It’s him. He’s here. My beast perked up, forgetting that he’d accused me of losing our mate.
I grabbed the door to steady myself as my mating instinct insisted I find our one and only. I didn’t have to look far because his scent marked him. He was at the table at the back next to a group of older men, and my beast growled, thinking they were attracted to our mate.
The others were swilling their drinks, but my mate’s beer sat on the table in front of him almost untouched. The men across from him were deep in conversation, and they were loud enough that I could hear them from across the room.
“Tracking collars, that's what they need,” one of them was saying. That guy had a thick gray beard and leathery hands. “We’ll know where they are so we can keep them away from the livestock.”
“Collars are pointless.” his companion argued. After he spoke, he set his mouth in a hard line. “We have to trap them and relocate the animals. That's the only way. And preferably, they should be moved farther north where they belong.”
My mate nodded but said nothing. His expression didn’t give anything away, but he was listening to those guys talking about the bears, either in my den or the wild ones. But as the den members outnumbered the others, chances were it was the den. Anxiety gnawed at my insides, because what sort of relationship could we have if he treated my kind as vermin?
But as I waited, I took note of his fingers tightening around the beer bottle, making his knuckles white. His hunched shoulders suggested he was tense, and both those signaled he wasn’t comfortable with the conversation around him. I hoped I wasn’t reading too much into it, because having a fated mate who wished to destroy my kind would make my heart whither and die.
“They probably won’t take them to a new location.” The bearded man shrugged. “But sometimes nature takes care of these things.”
Enough!I was striding across the room before my brain had caught up with what I was doing. Like the older man, my mate had a beard, but his was dark and trimmed. His hair, on the other hand, appeared to have not been brushed in a while.
He wasn’t anyone from my den because he scented human. I’d been so focused on finding him, it hadn’t registered that he wasn’t a shifter. That gave me pause because I’d been taught that humans couldn’t be trusted and they destroyed everything polar bears cared about. They thought nothing of culling, banishing, raiding, and poisoning.
My bear didn’t care. He dismissed what I’d been told and said he was ours and we needed to get him away from those men.
I stepped up to the table beside my mate and put my hand on his shoulder as a friend would. He jerked back and looked at me.
“Sorry I startled you.” My heart was thudding and echoing against my ribs, but I kept my voice light as I would if I had just met my friend. “Hope I didn’t keep you waiting long.”
He stared at me and tilted his head back while his eyes narrowed. But the tension in his shoulders vanished as if I’d offered him a lifeline.
“No, not long.” His voice was deeper than I expected. “I was just waiting, no problem.”
My hand was still on his shoulder, and the warmth from his body seeped into skin.
“Ready to go?”
“Absolutely.” He got up and abandoned his beer. “I’mdefinitelyready.”
The three older men barely glanced at us as we left, and they chatted about traps and territory.
I held the door open, and we stepped out into the evening.
My mate gave me a half-smile. “Thank you for that. I was trying to figure out how to extract myself without being rude.”
“I doubt they were worth being polite to.” My mate was so human, from the way he moved to the absence of a quality that told me he was a shifter. But the mating pull was intact.
How did you not detect he was human from his scent?
But my beast was so enamored with our mate, he ignored me.
“They really weren’t.” He sighed. “The things they were saying were…” He waved a hand as if dismissing the men from his head. “Sorry. You don’t want to hear me rant about conservation.”
Oh gods. That word, conservation, sent a prickle of fear through me. It could indicate anything, from creating a reserve for polar bears away from the den, or the other extreme of culling because we were interfering with humans.
Wait, was my mate part of a group of scientists? Regular folks didn’t chat about conservation.
“I’m Weston Morris.” He offered his hand.
I took it, and my hand tingled. Not like a jolt of electricity, which would have had me staggering back. It was smaller and smoother and wrapped with warmth.
His brows raised as I held him. He must have felt it too.
