She looked down and fiddled with her empty ice cream bowl. “Oh. Okay. Forget I?—”
He touched her hand. “No, I’ll explain. It just may not make any sense.”
“You transform into a bear more than double your weight. I think we left rational behind a while ago.”
He nodded. “It’s like opening a cage door inside and just letting it have free range. The bear takes over, and I sit in the back and kind of watch. The body change is secondary. Suddenly, everything’s instinct and action. What words I have are simple. Want. Need.” Kill. Destroy.
She tilted her head as she looked at him. “You sound as if you’re two different people.”
“That’s how it feels. There’s me, the one sitting here talking to you. I’m the one who plans and strategizes. Who acts as Max and watches over the kids.” He leaned back in his chair. “And then there’s him.”
“The grizzly part of you?”
“Sometimes he’s so close to the surface, I worry he’s going to explode out of me. It used to happen all the time as a kid. Now it’s just…” A constant war. “A balancing act.”
“It doesn’t sound like balance,” she said. “Actually, it sounds like what Theo was talking about with his friends.”
“A bear under his skin?”
“Not the words he used. His football coach told him it was hormones. All that aggression and lust.”
“I can relate.”
“So it’s like adolescence, only forever? Like your hormones take physical shape?”
He’d never thought about it like that. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’ve always been a shifter.” But he spent a great deal of his time with kids, especially boys. They all had the wild inside them. Shifters just had to be extra careful when and how the wild got loose. “But I don’t want you to think I can’t control the bear. You’re safe here.”
Becca released a huff. “Why does everyone keep reassuring me that I’m safe? I never thought I wasn’t. Well, except for when you kidnapped me, but that was just at the beginning.”
He looked at her, his heart filling with emotions he couldn’t control. “But what about this morning? What about…” He gestured vaguely to the front yard. He vividly recalled the way she’d turned from him.
“You protected me this morning. Me and the rest of the Gladwins. From what Alan said, Nick has been a problem for years.”
“But weren’t you afraid?”
“Not for me.” She stroked her thumb across the back of his hand. “Were there others who haven’t felt safe around you? Did someone get hurt?”
How to answer that without spilling his entire heart and soul? “We’re all raised from birth to keep this quiet. Sure, we have normal friends, but we don’t talk about shifting. And once we start dating…”
“It’s a closed community,” she finished for him. “Only look at girls who can shift.”
“Or grew up around shifters. It’s dangerous to share this stuff. Normal people tend to freak out.”
She nodded her understanding. “Paranoia probably gets ingrained early.”
She didn’t know the half of it. “Our kind have been hunted since the beginning of time. But it goes the other way, too.” He sighed. “People have a reason to fear. When shifters go feral, they destroy everything in their path. It’s insanity at its most brutal and violent.”
“You’re talking about Mark.”
He shook his head, his tone firming. “He’s not there. Not yet.” But he might be any minute now.
She flipped his hand over so that they could touch palm to palm, and that gesture pulled him out of his dark thoughts. “He seemed in complete control to me.”
He flashed her a grateful smile. “He’s strong.” Then he forced himself to return to the main topic. She needed to understand the reason for all that paranoia. “We’ve all broken the rules at least once. We’ve told an outsider and had them lose it.”
“Told them you can shift into a bear? Like you told me.”
“Yes. You don’t know how rare it is for someone to take it as well as you did.”
