by Spear, Terry
Nina smiled. He thought maybe she kind of liked that he had been. Little Miss Nina was a surprise at every turn.
"I figured if a canoe was just sitting somewhere not being used, I might as well take the old girl out on an adventure in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area."
"And you had a permit, right?"
He smiled. "I was skipping school. No permit. My foster parents never approved of what I was doing. That's one of the hazards of being raised by humans. I needed to get out and stretch my legs as a cougar. And there was no way to tell them that's what I was out doing. Nothing illegal, but they always suspected that I was up to no good."
"Taking a canoe out on the BWCA without a permit?" She arched a brow, but she was smiling.
"I would have paid to take one out, but they wouldn't let me purchase a permit or go canoeing. They figured I'd be up to mischief."
"There aren't any regular cougars up there, are there?" Nina asked, frowning.
He smiled again. "No, just bears and wolves. Bears treed me a couple of times."
Nina laughed.
"Seriously, I wasn't happy. The second time it happened, two obnoxious cubs climbed up the tree after me."
She laughed again. He loved to hear her laughter.
He smiled. "So I had to wait until momma bear called them down and then I must have sat half the night up in the tree before they finally went scrounging for food and I made it down."
"You couldn't fight the sow."
"No, not when she had two cubs she was caring for. Normally, I'd avoid any confrontation with the wildlife. It's their home. I was just a visitor, enjoying a run in the wilderness, being who I was in my cougar coat."
"You didn't get caught at it, did you?" Nina asked, frowning again.
"Not for borrowing the canoe."
"Ohmigod, as a cougar!"
"Yeah. Some darn campers saw me and chased me all over the place the last time. They posted the sighting of a cougar on the island, because they don't have breeding pairs in the area, and I had to make a hasty retreat to the canoe, shifted, and half-dressed, I paddled out of there."
Nina chuckled. "Oh, don't tell me Bridget saw you in your fur coat."
"Yeah. She broke up with me. She said I was too reckless and she couldn't be with me if I was going to pull stunts like that. I took it pretty hard and left Ely. I'd traveled all over and finally ended up in Colorado, where I knew they had cougars—the regular variety."
"And then you behaved and became a deputy sheriff."
"Not for a while. I didn't have any place to stay. No family. I'm sure my foster parents reported me missing to the police."
"What about Bridget?"
"She'd left for college. She had taken a bunch of college courses and ended up graduating ahead of time. She never knew that I'd left Ely."
"When you met up with her again here?"
"By then, she was with the Cougar Shifter Force and was mated to Travis. We're all friends. I was a deputy sheriff by then."
"But when you arrived in Yuma Town, you were still a teen. What kind of trouble did you get into there?"
"I thought being among cougar shifters would be perfect, I might even meet another she-cat around my age. The problem was I didn't want to tell anyone I was here, to begin with. Not when the police in Minnesota might be looking for me. I lived in an old barn for a while, but I wanted to work and I wanted to be part of the community. Still, I was afraid that someone would send me back to live with my foster parents."
"Not when they weren't cougars like us."
"I agree, but when you're a teen, you don't trust the system. So I was staying in this barn, and I heard a bunch of trucks pull up. Wouldn't you know the farmhouse and barn I was staying in were scheduled for some renovations after the previous owner had passed away so the new owner could sell it."
"So they caught you."
"Yeah. I wasn't willing to run any further. Chase was there with his grandfather, hauling paneling off a truck, and Chase said he smelled a strange cougar in the area. I came out of the barn and said I owned the place. What did they think they were doing on my property?"
Nina laughed. "You are too funny."
"Chase was frowning at me, like he knew I was some phony. But his grandfather, who had raised him after his parents had died in a car accident, was just smiling at me. 'You know, son, I was once your age, and just like you. Grab some boards out of the truck and you can have lunch with us and tell us your story,' Carver Buchanan said. You know, they came from a long line of castle builders in the old days in Scotland. Anyway, Chase looked like he thought I'd be trouble for his grandfather and he was really protective of him. Plus, he didn't think I'd ever figure out a nail from a screw. I proved him wrong, and we became best of friends. They never told my foster parents I was living with them. And I became a member of the community. I worked for Chase's grandfather and lived with them. Then Hal's dad, Roger, and Rick Mueller, who had been Special Forces before he became FBI, convinced us all to join the army. When we finished our military service obligations, we returned. Dan took over as sheriff, made me his full-time deputy, and Hal, and eventually Chase, became his part-time deputies."
"That's so nice that it all worked out for you coming here. It sounds like you made the right move and ended up just where you needed to be. Would you like some hot cocoa?" she asked.
"Yeah sure."
"Whipped cream on top?"
"Yeah. Cats love cream." He followed her into the kitchen and watched her make the cocoa.
Nina finished making the cocoa, poured it into mugs, and topped them with whipped cream. She handed Stryker one of the mugs.
"So tell me, would you have dumped me if you had been dating me?" he asked her.
"Probably."
He laughed, then sighed. "I guess I needed to be where I ended up. As for you?"
"I was like Bridget. I had places to go, needed to get my degree, and joined the FBI."
"You think the canoe bit was a little much," he said, resettling with her in the living room.
"I would have gone canoeing with you, and we would have both been caught on video."
He laughed. "As far as Bridget was concerned, I really liked her in high school. Now, also, that we are both adults. When I was in high school, I loved that she was a cougar like me and I could talk to her about everything that we had to deal with as cougar teens in a human world. But she'd had a loving family, and mine had abandoned me, which meant I had been stuck living with human foster parents." It had been harder on him than if he'd been a regular teen and it had been difficult for Bridget to understand that. But man, he would have loved to have run as a cougar with Nina. She sounded like she had a bit of wild cat in her.
"You don't know that they abandoned you," she gently said. "You want to know where your parents, Henry and Marybeth Hill, are, and why they abandoned you. I'm sure it will happen."
Stryker nearly choked on his cocoa. "How do you know their names?"
* * *
"I'm sorry," Nina said, and she meant it. She couldn't believe she knew some things about Stryker and Dan and Bridget but not other things and that it was about things they didn't already know.
"Wait. Seriously, how do you know their names?" Stryker asked, setting his empty mug on the table.
"Maybe I'm mistaken."
"No, no, how do you know any of this?" He was frowning at her.
She sighed, finished her mug of cocoa, and set it down on the coffee table. "I'm psychic. I have visions. I saw a birth certificate with their names on it and your name as their newborn child. The time of day, date, birth weight, length."
"But that would have happened in the past."
"I don't see the past. I see the future. So I must see your birth certificate at some future date."
Stryker was clearly distraught as he ran his hands through his hair.
"I'm sorry. I see visions, for whatever reason, and I just…I'm sorry. I should have known, if you were raised by foster parents, y
ou probably didn't know who your parents were. Or maybe, they'd even died. But why weren't you adopted by a family? Why didn't anyone take you boys in when you were infants? I would think two healthy male babies would easily have been adopted. And what happened to your parents that they couldn't care for you?"
"That's the question of the century. But wait, I don’t understand why our names would both be Hill, and nobody changed them, if someone had been up to something illegal, like trying to sell us as babies."
“Okay, you’re right about that. They wouldn’t have wanted anyone to learn who you really were.”
“If we’d been stolen, my parents would have solicited the police to find us.”
“I agree. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been easy to hide the fact that two male babies were suddenly given up to someone else. And that was a long time ago. A lot of law enforcement agencies still weren’t communicating with each other very well. I really think we can find out what happened. Are you interested in learning the truth?" She assumed he would be, but maybe he really didn’t want to know what had happened so long ago.
Stryker didn't say anything for a moment, and she reached over and placed her hand on his. "I'll help you if I can. I need to protect my sister, but if I learn anything more about your parents, I'll let you know. Do you have something you might have worn or were swaddled in shortly after you were born that would have your mother's DNA on it?"
"A baby blanket. I should have tossed it a long time ago, but…I just never found the time."
He never wanted to, is what she suspected he really meant. The baby blanket was a tie to his mom and dad, and up until now, their disappearance from his life had been a total mystery. Now he knew a bit of a clue about them. By occupation, he was a deputy sheriff, and she figured he had to solve puzzles. She imagined Leyton, in his field of expertise, would feel the same way.
"Maybe you could give it to me and I might get some feedback from it. What about Leyton? Does he have anything he might have kept that might have had some tie to your parents?"
"Hell, we've never discussed it. DNA!"
"Yes, that's a possibility if it hasn't degraded too much. Before I was undercover with the FBI, I worked in forensics, but then I was working as a genetic genealogist after I left the FBI and helped police and the FBI with solving six murder cases and discovered that a baby's father wasn't her father after he sexually abused her and was arrested for murder. Through my investigation, I was able to locate her biological father. It took me two years to discover the truth. Her real father had taken a genealogical DNA test that was in a database for connecting with ancestors."
“She had been stolen?”
“Yes.”
"But couldn’t you have used your special abilities to find her father quicker?"
"No. My visions usually pertain to something that I'm personally entangled in. Like this business with my sister.”
“And now you’re personally involved with me.” Stryker smiled a little.
She chuckled. “Accidentally. Where had Leyton been raised exactly?"
"White Bear Lake, Minnesota by foster parents also. They weren't cougars either."
She pulled her phone out and looked at a map of Minnesota. "Okay, but you weren't from Minnesota. You were from the state of Wyoming. That's what your birth certificate said."
"Wyoming."
"Yes. But you weren’t in Wyoming any longer, and you weren’t together in Minnesota. So your parents either moved you to Minnesota and somehow you lost them and you and your brother were separated or—"
"Someone else took us there."
"Either they got custody—"
"Or they didn't. Hell."
"There could be a perfectly logical explanation for what had happened," Nina said.
"Or still a sinister one."
Stryker was right about that.
"But the only reason for anyone wanting to steal you would be to sell you to new parents. So you would have been adopted then, not fostered."
"True." Stryker relaxed a little. "So Leyton was born on the fifth of July 1985 at eleven-fifty-eight that night, and I was born on the sixth at three minutes after midnight. You don't see his birth certificate?"
"No, just yours."
“Because you’re involved with me.”
She was amused he’d keep saying that. She was preoccupied with him only as it pertained to finding her sister.
Stryker got up and went to the back door, opened it, and looked in the direction of the traps. "You should have sat on my lap when I was Santa and I would have at least gotten your name and asked you to dinner."
"Ha! I was wanted by the police."
"It would have been my pleasure to have taken you into custody."
She laughed. "Better than me taking you hostage, right?"
"Oh, hell, the guys will rib me about that forever, once they get a chance."
She laughed again, glad he was changing the subject and being more of his humorous self. "It's getting late and—"
"I'll go check the traps and see if we caught any more critters. If so, I'll take care of them, and then let you get some rest. Since you're here looking for your sister, and I'm off, and willing to do anything I can to help you, did you want to come over for breakfast in the morning?"
"Why don't you come here? I just keep feeling like Ava's going to come here. I don't see any visions, but something just keeps nagging at me about my aunt and uncle's place."
"All right. It's a deal. I'll go check the traps."
She watched him trudge through the snow to the traps, but when he turned around and shook his head, she felt a bit of relief. Maybe there were only the four skunks then. She hoped.
He was so good to have helped her out, despite how she'd knocked him out earlier today. She hoped the meals had helped to make up for it. She couldn't believe she'd brought up the business of his birth certificate with him when he'd been clueless about it.
He rejoined her in the house and shut and locked the back door.
She asked, "Are you all right about what I told you?"
"Yeah. It's something both Leyton and I've thought about individually and discussed together from time to time over beers and pizza once we knew we were brothers. Though, you probably noticed we look a lot alike."
"Yes, a lot, though your eyes are a clear blue and his are much more blue-green."
"Like yours," Stryker said.
"Yes."
"Leyton was really bitter about having foster parents who just cashed the monthly checks and weren't the greatest at parenting skills. But it's hard to deal with our kind when they didn't know the turmoil we're in with wanting to run free as cougars. Even so, with our law enforcement jobs, we've looked into what happened to our parents, naturally. But we didn't know our parents' names. Neither one of us knew it was really Hill. Though the baby blanket I have had the name Hill embroidered in one corner and my foster parents just allowed me to use that name. I thought sometimes it was because, if I had any bad genes they didn’t know about, they could say I wasn’t really their kid.”
“You did have unusual genes.” Nina smiled.
“Yeah, wouldn’t they have been shocked. I wonder then if Leyton had his baby blanket with him too and his foster parents just kept his name as Hill also. But then again, we weren't adopted, and then our adoptive parents would have changed our names. You know, I'd see an older man in a store, or walking somewhere, and think he looks like me, that he could be my dad. But I knew, of course, that it was wishful thinking. For a long time when I was growing up, I'd hoped my parents would show up and take me home, and I'd have real cougar shifter parents. But I also resented that they didn't."
Nina ran her hand over Stryker’s arm, understanding how the little lost boy wanted to fit in with his kind, unable to, except when Bridget had been there for him, and then she was gone from his life. Nina was glad he’d made his way here to find his own kind and become one of them.
"Did you need me for anything else?" H
is gaze shifted from her eyes to her lips.
She smiled a little. "A goodnight kiss?"
He smiled a lot and pulled her into his arms. "Now that I can do."
She lifted her chin, wrapped her arms around his neck and smiled up at him. His kisses were totally addictive and when he leaned down to kiss her mouth, he pressed his warm, masculine lips against her mouth, gently at first, then pressuring them to delve into her mouth with his tongue. The intimacy sent delicious shivers of expectation rippling through her body, priming her for more as their tongues connected and he tightened his hold on her. She reminded herself she was only here for her sister, but when did Nina ever do anything for herself? She was always taking care of others, helping others out. This was for her.
She kissed him back with all her heart, as if she was in love with the hot cougar, and she was, just a little from the moment he’d given her such a cute smile while she was taking pictures of him showing off his abs as Santa. Their hearts were racing to the moon, their pheromones whisking around them in a frenzy saying, “Do it! Do it!” And she wanted to, wanted to take him to bed with her, and forget why she was here in the first place. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the moment, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time they kissed.
They finally separated from the kiss, and Stryker’s voice was rough when he said, "If you discover any more skunks out there, and you want me to come and relocate them, don't hesitate to call. I'm always on duty, even when I'm off-duty or on vacation. Otherwise, I'll check the traps in the morning when I come over for breakfast. What time do you want me to come?"
"Six."
He raised his brows, smiling a little.
He might be on vacation, but she wasn’t. She often ran as a cougar first thing when she could and then got to work. "We'll take a run on the wild side before we eat."
His smile broadened. "You've got it." Then he gave her a light kiss on the lips with a promise of more and headed for his Jeep.
She was certainly ready for more of his kisses and watched him go and waved. She went back inside and closed and locked the door. Despite him offering to help her out further if she needed him to, she would not wake him if she learned the traps had caught more skunks in the middle of the night. Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she looked to see where she could take them, if she had to, and remembered Stryker telling her about the ghost town of Anderson. She looked it up and saw it was only a half hour from town. Perfect. No one lived there, but ghosties, according to Stryker, and skunks wouldn't bother them.