His eyes drank me in from the toes of my hiking boots to the long, black braid of my hair. Desire flared in them.
“Good morning,” he said through a smile that could stop traffic. A nice rumble punctuated his low voice, making a tingle spread through me. Yep, that voice was just as sexy and masculine as I remembered.
I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of him. “Good morning,” I replied, and meant it. It wasn’t every morning I got to go hiking with a sexy stranger, which was why I had told one of the waitresses at the bar exactly where I was going and with who. While he gave me a querulous look, I texted the waitress his picture.
“Not that I mind, but why the pic?” he asked.
I looked him square in the eyes as I answered to better judge his reaction. “So my co-worker will know who to send the cops after if I don’t come back.”
He laughed, a deep, genuine sound that rumbled as much as his voice and vibrated along my skin. Heated blood worked its way to my breasts and groin.
“Smart and beautiful. I admire that,” he said. His gaze traveled past me to my Jeep.
I stiffened, preparing to defend her; she was being restored on a college student budget, and he had pulled up in a sports car after all.
“Black on black, hum? You even powder coated all the chrome bits,” he observed in a non-judgmental tone.
“Yep.” My gaze flicked to his car. “Flashy isn’t my thing.”
He walked around it, making appreciative noises as he passed the Smittybilt winch and custom bumpers. “You in the process of having it restored?”
“Of doing it myself, yep.”
His brows rose as he straightened and looked at me. “Yourself?”
“Yep,” I said again.
One corner of his lip quirked up and he tugged the other between his teeth in an expression that revealed his desire. “Nice,” he said in a breathy voice.
The fact that he was impressed by me doing my own mechanical work didn’t impress me. Most guys liked it at first. It fed some kind of fantasy they had of a greasy girl with tools in her hands. But then they realized it meant I spent a lot of time actually working on my rig instead of focusing on them. Their fascination faded quickly after that.
“Are you a mechanic?” Raul asked.
“Nope, just a starving medical student.” I decided not to mention having to take the semester off because I was broke and drowning in student loans.
“That makes sense.”
It was my turn to raise a brow at him. “Really? That’s the opposite of what most people say.”
He shrugged. “Both professions have outstanding hand-eye coordination and understand how machines work.”
I tried hard not to be too impressed, too interested in him, but he was doing an excellent job of knocking down my defenses. Now came the next test.
I motioned to the Jeep with an inclination of my head. “Hop in. Your car will never make it up the road we’re going on.”
One brow rising, he stood a bit taller as if squaring off with my Jeep.
“Afraid you’ll mess up your perfectly mussed hair?” I teased, inclining my head toward the topless Jeep.
A short laugh escaped him. “Hardly. I love the wind in my hair. My motorcycle jacket isn’t just for show.” He strode up to the Jeep and jumped in.
That made things down low tingle. Swallowing my libido, I climbed in and put my seatbelt on. I waited. We shared a long look before he shook his head as if surprised he forgot, then put his seatbelt on. It made me wonder if he was reckless enough not to typically wear one, or if my Jeep and I had flustered him that much. His brow went back up as he watched me grab the flathead screwdriver from the console and use it to turn the ignition over. Contrary to how that looked, the Jeep purred to life with a nice little rumble that betrayed the high-end motor and new exhaust I’d put in. I’d turned the radio off before getting out earlier, so the only sound was the engine.
He smiled and nodded. “Small but mighty,” he said with appreciation.
From the way he looked at me when he said it, I wasn’t sure if he meant the Jeep, me, or both. Either way, I liked it.
“What does 4th and eleven mean?” I asked with a thrust of my head in the direction of his car.
“It’s actually 4th and inches. It’s part of a football saying ‘4th and inches, do you have what it takes’. It’s about putting it all on the line, committing to the goal as a team.”
While he’d lost me at “football saying,” I liked the sound of his voice enough that a smile came easily to my lips. In the close proximity of the vehicle his scent wrapped around me like the arms of a warm, woodsy embrace. It lacked the sweet, fake smell of cologne, though. He smelled more like he had stepped out of a forest instead of a dusty sports car. Something in me stirred at it, and I wasn’t sure if it was desire or something else. A bit flustered and liking it, I put the Jeep in first gear and focused on the road.
“So, what do you do for a living, Raul?” I asked to fill the silence.
“I’m a forest ranger.”
Jaw dropping, I gave him a long look. “For real?”
The motorcycle jacket with biker gang-like rockers and a wicked cool Norse knot wolf’s head on the back that he’d worn last night, designer clothes, the sports car, none of it added up to forest ranger.
“For real,” he said in all seriousness.
Well, it would explain the forest smell that clung to him as if it were his natural scent, and possibly the wolf’s head on his jacket. Maybe he wasn’t the bad boy I’d thought he was last night when he walked into the bar. But what kind of a forest ranger could catch a dart in mid-air, then throw it and land it right in the bull’s eye without looking at the board? That spoke more of ex-military or some other highly trained and very dangerous kind of profession.
“What made you want to get into forestry?” I tested, trying to sound conversational rather than like I was psychoanalyzing him.
“Preservation. The more we know about the forests, the better our chances of saving them, and the animals that live in them.”
I took my eyes off the road completely for a moment to look at him straight on. His face looked as sincere as his voice had sounded, but the bad boy vibe resonated through him. It didn’t make sense.
“You’re surprised?” he asked.
“Um…uh…well, yeah,” I admitted, not knowing what else to say.
Instead of elaborating, he turned the tide on me. “What made you want to be a doctor?”
“I want to help people.”
“And you will.” He said with complete confidence as if he could see the future. It made me smile. “So, a doctor who hikes, huh?”
“Yep. Nature grounds me, helps me make sense of the world.”
He turned toward me as much as his seatbelt would allow. “Really?”
I made an affirmative humming noise. “Always has. At least, ever since I can remember. My parents took me hiking and camping a lot when I was a kid. They loved the outdoors, and it made me love it too.” The memory hurt, but it also made me smile. I didn’t want to get all emotional on a first date, so I changed the subject.
“Raul is an interesting name.”
His perfectly landscaped scruffy cheeks moved up in the beginnings of a smile, but didn’t quite make it all the way. “It’s a variance of the ancient Germanic name Radulf, though my parents changed the spelling to be more English friendly, so it reads more like the Spanish version.”
“Are your ancestors German?”
“Icelandic.”
I hadn’t seen that one coming. “Cool.” The instant reaction made me want to bury my head in sand. Cool, really? Ugh.
“What about you? Sonya is Russian, isn’t it? Yet you look at least part Native American.”
Long black hair, tanned brown skin, it wasn’t a stretch that he’d figured that part out. “You’re close. My mom is full-blooded Cherokee and my dad was Swedish-American. His parents were from Sweden.”
�
��Wow. Now that is cool.”
His play on my own words almost made me laugh. But I couldn’t laugh after mentioning my dad. The pain was too much. The oddness of him having descended from the same culture as my dad’s family took some of the edge off. It wasn’t often I met someone of Scandinavian descent.
I turned onto Rock Creek Road leading up Pike Mountain to the ski area. Grass covered hills dotted with flowering bushes stretched out around us.
“Have you been to Sweden?” he asked.
“A few times when I was young. We visited relatives in Stockholm and went and saw Gamla Stan.” I remembered how excited my dad had been to visit his parents’ homeland. That did make me smile, even though it hurt. I had to get him off the subject before this date took a weepy turn that would ensure there wouldn’t be a second. “What about you, ever been to Iceland?”
“My parents took me every summer until I turned sixteen.”
Was that a touch of bitterness in his voice? “I hear it’s beautiful, all waterfalls and glaciers.”
A huge smile spread across his face, banishing all traces of tightness in his features. He lit up as he delved into a description of all the waterfalls and the amazing hiking trails. Seeing the rugged, beautiful land through his eyes made me want to go there. His love for the land shone through his exuberant tone and his words about packing things in and out, leaving them better than one found them, and the gentle way he spoke of the creatures he encountered. My original impression of him being a bad boy melted more with each word. It had been a front, a shield he put up to keep certain people at a distance and give the appearance of strength. What in his life made him feel the need to exude such strength?
I tried my best to shut my budding psychologist’s mind off. It would be best if he didn’t realize what kind of doctor I wanted to be right away. Most guys ran for the hills once they figured out I was more interested in exploring the mind than cutting up the body. Go figure.
“I’m talking way too much. So what about you, do you like to travel?” he asked.
“I love it. I wish I had the chance to do more of it.”
He nodded in understanding. “School makes it so hard. When I was in college I didn’t have the time to go anywhere.”
That got us off onto a tangent about college that left us laughing so hard the tears in my eyes made me hit more than one rut in the road leftover from the snowplows. Raul grabbed the roll bar as we bounced along and laughed even harder. We talked about the places we wanted to visit and I was surprised to find his list was almost as long as mine. He seemed far less passionate about it, like it was something he would like to do, but didn’t felt compelled to do like I did. But then, I’d found most people didn’t have the travel bug nearly as bad as me.
“Someday I want to travel all over, see the world and all the different people in it,” I said.
“And you will,” he said with complete confidence.
I laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “Yeah, maybe in twenty years when I’m no longer buried under student loans.”
I turned off the pavement onto a rough dirt road, but instead of continuing up it, I pulled the Jeep off to the side and shut the engine off.
One eyebrow quirked up, Raul looked at me. “What, afraid this beast can’t make it up?”
I patted the dashboard. “She can definitely make it up, but that takes half the fun out of it and shortens the hike.”
“I like how you think.”
Relief eased muscles I hadn’t realized had tensed. Part of me had been afraid he wasn’t much of a hiker. Sure, he said he was a forest ranger, but with the car and the clothes, I wasn’t quite convinced yet. That was why the lipstick in my front pocket was actually bear spray in disguise, a little thing my dad had gotten me in the habit of carrying when I’d started dating in high school. It hadn’t been cleverly disguised back then. Nowadays, websites like Women on Guard made self-defense discreet and stylish at the same time. Not that I thought I’d have to use it on Raul, he didn’t give off those vibes. But one couldn’t be careful enough when taking a guy they’d just met at a bar out into the mountains alone.
I hopped out of the rig, shut the door, and pocketed my cell phone—which had no service up here at all—on the side opposite my pepper spray lipstick. I shrugged into a light pack filled with only snacks, water, and a rudimentary first aid kit. Raul came around the Jeep to stand beside me, looking as perfect as he had before stepping into my Jeep. Few people I’d met could pull off the windblown look and make it that sexy. Numerous strands of my black hair had come loose from my braid, no doubt making me look a bit of a mess. Though I knew my face hid my emotions perfectly—a thing I had honed over the years—he smiled as if he could sense my arousal.
“All right, poster boy, let’s see if you can hike,” I said.
That handsome face split into a grin. “Poster boy?”
Starting up the hill, I shot him a side glance. “Yep, like one of those models for the clothing stores or fragrances: perfect clothes, perfect hair, perfect face.”
He wiggled his brows at me. “Perfect, huh?”
Laughing, I bumped his shoulder with mine. Warmth radiated from him so powerfully that I felt it through both of our shirts. “Careful, if you get cerebral edema, you won’t look so perfect.”
A low sound between a growl and a hum came from him. “It’s very sexy when you use doctor jargon,” he said.
“I’m sure you could match me with forestry jargon.”
As we hiked along the ever-steepening trail, he pointed to a tall pine tree to our right. “Pseudotsuga menziesii of the Pinaceae family, which doesn’t produce seeds until it reaches the age of twenty-five.”
“Wow, that is sexy. And I never knew Douglas fir trees were so responsible as not to reproduce until they reached twenty-five,” I teased.
A grin handsome enough to make my breath catch turned up the manscaped edges of his perfectly maintained five o’clock shadow. He pointed to a grove of aspen trees clustered in a cleft between hills. “And that is Populus tremuloides, which has a deceptive reproduction system. It looks like there are many in that grove, doesn’t it?”
I nodded and made an affirmative noise.
He went on. “There really isn’t. They are all clones of the same tree, part of its roots, and in essence, kind of the same tree. The female tree, or grove, requires pollination from the male before releasing her seeds, and a male could be miles away in another grove of his own making. Otherwise, they can never spread beyond their own damp area.”
“Interesting,” I drew the word out, unsure of whether or not it really was.
He laughed. “Tragically romantic in a way, if you think about it. They need one another if they are ever going to spread their wings and expand beyond their corner of the world.”
That made me look at him hard and see something much more than just a handsome face. At my encouragement, he delved into a description of a wildflower, then a bush. He interjected his own quirky little fact with a clever comment after each one. The man clearly had a brain bigger than the bulge in his jeans and was kind of funny to boot. Handsome and a sense of humor was a dangerous combination. By the time we got to the top of the Jeep road, my sides hurt from laughing much more than they did from the hike.
We paused in silence at the top, taking in the view of rolling hills of grass and fragrant wildflowers topped with a cloudless blue sky. I drew in a long breath of the perfect air. Contrary to the old cliche, a vista like this gave me breath instead of taking it away. I removed my pack, took my water bottle from it, and swallowed a long drink. Raul did a slow, small circle, taking in the views with a huge grin on his face. The golden light of that magical hour just after dawn illuminated him, and suddenly the view was literally breathtaking.
“It’s beautiful here. Not as forested as I like, but beautiful. Do you come here often?” he asked.
“A bit late for pickup lines, don’t you think?”
He chuckled, a carefree sound that
sent tingles through me. “I’m not one for pickup lines.”
Gaze traveling the length of his body, I forced myself to breathe. “I don’t imagine you need to be.” I cleared my throat and answered his question. “I’m more of a grease-under-my-fingernails kind of girl than a dirt-on-my-shoes kind of girl, but yeah. I try to hike at least once a week. It’s good for the psyche.” Once a week, although nowhere near the forest. But I wasn’t about to say that part. Then I’d have to explain how the forest made me miss my dad, and how it made me feel like a powder keg in a burning building.
“Ah, I was right then.”
Dread filled me. I tried to sound light-hearted as I asked. “About what?”
He said the words that usually meant the date was over and there wouldn’t be another one. “You’re studying psychology, not medicine.”
Bummer. I had started to like this one.
Then he said something that threw me for a loop. “That makes sense.”
“How so?”
A rush of blood turned his cheeks pink, and he started to stutter. Or, he could have been choking. It was hard to tell by the sounds he made. “Um, uh, I only meant that you’re good with people, being a bartender and all, and you seem to like people. So it makes sense.”
I handed him my water bottle. He took a long drink before handing it back with a grateful smile. His embarrassment was cute, odd, but cute. And, the reaction was so different from what I’d expected that I smiled back at him. He wasn’t running off into the hills, so that was a good thing.
“Well, I’ve only recently switched my focus. The problem with going to college is that when you start, you have no idea what you want in life.”
Clawed & Cornered: A Viking Werewolf Paranormal Romance (Children of Fenrir Book 1) Page 3
