“We’ll grab a doughnut?—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Or cliché.” She opened a bottom cabinet and found a skillet shoved in the back. God, it had dust on it. “I’m making you breakfast.”
“You don’t have to do that…” His voice trailed away at her glare.
“Sit,” she ordered. Then she went into short order cook mode, pulling together a breakfast fit for a starving lumberjack. All the protein and tasty carbs she could shove in his body in ten minutes.
He ate every bite, murmuring appreciative grunts throughout. There wasn’t time for them to talk, which was just as well. She had no idea what she wanted to say. It took twelve minutes in total, and he left with a full thermos of coffee and three slices of buttered toast to eat on the road.
And then he was gone. She heard him and Tonya talk as they climbed into the squad car. Then she stood at the window and watched them drive away, feeling irrationally jealous that Tonya got to sit with him and not her. Five minutes later, Alan left as well. There were legal things to handle after this morning’s fight.
Which left her alone with her thoughts.
Which—she now realized—really sucked.
CHAPTER 16
Carl ached. There was no other word for the exhaustion that pulled at his heart and mind. It began with a physical burn from the fight earlier today. Plus, shifting left a residue in a body. A kind of toxin that had to be worked out either in bear or human form. It was normal, but it often required ibuprofen or a hot tub to soak the misery away. Carl had neither.
Next came his frustration at their lack of progress. He and Tonya had visited every possible site in the county for another secret lab to no avail. With modern satellite imagery and their combined knowledge of the area, they’d been able to investigate a dozen possibilities but had found nothing. Well, not quite nothing. They’d stumbled over three small pot fields, but Carl hadn’t cared enough to deal with that. Even Tonya had just texted the info to her boss and moved on.
But now it was after dark. Tonya had moved past cranky hours ago and was now into grunt-and-point mode as she dropped him off at his home. Which left Carl heading up the walkway to face Becca and the ache that had filled his heart for most of the day.
She was repulsed by him. He didn’t blame her. After all, it had taken him years to come to an armed truce with the animal inside him. The thing was brutal and violent. All it knew how to do was destroy. That was useful so long as his intelligence kept it under control. He’d learned in his first years as Max to open the cage and aim the creature at whatever nasty had to be taken out. Then the moment the danger was past, the grizzly went back into lockdown.
But this morning had required him in full grizzly. Which meant she’d seen him at his most brutal. He’d felt her revulsion like a physical blow. And when she’d turned from him? It was like being kicked to the curb by civilization. She was a soft kind of girl, raised in the city, educated well, and living in an area that didn’t even have crime. Of course the sight of him covered in gore would make her ill.
So he’d stayed away, searching for her adopted son as the only way he could help her. But he’d stewed about what had happened, worrying it like a diseased tooth until he was as surly as Tonya. And now he was home, his body tired, his mind still churning, and his heart aching because the woman he wanted had rejected him.
What a pathetic sack of shit he was.
He pushed open the front door, expecting the place to be deserted. Alan liked to work in his room, and Becca was probably hiding from him. Except instead of the typical dark, the living room was bright with light. Alan was sitting on the couch watching TV and Becca was at the dining room table working on a laptop. They both looked up when he entered, but if they said something, he lost it amid the smell.
Garlic bread and lasagna. He’d know that scent anywhere, and it drew him inside like nothing else. It was his favorite meal, and he hadn’t had it homemade since his mother died when he was sixteen. His stomach growled, loud enough to be heard over the TV. Becca smiled and gestured, but she needn’t have bothered. He went straight to the kitchen cabinets for a plate and silverware. It was a triumph of civilization that he didn’t just pick up the pan and gobble it whole.
Becca joined him in the kitchen, her scent an odd combination of his soap, tomato sauce, and gunpowder. He wrinkled his nose, trying to understand if he had that right, but then lost the thought as she scooped up a huge serving onto his plate. And when he started to dig a fork in, she pulled it out of his hand.
“It’s cold. You need to microwave it for a minute.” She fitted the action to her words and he almost howled at the loss. Then he stood there like a child counting down the seconds on the machine while he waited. His stomach growled three more times, though she poured him a glass of something and he drank that just as a way to wait.
Raspberry iced tea? From a jug?
He frowned at the container on the counter, and Becca answered before he could ask it out loud. “I made some sun tea this afternoon. Is it cold enough?”
He didn’t even know what sun tea was, but he nodded as held out his empty glass. Twenty-three more seconds until lasagna. Twenty-two. Twenty-one.
While Becca poured him more tea, Alan turned off the TV and leaned against the kitchen door. “I take it you didn’t have any luck.”
Carl shook his head, his gaze not on his brother but on Becca’s face. She kept it neutral, but he saw her disappointment. Her lips tightened and she even swallowed as she put away the tea. Meanwhile, heaven came at the sound of the microwave finishing. Lasagna!
He took it out and shoveled in his first bite while it was still too hot. Didn’t matter. Heaven in a single bite.
“This is good,” he managed.
“I can’t believe you didn’t just burn your tongue.”
He shrugged. “Hungry.” And wasn’t he doing a great job of acting like a mature man? A caveman spoke better than he had. So he forced himself to swallow and hold off shoveling in a new bite. “Thank you for the dinner. You can’t know how much I appreciate it.”
She smiled, her cheeks warming to a rosy pink. “I had to do something. Alan said your mother used to make lasagna. I found her recipe. I hope you don’t mind.”
