Jacob was already concentrating on her. He was coming to rescue her.
She didn't need saving. In that split second she thought, No! Go! Horses! I've got this!
Right before her attacker's fist connected with her jaw.
Bright lights exploded in her field of vision. The world turned wrong side out and spun around.
She dropped to her knees, gagging at the pain in her jaw. Both hands flew up to her face. That was enough to stop her attacker's boot from connecting with her mouth. He hit her hands instead.
Her eyes streamed tears. She could see just well enough to throw herself back, out of range of the next kick.
As she landed on her butt in the dirt, she saw Jacob ripple.
And change.
She saw the air around him seem to boil. Saw his face twist with savagery.
The bear pushed through the veneer of humanity. The grizzly roared, up on its back feet. Giant, killing paws with razored talons struck so fast she barely saw him move.
She screamed. The man who had hit her wavered briefly and fell, one hand pressed against his face.
His face. Jacob hadn't gone for the throat.
She let out a breath. There were two other men, both armed with baseball bats. But when she blinked away the pain and could see, the other men were already in custody, held between security guards, ranch hands, cowboys and a pissed off looking sheriff's deputy she didn't know.
A second sheriff's deputy was screaming into Jacob's face.
Jacob's mostly human face. The lips were still dark. The canine teeth still looked a little like fangs when his lip curled back. His hands couldn't be that big in human form. Could they?
She gulped, swallowing convulsively. Abruptly she could hear. The sheriff's deputy was shouting, "I want you out of this town," and Jacob responding, "We're here for the rodeo," and the reply, "I don't give a good damn what you're here for, I want you out."
Jacob's face was stony as he stalked over to her, faded jeans dusty, pointed, well-used boots kicking the dust. "Mind if I check on the victim?" he snarled back at the cop.
The deputy bent sharply, plucked his own sage green hat from the ground, and smacked the dust off against his thigh. "I don't give a good damn what you do, either," he snarled. "Take the whore with you."
With that he was out the chute, his silhouette disappearing quickly toward the arena and the city beyond, before Jacob could react to the last thing he'd said.
Jacob's hands were gentle on her as he helped her to her feet. Cara instantly tried to pull way.
"Fire," she said, surprised her voice sounded normal.
"Yeah, we've got that," Jacob said. He wasn't meeting her eyes. His attention was trained on her jaw. "Turn your head a little." He put one gentle hand on her shoulder and the other on her jaw and manipulated the jaw.
She stiffened, but the pain wasn't what she expected. Rather than a dislocation or break, it felt sore. Like a bruise.
Like she'd been hit.
She raised one hand and rubbed it herself. The pain made her head swim. All right, well, don't get cocky.
"Hold on there, girl," Jacob Tyrell said, and caught her neatly as she started to topple over.
I am not passing out.
And she didn't, either. Instead she found herself looking up into big, golden eyes. So much time spent wanting this, to be in his arms, to look into those brilliant eyes. His jaw was nearly square, his mouth made for self assured grins. His face was angular. The only thing of the bear she could see within it was the eyes.
She could stay here forever.
There was no time.
"Fire," Cara said.
This time he listened. Apparently she sounded enough like somebody not planning to pass out. He let go of her, watched her for about three seconds, then nodded to himself at the same time he turned and ran for the stables.
She was right on his heels.
The stables were a mass of flame. Horses screamed. Men shouted to each other. From beyond the arena Cara could hear emergency vehicles coming.
Her attention instantly switched. She focused on the stables. Owen Hutch and a man she didn't recognize were fighting to get a horse out of a stall. The exit was blocked by a fallen beam and the back of the stall catching flame. The horse screamed, its eyes rolling.
"We can lever that out," Jacob shouted.
"Can't get through," the other man replied.
Owen didn't speak but hammered at the stall gate with his shoulder.
Cara sized it up in a heartbeat. She could slip through the opening in the gate. She could use leverage to open the gate far enough to get the horse out or the men in. It wouldn't require upper body strength.
She was through the gap before anyone realized she was there. Four male voices shouted.
She yelled back, "I need something for leverage," and heard Jacob's voice. "Shovel. Wait!" Thick canvas gloves came over the gate to her.
She ducked, caught them, ducked the horse, said, "Easy, easy," and knew neither she nor the animal was going to listen to that. Then she had the shovel in her protected hands. The heat of the metal was still bad. Cara worked fast, putting the handle through the gate and bending all her strength to it.
Nothing happened.
"No!" She shouted.
Jacob shouted back. "Do that one more time and be ready."
She didn't bother asking. The horse was more frantic than ever, the fire consuming the hay fast and starting to move out along the wood stall. She bent her back to the lever.
Jacob hit the gate with everything he had.
The gate gave. At the same time Jacob darted to one side out of the path of the horse and Cara went to the other.
The animal was gone in an instant.
"Go!" Jacob shouted, just as a beam came down.
Cara screamed. The thing wasn't on fire but it had to weigh hundreds of pounds.
Before it caught him, he was ursine again. She started back but he scooped her off her feet. The beam glanced off him.
They were out.
Two of the stalls burned. None of the horses were injured, and none of the people. Jacob and Cara stood together with Owen Hutch and Eddie Tyrell, making a report. The EMTs checked out Cara's mouth and jaw and told her it would be a good idea to follow up with her doctor but otherwise she didn't even seem to have much smoke inhalation.
Made sense. The fire hadn't been smoldering and the smoke had vented out the arena. Even so, Eddie, tall, thin, with a brown face meant for the desert, kept asking her if she was all right.
Jacob kept watching her. Something about his eyes kept her on edge. The eyes were gold, and he was intense. Fiery. Watching her like she was his.
For the first time, she was afraid of him. At 17 she watched him shift to bear in her defense and fell in love.
At 22 she almost felt afraid. The power, the violence, the brute strength of the bear left her shaky. He'd held back. He hadn't killed her attacker. He could have. The man would have killed all of them and thought nothing of it.
The knowledge didn't help.
She was afraid.
But when the police finished their questions and the sheriff's deputy finished telling them to get out and the EMT finished with Cara, Jacob came to find her.
He'd held her briefly before. That didn't seem enough to explain this. But the hunger in his eyes silenced her. He took her hand, helping her down from the open back of the ambulance. He asked with a look if she'd go with him.
She answered by taking his hand and letting him lead.
One end of the arena was a mass of fire investigators, firefighters, cowboys and bears, and the random spectator or two not quite convinced the show was canceled for the day. Owen Hutch was there with Mary Beth Chaudett and her father, the CEO of the circuit. From a distance she saw Eddie Tyrell, clan leader in Holden's absence (and now in Colby's).
They didn't go that way.
They went in the other direction. Down one of the halls that branched like asteri
sks off the main stalls in the underground part of the arena. They kept going until they were somewhere the voices didn't echo back to them.
Somewhere alone.
He didn't ask then. She knew he would stop if she protested. She had no intention of protesting. Her fear flared up.
She let it.
He put one hand on her throat, caressing where she'd been struck, her jaw, the line of her throat, her shoulder, then let his hand drop, caressing her breast through the delicate summer top she wore.
Her back hit the wall. She reached for him, snaked her arms around his neck, turned her face up to his.
His mouth was hot, his tongue like cinnamon in her mouth, spicy and hot. He licked into her mouth with the first kiss, then pulled back and kissed her sweetly, his lips on hers, bracketing her mouth. He was hot as the fire that had just stopped burning.
Under his denim snap-front shirt his chest was thick with muscle, his shoulders broad, the caps of the delts defined like an anatomy chart.
Just as fast as he had started, he stopped, pulling away from her. He looked a little confused. "I don't usually," he said and left it like that.
So did she. "I think." She stopped, as if that were the end of the sentence, then said, "I probably should go home."
"What were you doing here?" He hadn't moved. He wasn't stopping her from going but he wasn't making it easy, either. "Who are you?"
She started to say her name, not that he hadn't heard it a dozen times during the questioning. Jacob held up a hand. "Come on. You know what I'm asking. What were you even doing at the arena at that hour? Are you a reporter?"
"Not hardly. I – " I was stalking you. I fell in love with you five years ago and despite other relationships, can't forget you.
I'm crazy. Probably I should go home now.
But she didn't say any of that. "We met five years ago," she said and tilted her head, waiting to see if he'd remember.
Jacob narrowed his honey colored eyes, considered her, then widened his eyes. "You're the girl with the horse!"
"I'm sure that narrows it down considerably, given what you do!"
He waved that aside. "You were the one with her dad's horse. The one on the road, those guys."
That was her cue to exit. Right? She could tell him she'd just been trying to say thank you, that she'd showed up early because – because? Because it would be easier to find him alone. Not because she knew after years of reading about him that he often arrived early before everyone else and stayed later.
Only she didn't. The morning's events had made her bolder. "What was that all about?"
He blinked. "You heard what I told the law." His thumbs stuck in the belt loops of his jeans, he leaned against one of the arena walls. He looked like an advertisement for the male ideal.
"I heard what you told the law," she agreed, nodding. "Now tell me the truth."
That made him laugh. "You don't believe in horse thieves, darlin'?" It came out a drawl.
She didn't respond. And finally he sighed. "You know the Tyrell clan is a family of shifters." At her nod, he said, "What do you know about the disappearances of shapeshifters throughout the community?"
"I've done some reading. Gemma Thomas was the first reporter to cover it."
He nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah. Holden came unhinged on that one. And after she broke the story, Colby himself started going looking into it." He looked grim, his mouth set tight.
Cara's mind flashed back to her reading.
Colby was Jacob's cousin, just like Holden was. Colby was also law enforcement, at least when he was home in Texas. Holden was the one looking into the disappearances, at least at first, leaving Eddie in charge of the group of rodeo bears. But ever since the articles broke, Colby had been seriously looking into the disappearances too, and –
"Colby's gone missing, hasn't he?" she asked.
When he asked how she knew what she'd just said, Cara got the impression this time Jacob wasn't relaxed about what he was asking. There was nothing casual about his grip on her arm.
Maybe now if she chose to walk off, he wouldn't let her.
"It's not as bad as it sounds," she said. "Can we sit somewhere?" Reaction to the morning's events made her legs shake.
Once they were in a VIP rodeo box in the deserted arena, she looked out over the performance floor and sighed.
When she glanced back at Jacob, the smile she was used to seeing on his face in countless media photographs and online videos was gone. He watched her with suspicion, like he thought she might be a spy.
Probably she could be. But the shapeshifting rodeo bears lived their lives in the spotlight. Why would anyone going after them need a spy?
"The fact that shifters are being hunted – " she held up a hand when he sucked in a breath at the assumption – "Or that something is happening, because they keep disappearing? That's not news. Or rather, it is. It's on TV."
He gave her a long look before he nodded. "But it's usually just that. News. Why do you have such interest that the facts are at the tip of your tongue?"
"They're not," she protested. "All I said was shifters are vanishing and Colby has disappeared, hasn't he? No one's said so," she went on fast, "But no one's seen him in what, a week? Ten days?"
Jacob made a face and ran his hands through his hair, brushing cinnamon colored curls into disarray. "Damn. Yes. Colby's been looking into the disappearances. And no, no one's heard from him in a while, including Gemma."
"She's not writing about it," Cara said instantly.
"No. Holden's at least talked her into that." When she raised her brows he said, "Colby was already out of the circuit, looking for missing clansmen. For missing bears. We're keeping it quiet that he's not checking in."
"How do you know I will?" She couldn't help asking.
"I don't. But you might be able to help us. Didn't you tell the deputy you're mounted posse?"
She shrugged. "Volunteer."
"Then you know the country around here."
"Yes, but – " She squinted. "Did Colby disappear in Nevada?"
"Shifters have vanished everywhere. But yeah, last we heard from Colby, he was out in the county." He looked miserable, staring at his hands where they clasped together between his knees.
Her response was automatic and instant. "How can I help?"
* * *
Chapter Three
"No," Holden said. Loudly. Firmly.
They were back in the arena, working the stalls with the City's repair crew sent to put the stables back together. Jacob had left Cara some distance away.
He shouldn't have bothered. She could hear them both.
"Look, she knows the area. Grew up here. Knows the rural valleys. And now she's mounted posse. Come on, Holden, Colby could be – "
"Colby could be dead," Holden said flatly.
Bear Anchor (BBW Shifter Romance) (FisherBears Book 2) Page 19