Page 1 of Handcuffed to the Bear

CHAPTER1

Casey’s first thought was,How did rocks get in my bed?

Her second thought was that maybe the rocks were actually in herhead.

Okay, I’m never drinking anything Billy mixes for me again.Her boss’s favorite bartender had a heavy hand with the alcohol.

Although ... she’d only had one drink. That she remembered.

The annual company mixer for Lion’s Share Software, the tech firm she worked for, was held each year on a cruise ship off the coast of Washington. This was the first time Casey had been invited, after working her way up from a lowly mailroom employee to nothing less than the administrative assistant for Roger Fallon, the head of the company himself, in just two years.

All the high-level employees were shifters of one kind or another. It should have been an opportunity for Casey to spend two days among her own kind, making professional connections and sipping expensive drinks. They would be sailing up Puget Sound, around the scenic San Juan Islands, and then back to Seattle by lunchtime the following day.

At this point, though, all she remembered clearly was sailing out of Seattle. Billy had opened up the bar, and everyone was mingling out on the deck. She’d had a drink ... or possibly two ...

Shit, did I get roofied? What the hell happened to me?

She was slowly becoming aware that not all of her physical misery was because of a hangover. She was nauseated and trembling, but some of the shivering was because it was actually quite cold and damp. Those reallywererocks pressing into her backside.

Her .... verynakedbackside.

Startled, and even more worried, Casey peeled her eyes open. It was dim, but not the flat darkness of a room with the doors and windows closed. She was outside somewhere. As her senses came slowly back online, she began to register the myriad little smells and sounds of a forest at night. Leaves rustled overhead; tiny things skittered in the darkness. She could smell wet leaf mold and the acrid tang where a fox had marked its territory. Since she was in her human form, her senses weren’t much sharper than a non-shifter’s, but she could feel the lynx instincts inside her stirring lazily at the proximity of small prey. Her awareness of her lynx side was fuzzy, though, muffled by the lingering vestiges of whatever the hell had happened to her.

And she reallywasnaked. Rocks and wet leaves pressed into uncomfortable parts of her anatomy. Had she been—? Her mind shied away from even asking the question. She didn’t feel terribly uncomfortable in the way that a person might if they were—if they’d been?—

Raped, she thought.Don’t dance around it. You’re naked in the woods and the last thing you remember is having a drink at a party. The implications are obvious.

But she really didn’t feel like she’d had sex anytime recently, forcible or otherwise. Mostly she just felt achy and miserable and like she might throw up if she sat up too suddenly.

And also naked. Very naked.

Casey started to raise a hand to investigate her physical condition, and was brought up short by a sharp jingling, like a heavy bracelet, and a tug on her wrist.

Wow, okay,thatwas twelve shades of not good. She was chained to something. It was too dark to see what it was. A log?

Casey gritted her teeth and sat up. Her stomach heaved, but once the initial wave of dizziness passed, she felt better now that she was vertical. At least, it made her feel a little more in control of the situation.

The in-control feeling went away fast when she discovered that she wasn’t chained to a log, she was handcuffed to a dead guy.

“Oh Jesus,” she whispered.

She gave the cuffs an experimental little tug. They were locked around her left wrist and Dead Guy’s right one. He was a very large man, lying facedown in the damp dead leaves of the forest floor with his head twisted to the side, away from her. And he was naked too.

What. How.Why?

Then an even worse thought occurred to her: maybe she was supposed to be dead, too. Shifters were generally more resilient than non-shifters, and it was possible that she’d been drugged—or, rather, poisoned—with something that was supposed to kill her, and then left in the woods with the other victim.

If only her memories weren’t such a blur. If only she couldthink.

How did they catch me? What did Ido?

There was a small, soft sigh from the body next to her. Casey nearly jumped out of her skin, and then laughed softly at herself. He wasn’t dead either. Oh, thank God.

Which still left her handcuffed to a naked stranger in the woods.

Not the best day she’d ever had.

The naked guy stirred a little, and then subsided back into sleep or unconsciousness. Casey decided not to bother him quite yet—if he felt anything like she did, it was probably merciful to let him sleep a bit longer—and instead took stock of herself.

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