But it was blowing a gale and the snow was falling thick and fast, and even the forest didn’t offer much protection from the storm. The snow had managed to work its way into the heart of the pines and formed a layer a few inches thick on the ground that made it hard going. He wasn’t a cougar or a wolf, wasn’t nimble on his feet like that breed of shifter. Maintaining his footing was requiring constant focus, and it was making him grouchy.
Knox muttered things beneath his breath beside him, grumbling about Saint and the female.
Lowe glanced across at his brother, reached out when the need to calm him became too great and laid a gloved hand on his wide shoulders.
Knox’s stormy blue eyes slid to him and then he huffed, faced forwards again and growled. “Can’t see shit in this weather.”
Lowe knew the snow wasn’t the reason Knox was in a foul mood. He wasn’t happy about being sent away by Saint either, but he would do as his alpha ordered. He preferred to go with the flow rather than cause any aggravation, unlike Knox. Knox had wanted to fight Saint when he had ordered them to prepare the lodge, but Lowe had calmed him down.
“Don’t know how you can be so relaxed about this. It isn’t right. Saint’s head isn’t on straight where this female is concerned,” Knox rumbled and kicked at a fallen branch, sending it flying out of his way.
Lowe smiled tightly. He might be calm on the surface, but his bear side was as grumpy as Knox. His more human side and his bear one had always been polar opposites. He wasn’t sure that part of him knew how to be calm. It was always easily agitated, always alert, and right now it was uneasy.
Something didn’t feel right, and he wasn’t talking about Saint and the cougar female now.
He glanced around the woods, peering through the endless sea of trunks.
Something didn’t feel right in the valley.
He couldn’t put a name to it, but it had him on edge and had his bear side restless, constantly scanning the area trying to figure out what was wrong. He glanced at Knox again, torn between mentioning it and keeping it to himself. His younger brother would only shrug it off and put it down to Saint and their frigid trek to the lodge.
And the fact they were all awake in the dead of winter.
An image of his bed popped into his head, heavy with warm furs and stacked with soft pillows.
He growled, aching to crawl under the layers of sheets and sleep.
Beside him, Knox chuckled. “Thinking about somewhere warm and dry, too?”
Lowe nodded. “Maybe once we’re done getting the place set up, we can bed down at the lodge.”
“Fuck, that sounds good.” Knox rolled his shoulders and huffed again, his breath fogging in the air as he glared at the snow that made it through the trees and swirled towards them. His dark blond eyebrows knitted hard. “Get out of this shit. Get the lodge ready. Get a few drinks in us, maybe thaw a steak or two and hit the sack… away from the noisy cougars.”
That sounded more than good. It sounded heavenly.
Their noisy neighbours were the reason they were in this mess, had woken him, Knox and Saint from their winter sleep with some kind of pride celebration. Knox suspected it was a wedding. Well, if their alpha had anything to do with it, it was going ahead without one of the cougars.
Saint hadn’t exactly handled the rude awakening with decorum.
The whole affair had agitated Lowe’s bear side even further and had irritated Knox to the point where he wasn’t thinking straight. Lowe glanced at his brother, feeling the weight of responsibility settling on his shoulders. He needed to calm Knox, to ease him down, and he knew just the way to do it.
Lowe focused on mentally preparing those steaks in his head, trying to remember what they had in storage up at the lodge. There were three things his brother needed in order to relax, and all three awaited them at the quiet lodge.
Steaks. Whiskey. Sleep.
His bear side groaned at the latter.
All he wanted was to go back to bed, to sleep the winter away as he did every year. All he wanted was for things to remain peaceful at Black Ridge. But here he was, trekking through the snow, battling the adverse weather conditions, because his damned alpha had gotten it into his head that stealing a female from the cougars as revenge for waking his pride from their winter sleep was a grand plan.
Gods, Lowe should have told him to take her back the second Saint had marched into the Ridge with her.
He had wanted to, but Saint was his alpha, and he was a good one. The big male had taken care of him and Knox, had provided a home for them when they had badly needed one, and had brought them into the pride.
A pride that might be makeshift, mostly filled with bears gathered from various clans, but it was a pride nonetheless.
A family.
One that felt as if it was stronger and meant more to those in it because it was made up of bears who had come together to live as a group. The bond between him and Saint, and Maverick and Rune, felt stronger than the bonds he’d had with bears who had been part of his old pride, ones tied together by blood and tradition. Those bonds had been flimsy, had snapped with only the slightest pressure, leaving him and Knox without a home.
A home they had found with Saint and the others. A family that shared a powerful bond that felt unbreakable. He would do anything for the males in his pride and he knew they would do anything for him.
And that was why he was freezing his ass off trekking to a remote lodge.
Saint needed him to do this, and so he would do it.
“Think maybe we have any butter in the freezer?” Lowe’s mouth watered as he thought about a nice perfectly cooked rib-eye brushed with butter and cracked black peppercorns.
Knox chuckled again, the warm sound soothing Lowe. His brother’s mood was improving even if the weather wasn’t. He gritted his teeth and braced as a blast of icy wind battered him, dug his heavy boots in to keep himself upright. When it passed, he brushed the snow off his black jacket and trudged onwards.
“Typical of you to think about the food first.” Knox jabbed him on his arm. “I was thinking about the whiskey.”
“Aren’t you always?” Lowe slid him a look, grinned at him. “Bourbon glaze might be nice.”
“Oh gods, honey and bourbon glazed steak.” Knox smacked his lips together, his blue eyes losing their focus as a dreamy look crossed his face.
Knox had never been able to resist either honey or what he called the ‘dark nectar of the gods’. Once, one particularly fine and long summer back when they had been younger, he had witnessed Knox in his bear form running from a swarm of bees with half a hive stuck on his head and chunks of honey flying from him in all directions.
He had never let his brother live that one down.
He had honestly never seen anything funnier than a five-hundred-plus pound grizzly thundering along a wooded riverbank trying to outrun angry bees.
“You know I can practically feel you thinking about it. Quit it,” Knox growled in his direction.
Lowe fought the smile that wanted to curve his lips as his brother glared at him, pulled a face and tugged his black scarf up to his nose when he couldn’t hold back the smile any longer.
“Two honey and bourbon glazed steaks coming right up.” Lowe patted his brother on his back again, hoping he wouldn’t hold on to his bad mood.
“Make it four.” Knox rubbed his stomach through his own black winter jacket. “I’ll be fiendishly hungry by the time we get there.”