Shannon rose, listened, her ears perked, trying to hear
anything other than the sound of the breeze rustling the
leaves down below. She heard no sign of humans and leapt
down to the next ledge. Thankfully, her kind could leap
eighteen feet in one bound, up or down. And horizontally? As
much as forty to forty-five feet. At a sprint, she could run
full out for short distances at forty to fifty miles per
hour, which was what she had planned—to race back to the
lake, despite discounting the idea earlier, and then take
however long it took to catch her meal.
She'd made it to the second rock ledge when she saw
something move in her peripheral vision. A man standing on a
lower ledge off to her right, his hands reaching for his
rifle, slung over his shoulder. How could he see her at
dusk?
He moved quickly as if he was a military man and not just a
hunter. Before she could leap at him, he fired a shot, the
sound ringing in her ears, echoing across the rocks. The
last thought she had as she collapsed on the rock ledge
above him was that she had lived a month longer than she
thought she would have ever managed.
***
As soon as the she-cat landed on the stone, asleep,
hopefully, Chase struggled to reach the ledge she was lying
on. If he’d been in his cougar form, no problem. But to
reach her as a human, he could have used climbing gear.
He hated having to shoot her as much as it felt as if he
were shooting one of his own people. But he wasn't. He had
just knocked out a wild cat protecting herself that might
have killed him, based on survival instinct alone.
He grasped the top of the ledge, got a couple of toe holds
with his boots, and pulled himself halfway up the rock face
when he saw a naked woman lying on the granite, her back to
him, and his tranquilizer dart in her shoulder. Shocking him
to the core, he gaped at her. Holy shit.
Silky, dark brown, nearly black hair draped around her neck,
the rest of her tan skin covered in chill bumps from the
cold. Before he could climb on top of the ledge to reach
her, and while he was still processing that the cougar was a
shifter, and not a full she-cat, his cell phone rang.
His nerves, normally made of steel, shattered into a million
fragments. He climbed up onto the ledge and hurried to pull
the dart out of the woman's shoulder, then jerked off his
parka. After rushing to lay it on the ledge and then lifting
her onto it, he pulled her arms into the sleeves and then
buttoned it up to her throat. The parka only came to high
thigh, but he couldn't do anything about that for now. He
glanced up at the cave above them, assuming she must have
been staying there.
His breath coming out in a misty fog and his heart pounding
hard, he made the rest of the arduous climb to reach the
cave to grab her clothes and ID. He stalked inside, used his
cell phone to provide some extra light as pitch black as it
was in there, and found—nothing. Not a backpack, not a
stitch of clothes. Certainly no ID. And she wasn't anyone he
remembered ever having seen before.
He hadn’t thought he could be shocked any further.
"God, what a nightmare." He had to get the nearly naked,
sleeping woman down the cliffs somehow. And he had to keep
her warm until then.
He called Dan to give him an update. "Dan.”
“Yeah, I tried calling you to let you know the cougar headed
in this direction at some point, but I haven’t found any
sign of him. Have you discovered anything your way?”
“Yeah. I sure as hell did. I'm in one hell of a mess. I need
your help… pronto."
***
Dan immediately headed back south. In all the years he'd
known Chase, he'd only heard him sound this frantic about
anything twice in his life. The first time was when three of
their team members had died in a mine blast during a combat
mission and neither could save any of them. The second time
was when Chase's family had been murdered.
"Okay, slow down and say everything after: you have a naked
woman in your custody."
The last Dan had recalled, he'd sent Chase to track a cougar
and… Ah, hell.
Sounding startled, Chase said, "Just a minute."
But Dan couldn't wait to hear what was going on. "Don't tell
me she's the cougar we were trying to track down. The one
who saved the boy."
No answer.
"Chase?"
No answer.
"Chase!" He had to get coordinates from him if nothing else.
And he damn well wanted to know what he was up against, so
he knew how to get Chase out of the mess he was in, whatever
it was.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Chase said, sounding totally rattled. He
quickly spouted off coordinates. "I'm in a cave above where
the woman is. No ID, no clothes, nothing, but she's been
sleeping here. I need to get back down to her."
"She's sleeping, naked, in this cold weather on a rock ledge
below a cave," Dan said, still not believing it as he strode
through the woods, figuring it would take him an hour to
reach the location.
"I tranquilized her before she leapt at me. I didn’t know
she was a shifter."
“One of our kind.” Dan didn't say anything for a moment. He
couldn't imagine shooting one of their own people like that.
But at least some of it made sense now. "No one we know, I
take it."
"No. We've got to get her down from here. I'm afraid if we
allow her to come to, she'll shift and run off. We’re going
to have a hell of a time getting her down from here safely."
"Run off… because she wouldn't come into town initially."
"I didn't find any sign of hiking gear or anything else. So
it looks like she arrived here as a cougar from somewhere
else. She might have a tent somewhere and just went for a
run as a cougar. This is one hell of a mess."
"All right. All right. We’re fine. We’ll take care of her
and then we’ll find her stuff and marry them up. If you’ve
knocked her out, it might be awhile before we can locate
anything for her."
"True. Are you on your way?"
