in the dark. “I don’t know quite what you need to know. Where do I begin?”

Jack smiled back. “Just give me a general idea of the lay of the land. Overall landforms and so forth. You said you could see the ocean; why don’t you start by telling me where it is? Is it all around us? How close?”

Casey shaded her eyes with her uncuffed hand. “Well, let’s see. There’s a lot of trees between here and there. I don’t know how to tell how far away it is in terms of actual miles, but I can see water on three sides of us. The fourth way—” She pointed over her shoulder, in the general direction of the newly risen sun. “—the hills are too high for me to see.”

Jack could make out the basic contours of what she was describing. It was the details he was having trouble with.

“Any sign of land?”

Casey shook her head. “No ... wait.” She pointed hesitantly out to the open ocean in front of them. “I think there’s something there, kind of dark blue? More of a shadow, really.”

“Could be clouds,” Jack suggested. “A storm system coming in.” If they were where he thought they were, on the west side of an island along the Pacific Coast, there shouldn’t be land in front of them anyway.

“I can’t tell,” she said.

God, he wished he could see . “Do you see anything else? Boats, buildings, cell or radio towers, anything man-made?”

“Not really. I wish I had binoculars.” Her nose wrinkled in frustration. She was really astonishingly cute, with a kind of natural sex appeal that she didn’t even seem to be aware of.

Exactly the kind of girl, Jack reminded himself, who wouldn’t be interested in a guy whose resume consisted largely of running around the world shooting people. He steered himself firmly back on track. “How about smoke? Any rivers big enough to see from up here? Anything like that?”

“Not really.” She scanned the scenery. “Hmm, I see something dark up in the hills, maybe caves or something? That might be helpful, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Jack said, wishing he could see anything other than a green blur. “Where?”

“There.” Casey pointed, using the cuffed hand involuntarily, and dragging his arm up along with it. “Like I said, I don’t know if that’s what it is. It could just be a bluff or something. I wish I had binoculars to—” She broke off with a little gasp.

“What’s wrong?”

“I—I don’t know. I’m not even sure if it’s important, but—” Casey shook her head and pointed again, to a different part of the highlands to the east. “I just saw a flash of some kind up there.”

“Shit,” Jack muttered. He planted a hand on her bare back, steering her toward the trees. Casey went without complaint. Jack didn’t stop until he had them under the shelter of a stand of wind-stunted pines.

“It’s them, isn’t it?” Casey asked. She was pale. “Do you think they saw us?”

“Not necessarily. There might be a ranger cabin up there, or, I don’t even know, bird-watchers or something. But you might have seen sunlight glinting off binoculars or a rifle scope.” He regretted the words rifle scope as soon as they left his mouth, seeing the remaining color drain from her face. “I doubt if they’ll snipe us,” he pointed out quickly. “That’s not their usual method.”

“No, just running us to the ground like some kind of ... of prey .”

Her voice began to quaver; her lips trembled. Jack had been braced for this—considering she was an administrative assistant with no combat experience, she’d been taking everything much too well so far. It was all going to crash down on her at some point. But now that the pivot point had come, now that the reality of their situation was falling on her like a crashing freight train, all he could do for that first critical instant was stand frozen while her face crumpled and she began to collapse.

It was the sharp jerk on the handcuffs that jolted him out of his temporary paralysis, and he reacted with predator-quick reflexes to catch her as she fell. They both went down to the ground, Jack bearing her down as gently as he was able. She ended up half in and half out of his lap, and maybe later he’d have time to worry about that, but right now his big concern wasn’t for accidental nakedness, but for her mental health.

She wasn’t crying, exactly, but she was making short hitching noises that were, he realized after another frozen instant, a choking attempt to breathe. She was having a panic attack. This, at least, he’d dealt with before.

“It’s okay. You’re all right. Breathe with me. Breathe with me.”

He took her small hand in his—it was curled into a fist—and placed it against his chest so she could feel the rise and fall.

Without warning, he had a sudden lapful of enormous fluffy cat. In her emotional turmoil, she’d shifted, and now she no longer had the human self-control to restrain the panic and anxiety filling her. She threw her weight against the handcuffs, struggling to free herself with raw animal desperation.

Her claws raked his chest. Her eyes were huge, the pupils narrowed to slits.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He bore her down to the forest floor, using his greater weight and strength to pin her as she thrashed. She wasn’t trying to hurt him. She was only trying to get away. But of course, she couldn’t, because of the cuffs.

Beneath him, the ribs of her feline body rose and fell with rapid shallow gasps. Her jaws were open, lips drawn back in a silent snarl.

“Casey.” He said her name over and over again, until she managed to focus on him. In human form, her eyes were brown with gold flecks; as a lynx, they were the other way around, gold with hints of brown. “It’s all right, Casey. You’re all right. Just listen to my voice. You’re okay, you’re here, you’re not going anywhere. Breathe with me. One, two ...”

It was nonsense, mostly. He wasn’t even sure if the words mattered, at least not as much as the sound of his voice.

But she seemed to be listening. She was still panting shallowly, but her tufted ears twitched. When she shifted again, it happened with the same suddenness as before, her muscular furry body collapsing into her human one.

Jack shifted his weight just enough that he was no longer flattening her. Now they were lying side by side on the prickly carpet of pine needles beneath the trees. He turned his cuffed hand so he could close his fingers over hers.

“That’s good. Slow breaths. Just focus on your body. Feel this?” He squeezed her hand. “That’s real. I’m real. You’re here and you’re okay. Slow breaths.”

“They had no right,” she snarled, her voice choked. “They had no—fucking—right!”

Then there was silence, her chest heaving as she gasped.

“You with me?” Jack asked quietly.

Silence, then a shaky, “I ... I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

“It’s all right. Everybody gets scared sometimes. Everyone loses it.”

“Not you,” she mumbled.

“Yes, me. Absolutely, me. And I’ll tell you all about it later, but not right now, because right now I need to know if you feel like you can get up.”

She wiped her face, which was Jack’s first cue that she was crying. She wasn’t sobbing, but quiet tears slipping out of the corners of her eyes. “I guess so. Can’t stay here, right? Lions will eat us.”

“That’s the spirit. But don’t worry. I won’t let them eat you.”

The words just slipped out, startling him at least as much as her. She pushed herself up on her elbows and regarded him with a scowl. “You can’t promise that, Agent Ross.”

“Jack,” he said. He got to his knees and offered her a hand up. “I keep telling you, Jack is fine. At this point I think it’s silly to stand on ceremony, don’t you?”

Casey managed to smile weakly as she accepted the help. “Oh, I bet you say that to all the girls you’ve been naked with.”

“Nope, just you.”

Now her smile was genuine enough to bring out the dimples. “I’m the only woman you’ve ever been naked with? Don’t worry, I promise I won’t tell.”

At that, Jack managed a real laugh for the first time since waking up. “I’m glad my secret is safe with you.”

She brushed his chest lightly with her fingertips, below the stinging cuts she’d raked across his pecs. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it. You didn’t mean to.” He found himself responding to the soft brush of her fingertips much more intensely than he’d expected, and shifted a little to break the connection before his body betrayed him in ways that were impossible to hide while naked. “Come on, let’s get moving.”

He kept hold of her hand and set a brisk pace down the side of the ridge they’d just come up. He breathed a little easier once the trees had swallowed them and blocked the view of the higher ridges to the east.

Casey’s fingers rested in his. The short handcuff chain meant their hands were always brushing against each other anyway. This way he could keep her from bumping into him, and help guide her over obstacles. Whether because she recognized the usefulness of it, or just didn’t want to let go of his hand, she made no effort to break his grip, but instead curled her fingers around his.

“But what can we do ?” she asked as she stumbled along in his wake, casting frequent glances in the direction of the higher hills, now hidden, where the flash of light had come from, now hidden by trees. “I hate feeling so helpless.”

“Me too. But we’re not.”

Casey scowled. “We’re up against a bunch of lion shifters, and we have absolutely nothing but our bare hands to fight them with. We can’t even shift. I’d say that makes us pretty helpless!”

“You have to remember, though, we still have the most important tool of all. The one no one can ever take from us.” Jack tapped his temple. “This.”

“You know what, Jack?” She snatched a handful of leaves from a bush as she passed it and ripped them off, scattering the fragments. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop throwing platitudes at me to make me feel better. In spite of what happened back there, I swear I’m not going to fall down and start crying again if you don’t coddle me. I know exactly how fucking screwed we are.”

“It’s not just a platitude. Yeah, we’re in trouble. There’s no denying it. But you have to remember, all the things we don’t have right now—clothes, guns, modern manufactured tools—are things we haven’t really had very long, evolutionarily speaking. We survived for millions of years against lions and other large predators using nothing but exactly what we have right now: our bare hands, and our wits.”

“And that’s why the average life expectancy was about fifteen,” Casey said dryly.

“Look, take it from a guy who’s been in a lot of hairy situations. I’ve seen people pull out saves against impossible odds. Nothing is truly impossible unless you give up.”

“Power of positive thinking. Right. Got it.” But she managed to give him a smile, even if it was stretched a little thin. “Besides, we have one asset other than our brains, right? We have a pair of handcuffs.”

“True.” Jack shook their linked hands, jingling the cuffs. “And the woods are full of tools if you know how to make them.”

“Do you actually have a plan, or are you just acting like you do to make me feel better?”

“I’m developing the glimmerings of one,” Jack said, helping her over a boulder. “Hiding our scent trail is the most important thing to start with. That’s most likely what they’ll be using to follow us.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Water,” Jack said. “Flowing water will kill the scent better than anything else.”

“I didn’t see any from the hilltop.”

“Maybe not, but there are usually streams in hilly country like this. We just have to find them.”

“How?”

“By listening, for one thing.” He stopped and tipped his head to one side. Casey paused too, holding her breath. All he could hear was the whisper of wind in the trees, distant birdsong, and the little rustles Casey made as she tried to stay still. Jack shook his head and started moving again, taking them down the side of the ridge at an angle towards the saddle where it joined to the next ridge.

“Valleys,” he said over his shoulder to Casey, picking his way around a tangle of thorny scrub. “Valleys and ravines. Water carves them, so it stands to reason there’ll be water at the bottom of them, at least some of them.”

There was a brief silence while she digested this bit of information, during which Jack hustled them around another cluster of boulders, tucked beneath a cape of moss and young trees. Then she said, “You’re not just a federal agent, are you? No way you learned all this stuff as a fed.”

Jack wasn’t sure how to respond. He knew this topic would come up sooner or later; she was bound to want to know how he learned all the tricks he was going to have to use to keep both of them alive. But he’d hoped she’d have a little more time to get to know him first, because the last thing he needed was Casey being as afraid of him as she was of the Fallons.

His silence, and the signals it clearly sent, made her hand go a little looser in his. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t bring up something painful. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“It’s not really that,” Jack said. “I don’t mind talking about it.” I just don’t know how you’ll react.

“Well, I think I’ve figured out it out anyway. You’re military, right? Or former military.”

“You’re half right. I did a tour in Iraq, yeah. But it turned out life in the Army wasn’t for me. Too many rules, too much ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ and having to deal with bureaucratic bullshit. I hated it.”

“So what then?” she asked, holding a branch aside for him.

“You’ve heard of Blackwater, right?”

“I guess so,” she said. “I think I remember news stories about that. Some kind of scandal in Iraq, right? Wait, are you telling me you worked for Blackwater?”

“Not Blackwater specifically, but something similar. After I left the service, a buddy got me a job working for a similar outfit. They’re called private security companies, but what it comes down to is, they’re mercenaries. I was a merc, Casey.”

The look she gave him wasn’t scared or worried, just thoughtful. “I didn’t even know mercenaries were a thing anymore. I guess I think of that as something that went out with the Revolutionary War.”

“Nope, they are definitely a thing. Oh, they have to run around under the radar of the Geneva Conventions and various other international treaties. You can’t just go out and hire yourself a private army anymore. Well, most people can’t. But private armies still exist, and I was part of one.”

“What kind of things did you do?”

This was one area where censoring himself for civilians was second nature. Maybe someday he’d tell her some of the hairier stuff. Avery knew most of it. But not right now. “Guarding places, mostly. The U.S. employs a lot of private security to do things like guard installations and convoys overseas, so they’re not stretched quite so thin.”

“Sounds boring.”

“It mostly was. I mean, like anything else. Moments of excitement punctuated by a whole lot of boring.”

He waited for more questions, but instead she said simply, “Thanks for telling me.”

“You’re welcome. If you want to know more, just ask. I can’t promise to tell you everything, but I’ll tell you what I can.”

She looked up at him with those startling gold-flecked eyes. “Jack, I—” she began.

And then she stopped. It seemed to him that she hovered on the edge of something she couldn’t quite bring herself to come out and say.

“Yeah?” he prompted at last.

Her face was very near. Her lips were parted, her eyes locked on his. He was suddenly all too aware that it would only take a bend of his neck, a dip of his head, to brush her lips with his.

He hadn’t meant it to come to this.

But she was the one who pulled away, blinking like a woman waking up from a dream.

“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry. We’d better move.”

She slipped her hand into his as they started walking again. It was definitely easier to move with their hands linked together like that.

Expediency—the only reason. Of course.