Sierra had never seen him angry like this. If there was anything politicians were good at it was maintaining their composure. But Joe was pissed.
A few miles down the highway, he eased off the gas and pulled on to the shoulder.
“Let me see your arm,” he said.
Using a first aid kit they found in the glove box, Joe expertly cleaned the wound and bandaged it.
“You’re going to need stitches.” he muttered. “The closest emergency room is a few miles from here. You can tell them it was a raccoon. They won’t ask too many questions. I can’t go in with you.”
“It’s okay,” she assured him.
“If someone recognized me-”
“It’s alright.” she said. “I understand.”
Joe suddenly punched the steering wheel.
“Why did you follow me?!” he shouted at her. “Do you have any idea the damage you’ve caused?!”
“I thought you were stealing from charity!” she shouted back at him. “And kidnapping children! And running illegal bear fights!”
He stared at her for a moment, then burst out laughing.
“Actually,” he said between bits of laughter, “I am running illegal bear fights. You got me there. But I promise you the participants are willing.”
He pulled the truck back on to the highway.
“So how did Brenda get out of her cage?” he asked her.
“She told me bad people kidnapped her.”
He chuckled.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do with that conniving little girl.”
“Do you have to keep her locked up?”
“Only during the full moon and a couple of days before and after.” he explained. “The shifting can be spread with a bite, but it’s also genetic, so all the kids get it. Most of them don’t shift for the first time until after puberty, but it starts sooner in some. The young ones can’t control when they shift, and they don’t have control of themselves in bear form. So they have to stay locked up to keep people safe. But you try telling a six-year-old she can’t go to the fight with all the other kids.”
“And you’re all…shifters? Everyone in that town.”
Joe nodded.
“We call it Sleuth. That’s the scientific term for a group of bears. We built it for the kids. People needed to be able to raise their children away from prying eyes. Social Services tends to question parents keeping their teenagers in a cage five days a month.”
Sierra struggled to process all of this.
“What about the charity money?” she asked.
“It was my money.” he replied. “I’ve got quite a bit more of it then the IRS is aware of. I funneled it into the charity, then hired one of the pack as the accountant for Camp Basnight. She takes a very big salary and uses the money to buy things for Sleuth. And then none of it links back to the Governor of Washington.”
Sierra laughed suddenly, remembering.
“A payroll advance for a camp employee with a sick kid.”
“I told you it was an honest answer,” he said with a sly smile. “You don’t give me enough credit.”
“Yeah well, there was an awful lot of omission in that honest answer.”
“What can I say? I’m a politician.”
They both laughed at that. Joe shot her a look of amazement.
“You’re being remarkably calm about this.”
“What can I say? I’m an investigative journalist. I ask questions first and ponder the implications later.”
They had reached the hospital.
“I’ll have a car sent to take you home. I can return the truck to Enterprise.”
“Okay.” Sierra reached for the door handle.
“Wait,” Joe reached for her hand. “You understand you can’t tell anyone about this. They’re good people in Sleuth…mostly. They’re just scared. And they don’t allow outsiders.”
Sierra paused before answering.
“Joe, am I in danger?”
“I’m their Alpha.” he assured her. “They wouldn’t do anything without my say so. And I told them to let you walk away.”
“Okay,” she said, not entirely reassured.
“Sierra,” he said, looking into her eyes, “I promise you, I won’t let anyone hurt you. I will keep you safe.”
He kissed her gently.
“You should go.” he said. “Get that stitched up. I’ll see you soon.”
Sierra kissed him again before climbing out of the truck and walking into the emergency room, hoping they wouldn’t ask her how she’d managed to get scratched by a raccoon.
CHAPTER 5
The emergency room staff bought the raccoon story without question.
Molly, however, did not.
“But it’s so deep!” she objected. “And how did it scratch you anyway? When did this happen?”
“I told you,” Sierra lied, “when I was out in the woods.”
“Where you say you found nothing.”
“That’s right.”
“Then, why did you get out of the truck to be mauled by raccoons if there was nothing out there?”
“I thought I saw something so I got out to take a look, but I was wrong. There was nothing. And then this raccoon just charged.”
“You’re lying to me, and you’re bad at it. If there was nothing out there, then why didn’t you get home until 10:00 am?
“Because…because…”
An idea seized her.
“Because I met Joe out there.”
“What?”
“There’s no big secret thing. He just goes out there for the quiet. I ran into him and…spent the night with him.”
Molly eyed her suspiciously.
“I still don’t believe you.” she decided.
“He was a birthmark on his inner thigh shaped like an apple.”
Molly looked her in the eye, running her human lie detector on her.
Fortunately for Sierra, she didn’t have to lie about that part. She’d seen it. It was just that circumstances that were a little different. Molly grinned.
“You slut!” she declared with glee. “You have to tell me all about it.”
“No, I don’t.” Sierra headed for her bedroom. What she had to do right now was sleep.
Joe came by the apartment unannounced the next day. Thankfully it was Sierra who answered the door.
“Hi.” she greeted him, and stood on tiptoe to kiss his check. Quickly, she whispered into his ear, “Molly thinks we had sex in the woods.”
He grinned at her before sliding on his poker face.
“Hi Joe!” Molly called out to him. “Just wondering for no particular reason, do you have any birth marks?”
After Joe had satisfactorily answered Molly’s questions, they escaped into her bedroom. Sierra shut the door behind them.
“Well that was horrific.” she said.
“That’s quite the cover story, Sierra.” Joe smiled seductively.
He moved closer to her, pushing her up against the door.
“You sure you can keep her convinced?”
He kissed her neck and wrapped his hands around her waist, sending shivers down her spine.
“Maybe it would be easier to lie about it if we actually made love.”
His hands slid up her shirt. He toyed with one nipple between his thumb and forefinger.
“It could be easier.” She agreed breathlessly.
“Besides,” he said as he fingered the top button of her jeans, “It’s completely unfair that you’ve seen me naked and I haven’t seen you.”
He unzipped her pants and tiptoed his fingers towards her clit.
Summoning an enormous amount of will power, Sierra reached her hand down and stopped him.
“How about you take me to dinner first? One where you don’t have to leave half way through.”
“How about dinner after?” he replied hungrily, pressing the bulge of his erection against her.
She pushed him away and sat down on the bed.
“Nope,” she said. “Dinner first. And a movie. And then maybe I’ll let you see me naked.”
“You know most women don’t say no to me.”
“I am not most women.” she replied.
Joe sighed. “No. You are not. I suspect that’s why I like you.”
*
This time he took her out for steak.
Joe was noticeably more at ease here then he had been at La Petite Maison. He relaxed back into his chair, laughed easily at the waiter’s jokes, and gave the guy manning the grill a backbreaking hug. They each got a pint of stout and a thick porterhouse steak. Joe told the waiter he’d like his, “as rare as you’ll make it.”
When the waiter was out of earshot Sierra asked Joe, “Do you eat raw meat?”
Joe chuckled.
“Only in bear form. But I do like my meat a little less cooked then humans seem to.”
Sierra’s mind reeled at his use of the word humans. She was trying very hard to reconcile shifters into her view of the world. Sometimes she could accept it. Other times, in spite of all she’d seen, the logic part of her brain ran screaming from the notion that a person could sometimes be a bear. It felt more like a dream than something she had actually witnessed.
“You don’t consider yourself human?” she asked.
“I’m not human, Sierra.”
“But…you don’t think of it like sometimes you’re human, and sometimes you’re a bear?”
They switched their conversation to a banal one about the weather as their waiter returned with their steaks. Joe took a bite of the bright red meat before answering.
“There’s more to it than just a penchant for rare steak. There’s other ways we’re different from humans.”
“Such as?”
“I heal faster. I’m stronger. Better able to help damsels in distress lift their hybrid’s out of the mud. My body temperature runs a little hotter and my heart rate a little faster. I don’t age.”
Sierra choked on her beer.
“What?” she sputtered.
“The young ones continue to age until about twenty or so then stop. The ones that were bitten, like I was, just freeze in place.”
Sierra found herself grasping the table as if it would keep the world from spiraling out of control.
“So you’re 46…forever.”
“Actually, I’m 34 forever. Which reminds me, I need to start dying my hair gray again.”
Joe noticed her reaction. He took her hand and smiled at her in a bemused sort of way.
“Do you want to talk about the weather again?”
“No!” Sierra said, annoyed at herself for not keeping it together. “I can handle this.”
“Never doubted it for a moment.”
Sierra took another long swig of her beer as a realization dawned on her.
“How long have you been 34?” she asked him.
“Since 1916. I stay in one place as long as I can, but sooner or later the neighbors notice I don’t get any older. I’ve faked my death four times, then gone back later pretending to be my own offspring and inherited everything. It’s been fairly lucrative for me.”
Suddenly, the part of her mind that wanted to run screaming took a backseat to pure journalist fascination.
“What were the 20’s like?” she wanted to know.
For the rest of dinner he regaled her with stories about prohibition, the Great Depression, and both World Wars. He’d been to Woodstock, owned one of the first televisions, and ran a speakeasy. He promised to show her photographs later that he kept hidden away in his safe. Sierra found herself wishing she could write his story. There were, or course two small problems with that: she had promised not to tell anyone and, also, no one would ever believe it.
By the time they got to dessert, Sierra had asked so many questions Joe began to protest.
“That’s it.” he said. “I’ve spent the whole meal talking about me. You have to tell me about you now.”
Suddenly feeling as though her own life story paled in comparison, she did her best to give him the highlights anyway. Growing up in Visalia. High School. Family drama. Moving to Olympia to take the job with The Post and meeting Molly. He listened to every word with the same level of fascination she had held for his stories. He asked questions. He wanted to know everything about her.
They left the restaurant holding hands and headed to the movies. Impulsively, they told the teenager at the counter to give them two tickets to whatever started in the next five minutes. That turned out to be Ouija. Not having the highest hopes about a movie based on a board game, they got a big bucket of popcorn, and box of Junior Mints, and settled in to their seats anyway.
The movie turned out to be, if possible, worse than their expectations. The plot was predictable and failed to be scary and the array of pretty teenage actors brought general shame upon their profession. So it wasn’t long before they lost interest in the movie entirely and decided to make out in the darkened theater instead. Sitting in the last row, they lost themselves in each other.
Joe leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Do we really have to sit through the rest of this?”
They spilled out of the theater and raced to the car laughing, having made it through an admirable 37 minutes of the movie. Joe gunned the Range Rover to the Governor’s mansion.
They stole one more long kiss in the driveway before straightening their hair and walking inside, where they were greeted by what felt like an obscene number of staffers. Sierra had never felt more conspicuous then she did walking up the stairs to the Governor’s bedroom with about eight sets of eyes on her.
“Don’t you hate having all these people around?” she whispered to him.
“Just wait till you try Rose’s strawberry pancakes in the morning. You won’t be bothered by the staff anymore.” he replied.
Joe’s bedroom was elegantly appointed and larger than her whole apartment. At its center was a beautifully carved oak four-poster bed. As soon as the door shut behind them they made straight for it.
Joe pulled her dress over her head, leaving her in just her bra, panties, and heels. Sierra unbuttoned his shirt, revealing the smooth, sculpted muscles on his chest. He started at her heel and made his way up her leg, kissing and caressing the whole way. Sierra moaned as he gently nibbled on her inner thigh. He kissed the lace on her panties before ripping them off in one sudden motion. Sierra gasped and some tiny part of her brain considered protesting. But that voice was drowned out as he slid his hands up to her breasts and unhooked her bra. He gazed down at her naked body for a moment, drinking her in.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked him breathlessly.
He grinned wickedly and unzipped his jeans.
Sierra’s phone started to ring, blaring rudely out of her purse by the door.
“Sorry, just give me a minute.” Sierra said.
“Are you seriously going to answer that?” Joe asked incredulously.
Sierra climbed off the bed and walked over to her purse.
“What can I say? I’m married to my job.”
But it wasn’t work on the caller ID, it was Molly.
Sierra answered the phone.
“Not a good time Molly.” she said.
On the other end of the line Molly sobbed hysterically.
“Molly? Molly, calm down. Tell me what’s wrong.”
CHAPTER 6
Joe drove her back to her apartment. Sierra’s throat went dry as she saw the flashing lights on the police cars out front. Inside two cops were asking Molly questions. An EMT was hovering over her, applying an ice pack to the massive bruise blooming on her right eye. The blow had split her eyebrow down the middle in a jagged line now held together with butterfly bandages.
The apartment was trashed. The glass-topped coffee table had been flipped over, leaving glittering shards all over the carpet. There was a hole in the wall where the assailant had thrown a can of paint against it. The bright red paint had splattered everywhere, stan
ding out starkly against the white walls. The TV had also been knocked over and smashed in. He had taken a knife to their couch, exposing the stuffing. Worse yet, he’d done the same to several of Molly’s paintings, turning her works of art into shredded strips of painted canvas.
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