“We’ve got food.”

“Real food? Or seal blubber?”

“Probably both.”

She stood and stretched, and Bo was reaching for her again, his hands on her waist before she realized it and scrambled back.

“No! Food!” She headed off to the bathroom. “I’ll be out in a minute.” Less than that, as she shot back out again. “Oh, my God.”

“What’s wrong?”

“We left the shower on.”

“That’s not good for the town water supply.”

“Thanks, Mr. Helpful.” She went back into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Bo dragged himself off the floor, stopping to pick up the empty packets and used condoms he’d tossed around like some heathen, since he assumed all heathens were messy. Unwilling to use the kitchen trash for his used condoms, he walked outside naked to drop them in the big cans his uncle had behind the house. That done, he headed back inside, guessing that the weather was probably a negative twenty Fahrenheit. Weather that was not for the weak or the felines.

Once in the house, he closed the back door and headed to the dining room, passing the living room. That’s when he stopped and walked back. Blayne had on one of his high school hockey jerseys and nothing else. Although she didn’t need much else since it went past her knees. She’d found his uncle’s CD collection. What Bo used to call his “subversive music pile” for no other reason than it pissed the old bastard off.

She’d put on some French alternative band singing about Tokyo and was dancing around his uncle’s living room like she hadn’t just spent the last two hours with Bo buried either cock first or head first in her lap. Where she got all that energy from, he’d never know.

“Come on,” she said, jumping up onto one of the couches. “Dance with me.”

“I thought you were hungry.”

“I’m never too hungry to dance to pretentious French music!” And only Blayne could make a compliment out of an insult.

“I can’t dance to this,” Bo told her, walking across the room.

“Are you one of those guys who won’t dance?”

“Not everyone has your lack of shame.” He dug through his uncle’s collection, going for what he had in the back since he knew the CD was his and not Grigori’s. He popped it into the player. “After cleaning up that hoarder’s nest you call an apartment—”

“Hey!”

“—I know your taste.”

Blayne’s mouth dropped open when she heard the first bits of the song. It was from a very old movie soundtrack that few people knew about.

“How . . . how did you get this?”

“Bootleg. Not easy to come by.”

“I know! I’ve been trying to find this for years.”

If there was one thing Bo always had a weakness for itwas sixties music and bad sixties cult movies. “Hot Rods to Hell” or “Riot on Sunset Strip” or anything with hippies and ridiculous drug usage and uptight parents . . . he was there. But “Wild in the Streets” was one of his all-time favorites, and he’d searched with his old computer and even slower modem all through high school for the soundtrack. He somehow knew Blayne was the one person who could appreciate the great get-up-and-riot tune “Fourteen or Fight,” and he was right. She not only knew the song, she knew the words to the song.

She crooned the first slowly sang line, and Bo crooned the next one back to her, moving up to her as she stood on his uncle’s couch. Something he’d normally never allow simply because it wasn’t his couch and they’d already destroyed the man’s coffee table. But it was Blayne and . . . and she knew the words to “Fourteen or Fight!”

And when a man found a woman like that, he let her stomp all over his uncle’s damn furniture or anywhere else for that matter!

Marci had insisted they check on the kids since they were out for a late-night stroll anyway. Harsh Maine winters didn’t bother Ursus County bears, not when you were born and raised here. Although Grigori didn’t need much of an excuse to stay the night at Marci’s, he also figured his nephew could use a little space. He’d always been a little awkward around girls. Either too gruff, too busy staring, or just too . . . OCD. Most females couldn’t handle it.

Still, the boy didn’t need a babysitter, but try telling that to Marci Luntz. Grigori didn’t bother to argue some things with her. She could be stubborn as any black bear he’d ever met before. The grizzlies and blacks never as relaxed as the polars.

They lumbered up to the house, his belly full of the dying old walrus he’d found on the beach and Marci’s face still covered in the honey and pissed-off bees she’d taken from the year-round hives the town kept a few miles away.

Marci was about to go up the stairs and into the house, but Grigori knew better. Using his body, he pushed her toward the side of the house with the big picture window. As they came around the corner, they both froze, their mouths open in shock while they focused on that window and what went on behind it.

Seeing Blayne on his couch didn’t bother him a bit. She was a little tiny thing, so it wasn’t like she could do any real damage. But seeing his nephew naked and dancing with Blayne while they listened to that crappy sixties music the boy loved . . . well, that was something Grigori had never seen, never expected to see, and was now kind of freaked out by seeing.

Not because the kid was naked. Not because he was singing—the boy had always been a bit of a hummer when he thought no one was around. But the smiling? The laughing? The pretending he had a mic while Blayne played a hippie backup singer with her long hair covering her face?