On the waiver, her name was Moira Jennings. Pretty name. He was absolutely looking up her registration as soon as she left.
He looked back again, but she was trailing even farther. Alright, that was enough. “We have another mile before we are stopping for brunch,” he told Lance. “Do you mind leading for a minute? I’ve ridden a trail into the snow. All you have to do is follow the trail. I need to check on Moira.”
“Her name is Moira?” Birdie asked over the sound of the engines. “We’ve been calling her Debbie Downer.”
“I can still hear you,” Moira called from way back.
“I can lead, no problem,” Lance said.
Cam dipped to the side between two trees and waited. Moira was wearing a tight black sweater, and gray mittens, a black beanie over black, straight, shoulder-length hair. Her skin was fair, but her cheeks were rosy out here in the cold. She woreheavy eye liner, and her dark eyebrows were arched delicately under the edge of her beanie. Her lips were full, and she had a small piercing just beside her lip, like a little sparkling dimple.
God she was pretty. His dick swelled against his pants, and he adjusted quick before she reached him.
“What do you want?”
“To check on you.”
“Well, check complete. Go back to leaving me alone.”
He sighed and watched her zoom past him. He bet no one in the world could get past the walls she put up, and that should make him run, but instead, it made him curious. Why had a pretty girl like her constructed those walls in the first place?
He shouldn’t care. He shouldn’t. He wasn’t the type to go be a good match for anyone. He was a loner who didn’t care about the needs of anyone but his customers. It had always been like that. It was him and his career here with ATV tours. Changing without mauling anyone. Eat, sleep, fuck occasionally and fashion every week just like the last and just like the next.
That’s how he kept his animal steady.
So why was this little prickly kitty shifter dragging his attention?
He was a freaking grizzly bear who stood twelve feet tall. She was probably nine pounds soaking wet when she was Changed. He was scared of nothing, and she was scared of a hamster.
They didn’t fit in any way.
“Get it together, man,” he growled to himself as he hit the accelerator.
You know what it was? It was the fear she’d shown him. It was the vulnerability and going straight to him to keep her safe. That had messed with his head. It had made him protective. Yeah. That was it. He wasn’t interested in her, per se. His animalhad just enjoyed being needed for protection for a minute. That’s all this was.
Another hour and a half and she would be on her way to whatever hotel she was staying in, and probably soon after, she would be heading back to…he frowned, trying to remember the information off her waiver. He thought she’d written down that she was from Arizona but couldn’t remember the name of the town.
Arizona was a hell of a long way from here.
Yep, an hour and a half and she would leave and he would forget her and she would forget him.
End of their short story.
But when she slowed ahead, and turned around, waiting for him, his damn heart rate kicked up, and he hit the accelerator to speed up.
“I didn’t actually pee in your territory,” she told him.
Whatever he’d been expecting her to say, it hadn’t been that. “Okay?”
“Well, I know how disgusting you bear shifters can be, and I know you’ll be sniffing around your territory looking for my marking, but it’s a waste of your time.”
He ignored the disgusting remark. “So why did you go into the woods then?” he asked pulling up beside her on a wider part of the trail. It would be wide enough for both of them for half a mile or so. He had this trail memorized like the back of his hand.
She glanced over at him with her glowing, light, strange colored eyes, and then back to the trail as she picked along over the uneven snow. “I was having a moment.”
“A panic attack moment?”
“What? No. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
