Bear Naked (2 page)

No, mating with another shifter would be messy. I needed a were-bear.

I thought of Jokkum’s offer and shuddered. I didn’t want to be his second wife, or his mistress, or whatever he suggested. Nor did I want to do that for anyone else. No family would want to absorb a second wife, and I didn’t want to share a husband. I thought of the bear clan men, and wasn’t attracted to any of them. That wasn’t an option, either.

I thought of Gunnar’s words.
If my boy Leif was here.

I sat on the edge of my bed, thinking. If Leif
was
here, it would be simple. Ramsey had left me alone and unmated, but Leif’s intended bride had died at eighteen. We were two broken pairs that would naturally be right to stick together. I vaguely remembered Leif; I’d been ten when Katja had died. He had laughing brown eyes, dark hair, and was rangy and tall. I remembered him ruffling my hair as a child.

If he was still alive, he’d be thirty-four.

Unmarried. Unmated.

He’d be perfect.

I…just had to find the man.

I bounded up from my bed and immediately began to pack a bag.

3 weeks later

“You so owe me.” Mikkel Tolfson shook his head as we stood on the deck of the ship, the Antarctic air crisp and biting. His cheeks were windburned a bright red, but then, so were mine. I liked the air. It felt good against my all-too-frequently-lately flushed skin.

“I don’t owe you shit,” I said easily, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my parka as I leaned into the ocean spray. “You’re my cousin. This is what we do for each other.”

“Yeah, but the clan leaders are going to kill me dead if the find out I’m the one helping you go on this wild goose chase. You know they want you to stay home so someone can come fill you up with baby batter.”

I smacked him on the arm. “Don’t be gross, Mikkel.” But I was laughing. Mikkel was my age, and as mischievous as a naughty boy. He was my favorite cousin, which meant I was able to tolerate his moods despite my increasingly wild ones.

Mikkel was also a traveling photographer, so he had connections and the ability to get away for long periods of time to remote, exotic locations. His connections were what was helping me out at the moment.

We stood on the deck of the small ship, staring out at the remote, icy Antarctic island in the distance.

It was my destination.

Once I’d found out that the clan elders had no plan for my oncoming heat other than “pass her off to someone and get her pregnant,” I decided to take matters into my own hands. I’d left home that evening without telling anyone where I was going…just like Leif had done years ago. Except I didn’t disappear off the map. I knew that wasn’t possible. To get anywhere, you had to have connections or money - or both.

So I used mine. I visited cousins. I told no one about my troubles (though Mikkel had guessed and demanded the truth) and tracked down Leif’s trail. He’d left the Ozarks and wandered for a time. With my savings account, I’d hired private detectives to follow the financial trail he’d left behind so long ago, and had tracked him down to a research expedition down to Antarctica more than ten years ago. He’d been interning for a scientist.

He’d also never returned.

Seeing as how Leif was a bear shifter, I’d had a hunch that he’d gone native - simply transformed into bear shape and never returned. Someplace as remote as Antarctica would allow him to escape notice for a long time, maybe forever.

And so I’d convinced Mikkel that he needed to set his latest photo shoot in the Antarctic, with his lovely cousin Nikolina as his assistant. Nobody would really question the fact that I had no photographic experience, considering I was tall, blonde, and pretty. They’d simply assume Mikkel had hired me for obvious reasons.

So we went to McMurdough Base and while Mikkel set up a shoot, I mingled with all the men. I laughed. I talked. I flirted. I teased. And I asked a lot of questions.

We’d been at McMurdough for less than a week when a drunk Swede had confessed to me that he’d been so high on weed that he’d thought he’d seen a grizzly bear out on one of the islands. I giggled at his story and teased him about seeing leprechauns and unicorns next, and hid my excitement.

A lone grizzly bear? Out here in the Antarctic?

Bingo.

I’d flirted heavily with him to get more information from him. Which island, exactly? Half Moon Island – one with an old base on it that was only inhabited every few years. When had he seen it? A few months ago, he told me…and then proceeded to mansplain about how it was just the drugs. No grizzly would live this far south, he explained to me in a condescending tone, and the only things that lived on that island were chinstrap penguins.

His information had been scattered, but I had enough to go on, and I told Mikkel about my plans the next day. I wanted to go out to Half Moon Island and set up my camp.

Naturally, my cousin didn’t like that idea, but I’d won him over. Mostly.

“It’s the Antarctic,” he told me for the thousandth time again as we stared at the island in the distance. “You need permission to go anywhere, and we don’t have permission to be poking around there.”

“It’s a deserted island,” I told him. “Just drop me off and we’ll pretend you don’t know where I went.”

“This is nuts, Niko. We can still turn this ship around.”

I merely patted him on the shoulder. “We can’t turn the ship around. And I don’t need permission. Just don’t tell anyone I’m there.”

“Nikolina,” he said patiently. “Come on. Be reasonable.”

“I am being reasonable.”

“No, you’re asking me to abandon you onto a remote Antarctic island for the next six weeks because you want to track down a missing shifter in the hopes that he’ll impregnate you.”

“Well, when you put it that way…”

“Come on. You have to have options.”

I gave him a level stare, my pocketed hands clenching into stubborn fists. “I’m going into heat in the next week or two, Mikkel. So unless you want to be a proud papa, this is the only route I have.”

He blanched at my suggestion. “God, Niko, that’s gross.”

“I know it’s gross,” I said, calmly staring out at the distant snowy island. “That’s why I said it.” We were cousins, but our families were so close we’d been raised as brother and sister more than cousins. The idea was as repugnant to me as it was to him, but I was running out of options. “Look at it this way. I’m a bear shifter. The cold won’t bother me. Considering that my temperature is running a few degrees hotter right now because of the heat thing? It
really
won’t be a problem for me. I have food supplies enough for two months. There’s an abandoned base. No one’s going to bother me. And if Leif isn’t here, it’ll just be a lonely month for me and I’ll be well out of the way of anyone and everyone that might be affected by the heat.”

Poor Mikkel still looked unconvinced.

I reached out and patted his sleeved arm. “I’ll be fine.”

He shrugged my hand off. “Just, uh, don’t touch me. The heat thing. It makes things…weird.”

I wrinkled my nose, the hoop in my nostril chilly in the brisk weather. “Sorry. I keep forgetting.”

“Me too.” He grimaced. “You sure you’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be perfect.”

And I would be, if Leif was truly actually on Half Moon Island. What I remembered of Leif was vague, but I recalled that he was a kind, dreamy boy. I remembered he’d loved to sculpt figures in wood. I still had one of those tiny figures he’d given to me. It was tucked into my bag at the moment. He was an artist. Polite. Friendly.

Which was ironic, because I was cranky, ballsy, and stubborn. I figured if I met him here, I’d be the one that got my way.

And if I didn’t, well, I had a nice, long solo vacation…and a bullet vibrator.

I sighed, staring out at the lonely island. If he wasn’t out there? It was going to be a long, long heat cycle.

By the end of the next afternoon, I was on the shore of Half Moon Island, waving goodbye to Mikkel as the ship pulled away. The small inflatable raft I’d used to get to the shore was temporarily parked on the beach, and Mikkel had instructed me to hide it at the abandoned base so no ships passing through the area would see and think the place was inhabited.

If someone did stop in, I had plenty of camera equipment, forged permits from Mikkel that showed I worked for him, and a cover story that I was filming a documentary on chinstrap penguins that inhabited this island.

As I watched the ship pull away, I rubbed my nose. With my shifter sense of smell, I was already trying to pick up the scent of another bear. Unfortunately, all I smelled was penguin and penguin shit. It’d take a few days for my nose to adjust to the ‘common’ scents.

When Mikkel raised a hand to wave, I returned it until I could no longer see him.

Then, I was entirely alone on a remote Antarctic island. Yeah. I grabbed the hauling rope on the front of my raft and began to drag it inland.

Half Moon Island was pretty. Pretty bleak, that was. There were weird tufts of dried-looking grass stuck between rocks, and there was snow. Lots, and lots of snow. But other than that, it was vast, silent, and empty. There was no sound but the wind and the distant caws of penguins. The beaches were rocky and cold, and I could smell no other inhabitants. I lifted my face to the wind as I walked and circled the island twice, but there were no signs of anything other than an army of chinstrap penguins. There were three long buildings, but I avoided them. I didn’t want the smells of other humans contaminating my nostrils, not when I was trying to find the delicate scent of one particular shifter.