“Since you saved my brother’s life, I can only be grateful.”
He blew out a breath, clearly brooding on the experience. She let him do it for a while, hoping that he would talk out his thoughts. He didn’t. He was the strong silent type, which made him mysterious and attractive to her twisted libido. Why couldn’t she lust after someone who couldn’t shut up? Then she’d know exactly what drivel went about in his head.
Eventually she got tired of the silence. “So how did you get him back to base without getting shot?” She couldn’t imagine guards allowing a huge grizzly bear to zip up to the front gate.
“There were trees nearby. I shifted to human there, then carried your brother back to base.”
Carried?Vic must have been hurt a great deal more than a bad knee. But hell, he was talking about carrying a man through an Alaskan snowstorm while naked.
“It’s a miracle you weren’t frostbitten.”
“I was. But I fixed it on my next shift.”
“But there must have been questions. And video, right? Even if the guards didn’t see, weren’t there cameras?”
He turned and looked directly at her, surprise in the lift of his eyebrows. “I was seen.”
He seemed startled that she could think the scenario through. She shot him an arch look. She wasn’t just a pretty face.
Meanwhile, he nodded as if he accepted her words though she hadn’t said anything. “Enough people saw and then more when I refused to allow them to amputate my feet.”
What? Ouch.
“Among many shifters, that is a killing offense.”
And now she had another thousand questions, all of them ending in an exclamation point. So she started with the most obvious. “Killing offense because you didn’t want your feet amputated?”
He shook his head. “Letting the shifter secret out.”
Oh. Right.“So you’d be killed for telling? Or they’d be killed for knowing?” And how soon were angry grizzly-shifters going to come for her because she knew about the fur?
He sighed. “Both. Sometimes. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone.”
Oh shit.“So, um, the military knows about shifters now because you saved my brother’s life?”
“Yes.”
“And you haven’t confessed that particular detail to your alpha.” She was guessing at the power structure among his kind, but he seemed to confirm it all with a nod.
“Many human things are forgotten when being a bear. And they don’t come always come back.” He glanced at her. “It slipped my mind.”
Yeah, right.“I thought you said you didn’t lie.”
“I don’t. I came back home and everything about my clan had changed. We had a new alpha and new rules, plus there had been some sort of attack on the children.”
“What?” A very real surge of fury went through her. She despised it when kids were targeted.
“I was angry about leaving the army, and I would not submit to Carl. I decided since I had left the army, I didn’t have to take orders from anyone anymore.” He swallowed loud enough for her to hear. “I was very angry.”
She heard the pain in the very emptiness of his tone. Her brother had cost him everything, and here she was demanding he help Vic again. But rather than face his pain, she shifted to her questions. “Who is Carl?”
“The new alpha.” His gaze wandered out the window to the passing trees as he clearly longed to be outside as a bear. Which meant she had to keep him talking.
“That’s why you went bear for so long? Because you were avoiding a showdown with your alpha?” Another guess. Another nod.
“Carl understood that I needed to find control of something. He suggested I go to the UP to get away from clan politics. Control myself and my life up there. I don’t think he meant for me to be a bear for ten months.”
Yeah, probably not.“And now?” she pressed.
