Page 3 of Handcuffed to the Bear

He seemed to be in the woods. It was dark. Night.

No enemies that he could see or smell, at least none close enough that he was aware of them.

On the other hand, it was dark, his vision was fuzzy, and he had his hands full trying not to throw up or fall face-first in the dirt.

“What’s going on?” he asked thickly.

“We’re handcuffed together,” the woman said. “I mean, you probably noticed that, but I thought you might know why ...?” Her voice trailed off on a hopeful question.

Jack turned and looked at her for the first time. At ... all of her. Oh. He wrenched his eyes up to her face.

They were close enough together, just a few feet apart, that he could see her well enough even in the dim light and without his glasses to tell it was a very pretty face: small and heart-shaped, with olive skin and large eyes and a wide, full mouth.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“No,” she said emphatically. “I’m naked and freezing, I feel like I’m coming off a week-long bender, and I’m handcuffed to a total stranger in the middle of the woods. A stranger withknife scars. Would you be okay at that point?”

“Probably not,” Jack had to admit.

As memories filtered back into his drug-fogged brain, dropping puzzle pieces into place about where they were and what they were doing here, his level of tension ramped up steadily. He recognized this woman, although it took a moment for him to remember from where. She was Fallon’s secretary. He’d read her dossier, and had subsequently seen her at the party. His last sight of her, in fact, had been her limp body getting manhandled by one of Fallon’s pride sisters into a cargo container, at which point things got extremely fuzzy and had not, he assumed, gone well.

“Do you know why we’re here?” she asked.

“Shhh!”

Looking alarmed, she closed her mouth.

Jack cocked his head to the side, listening to the small sounds of the night. Every little rustle in the dark woods made his alertness spike. However, as seconds ticked by and nothing attacked them, he began to slowly come down from his adrenaline high.

He had, without realizing it, gone into the four-legged stance from which he could most easily assume his bear shape. However, there was nothing to attack—so far—and therefore nothing to gain by letting the bear come out. In fact, glancing down at his cuffed wrist, he wondered if it was even possible to take bear form right now. He had an uncomfortable feeling the answer was “no,” at least not if he enjoyed having two functional hands.

Besides, they’d been unconscious for .... well, he had no idea how long, really. Was it even the same night?

We have to move. Get out of here.

But they also needed to get themselves together and let the drugs continue clearing out of their systems. The only asset they had right now was their brains, so the fewer stupid mistakes they made, the better their odds of survival. Just charging blindly into the woods was the sort of thing that got people killed.

Also, he needed the trust and help of this woman he seemed to be handcuffed to, if they were both going to get out of this alive. Right now all he was doing was scaring her.

He went from his battle-crouch to a more comfortable sitting position. The woman stared at him with wide eyes: striking eyes, brown flecked with gold, glittering in the twilight semidarkness under the trees. She was kneeling with her right arm over her breasts. Her left was down on the ground next to his, because she only had a few inches of chain on the handcuffs that separated them.

“Are we in danger?” she whispered.

Yes. “Not at the moment,” he said.

“That’s not comforting.”

Casey, Jack thought. Casey McClaren. That was her name. His partner Avery would probably have memorized her entire folder; he’d be able to call up everything from her birthdate to her previous job history. Avery had one of those steel-trap brains that snagged onto details and never let go. Jack’s skill set was geared more towards observational awareness—noticing booby traps, anticipating someone else’s movements in a fight.

Jack wondered how long he’d been out. If it was still the same night, his partner might not even know he’d gone missing yet. The one bright spot in this whole clusterfuck was that Avery was out there somewhere, and would be looking for him as soon as it became obvious something had gone wrong.

“You are a very dangerous-looking person,” Casey said.

“I know,” he said. “I can’t help it.”

“Well, it’s a little alarming for strangers who might wake up next to you unexpectedly.” She shifted a little, the curve of one breast peeking out from behind her arm. “Whoareyou?”

Jack had been working around other shifters long enough that he was more or less inured to the embarrassment of being naked around people he didn’t know. Most of the shifters he knew were equally blasé about it, at least in the company of fellow shifters. The fact that it clearly bothered her was interesting. He knew she was a shifter from her file—most of Fallon’s employees were—but she evidently had not spent much time around her own kind, or else was unusually shy.

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