She huffed a thick, surprised laugh. “You’re not mad?”
Bash flinched back as though he’d been punched. “Mad?” He set the flowers down too rough on the counter. One of the petals fell off, but that was just Bash.
He stomped over to her and went soft millimeters before he touched her skin. He brushed his knuckle over the streak of wetness on her cheek, then stared at the smear of moisture on his hand with an upset furrow to his dark brows. “I’m sad you think I would be mad. Even if we never made a baby, you would still be the best part of me. Are you mad at me?”
She slid her arms around his neck. “Of course not.”
“Okay, good, because I don’t want you to leave. And now we get to keep trying. We’ve been having fun trying, right?”
She giggled and nodded. “The most fun.”
“This is the exciting part. The what-if every month. And having to wait will make it even better when we finally get our cub.” Bash hugged her tight and rested his cheek against the top of her head. “My mom and Bill wanted a baby together real bad. Real bad. It didn’t ever happen for them, but he still touches her butt all the time.”
A million pounds of pressure lifted from her chest with the long sigh she let off. She should’ve known Bash would make her feel better instead of worse. He was a good teammate. A good partner.
“Look,” he murmured, easing back to cup her cheeks. “I’ll go turn off my computer, we’ll go visit Audrey up at Moosey’s and eat tons of barbecue, and then we’ll come back and fuck like rabbits.”
Emerson snorted at the imagery, but gripped his wrists and nodded. “That would make me feel better. So…we’re okay?”
Bash looked at her like she was the silliest creature on planet Earth. “No matter what, we’re always okay.”
Chapter Sixteen
Bash inhaled deeply, but these weren’t his woods. This wasn’t Boarlander territory. He looked around to the unfamiliar pines that creaked in the breeze. Something wasn’t right. There were strangers in these woods. People. Humans.
Movement to his left drew his attention, and he crouched, ready for a fight, but it was just Harrison. His alpha came to a stop near him but didn’t look at Bash. He was pale and shaken, his hair mussed, and his gaze stayed glued to the space between two tree trunks.
“Harrison?” Bash asked as the hairs on the back of his neck rose.
When Harrison dragged his gaze slowly from the woods to Bash, his dark blue eyes looked hollow, empty. Lifeless. “Run, Bash. Run home.”
Home? Bash looked around the strange woods. Where was home?
The crack of metal on metal echoed through the woods, and Harrison fell to his knees. He looked down at his torso with sad eyes. His alpha lifted his hands, palms dripping red, as circles of wet crimson spread across his shirt.
“No,” Bash said, stumbling toward him. “No, I saved you. I saved you!”
The whoosh of wind nearly flattened him against the ground, and he looked in horror as something massive flew across the sky blocking out the moon and stars. Damon.
“Harrison!” Bash yelled as he bolted for him.
Fire lit up the night sky as Bash threw himself over his alpha’s fallen body. The pain of blistering heat was excruciating on his back, and he gritted his teeth against the scream of agony that clawed its way up his throat. He didn’t want Harrison to leave this world on the sound of his pain.
But with the ache lifted and his skin cooled, it wasn’t Harrison he heard, but soft crying sounds he didn’t recognize. When Bash eased up, Emerson lay in his arms, her curls draped across his forearm, her amber eyes wide and frightened as a single tear streamed down the side of her face. So much red on her shirt, spreading everywhere.
In a hoarse whisper, she said, “Bash, they’re here.”
Bash shot up in bed, his body drenched in sweat and ready for a battle he didn’t understand.
“What’s wrong?” Emerson asked in the dark, her hand soothing against his back.
“You’re breathing. You’re breathing,” he chanted mindlessly as he patted her body. Touch wasn’t enough. He had to see her. Bash bolted for the light switch and slammed it on.
Emerson winced hard and curled in on herself on the bed of 1010. He was sorry for her pain, but he had to make sure. Bash ripped the neck of the black T-shirt he’d given her and checked her chest for bullet holes.
She had frozen, eyes round and locked on him. “Bash, tell me what’s wrong.”
He dropped the tatters of her sleep shirt and lurched off the bed away from her. Not gentle enough. He could see her chest rising, could see her skin free of blood, but his bear was still roaring inside of him to Change. Outside, the soft bellow of a bear sounded.
Bash bolted for the front door, and behind him, the soft footfall of his mate followed.
“Bash, what’s happening?” she asked in a scared voice, but he didn’t have any answers for her. He didn’t know. Something bad.
He pulled open the door. His heart banged against his chest like a war drum.
Harrison’s massive dark-furred grizzly was pacing back and forth across the road, eyes on the woods behind Bash’s cabin. Fuck.
“Stay here,” Bash said low.
“Why?” Emerson was holding her tattered shirt together as best as she could.
“I’ll be back.” If I’m able. He kissed her forehead and bolted down the stairs just as Harrison made for the woods. Two weeks wasn’t enough time with her. Not near enough.
Bash let the snarling bear rip from his body because it wasn’t just Harrison and his crew he had to protect now.
He had to keep Emerson safe from whatever waited out in those woods.
****
Emerson gasped as a massive, coal-black grizzly exploded from Bash’s body. When a wave of raw power blasted against her skin, she stumbled backward against the side of 1010.
With long, strong strides, Bash followed Harrison’s grizzly into the woods.
Something was wrong. Something bad was happening because she hadn’t ever seen fire like that in Bash’s eyes. Tensed, growling, every muscle rigid as he’d searched her chest for something she didn’t understand.
She sprinted into the trailer and pulled on her jeans and tank top that sat in a pile on the dresser. She shoved her feet into a pair of sneakers and didn’t even bother to tie the laces before she sprinted out of 1010 and toward Clinton’s trailer. She took his porch stairs two at a time and banged on the door.
“What?” Clinton yelled from inside. Even though she’d spent a lot of time here, it hadn’t softened him much.
“Something’s wrong. Bash needs help.”
Without waiting on an answer, she sprinted to Mason’s trailer and did the same. Audrey was jogging down the porch stairs of Harrison’s trailer, and Kirk was already headed to the trail in the woods where Bash had disappeared.
Audrey let off a pained yell. She hunched into herself, then fell to her knees on the gravel. Emerson ran to help her, but her friend’s body blurred and broke, and Audrey’s tiger snarled its way out of her in a matter of moments.
Emerson skidded to a stop in the gravel, but Audrey bolted, her giant paws flattening on the road as she ran after Kirk. Audrey looked over her shoulder and slowed down with a short roar.
Okay, she was in this now. Emerson sprinted after Audrey and tried to keep up as the massive white, striped cat weaved this way and that through dark wilderness she could obviously see much better than Emerson could. Come on, moon. Give me something.
She blinked hard to try and force her eyes to adjust as Audrey led her deeper and deeper into the Boarlander woods. She could hear it now—voices, just over the sound of Bear Trap Falls. And through the trees, she saw something that made no sense until she hit the edge of the tree line.
A woman and a man, dressed in black with thick bulletproof vests, stood legs locked, handguns pulled, and facing off with the two grizzlies. Harrison paced back and forth from the bank to the tree line since Bash’
s black grizzly was cutting him off from getting to the intruders.
The man was tall and lanky, his face red to match his shorn hair. He was yelling, “Back the fuck off. We don’t want to shoot, but we will!”
The woman was shorter, thin, and one of her arms was covered in an intricate tattoo that stretched to her elbow on one arm. Her hair was short, chin-length, and bleached blond, and as Audrey skidded to a stop on the beach sand in front of her, another woman’s voice shouted, “Drop your weapons. Now!”
Emerson stumbled forward and stopped beside Audrey, who crouched and hissed, as if she was about to attack. Without thinking, Emerson clenched the scruff of her neck and said, “No, Audrey. They’ll open fire.”
Adrenaline had dumped into her system, and her heart was beating so hard her chest hurt. This was her nightmare, seeing the people she’d come to love threatened like this. Behind her, a quick drumming sound echoed through the woods, and now Kirk was here, a massive silverback gorilla walking slowly from the darkness, eyes on the two intruders and his lips curled back to expose impossibly long canines.
There was a woman holding a weapon trained on the couple that Emerson hadn’t seen until she cleared the trees. She was curvy, and her sandy-colored hair was wild with curls like her own, but when the woman ghosted her a glance and ordered, “Stay back,” her eyes glowed like a demon’s. Shifter.
“I’m Georgia of the Gray Backs, ranger and protector of these mountains, and you are trespassing,” she gritted out. She cocked her gun and aimed for the woman’s head. “Drop your fucking weapons, or you won’t live until your next breath.”
“I’m Officer Allison Holman and this is my partner Finn Brackeen. We are part of a task force here to extract a human you are holding against her will.” She flashed a badge on her hip and aimed her gun at Georgia. “You put your gun down,”—Holman jerked her chin toward Emerson—“and let her go.”
Bash roared a furious, deafening sound and turned on the woman, but Emerson bolted and put her hands up in front of him. “No, Bash!” She rounded on the woman and pleaded, “Don’t shoot him. Don’t shoot any of them. They’re my people!”
Holman’s face faltered. “Your people?”
“Tell me you aren’t here because of Damon,” Clinton said from where he leaned against a tree, his eyes glowing silver.
“We’re here to extract—”
“Bullshit!” Clinton’s voice cracked across the mountains, and he pushed off the tree. “Emerson, tell them what you are really doing here.”
“I’m Bash’s mate. I belong with him. With them. I love him,” she said, pushing the words desperately past her tightening vocal cords. “I love all of them. I’m not here against my will. Please don’t take them away from me. I just found them.”
The woman shook her head over and over, confusion washing over her face. “That’s not what we’ve been told.”
“By who?” Emerson asked.
“Your friend, Rachel Mallory, turned in a missing person’s report this morning. She said you were taken from your home in distress by Sebastian Kane.”
“Rachel Mallory is my doctor, not my friend. I haven’t seen her in two weeks. And the last time I saw her, I left her clinic upset because she was spewing anti-shifter garbage at me because of my growing relationship with Bash. She gave you wrong information. I’m here because this is exactly where I want to be.”
“Drop you’re weapons,” Georgia gritted out.
The redheaded officer shook his head and held his ground. “If we drop them, what will stop you from murdering us? What will keep you from disposing of us just like you did with all those IESA agents?”
“Look around you,” Clinton said.
The officers cast their glances to a commotion on the other side of the riverbank. A dark-furred titan grizzly slipped from the woods, and behind him several pairs of eyes glowed and reflected through the trees. Creed was battle ready and so was his crew, which meant Georgia must’ve sounded the alarm.
“Your little pea shooters won’t save you,” Clinton said, coming to stand right beside Emerson and Audrey. “Pull that trigger one time, and you’ll have every Boarlander and every Gray Back fighting for your jugulars. But we aren’t the ones you’re really worried about, are we?”
Something huge blocked the sky like an eclipse, and hurricane winds blew the sand around them into tornadoes. Clinton held Emerson up when her legs failed, and then it was gone and the wind settled.
Bash placed himself in front of her, so close she could smell the richness of his fur. His muscular hump stood high above her head, and she was intimidated to stillness with how big he really was.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Holman said soothingly, holding her hands out, gun gone limp. “Call the dragon off. We aren’t here to hurt you. We thought we were saving a civilian. We were just supposed to come in quiet—”
“In woods full of shifters,” Mason said from behind them. “You thought you would be quieter than us? Too quiet for us to hear or sense? Who are you, and I swear to God, if we hear a lie, you’re dead.”
“We’ve been sent here as the point of contact between the rest of the world and these mountains.” Holman holstered her gun. “Brackeen, put it away!” she demanded with a quick, fierce glance at her partner. When he did, she continued. “We have two cabins down the hill where humans will have to check in before they come up here from now on.”
“That’s not right,” Emerson argued. “There are human mates up here. Fuck that. We aren’t checking in any time we want to come back from a grocery run.”
“Not registered mates, but humans who aren’t already paired up.”
“Why?” Clinton asked. His lips turned up in a cruel smile. “I already know the answer, but I want to hear you tell the rest of my crew.”
Officer Holman swallowed hard and murmured, “Our objective is to keep peace between humans and the shifters of Damon’s mountains as changes to the laws surrounding your existence are reviewed and—”
“Tell them!” Clinton yelled.
The blond dropped her gaze to the sand and angled her face away from the anger in Clinton’s voice. “We’re here to slow the spread of shifters in these mountains.”
“I don’t understand,” Emerson said, shaking her head.
“They’re here for population control,” a deep, gravelly voice said from the shadows. “They’re here to make sure the shifters in my mountains know their lives aren’t their own.” Damon Daye, the dragon himself, stepped from the shadows, fastening the last button of a crisp white shirt. She’d seen him from a distance in town once, but standing this close to him, the air was too thick to breath. “We registered, just like they wanted us to. We gave them information about ourselves and our whereabouts, and they’ve been watching us grow. They’re here to undermine everything I’ve built because our happiness threatens the weak-minded.”
“Effective immediately,” Officer Holman said in a shaking voice, her neck exposed like a smart little human, “no one else will be allowed to register to the crews of your mountains. No more pairings will be recognized in the eyes of the law.”
Bash shrank back into his human skin with a grunt. “But, Emerson is mine,” he rasped out, his eyes glowing like the Gray Backs’ on the other bank. “I love her. She marked me.” He gestured to the scar on his chest.
“I’m sorry.” At least Holman sounded regretful. “You can’t claim her because she’s human. If you Turn her now, they’ll cage you.”
“I wouldn’t Turn her unless she asked.”
“Even if Emerson Elliot asks you to Turn her, you can’t.”
“Well…can I marry her?” he asked. “Can Emerson take my last name?”
Officer Holman looked sick as she shook her head, and Emerson’s face crumbled as twin tears streamed down her cheeks. No. No, no, no. She dashed away the dampness under her eyes with the back of her hand. “But he’s mine,” she said in a pitiful voice. “This isn’t fair.”
?
??This isn’t my doing,” Holman said. “You have caught the attention of people who are much higher up than me. We’re only here to keep the peace.” She pulled a pad of paper from her pocket and scribbled across it.
“What are you doing?” Brackeen asked in a harsh voice.
“Stand down,” Holman barked out when he got too close to her. Illuminated by blue moonlight reflecting off the river, the tough-looking woman ripped off the piece of paper and folded it in half, then approached Emerson slowly, exposing her neck to Bash. Holman lifted her eyebrows high and gave Emerson a loaded look she didn’t understand. “If you have any questions about changes in the laws, call me on my cell phone. Here.” She shoved it in Emerson’s palm and backed away. “Or you can come talk to us at our post. We’re located right off the main road on the boundary of Damon’s land.” Holman twitched her gaze to the paper in Emerson’s clenched fist, then back to Emerson’s face. To the others, she said, “I’m sorry we had to introduce ourselves to all of you like this. We just arrived at our post to a missing person’s report and thought Ms. Elliot was in trouble. Damon, we need to set up a meeting—”
“Maybe tomorrow,” the dark-headed, silver-eyed dragon shifter ground out. “Tonight my people have been dealt a blow.” He leveled the officers with a dead look and said, “Leave now, and next time you enter my land unannounced, it would benefit you to keep your weapons holstered.”
“Is that a threat?” Brackeen asked. “Huh?”
Holman grabbed him by his vest and shoved him toward the trees.
“Or else what, dragon?” Brackeen shouted over his shoulder.
“Or else he’ll chomp your ass,” Willa shouted from across the river. “Right Beaston?”
“Chomp,” Beaston agreed in a deep, echoing timbre from the shadows of the trees.
Glowing green eyes and a Cheshire cat grin were all Emerson could see of Beaston in the dim light, and another wave of chills blasted up her arms. She didn’t even want to know what the Gray Backs meant by that.