He sat up, sniffed the air and listened.
Fuck!
He looked at the closed front door. Axel wasn’t back, and he couldn’t warn him telepathically at a distance, not when Axel was in human form. He had to be within eyesight.
Dakota. He couldn’t warn her either, not as-Fuck!
With no time to lose, he transformed into a man and headed for the bathroom door. “Dakota! Hurry.”
“Just a second,” she shouted back.
“No. Now!” He threw open the hatch in the floor and then yanked the bathroom door open. “Come on!”
Dakota startled, but he didn’t have time to explain.
“Axel! What the—” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the hatch.
“Go. Hurry.”
“What… Where are your clothes?”
“Avalanche!”
That was enough to make her move. She scrambled down the ladder into the in-ground storage room that had been built as an avalanche shelter. “Stay in there,” he shouted, running naked for the front door.
“But—” He had to warn Axel, and there wasn’t much time.
Just as he threw open the door, though, he saw Axel step up onto the porch, a frozen package of sausage in one hand and several logs of wood in his arms. His brother’s eyes widened.
“Avalanche.” But he didn’t need to explain. The rumble was getting loud enough now for human hearing to pick up and the ground began to shake.
Axel dropped the burden of sausage and logs and dashed after him back inside the cabin. They didn’t even bother to shut the front door.
Gunnar dropped into the hole, barely missing a frightened Dakota with whom he fell to the floor, covering her body with his own. A second later, Axel followed, pausing just long enough to yank the rope on the hatch to slam it closed.
“No, Falke!” Dakota screamed, her fear apparent.
The rumble was now a roar. The shelter was black as pitch.
“He’s okay.” Axel joined them on the river stone floor as he, too, used his body to protectively blanket Dakota.
Like a runaway freight train, the crashes sounded closer until it shook everything around and above them. Something fell off a shelf, causing Dakota to yelp and him to hug her closer.
Then…silence. Gunnar breathed a sigh of relief.
They might not be safe, but at least they were still alive.
Dakota opened her eyes and saw nothing
, but she felt a lot. Rough floor. Cold chill in the air. Warm breaths-hers, Axel’s, and…
“Uh. Oh, my God. Who—?” She began to squirm, which was not easy with two— two— men on top of her. One was clothed. One wasn’t.
A man grunted.
“Careful,” Axel said, as they moved off of her.
She shot to a seated position, tried to butt-scoot backwards, but her hand collided with something hard behind her. Feeling around, she recognized it as a shelving unit.
“Who the… What…” She couldn’t draw breath enough to form the questions that raged in her mind.
“Let me find some candles,” Axel said, his voice way calmer than she would’ve expected. She could hear him move, start to feel his way about the confines of their underground shelter.
“I would wait on that, brother.”
Dakota squeaked and wedged her body against the shelves, as far away from that voice as possible. When did one of Axel’s brothers show up here? And which one of them was naked?
“When did you get here? Where’s Falke? Axel! My God, he’s still out there,” she said, realizing the cougar might be trapped in the snow, hurt or dead.
“Meow,” the brother said.
She turned her face toward the voice even though she couldn’t see anything but blackness. “That’s not funny. He might be hurt.”
“I’m not.”
Anger simmered. “I’m not talking about you! I’m talking about a poor defenseless cat that might be—” The man chuckled and so did Axel.
She stopped, baffled at why they could be so heartless over their pet. Didn’t they care?
“Falke is far from defenseless,” Axel explained, “and he’s fine. He’s here.”
“Oh?” She hadn’t noticed the cat jump inside, but everything had happened so fast. Had the cat been down here before her and she’d somehow missed him?
That must be it. She breathed a sigh of relief that he was safe. “Here pretty kitty.” She raised her hand out, expecting the puma to find her, nuzzle her hand.
Instead, a man’s hand cupped hers and raised it to his face. Her fingers trembled as they slid over a slight growth of whiskers. Axel had shaved earlier that morning. This man wasn’t Axel. He couldn’t be.
He pressed a kiss into her palm. Her breath hitched.
“I like you too, lil’un.”
She gaped. Not that he could see her or she him, but this man, this brother knew, quoted almost verbatim, the last thing she’d said to the cat. “I-I don’t understand.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured, his hand still holding hers against his face.
Then a soft glow appeared, illuminating the man, and her first thought was beautiful. “Wow,” she whispered.
Then his face, his body began to blur, dissolve. His eyes…his whiskers became that of a mountain lion, a very familiar mountain lion.
She jerked her hand away, slamming her elbow against the shelving unit behind her. “Ouch!”
Blackness returned all around her, as did her fears. Her body shook. Her heart hammered against her ribs, and she could barely catch her breath, much less her scattered thoughts. Fight, flight, scream or cry. She didn’t know what to do or how to react to what she’d just witnessed. There was nowhere she could go, although that didn’t stop her from trying to lean as far away from— “What the hell are you?”
“We’re shifters.” The answer came from Axel. The strike of a match vanquished the darkness as he lit an oil lamp.
“Shifters?”
Yes, shapeshifters. I’m Gunnar, Axel’s brother.
She blinked when the voice sounded in her mind.
Shaking her head in disbelief, rubbing her temples, Dakota eyed the cat who sat tranquilly a foot or two from her. “D-did you just…?”
“We can communicate telepathically,” Axel explained.
Telepathically? She glanced at Axel and pressed her lips together to keep from echoing his words like a parrot. Then she realized something. “We? You mean you both can be…can turn into cats?”
Axel stared at her, gave her a cautious smile and nodded. Setting the lamp on the stone floor at his feet, he took one step to his left, bent down and shifted before her very eyes. The same luminosity. The same incredible, unbelievable change, as if the image of a man dissolved into that of an animal. It was miraculous. Magical. Insanely mind-boggling. And yet…
In the next heartbeat, she faced two mountain lions, but one was dressed in Axel’s clothes—a sight that made her snicker then burst out in an uncontrolled, hysterical giggle. Then she heard male laughs in her mind, and her humor fled as quickly as it materialized.
She wasn’t afraid, not now, not of what appeared to be wild predators, but she was freaked out. She’d fucked a man who was now a cat staring at her. Those eyes… Brothers. No wonder the cougar’s eyes looked so much like the man’s.
Then she remembered all of the little things she shared with Falke, things she’d no intention of telling Axel. Thankful for the dim light and hoping it helped cover the sight of her embarrassing blush, she covered her mouth with the back of her hand. “Oh, my God.”
Horrified, she stared at the cats even as they eyed her.