Free Alaskan Fire by Sara King Page B

would’ve eaten you.”
    Her mouth formed a little O as
she tried to think of some way he could be joking. 
    “Probably with mushrooms and wine
sauce,” he added.  “The creepy bastards are all about fungi.”
    I’m in a stranger’s cabin,
having a chat about fairy-tale culinary preferences with a man who’s claiming
to be a wereverine, Blaze thought.
    “So,” Jack growled, “You use the
CB?”
    “The what?” Blaze demanded.
    “The CB.  The radio ?”  He
gestured at the black monstrosity taking up an honored spot beside the
woodstove.
    Blaze just stared at him.  “Why
would I use the radio?”
    Jack narrowed his pretty green
eyes at her.  “You’re trying to tell me you just spent five hours running from
me through the woods, but you didn’t even try to use the CB?”
    This has to be some sort of
nightmare, Blaze thought.  “I wasn’t really in the mood for music, thank
you,” Blaze gritted, showing teeth.  “Getting kidnapped kinda put me out
of the mood.  Now if you would just get out of my head and let me wake
up, I’d be much obliged.”
    He cocked his head at her, making
his black curls twitch against his scalp.  “I can’t fucking believe this.  You still don’t believe me, do you?”
    Blaze gave the wereverine a long
glare.  “All right,” she gritted finally, when he didn’t vanish in a puff of
mental exhaust.  “Let’s say your argument has some merit.  What now?”
    “That’s what I was gonna ask
you,” the man bristled.  “ You’re the one who seemed to be getting
butt-hurt about the whole thing.”
    Blaze considered repeating the
fact that he had kidnapped and assaulted her, but then decided
not to waste her breath on a creature that obviously had less mental acuity
than a vole.  “You,” she said carefully, “have obviously got some
misconceptions about me, and—thanks to you—I now have some less-than-welcome
revelations about you.”  She took a deep breath, using all of her tact in an
attempt to punch through this man’s thick skull.  “It seems to me that we need
to come to an understanding before one of us gets hurt.”
    Jack laughed.  “Let’s hear it,
tootz.”
    “You’re fired, for one.”
    He raised a brow.  “Who said I
was letting you fire me?”
    “…letting you…” Blaze stammered,
shocked.  “Look, you cretin , just because you’re starving , I
don’t have any obligation to pay you for trying to eat me.”
    “Already told you,” Jack growled,
“if I’d tried to eat you, I’d be shitting a really big Yeti turd right now,
instead of sprawled over a chair, listening to her bitch.”
    Blaze’s mouth dropped open.  She
stared at him in silence for a long, horrible minute, then glanced at the
nearest window, wondering if she could wriggle through it and make it to the
lake before the wereverine caught her. 
    Immediately, Jack lazily unwound
himself from the chair and got to his feet.  “All right, girlie, seein’ as how
you’re still not going to be reasonable, I’m just gonna take your ass back home
and give you a couple days to think about it.”
    Blaze hastily backed away from
him, stumbling into the far corner of the cabin, rapping her head on an iron
frying pan that had obviously been hung there out of head-reach by the previous
occupant.  Immediately, she yanked it off of the wall and held it up between
them.  “Back off,” she growled, swinging it back and forth.  “I will bash your
brains all over the goddamn walls, I swear it.”
    Jack’s eyes darkened.  “Put that
down.”
    Blaze gave him her best
impression of a confident laugh.  “Not a chance, buster.  I know six different
forms of judo, and I could kick your teeth out through the back of your skull
with just my big toe.”
    He crossed his huge arms over his
burly chest.  “That so.”
    “Uh-huh,” Blaze said, grinning in
her best impression of a crazy martial artist on the edge.  “Just try me,
asshole.”
    “You know judo, huh?” he