Page 7 of Taming Her Bears

“And selling them,” Roy reminded him grimly.

“Son-of-a-bitch.” Lee did a little hop that was something like a jig, his hands stuck in his pockets and his hair falling into his eyes as he tried to make himself smaller in front of the lady than his six-foot-two frame would allow. “And the show girls think a Coast Guard captain is involved? With all due respect, Trooper Ivanova, but that just isn’t true. Only a man with a death wish and a bone to pick with nature joins the Alaska Coast Guard. It’s never about the money.”

A gust of wind carried the smoke close enough for even Natalia to notice. Captain Josh bundled some dead branches together in the shape of a lean-to and squatted inside. “We’re getting more rain. Roy, you and Lee finish up this shelter and wait here with Trooper Ivanova. Darkhorse and I will go down to the burn zone. Or are you still unconvinced we’re on your side, Ms. Ivanova?”

She laughed a little nervously. “I think you are. Either that, or you are very good actors.”

He barely waited for her answer but took off at a clip, with me right behind him. I could feel his urgency as much as I could feel my own. He wanted to shift. He wanted it with every cell in his body, but he wanted to talk strategy first. He stopped close to the edge of the burn, where scorched prairie grass mixed with curling black stalks of winter fireweed before being drowned by the rain. “You check the outside perimeter. I’ll swim out to the chopper to see what we can salvage.”

“Natalia thinks we should rescue the radio equipment.”

He nodded. “Good idea. It won’t work until it’s completely dried out, and even then, with the salt…”

“We can clean it all up,” I promised. “Just find that can of grease Roy uses all the time to keep those blades chopping. Oh, and if you find any energy bars… for the girl, you know. She might not approve of the way we go fishing.”

“Do you think she approves of us at all?”

“Yeah.” I checked the lump at the back of my hand. The swelling was going down. “She beat me with a stick. That’s approval.”

He chewed on a brush willow twig, thinking about this. “That’s pretty hot.” He took off his shirt. “Are you ready?”

I was ready. I couldn’t strip off my clothes fast enough. The blood was pounding in my head, screaming for release, and my muscles swelled. I was bursting with eighteen-hundred pounds of vengeance. I wanted to destroy every slave trader on earth. I rose to my hind legs and tilted my head back, a huge rumble thumping first deep in my chest, then rising into my throat and exploding into the air.

Natalia

Ihad made one major error in judgment, and that error had landed me on this rock. I didn’t want to make another, but it was very difficult not to trust this team. They were erratic. Alaskan women see all kinds, from near-sighted accountants to three-hundred-pound mountain men who hit town once a year, trashed every bar in it, and returned to the hills for another 360 days.

They all do their strutting, but this was more machismo than rodeo cowboys. They swaggered. They flexed their admittedly impressive muscles. Even Lee, who crouched and seemed so bashful when he spoke to me, reared up to his full height around the others, threw out his shoulders and puffed up his chest. It seemed like a lot, but it was all show. They were posturing. If they were mobsters, they would have taken me down in their first five minutes here.

Apart from being built like a calendar display of the hottest coast guards, they had heads as thick as poured concrete. With skulls like that, I doubted there was much room for anything more complicated in their emotional vocabulary than direct responses. I hit Darkhorse hard enough to make most men see Tweety Birds, and all he did was stumble and grab his head. And he was naked. Brown as a winter berry, two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew wrapped into one of the most gorgeous hunks of male anatomy I’ve ever seen. The trust issue was nearly completely blown away by the turned-on issue.

There was something submissive about their behavior, and that was a turn-on, too. It was the submissiveness of strong men who respected women, who would rather do harm to themselves rather than see any harm come to a woman. Lee was the one who’d finally persuaded me their concern was genuine. He was a little slow on the uptake, but his indignation was real once he understood Alaska’s girls were being whisked away. A mobster couldn’t have pulled it off. Not like that.

I think of the two youngest as “the boys.” I know they are both a little older than me, but ages blur in a land where you know everybody for two hundred miles around on a first-name basis. They reminded me of college students working up the nerve to ask for that first date. Old enough to know how it should be done, young enough to have had no real-life experience. The boys were making the lean-to as comfortable as possible, weaving branches together until it made a nice, dry burrow against the trees. We sat in it and listened to the rain.

We had barely gotten comfortable, however, when a thunderous roar shattered the air, followed by another. I shrank between Lee and Roy, my blood turning to ice. “Two bears,” I whispered hoarsely. “I didn’t even know this island had bears.”

“They swim,” said Roy, then added quickly, “but don’t worry. We’re experts on bears. We can keep them away from you.”

They were so self-assured, I had to say something. “Are you Davy Crockett now? I don’t see any automatic weapons.”

“We’re better than Davy Crockett,” Lee put in boastfully. “Davy Crockett can’t do the things we can.”

Roy reached behind me to cuff the chief petty officer’s head. “Don’t be an idiot. We’re not Davy Crockett.”

Lee shifted so Roy’s hand couldn’t reach him and repeated stubbornly, “We’rebetterthan Crockett. Could Davy Crockett break an oil barge loose from the ice and tow it fifty nautical miles to the nearest harbor? He couldn’t. We can.”

Despite trying to discover ill will, I laughed. “Towing a barge out of the ice is not the same as standing down a bear.”

“That’s right,” he agreed. “It’s harder.”

As I said, they were erratic. I listened to them talking about the missions they had gone on until it became a lazy drone that blended with the rain. I had quit paying much attention. To hear Lee talk, they had personally hauled the towlines, not the boat, and had tracked enemies of the state hundreds of miles through the Arctic without so much as snow machines or communication devices. What amused me was that Roy didn’t contradict him, not even when he said the team had once carried the victims of a plane crash seventy miles on their backs through a raging snowstorm. In fact, he’d beamed with pride.

They were cute, like butter and jam for your toast—you don’t want just one or the other; you want them both. I was sure they were close to the same age, but other than that, they were completely different. Roy was Nordic, either Scandinavian or Swedish. His face was a bit round, his hair highlighted with copper tones, his eyes a mild, muted color. He thought carefully before he spoke, and when he did speak, he studied me as though he wasn’t sure he had said the right thing.

Lee was Native. He wore his hair just a little too short to keep it all back in a ponytail, but he tried anyway, the locks in front dangling persistently near his eyes. He had no awkwardness around women. He had no awkwardness around anyone, as far as I could perceive. He assumed we all wanted and enjoyed the same things. This worked well enough for me, provided he didn’t think everyone enjoyed deep sea diving into icy waters or whatever else this strange crew did in the frozen Arctic.

When Captain Josh and Darkhorse returned, they were carrying a flat metal tray by its handles. The tray had been piled high with items and covered with a tarp. In a rush of relief, I realized just how worried I had been in the back of my mind. They hadn’t betrayed my trust, and they had come back safely. The odd part was, it hadn’t been their trust I had worried about at all—it had been their safety.

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