Page 13 of Handcuffed to the Bear

“Okay.” She smiled hesitantly, bringing out dimples he hadn’t been able to appreciate in the dark. “I don’t know quite what you need to know. Where do I begin?”

Jack smiled back. “Just give me a general idea of the lay of the land. Overall landforms and so forth. You said you could see the ocean; why don’t you start by telling me where it is? Is it all around us? How close?”

Casey shaded her eyes with her uncuffed hand. “Well, let’s see. There’s a lot of trees between here and there. I don’t know how to tell how far away it is in terms of actual miles, but I can see water on three sides of us. The fourth way—” She pointed over her shoulder, in the general direction of the newly risen sun. “—the hills are too high for me to see.”

Jack could make out the basic contours of what she was describing. It was the details he was having trouble with.

“Any sign of land?”

Casey shook her head. “No ... wait.” She pointed hesitantly out to the open ocean in front of them. “I think there’s something there, kind of dark blue? More of a shadow, really.”

“Could be clouds,” Jack suggested. “A storm system coming in.” If they were where he thought they were, on the west side of an island along the Pacific Coast, there shouldn’t be land in front of them anyway.

“I can’t tell,” she said.

God, he wished he couldsee. “Do you see anything else? Boats, buildings, cell or radio towers, anything man-made?”

“Not really. I wish I had binoculars.” Her nose wrinkled in frustration. She was really astonishingly cute, with a kind of natural sex appeal that she didn’t even seem to be aware of.

Exactly the kind of girl, Jack reminded himself, who wouldn’t be interested in a guy whose resume consisted largely of running around the world shooting people. He steered himself firmly back on track. “How about smoke? Any rivers big enough to see from up here? Anything like that?”

“Not really.” She scanned the scenery. “Hmm, I see something dark up in the hills, maybe caves or something? That might be helpful, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Jack said, wishing he could see anything other than a green blur. “Where?”

“There.” Casey pointed, using the cuffed hand involuntarily, and dragging his arm up along with it. “Like I said, I don’t know if that’s what it is. It could just be a bluff or something. I wish I had binoculars to—” She broke off with a little gasp.

“What’s wrong?”

“I—I don’t know. I’m not even sure if it’s important, but—” Casey shook her head and pointed again, to a different part of the highlands to the east. “I just saw a flash of some kind up there.”

“Shit,” Jack muttered. He planted a hand on her bare back, steering her toward the trees. Casey went without complaint. Jack didn’t stop until he had them under the shelter of a stand of wind-stunted pines.

“It’s them, isn’t it?” Casey asked. She was pale. “Do you think they saw us?”

“Not necessarily. There might be a ranger cabin up there, or, I don’t even know, bird-watchers or something. But you might have seen sunlight glinting off binoculars or a rifle scope.” He regretted the wordsrifle scopeas soon as they left his mouth, seeing the remaining color drain from her face. “I doubt if they’ll snipe us,” he pointed out quickly. “That’s not their usual method.”

“No, just running us to the ground like some kind of ... ofprey.”

Her voice began to quaver; her lips trembled. Jack had been braced for this—considering she was an administrative assistant with no combat experience, she’d been taking everythingmuchtoo well so far. It was all going to crash down on her at some point. But now that the pivot point had come, now that the reality of their situation was falling on her like a crashing freight train, all he could do for that first critical instant was stand frozen while her face crumpled and she began to collapse.

It was the sharp jerk on the handcuffs that jolted him out of his temporary paralysis, and he reacted with predator-quick reflexes to catch her as she fell. They both went down to the ground, Jack bearing her down as gently as he was able. She ended up half in and half out of his lap, and maybe later he’d have time to worry about that, but right now his big concern wasn’t for accidental nakedness, but for her mental health.

She wasn’t crying, exactly, but she was making short hitching noises that were, he realized after another frozen instant, a choking attempt to breathe. She was having a panic attack. This, at least, he’d dealt with before.

“It’s okay. You’re all right. Breathe with me. Breathe with me.”

He took her small hand in his—it was curled into a fist—and placed it against his chest so she could feel the rise and fall.

Without warning, he had a sudden lapful of enormous fluffy cat. In her emotional turmoil, she’d shifted, and now she no longer had the human self-control to restrain the panic and anxiety filling her. She threw her weight against the handcuffs, struggling to free herself with raw animal desperation.

Her claws raked his chest. Her eyes were huge, the pupils narrowed to slits.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He bore her down to the forest floor, using his greater weight and strength to pin her as she thrashed. She wasn’t trying to hurt him. She was only trying to get away. But of course, she couldn’t, because of the cuffs.

Beneath him, the ribs of her feline body rose and fell with rapid shallow gasps. Her jaws were open, lips drawn back in a silent snarl.

“Casey.” He said her name over and over again, until she managed to focus on him. In human form, her eyes were brown with gold flecks; as a lynx, they were the other way around, gold with hints of brown. “It’s all right, Casey. You’re all right. Just listen to my voice. You’re okay, you’re here, you’re not going anywhere. Breathe with me. One, two ...”

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