HUNTER
H unter’s first disappointment was finding that he was going to have to drive to Tok, especially when he realized where it was.
The second disappointment was that they gave him a company truck instead of letting him rent something faster and sleeker.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be able to drive fast anyway,” Orson laughed. “Frost heaves.”
It sounded like some kind of frat boy challenge, but Hunter quickly discovered that frost heaves had nothing to do with iced drinks or vomit and everything to do with a crumbling roller coaster road. For a state that only had a few highways, they weren’t in great shape.
It was an eye-opening trip with impressive vistas and a lot of trees, but the weather was poor, and the promised mountains were shrouded in clouds. Hunter told himself he wasn’t on a sight-seeing expedition anyway.
Hunter usually liked solitude, but he found himself yearning for someone to share the trip with. His bear didn’t understand the quips he wanted to make about the state of the road or the fact that the rest stops didn’t have running water.
It might have been more fun with a companion, but Orson hadn’t offered one, and Hunter certainly wasn’t going to ask. Hunter wasn’t there to have fun, anyway.
He left at six-thirty in the morning and still wasn’t at the job site until after noon, tired from the long, grueling drive.
He had checked the driving estimate that his GPS gave him, but hadn’t really believed it.
The journey was complicated by several grueling stops for dusty, noisy road construction.
He frowned as he finally turned off the highway onto a winding gravel road. There were big hand-painted signs at the turnoff with crooked lettering: SAVE THE SALMON. DEVELOPMENT IS DEATH.
The road opened onto a gravel pad with a silver travel trailer and a half-built structure surrounded by a pit. A single beat up pickup was backed up to it, and a figure wearing a hardhat sat on the tailgate eating.
Hunter checked his watch. He was an hour earlier than Orson had scheduled him and he hadn’t stopped to eat along the way.
This is right , his bear said, and Hunter was suddenly aware of an unexpected hum beneath his hunger.
Sometimes, instinct was a flash of warning or a gut feeling of unrest that Hunter had learned to listen to.
Other times, it was an urge that might not follow logic and couldn’t be ignored.
(It had once convinced him to get up at night and catch Orson trying to set off fireworks that probably would have left him with no fingers.)
Now, instinct was a feeling of contentment and rightness that Hunter had never experienced before, pulling him like a fishing line straight for the person who was standing to greet him .
He was supposed to be here in Alaska. He was supposed to take this job. He was meant to be right here, in this moment, meeting… her?
“I’m looking for a Mr. Pat Talon,” he said in confusion.
She was shorter than he was by a head, which still meant she was a tall woman, and she was buckling a tool belt at her waist. Stiff Carhartts couldn’t hide the curve of her hips.
Her arms were obviously strong under a simple T-shirt emblazoned with what Hunter guessed was a band logo that he wasn’t familiar with.
She met his gaze with a look of amusement.
“I’m Pat. It’s short for Patricia, but you can call me Trixie. ”
She thrust her hand out while Hunter was still drinking in her face. She had lively brown eyes above tanned cheekbones and a big kissable mouth curved into a friendly smile. A few curly brown strands of hair had escaped her hardhat. “You here to give me a quote for some security ?”
Did Hunter imagine the lilt to her last word? Security was not what he wanted to give her at the moment, and he stared at her hand a moment before he remembered to shake it.
She wasn’t a shifter. There was no telltale tingle to her proximity or to her touch, though Hunter did feel an undeniable shiver of pleasure with her hand in his for a regulation-length handshake.
He still hadn’t figured out how to make words, and she’d asked him a question.
“I understand you’ve had some thefts.”
Her face was incredibly expressive and Hunter had a hard time dragging his eyes off of it to avoid staring. There was a flash of annoyance, an amused twist to her mouth, and a roll of her eyes. He didn’t know what any of it meant.
“Theft and sabotage. A week ago, a compressor went missing. A crime of opportunity maybe. It was a good one. But two nights ago, someone put water in one of the generator tanks and totally ruined it. I had a security camera up this week, just so you know that I’m not a complete idiot, but it didn’t catch anything except a stray dog, and my insurance company doesn’t want to cover the loss because they say I didn’t take appropriate measures.
I’ll show you the scene of the crime. Mind your fancy shoes, there’s some mud. ”
Hunter had forgotten he even had feet, following Trixie as she led him over the uneven ground.
The building was in a pit, the basement not yet buried, and access to the single finished floor was by two planks over a yawning gap through an unfinished wall. Trixie scampered over in front of him. They groaned and flexed alarmingly under Hunter’s weight.
“That’s the camera,” Trixie pointed out.
It was a standard game camera, bolted to one of the interior columns.
“Battery powered. There’s no wifi here, so everything was on the chip.
It’s in a locked case to prevent tampering.
Someone got up behind it and put duct tape over the lens.
They must’ve known right where it was to come around the back out of view, and they would have had to jump the excavation because the camera was trained on the ramp. ”
Hunter grunted, looking around the site. As a shifter, he was a little stronger and faster than a human. He could probably make the jump, but it wouldn’t be easy, even for him. “You’ve got the footage?”
“Yeah, I transferred it to my phone.” Trixie had to stand very close to him to share the screen and find the video. “It’s a motion sensor, and this is all it caught.”
The picture was grainy, clearly an infrared image. Trixie started the recording and Hunter forced himself to focus on the phone she was holding and not her tantalizing proximity.
She smells good , his bear said in approval.
She smelled, if Hunter was honest, like sweat and hard work, with a little hint of flowers. It was intoxicating and if he’d been a bear, he would have rolled in it.
And rolling with her would be…amazing. Hunter longed to see if she was as strong as she looked. Would she be quiet and docile in bed? Or would she be aggressive and forceful about her desires?
Hunter swallowed and made himself pay attention to the screen she was holding.
“Is that a wolf?” A long-legged canine loped down the drive and picked its way across the ramp, sniffing at the floor.
The structure in the image was markedly less finished, with no exterior walls whatsoever aside from the basement, and Hunter found himself looking between the two curiously.
They had made a lot of progress in just a few days.
“Probably just a dog,” Trixie said. “A lot of locals have half-wolf huskies as pets. Regulations are really lax out here and a lot of them run free. Either way, it doesn’t have thumbs, so it can’t be our thief.”
Hunter frowned at the time stamp as the canine moved out of the field of view and Trixie moved to the next video, which was a confused blur and then blackness. “And that’s where the tape was put over the lens. That morning, the generator failed.”
“Show me again,” Hunter growled. He thought belatedly that he should be gentler about it, but he was already working on a theory.
If Trixie was put off by his gruffness, she didn’t show it. She started to replay the duct tape footage.
“The first one,” Hunter snapped, then regretted it immediately. “Please. ”
The wolf-dog was certainly dog-like. It sniffed around like a dog would, wandering convincingly to the edge of the excavation before testing the ramp and then walking over it with almost theatrical hesitation.
It was exactly the kind of act a shifter might put on if it knew just where the camera was, and there was one quick, direct glance like it was making sure it was in view.
The first time he saw the footage, Hunter had a suspicion. The second time he was positive.
That wolf was definitely their man.