Page 47 of Handcuffed to the Bear

“Okay,thatmight be a dealbreaker.”

“Ha. It’s true, though. I got addicted to bubble-gum pop when I was overseas. Mostly American stuff, though not entirely. I also like Korean and Japanese pop music, for example. The fluffier the better.”

“It’s so strange how little we know about each other. I think that’s the only thing I actually know about your tastes or interests. I don’t know what kind of food you like, or what books you read, or what your hobbies are. Heck, I don’t even know where youlive, Jack. And yet, right now I feel closer to you than anyone else in the world.”

“We are literally naked and touching,” Jack pointed out. “It would be pretty damn hard to get any closer.”

Casey batted him playfully in the shoulder, clattering the cuff on her wrist. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” He didn’t want to say what he had to say next, but he wasn’t going to lie to her. “It’s an illusion, though, Casey.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“People bond under pressure. It’s a natural human tendency. There’s no reason to think it’ll last once we get away from here and go back to our own separate worlds.”

“What about you and Avery?” she countered.

Damn. “It isn’t the same. And anyway, we didn’t see each other for months afterward.”

“But you went looking for him later.”

“He looked for me, actually. Wanted to thank me for saving his life. And also ... well, I hinted there’s a reason why I needed to tell you about Avery before we even tried dating each other. First of all, what do you know about wolf shifters?”

“In what way?”

“In any way. Every kind of shifter has their own unique physiology and culture. How much do you know about wolf shifters?”

“Not much,” Casey admitted. “I’ve never known any personally. As far as I know, they stick with their own kind, mostly. Like, the pack is everything?” She shrugged, a bit uncomfortably. “I knew, growing up, that there were several packs in the Cascades and on the eastern side of Oregon and Washington. But I guess I kind of always thought of werewolves as—okay, I shouldn’t say this, he’s your friend. And like I said, I never knew any personally.”

“Hicks?” Jack suggested. “Rednecks?”

Casey squirmed. “I know, it’s terrible of me! And it really is just a stereotype. I’d like to meet Avery and get to know an actual werewolf in person. I thought they stuck with their packs, though—like, they don’t even really talk to people outside the pack? Maybe that’s just a stereotype, too.”

“It’s not completely wrong. Wolf shifters are mostly rural and very, very family-oriented. Insular to an extreme. Lions and other social animals are all about the group bond, too, but wolves are maybe more so than any other kind of shifter. Mind you, I’m an outsider, so I don’t know what it’s like from the inside. I have friends and family and people I love, sure. But with werewolves, it’s an all-encompassing kind of loyalty. They’re loyal to death and beyond. The closest thing I can compare it to from my own life is the military bond.”

“If that’s so, then how did Avery end up in the SCB? It seems like he wouldn’t want to be that far from his pack. Unless it’s an urban pack?”

Jack shook his head. “Avery doesn’t have a pack. Except us, I guess. I won’t go into the details; I’ll leave that for him to tell, if he wants to. But he had an absolutely miserable childhood. Werewolves are people just like anybody else, and some wolf packs are dysfunctional just like a lot of non-shifter families are. Like I said, the details are Avery’s to tell, but like your friend Wendy, he grew up in the foster system.”

Her eyes went soft with sympathy. “Poor Avery.”

“Yeah, it’s rough on anybody, but even more so for a wolf shifter, since family is everything to them. He bounced from one foster home to another, and never really had anyone to bond with. I think that’s why he ended up going into the military, looking for a replacement pack, but that didn’t work out for him either, obviously.”

“Not your fault,” she said immediately.

“Well, Avery clearly doesn’t think so. The point is, though, that whatever it is that makes wolf shifters need a pack—instinct, emotion, whatever it is, while I was holding him and trying to stop him from bleeding to death in the desert, he latched onto me that way.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Yeah. I don’t know what that actually feels like for a wolf shifter. I don’t know if he thinks of me as a brother or a close friend or if it’s even less comprehensible for non-werewolves than that.”

“But he’s in your life, for better or worse.”

“Yeah; I’m just saying, if you and I try to make a go of it, you’re probably going to get a lonely werewolf thrown in as part of the package. Not that Avery is clingy,” he added quickly. “He really isn’t, which I gather is kind of unusual for wolf shifters and probably something to do with how he grew up. But he’s very attached to some of the people at the SCB.Veryattached. And I’m the one he’s most attached to.”

Casey half smiled. “Jack, I told you how I grew up, right? I was desperately lonely. I would’ve killed for a brother or sister to share my life with. I wouldloveto adopt your lonely werewolf buddy right along with you.”

Jack laughed, though there was a melancholy note to it. He’d had girls say that before, that they didn’t mind if he and Avery came as a sort of inadvertent package deal. They didn’t always mean it. Or it was his past they couldn’t handle, even if they thought they could at first. Or everything else that went along with it. One girlfriend broke up with him on the spot when they went back to his condo, started to get busy, and then she found out he had a knife in his boot and a gun taped to the underside of the dining room table. Good thing she hadn’t checked for weapons in the bedroom ...

---