into the warmth of his body. “You don’t seem that cold.”
“I’m half-bear,” he pointed out. “And I consumed about twenty thousand calories in the days leading up to this exercise. I could go out naked in a snowstorm.”
She laughed. “That’s quite the image.”
Despite his discomfort, Declan chuckled, too.
“I read the profile for Costa Rica before we left, but I never expected it to be this cold,” she said, serious again.
Most people didn’t think about that in the jungle, but with the temperatures in the fifties, the exhaustion, the intermittent rains, and thirty minutes in the icy-cold mud, it was pretty damn easy for the body’s core temperature to sink to dangerous levels.
“The jungle canopy makes it worse. The sun rarely gets a chance to penetrate down to the ground level and heat things up,” he explained. “You feel like eating something?”
She nodded and sat up, putting some blessed distance between them and pushing the hair that had come loose from her ponytail behind her ear. He rummaged in his pack and pulled out an energy bar, then handed it to her.
“Brent and Gavin had the good camp food in their packs, so we’re stuck with the survival stuff we had in ours and whatever we can forage until we get out of here.”
But Kendra didn’t seem to care that the energy bar had the consistency and taste of shoe leather. She tore into it and took a big bite. She chewed, then frowned.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nah. I wasn’t kidding about all the food I ate before coming down here. I can go without eating for a few days if I have to.”
Declan didn’t tell her the real reason he wasn’t eating was because they hardly had any food in their packs. Foraging for food sounded like a good idea, but it wasn’t going to be that easy with hybrids on their tails. Thankfully, Kendra didn’t press the issue. He picked up a few of the cinnamon-scented flowers and rubbed down her pack while she ate.
“Those smell nice, kind of like spiced apple cider. How did you know it’d fool the hybrids?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know. But the odor has always been overpowering for me, so I hoped it’d be as bad for them. It’s so strong that it could trick a shifter with a good nose—like Ivy. And based on how little the hybrids used their noses back there at the stream, I think their sense of smell is worse than mine.”
She regarded him thoughtfully. “I’ve always wondered about that. Why do bears generally have such an amazing sense of smell, but you don’t?”
Declan set down her pack and picked up his. “I don’t know. It’s just not something I’m good at.”
He tried to keep his voice casual, but it actually came out sharper than he intended. Maybe because it was Kendra asking and he knew she’d take it as one more reason to think he didn’t measure up.
“Guess that makes sense,” she said. “How did you learn so much about flowers? Is it something you picked up when you were a forest ranger?”
The question caught him off guard. He would have thought that since she had access to his personnel record, she already knew everything there was to know about him, including where he’d learned about flowers.
“My mother has a huge greenhouse. She raises all kinds of exotic plants and flowers, but orchids are her favorite. I used to help her when I was a kid—planting, watering, weeding, that kind of stuff.”
Kendra smiled. “Sounds like you and your mom are close.”
Declan grunted. He wasn’t going to tell her that his mom had all but disowned him when he’d dropped out of MIT.
Kendra finished her energy bar and shoved the wrapper in her pack, then took a quick drink of water from her canteen before digging around for a small canvas pouch. He watched in surprise as she picked up her M4 and started breaking it down. They’d gotten the worst of the mud off their weapons, but the M4s would need a detailed cleaning to keep them from malfunctioning later. That she was cleaning her weapon now wasn’t nearly as surprising as the fact that she was doing it in the near darkness of their shelter. Sure, he could see fine—he was a shifter—but she was doing it all by feel. Just another indication that she was way more comfortable handling a weapon than he’d realized.