Free Kodiak's Claim by Eve Langlais Page A

mouth to resuscitate him. Wait, that was for drowning victims, not concussion ones. Who cared? He needed clothes so she could concentrate on something other than sex.
    Besides, he couldn’t very well tamper with anything while dressing, so keeping the frying pan between them, she nodded, and followed him—admiring his bare, flexing cheeks the entire way—as he went to the second floor and entered the door across from her own.
    It wasn’t long before he emerged in a tracksuit that covered all his bits. How unfortunate.
    “Shall we go establish my honesty?” he asked.
    She motioned him ahead, wishing she had something more deadly than a frying pan, say like a gun. As if I could bring myself to shoot him. But what about the bear she’d seen outside?
    “Where did the bear go?” she asked. “You must have seen it as you were coming in. It was on the porch.”
    “Are you still insisting on that? Do you even hear how that sounds? A bear on the porch.” He snorted. “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”
    “The same way I imagined a naked man in the kitchen? No. I know what I saw. There was a bear outside.”
    “If you say so. Maybe it heard or smelled me coming and took off. The porch does wrap around the house you know.”
    Again with a plausible explanation that didn’t quite ring true. Yet why would he lie? It wasn’t as if he stood to gain from hiding the presence of a wild animal from her.
    Unless his plan is to lead me outside and feed me to it!
    She really needed to stop channeling her mother’s paranoia.
    In silence she swapped her warm slippers for boots and slid her coat on over her robe. He didn’t bother with any outerwear, his only concession to the weather a pair of boots.
    He swung the kitchen’s side door open and led the way to the garage. The cold bit right though her robe and jammies, and she tucked her hands up her sleeves and her face into the collar of her jacket. Reid, a true Alaskan man, didn’t seem bothered as he strode to the garage door. She still clung to the pan in one hand, and her eyes darted nervously from side to side as she followed, seeking in the shadows the beast she’d spotted earlier. They made it without incident, and she stepped into the chilly, but at least bluster-free, space.
    Reid walked over to his snowmobile and pointed to the pile of clothes beside it, clothes that reeked of gasoline.
    “I told you they were dirty,” he said, smirking in triumph. “I sprang a leak in a line and got some fuel on myself as I fixed it. My grandmother would have killed me if I brought these in the house and stank the place up. So, I left them out here for disposal and did a polar streak across the yard.”
    He’s lying. Where that certainty came from, she couldn’t have said. But she knew it. Sensed it, even though he had the proof of his words lying on the floor, the same clothes she’d seen him wearing earlier that day. She nudged them with her toes but, other than the reek of volatile fumes, saw no suspicious red or brown stains.
    “Satisfied now?”
    “I guess.”
    “My turn then for questions. What were you doing up? Were you spying on me? For that matter, how do I know you are who you say you are? How do I know you’re not part of a conspiracy to take down my company, in cahoots with whoever is stealing my trucks?”
    Finding herself on the other end of the interrogation and suspicious stick sucked. Tammy sputtered. “Me, a spy? I’m with the insurance company. You can call and check with them.”
    “I did, and they verified someone was coming,” he corrected. “But, for all I know, the real Tamara Roberts was killed, and you’ve taken her place.”
    “That’s absurd.”
    “No more absurd than thinking I would steal my own trucks and make my employees disappear.”
    “I have to investigate all the possibilities.”
    “As do I.” For some reason, his words sent a shiver through her, especially since he said them with an intent look.
    “You can check me