“Yeah, but he was a shifter. It’s kind of gross. Like, doing it with an animal man. Yuck.”
“Are you like, one of those shifter haters or something? Colin was hot, and he was a total sweetheart. Poor Bethany. I wish I’d known they were together.”
“Nobody knew. I’m the only one she told. She was out of town visiting friends when he was killed, and she hasn’t come back.”
Wyatt looked up at Candice, his eyes dark and hooded. “We’ve got to go,” he said, standing. He took her hand and headed towards the door.
Chapter Seventeen
When Wyatt heard the women talking in the ice cream shop, he knew it was crucial information to the investigation. Why the woman hadn’t come forward to the sheriff was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was a sense of loyalty to her friend. Perhaps it was simple cluelessness. What mattered was that Wyatt now had a missing piece of the puzzle.
Tim Lawson was Reginald Lawson’s son. If Reginald was a shifter hater, there was a good chance his son was, too. Not to mention the fact that the woman, Bethany, had left him for Colin. Questioning Reginald had come to a dead end. The man had an alibi for the day of the murder, and the murder weapon still hadn’t been found.
When Wyatt got Candice home and safely in bed, he told her he had to go back to the station to do some work on the case. Candice was disappointed, covering him in hot kisses before he left. That didn’t make it exactly easy for Wyatt to pull away from the curvy sex kitten in his bed.
Wyatt had an important job to do, no matter how much he wanted to stay with Candice and feel her sexy curves moving under his hands. He arrived at the sheriff’s department and filed a quick report on what he had heard at the ice cream shop. Nobody else was there this late at night except the night dispatcher, who did dispatch for late night highway patrol.
With the new information, Wyatt didn’t want to wait until morning. He had the sinking suspicion that Tim Lawson was his man, and he wanted to be sure of it before the rest of the team came back in in the morning.
He looked up Lawson’s place on the computer and then went back out to his truck. If he parked far off on one of the service roads and trekked in towards Tim’s place in bear form, he could use his bear senses to sniff out the identity of the killer.
He drove up the back country road and parked at the edge of the forest. Beside the truck, he removed his clothing, neatly folding them up in the passenger seat. With a low rumble, he changed. His body contorted and shifted, growing in every direction as his spine bent and his legs twisted into shape. Fur sprouted from his skin, and ferocious canines erupted from his mouth. When he had completed his shift, he let out a low, rumbling roar.
He dove into the forest, galloping at top speed through the trees. His amplified senses filled his mind. Rich scents drifted past his nose––the smell of berries, pine, rotting leaves. The light of the moon glowed down over the underbrush, shining supernaturally before his eyes.
He could feel the breeze on his hide and hear the faint hooting of an owl in the distance. Wyatt loved to run in bear form. He loved to hunt and fish and feel the world around him as he communed with his animal. But it wasn’t always practical to shift, especially knowing what he did about all the rules human hunters broke every single day. It was dangerous for a bear in the wild, even if you didn’t have an angry ex-boyfriend after you.
He approached the edge of Tim Lawson’s property and could see the glow of his porch lights shining over a collection of cars in the driveway. Wyatt didn’t feel comfortable going any closer. But he could hear the men speaking as he opened his senses.
The back door of the porch was open, and two men were sitting around a table, drinking beer. Wyatt smelled the familiar scent, the same as the scent he’d picked up out in the woods the day he met Candice.
“That woman’s a damn shifter lover,” one of the men said. “She deserves to be taught a lesson.”
They must be talking about Bethany. He needed to find her so that he could protect her from whatever Tim and his gang were planning to do.
“I say we take her down tonight.”
Wyatt didn’t need to hear any more. He needed to get back to the station and find out who Bethany was and where she was staying so that he could make sure she was safe. She was in danger, and he needed to help her.
Wyatt turned around and ran swiftly through the woods back to his truck. He threw his clothes on and drove as quickly as he could to the station. The morning crew was arriving, and Wyatt would have help tracking down Bethany.
He found Deputy Sheriff Morris in his office and told him what he’d discovered.
“We didn’t know that Chase had a girlfriend,” Morris said. “We need to find this woman and make sure she’s safe. If Lawson was willing to murder the boyfriend, he’d be willing to hurt his ex.”
Wyatt went to his office to do more research on the girlfriend until Morris came back and said he got a lead. Morris had officers in her town already going out to inform her that she was in danger. Morris had a search warrant for Lawson’s place drawn up, and several officers went out to search his property. There wasn’t anything else Wyatt could do.
Worried about Candice alone at home, he gave her a call on the walkie-talkie. She didn’t answer after several tries. Then he called her on her cell phone to no avail. Anxiety sank like a stone in his gut. He had to get home.
Chapter Eighteen
Candice woke to the sound of the door slapping open. She shot out of bed and hurried downstairs, expecting to find Wyatt in the living room. What she found startled a scream from her lips. The faces of the two men snapped to her direction, and she froze.
“There she is, the dirty shifter lover. Get her,” said a familiar voice. He was the one from the grove, the one who’d shot the bear.
The second man grabbed her, his face a mask of disgust and rage.
“Let me go,” she wailed.
“You’re coming with us,” the first man said.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed, gasping, as they dragged her outside.
“You’re a dirty shifter lover,” the second man said. “First we deal with you, then we get your boyfriend.”
“What are you talking about?” she cried as they pushed her into the back of a van. “Wyatt isn’t a shifter.”
“So he hasn’t told you yet, huh? Typical shifter manipulation. Using a human woman. He would probably turn you without your permission. Then you’d be one of them.”
“What makes you think Wyatt’s a shifter?” she wailed. They tied her hands together with a bungee cord and shoved a dirty rag in her mouth.
“Let’s just say, we know all the shifters in town. We have access to the clan’s meeting records. Believe me, your boyfriend is one of them.”
Hurt and rage filled Candice as tears slid down her face. Was Wyatt really a shifter? Why hadn’t he told her? She didn’t have anything against shifters. The opposite, in fact. She believed people should leave them alone, and they should be allowed to live in peace.
After seeing a shifter murdered before her eyes, she had the greatest empathy for their struggle. She didn’t want to see another shifter hurt or brutalized for something they had no control over. Every person deserved to be treated with respect and equality, even people who were able to transform into animals.
But the fact that Wyatt hadn’t told her that he was a shifter really hurt her. It wasn’t that she thought differently of him. It didn’t matter to her that he was a shifter. It was actually rather fascinating. What hurt her was the fact that he hadn’t trusted her enough to share it with her.
After everything they’d been through together, after he’d had her paintings put up in a gallery, saved her from attackers, and sheltered her in his home, why hadn’t he trusted her enough to share his true self with her?
The van bumped through the woods, and fear coiled in Candice’s chest. What did they plan to do with her? They’d gone so far as to murder a man for being a shifter. There wasn’t mu
ch they weren’t willing to do in their sick quest to rid the world of people they believed below them.
Finally, the van came to a stop, and they pushed open the door. They were out in the woods somewhere Candice didn’t recognize. The men pulled her out of the van and yanked her across a gravel driveway.
They came to the front door of a rustic hunting cabin and pushed her inside. She dropped onto a dusty, red couch that smelled of mold. Candice told herself not to cry, but the tears wouldn’t stop rolling down her face.
The men opened a cooler full of beer and opened the cans with a loud crack before they began to chug. She noticed one of them had a pistol tucked in the waist of his jeans at the small of his back.
The second picked up a shotgun from a rack beside the door and began waving it around as the two drank their beer. “What should we do with her?” the one with the pistol asked. He pulled the pistol out of his waistband and pressed the barrel under Candice’s chin, lifting her face to look in her eyes.
“I say we shoot her and bury her in the woods,” the one with the shotgun said. Candice blanched at that, squeezing her eyes closed as hard as she could.
Her heart pounded furiously, and all her thoughts focused on Wyatt finding her. She didn’t care that he was a shifter. All she wanted was him. These psychopaths deserved to be put away for a long time. How could they think that they were somehow better than peaceful men and women who happened to be able to transform into animals? It just wasn’t right.
“I say we have a little fun first,” the one with the pistol said. “Look at her. She’s so cute and curvy. A shifter took my woman. I think it’s only fair that I take a shifter’s woman back.”
Candice whimpered under the disgusting gag in her mouth, her body shaking as the man looked down at her exposed cleavage.
Chapter Nineteen
When Wyatt arrived home, he noticed that the front door was left open. When he sniffed the air, his heart dropped. He could smell the scent of the men at Tim Lawson’s house.
“Candice,” he called, stepping into the house and drawing his gun. “Candice, honey, are you here?” He opened up his bear senses, but didn’t hear her. He stepped farther into the house.
The farther he ventured into the house, the stronger the scent of the killer became. There was evidence of a struggle in the living room. The coffee table had been pushed out of place, and magazines were spilled on the floor.
He opened his senses further and found traces of the footprint he’d seen at the campsite in a faint dusting of dirt across the floor. He growled inwardly and pressed the button on the walkie-talkie at his shoulder.
“Candice Gray has been kidnapped from my home,” he told Janis the dispatcher. “I suspect Tim Lawson.”
“Morris is out at Lawson’s house now. There’s no one there.”
Wyatt grumbled and let go of his walkie-talkie. He hurried out to his truck and drove quickly across town to where he’d parked the night before. He put his clothes on the front seat, shifted, and galloped through the woods.
For all the sheriff department’s advanced technology and techniques, they couldn’t beat Wyatt’s bear senses when it came to tracking someone through the woods.
When he arrived at Tim Lawson’s house, he saw Morris’s squad car parked out front. Tim’s scent was weak, as if he hadn’t been home for quite some time. Circling around the house under the cover of forest, he picked up a faint scent on a trail leading up into the woods. Perhaps Tim was hiding somewhere on his land. Wyatt followed the trail up the winding bluff.
As the son of a prominent store owner, Tim Lawson had the money to own quite a bit of land. He knew Tim from his exploits in town as a big game hunter. Wyatt had given Tim and his crew tickets more than once for hunting out of season and without licenses.
The last time he’d found him with a female black bear, he’d orphaned two cubs. Wyatt had almost arrested him that time. He growled, just thinking about it. He hated people who raped the land and animals like that. Men like Lawson were the reason he’d become a warden in the first place.
As he crested the ridge, he picked up the sharp scent of exhaust fumes. He stopped in his tracks and opened his senses. Tasting the air with his tongue, he could make out the sweetness of Candice’s scent. In the distance, he saw a small hunting cabin with a van parked outside.
Anger boiled inside him. His bear, barely under control, barreled down the hillside until he was right behind the cabin. He heard the faint sound of men speaking within. They had Candice. They meant to hurt her.
Without rational thought, without waiting to let the man in him second guess his instincts, Wyatt burst around the cabin and smashed down the door.
The two men inside were caught off guard. They both wielded weapons. One shot into the air as Wyatt batted him with his massive paw. The pistol went flying. The smell of the killers bit his nose as he roared, springing up on his hind legs.
Candice shivered and cried on a dusty old couch in the corner. His heart burst when he saw her. He fell to his feet and roared at the men. The one with the shot gun tried to aim, but Wyatt charged, and the gun fired into the ceiling.
He knocked him over and bit down on his neck, controlling himself just enough not to kill him. The first man had been knocked unconscious from a swipe to the face. Blood seeped into the roughhewn floor planks.
Wyatt turned to Candice, who was gasping through her nose and could barely breathe through the gag in her mouth. He shifted quickly, coming to stand naked and bloody before her. This was not how he wanted to introduce his bear to her.
He hurried to Candice and pulled the gag out of her mouth and untied her hands. She fell into his arms, sobbing. Wyatt held her shaking body. Worry filled his chest. Would she accept him now that she knew?
“It’s okay, baby, I’m here now,” he soothed. “Did they hurt you? Are you all right?”
“Oh, Wyatt,” she cried through shaky sobs. “Why are people so horrible?”
“Don’t worry about that now, sweetheart. As long as you are safe, that’s all that matters.”
Wyatt pulled the bigger man’s pants off and pulled them on over his nakedness. Morris arrived a few minutes later, finding a bloody, half-naked Wyatt and a terrified Candice beside two unconscious men.
“I heard the gunshot, called for backup, and came straight up here,” said Morris.
“These are the killers,” Wyatt said, pointing to the unconscious men as Sheriff Jefferies came into the room.
“What happened here?” Jefferies said. “They look like they’ve been attacked by a grizzly. And why isn’t that man wearing any pants?”
Wyatt looked them both in the face and then looked down at Candice. “Well, you see. I’m a shifter. A grizzly bear shifter. I hadn’t registered yet, but I’m coming out now. I’m proud of who I am. It helped me solve this case. I wouldn’t trade it.”
“I suspected all along,” Sheriff Jefferies said. “Most of the game wardens in Montana are bear shifters. Having a shifter on the force is an asset, not a liability.”
***
At home later, they sat in the relaxing bubbles of Wyatt’s big, soaker tub. He washed her back and held her close in the candlelight.
“You aren’t angry about me being a shifter?” he asked her between planting kisses on her neck.
“I wish you’d trusted me enough to tell me before. But I’m not angry. How could I be?”
“Most women wouldn’t be so understanding.”
“I’m not most women,” Candice said, turning to kiss Wyatt on the lips.
“No, you aren’t,” he said, smiling. He kissed her back and held her close to him. “There’s something else I have to tell you, Candice.”
“What is it?”
“You’re my fated mate.”
“What does that mean?” She threaded her fingers through his as bubbles dripped down their hands.
“It means that as soon as I met you, I knew you were the one for me. My one and only love.”
/> “Oh,” she said, breathlessly. “How could you tell?”
“Your scent, mostly. But everything about you. The fact that I can barely control myself when you’re around. And my bear made it pretty clear.”
“Does it talk to you?”
“Yes. In my mind. It gives me messages. Kind of like an intuition, but louder.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Whatever you want. You are the most important thing in my life. I’d do anything for you, Candice.”
“My vacation from work is almost over.” She looked back at him, her eyes big.
“Stay here. Marry me. You can paint to your heart’s content, and we can be together.”
“Wyatt, you want to marry me?”
“Of course I do. I want to be with you always. Start a family. Fill the house with cubs and grow old with you.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. Wyatt’s heart thudded. Did she not share his feelings? He’d been sure that she did.
“Say yes,” he said in a gravelly voice.
“Yes,” she said, turning around to face him. She leaned over his body and kissed him hard on the lips, wrapping her arms around his neck. Her slick breasts pressed against his chest, and he was instantly hard.
Chapter Twenty
Wyatt lifted Candice out of the bathtub and carried her into his bedroom, dripping water across the hardwood floors. Her heart sang as his big arms enfolded her. They climbed under the patchwork quilt on his bed, still wet and warm.
She inhaled his masculine scent, musky and bold like the outdoors. His mouth claimed hers, and his tongue pressed between her lips. He climbed on top of her, his hard cock pressed against her stomach. Wyatt growled into her neck as he squeezed her breasts and nipped at her ear.
“I want to make you mine,” he said in a low rumble.
“I am yours,” she whispered, running her hands up and down his muscled back.
“I want to claim you as my mate. Put the mating bite on you.” His teeth grazed her skin as his cock pushed against her soaking wet opening.