Page 4

CHAPTER FOUR

SEBASTIAN

Twenty minutes later, Claire has managed to wrestle her feline fleabag into his carrier and stuff him into the back of my Mercedes. The stench of the angry beast’s terror fills the vehicle, though it’s dampened somewhat by Claire’s sweet honeysuckle scent.

I close my eyes and drink it in, hoping she doesn’t notice the effect she has on me. I never planned on dragging an innocent human into this mess, but the second I laid eyes on Claire, my wolf refused to let her go.

I’d like to think she’ll be safer with me, but there’s nothing safe about my world.

After Adrian killed Clint McGregor, his remaining bears scattered like rats. I let Murphy escape that night — a mistake that still haunts me.

Adrian let the rest of the bears go without another thought, but he ordered me to kill Dane Murphy. After seeing him tower over Claire in animal form, I’m going to take great pleasure in ripping him to shreds.

Glancing over at the woman in my passenger seat, that wild protective instinct hits me full force again. I realize I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her safe — including hauling her back to my place where Murphy can’t touch her.

It’s surreal having Claire beside me after watching her through my computer screen. She is ClaireWhoLovesCats, which makes me question everything else I thought I knew about her.

“You said Murphy followed you home from work?”

Now comes the hard part of being a cyberstalker — not letting slip that I know anything she hasn’t told me already.

She nods. “Dane knew where I worked. He even dropped me off a few times. But I never thought . . .” She breaks off and looks out the window as fresh tears fill her eyes.

“Aw, come on, love.” My hand moves from the steering wheel, but I stop myself before reaching for her. I have the inexplicable urge to comfort her, but I’m not good at this sort of thing. Instead, I decide to change the topic. “And . . . what is it that you do?”

Something tells me this woman is not a stripper.

Claire draws in a shuddering breath, mopping under her eyes before turning to face me again. “I work at Nine Lives. It’s a no-kill shelter for elderly cats with special needs. ”

“Seriously?” I ask before I can stop myself. “They actually have those?”

She nods.

I raise my eyebrows and focus on the road ahead. Now all her cat videos suddenly make sense. It also explains why she’d choose to keep that neurotic fur ball who’s hacking up a lung in the back of my Mercedes as a pet.

“You seem . . . surprised,” she observes, watching me closely.

I shrug. I can’t exactly tell her that I thought she worked at a gentleman’s club. “Humans don’t even take that good of care of their own elderly. They just stick them in a care home where they’re left to stew in their own excrement until the end of their days.”

Claire blinks at me, and I grimace.

What was I thinking, asking her to come home with me? Claire is sweet, idealistic, and fourteen years my junior. I might have been able to hide what a monster I am when I was playing the hero in her flat, but as soon as she gets to know the real me, she’s going to run screaming in the other direction.

“Well, Nine Lives might not be around much longer,” she says with a sigh. “We didn’t get our grant renewed this year.”

“What, they didn’t think it worthwhile to continue to house a bunch of geriatric cats?”

Fuck, what is wrong with me?

Murphy put this poor woman through hell, and I can’t manage to keep my shitty thoughts to myself. On top of that, she’s pregnant, if my instincts are correct.

The reminder makes my chest tighten. I wonder whose baby it is. She didn’t mention that she had a new boyfriend, and I didn’t see any sign of another male at her flat.

I take a deep breath and try to soften my tone. “How did you get hooked up with Murphy? He doesn’t seem like your type.”

Claire swallows. “We met last fall at a creek cleanup event up north. He was camping in the area and we . . . hit it off, I guess.” She stares down at her lap, shame reddening her cheeks. “When we started dating, he didn’t have a place of his own, so I told him he could stay with me for a while.” She shakes her head. “It was stupid.”

I’m not inclined to disagree, but it tracks with what I know of her so far — the do-gooder creek-cleaning cat rescuer. Always taking in strays.

“Things were all right for a few months, but sometimes Dane would drink, and he . . . scared me. One night, it got really bad, and I told him to leave.” She swallows. “He refused.”

My hands tighten on the steering wheel, and it’s all I can do to contain my wolf.

“After that night, after he —” She breaks off. “I just knew I had to get out of there.”

“He hit you?”

Claire nods.

“And the baby is . . . his? ”

She jerks her head up to look at me finally, her eyes wide with surprise. “How did you know?”

“Your scent,” I explain. “Females smell different when they’re pregnant. Richer, if that makes sense. And you put your hand on your belly earlier, almost like you were protecting something.”

Claire sucks in a breath and rests her head against the back of the seat, staring into space. “Yes. It’s his,” she says in a small voice. Then she turns to look at me. “Dane doesn’t know about the baby. He can’t know about the baby.”

I nod, swallowing down all my questions. “Your secret’s safe with me.” But there’s one question that’s eating me — one I can’t hold back. “Are you going to keep it then?”

“Yes,” she whispers, smiling faintly. “I could never . . . you know. It just doesn’t feel right. No one gets to choose how they were brought into this world. He’s innocent in all this.”

“He?” I croak, my chest aching.

Claire’s smile widens. “I don’t know that it’s a he. I think it’s probably too early to tell. But I keep imagining that I’m having a boy.”

Watching Claire place a tender hand on her stomach, I get a flash of temporary insanity.

I find myself wishing that I was the one who put a baby in her belly — wishing it were my pup she was protecting like that. Loving before he was born.

I give my head a little shake, as though I can physically dislodge the idea. It has to be the aftermath of the fight pushing my wolf to the fore. That’s the only explanation.

Then Claire stiffens in her seat, and a panicked look comes over her. “Will the baby . . . be like him ? A bear shifter, I mean.”

I grind my back molars together, hating that there’s a piece of that scumbag inside of her.

But I swallow down my own feelings. My angel is afraid and needs reassurance. “There’s a pretty good chance.”

At my words, all the blood drains from Claire’s face, and she reaches over to grip my arm. “Could it . . . will it change inside of me?”

“No,” I say, my voice husky. “Wolf shifters don’t experience their first Change until they’re seven or eight. I don’t know exactly when it happens for bears, but it can’t be much younger than that.”

A look of immense relief sweeps over her, and she sits back against the seat and releases my arm. I instantly mourn the loss of her warmth, but it’s just as well.

Claire shouldn’t get too close. She’ll only be disappointed when she realizes the type of male I am.

“Will he even know how to shift? I mean, does another bear need to show him how?”

I shake my head. “The urge to shift is instinctual — undeniable, actually. He or she won’t have any trouble. A lot of shifters who are orphaned or abandoned by their birth parents don’t know what’s happening the first couple of times. ”

“That’s horrible,” she murmurs.

I nod, and a cold fist clenches around my heart. “I thought I was dying the first time I shifted.” I flash a smirk, but it feels hollow. “I was in primary school . . . asked to go to the toilet. The first Change is always . . . sloppy. And it hurts like hell. I think I shifted halfway, passed out from the pain, and changed back. I woke up on the bathroom floor in a pool of my own piss.”

I glance at Claire, whose face is a mask of devastation. “How old were you?”

“Eight.”

She swallows. “And you didn’t . . .”

“I never knew my dad,” I say quickly. “And my mum was . . . Well, let’s just say she didn’t really know him either.”

Claire sucks in a breath and lets it out in a rush. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Sorry you had to go through that.”

I shake my head. “You don’t need to feel sorry for me.”

But Claire reaches back across the center console and takes my hand in hers. Her hand is tiny — almost childlike — and her skin is the softest I’ve ever felt.

It’s weird — I should hate this. It’s why I never tell people about my childhood. It’s bloody depressing, for one thing. And I fucking hate to be pitied.

But with Claire, I find I don’t mind being comforted. My wolf craves her closeness — like it’s something he’s been missing for a long, long time .

When I snap back to reality, I realize I’ve almost reached the exit for Gold Creek. I turn off the motorway and cut through town, taking the snow-packed dirt road up the side of the mountain.

Claire sits up in her seat and looks out the window, admiring the view of the town sprawled out below, its golden lights twinkling in the dark.

Soon the road gets rougher with jagged washboards, but I navigate the icy switchbacks with ease. My G-wagon is the 4x4 squared — one of only three hundred units produced in America.

As we pull into the garage I had built into the mountain below my house, I get a nervous flutter in my chest. I’m not sure why, but I find myself worrying what Claire will think of my place.

“Where are we?” Claire asks nervously, stiffening as the automatic door blots out the star-flecked sky, throwing us into darkness.

“Home sweet home.”