A Groom For Red Riding Hood
A Groom For Red Riding Hood
Jennifer Greene
A Groom for Red Riding Hood
Jennifer Greene
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Prologue (#u59c9db3b-05c2-5a55-abd9-d17ceb0024c8)
One (#u60dd26bc-d921-5d47-be6b-23e7965a9eb3)
Two (#u4d960cc3-2c31-5eb4-8b92-2f70d7477053)
Three (#ucc524c31-7a65-52a2-89db-fc3de1b0fb25)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Mary Ellen Barnett slammed the car door, hitched her wedding gown to her knees and hiked up the porch steps into the kitchen. Without a pause for breath, she locked the door, pulled the curtains, flipped open the oven and switched on the gas.
Suicide was for cowards, but that didn’t bother her—she’d been an ace pro coward for years. Truthfully, she was feeling more murderous than suicidal, but that was irrelevant, too. She’d had it. Really had it. Being jilted at the altar wasn’t the first time she’d made a humiliating fool of herself, but it was positively the last.
The sickly sweet gas fumes invaded the small, closed kitchen quickly. Too quickly. Cripes, they were making her gag. She’d never manage to kill herself off—at least not before throwing up.
Impatiently she jerked off the gas, snapped the oven door closed and stormed outside.
There had to be another way. Yanking off her long white veil, she plopped her fanny on the porch steps and inhaled gulping lungfuls of fresh air.
A balmy breeze drifted off the Georgia coast. The blasted evening was damn near breathtaking. In any normal Christmas season, the weather would be obligingly cold, damp and dreary. Not this year. The wind drifted through her hair, as soothing as a caress, as soft as a whisper. The stars were just coming out, backdropped against a velvet sky and a dreamer’s crescent moon.
The night was so disgustingly wonderful that it was darn near impossible to concentrate on doing herself in, but Mary Ellen was furiously, stubbornly, bulldog-determined. How many times had she made embarrassing, mortifying, humiliating mistakes? Millions, that’s how many. The flaws in her character were unfixable. God knew, she’d tried. And though her self-esteem and self-respect were nonexistent at the moment, she’d never lacked for imagination. The trick was simply applying her fertile mind to effective suicide methods.
She stuck her chin in her palm. Minutes passed. As violently and tenaciously as she focused on morbid thoughts...self-destructing just wasn’t going to be that easy.
Gas was out. Car crashes were no good, either—there was too much risk of hurting someone else; she’d die before hurting anyone else—and if she screwed up and failed to take herself out, she could end up a vegetable on machines that someone had to take care of. That was out of the question. Hanging was even less palatable—somebody would be stuck finding a gruesome scene. The time-honored traditional method of slitting one’s wrists had that same unfortunate glitch and anyway she hated—really hated—the sight of blood.
She concentrated harder.
Poison struck her as a stupendous idea, but the thought of drinking drain cleaner was too repulsive to stomach. Swallowing enough pills to go to sleep was the easiest out, but there was an inherent problem with that method, too. She’d always been as healthy as a horse. The only medicine laying around was a little PMS stuff, and since that was a regular plague, there were only a few pills left in the bottle. Somehow she didn’t think taking six tablets was going to get the job done.
Drowning was a possibility, but awfully tough to pull off. She could swim like a fish. Starvation? Mary Ellen rolled her eyes to the sky. That’d never work. She’d been born with the appetite of a lumberjack. If there was food around, for absolute sure, she’d never have the self-control to turn it down.
She scowled. There had to be some way. A suicide method that she couldn’t bungle. A way that left no mess and looked like an accident—everyone in town knew she was distraught and distracted after that debacle tonight in the church, so a careless accident would be understandable. She didn’t want anyone blaming themselves. She’d never deliberately hurt anyone.
But damnation, there didn’t seem to be a method that fit all the criteria.
The more she thought about it, the more she came to the unavoidably nasty conclusion that—blast and hell!—she was just going to have to live.
That morose thought barely registered before an alternative took its place. She could run. If she was cowardly enough to consider suicide—which she certainly was—there was certainly no reason to sweat any scruples about running away from her problems. No one would miss her. Like removing a thorn or a bee stinger, it would be a relief to everyone if she were gone. She’d been a Class A problem from the day she was born, especially for those she loved. And living down this latest fiasco and humiliation would be far easier if she were removed from the picture.
The idea of running gained momentum like a tumbleweed gathering speed in a high wind. She could do it. Disappear. Become someone else. Go someplace where no one knew her or had any idea what a disastrous mess she’d made of her life.
Positively it had to be a place with no men—she’d made a fool of herself for absolutely the last time over that half of the human species—but that tiny detail presented more of a challenge than a problem. There had to be someplace in the continental United States that had no men.
She just had to find it.
One
Steve Rawlings pushed open the door to Samson’s and stomped the snow off his boots. The sudden warmth and light made his eyes sting. He yanked off his gloves and hat and automatically headed for the far booth in back. As he expected, the bit of a bar was packed. There was nothing to do on a bitter, blizzardy Monday night in Eagle Falls—except drink and indulge in a little male bonding over a football game.
The Lions were playing on the black-and-white over the bar. The picture was fuzzy—TV reception was typically nip and tuck in this isolated corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Also, typically, beer was flowing freely. A few heads turned when Steve walked by. None of the men nodded or asked him to pull up a chair. He’d probably have keeled over from shock if they did. His work automatically gave him the popularity of a piranha with an infectious disease. He was used to it. So far, the guys had given him a wide, wary berth, but there were no overt signs of hostility. Hell, he’d been some places where people greeted him with a shotgun.
Blowing on his cold hands, he slid into the worn pine booth. The windchill factor was a mean subzero. He’d been working outside for the better part of six hours. His boots were caked with ice, his hands too numb to function and his stomach was growling with hunger. Stiffly he unzipped his parka and pushed the coat off his shoulders. His head was bent when he heard the soft, feminine magnolia drawl. His eyes shot up.
There were women in Eagle Falls. Just not many. The total local population couldn’t be more than a few hundred—summer cottages and hunting cabins were all boarded up by this time of year, and even the timber industry shut down in the dead of winter. Permanent residents were few. The area attracted wilderness lovers, loners, and for sure some families, but mostly people who chose to march to a different drummer. There were no lone women, for the obvious reason that there was spit little to appeal to a woman alone.
And especially a young woman like her.
She stood out like a rose in a pen of bulls. There wasn’t a line on her face—she couldn’t be thirty—and wearing boots, she stood maybe five foot six. A cap of glossy hair framed her face, mink brown, worn short and smooth. Classic beauty was the wrong label. Cute was more like it. Real cute, honest cute. Her nose had a sassy tip, her chin had a dimple and a slash of dark brows arched over huge, startling blue eyes. Her mouth was small, naked of lipstick, as pink as a petal and shaped like a bow.
Steve rubbed the circulation back into his cold hands, studying the rest of her. Her clothes were straight L.L. Bean, a flapping flannel shirt worn over a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. The clothes looked new, the jeans still stiff, her boots unscuffed. Still, the denim fabric faithfully cupped the curve of a truly delectable fanny, and a man would have to be both blind and brain-dead not to notice how unforgettably she filled out that turtleneck.
He couldn’t imagine what she was doing here.
Samson, the owner of the bar, was getting up in years and was plagued with arthritis. Steve understood why the old codger had hired help, just not how she fit in. Conceivably she’d waited tables and tended bar before, but he doubted it. Frowning, he watched her awkwardly handling a heavy tray. Her clumsy juggling of the beer mugs suggested a total lack of experience at the job.
When her hands were full, Fred Claire took advantage and patted her behind with a wink for the other guys. Brick red color skated up her cheeks. A mug of beer started to tip and spill. The tray clattered to the table.
Steve scratched his chin. He had a sixth sense for trouble. Honing and fine-tuning that instinct was an automatic requirement with his work. In this case, he didn’t smell trouble. Nothing about her attire was deliberately suggestive, but if she thought she could escape the guys’ attention in this place, she had to have a dreamer’s fantasy life. Most of the men were middle-aged, a fair slug of them married—hardly Lothario types, but hell, she was a testosterone-arousing package of new, young, female and good-looking. The boys giving her a rush was as predictable as conflict in the Middle East.
Rowdy laughter echoed from the crowded table by the door. Fred and his cronies had clearly been drinking for several hours now, and they were all making a teasing fuss over the spilled beer. Rafer claimed loudly that there was a wet spot in his lap that he’d sure appreciate her helping him with. The others snickered at his wit. The splotches of color on her cheeks darkened to the hue of a raw burn.
She was still flustered when she glanced up and spotted him. As soon as she escaped that table, she headed over and flipped open her order pad. “I’m sorry you had to wait. What would you like?”
“Coffee. And a couple of steaks if Samson’s still got any in back. Rare.”
She scribbled the order with her head tucked down, paying no attention to him until she suddenly glanced up. “A couple of steaks?” she echoed.
“A couple. As in two,” he affirmed.
She looked at him then. With him sitting down, she had no way of knowing he was six-three, but her gaze flickered over his rangy frame and broad shoulders. She wasn’t the first woman to check him over. It wasn’t Steve’s fault he was a hard man to ignore—he had no vote in his genetic inheritance—but his height and linebacker build made it tricky to hide in a crowd. His jet black hair, blue eyes and ruddy, clear skin added up to striking looks that had an embarrassing habit of attracting female attention. Most women took a second look.
Not her. After that quick shot at his face and shoulder span, her eyes dropped. Fast. She promptly wrote down “two” and underlined it. “I can see it’ll be an uphill job filling you up. I’ll nuke a couple of potatoes. And I think there’s still a piece of apple pie in back—”
“That’d be great.”
“You want your coffee black or with cream?”
“Black’ll do.”
“Okay. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
She spun around, not once looking at him again—but he’d had more than enough time to do a prowling close-up of her. Once the flush climbed down from her cheeks, her skin was as pale as ivory. Her voice was a velvet Southern drawl, soft, feminine and as vulnerable as everything else about her. The tag on her shirt read “Mary Ellen.” If Mary Ellen was looking for men, she’d positively picked the right place. Winters were long and lonesome in this neck of the woods, and she couldn’t find a higher male-to-female ratio outside of Alaska. Still, the image of man hungry didn’t work at all. Her posture was as stiff as a poker, her expression a mirror of nerves and wariness, and those incredible eyes of hers were as skittish as a newborn colt’s.
He watched her take another order—standing as she had at his booth, careful to keep from pinching and patting distance, not looking any of the boys in the eye—and then she disappeared into the back. A masculine bellow echoed through the room when the Lions fumbled the ball. Samson shot out from the kitchen, his white hair standing in spikes, waving a spatula, to armchair coach with the rest of them.
Steve rolled his shoulders, mentally blocking out the football game and the noise and his curiosity about the waitress, too. She wasn’t his problem. Heaven knew, he had problems of his own. The smoky warmth of the bar was slowly unthawing his frozen bones, and weariness was starting to hit him in waves. If his stomach hadn’t been pit-empty, he’d have driven straight to his trailer and six straight hours in bed. His body was used to being pushed, and this snow squall was no worse than a hundred he’d seen growing up on a Wyoming ranch, but the cold and exhaustion combined had been killers today. Weariness was dogging him as relentlessly as a shadow.
He didn’t know his eyes had closed, yet they must have, because the aroma of fresh coffee suddenly startled him. The steaming mug was sitting in front of him, hotter than the devil’s breath. Mary Ellen had come and gone without his hearing her, but he could see her now, dodging around the room, serving fresh pitchers of foaming beer, ducking under the TV so she didn’t block the view. Someone called out, “Sweetheart? Darlin’, we desperately need you over here.” He saw her jaw clench and that cherry color shoot to her cheeks again.
If there was a woman less suited to working in a bar, he couldn’t imagine one.
Over the next hour, she came to his table three times. She never said a word, never looked at him, but she kept his coffee filled; she served his steaks blood-rare with potatoes and trimmings he’d never asked for, noticed when he’d leveled that, and came back with a fat slice of apple pie heaped with ice cream. She didn’t hover—hell, she didn’t even ask what he wanted—but she took better care of him than a mother hen.
Steve couldn’t help but notice that her quiet competence around him was a direct contrast to her behavior around the other men. He’d always had a gift with wild critters—animals instinctively trusted him. But women were a distinctly different species. The lady didn’t need any great perceptive skills to realize that the other men treated him like a pariah. For most women, that would be a steer-clear clue that he was a man to be avoided, and with his height and size, the last instinct he usually aroused in females was security. Yet she treated him as if she’d instantly labeled him “safe,” no one who was going to cause her trouble. Although that was certainly true, it made her behavior around the other guys downright bewildering.
He wolfed down a bite of pie, watching Fred Claire try to cop another feel. A bowl of peanuts skittered when Mary Ellen jerked back.
Steve forced his attention on the pie. Samson’s specialty was apple pie; the apples were heavy on the nutmeg and cinnamon, not too much sugar, the crust as flaky as his own mother’s. Delicious. No reason at all for a lump to lodge in his throat. There was nothing going on at that far corner table by the door that he needed to think or worry about.
He wasn’t bosom buddies with Fred—or anyone else in Eagle Falls—but those particular people were regulars at the bar. He’d seen them often enough to have their measure. Fred’s brush cut was clipped shorter than a marine’s; he favored dressing in army fatigues, playing weekend war games, flashing a lot of weapons and coaxing anyone who’d listen into talking about his conspiracy theories. Maybe he wasn’t the average Joe, but basically he was harmless, a lot of big talk but no action.
A raucous snicker of masculine laughter echoed across the room.
Steve didn’t lift his head. She wasn’t really in trouble. There wasn’t anything tricky or difficult about handling Fred. Either a smile or a scolding would have put him—or any of the boys—in their place. By taking their teasing so seriously, it was the same as begging for more. Any woman who had an older brother or chose to work around men would surely know that. The boys had had too much beer. They were feeling their hormones. Nobody was going to ignore her if she kept rising to the bait.
He was on the last bite of pie when she whisked over and slipped the bill under his plate. She’d bitten her bottom lip a bruised red. The look around her eyes was pinched and drawn. Still, her magnolia drawl had a winsome shyness. “I’ll be back if y’all need change,” she said.
She’d already moved on before Steve had the chance to dig into his back pocket for his wallet. Change was no problem. He smacked the bills on the table, more than enough to include a walloping tip—which she’d earned. That easily, he told himself, she was completely off his mind. All his attention was focused on getting home. Already he could picture the double bed in his trailer, slipping between the sheets buck naked, burrowing into the warmth of a down comforter. Nothing was quieter than a night in the north woods, and the hot meal had pushed him over an edge. He was dizzy-tired, gut-tired, darn near mean-tired.
He could have sworn he wasn’t still watching her. Yet when he reached back for his parka, his eyes seemed to be peeled across the room, because he saw the exact moment when Fred hooked an arm around her waist.
She wasn’t carrying a tray that time, but she wasn’t expecting the pass, either. She landed with an awkward plop in Fred Claire’s lap. Fred said something—undoubtedly some kind of vulgar compliment, because it made the other men guffaw. She was trying to scramble off him. Fred was trying to keep her pinned.
Steve muttered an exasperated “Hell” under his breath and lurched to his feet. He didn’t need this. He had troubles of his own, and getting along with the good old boys in town was integral to resolving those troubles. But dammit, her face wasn’t flushed this time. It was stark white. Even from yards away, he could see her expression wasn’t just flustered or embarrassed, but downright, outright scared.
He stalked over, his step so quiet that no one even realized he was there—until he reached over and plucked the lady off Fred’s lap.
“Hey,” Fred objected.
It took a second to steady her. For that instant his hands were on her waist, he felt the supple warmth of her body and caught the vague drift of a subtle, feminine scent. His libido stirred, with a punch of sexual awareness that he’d never expected—but it didn’t last long.
“Hey!” Fred snarled again, nearly tipping the table when he jerked out of his chair.
Steve had no time to release an aggrieved masculine sigh. No question, when a man asked for trouble, he got it. Fred had been drinking for how many hours? His leathery face had a beer flush and the adrenaline of rage was flashing in his eyes. Steve grasped him by the shirt collar, quick. “I’m going to worry about you driving home after all that drinking,” he said calmly. “Wouldn’t you say that a good friend would help you sober up?”
Chairs scraped across the plank floor. As if a bomb had dropped, there was suddenly no sound in the room except for the blare of the Lion’s announcer on the boob tube. No one attempted to get in the way as Steve propelled Fred toward the door. There was no reason for anyone to object. It was the best entertainment anyone had enjoyed that night—short of watching one small woman get picked on.
The wind had finally died, but the air was colder than a witch’s heart when Steve yanked open the door. The icy air slammed straight into his lungs. It was dark out, but the fresh foot of snow had the sharp, bright gleam of sequins. He released Fred’s collar, bent down, scooped up a handful of snow and washed Fred’s face with it. His intuition was correct. The method helped Fred sober up right quick. The other man threw a punch. He got his face washed a second time for that asinine move.
“Where I come from, a man doesn’t pick on someone smaller than him. Only bullies do that, and I never met a bully yet who wasn’t a coward. Now, you got that message, or you want to discuss it a little while longer?”
Apparently Fred was in the mood for an in-depth discussion, although the subject of bullies never came up again. He let loose a string of four-letter words, including extensive commentary about Steve’s mother, her preference for combat boots and the shaky sexual preferences of his father. He didn’t throw another punch, though.
“Look, you’re drunk,” Steve said quietly. “Damn stupid to fight when you’re drunk. When you sober up, if you’re still looking for a fight, you come pick on me. I’ll take you on, if that’s what you really want. Just leave the lady alone, you hear me?”
Fred seemed to feel that comment required another wordy dissertation on his character, values and manhood—or lack thereof. It took an enormous amount of wind and hot air before he ran out of insults. Steve listened patiently the whole time. The Japanese had always understood that once a man lost face, he became an enemy. No man forgot being humiliated. Steve let him get the last word in for the same reason he hadn’t leveled the little hothead in front of his cronies inside. He wasn’t looking to make an enemy out of Fred Claire—or anyone else in Eagle Falls. He just wanted Ms. Blue Eyes left alone.
Once Fred’s windup insults ran down, Steve waited, studying his face. The begging-to-fight fire was dying in his eyes, the adrenaline settling back down. Fred was just plain cold, shivering violently in his shirtsleeves, snow dripping from his face and down his neck. A few minutes in subzero temperatures had a way of equalizing everything, even challenged male egos and bad tempers. Fred was no longer having fun.
Steve took one last look at his face. And walked away.
* * *
Men. Since the only thing Mary Ellen wanted to avoid was that particular half of the human species, it seemed the height of irony that she’d landed in a nest of the vipers. Of course, her specialty was screwing up. She never made small mistakes. Her forte had always been the big, classic, mortifyingly embarrassing-type boners.
She stuffed her hair under a stocking cap and grabbed her ski poles. Inhaling a lungful of crisp clean air, she reassured herself that moving here had been the best thing that ever happened to her. True, she’d misjudged the population of men. Equally true, she’d failed to consider the teensy problem of money. In her wildest nightmare she’d never anticipated having to work in a bar, but there’d simply been no other job around.
Still, her shift at Samson’s didn’t start until four in the afternoon. Her day was free until then. All her day hours were free.
She pushed off, her cross-country skis forging a fresh track in the new snow. Wonders surrounded her. Raised in the South, she’d never dreamed of snow like this. The rolling pine woods were deep, peaceful, quiet. Where sunlight shot down, the new snow laid on the emerald branches like a white satin glaze. A scarlet cardinal caught her eye. A soft-furred bunny scampered across her path.
She didn’t know where she was going. Didn’t care. She hadn’t misjudged how soul renewing this isolated area would be. There were endless acres of woods and wilderness to explore. Her rented cabin was an idyllic retreat for a woman planning to live as a hermit-monkess. There was no family around for her to disappoint. No town looking over her shoulder, waiting for her next I-told-you-so screwup. And although the Freds and the Georges and the Ben McCreries were giving her fits at the bar, during the day she didn’t have to even see a human being with a Y chromosome unless she wanted to. And there was positively no man appealing enough to tempt her aggravatingly impulsive heart.
An image of a giant with searing blue eyes drifted through her mind.
She let the image linger, simply because there was no harm, no possible temptation involved. She remembered the stranger’s overwhelming height, the impact of his startling eyes. She remembered thinking that he was an incredible hunk, and for the same reason feeling a rare sensation of being safe. Hunks never preyed on her. Her looks were too ordinary.
And for once, her first judgment of a man had been accurate. The whole time she waited on him, he’d been kind and quiet, but there’d been no teasing or come-ons. He just wasn’t the kind of man who would ever be interested in her. Looking at him was like indulging in window-shopping at a candy store when the door was locked. There was no threat of her suckering into those dangerous calories. His face was square cut, strong boned, ruggedly handsome; there was character in the etched lines around his eyes and mouth. She wasn’t likely to forget it.
Nor had she forgotten the way he’d suddenly gotten up and hustled Fred Claire outside. At the time, it barely registered that he was rescuing her. He’d moved like a hunter, swift and sure, hauling Fred outside faster than anyone knew what was happening. He’d never said anything, never came back in. Mary Ellen still didn’t know what he’d done, but when Mr. Jerk returned to his table, he’d been as polite as a Catholic schoolboy and he’d pointedly ignored her for the last three nights now.
She owed that giant big time.
He’d get his thanks—if she ever saw him again—but right now she had other things on her mind. Her skis hissed through the new-fallen snow. She was still new to the sport, still prone to an occasional clumsy tumble, but getting better. As she worked up a rhythm, the crisp air pinkened her cheeks and stung her eyes.
Every day she trekked farther and explored new directions. She’d been so crushed when she first moved here. Occasionally she still thought about Johnny. Occasionally she still woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the nightmare of a bride in a white dress, standing in the church for a Christmas Eve wedding, the guests all there, the whole town waiting for a groom who never showed.
That humiliating memory still made her cringe, but she’d slowly realized that that singular rejection wasn’t the real source of her hurt. It was being wrong, one too many times. It was feeling, once too often, the stone weight of being unloved and unlovable. Johnny had turned out to be a turkey, but Johnny wasn’t the real problem. Her self-respect was in more crumpled pieces than a broken cookie.
That cookie refused to instantly glue back together—but she was working on it.
When she brushed against a pine branch, snow shivered down in a shower of fluffy crystals, making her chuckle. It wasn’t so hard, being happy. It wasn’t so impossible, to laugh again. Being alive was riches enough, and she was discovering more riches every day.
She poled to the crest of a hill, and then, bending her knees, sailed down to the belly of a small valley. At the bottom she stopped, breathless and exhilarated, and yanked off a glove to check the compass in her pocket. Northeast. If she kept going in that direction, eventually she’d hit Lake Superior. Even if the landscape was totally unfamiliar, she had her bearings, wasn’t afraid of being lost. She zipped the compass back into her jacket pocket again, and was just refitting her glove when she saw the animal.
Fear never occurred to her in that first instant. He looked like a dog. A Siberian-husky type. He had a long snout and pointy ears, and mesmerizingly liquid black eyes staring right at her. His luxuriously thick pelt was almost as stark white as the snow. Her eyes softened. Lord, he was gorgeous, and standing motionless from a knoll thirty feet from her, as regal and silent as a statue.
“Hey, boy,” she said softly. “Are you lost?”
Her tone was as gentle as a whisper—she’d fallen in love on sight—but his response to her was distinctly different. At the first sound of her voice, he bared huge pointed teeth and snarled, his growl so ferocious that her throat closed.
It wasn’t a dog. She knew it in a pulsebeat. No husky was that big; no tame animal made wild, feral sounds like that. It had to be a wolf.
Every muscle in her body clenched up and locked. She couldn’t swallow. Adrenaline shot through her veins in an ice-cold rush.
The wolf paced another five feet closer, snapping threatening growls the whole time. It wasn’t hard to get the message. He didn’t like her. She’d have been thrilled to turn tail and run, only damned if she wasn’t too scared to move. She heard another snarl and whipped her head around.
Another one. Lord. Another two—no, three. At least three of them. The others were multicolored, their pelts ranging from dark charcoal to streaky gray. None of them were as huge as the white wolf, but the few pounds difference was hardly reassuring. She sensed as well as saw that she was being circled. They were moving. Pacing slowly in the snow, ducking in and behind trees, but keeping her in sight.
She’d have wet her pants if she had time.
There was no time. Panic sealed her throat. She had a flash memory of the afternoon she’d idiotically considered suicide. She’d never meant it. She’d just been so angry with herself—being stood up at her wedding had been a last straw in a long history of humiliating, embarrassing screwups. But geesh. At her most stupid, she’d never really wanted to die. And for sure she didn’t want to die all alone, torn to shreds in the middle of the north woods by a pack of wolves.
It was positively an uphill, difficult and darn near insurmountable job to earn her own self-respect. But she wanted a chance. Come on, God. I’m trying so hard, but I need a little time. How about a bargain. You get me out of this, and I’ll never mess up again as long as I live. I’ll be so good you’ll be astounded. I’ll be so good that I’ll be astounded....
The white wolf lifted his head and howled.
The sound echoed in the lonely woods like a cry from her own heart. She swallowed on a shattered breath. Tears welled, unwanted nuisance tears, blurring her vision when she desperately needed to see.
The wolves circled closer. The word run screamed through her mind, but it was easier to think than act. She could hardly run hellbent-for-leather wearing cross-country skis. There were trees all over the place, hardwoods as well as heavily branched pines, but her skis made climbing any of them just as impossible. There had to be a way out of this. She just had to think.
“Stand still. Don’t run. Don’t move—just stand real still.”
She heard the human voice. A masculine voice, but just then she wasn’t picky. One chord of that low masculine baritone and relief sang through her pulse like an opera aria. She whirled around. Nothing—not death, bombs or taxes—could have stopped her from aiming for that voice. “Oh, God, I’m so glad you’re here—”
“For cripe’s sakes, listen to me! Don’t move!”
Two
Mary Ellen obediently froze. Her heart even started beating again. She recognized the giant from the restaurant, although she barely looked at him. Her eyes glued straight on the gun he was carrying. The nice, long, big gun. She wasn’t going to die. The wolves weren’t going to get her. He had a gun. “Shoot ‘em, for pete’s sake!”
“Now, just take it easy. I’m pretty sure we don’t need to go that far.”
His slow, lazy baritone took her back. “In case you haven’t noticed—” personally, she thought he’d have to be myopic and deaf not to notice “—I think those wolves are planning to have me for lunch.”
“Yeah, I can see they’re not too happy with you.” He glanced at the wolves, then back at her. “Try to see it from their viewpoint. A human is their worst enemy. And you didn’t just barge into their territory. You wandered within twenty-five yards from a nest of their pups. They’re just trying to protect their young.”
Conceivably he thought she needed this information. She waved her hand in front of his face. One of them seemed to be under the illusion they had time for a casual chitchat. It wasn’t her. “I’m sorry I upset them. You’d never believe how sorry. If I could disappear into thin air, trust me, I’d be glad to. But that not being an option, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d at least aim that gun—”
“I’m afraid it isn’t the kind of weapon you think it is. It’s just a tranquilizing gun. No bullets. And yeah, I can shoot them if I have to, but it’s a lousy choice. The sedative would put them out for several hours. They’d be prey to the elements, other animals, and they’d be affected by the drug for a couple of days. Just relax, okay? They aren’t doing anything but growling at you. They’re entitled to give you a lecture. You screwed up.”
“Nothing new about that. It’s the story of my life,” she muttered.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. I can’t think. Geezle beezle, they’re still circling!”
“I know. And I know you’re scared, but you’re staying real cool. I’m proud of you. Most men would have lost it by now, but not you. You’re holding it together just fine. We’re gonna keep talking, okay? And while we’re talking, I want you to toe the catch on your skis. Real slow, real careful, see if you can get them off. Just forget the wolves. Look at me, straight at me.”
He had everything wrong. She wasn’t staying cool; she was a pinch away from totally losing it, and positively she’d done nothing to make the stranger—or anyone else—proud of her. Yet she looked straight at him, because he’d asked her. And she managed to awkwardly, clumsily toe off her skis, because he’d asked her to do that, too. The man had a Pied Piper voice—throaty and husky and hypnotizingly seductive. He could probably coax a nun to strip with that wickedly sexy voice, but that hardly explained why she obeyed him. There was only one possible reason why she did what he asked.
She’d lost her mind.
Circumstantial evidence wasn’t a fair way to judge a man, but she could hardly fail to notice clues that he wasn’t necessarily operating with a full deck. The wolves were snarling and circling and charging around. He was as calm as a spring breeze. Mary Ellen took that as a teensy hint that he needed a reality check. For reasons she couldn’t imagine, the front of his parka and jeans were hard-packed with snow. The hood was thrown back, revealing a shaggy, disheveled pelt of jet black hair. It looked as if his hair was decorated with dry leaves, which made no sense. Making even less sense, he was unzipping his parka as he slowly walked toward her.
She’d instinctively trusted him in the restaurant, instinctively sensed that he wasn’t the kind of man to prey on a vulnerable woman. Then and now, she should have remembered that her judgment about men wasn’t worth a Las Vegas dollar. Obviously she’d been mistaken about the intelligence in his shrewd blue eyes. No way he could be too bright when it seemed to have missed his notice entirely that her life was in imminent danger. Hells bells, so was his. The wolves sounded restless and hungry and mean and ferocious. And her damn fool of a giant was peeling off his jacket in freezing-lung temperatures as if he had nothing better to do.
“What I want you to do,” he said gently, “is put on my coat.”
“You want me to wear your coat?”
“And my muffler and gloves.”
“And your muffler and gloves,” she echoed. Vaguely she wondered if she’d landed in the twilight zone. She had experience, extensive experience, in embarrassing messes. Coping with situations that no sane woman would normally land herself in was really her forte. Somehow, though, nothing had prepared her for holding a witless conversation with a madman while surrounded by wolves.
“They know my scent.”
“Swell.”
Her deadpan comment was hardly intended to arouse his sense of humor, yet his mouth curved in the crack of a grin. “I’m getting the definite feeling we’d better backtrack a few yards. My name is Steve. Steve Rawlings. And I guess I just assumed you knew who I was. My being around has raised a lot of talk in town.”
“I’m new in Eagle Falls. And not exactly on the chitchat gossip circuit.”
He nodded. “So you didn’t know.... These wolves are my problem. My job. By profession I’m an ethologist. I study and work with animals like wolves, and specifically I’m working with this pack. It’d be my responsibility if anyone was hurt because of them, and I’m for sure not going to let anything happen to you, okay?” He gave her a moment to take in that information, then calmly went on. “The reason I want you to wear my coat is that it has my scent. They know me. In fact I’ve known White Wolf, the alpha male, since he was a pup. I don’t want to kid you—we’re in dicey waters. Wolves aren’t dogs—they’re wild animals. It’s dangerous to trust any wild animal. But I think we’ve got a great chance of this working.”
He’d reached her by then. The blasted man was so tall that she had to tilt her face to meet his eyes. “If you’re trying to be reassuring, I hate to tell you, but you’re failing big time. I’m real close to throwing up.”
“Nah. You’re staying real cool, real calm. I knew you would. When I saw you in the restaurant, I thought to myself, now there’s a lady who wouldn’t lose it in a crisis—no, no, quit looking at them. Look at me. Take it easy. You’re doing just fine. Although—”
“Although?” Momentarily she couldn’t help feeling distracted. She wasn’t the stay-cool type. She reliably fell apart in any crisis. Now was no different—she was scared enough to lose her cookies. How he could have formed such a mistakenly inaccurate impression of her was downright confounding.
“Although—” lazy, easy humor glinted in his eyes again “—it’d sure help a lot if you could loosen that death grip you’ve got on your ski poles.”
She glanced down. She had no idea her fists were glued to her ski poles until he started peeling her gloved hands loose. Once that was accomplished, the ski poles dropped in the snow. Then, with the gun anchored between his knees, he slowly fitted her arms into his parka. The size of his jacket was big enough to fit over her own, but stuffing her into the second coat was a cumbersome process. She couldn’t help him. Her stomach was too busy doing flip-flops.
Her response to his closeness wasn’t sexual. It couldn’t be. Sex was the last thing on her mind, not just because of the situation, but just because. Other women seemed to feel an automatic jet pull near a virile male hunk. Not her. Her hormones had never flipped on like a light switch. She had to know a guy. She had to think about it.
Since sexual awareness couldn’t conceivably be causing the dancing flutter in her stomach, she decided it must be the...strangeness. He’d given her a lot to take in. He worked with wolves. That was tough to imagine. He promised he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. It was even tougher to imagine her believing that—heaven knew, she’d suffered consequences from mistakenly trusting men’s promises before.
She’d been reasonably fine. Until he moved so close. When he wrapped the scarf around her neck, his wrist brushed her cheek. The muffler carried the warm male scent of his skin, and his touch aroused a shivery lick of feminine nerves. She tried to prop Johnny’s mental picture in her mind’s eye, which invariably reminded her of the mistakes she’d made. Only it didn’t work this time. Steve wasn’t Johnny. He wasn’t like any man she’d known before, and she had the sudden disoriented feeling that he could be far more dangerous than his wolves.
His towering height blocked the view of the woods, the world, the pale afternoon sun. She hadn’t seen his face this close before. The weathered lines around his eyes and forehead were as ingrained as granite. He hadn’t gotten those character lines playing checkers in a warm parlor. He knew what he wanted. It wasn’t a life playing checkers. There was steel in his square jaw, wildness in his unkempt hair and rough, straggly brows. His touch was gentle with her, but she couldn’t stop thinking that it didn’t have to be. With his powerful build, she couldn’t imagine anyone stopping him from doing whatever he wanted.
When he zipped the jacket straight to her chin, his eyes met hers. He didn’t say, Make up your mind, Mary Ellen. He didn’t say, Damn, but I’m tempted to give you something a lot more serious to worry about than a few old wolves. It was just in her mind, that he was sizing her up in an intense, intimate way. He didn’t want her. For pete’s sake, he didn’t even know her. She was just imagining silly things because she was so shook up.
“They quit,” she said.
“Quit?”
“The wolves. They’re quiet. They quit howling.” When he stepped back and glanced around, the breath whooshed out of her lungs. “I don’t see them. Do you think they’ve left?”
“No. They’re around. But since they’ve moved out of sight, they’ve apparently made up their minds to behave. Which leaves me with a tricky decision,” he murmured.
Again, his eyes peeled on her. Again, she felt a curling sensation, as if her whole body was warmer than buttered toast. Foolishness. She was wrapped in double layers of down; naturally she was hot. It had nothing to do with the way he was looking at her. “What’s this tricky decision?”
“I’m not about to leave you alone,” he immediately reassured her. “I have a pickup over the next rise, about a quarter-mile walk from here. I’ll take you home. But it would help a lot if you wouldn’t mind sticking with me for a few more minutes.”
“Sticking with you?”
“I’m in a bind,” he admitted. “When I first heard the wolves kicking up a fuss, I was halfway through feeding the pups. There’s seven of them, a couple I left hungry. It would take time to drive you home and get back here. It’d just be a lot easier to finish the job right now, but I don’t know how shook-up or scared you are—”
She could have told him how scared and rattled she was. The instant she got home, she fully anticipated indulging in a nice long case of the shakes. She loved cats. She loved schnauzers. But this singular experience with wolves had permanently cured her of any desire to be anywhere near this particular animal again in this lifetime.
But damn. He’d saved her behind. Twice now. And he’d mentioned the pups, but she hadn’t made the connection that he had anything to do with them. The debt she owed him sat on her conscience like guiltladen lead, and geesh, what was a few more minutes of heart-hammering terror? “It’s not that I’m shook-up,” she assured him, and then had to clear her throat. The giant lie had almost caught in it. “But you’re the one who needs to get out of the weather. You have to be freezing without your jacket. You’ll catch cold.”
Over his jeans, he was only wearing a gray alpaca sweater. The garment stretched over his muscular chest, a thick-weaved, scratchy wool, practical and warm enough for a dash outside but hardly for working in these temperatures. “I’m cold,” he admitted, “but the pups are real young. So young that their survival at all is real iffy.”
“So it could matter, if they were fed right this instant, huh?” She gulped in another guilty breath. Babies were babies. How could she be responsible for babies going hungry? Still, she’d only asked him a question. She hadn’t said yes, sure, I’d love to stick around and risk my life for another few hours. Yet his response to her single hesitant comment was a devil-slow masculine grin.
“I could have guessed you’d say yes. Nothing much throws you, does it? And it’s possible that we’re pushing our luck, but I don’t think so. White Wolf wouldn’t have backed off if he hadn’t made his mind up about you. Still, we’ll just take this slow and easy. Have you ever seen baby wolves?”
No, she’d never seen baby wolves—or ever planned to. For two exhilarating seconds, her fragile ego basked in his respect for her courage, but that soaring sensation didn’t last long. He was so totally mistaken. She hadn’t earned that respect. She had no guts. She’d just never managed the assertive art of saying no—a personality flaw that had majorly contributed to her landing in hot water in the past.
She’d never been in hot water quite like this, though. Quicker than a smile, he’d taken her hand. Before she could draw a nervous breath, they were crossing the white sugarcoated valley. In the open. Easy prey for wolves or bears or anything else. He’d scooped both her skis and his gun under one arm, so it wasn’t as if he could aim that rifle quick, even if he had to.
They climbed a ridge, ducked around a stand of white pines and scrambled down a knoll. The new snow layer was fluff, but beneath that lay an ice crust, tricky footing in just her ski boots. Even though he had to be freezing in just that sweater, he never moved fast and he never loosened his grip on her hand. The thick gloves prevented any personal contact, but his secure hold felt like being plugged into a direct socket of strength. He wasn’t going to let her fall.
He kept talking in that lazy, calm baritone of his. Talking was a necessity, he told her. Wolves had acute hearing. Talking let the animals know where he was, who he was, and a steady, soothing tone helped communicate that he meant them no harm. Wolves were nervous by nature. They had reason to be.
Mary Ellen had no idea if he was successfully calming the beasts, but his low, husky voice was working an unwilling magic on her. He didn’t talk about anything but the wolves. She wondered if he realized how much he was revealing about himself.
Isle Royale, he told her, was less than a thirty-mile stretch across Lake Superior from here. Since the late fifties, the island was one of the few places on the continent where the endangered species of gray wolf was protected. A few years ago, though, the species had started dying out. Numbers dropped from fifty to eleven. No one could pin down the problem. The wolves had an ample food supply; the winters weren’t that harsh; neither disease nor age seemed to be the contributing factor. They simply weren’t breeding. The best theory seemed to be genes—that the three surviving packs were too inbred. The wolves needed a new gene pool if they were going to survive.
“So two years ago, I flew in White Wolf. He’s from Alaska—where I was working then. Carried him, his best girl and two more from that pack, and settled them on the island. They seemed to be doing fine. They mated and bred, and everything was going hunky-dory—until this winter.”
Normally the icy waters of Lake Superior created a formidable barrier between the island and the Upper Peninsula. But that stretch of lake had frozen before, in winters as violently cold as this one. “The damn doofuses walked across on the ice floes. They got it in their heads that they wanted to set up housekeeping on this side. Not a brain in their idiot heads.”
It was hard for Mary Ellen to think of wolves in affectionate terms like “doofuses,” but clearly Steve did.
“No one wants them. No one’s ever wanted wolves. People don’t mind a romantic story about them, like Jack London wrote or Walt Disney filmed, but find one in your backyard and that attitude changes real quickly. Man has always been afraid of wolves—it’s as simple as that, and no laws have ever protected them from being hunted down. They need to be taken back to the island, partly because the whole species isn’t going to make it—not without this new blood—and partly because their chance of surviving here is worse than a bookie’s odds. So that’s what I came here to do—transport them back to the island. Only damn, I hit a little snag I never expected.”
“A snag?” She couldn’t imagine what he’d consider “a little snag.” He mentioned rounding up the wolves and transporting them to the island as if this were an ordinary project for him. Even trying to picture the act boggled her mind.
“White Wolf’s mate was shot several days ago. And unfortunately, she’d just given birth to a litter of pups less than ten days before that.”
“Someone shot the mother?” Her voice was small. Minutes before, she’d been in a bloodthirsty rush for him to aim that gun and shoot to kill. That white behemoth of a wolf—and his cronies—had terrified her. Still did. But she hadn’t thought of the wolves as vulnerable then. She hadn’t pictured a young mother hunted down, leaving a nest of helpless newborn babies. “I guess I should have expected that something had happened to the mother. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t have any reason to be feeding the pups if the mom was alive.”
“Well, normally if a mother wolf dies, another female in the pack will take over. She’ll bond with the pups and start producing milk. Only there’s only one other female in the pack. She’s no spring chicken and that didn’t happen. So I’m feeding them formula five times a day. Unfortunately they’re just too young and weak to move right now. And the rest of the pack—they won’t leave. Not without their young. There isn’t a human alive who can understand a wolf’s loyalty. He’ll sacrifice his life to protect those he loves. They take care of each other. That instinct is as strong in wolves as their need to eat or breathe.”
Steve grabbed her arm when she stumbled on a slick ridge. She hadn’t been looking where she was going, but at him. His face was ruddy from the cold, yet the temperature didn’t seem to bother him. He released her arm quickly, but the gesture had protected her from a fall as automatically as the wolves he’d been talking about. His affinity for the animals was no accident, she mused. He was like them. A lone wolf. A man who valued loyalty, who willingly made personal sacrifices for something he cared about, who was instinctively protective of others around him. He’d obviously chosen his work and his life-style. That kind of strength—that kind of loneliness—was beyond anything she knew.
But being a loner...Mary Ellen knew a lot about that. She’d lived her whole life with the tag of misfit.
“So,” she said, “how long are you stuck with this problem?”
“It’ll be at least a month, maybe more, before the pups are strong enough to be relocated. And the whole thing is a gamble. Someone would say a stupid gamble, trying to keep them together. It’s not like I couldn’t ship the pups off to some zoo—there’s no problem finding people willing to take care of them. But they’d never make it outside of captivity if I separated them from the pack now. They imprint on the grown-ups. The older ones teach them how to survive in the wild, something no human could do. It’s real iffy whether I can keep them all safe for that long. There’s a town meeting this Thursday. I know damn well they have in mind voting an open season on my pals.”
She glanced at him again. His voice never fluctuated from that slow, lazy drawl. He made that town meeting sound like nothing more challenging than a Sunday stroll. Yet it had to be hard, being an unwanted stranger with an unwanted cause, and she couldn’t imagine the guts it would take to face down a townful of people who viewed him as an enemy.
She knew how it felt to be judged, so it was probably natural that she felt a compelling emotional tug for him. She was a loner, too, but a misfit not by choice. For an instant she wanted to reach out and touch him as if they shared a personal bond—when there was no bond. He had guts. She didn’t. He had strength to burn, volunteered for difficult situations. Her response to the difficult situation with Johnny had been to cringe, get an itchy case of hives and then duck and run lickety-split, like the coward she was. She looked away. “I guess you’ve had to deal with that kind of problem before?”
He never got around to answering her, although when he suddenly stopped walking, she wasn’t sure why. The craggy ridge looked no different than the landscape they’d just traveled—wild and woody. There were no footprints in the snow, no sign any human had ever discovered these primitive backwoods. The forest was dark, deep, endless, winding around hills and snow-swept, jutting crags of land. Then, though, she spotted an olive green box, like the kind of case people packed drinks and sandwiches for a picnic in.
Steve bent over and pushed the top off. The box definitely wasn’t being used for picnic supplies. Strange-looking baby bottles were packed around hot-water sacks. He unwrapped one and showed her. “I got the bottles from the hospital in Houghton. They’re meant for babies with cleft palates, but they work just as well for pups too young to suckle.”
She edged closer, her arms wrapped around her chest. A wisp of a smell hit her nostrils—strong enough to make her nose crinkle.
He chuckled. “I should have warned you. The formula isn’t exactly aromatic.”
“Good grief, what’s in it?”
“Piles of disgusting stuff, from raw egg yolks to vitamins. Trying to fool them that this is their mama’s milk has been an uphill trip, I’ll tell you. But never mind that. Are you ready to fall in love?”
Her eyes flew to his faster than a shooting comet. “I beg your pardon?”
Slowly, lazily, he studied her face as if the color in her cheeks was the most fascinating thing he’d seen in a blue moon. “You’re not all that sure what you think, are you? You don’t think you’re gonna be tempted into caring. A lot of people don’t. A wolf’s a wolf, and these little guys don’t come out of the womb looking like a Walt Disney cartoon. They’re born wild and wary, a real handful, no interest in being tamed. But I just have this strange feeling, Mary Ellen, that you’re gonna fall hopelessly in love.”
He was talking about the baby wolves, of course. Not him. Not them. Not for a moment—not even for a millisecond—had she thought he meant anything else. It was just the low timbre in his voice when he said her name...she didn’t realize he even knew her name...that made her suddenly shiver. She shifted her attention from his gaze at the speed of light, looking all over for some sign of the nest or a den or someplace where the pups might be. “So where are they?” she asked impatiently.
“Right here.” Stuffing two bottles under his sweater, he bent under the shadowed branches of a spruce, and then went belly flat in the snow.
More wary than curious, she crouched down, too.
“Can’t see them from that far. You have to get closer.”
Well, geesh. She’d come this far, so it seemed pretty ridiculous to back out now. Snow showered her head when she elbow crawled to his side, protected by ski pants and a double layer of coats, as he certainly wasn’t. She heard him sneeze, and automatically started to respond with a “Bless you” when she saw the silky gleam of tiny eyes.
The nest wasn’t exactly a cave, more like a long, low ledge of a rock that tunneled in several yards, the opening concealed entirely by the spruce and stark winter black brush. Once inside, the darkness was as sudden as night. Her pupils had to dilate to see anything after the blinding glare of sunlit snow. Yet she saw the tiny eyes, and then another pair and another. Milky blue. Baby blue. The fur balls were nestled in a heap, with tiny shiny noses and tiny floppy ears, and one had the same gorgeous white pelt of his father.
The snowball baby tried out a lonely, angry howl, echoing his daddy except that its volume was barely a mewl. He thought he was real tough, for a two-pound bit of fluff. Steve plugged its mouth with the strange-tipped bottle, and the baby instantly quieted. Steve sneezed again—the blasted man was positively going to catch pneumonia on this little venture—but sympathy for him wasn’t the reason for the velvet lump in her throat.
Damnation if he wasn’t right.
She fell hopelessly in love on the spot. Not for him. Good grief! She wasn’t crazy.
But definitely for the babies.
Three
Predictably, as soon as Mary Ellen doused the car lights, she dropped the keys. Bending over and squished, she groped in the no-man’s land of the dark car floor until she found them, then collected her gloves, shoulder bag, hot pads and Crockpot. Holding all of those, she naturally discovered she had no way to open the door. She rejuggled. Eventually she escaped the dratted car, and holding the heavy pot with both hands, gave the door a good swing with her fanny to close it.
It was a lot of trouble to go through, just to bring a man some plain old beef stew. Well, truthfully it was her best ragout, but that point was moot. The dinner was owed. She hadn’t met any Galahads in the nineties. Steve had not only given up his coat for her yesterday, but he’d also saved her from the wolves—both in the woods and the bar. She obviously had to find a way to thank him.
The offer to bring him dinner had been impulsive. Steve had pounced on it. No demurring. No gee-you-don’t-have-to’s. His fast agreement worried her—it was the first time she’d seen Steve Rawlings do anything fast—and she’d chewed a fingernail, fussing over whether he could misinterpret the gesture. Men had a habit of misinterpreting just about anything she’d ever done, no matter how innocent or well-intentioned.
Her arms ached from the weight of the Crockpot as she looked around. He was home, because she could see the edge of his black four-wheel-drive pickup, parked behind the trailer. Yellow light shined from the windows, making lonely patches of color in the snow. Even this early in the evening—six o’clock—the night was blacker than tar. He’d chosen to set the trailer in the middle of nowhere, isolated in a nest of black trees and sooty shadows. An icy, eerie wind shivered through the treetops, making her shiver uneasily, too.
If she were home in Georgia, it’d be warm by the first week in March. Not blizzard-mean-cold like here. In her Georgia hometown, too, no single woman would be visiting a single guy, in his lair, after dark, unless she was volunteering for big-time trouble.
Now that’s ridiculous, Mary Ellen told herself impatiently. She wasn’t staying. She was just going to drop off the Crockpot. Twice now, he’d gone out of his way to help her, and manners required a thankyou. The only danger she was risking was a frostbit tush from standing out here in the dark like a witless goose.
She took a breath, marched to his doorstep and used her elbow to knock. The knock only created a muffled sound, but the door promptly flew open. Warm air flooded out. She only had one quick, daunting glimpse of a giant whose shoulders were never meant to fit in a compact trailer-size door.
“Finally Red Riding Hood arrives. I was starting to get worried, afraid you’d get lost trying to find the place.”
“Red...?” The Riding Hood tag startled her. Could he possibly know how wary she felt about walking into a wolf’s lair? But then she caught the flash of an easy, teasing grin, and it clicked real quick where he’d picked up the fairy-tale association. She was wearing a hooded cherry red jacket and carrying goodies through the woods. Pretty hard to deny she was natural prey for a tease, and she had to smile back. “No, I had no trouble. Your directions were great.”
He reached down the steps to take the heavy pot from her hands. “This smells great. Come on in.”
She shook her head swiftly. “I can’t stay—”
“You have to work tonight?”
“No. I only work four nights a week. It’s just that I only meant to bring you dinner. To thank you. Not to take up any of your time—”
“You’re going to make me eat alone? When you’re already here? And I haven’t had anyone to talk to all day but wild animals?”
His mournful tone made her roll her eyes—he couldn’t pass that off as blarney in Ireland—but damn. He made her feel awkward about taking off without at least sharing some conversation. Gingerly she stepped inside. “I’ll just stay a couple of minutes,” she insisted.
He didn’t seem to hear her, and he hadn’t let go of the pot yet. He sniffed. “I haven’t had a homemade ragout in a hundred years. Is it okay if I admit my undying love for you?”
“It’s just stew,” she said dryly, but drat the man, he was downright forcing her to chuckle.
“Just stew is real food. You don’t understand. I’ve either been opening cans or eating Samson’s cooking for weeks now.” Once he set the pot down, he hustled her out of her red jacket and made it disappear, then gave her white tunic sweater and jeans a once-over. She’d been careful about her choice of clothes. The jeans were old, not tight, not fancy, and the bulky sweater concealed her figure more effectively than a nun’s habit. There was nothing in his view, absolutely nothing, to cause the sudden lazy, masculine gleam in his eyes. “Good thing you’re a shrimp. There’s not a lot of space around here for two of us to move around.”
She chuckled again, and this time felt the tension in her shoulders easing. Would a man call a woman a shrimp if he had seduction on his mind? He was being funny, natural, just plain nice. It was past time she kiboshed the electric nerves she felt around him. She never used to be so paranoid, not until Johnny burned her, and it was ridiculously egotistical to imagine that Steve represented any danger to her. He was positively nothing like Johnny.
“Your place isn’t so small. In fact, it’s a lot bigger than it looks on the outside,” she commented as she looked around.
“So sit and make yourself comfortable. You can have the seat of honor. You want wine, beer, soda?”
“Nothing, really, but thanks.” His “seat of honor” was the only chair, a tweedy recliner in gray hues. A long couch matched it. Both were his size—heck, she could have curled up and slept in the chair—and the small living area overlooked the kitchen ell. The bar-style table was ivory colored, the charcoal-shaded carpeting cushion-thick. A short hallway of closets led to a shadowed bedroom—where he’d tossed her jacket—and she saw the tucked end of a Hudson Bay blanket in the wedge of light.
The trailer wasn’t big enough for a party, but there was ample room for him to move around. It was hard for two to maneuver, though. She slipped off her boots and dropped in the chair when she saw she was going to be in his way. He opened and closed cupboards, taking out plates, silverware, napkins. His TV was on, tuned to the news, but without sound. He kept up an easy conversation.
“I have a place in Wyoming. A little house, on a spread of land by a creek. That’s where I grew up, out West, but I’ve had the trailer for years. Sometimes I’m gone months at a time with my work, and I’d go nuts trying to live in motels and finding rental places. This way I can have my own stuff with me.”
“So...you go wherever the wolves are?”
“Not always wolves. But they’re my love, and I seemed to have ended up specializing in them whether I planned it or not. I worked for the EPA for a while, then hooked up with the National Park Service. For this project I’ve been loaned out to the state of Michigan—their DNR, Department of Natural Resources. Never seems to matter who’s signing my paychecks, I end up doing the same thing. There just aren’t a lot of people who get real excited about tackling a wounded wolf, or moving a pack of ‘em. Maybe it’s like a doc who overspecialized. There’s nobody else who does the job—or really wants the job—so I’m the stuckee.”
“You’ve traveled all over?”
“From Mexico to Alaska,” he confirmed. “The red wolf, gray wolf, Mexican wolf—they’re all threatened. Only three places on the planet where they’re not, though lots of people are sympathetic to the cause. The UP here has really worked at it—set up a Michigan Wolf Recovery Team, and backed that up with good laws and stiff penalties for killing wolves. But the bottom line is that when a wolf’s causing trouble, the easiest solution is to shoot him—or trap and put him in captivity, out of harm’s way. Nobody’s to blame for that. A problem wolf, wild, part of his pack, in his own environment...he doesn’t make it real easy to help him. It’s just a lot easier for someone who knows the species to take the ball.”
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Jennifer Greene
A Groom for Red Riding Hood
Jennifer Greene
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Prologue (#u59c9db3b-05c2-5a55-abd9-d17ceb0024c8)
One (#u60dd26bc-d921-5d47-be6b-23e7965a9eb3)
Two (#u4d960cc3-2c31-5eb4-8b92-2f70d7477053)
Three (#ucc524c31-7a65-52a2-89db-fc3de1b0fb25)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Mary Ellen Barnett slammed the car door, hitched her wedding gown to her knees and hiked up the porch steps into the kitchen. Without a pause for breath, she locked the door, pulled the curtains, flipped open the oven and switched on the gas.
Suicide was for cowards, but that didn’t bother her—she’d been an ace pro coward for years. Truthfully, she was feeling more murderous than suicidal, but that was irrelevant, too. She’d had it. Really had it. Being jilted at the altar wasn’t the first time she’d made a humiliating fool of herself, but it was positively the last.
The sickly sweet gas fumes invaded the small, closed kitchen quickly. Too quickly. Cripes, they were making her gag. She’d never manage to kill herself off—at least not before throwing up.
Impatiently she jerked off the gas, snapped the oven door closed and stormed outside.
There had to be another way. Yanking off her long white veil, she plopped her fanny on the porch steps and inhaled gulping lungfuls of fresh air.
A balmy breeze drifted off the Georgia coast. The blasted evening was damn near breathtaking. In any normal Christmas season, the weather would be obligingly cold, damp and dreary. Not this year. The wind drifted through her hair, as soothing as a caress, as soft as a whisper. The stars were just coming out, backdropped against a velvet sky and a dreamer’s crescent moon.
The night was so disgustingly wonderful that it was darn near impossible to concentrate on doing herself in, but Mary Ellen was furiously, stubbornly, bulldog-determined. How many times had she made embarrassing, mortifying, humiliating mistakes? Millions, that’s how many. The flaws in her character were unfixable. God knew, she’d tried. And though her self-esteem and self-respect were nonexistent at the moment, she’d never lacked for imagination. The trick was simply applying her fertile mind to effective suicide methods.
She stuck her chin in her palm. Minutes passed. As violently and tenaciously as she focused on morbid thoughts...self-destructing just wasn’t going to be that easy.
Gas was out. Car crashes were no good, either—there was too much risk of hurting someone else; she’d die before hurting anyone else—and if she screwed up and failed to take herself out, she could end up a vegetable on machines that someone had to take care of. That was out of the question. Hanging was even less palatable—somebody would be stuck finding a gruesome scene. The time-honored traditional method of slitting one’s wrists had that same unfortunate glitch and anyway she hated—really hated—the sight of blood.
She concentrated harder.
Poison struck her as a stupendous idea, but the thought of drinking drain cleaner was too repulsive to stomach. Swallowing enough pills to go to sleep was the easiest out, but there was an inherent problem with that method, too. She’d always been as healthy as a horse. The only medicine laying around was a little PMS stuff, and since that was a regular plague, there were only a few pills left in the bottle. Somehow she didn’t think taking six tablets was going to get the job done.
Drowning was a possibility, but awfully tough to pull off. She could swim like a fish. Starvation? Mary Ellen rolled her eyes to the sky. That’d never work. She’d been born with the appetite of a lumberjack. If there was food around, for absolute sure, she’d never have the self-control to turn it down.
She scowled. There had to be some way. A suicide method that she couldn’t bungle. A way that left no mess and looked like an accident—everyone in town knew she was distraught and distracted after that debacle tonight in the church, so a careless accident would be understandable. She didn’t want anyone blaming themselves. She’d never deliberately hurt anyone.
But damnation, there didn’t seem to be a method that fit all the criteria.
The more she thought about it, the more she came to the unavoidably nasty conclusion that—blast and hell!—she was just going to have to live.
That morose thought barely registered before an alternative took its place. She could run. If she was cowardly enough to consider suicide—which she certainly was—there was certainly no reason to sweat any scruples about running away from her problems. No one would miss her. Like removing a thorn or a bee stinger, it would be a relief to everyone if she were gone. She’d been a Class A problem from the day she was born, especially for those she loved. And living down this latest fiasco and humiliation would be far easier if she were removed from the picture.
The idea of running gained momentum like a tumbleweed gathering speed in a high wind. She could do it. Disappear. Become someone else. Go someplace where no one knew her or had any idea what a disastrous mess she’d made of her life.
Positively it had to be a place with no men—she’d made a fool of herself for absolutely the last time over that half of the human species—but that tiny detail presented more of a challenge than a problem. There had to be someplace in the continental United States that had no men.
She just had to find it.
One
Steve Rawlings pushed open the door to Samson’s and stomped the snow off his boots. The sudden warmth and light made his eyes sting. He yanked off his gloves and hat and automatically headed for the far booth in back. As he expected, the bit of a bar was packed. There was nothing to do on a bitter, blizzardy Monday night in Eagle Falls—except drink and indulge in a little male bonding over a football game.
The Lions were playing on the black-and-white over the bar. The picture was fuzzy—TV reception was typically nip and tuck in this isolated corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Also, typically, beer was flowing freely. A few heads turned when Steve walked by. None of the men nodded or asked him to pull up a chair. He’d probably have keeled over from shock if they did. His work automatically gave him the popularity of a piranha with an infectious disease. He was used to it. So far, the guys had given him a wide, wary berth, but there were no overt signs of hostility. Hell, he’d been some places where people greeted him with a shotgun.
Blowing on his cold hands, he slid into the worn pine booth. The windchill factor was a mean subzero. He’d been working outside for the better part of six hours. His boots were caked with ice, his hands too numb to function and his stomach was growling with hunger. Stiffly he unzipped his parka and pushed the coat off his shoulders. His head was bent when he heard the soft, feminine magnolia drawl. His eyes shot up.
There were women in Eagle Falls. Just not many. The total local population couldn’t be more than a few hundred—summer cottages and hunting cabins were all boarded up by this time of year, and even the timber industry shut down in the dead of winter. Permanent residents were few. The area attracted wilderness lovers, loners, and for sure some families, but mostly people who chose to march to a different drummer. There were no lone women, for the obvious reason that there was spit little to appeal to a woman alone.
And especially a young woman like her.
She stood out like a rose in a pen of bulls. There wasn’t a line on her face—she couldn’t be thirty—and wearing boots, she stood maybe five foot six. A cap of glossy hair framed her face, mink brown, worn short and smooth. Classic beauty was the wrong label. Cute was more like it. Real cute, honest cute. Her nose had a sassy tip, her chin had a dimple and a slash of dark brows arched over huge, startling blue eyes. Her mouth was small, naked of lipstick, as pink as a petal and shaped like a bow.
Steve rubbed the circulation back into his cold hands, studying the rest of her. Her clothes were straight L.L. Bean, a flapping flannel shirt worn over a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. The clothes looked new, the jeans still stiff, her boots unscuffed. Still, the denim fabric faithfully cupped the curve of a truly delectable fanny, and a man would have to be both blind and brain-dead not to notice how unforgettably she filled out that turtleneck.
He couldn’t imagine what she was doing here.
Samson, the owner of the bar, was getting up in years and was plagued with arthritis. Steve understood why the old codger had hired help, just not how she fit in. Conceivably she’d waited tables and tended bar before, but he doubted it. Frowning, he watched her awkwardly handling a heavy tray. Her clumsy juggling of the beer mugs suggested a total lack of experience at the job.
When her hands were full, Fred Claire took advantage and patted her behind with a wink for the other guys. Brick red color skated up her cheeks. A mug of beer started to tip and spill. The tray clattered to the table.
Steve scratched his chin. He had a sixth sense for trouble. Honing and fine-tuning that instinct was an automatic requirement with his work. In this case, he didn’t smell trouble. Nothing about her attire was deliberately suggestive, but if she thought she could escape the guys’ attention in this place, she had to have a dreamer’s fantasy life. Most of the men were middle-aged, a fair slug of them married—hardly Lothario types, but hell, she was a testosterone-arousing package of new, young, female and good-looking. The boys giving her a rush was as predictable as conflict in the Middle East.
Rowdy laughter echoed from the crowded table by the door. Fred and his cronies had clearly been drinking for several hours now, and they were all making a teasing fuss over the spilled beer. Rafer claimed loudly that there was a wet spot in his lap that he’d sure appreciate her helping him with. The others snickered at his wit. The splotches of color on her cheeks darkened to the hue of a raw burn.
She was still flustered when she glanced up and spotted him. As soon as she escaped that table, she headed over and flipped open her order pad. “I’m sorry you had to wait. What would you like?”
“Coffee. And a couple of steaks if Samson’s still got any in back. Rare.”
She scribbled the order with her head tucked down, paying no attention to him until she suddenly glanced up. “A couple of steaks?” she echoed.
“A couple. As in two,” he affirmed.
She looked at him then. With him sitting down, she had no way of knowing he was six-three, but her gaze flickered over his rangy frame and broad shoulders. She wasn’t the first woman to check him over. It wasn’t Steve’s fault he was a hard man to ignore—he had no vote in his genetic inheritance—but his height and linebacker build made it tricky to hide in a crowd. His jet black hair, blue eyes and ruddy, clear skin added up to striking looks that had an embarrassing habit of attracting female attention. Most women took a second look.
Not her. After that quick shot at his face and shoulder span, her eyes dropped. Fast. She promptly wrote down “two” and underlined it. “I can see it’ll be an uphill job filling you up. I’ll nuke a couple of potatoes. And I think there’s still a piece of apple pie in back—”
“That’d be great.”
“You want your coffee black or with cream?”
“Black’ll do.”
“Okay. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
She spun around, not once looking at him again—but he’d had more than enough time to do a prowling close-up of her. Once the flush climbed down from her cheeks, her skin was as pale as ivory. Her voice was a velvet Southern drawl, soft, feminine and as vulnerable as everything else about her. The tag on her shirt read “Mary Ellen.” If Mary Ellen was looking for men, she’d positively picked the right place. Winters were long and lonesome in this neck of the woods, and she couldn’t find a higher male-to-female ratio outside of Alaska. Still, the image of man hungry didn’t work at all. Her posture was as stiff as a poker, her expression a mirror of nerves and wariness, and those incredible eyes of hers were as skittish as a newborn colt’s.
He watched her take another order—standing as she had at his booth, careful to keep from pinching and patting distance, not looking any of the boys in the eye—and then she disappeared into the back. A masculine bellow echoed through the room when the Lions fumbled the ball. Samson shot out from the kitchen, his white hair standing in spikes, waving a spatula, to armchair coach with the rest of them.
Steve rolled his shoulders, mentally blocking out the football game and the noise and his curiosity about the waitress, too. She wasn’t his problem. Heaven knew, he had problems of his own. The smoky warmth of the bar was slowly unthawing his frozen bones, and weariness was starting to hit him in waves. If his stomach hadn’t been pit-empty, he’d have driven straight to his trailer and six straight hours in bed. His body was used to being pushed, and this snow squall was no worse than a hundred he’d seen growing up on a Wyoming ranch, but the cold and exhaustion combined had been killers today. Weariness was dogging him as relentlessly as a shadow.
He didn’t know his eyes had closed, yet they must have, because the aroma of fresh coffee suddenly startled him. The steaming mug was sitting in front of him, hotter than the devil’s breath. Mary Ellen had come and gone without his hearing her, but he could see her now, dodging around the room, serving fresh pitchers of foaming beer, ducking under the TV so she didn’t block the view. Someone called out, “Sweetheart? Darlin’, we desperately need you over here.” He saw her jaw clench and that cherry color shoot to her cheeks again.
If there was a woman less suited to working in a bar, he couldn’t imagine one.
Over the next hour, she came to his table three times. She never said a word, never looked at him, but she kept his coffee filled; she served his steaks blood-rare with potatoes and trimmings he’d never asked for, noticed when he’d leveled that, and came back with a fat slice of apple pie heaped with ice cream. She didn’t hover—hell, she didn’t even ask what he wanted—but she took better care of him than a mother hen.
Steve couldn’t help but notice that her quiet competence around him was a direct contrast to her behavior around the other men. He’d always had a gift with wild critters—animals instinctively trusted him. But women were a distinctly different species. The lady didn’t need any great perceptive skills to realize that the other men treated him like a pariah. For most women, that would be a steer-clear clue that he was a man to be avoided, and with his height and size, the last instinct he usually aroused in females was security. Yet she treated him as if she’d instantly labeled him “safe,” no one who was going to cause her trouble. Although that was certainly true, it made her behavior around the other guys downright bewildering.
He wolfed down a bite of pie, watching Fred Claire try to cop another feel. A bowl of peanuts skittered when Mary Ellen jerked back.
Steve forced his attention on the pie. Samson’s specialty was apple pie; the apples were heavy on the nutmeg and cinnamon, not too much sugar, the crust as flaky as his own mother’s. Delicious. No reason at all for a lump to lodge in his throat. There was nothing going on at that far corner table by the door that he needed to think or worry about.
He wasn’t bosom buddies with Fred—or anyone else in Eagle Falls—but those particular people were regulars at the bar. He’d seen them often enough to have their measure. Fred’s brush cut was clipped shorter than a marine’s; he favored dressing in army fatigues, playing weekend war games, flashing a lot of weapons and coaxing anyone who’d listen into talking about his conspiracy theories. Maybe he wasn’t the average Joe, but basically he was harmless, a lot of big talk but no action.
A raucous snicker of masculine laughter echoed across the room.
Steve didn’t lift his head. She wasn’t really in trouble. There wasn’t anything tricky or difficult about handling Fred. Either a smile or a scolding would have put him—or any of the boys—in their place. By taking their teasing so seriously, it was the same as begging for more. Any woman who had an older brother or chose to work around men would surely know that. The boys had had too much beer. They were feeling their hormones. Nobody was going to ignore her if she kept rising to the bait.
He was on the last bite of pie when she whisked over and slipped the bill under his plate. She’d bitten her bottom lip a bruised red. The look around her eyes was pinched and drawn. Still, her magnolia drawl had a winsome shyness. “I’ll be back if y’all need change,” she said.
She’d already moved on before Steve had the chance to dig into his back pocket for his wallet. Change was no problem. He smacked the bills on the table, more than enough to include a walloping tip—which she’d earned. That easily, he told himself, she was completely off his mind. All his attention was focused on getting home. Already he could picture the double bed in his trailer, slipping between the sheets buck naked, burrowing into the warmth of a down comforter. Nothing was quieter than a night in the north woods, and the hot meal had pushed him over an edge. He was dizzy-tired, gut-tired, darn near mean-tired.
He could have sworn he wasn’t still watching her. Yet when he reached back for his parka, his eyes seemed to be peeled across the room, because he saw the exact moment when Fred hooked an arm around her waist.
She wasn’t carrying a tray that time, but she wasn’t expecting the pass, either. She landed with an awkward plop in Fred Claire’s lap. Fred said something—undoubtedly some kind of vulgar compliment, because it made the other men guffaw. She was trying to scramble off him. Fred was trying to keep her pinned.
Steve muttered an exasperated “Hell” under his breath and lurched to his feet. He didn’t need this. He had troubles of his own, and getting along with the good old boys in town was integral to resolving those troubles. But dammit, her face wasn’t flushed this time. It was stark white. Even from yards away, he could see her expression wasn’t just flustered or embarrassed, but downright, outright scared.
He stalked over, his step so quiet that no one even realized he was there—until he reached over and plucked the lady off Fred’s lap.
“Hey,” Fred objected.
It took a second to steady her. For that instant his hands were on her waist, he felt the supple warmth of her body and caught the vague drift of a subtle, feminine scent. His libido stirred, with a punch of sexual awareness that he’d never expected—but it didn’t last long.
“Hey!” Fred snarled again, nearly tipping the table when he jerked out of his chair.
Steve had no time to release an aggrieved masculine sigh. No question, when a man asked for trouble, he got it. Fred had been drinking for how many hours? His leathery face had a beer flush and the adrenaline of rage was flashing in his eyes. Steve grasped him by the shirt collar, quick. “I’m going to worry about you driving home after all that drinking,” he said calmly. “Wouldn’t you say that a good friend would help you sober up?”
Chairs scraped across the plank floor. As if a bomb had dropped, there was suddenly no sound in the room except for the blare of the Lion’s announcer on the boob tube. No one attempted to get in the way as Steve propelled Fred toward the door. There was no reason for anyone to object. It was the best entertainment anyone had enjoyed that night—short of watching one small woman get picked on.
The wind had finally died, but the air was colder than a witch’s heart when Steve yanked open the door. The icy air slammed straight into his lungs. It was dark out, but the fresh foot of snow had the sharp, bright gleam of sequins. He released Fred’s collar, bent down, scooped up a handful of snow and washed Fred’s face with it. His intuition was correct. The method helped Fred sober up right quick. The other man threw a punch. He got his face washed a second time for that asinine move.
“Where I come from, a man doesn’t pick on someone smaller than him. Only bullies do that, and I never met a bully yet who wasn’t a coward. Now, you got that message, or you want to discuss it a little while longer?”
Apparently Fred was in the mood for an in-depth discussion, although the subject of bullies never came up again. He let loose a string of four-letter words, including extensive commentary about Steve’s mother, her preference for combat boots and the shaky sexual preferences of his father. He didn’t throw another punch, though.
“Look, you’re drunk,” Steve said quietly. “Damn stupid to fight when you’re drunk. When you sober up, if you’re still looking for a fight, you come pick on me. I’ll take you on, if that’s what you really want. Just leave the lady alone, you hear me?”
Fred seemed to feel that comment required another wordy dissertation on his character, values and manhood—or lack thereof. It took an enormous amount of wind and hot air before he ran out of insults. Steve listened patiently the whole time. The Japanese had always understood that once a man lost face, he became an enemy. No man forgot being humiliated. Steve let him get the last word in for the same reason he hadn’t leveled the little hothead in front of his cronies inside. He wasn’t looking to make an enemy out of Fred Claire—or anyone else in Eagle Falls. He just wanted Ms. Blue Eyes left alone.
Once Fred’s windup insults ran down, Steve waited, studying his face. The begging-to-fight fire was dying in his eyes, the adrenaline settling back down. Fred was just plain cold, shivering violently in his shirtsleeves, snow dripping from his face and down his neck. A few minutes in subzero temperatures had a way of equalizing everything, even challenged male egos and bad tempers. Fred was no longer having fun.
Steve took one last look at his face. And walked away.
* * *
Men. Since the only thing Mary Ellen wanted to avoid was that particular half of the human species, it seemed the height of irony that she’d landed in a nest of the vipers. Of course, her specialty was screwing up. She never made small mistakes. Her forte had always been the big, classic, mortifyingly embarrassing-type boners.
She stuffed her hair under a stocking cap and grabbed her ski poles. Inhaling a lungful of crisp clean air, she reassured herself that moving here had been the best thing that ever happened to her. True, she’d misjudged the population of men. Equally true, she’d failed to consider the teensy problem of money. In her wildest nightmare she’d never anticipated having to work in a bar, but there’d simply been no other job around.
Still, her shift at Samson’s didn’t start until four in the afternoon. Her day was free until then. All her day hours were free.
She pushed off, her cross-country skis forging a fresh track in the new snow. Wonders surrounded her. Raised in the South, she’d never dreamed of snow like this. The rolling pine woods were deep, peaceful, quiet. Where sunlight shot down, the new snow laid on the emerald branches like a white satin glaze. A scarlet cardinal caught her eye. A soft-furred bunny scampered across her path.
She didn’t know where she was going. Didn’t care. She hadn’t misjudged how soul renewing this isolated area would be. There were endless acres of woods and wilderness to explore. Her rented cabin was an idyllic retreat for a woman planning to live as a hermit-monkess. There was no family around for her to disappoint. No town looking over her shoulder, waiting for her next I-told-you-so screwup. And although the Freds and the Georges and the Ben McCreries were giving her fits at the bar, during the day she didn’t have to even see a human being with a Y chromosome unless she wanted to. And there was positively no man appealing enough to tempt her aggravatingly impulsive heart.
An image of a giant with searing blue eyes drifted through her mind.
She let the image linger, simply because there was no harm, no possible temptation involved. She remembered the stranger’s overwhelming height, the impact of his startling eyes. She remembered thinking that he was an incredible hunk, and for the same reason feeling a rare sensation of being safe. Hunks never preyed on her. Her looks were too ordinary.
And for once, her first judgment of a man had been accurate. The whole time she waited on him, he’d been kind and quiet, but there’d been no teasing or come-ons. He just wasn’t the kind of man who would ever be interested in her. Looking at him was like indulging in window-shopping at a candy store when the door was locked. There was no threat of her suckering into those dangerous calories. His face was square cut, strong boned, ruggedly handsome; there was character in the etched lines around his eyes and mouth. She wasn’t likely to forget it.
Nor had she forgotten the way he’d suddenly gotten up and hustled Fred Claire outside. At the time, it barely registered that he was rescuing her. He’d moved like a hunter, swift and sure, hauling Fred outside faster than anyone knew what was happening. He’d never said anything, never came back in. Mary Ellen still didn’t know what he’d done, but when Mr. Jerk returned to his table, he’d been as polite as a Catholic schoolboy and he’d pointedly ignored her for the last three nights now.
She owed that giant big time.
He’d get his thanks—if she ever saw him again—but right now she had other things on her mind. Her skis hissed through the new-fallen snow. She was still new to the sport, still prone to an occasional clumsy tumble, but getting better. As she worked up a rhythm, the crisp air pinkened her cheeks and stung her eyes.
Every day she trekked farther and explored new directions. She’d been so crushed when she first moved here. Occasionally she still thought about Johnny. Occasionally she still woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the nightmare of a bride in a white dress, standing in the church for a Christmas Eve wedding, the guests all there, the whole town waiting for a groom who never showed.
That humiliating memory still made her cringe, but she’d slowly realized that that singular rejection wasn’t the real source of her hurt. It was being wrong, one too many times. It was feeling, once too often, the stone weight of being unloved and unlovable. Johnny had turned out to be a turkey, but Johnny wasn’t the real problem. Her self-respect was in more crumpled pieces than a broken cookie.
That cookie refused to instantly glue back together—but she was working on it.
When she brushed against a pine branch, snow shivered down in a shower of fluffy crystals, making her chuckle. It wasn’t so hard, being happy. It wasn’t so impossible, to laugh again. Being alive was riches enough, and she was discovering more riches every day.
She poled to the crest of a hill, and then, bending her knees, sailed down to the belly of a small valley. At the bottom she stopped, breathless and exhilarated, and yanked off a glove to check the compass in her pocket. Northeast. If she kept going in that direction, eventually she’d hit Lake Superior. Even if the landscape was totally unfamiliar, she had her bearings, wasn’t afraid of being lost. She zipped the compass back into her jacket pocket again, and was just refitting her glove when she saw the animal.
Fear never occurred to her in that first instant. He looked like a dog. A Siberian-husky type. He had a long snout and pointy ears, and mesmerizingly liquid black eyes staring right at her. His luxuriously thick pelt was almost as stark white as the snow. Her eyes softened. Lord, he was gorgeous, and standing motionless from a knoll thirty feet from her, as regal and silent as a statue.
“Hey, boy,” she said softly. “Are you lost?”
Her tone was as gentle as a whisper—she’d fallen in love on sight—but his response to her was distinctly different. At the first sound of her voice, he bared huge pointed teeth and snarled, his growl so ferocious that her throat closed.
It wasn’t a dog. She knew it in a pulsebeat. No husky was that big; no tame animal made wild, feral sounds like that. It had to be a wolf.
Every muscle in her body clenched up and locked. She couldn’t swallow. Adrenaline shot through her veins in an ice-cold rush.
The wolf paced another five feet closer, snapping threatening growls the whole time. It wasn’t hard to get the message. He didn’t like her. She’d have been thrilled to turn tail and run, only damned if she wasn’t too scared to move. She heard another snarl and whipped her head around.
Another one. Lord. Another two—no, three. At least three of them. The others were multicolored, their pelts ranging from dark charcoal to streaky gray. None of them were as huge as the white wolf, but the few pounds difference was hardly reassuring. She sensed as well as saw that she was being circled. They were moving. Pacing slowly in the snow, ducking in and behind trees, but keeping her in sight.
She’d have wet her pants if she had time.
There was no time. Panic sealed her throat. She had a flash memory of the afternoon she’d idiotically considered suicide. She’d never meant it. She’d just been so angry with herself—being stood up at her wedding had been a last straw in a long history of humiliating, embarrassing screwups. But geesh. At her most stupid, she’d never really wanted to die. And for sure she didn’t want to die all alone, torn to shreds in the middle of the north woods by a pack of wolves.
It was positively an uphill, difficult and darn near insurmountable job to earn her own self-respect. But she wanted a chance. Come on, God. I’m trying so hard, but I need a little time. How about a bargain. You get me out of this, and I’ll never mess up again as long as I live. I’ll be so good you’ll be astounded. I’ll be so good that I’ll be astounded....
The white wolf lifted his head and howled.
The sound echoed in the lonely woods like a cry from her own heart. She swallowed on a shattered breath. Tears welled, unwanted nuisance tears, blurring her vision when she desperately needed to see.
The wolves circled closer. The word run screamed through her mind, but it was easier to think than act. She could hardly run hellbent-for-leather wearing cross-country skis. There were trees all over the place, hardwoods as well as heavily branched pines, but her skis made climbing any of them just as impossible. There had to be a way out of this. She just had to think.
“Stand still. Don’t run. Don’t move—just stand real still.”
She heard the human voice. A masculine voice, but just then she wasn’t picky. One chord of that low masculine baritone and relief sang through her pulse like an opera aria. She whirled around. Nothing—not death, bombs or taxes—could have stopped her from aiming for that voice. “Oh, God, I’m so glad you’re here—”
“For cripe’s sakes, listen to me! Don’t move!”
Two
Mary Ellen obediently froze. Her heart even started beating again. She recognized the giant from the restaurant, although she barely looked at him. Her eyes glued straight on the gun he was carrying. The nice, long, big gun. She wasn’t going to die. The wolves weren’t going to get her. He had a gun. “Shoot ‘em, for pete’s sake!”
“Now, just take it easy. I’m pretty sure we don’t need to go that far.”
His slow, lazy baritone took her back. “In case you haven’t noticed—” personally, she thought he’d have to be myopic and deaf not to notice “—I think those wolves are planning to have me for lunch.”
“Yeah, I can see they’re not too happy with you.” He glanced at the wolves, then back at her. “Try to see it from their viewpoint. A human is their worst enemy. And you didn’t just barge into their territory. You wandered within twenty-five yards from a nest of their pups. They’re just trying to protect their young.”
Conceivably he thought she needed this information. She waved her hand in front of his face. One of them seemed to be under the illusion they had time for a casual chitchat. It wasn’t her. “I’m sorry I upset them. You’d never believe how sorry. If I could disappear into thin air, trust me, I’d be glad to. But that not being an option, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d at least aim that gun—”
“I’m afraid it isn’t the kind of weapon you think it is. It’s just a tranquilizing gun. No bullets. And yeah, I can shoot them if I have to, but it’s a lousy choice. The sedative would put them out for several hours. They’d be prey to the elements, other animals, and they’d be affected by the drug for a couple of days. Just relax, okay? They aren’t doing anything but growling at you. They’re entitled to give you a lecture. You screwed up.”
“Nothing new about that. It’s the story of my life,” she muttered.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. I can’t think. Geezle beezle, they’re still circling!”
“I know. And I know you’re scared, but you’re staying real cool. I’m proud of you. Most men would have lost it by now, but not you. You’re holding it together just fine. We’re gonna keep talking, okay? And while we’re talking, I want you to toe the catch on your skis. Real slow, real careful, see if you can get them off. Just forget the wolves. Look at me, straight at me.”
He had everything wrong. She wasn’t staying cool; she was a pinch away from totally losing it, and positively she’d done nothing to make the stranger—or anyone else—proud of her. Yet she looked straight at him, because he’d asked her. And she managed to awkwardly, clumsily toe off her skis, because he’d asked her to do that, too. The man had a Pied Piper voice—throaty and husky and hypnotizingly seductive. He could probably coax a nun to strip with that wickedly sexy voice, but that hardly explained why she obeyed him. There was only one possible reason why she did what he asked.
She’d lost her mind.
Circumstantial evidence wasn’t a fair way to judge a man, but she could hardly fail to notice clues that he wasn’t necessarily operating with a full deck. The wolves were snarling and circling and charging around. He was as calm as a spring breeze. Mary Ellen took that as a teensy hint that he needed a reality check. For reasons she couldn’t imagine, the front of his parka and jeans were hard-packed with snow. The hood was thrown back, revealing a shaggy, disheveled pelt of jet black hair. It looked as if his hair was decorated with dry leaves, which made no sense. Making even less sense, he was unzipping his parka as he slowly walked toward her.
She’d instinctively trusted him in the restaurant, instinctively sensed that he wasn’t the kind of man to prey on a vulnerable woman. Then and now, she should have remembered that her judgment about men wasn’t worth a Las Vegas dollar. Obviously she’d been mistaken about the intelligence in his shrewd blue eyes. No way he could be too bright when it seemed to have missed his notice entirely that her life was in imminent danger. Hells bells, so was his. The wolves sounded restless and hungry and mean and ferocious. And her damn fool of a giant was peeling off his jacket in freezing-lung temperatures as if he had nothing better to do.
“What I want you to do,” he said gently, “is put on my coat.”
“You want me to wear your coat?”
“And my muffler and gloves.”
“And your muffler and gloves,” she echoed. Vaguely she wondered if she’d landed in the twilight zone. She had experience, extensive experience, in embarrassing messes. Coping with situations that no sane woman would normally land herself in was really her forte. Somehow, though, nothing had prepared her for holding a witless conversation with a madman while surrounded by wolves.
“They know my scent.”
“Swell.”
Her deadpan comment was hardly intended to arouse his sense of humor, yet his mouth curved in the crack of a grin. “I’m getting the definite feeling we’d better backtrack a few yards. My name is Steve. Steve Rawlings. And I guess I just assumed you knew who I was. My being around has raised a lot of talk in town.”
“I’m new in Eagle Falls. And not exactly on the chitchat gossip circuit.”
He nodded. “So you didn’t know.... These wolves are my problem. My job. By profession I’m an ethologist. I study and work with animals like wolves, and specifically I’m working with this pack. It’d be my responsibility if anyone was hurt because of them, and I’m for sure not going to let anything happen to you, okay?” He gave her a moment to take in that information, then calmly went on. “The reason I want you to wear my coat is that it has my scent. They know me. In fact I’ve known White Wolf, the alpha male, since he was a pup. I don’t want to kid you—we’re in dicey waters. Wolves aren’t dogs—they’re wild animals. It’s dangerous to trust any wild animal. But I think we’ve got a great chance of this working.”
He’d reached her by then. The blasted man was so tall that she had to tilt her face to meet his eyes. “If you’re trying to be reassuring, I hate to tell you, but you’re failing big time. I’m real close to throwing up.”
“Nah. You’re staying real cool, real calm. I knew you would. When I saw you in the restaurant, I thought to myself, now there’s a lady who wouldn’t lose it in a crisis—no, no, quit looking at them. Look at me. Take it easy. You’re doing just fine. Although—”
“Although?” Momentarily she couldn’t help feeling distracted. She wasn’t the stay-cool type. She reliably fell apart in any crisis. Now was no different—she was scared enough to lose her cookies. How he could have formed such a mistakenly inaccurate impression of her was downright confounding.
“Although—” lazy, easy humor glinted in his eyes again “—it’d sure help a lot if you could loosen that death grip you’ve got on your ski poles.”
She glanced down. She had no idea her fists were glued to her ski poles until he started peeling her gloved hands loose. Once that was accomplished, the ski poles dropped in the snow. Then, with the gun anchored between his knees, he slowly fitted her arms into his parka. The size of his jacket was big enough to fit over her own, but stuffing her into the second coat was a cumbersome process. She couldn’t help him. Her stomach was too busy doing flip-flops.
Her response to his closeness wasn’t sexual. It couldn’t be. Sex was the last thing on her mind, not just because of the situation, but just because. Other women seemed to feel an automatic jet pull near a virile male hunk. Not her. Her hormones had never flipped on like a light switch. She had to know a guy. She had to think about it.
Since sexual awareness couldn’t conceivably be causing the dancing flutter in her stomach, she decided it must be the...strangeness. He’d given her a lot to take in. He worked with wolves. That was tough to imagine. He promised he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. It was even tougher to imagine her believing that—heaven knew, she’d suffered consequences from mistakenly trusting men’s promises before.
She’d been reasonably fine. Until he moved so close. When he wrapped the scarf around her neck, his wrist brushed her cheek. The muffler carried the warm male scent of his skin, and his touch aroused a shivery lick of feminine nerves. She tried to prop Johnny’s mental picture in her mind’s eye, which invariably reminded her of the mistakes she’d made. Only it didn’t work this time. Steve wasn’t Johnny. He wasn’t like any man she’d known before, and she had the sudden disoriented feeling that he could be far more dangerous than his wolves.
His towering height blocked the view of the woods, the world, the pale afternoon sun. She hadn’t seen his face this close before. The weathered lines around his eyes and forehead were as ingrained as granite. He hadn’t gotten those character lines playing checkers in a warm parlor. He knew what he wanted. It wasn’t a life playing checkers. There was steel in his square jaw, wildness in his unkempt hair and rough, straggly brows. His touch was gentle with her, but she couldn’t stop thinking that it didn’t have to be. With his powerful build, she couldn’t imagine anyone stopping him from doing whatever he wanted.
When he zipped the jacket straight to her chin, his eyes met hers. He didn’t say, Make up your mind, Mary Ellen. He didn’t say, Damn, but I’m tempted to give you something a lot more serious to worry about than a few old wolves. It was just in her mind, that he was sizing her up in an intense, intimate way. He didn’t want her. For pete’s sake, he didn’t even know her. She was just imagining silly things because she was so shook up.
“They quit,” she said.
“Quit?”
“The wolves. They’re quiet. They quit howling.” When he stepped back and glanced around, the breath whooshed out of her lungs. “I don’t see them. Do you think they’ve left?”
“No. They’re around. But since they’ve moved out of sight, they’ve apparently made up their minds to behave. Which leaves me with a tricky decision,” he murmured.
Again, his eyes peeled on her. Again, she felt a curling sensation, as if her whole body was warmer than buttered toast. Foolishness. She was wrapped in double layers of down; naturally she was hot. It had nothing to do with the way he was looking at her. “What’s this tricky decision?”
“I’m not about to leave you alone,” he immediately reassured her. “I have a pickup over the next rise, about a quarter-mile walk from here. I’ll take you home. But it would help a lot if you wouldn’t mind sticking with me for a few more minutes.”
“Sticking with you?”
“I’m in a bind,” he admitted. “When I first heard the wolves kicking up a fuss, I was halfway through feeding the pups. There’s seven of them, a couple I left hungry. It would take time to drive you home and get back here. It’d just be a lot easier to finish the job right now, but I don’t know how shook-up or scared you are—”
She could have told him how scared and rattled she was. The instant she got home, she fully anticipated indulging in a nice long case of the shakes. She loved cats. She loved schnauzers. But this singular experience with wolves had permanently cured her of any desire to be anywhere near this particular animal again in this lifetime.
But damn. He’d saved her behind. Twice now. And he’d mentioned the pups, but she hadn’t made the connection that he had anything to do with them. The debt she owed him sat on her conscience like guiltladen lead, and geesh, what was a few more minutes of heart-hammering terror? “It’s not that I’m shook-up,” she assured him, and then had to clear her throat. The giant lie had almost caught in it. “But you’re the one who needs to get out of the weather. You have to be freezing without your jacket. You’ll catch cold.”
Over his jeans, he was only wearing a gray alpaca sweater. The garment stretched over his muscular chest, a thick-weaved, scratchy wool, practical and warm enough for a dash outside but hardly for working in these temperatures. “I’m cold,” he admitted, “but the pups are real young. So young that their survival at all is real iffy.”
“So it could matter, if they were fed right this instant, huh?” She gulped in another guilty breath. Babies were babies. How could she be responsible for babies going hungry? Still, she’d only asked him a question. She hadn’t said yes, sure, I’d love to stick around and risk my life for another few hours. Yet his response to her single hesitant comment was a devil-slow masculine grin.
“I could have guessed you’d say yes. Nothing much throws you, does it? And it’s possible that we’re pushing our luck, but I don’t think so. White Wolf wouldn’t have backed off if he hadn’t made his mind up about you. Still, we’ll just take this slow and easy. Have you ever seen baby wolves?”
No, she’d never seen baby wolves—or ever planned to. For two exhilarating seconds, her fragile ego basked in his respect for her courage, but that soaring sensation didn’t last long. He was so totally mistaken. She hadn’t earned that respect. She had no guts. She’d just never managed the assertive art of saying no—a personality flaw that had majorly contributed to her landing in hot water in the past.
She’d never been in hot water quite like this, though. Quicker than a smile, he’d taken her hand. Before she could draw a nervous breath, they were crossing the white sugarcoated valley. In the open. Easy prey for wolves or bears or anything else. He’d scooped both her skis and his gun under one arm, so it wasn’t as if he could aim that rifle quick, even if he had to.
They climbed a ridge, ducked around a stand of white pines and scrambled down a knoll. The new snow layer was fluff, but beneath that lay an ice crust, tricky footing in just her ski boots. Even though he had to be freezing in just that sweater, he never moved fast and he never loosened his grip on her hand. The thick gloves prevented any personal contact, but his secure hold felt like being plugged into a direct socket of strength. He wasn’t going to let her fall.
He kept talking in that lazy, calm baritone of his. Talking was a necessity, he told her. Wolves had acute hearing. Talking let the animals know where he was, who he was, and a steady, soothing tone helped communicate that he meant them no harm. Wolves were nervous by nature. They had reason to be.
Mary Ellen had no idea if he was successfully calming the beasts, but his low, husky voice was working an unwilling magic on her. He didn’t talk about anything but the wolves. She wondered if he realized how much he was revealing about himself.
Isle Royale, he told her, was less than a thirty-mile stretch across Lake Superior from here. Since the late fifties, the island was one of the few places on the continent where the endangered species of gray wolf was protected. A few years ago, though, the species had started dying out. Numbers dropped from fifty to eleven. No one could pin down the problem. The wolves had an ample food supply; the winters weren’t that harsh; neither disease nor age seemed to be the contributing factor. They simply weren’t breeding. The best theory seemed to be genes—that the three surviving packs were too inbred. The wolves needed a new gene pool if they were going to survive.
“So two years ago, I flew in White Wolf. He’s from Alaska—where I was working then. Carried him, his best girl and two more from that pack, and settled them on the island. They seemed to be doing fine. They mated and bred, and everything was going hunky-dory—until this winter.”
Normally the icy waters of Lake Superior created a formidable barrier between the island and the Upper Peninsula. But that stretch of lake had frozen before, in winters as violently cold as this one. “The damn doofuses walked across on the ice floes. They got it in their heads that they wanted to set up housekeeping on this side. Not a brain in their idiot heads.”
It was hard for Mary Ellen to think of wolves in affectionate terms like “doofuses,” but clearly Steve did.
“No one wants them. No one’s ever wanted wolves. People don’t mind a romantic story about them, like Jack London wrote or Walt Disney filmed, but find one in your backyard and that attitude changes real quickly. Man has always been afraid of wolves—it’s as simple as that, and no laws have ever protected them from being hunted down. They need to be taken back to the island, partly because the whole species isn’t going to make it—not without this new blood—and partly because their chance of surviving here is worse than a bookie’s odds. So that’s what I came here to do—transport them back to the island. Only damn, I hit a little snag I never expected.”
“A snag?” She couldn’t imagine what he’d consider “a little snag.” He mentioned rounding up the wolves and transporting them to the island as if this were an ordinary project for him. Even trying to picture the act boggled her mind.
“White Wolf’s mate was shot several days ago. And unfortunately, she’d just given birth to a litter of pups less than ten days before that.”
“Someone shot the mother?” Her voice was small. Minutes before, she’d been in a bloodthirsty rush for him to aim that gun and shoot to kill. That white behemoth of a wolf—and his cronies—had terrified her. Still did. But she hadn’t thought of the wolves as vulnerable then. She hadn’t pictured a young mother hunted down, leaving a nest of helpless newborn babies. “I guess I should have expected that something had happened to the mother. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t have any reason to be feeding the pups if the mom was alive.”
“Well, normally if a mother wolf dies, another female in the pack will take over. She’ll bond with the pups and start producing milk. Only there’s only one other female in the pack. She’s no spring chicken and that didn’t happen. So I’m feeding them formula five times a day. Unfortunately they’re just too young and weak to move right now. And the rest of the pack—they won’t leave. Not without their young. There isn’t a human alive who can understand a wolf’s loyalty. He’ll sacrifice his life to protect those he loves. They take care of each other. That instinct is as strong in wolves as their need to eat or breathe.”
Steve grabbed her arm when she stumbled on a slick ridge. She hadn’t been looking where she was going, but at him. His face was ruddy from the cold, yet the temperature didn’t seem to bother him. He released her arm quickly, but the gesture had protected her from a fall as automatically as the wolves he’d been talking about. His affinity for the animals was no accident, she mused. He was like them. A lone wolf. A man who valued loyalty, who willingly made personal sacrifices for something he cared about, who was instinctively protective of others around him. He’d obviously chosen his work and his life-style. That kind of strength—that kind of loneliness—was beyond anything she knew.
But being a loner...Mary Ellen knew a lot about that. She’d lived her whole life with the tag of misfit.
“So,” she said, “how long are you stuck with this problem?”
“It’ll be at least a month, maybe more, before the pups are strong enough to be relocated. And the whole thing is a gamble. Someone would say a stupid gamble, trying to keep them together. It’s not like I couldn’t ship the pups off to some zoo—there’s no problem finding people willing to take care of them. But they’d never make it outside of captivity if I separated them from the pack now. They imprint on the grown-ups. The older ones teach them how to survive in the wild, something no human could do. It’s real iffy whether I can keep them all safe for that long. There’s a town meeting this Thursday. I know damn well they have in mind voting an open season on my pals.”
She glanced at him again. His voice never fluctuated from that slow, lazy drawl. He made that town meeting sound like nothing more challenging than a Sunday stroll. Yet it had to be hard, being an unwanted stranger with an unwanted cause, and she couldn’t imagine the guts it would take to face down a townful of people who viewed him as an enemy.
She knew how it felt to be judged, so it was probably natural that she felt a compelling emotional tug for him. She was a loner, too, but a misfit not by choice. For an instant she wanted to reach out and touch him as if they shared a personal bond—when there was no bond. He had guts. She didn’t. He had strength to burn, volunteered for difficult situations. Her response to the difficult situation with Johnny had been to cringe, get an itchy case of hives and then duck and run lickety-split, like the coward she was. She looked away. “I guess you’ve had to deal with that kind of problem before?”
He never got around to answering her, although when he suddenly stopped walking, she wasn’t sure why. The craggy ridge looked no different than the landscape they’d just traveled—wild and woody. There were no footprints in the snow, no sign any human had ever discovered these primitive backwoods. The forest was dark, deep, endless, winding around hills and snow-swept, jutting crags of land. Then, though, she spotted an olive green box, like the kind of case people packed drinks and sandwiches for a picnic in.
Steve bent over and pushed the top off. The box definitely wasn’t being used for picnic supplies. Strange-looking baby bottles were packed around hot-water sacks. He unwrapped one and showed her. “I got the bottles from the hospital in Houghton. They’re meant for babies with cleft palates, but they work just as well for pups too young to suckle.”
She edged closer, her arms wrapped around her chest. A wisp of a smell hit her nostrils—strong enough to make her nose crinkle.
He chuckled. “I should have warned you. The formula isn’t exactly aromatic.”
“Good grief, what’s in it?”
“Piles of disgusting stuff, from raw egg yolks to vitamins. Trying to fool them that this is their mama’s milk has been an uphill trip, I’ll tell you. But never mind that. Are you ready to fall in love?”
Her eyes flew to his faster than a shooting comet. “I beg your pardon?”
Slowly, lazily, he studied her face as if the color in her cheeks was the most fascinating thing he’d seen in a blue moon. “You’re not all that sure what you think, are you? You don’t think you’re gonna be tempted into caring. A lot of people don’t. A wolf’s a wolf, and these little guys don’t come out of the womb looking like a Walt Disney cartoon. They’re born wild and wary, a real handful, no interest in being tamed. But I just have this strange feeling, Mary Ellen, that you’re gonna fall hopelessly in love.”
He was talking about the baby wolves, of course. Not him. Not them. Not for a moment—not even for a millisecond—had she thought he meant anything else. It was just the low timbre in his voice when he said her name...she didn’t realize he even knew her name...that made her suddenly shiver. She shifted her attention from his gaze at the speed of light, looking all over for some sign of the nest or a den or someplace where the pups might be. “So where are they?” she asked impatiently.
“Right here.” Stuffing two bottles under his sweater, he bent under the shadowed branches of a spruce, and then went belly flat in the snow.
More wary than curious, she crouched down, too.
“Can’t see them from that far. You have to get closer.”
Well, geesh. She’d come this far, so it seemed pretty ridiculous to back out now. Snow showered her head when she elbow crawled to his side, protected by ski pants and a double layer of coats, as he certainly wasn’t. She heard him sneeze, and automatically started to respond with a “Bless you” when she saw the silky gleam of tiny eyes.
The nest wasn’t exactly a cave, more like a long, low ledge of a rock that tunneled in several yards, the opening concealed entirely by the spruce and stark winter black brush. Once inside, the darkness was as sudden as night. Her pupils had to dilate to see anything after the blinding glare of sunlit snow. Yet she saw the tiny eyes, and then another pair and another. Milky blue. Baby blue. The fur balls were nestled in a heap, with tiny shiny noses and tiny floppy ears, and one had the same gorgeous white pelt of his father.
The snowball baby tried out a lonely, angry howl, echoing his daddy except that its volume was barely a mewl. He thought he was real tough, for a two-pound bit of fluff. Steve plugged its mouth with the strange-tipped bottle, and the baby instantly quieted. Steve sneezed again—the blasted man was positively going to catch pneumonia on this little venture—but sympathy for him wasn’t the reason for the velvet lump in her throat.
Damnation if he wasn’t right.
She fell hopelessly in love on the spot. Not for him. Good grief! She wasn’t crazy.
But definitely for the babies.
Three
Predictably, as soon as Mary Ellen doused the car lights, she dropped the keys. Bending over and squished, she groped in the no-man’s land of the dark car floor until she found them, then collected her gloves, shoulder bag, hot pads and Crockpot. Holding all of those, she naturally discovered she had no way to open the door. She rejuggled. Eventually she escaped the dratted car, and holding the heavy pot with both hands, gave the door a good swing with her fanny to close it.
It was a lot of trouble to go through, just to bring a man some plain old beef stew. Well, truthfully it was her best ragout, but that point was moot. The dinner was owed. She hadn’t met any Galahads in the nineties. Steve had not only given up his coat for her yesterday, but he’d also saved her from the wolves—both in the woods and the bar. She obviously had to find a way to thank him.
The offer to bring him dinner had been impulsive. Steve had pounced on it. No demurring. No gee-you-don’t-have-to’s. His fast agreement worried her—it was the first time she’d seen Steve Rawlings do anything fast—and she’d chewed a fingernail, fussing over whether he could misinterpret the gesture. Men had a habit of misinterpreting just about anything she’d ever done, no matter how innocent or well-intentioned.
Her arms ached from the weight of the Crockpot as she looked around. He was home, because she could see the edge of his black four-wheel-drive pickup, parked behind the trailer. Yellow light shined from the windows, making lonely patches of color in the snow. Even this early in the evening—six o’clock—the night was blacker than tar. He’d chosen to set the trailer in the middle of nowhere, isolated in a nest of black trees and sooty shadows. An icy, eerie wind shivered through the treetops, making her shiver uneasily, too.
If she were home in Georgia, it’d be warm by the first week in March. Not blizzard-mean-cold like here. In her Georgia hometown, too, no single woman would be visiting a single guy, in his lair, after dark, unless she was volunteering for big-time trouble.
Now that’s ridiculous, Mary Ellen told herself impatiently. She wasn’t staying. She was just going to drop off the Crockpot. Twice now, he’d gone out of his way to help her, and manners required a thankyou. The only danger she was risking was a frostbit tush from standing out here in the dark like a witless goose.
She took a breath, marched to his doorstep and used her elbow to knock. The knock only created a muffled sound, but the door promptly flew open. Warm air flooded out. She only had one quick, daunting glimpse of a giant whose shoulders were never meant to fit in a compact trailer-size door.
“Finally Red Riding Hood arrives. I was starting to get worried, afraid you’d get lost trying to find the place.”
“Red...?” The Riding Hood tag startled her. Could he possibly know how wary she felt about walking into a wolf’s lair? But then she caught the flash of an easy, teasing grin, and it clicked real quick where he’d picked up the fairy-tale association. She was wearing a hooded cherry red jacket and carrying goodies through the woods. Pretty hard to deny she was natural prey for a tease, and she had to smile back. “No, I had no trouble. Your directions were great.”
He reached down the steps to take the heavy pot from her hands. “This smells great. Come on in.”
She shook her head swiftly. “I can’t stay—”
“You have to work tonight?”
“No. I only work four nights a week. It’s just that I only meant to bring you dinner. To thank you. Not to take up any of your time—”
“You’re going to make me eat alone? When you’re already here? And I haven’t had anyone to talk to all day but wild animals?”
His mournful tone made her roll her eyes—he couldn’t pass that off as blarney in Ireland—but damn. He made her feel awkward about taking off without at least sharing some conversation. Gingerly she stepped inside. “I’ll just stay a couple of minutes,” she insisted.
He didn’t seem to hear her, and he hadn’t let go of the pot yet. He sniffed. “I haven’t had a homemade ragout in a hundred years. Is it okay if I admit my undying love for you?”
“It’s just stew,” she said dryly, but drat the man, he was downright forcing her to chuckle.
“Just stew is real food. You don’t understand. I’ve either been opening cans or eating Samson’s cooking for weeks now.” Once he set the pot down, he hustled her out of her red jacket and made it disappear, then gave her white tunic sweater and jeans a once-over. She’d been careful about her choice of clothes. The jeans were old, not tight, not fancy, and the bulky sweater concealed her figure more effectively than a nun’s habit. There was nothing in his view, absolutely nothing, to cause the sudden lazy, masculine gleam in his eyes. “Good thing you’re a shrimp. There’s not a lot of space around here for two of us to move around.”
She chuckled again, and this time felt the tension in her shoulders easing. Would a man call a woman a shrimp if he had seduction on his mind? He was being funny, natural, just plain nice. It was past time she kiboshed the electric nerves she felt around him. She never used to be so paranoid, not until Johnny burned her, and it was ridiculously egotistical to imagine that Steve represented any danger to her. He was positively nothing like Johnny.
“Your place isn’t so small. In fact, it’s a lot bigger than it looks on the outside,” she commented as she looked around.
“So sit and make yourself comfortable. You can have the seat of honor. You want wine, beer, soda?”
“Nothing, really, but thanks.” His “seat of honor” was the only chair, a tweedy recliner in gray hues. A long couch matched it. Both were his size—heck, she could have curled up and slept in the chair—and the small living area overlooked the kitchen ell. The bar-style table was ivory colored, the charcoal-shaded carpeting cushion-thick. A short hallway of closets led to a shadowed bedroom—where he’d tossed her jacket—and she saw the tucked end of a Hudson Bay blanket in the wedge of light.
The trailer wasn’t big enough for a party, but there was ample room for him to move around. It was hard for two to maneuver, though. She slipped off her boots and dropped in the chair when she saw she was going to be in his way. He opened and closed cupboards, taking out plates, silverware, napkins. His TV was on, tuned to the news, but without sound. He kept up an easy conversation.
“I have a place in Wyoming. A little house, on a spread of land by a creek. That’s where I grew up, out West, but I’ve had the trailer for years. Sometimes I’m gone months at a time with my work, and I’d go nuts trying to live in motels and finding rental places. This way I can have my own stuff with me.”
“So...you go wherever the wolves are?”
“Not always wolves. But they’re my love, and I seemed to have ended up specializing in them whether I planned it or not. I worked for the EPA for a while, then hooked up with the National Park Service. For this project I’ve been loaned out to the state of Michigan—their DNR, Department of Natural Resources. Never seems to matter who’s signing my paychecks, I end up doing the same thing. There just aren’t a lot of people who get real excited about tackling a wounded wolf, or moving a pack of ‘em. Maybe it’s like a doc who overspecialized. There’s nobody else who does the job—or really wants the job—so I’m the stuckee.”
“You’ve traveled all over?”
“From Mexico to Alaska,” he confirmed. “The red wolf, gray wolf, Mexican wolf—they’re all threatened. Only three places on the planet where they’re not, though lots of people are sympathetic to the cause. The UP here has really worked at it—set up a Michigan Wolf Recovery Team, and backed that up with good laws and stiff penalties for killing wolves. But the bottom line is that when a wolf’s causing trouble, the easiest solution is to shoot him—or trap and put him in captivity, out of harm’s way. Nobody’s to blame for that. A problem wolf, wild, part of his pack, in his own environment...he doesn’t make it real easy to help him. It’s just a lot easier for someone who knows the species to take the ball.”
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Jennifer Greene
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A Groom For Red Riding Hood, электронная книга автора Jennifer Greene на английском языке, в жанре современные любовные романы