She flicked her fall of black hair over her shoulder and tipped her chin up, and tersely said, “Thanks for freeing me. I’ll be on my way now. No more problem for you.”
She went to turn.
He seized her wrist.
Callie smacked his hand away again, growled at him and bared her fangs. “Keep your filthy paws to yourself, buddy.”
His pale blue eyes flashed with chilling fire, with rage she knew she was stoking, but she couldn’t bring herself to heel. Something about him riled her, rubbed her the wrong way, made her want to push and fight him despite his size and how strong he was.
Maybe she was just sick and tired of overbearing males thinking they could order her around.
He proved how overbearing he was by saying, “Answer my questions and I’ll think about letting you go.”
She huffed at that. “How kind of you. I’ll skip the answering questions part and move straight to the leaving, thanks.”
He made another grab for her.
Callie was on to him, moved too quickly for him to keep up, nimbly leaping away from him to place a good ten feet of dirt between them. She grimaced when she placed some weight on her right leg as she landed and pain shot up it, arcing along her bones.
He growled, only this time it was a low groaning sound that bordered on sorrowful or oddly melancholy, and it sent a shiver down her spine and rang alarm bells in her head as it revealed what he was.
A bear.
She had never had a good experience with a bear shifter. They were ridiculously territorial, almost as bad as the felines. Felines were worse though. She wanted to spit on the ground at just the thought of them, while at the same time she wanted to run as fast as her tired, aching legs could carry her.
The term ‘fighting like cats and dogs’ was applicable in the shifter world too. Callie had lost count of the number of fights she had gotten into with a feline shifter just because she was a wolf.
“If you won’t answer me, then you’ll answer to my alpha.” Bear was surprisingly quick, closed the distance between them without giving himself away, and had his hand on her arm before she could blink and catch up.
She had been watching him closely, should have spotted the moment he decided to move. He hadn’t broadcasted his intent at all though. One moment he had been standing there, as calm as anything and showing no sign he was going to try something, and the next he was right beside her.
For some reason, that terrified her.
Who was this male? Or better still, what was he? She had never seen a male move like he did. Not even the warriors at her old pack had moved like him, without broadcasting anything to the enemy. When she had watched them sparring, something she had often done because she wasn’t allowed to fight since she was female, she had always been able to spot when they would move. The slightest shift of their weight. The smallest change in their eyes. Even a secretly drawn breath. There had always been a tell, something to warn her they would make a move against their sparring partner, something most of the warriors always seemed to fail to notice.
But not her.
She had been good at spotting them.
Which was why she knew he hadn’t given away his intent to move.
She stared up into his eyes as he loomed over her, easily a good nine inches taller than her despite the fact she was pushing five-eleven, was tall for a wolf female. A cold abyss stared back at her. No trace of emotion. Not even rage.
Everything about him was carefully, meticulously controlled.
Right down to his breathing and the pressure of his grip on her arm. Not hard enough to hurt her, or gentle enough that she could twist free. He held her just tightly enough that she knew she couldn’t escape him, not without resorting to a desperate act of violence. Even then, she had her doubts it would be enough to break free of his grip this time.
Callie studied him, swiftly cataloguing everything about this dark male, this dangerous bear.
Was he a warrior too?
If he was, he was on another level to those she had known back at her old pack, back when her life had been better.
It struck her that Bear hadn’t moved in the whole time she had been staring at him, had locked up tight, as if placing his filthy paw on her had startled him. If it had, nothing about him other than his stillness gave it away.
Callie found herself relaxing a little, some of the tension draining from her when he made no move to hurt her or drag her somewhere, just stood there watching her, his eyes glacial. She wanted to break through that layer of ice for some reason, felt compelled to provoke him and gain a reaction. Some twisted part of her wanted to crack the cage around his emotions wide open and see what came out.
She raked her eyes over him, an appraising look that she hoped rankled him. “You’re not the alpha?”
He was a big male. Bigger than any wolf she had ever met. He had to be twice Carrigan’s size. Outmuscled even Carrigan’s biggest goon.
If Bear was this big, then how big was his leader?
She didn’t want to find out.
“I’m good.” Those words came out as flippant as she meant them to, had a flicker of cold fire igniting in his eyes again. “I don’t need to meet your extended family. I’ll just be on my way.”
“On your way where?” He tightened his grip on her arm, the barest flex of his fingers. It was enough to deliver the silent message that she wasn’t going anywhere.
Not until she answered his questions.
Well, they were both shit out of luck then. She wasn’t going to tell him anything about herself, because it was safer that way, and he wasn’t going to let her go. A stalemate. She looked at him, her resolve wavering. He was from this valley, lived here and must have come to find her when she had howled, dispatched by his pack to locate her and bring her in for questioning.
Which meant he would probably be able to tell her whether or not the White Wolf pack was near here.
She needed to reach that pack and soon. Every second she spent here with Bear was another second that Carrigan closed in on her.
The longer she stared into his eyes, locked in a stalemate with him, the stronger a feeling grew inside her—Bear wouldn’t answer her questions. He wanted to ask his and hear her answer them, and that was that. She had met males like him in the past, ones who were rigid about how they went about things, inflexible and unlikely to bend to accommodate others.
Her eyes widened as he tried to prove her wrong about him, as he released her arm and eased back a step, placing some distance between them. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as she was painting him.
She thought he might be worse when he unzipped his thick fleece and pulled it off, stripping down to only a black T-shirt that hugged his heavily-muscled torso like a second skin.
“What are you doing?” She hated that note of panic in her voice, how her words warbled and how he looked at her as if she was weak.
Or perhaps insane to fear he wanted to do anything nefarious to her.
“I’m tired of seeing you naked.” He held the fleece out to her. “Put it on.”
“No.” Callie stood her ground, ignoring the way her cheeks heated as he stared at her, as a voice in the back of her mind taunted her for fearing he had been about to try something with her when she apparently wasn’t attractive enough for him.
Her blood burned for another reason as that hit her. Plenty of males had told her she was beautiful and had pursued her, desiring her as their lover. Some of them had wanted her to be more than that for them, and while she had been flattered, she had turned them all down. None of them had been quite right for her.