He didn't have time to get embarrassed, though.
To his astonishment, Kara came hurtling towards him and threw her arms around him in a hard hug.
"Oh my God," she exclaimed, her breath brushing his neck and raising a delightful shiver that ran straight down his spine to his cock. "I thought I was gonna get eaten for sure."
What the heck do you say when the woman that you're head over heels in love with wraps herself around you and thanks you for saving her life?
Mike had a brief, extremely graphic fantasy that began with kissing her—hard—and ended with both of them naked and panting on a bed of springy grass.
"That's it," he growled, his bear still close enough to the surface to roughen the edges of his voice. "I'm not letting you out of my sight until we're safely back in Fairbanks."
He slid his arms around her. Only then did it truly hit him how close he'd just come to losing her.
It had been such a close call. If he hadn't been following her… If he'd been a little slower to shift… He bent his head and rested his cheek against the top of Kara's head, letting the terror of the near-miss drain away.
Her hair was soft against his cheek. She reeked of fresh terror and stale smoke, underlaid with coffee, maple syrup, and her own sweet, unique scent that combined healthy woman and coyote.
She trembled as she leaned against him, nestling her forehead into the dip between his collarbone and his shoulder. He heard—and felt—her heart pounding furiously with the aftermath of her near-miss.
He and Kara stood locked together in an embrace for a long time, until her heart and her breathing slowed. Mike wasn't in any hurry. She was warm and soft, and he had dreamed about holding her like this for so long.
He didn't want this moment to end, because he didn't know if it would ever happen again.
* * *
Once the dizzying rush of terror passed, Kara became acutely aware that Mike was naked, as usual post-shift.
It was considered extremely bad form to stare—or worse, leer—at another shifter when they were in human shape, clad in their own skin and nothing else.
Still, Kara had taken the opportunity to catch an eyeful just now.
Wow, he's hunkalicious! she thought.
And he was. Smooth, tanned skin with a wide chest that looked hard enough to bounce rocks off, and a lean torso that sported an impressive six-pack…Wow.
He really needs to volunteer for one of those firefighter charity calendars. I bet his hometown fire department would be all over that.
Up to this point, she'd never actually seen Mike naked, even though she'd seen every member of her team shift into their beast shapes at one point or another.
How have I miss seeing Naked Mike until now?
Without making a big fuss of it, Mike had always seemed to complete his shifts out of sight, emerging fully dressed afterwards from wherever he'd cached his clothes.
Because she was ridiculously shaky after her close call with 800 pounds of enraged Mama Grizzly, Kara let him hold her.
It felt good—she liked the way he smelled, and her inner coyote found his warm skin against her cheek and the slow stroke of his hand down her back extremely soothing. It wanted to snuggle even closer to him…until she became aware that something firm was poking into her belly.
Kara suppressed a giggle but broke the embrace right quick. She stepped back. To his credit, he immediately released her. Then, adorably, his face flushed dark red, and his hands flew to his groin to cover his impressive hard-on.
She was weirdly flattered and bit back on her impulse to tease him about it, as was the coyote way. She didn't want to hurt his feelings, not right after he'd saved her from becoming a lunch of coyote al dente.
Then Mike's eyes widened, and his head whipped around in the direction he'd come from.
An instant later, Kara heard it, too—a high screech that sounded like tent fabric ripping.
"Shit. Gotta go!" Mike spun and sprinted back the way he'd come, leaving Kara to admire his extremely fine, tight ass before he vanished into the trees.
Kara stood in the sunlit meadow for a moment longer, trying to digest everything that had just happened.
She scanned her surroundings cautiously, straining all her senses for any further signs of danger.
But Mama Grizzly and the cubs appeared to be well and truly gone, and any other critters in the neighborhood had vanished during the confrontation.
With a sigh, Kara walked over to her pack-out bag.
She squatted, slipped her arms through the extra-sturdy leather-reinforced shoulder straps she'd sewn, and rose to her feet in a smooth motion. She wriggled around a bit to settle the bulky pack into place before fastening the wide, padded hip and chest straps.
Then she set off, pushing aside branches as she followed the trail of Mike's scent into the woods.
Chapter 5
Jury-Rig
Mike stopped and stared in disbelief at the scene in front of him.
An all-too-familiar female grizzly with a blonde face and neck was occupied in ripping through his stash of candy while her two cubs busied themselves with the plastic packets of main course, peanut butter, ketchup, crackers, and jam from his MREs.
His sleeping bag lay in shreds on the forest floor, clumps of feathers scattered across the carpet of fallen conifer needles like a dusting of snow, with downy tufts snagged on nearby tree trunks. Torn MRE and chocolate bar wrappers lay scattered around the bears, glistening like sequins in the patches of sunlight filtering through the canopy of branches overhead.
Worst of all, his pack-out bag, a big, frameless backpack that Mike had had custom-made for himself at the smokejumper base in Denver, had been ripped nearly in two.
All smokejumpers were experts at building, sewing, and patching their own gear. Mike had designed and constructed the big bag to carry a volume and weight of gear that would have blown out the seams of any commercially manufactured backpack.
However, the heavy-duty woven nylon fabric hadn't been any match for Mama Grizzly's huge, curved claws when she had caught the scent of his rations.
At the sight of the destruction, rage swept over him in a blood-red wave.
Mike had spent his life trying to control his temper—both the man's anger and the bear's rage. But the wanton destruction of the bag that he'd spent endless hours constructing, sewing, and testing, coupled with his bear's agitation from the earlier confrontation, shattered his carefully built self-control like a tsunami smashing a building into matchsticks.
"You jerks!" he bellowed. "Leave my stuff the hell alone!"
Mama Grizzly and her two cubs paused in gobbling down his food. Their heads came up and they stared at him, clearly startled.