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Well, I had to pick something to shield in my naked state and that was it!
I certainly didn’t want to explain why my nipples were hard as diamonds.
“It’s mine,” I said, even as I surrendered the pack. He could have hurt me after I fell, could have done whatever he wanted to, but he hadn’t. He had healed me, instead.
That didn’t mean I had to be a fool and trust him completely.
Ignoring the cheap cellphone I’d picked up on the trip, the first thingWhatsHisNamefocused on after unzipping the pack was the 9mm Hellcat. He expertly dropped the magazine and cleared the round from the chamber, then popped the rounds from the magazine and pocketed them.
“That looks like a lot of money,” he said, returning the empty gun to the pack and handing everything but the bullets back to me.
Rising to his feet, he started walking away. As beautiful as it was, the sight of his bare, muscular back and powerful jean-clad butt and legs leading him away from my location pissed me off.
Seriously, he was just going to up and leave?
I mean, I was naked and really didn’t want him around. But that didn’t mean I wanted him to go, either. For fuck's sake, I was naked, alone, and my damn bullets were in his front right pocket!
Putting a stop to the complaints racing through my head, the stranger bent down and picked up the hoodie I had discarded so I could shift. Somehow, it had managed to not get hooked on the hundreds, if not thousands, of branches on the way down, and he had spotted it when I hadn’t.
Holding the hoodie in front of him like a peace offering, he slowly approached, his gazealmostaverted. Yeah, almost. Even if I couldn’t tell the direction his pupils pointed, he was starting to blush like a virgin in a dildo factory.
I snatched the sweatshirt from him and shoved it roughly over my head, threaded my arms through the sleeves then tried to force the bottom hem to grow a few more inches so he’d see less of my ass and none of the patch of fur between my thighs.
He looked up, his sharp gaze searching the branches for more of my clothing.
“Never heard of anyone double shifting,” he said, his voice aiming for casual and failing.
The phenomenon was nothing to be casual about. For a species already so far out from the norm in the animal kingdom, I was now a big freak for what I had just done. If I’d been back home, in my…in that bastard Henric’s leap, I might well be in chains while everyone argued with how best to kill me and whether I should be experimented on first.
As I processed that thought, another one hit me. What was it my mother had said somewhere mixed in with all her panicked talk? It was something about not being certain Henric wasn't my father until the first time I shifted. My brain had glossed over her words because they hadn't made sense. I was a panther, like my mother. But, just like the panthers in the animal kingdom, there were spots under my skin, and mine were quite visible at the surface, too, little puffs of pale gray circles among the black. Panthers and leopards were basically the same cat.
So that first time I shifted?
It had to have been as a wolf.
“How long you been doing that?” he asked as I remained silent.
“All of five minutes,” I snapped. My stomach churned in a slurry of rocks and acid. The video I had discovered two days earlier had suggested a rare openness among and between different shifters. But how far would such tolerance stretch?
“You steal the money?” the big wolf asked as he came to a stop in front of a massive tree.
I shrugged initially, then answered with just the facts. “My mother gave it to me, along with a new ID. She wrote the name of the town near here on one of the bills.”
With a powerful, vertical jump, he grabbed hold of the bottom limb of the tree, then swung to the next higher limb.
“Does that mean your mother stole it?” he asked from his safe perch above me.
“Depends on who you ask,” I mumbled. “She should lead our group. Not my…not the cathole who does.”
Freeing my pants from a limb about twenty feet up, he dropped them to the ground. I jumped to my feet, still fighting to keep the bottom hem of my hoodie pulled as low as I could, and scampered to where the pants had landed. I slid into them, a way too loud sigh of relief escaping my lips even as my feet complained from the shuffling sprint across rough ground.
“I heard that,” he chuckled. “What’s the cathole’s name and who is he to you?”
“Henric,” I answered. “And he’s the leopard I thought was my father.”
He mumbled something.
“What?” I snapped.
