A Bear's Secret Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Did you notice anything else about the scene, anything unusual?”

  “He was unconscious in the middle of the woods with a syringe in his neck,” Austin said.

  “You don’t know who he is?”

  Austin shook his head.

  The paramedic nodded once, tersely, and addressed the other man.

  “Let’s take him in,” he said.

  As they put the kid on a stretcher in the kitchen, Austin heard a door open. Despite himself, he turned his head, knowing that he was going to find her standing there, and he did.

  She’d changed out of her hiking clothes and into a super oversized rodeo t-shirt and a long floral skirt that buttoned up the front.

  Austin had a very strong suspicion that Barb had insisted the girl borrow her clothes. He nodded at the girl once.

  “Austin, this is Sloane,” Barb told him, keeping one eye on the kid being loaded onto the stretcher, totally unconscious. “Sloane, Austin.”

  Austin stretched out his hand, forcing himself to half-smile at the girl.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Her touch sent shivers up his spine, and for a moment, his mind simply went blank.

  Then, at last, he said, “Hi.”

  “Sloane’s coming to the hospital with us,” Barb said. “It’s a safe bet that the cops are gonna want to talk to you two, and you know how I hate them tromping around my nice house.”

  Austin heard another door slam, and the footsteps of several men came into the house through another wing, their loud voices echoing through the hall. The paramedics got the kid into the ambulance and turned the lights on again just as the three men came through the door to the kitchen.

  “Barb?” the oldest one asked. He lifted his hat and wiped his bald head with a handkerchief.

  “Our boarder found an unconscious boy in the woods,” Barb said, matter-of-factly. “We’re going to the hospital with him. You’re on your own for dinner.”

  Bill, the bald, guy, nodded his head, and Barb gave him a kiss on the lips. Then she grabbed the truck keys from Austin and the three of them followed her out the door, the ambulance already halfway down the driveway.

  For most of the drive, Austin didn’t say much. The three of them were sandwiched into the wide cab of the truck. Barb took care of most of the talking, doing about ninety down the highway, simultaneously changing the radio from one country western station to another, and asking Sloane her life story. Meanwhile, the truck shook and rattled like it might blow apart at any second.

  Sloane looked just a little nervous. Austin nearly reached out his hand to pat her knee, then stopped himself.

  Don’t get too friendly, he thought.

  “Bill’s the best mechanic in Ponderosa County,” he said. “I’m sure the truck’ll hold.”

  “This thing is a tank,” Barb volunteered. “You’re hiking the whole Pacific Crest by yourself?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Yup,” Sloane said. She tucked one strand of hair behind her ear, and Austin just watched her. He wanted to touch that perfect, smooth curve of her ear himself, bite it gently between his teeth, listen to her gasp.

  “Dangerous,” said Barb.

  “It’s pretty crowded as trails go,” said Sloane. Austin could tell from the tone of her voice that she’d had this conversation a million times before. “And I’m no more likely to fall to my death alone than with a buddy.”

  True, thought Austin.

  From the side of his eye, he checked her out again. The rodeo shirt and floral skirt didn’t do her figure any favors, but Austin could still tell perfectly well what was underneath all that ugly fabric. She had thigh muscles for days, and her perfect, plump, round ass had probably already climbed thousands of feet of elevation — and with a forty-pound pack on her back.

  All that, and a girl with the balls to hike from Canada to Mexico by herself.

  If she’s the one who put the dart in that guy, I bet he deserved it, Austin thought, looking at Sloane appreciatively.

  His bear growled, the feeling raising the hairs on the back of his neck, and Austin looked out the window, hiding a small smile.

  “Are you hiking the whole thing?” Barb went on.

  “Yes ma’am,” Sloane said. “I started at the Canadian border and I’m ending it by Mexico.”

  “Now, I hope you don’t mind my asking,” said Barb, “but I’ve always got to ask, what on earth possesses people to hike this whole thing?”

  She pushed the truck’s gas pedal to the floor and maneuvered around a car in the right lane that was only going eighty.

  Sloane exhaled hard, her lips pursing.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” she said, clearly not wanting to go into it, “but pretty much, I got laid off, broke up with my boyfriend, and always wanted to do it, so now seemed like the best time.”

  Barb nodded once.

  “That’s fair,” she said.

  She’s single, Austin thought, his skin prickling.

  “Austin here talks about hiking the PCT sometimes,” Barb said.

  “I’m not serious about it,” Austin said.

  “Well, you always say that you want someone to do it with,” Barb said.

  Even though the truck was pushing ninety-five, Barb gave Austin a sideways half-smile.

  Austin sighed inwardly. He was over thirty and Barb thought he was unmated, which made him fair game in her eyes. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to unsubtly hook him up with someone else.

  It was the first time Austin had wanted to take her up on it, though.

  He didn’t answer her, as Barb swerved around another car and exited the highway from the left lane, crossing both lanes without putting her turn signal on. From the corner of his eye, Austin saw Sloane swallow hard and look ahead, her face totally stony.

  “Surprisingly, Barb’s never crashed a car,” Austin told her. “She’s gotten about a thousand tickets, but no one’s ever gotten hurt.”

  Sloane looked up at him, her face still pale, her hands still locked into fists in her lap.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Barb took a nail-biting right, then a left, and then they were in the hospital parking lot. When the truck turned off, Sloane closed her eyes and took a deep breath, forcing her hands to unclench. Barb was already out of the truck, striding toward the hospital, and Austin got out and offered Sloane a hand, despite knowing full well that she didn’t need it.

  She took it anyway.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem,” Austin said, shoving the hand back in his pocket, hoping that would make it stop tingling. “Barb’s driving can take a little getting used to.”

  “No kidding,” she muttered under her breath. “I hiked three miles on an icy cliff face once and it was less scary.”

  “I believe it,” Austin said, and they walked fast to catch up to Barb, the hospital doors opening automatically.

  It wasn’t a big hospital. It had an emergency room and a couple of floors, but serious cases got taken by ambulance to the bigger hospital in Canyon City, and the really serious cases got airlifted to the university hospital in Redding, the capitol of Cascadia.

  As soon as they turned the corner into the main waiting room, Barb snorted, her nostrils flaring.

  “They’re here,” she said. She inclined her head at two wolf shifters standing and talking quietly on the far end of the room, both wearing the standard ranch outfit of a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up, the bottom tucked into a pair of well-fitting jeans with a flashy belt buckle.

  Sloane’s eyebrows went up. Austin’s heart felt like it skipped a beat.

  “At least it’s Trevor and not his father,” Austin said, keeping his voice low. “Trevor’s reasonable.”

  “None of them are reasonable,” said Barb. “Trevor just parrots whatever his father says.”

  Austin bit back a response, and Barb stomped over to the other wolves.

  As she did, the one on
the right — Trevor — looked over at Austin for half a second.

  Austin looked away.

  “Who are they?” asked Sloane, her voice a whisper.

  “They’re from the Red Sky ranch next door, though next door is a stretch,” Austin said. “The next ranch over. That guy was on their land when you found him.”

  “Ah,” said Sloane. “And they’re... not cool?”

  “Barb and Bill don’t get along too well with the owner, Buck,” Austin went on. “Though no one’s seen him in a little while.”

  “Why don’t they get along?” Sloane said, her voice still a whisper. Her eyes were on Barb, now standing and facing the wolves, her hands on her hips.

  “It’s the usual territorial wolf bullshit more than anything,” murmured Austin. “But they’ve just never liked each other, and then last year Buck kept a bear shifter prisoner for a little while, and it came out that he might have gotten some of his own people killed in the process. Rumor has it he’s been stockpiling weapons, to boot.”

  Trevor’s gray eyes flicked to his again, and Austin swallowed. A shudder made its way through his bones.

  “They’re just bad neighbors overall,” he finished.

  “They kept someone prisoner?” Sloane hissed, her eyes going wide. “How are they not in prison?”

  “It’s a long story, but she was feral,” Austin said. “No one could ever prove that they knew Olivia was a shifter.”

  “You know her?”

  “She’s my cousin.”

  Sloane looked at Austin in surprise, a frown forming on her forehead.

  “By marriage?”

  Now it was Austin’s turn to frown.

  “Her mom and my dad are brother and sister,” he said.

  “And she’s a bear shifter?”

  Finally, Austin understood the confusion, and grinned at Sloane.

  “I’m also a bear shifter,” he said. “I just work and live on a wolf ranch.”

  Comprehension dawned over Sloane, and though the frown stayed on her face for a moment, Austin could practically see her ticking through the things that made sense now.

  “Got it,” Sloane said.

  The cops walked into the hospital through the front door. There were two of them, and even though they were wearing suits, it was obvious who they were. Barb and the two wolves sauntered over, and in no time at all, the seven of them were standing in a ring in the middle of the waiting room.

  “I’m Detective Tripp and this is Detective Vista,” the man on the left said. He was middle-aged, human, and had a slight paunch. “No word on the kid yet?”

  “Still hasn’t woken up,” said Trevor.

  “And you all don’t know who he is?” Tripp asked.

  Everyone shook their heads.

  “All right,” Tripp said. He wrote something down in his notebook. “The hospital is letting us use a room to ask some questions, if you don’t mind. Miss?” he said, nodding his head first at Sloane.

  Sloane straightened her spine and then followed him down a hall and out of sight. Austin found himself watching her, his bear growling protectively.

  She can take care of herself, he thought. Remember?

  Detective Vista took Barb, the other wolf wandered off, and a moment later, Trevor and he were standing together, alone, in the middle of the waiting room.

  “Howdy,” Trevor said, his hands still in his pockets. He didn’t exactly smile, but the very edges of his eyes crinkled.

  “Howdy yourself, ”Austin said, mirroring the other man’s stance.

  “The girl’s the one who found that kid?” Trevor asked.

  “Yep,” said Austin.

  Both of them took a beat to look down the hall where she’d disappeared. Austin could practically hear his heart roaring through his veins, and he had to force himself to stand still.

  “She’s really something.”

  “She is.”

  The other wolf started moseying back toward them, still looking at his phone.

  “Tonight?” Trevor asked, in the exact same tone he’d been using. He didn’t look at Austin, but instead watched a couple of people walk past, though Austin could sense the tightness in his temples and in his voice, the urgency there evident.

  “Have to be late,” Austin said, as casually as he could while his stomach clenched and his heart beat just a little faster. “Might be with the cops for a while. Midnight?”

  Trevor nodded once.

  Then the other wolf was back, standing in front of Austin and Trevor, making a triangle with the two of them.

  “Is it true that the kid had a syringe in his neck?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest.

  Austin tapped the area right over one vein with his forefinger.

  “It was right here,” he said.

  Trevor and the other wolf shuddered in unison.

  Chapter Three

  Sloane

  “You can have the recliner, Miss,” Detective Tripp said.

  They were in a hospital room with two beds, a chair, and a vinyl-covered recliner. It squeaked as Sloane lowered herself into it tentatively.

  This is vinyl-covered because people get their fluids all over it, she couldn’t help but think. Blood. Pee. Worse. This way they can just hose it down.

  She made extra-sure that none of her exposed skin was touching the recliner.

  Detective Tripp sat in a folding chair and put a mini recorder on the hospital bed’s fold-out tray.

  “All right,” he said, clapping his hands down on his knees. “Why don’t you just start from the beginning?”

  “You mean finding the guy in the woods?” Sloane asked. “Or before that?”

  “Wherever you think makes sense.”

  Sloane thought for a moment, trying to collect herself, trying to make the story fit into a few simple sentences that she could wrangle.

  “I’m through-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” she started.

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah, alone. I just finished a long stretch through the southern end of the Cascades, so when I was planning this, I booked two nights at the Double Moon Ranch, to shower and rest and eat and stuff.”

  “It’s a hostel?”

  “Sort of, I guess. They house backpackers on the PCT for a couple of nights, that kind of thing. I found them on a backpacking forum, I don’t know how much they advertise, but other people do it,” she said.

  He doesn’t need this much information, she thought. Stop rambling.

  “Anyway, there’s a mile-long spur trail from the PCT to the ranch, and I was about halfway down it when I saw this flash of blue from the corner of my eye, off in the woods,” she went on. “So I stopped, and when I got a closer look, this guy was there. I totally thought he was dead at first, but then I saw him breathe and I saw the syringe, and I ran back to the trail and started running for the ranch and shouting for help. After a few minutes of that, Austin showed up, and then I showed him where the unconscious guy was, and he carried him to the ranch for me.”

  The detective nodded.

  “When you first saw the blue scrap, what exactly did you see?” he asked.

  Sloane closed her eyes and tried to remember it, but the image kept slipping through her grasp. She’d seen something, she was totally sure of it, but she couldn’t pull up the exact image.

  “I don’t have a photographic memory or anything,” she said. “But it was this dot, maybe, of like electric blue? I think it was his elbow, sticking up above the fallen tree that he was behind.”

  “And that seemed suspicious.”

  “It did,” Sloane said slowly. Something in the detective’s manner was making her start to feel nervous, though she couldn’t exactly say what it was. “I don’t really know why, but it seemed out of place, fifty feet into the woods?”

  “You didn’t just think that someone was taking a nap or having a snack?”

  Sloane shook her head.

  “It was too still, maybe,” she said. “There was just some
thing off about it.”

  “Did you see any of his effects around?”

  Sloane blinked. She’d never even thought about it before.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing anything, but I wasn’t really looking, I guess?”

  The detective nodded and wrote something else down.

  “Where was your backpack during this time?” he asked.

  Sloane rubbed her eyes. She was starting to get the feeling that they were going to be in that hospital room for a while, as she tried to remember every single detail of her afternoon.

  By the time the detective was finished, Sloane was so hungry that she was fantasizing about freeze-dried backpacking food and granola bars. That morning, she’d been totally sick of both, but now they sound like a feast.

  He’d made her go over every single detail of finding the kid, sometimes more than once, and Sloane just didn’t remember the event that exactly. Her mind had been elsewhere — in the shower, mostly — and once she’d seen him, she’d panicked, and things got a little out of order, jumbled together in her mind.

  “Okay,” Detective Tripp said at last, flicking his little notebook closed. “Do us a favor and don’t leave town for a few days.”

  Sloane frowned.

  “I’m only at the ranch for two nights,” she said. “I have other places booked south of here, I’ve got food drops lined up; I can’t just stick around indefinitely.”

  Detective Tripp gave her an inscrutable look.

  “At best, we’ve got a missing person case,” he said. “At least until he wakes up. If he never wakes up, it’s a murder case, and you’re a major witness.”

  Sloane slumped in her chair.

  “Right,” she said.

  Fuck, I’m going to have to reschedule so much stuff, she thought.

  At the same time, she thought of Austin.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be around him for a little while. Have some fun while she was in town — after all, he could sure help her get over her ex.

  She blushed, just thinking about the first time she’d seen him, standing there in all his muscled, naked glory. In retrospect, of course he was a bear — after all, he was alone, and only grizzlies were built like that.