Page 77 of Handcuffed to the Bear

“I haven’t. At the very least, even if she gets out of it without charges, she’s not going to have the family money to fall back on.” Avery grinned wolfishly. “Now that the serial killer story has hit the news—minus the shifter aspects, thanks to Easton and the rest of our PR department—Lion’s Share stock has gone through the floor and the basement, and seems likely to just keep plummeting. Plus, everybody who does business with them is now falling all over themselves to backpedal from association with a name that’s just become poison.”

“Which means Casey’s going to be out of a job.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you get hired by homicidal maniacs. I notice you aren’t worried about the other several dozen employees who are now on the job market.”

“She saved my life,” Jack said defensively. “It’s reasonable to wonder what’s going to happen to her. And she’s just been through a hell of a thing.” He’d seen people implode before, under that kind of stress. He hoped Casey was handling it okay.

“You could call and see how she’s doing.”

“She just went through the worst experience of her life. She probably doesn’t want any reminders of it.” Like, say, a giant bear-shaped reminder that didn’t have the decency to stay out of her life.

Avery rolled his eyes. “For God’s sake, Jack. There’s oblivious and there’s justobtuse.”

“What?” Jack asked, genuinely baffled.

His phone picked that moment to twitter cheerfully at him. Saved by the bell.

Avery, who was closer, lurched out of his chair and picked it up. Glanced at the caller ID. Grinned. Tossed it over.

Jack didn’t recognize the number, but the look on Avery’s face said it all.

Casey.

Avery mimed holding a phone to his ear, and raised his eyebrows.

Jack glanced down at himself. He hadn’t bothered getting dressed when Avery showed up, so he was wearing nothing but sweatpants and a T-shirt, as well as a number of bandages.

“Jack!” Avery said, exasperated. “She can’t see you. Answer the damnphone.”

By the time he did, though, it had already gone to voice mail.

“Damn it.”

“This is just painful,” Avery said. “You know what? I think I’m going out on the patio to commune with nature for a few minutes.” And with that, he limped to the sliding glass doors leading outside.

“Very subtle,” Jack scoffed.

“As a hammer between the eyes,” Avery agreed. “Now, I’m going to give you what passes for privacy in a one-bedroom condo.Call her, Jack.”

Once Avery was safely outside, Jack played back the message. He was unprepared for the effect of hearing her voice—alive, safe, and well. His heart tripped over like a thirteen-year-old kid with a crush.

“Jack?”Casey’s voice said. She sounded hesitant.“I’m sorry, I hope this isn’t a bad time. Look, I’m kind of ... in the neighborhood, I guess, and I wondered if you might want to ... no, you know, this is stupid.”And she hung up, with a very final click.

CHAPTER21

I’ll giveyou the address of his condo if you promise not to go all creepy stalker on his ass, Avery had said.

Casey wondered just where, exactly, Avery considered the creepy stalker line to be—and if she’d crossed it already.

She was sitting on a bench in a small waterfront park some five or six blocks from Jack’s condo. It was still difficult to figure out how she’d ended up here, or why. She had spent most of the day on a series of increasingly frustrating errands, trying to reconstruct the destroyed building blocks of her life. Wrestling her crutches in and out of taxicabs, and on and off buses, she’d visited the DMV, the bank, the social security office, and so forth.

Having the cab driver run her by the address Avery had given her was a treat to herself after an exhausting, irritating, and expensive afternoon. She just wanted to see what the condo looked like and where it was, on the grounds that you could learn a lot about a person by seeing where they lived. It turned out to be a secure building not too far from downtown and close to the ocean. Somehow she would have figured Jack for the top floor of a seedy converted warehouse or something similar, but this was a nice, newly refurbished building; there was even attached parking. It reminded her, in fact, of the sort of building where she and Wendy had lived while they were able to benefit from Wendy’s software-developer salary, before Casey had to move to a much more run-down part of town after losing her roommate.

And this made her teeter on the edge of tears again. Ever since breaking down in the kitchen yesterday, she’d been a weepy mess, to her own annoyance. Her emotions were all over the place—sometimes it was a flare of violent anger; sometimes she burst into tears at something she absolutely should have gotten angry about instead; sometimes it was a fit of laughter at something that should have made her cry.

If this was the alternative, she missed the dispassionate calm she’d managed to achieve in the hospital.

And she wasn’t sure if it was all part of the emotional roller coaster that she’d been on since yesterday, but suddenly she was sick to death of dancing around, and perhaps more to the point, havingJackdance around what had happened between them on the island.

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