Her Wild Hero Page 13

  “Is it that frigging hard to believe a woman wanted to marry me?” he grumbled.

  Kendra shook her head. “No, of course not. It’s just that, if you were engaged, how come you’re not married? I don’t see you as the kind of guy who’d leave a woman at the altar, and I sure as hell don’t see any sane woman leaving you there.”

  He supposed there was a compliment buried somewhere in all that twisted logic, but he had a hard time seeing it.

  “When was this?” she prompted.

  “It was during my senior year at MIT.”

  Her brow scrunched up. “You were in some technical engineering program there, right?”

  At least she’d read that much of his personnel file. “Yeah. I was a dual major, electrical and mechanical engineering.”

  “Was your fiancée an engineering student, too?”

  He shook his head. “Marissa was a political science major. Her family was very rich and very deep into the political scene in Massachusetts. She wanted to get into politics as well. She appreciated my brains and rational outlook on things. I loved her passion and social savvy. We might have been complete opposites, but we were crazy about each other.”

  Back then everything had looked so bright and possible.

  “I’m not completely sure her family was as thrilled about the pairing as we were,” he continued. “Probably thought her future political career would fare better if she married another politician—or at least someone just as rich as she was. But we didn’t care about any of that. Marissa always said I was the one decision in her life that wasn’t about her future career or her family’s image.”

  “Why didn’t it work out?” Kendra asked.

  “We were planning our wedding most of our final semester. Late one night, after class, we were in downtown Cambridge, going over some of the last-minute details with the wedding planner. We were having so much fun that time got away from us, and before we knew it, we were walking down completely empty streets at almost midnight.”

  “Oh God,” Kendra breathed. “I don’t think I like where this is heading.”

  Declan strained his ears, listening to make sure no hybrids had snuck up on them. So far, so good.

  “We were still a half-dozen blocks from the car, walking across a parking lot to save time, when two guys stepped out of the shadows and approached us.”

  He remembered every detail like it had happened yesterday. He remembered smelling something he’d never remembered smelling before—fear. Marissa had been exuding it like a perfume.

  “At first I thought they were just planning to rob us,” he murmured. “I was already reaching for my wallet to give it to them.”

  “But?” Kendra prompted when he stopped.

  “They were looking for more than money. I heard them saying what they were going to do to Marissa after they killed me.”

  “Oh no,” Kendra whispered. “Did you shift?”

  Declan lifted a low-hanging branch for Kendra, then stepped underneath it himself. “What choice did I have? I hadn’t shifted more than once or twice since that first time. I’d completely boxed up that part of me and put it away in the closet, never intending to bring it out again. But when they came at us, one with a knife, the other with a gun, all I could think about was what they were going to do to Marissa.”

  Declan took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe that after this long, the memory was getting to him. Maybe saying it was harder than thinking about it.

  “I tried to keep my claws and fangs in, but I didn’t have enough experience with controlling my shift because I’d refused to ever let it happen. So when it happened, it was pretty bad.”

  “But you said one of them had a gun,” Kendra said. “How did you…?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t even remember exactly what I did. I just shifted and charged the one with the gun. The guy with the knife slashed me, but I didn’t pay any attention. I hit the first one so hard I think he was out cold before he landed on the ground. I turned on the other one, roaring at him so loud he almost crapped himself, but he came at me anyway. I broke his arm and threw him through a car window.”

  “What about Marissa? How did she react?”

  Stopping right there in the middle of the jungle even for a few minutes was dangerous, but Declan needed a moment to get himself together. “She didn’t handle it well. While she knew the two men were violent, she hadn’t heard them whispering about what they were going to do to her. She didn’t even know there was a gun until it was all over. She just saw her fiancé turn into a snarling monster and beat two guys to bloody pulps. When I turned to check on her, she screamed and ran.”

  Kendra’s hand came up to cover her mouth, her eyes full of pain.

  “I tried to go after her, but she only screamed louder and ran faster, so I stopped.” He swallowed hard. “Someone heard the screams and called the cops. They found me there waiting beside the two unconscious men. It took another fifteen minutes to find Marissa. She was hiding behind a Dumpster nearly a quarter mile away. She was so freaked out they couldn’t even get a statement from her.”

  “How did you keep the cops from figuring out what happened?”

  He shrugged. “I really didn’t have to do anything special. The pair had hit several other people over the last few days. Exact same MO, including one sexual assault. The cops took one look at my size and assumed I’d kicked their asses the old-fashioned way. When the punks finally woke up and started talking, everyone thought they were on drugs. Who’d believe a story about an MIT engineering student turning into a monster?”

  Kendra shook her head. “And Marissa?”

  “The cops assumed I told her to run when the attack started and she never told them differently. Actually, she never gave a statement at all. Claimed she couldn’t remember any of it—total PTSD blackout.”

  “What did you tell her?” Kendra asked. “Didn’t she have a million questions?”

  “She didn’t have any questions.” He snorted. “I never saw her again after that night. Her father came over to my apartment the next morning, thanked me for saving his daughter’s life, then gave me Marissa’s engagement ring back and told me she no longer wanted to marry me.”

  Kendra’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding right? You save her life and she dumped you over something as stupid as you being a shifter?”

  Declan tried not to let the words hurt, but they did, because that was exactly why Marissa had left him. “You didn’t see her face when she looked at me…when she saw the real me. The monster she saw terrified her more than the idea of anything those men might have done to her.”

  “That’s crap.” Kendra didn’t even bother hiding her anger. “Did you try to talk some sense into her, remind her you were still the same man she fell in love with, the same man she’d been about to marry?”

  “Of course I did.” This part of the story didn’t hurt nearly as much. Maybe because he had more calluses from it. “After I got everything settled with the police, I drove out to her parents’ place to talk to her, but her father wouldn’t let me see her. One of the maids took pity on me and led me outside to the trash cans. Marissa had thrown out her wedding gown, the invitations, and the wedding favors. I dug a little deeper and found a bag full of all the stuff I’d given her over the previous two years we’d been together. The Valentine’s and Christmas presents, the silly knickknacks guys give their girls, pressed flowers…everything. Any thought I had about us getting back together disappeared right then. I knew it was over.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kendra whispered. “I never knew.”

  “How could you know?” His mouth curved into a wry smile. “I don’t talk about it much…for obvious reasons.”

  For one crazy second, he thought she was going to hug him, but she only took his hand in hers and gave it a squeeze. “No one should have to deal with that. I don’t think I would have handled it nearly as well.”

  Declan looked down at her hand wrapped around his. It felt nice.
“I didn’t handle it all that well.” He scanned the area around them for sounds of trouble, then got her moving again. “I drove straight back to MIT, dropped out, and ran away from the world. My parents thought I was insane when I moved out to Oregon and became a forest ranger.”

  Kendra gave him a sidelong glance. “Why did you move out to Oregon and become a forest ranger? With your engineering background, I thought you’d find something technical.”

  He shrugged as he kept moving. “I didn’t consider myself fit to be around people. I figured if I was going to be an animal, I might as well find a job that allowed me to live with them. And keep me away from humans as much as possible.”

  Kendra moved around in front of him and put her hand on his chest. “You’re still human.”

  “There are times when I’m not so sure of that.”

  Before he realized what she was doing, Kendra went up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. She stepped back and smiled at him. “I’m sure.”

  Then she was walking ahead of him, leaving him unsure about what the hell had just happened. He wasn’t unsure about the effect the little kiss had on him, though. His cheek tingled from the touch of her lips, his heart was thudding, and from the way his vision had tightened all of a sudden, he knew his eyes had shifted. Damn, how was it possible for one little kiss to completely discombobulate him? It wasn’t fair. His head was frigging spinning as he followed her.

  Why the hell had he spilled his whole life story to Kendra? He’d never told a soul about what had happened between him and Marissa.

  Kendra glanced over her shoulder at him. “This is probably a silly question, but do you still love Marissa?”

  “She was a big part of my life…first love and all that,” he admitted. “But no, I’m not in love with her anymore.”

  That was the first time he’d said those words out loud—it felt good. He was still thinking about that when the sounds of crunching leaves and branches pulled him back to the present. Shit. He grabbed Kendra and held his finger to his lips, then urged her away from the approaching hybrids, pulling her behind a pile of boulders that weren’t much taller than he was. He breathed a sigh of relief as the sound of boots crossing rock and soil receded steadily, then finally disappeared in the distance.

  “Dammit, I wish we could come up with a better way of dealing with these things than hiding every thirty minutes,” he growled.

  Kendra leaned against one of the rocks, a smile curving her all-too-kissable lips.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I just had this crazy image of Clayne hiding behind this pile of rocks while two hybrids walked by. Something tells me he’d opt for shooting them—or something equally violent.”

  She laughed, as if the picture in her head was the funniest damn thing she’d ever imagined.

  Declan didn’t laugh. He sure as hell didn’t find the comparison funny. It might be juvenile as hell, but he hated when she compared him to Clayne. He was nothing like the other shifter. Which explained why Kendra had never been attracted to him.

  He clenched his jaw so tight, he thought his teeth were going to shatter. He’d been looking for something to get Kendra out of his head, and bringing up Clayne had done the trick.

  Declan fought the urge to stand up and start moving again, anything to get his mind on another subject. But he couldn’t do that with the hybrids so close. Instead, he had to sit there and stew in the knowledge that Kendra was obsessed with the damn wolf shifter. Unbidden, his mind went to the one place he’d always refused to let it go: wondering how many times Kendra had slept with Clayne. God, he hated thinking about the two of them together. It literally made him see red to picture her with Clayne—or any man.

  But as they hid behind the rocks, that’s the only thing he could think about.

  ***

  Kendra was never going to understand Declan’s mood swings. After spending a good part of last night and this morning connecting with each other, he’d suddenly shut down on her, as if someone had hit a switch and changed his channel on her. And she had absolutely no idea why. She’d retraced their conversation and her actions over the last few hours but couldn’t identify anything she’d said or done that might have provoked him to pull away from her and drop that damn wall of his back into place.

  And they had been getting closer; she’d felt the wall coming down. Nothing else explained the willingness Declan had shown in opening up about that bitch who’d dumped him. She’d almost cried more than once during his story. It was either that or shoot something. She’d never met Marissa, and she hated her. What sort of idiot walked away from someone as special as Declan just because he’d flashed some fangs and claws while in the process of saving her life? The woman must be the dumbest twit on the planet.

  Then again, she could say the same thing about herself. She might not have dumped Declan, but she’d ignored him for years, which was just as bad. Maybe worse.

  But while she might not get his mood swings, Kendra now completely understood one very important thing about Declan. His ex-fiancée was the reason he kept a wall up around himself. He wasn’t going to let anyone get close enough to hurt him like that again. She only wished there was some way to make him see she was different from Marissa.

  She glanced at him as they weaved through the trees covering the mountainous slope. “You know, I’ve been thinking about something—”

  Declan held up his hand, cocking his head to the side in a posture she was growing to really dislike. “Hold on.”

  Not again.

  “Hybrids heading this way,” he said. “And they’re coming in fast.”

  Kendra raced up the hillside as quickly as she could while at the same time picking her path carefully, so she wouldn’t kick loose any rocks. This was a big ridge to get over with nowhere to hide. If the hybrids caught them out here, it was over.

  By the time they crested the ridge, she was gasping for air. Thank God she wasn’t still wearing her pack or she would’ve been in even more trouble. The cumulative effect of little food, hardly any sleep, and days spent running for her life were finally catching up to her. But there was no rest just because they’d gotten to the top. Declan hurried her right down the other side, urging her to go even faster as they approached the thick jungle growth covering the ravine at the bottom.

  Kendra groaned when she saw there was another ridge waiting for them. This one was even steeper and more thickly overgrown than the one they’d just traversed. There was no way she could make it up that at anything approaching a full run.

  “We have to keep moving,” Declan said, grabbing her hand and pulling her after him. “They’re just on the other side of the ridge we crossed. I think they have our scent.”

  Crap. She was in no condition to get into a footrace with a pack of hybrids.

  “How many of them are there?” she asked, working fast to catch her breath. “Can we fight them?”

  He shook his head. “Too many. We can’t fight them. Not out in the open like this.”

  Dammit. She picked up speed, psyching herself up for the climb, when Declan suddenly changed direction, running parallel to the slope instead of up it.

  “What are we doing?” she demanded as he hustled her through the jungle.

  “Change of plans.” He pushed her ahead of him. “Keep running straight ahead.”

  She didn’t have a clue what he was up to, but she liked any plan that didn’t involve running up the side of a mountain. She started rethinking that idea a few minutes later, when their route led straight to a swiftly moving stream and Declan dragged her into it with him.

  God, it’s cold!

  Biting her lip, she lifted her weapon high and let Declan lead the way upstream through the freezing, knee-deep water. The stream was moving fast, and the bottom was filled with big rocks that rolled out from under her feet as she moved. Hitting them at a stumbling run made it hard to keep upright. If Declan hadn’t been holding her hand, she would have fallen
a dozen times.

  Kendra was so numb from the cold, she barely realized the tree-lined banks had transitioned into steep, rocky cliffs. Her eyes went wide. If the hybrids followed them in here, there’d be nowhere to go but up those cliffs, and she’d never be able to climb them. She and Declan would be trapped. Her panic kicked up a notch when he abruptly changed direction and headed for the nearly vertical cliff on their right. What the hell was he thinking?

  But when they got to the stone wall, Declan didn’t order her to climb as if her life depended on it. Instead, he shoved some hanging vines out of the way to reveal a wide diagonal gash in the rock that was almost four feet wide and ten feet high.

  A cave?

  “How did you know this was here?” she asked.

  His mouth quirked. “I’m a bear, remember? Finding caves is in my nature.”

  Kendra would have marveled at that if hybrids hadn’t been on their tail. She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled into the cave. The opening was jagged and rough, but within a few feet, it leveled out. Loose dirt covered much of the floor, making the place feel almost…cozy.

  As soon as Declan climbed in, the vines fell back into position, cloaking the cave in shadows. Kendra was about to head deeper into the cavern, but Declan stopped her with a touch on the shoulder.

  “Stay here and cover the entrance while I go check out the rest of the cave,” he said. “I want to make sure we’re the only ones who thought this was a great place to hide.”

  She hadn’t even thought of that. The cold water had obviously frozen more than her legs—her head was pretty numb, too.

  While Declan looked around, she took up position just inside the mouth of the cave and aimed her M4 toward the rapids. She waited, tense and nervous, expecting to see a pack of hybrids stomping their way up the stream toward them at any second. Would they be able to see the cave? She hadn’t seen it even when Declan had been leading her toward it, so she hoped the hybrids wouldn’t be able to either.

  She almost jumped out of her skin when Declan came up beside her. “We have the place to ourselves. You see anything yet?”