Page 11 of Handcuffed to the Bear

And Jack, of course. He was on his knees, watching her. She could see him clearly with her newly sharpened night vision, but his nakedness now bothered her no more than the memory of her own; she couldn’t understand why she’d ever been embarrassed by it.

She should have lynx-shifted for the earlier bathroom break, she now realized. It would have been much less humiliating, if a little trickier in terms of logistics. In fact, why hadn’t she just been a lynx all along? She was so much better suited to the forest in this shape. It seemed very sensible.

But there was also a distracting, painful constriction around her left ankle, pressing uncomfortably through the fur to bruise the bone. Casey lifted her foreleg and bit at it, tasting the sharp tang of metal, unpleasant and bitter.

“No,” Jack said.

He touched her paw. She bared her teeth at him, but then her human mind prevailed over her lynx instincts, and she smoothed out her wrinkled muzzle.

Jack had pulled his hand back, but when she relaxed he touched the cuff lightly, feeling through her thick fur for the contact between metal and skin. He winced.

“Wow, yeah, that’s tight. Want to see if you can pull it off? I’ll hold it. You pull.”

He gripped the cuff tightly. Casey tried to pull her paw backwards. It didn’t budge; all it did was scrape the cuff against the skin. She hissed softly and tried again.

“No luck,” Jack said. “You’ll just hurt yourself.”

Casey sat back on her haunches. She didn’t want to let go of the lynx. She felt so much safer in this form, so much more at home and comfortable in the woods than in her soft, fragile human body. The forest called to her; she wanted to run, to hunt, to vanish into the shadows ...

But it was a deceptive kind of freedom. She’d be just as vulnerable in lynx form to the big predators hunting her. And with one cuff around her ankle and the other attached to Jack’s wrist, she couldn’t run in lynx form anyway. The best they’d be able to manage was an awkward shuffle.

With a little huff, she transformed back.

While she was in her lynx body, she discovered, color had seeped back into the world: the green of pine needles, the blue of the sky. Sunlight gleamed soft gold on the tops of the trees.

Jack still had his hand on hers. He jerked it back self-consciously. Casey met his eyes for a fraction of an instant, discovering they were a deep brown, with maybe the slightest hint of gray in the depths.

Forest eyes.

She dropped her gaze, except now she was looking down at her own naked chest, reminding her that Jack couldn’t help seeing it too.Aargh. Things had been so much simpler when she was a lynx.

“How’s your wrist?” Jack asked.

Casey tried to move the cuff off the abrasions without hurting them more. The pain had bothered her less as a lynx. It wasn’t severe, but she had definitely scratched up the skin. “I’m okay, I guess. And on the bright side, I didn’t smell lion, and I did smell ocean. We’re near the sea.”

“I thought we might be.”

“Wait, what?” She pulled back, scowling at him. “You know where we are? And you didn’t tell me?”

“No, no.” Jack held up a hand—his cuffed hand, unfortunately, which yanked on her sore wrist. “It’s only a guess. Based on the kinds of trees and other vegetation, though, I figured we were either on the coast or on an island.”

Casey’s heart sank. “The Fallons actually own a couple of islands out here. I bet they put us on one of them.”

To her surprise, this didn’t seem to depress Jack; instead he looked energized, his brown eyes alight. “Where are these islands? Do you know?”

“Somewhere off the coast of British Columbia, is all I ever heard. Roger and his family have a private hunting cabin out here. They used to go up to the cabin sometimes—” She gulped, and covered her mouth with her hand for a moment. “To hunt deer,” she finished in a very quiet voice.Or something much worse.

I knew it would be bad, but I never dreamed it would be this bad.

“But don’t you see, if weareon an island belonging to the Fallons, that gives my team an excellent chance of finding us,” Jack explained. “Once they start looking into the Fallons’ records and find the island, it’s the very first place they’ll go. I mean, if you’re going to do something like this, better do it on your own private land, right?”

“I guess so.” She was still dubious, but his confidence made her a bit more hopeful.

“C’mon,” he said. “Lions are day hunters. We need to move.”

CHAPTER5

Now that it was light,Jack could see they were near the top of the ridge they’d been climbing. The trees were much sparser here, the ground rocky and broken under their bare feet. Once they got to the ridge crest, he hoped they’d have a good enough view to give them some idea of where they’d been dumped, if only in terms of the general contours of the land.

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