I took a deep, slow breath. He was a magnificent specimen. His coat was a rich, shimmering black with a distinctive pattern of grey around his eyes and muzzle. He must have been at least 40 inches at the shoulder, and maybe 140 pounds. Huge. Wolves are not meant to live alone, and lone males are not always healthy. But this wolf—
Was standing right in fucking front of me. A fresh spike of adrenaline surged through my body as my latent survival instinct finally overrode my scientific observations.
The wolf displayed no signs of aggression. His ears pricked up, indicating friendly interest. His tail hung at his back, reflecting a bored ambivalence toward the presence of a naked woman in the stream.
But his gleaming golden eyes were fixed on me.
My jaw clenched as my teeth began to chatter. The water was damn cold, and I couldn’t stand thigh-deep in it much longer. I desperately wanted to turn and lunge for my bear spray, but I was afraid to break eye contact with the wolf. If I moved, I could be perceived as a threat. And if a strong, healthy wolf perceived me as a threat... well, I wouldn’t have much of a chance.
The wolf tilted his head to the side. His eyes seemed to sparkle with, what? Curiosity?
Stop anthropomorphizing, I told myself. You’re a scientist, for fuck’s sake. I hugged myself as I began to shiver. My hand splashed the surface of the water, very gently.
The wolf’s eyes shifted to my hand. Then they traveled the length of my body, back to my face. He’ll be afraid of human voices, I realized. He’ll bolt if I talk.
“Hello,” I said, making my voice as soft and gentle as I could manage through chattering teeth.
The wolf didn’t bolt.
“I am not a threat,” I said, feeling ridiculous.
The wolf’s eyes shifted, moving from my body to the pile of clothing and gear on the far bank. I watched as his gaze settled on the gleaming silver canister of bear spray.
“I wouldn’t use that against you.” As soon as the words tumbled from my mouth, I knew they were true. I could never use that on a wolf.
He turned to me again, fixing me with his golden eyes. It was an unusual eye color for a wolf. Still, these seems familiar somehow. My body trembled violently, and I lost the thought.
“I n-need to get out,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and gentle. “The water’s t-too cold.”
The wolf didn’t move.
I forced myself to crouch low in the water until I reached the opposite bank. The wolf’s eyes flickered as I eased myself slowly out of the water. For a heartbeat, I felt absurdly aware of my fat thighs and stretch marks. I stretched my pale legs slowly in the warm sunlight, then held still, frozen in the strange gaze of the wolf’s golden eyes. The glassy water of the little pool separated us, but that wasn’t much of a barrier. An animal that size could easily jump over the water, rip out my jugular, and feed for a week.
The wolf raised his snout and sniffed the air. I froze. His gaze traveled the length of my naked legs and up my torso.
“Well,” I whispered, “it’s been nice meeting you.”
His golden eyes met mine, and I forgot to breathe. Grasshoppers sang from the meadow; the sweet trill of a yellow warbler drifted across the water. The wolf’s eyes narrowed. My heart hammered against my chest. Then his head turned downstream, and he vanished into the willows.
My shoulders slumped in relief. A series of violent trembles lanced through my body. I pulled my legs to my chest, rocking back and forth as my teeth clanked together. When the shivering finally subsided, I pulled my clothes back on, snapped my bear spray canister to my belt, and told myself I was an absolute fucking idiot to get naked in the backcountry. Finally, I pulled out my notebook, checked my GPS, and recorded the coordinates.
My fingers trembled, leaving a long streak of ink across the top of the page.
“Did that just happen?” I whispered.
I glanced at the opposite side of the stream. Willow bushes swayed in the breeze. Insects buzzed and fluttered in the bright sun, and somewhere, deep in the lodgepoles, I heard the incessant thwack-thwack-thwack of a hairy woodpecker. I ran my fingers across the page as if I could erase the ink smear.
Visual confirmation, I wrote, under the GPS coordinates. Male. Black. Large - 140 lbs? 40 in? height
I paused again, looking across the water.
Golden eyes, I wrote.
IT WAS ALMOST FOUR in the afternoon when I finally heard Colin and Zeke approaching the campsite. I had done everything I could possibly think of without their equipment, and I’d resorted to watching a mule deer graze through my binoculars for entertainment.
“Hey, Boss Lady,” Zeke called. His Southern twang echoing across the clearing.
I watched the mule deer raise her head through my binoculars before turning to greet them.
“It’s about damn time,” I said, coming to my feet. “What took you—”
My voice died in my throat as I turned to meet them. Zeke, an enormous, burly man wearing an enormous, burly backpack, gave me a wide smile, showing off his broken front tooth. He had a swollen black eye that looked painfully fresh.
“Zeke, what the hell happened to you?”
He shrugged in an offhand manner as he set his backpack down. “Oh, living,” he sighed.
I turned to Colin, who was just walking into the campsite. How those two were best friends I would never know. They shared an intense, almost destructive love for the outdoors, everything from backcountry skiing to technical rock climbing, but that seemed to be the only thing they shared. Colin was a small, almost delicate, introvert from Idaho while Zeke was enormous, outspoken, and aggressively Southern.
“You know anything about that, Colin?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I’ve been sworn to secrecy, Professor McDonald,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“Did it have anything to do with the Bar-muda Triangle?” I asked.
Both boys just grinned as they started to unpack their backpacks. I rolled my eyes, but they didn’t notice. Sometimes, I was half tempted to hit the dive bars in downtown Bozeman just to tell everyone the legendary Ezekiel Dills also happened to be brilliant and could run a computation analysis faster than anyone I’d ever met. It made me wonder what he could do if he didn’t spend so much time drinking.
Well, I supposed if he wasn’t also drinking and bar-brawling, Zeke would probably be doing research for one of the serious big names at MSU instead of working for me. With a sigh, I settled back to watch the boys set up their tents. This was our second summer working together, and our second Yellowstone research trip. Zeke and Colin seemed as comfortable in the backcountry as they were in our lab and, I had to admit, I was grateful for both of them. Even if they were four hours late.
I got the satellite tracker up and running while Colin set up an elaborate camp kitchen with two stoves and three lightweight plastic cutting boards.
“It looks like the Leopold pack moved closer,” I told the boys as I squinted at the satellite readings. “They’re maybe three miles away.”
“Sweet,” Colin said.
He was bent over his MSR stove, stirring a pot of something that already smelled like an Italian restaurant. Among his many other talents, Colin was a fantastic camp cook. He had already unwrapped two loaves of homemade French bread, and it looked like he’d actually backpacked in a thermos full of ripe tomatoes. Probably from the garden he’d planted behind his shoebox-sized graduate student housing condo.
“Zeke, I think he’s trying to outdo our cooking,” I said.
“Can’t be done,” said Zeke. “Nothing beats Dinty Moore beef stew.”
I wrinkled my nose. “You brought Dinty Moore?”
“Oh, not only that,” Zeke said, with a wide smile.
Zeke’s broken front tooth made him look slightly deranged, and the black eye wasn’t helping matters. Last month he told me he broke his tooth in a bar fight, and I hoped to God that wasn’t the watered-down version of the story. I assured him the graduate student health i
nsurance plan would cover a dentist, but I think he actually liked the look of the chipped tooth.
“Tonight, Boss Lady, for your drinking pleasure,” Zeke said.
He reached into his massive backpack and pulled out a six pack.
“Is that beer?” I said. “Zeke, did you just backpack a six-pack of cheap beer over seven miles?”
“Wrong on both counts, Miss Boss,” he said, grinning. “First, this is not just any beer. This is the champagne of beers.”
He handed me a can of Miller High Life. It was warm.
“And second,” he said, reaching into his backpack and pulling out six more beers, “I carried twelve.”
COLIN SERVED US A DINNER of spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, homemade bread, and a spinach salad with balsamic vinaigrette that was, hands down, the best backcountry meal I’ve ever had. It made last night’s solitary dinner of freeze-dried beef stroganoff look downright pathetic, and I told him so. Colin shrugged off the praise, as usual.
“So,” I said, once the dishes were done and we’d settled into a post-dinner round of warm, well-shaken Miller High Lifes. “I saw a wolf today.”
They were instantly all business. I omitted the part about being naked and in the water, but left the rest unchanged. They wanted to know everything: height, weight, what direction was he heading, where was his pack?
“Hey, hold the phone,” Zeke said, suddenly. “You were how close to this thing?”
I smiled. “About as close as I am to you.”
Colin whistled. Zeke slapped his leg and cursed into the gathering darkness.
“I know,” I said. “Crazy. I’ve never been that close to a wolf before.”
And then I fell silent as I remembered that wasn’t exactly the truth.
IT HAD BEEN FOUR YEARS ago, in late November, and I was at my parents’ house. I was living there, although none of us actually called it “living.” But I’d been there since May, and I wasn’t showing any signs of moving out.
To be honest, I wasn’t showing many signs of doing anything.
It was a dismal day, almost cold enough to turn the steady patter of raindrops to bullets of ice, and I’d borrowed my dad’s old, blue pickup truck to drive to town. I had to fax the final paperwork for the divorce back to my lawyer in Chicago, who had emailed me the form that morning. Barry had already signed it; his firm, confident signature sat snugly on the bottom left hand side of the paper. It was a little smudged, but that was from my parents’ printer. Nothing else.
This Certifies the Dissolution of a Marriage, it said.
I signed it in the car, in the Kinko’s parking lot, the windshield wipers frozen in their half-way position. My hand shook. I held the certificate under my jacket to protect it from the rain, and my cheeks burned with a sudden rush of shame as I handed it to the middle-aged woman behind the counter, even though it was hidden behind an official and reasonably boring cover sheet.
“Will that be all, deah?” she asked, stretching out the last syllable and dropping the hard -r sound. It had taken me years to learn to pronounce the -r at the end of a word. I nodded. The dingy gray fax machine sucked in the dissolution of my marriage and spat it back out.
“Looks like it went through,” she said, and she handed the stack of papers back to me.
I threw the papers on the passenger seat of my dad’s truck and took a deep breath. I looked down at my left hand, but of course I’d stopped wearing the wedding ring months ago. I felt like I should do something: cry, or cheer, or call someone on my phone. Instead, I sat in the cab for a long time, watching the sleet hit the windshield.
Finally, I decided to head back to my parents’ house and stop at Plourde’s on the way for a milkshake. And I’d throw the paperwork in their trashcan.
The headlights of the truck flashed across a “Now Hiring” sign in the dusty front window of Plourde’s, the little ramshackle building that served as our town’s gas station, post office, sandwich shop, and grocery store. The ceiling was decorated with a wide assortment of items made out of beer cans; Budweiser bird feeders, model airplanes, and moose sculptures all jangled as I closed the door behind me.
As I counted out two dollars in quarters to pay for my milkshake, I asked for a job application. The teenager behind the counter handed it to me without a word, and it went in the passenger seat, right where the divorce paperwork had been that morning. The divorce paperwork that was now lying in a sleet-filled trashcan next to a gasoline pump.
“So,” I said that night, over dinner. “It looks like Plourde’s is hiring.”
My parents shared a brief, worried look.
“I bet it would pay more than the GED class I’m teaching now,” I said, picking at the food on my plate. Dad shot a moose that fall, and I was already sick of moose roast.
“Karen,” Mom reached for me, putting her hand over mine. “All those years at Northwestern. You earned your doctorate, after all—”
I glanced away, staring at the gaudy fleur-de-lis Orleans crest over the fireplace. But I didn’t turn quickly enough to miss the expressions that flickered across my mother’s face; fear, concern, and a bone deep disappointment that made my numb chest twist in on itself.
My dad coughed to clear his throat. “Karen, honey, could you go out and get some firewood?”
“Sure, Dad,” I said, pushing my chair back from the table.
The night was brisk, hovering on downright cold, although the sleet had stopped falling at dusk. The front porch was loaded with firewood, firewood I’d neatly stacked in all my copious free time, when I’d gone from not really helping my dad in the two bays of McDonald’s Auto Repair at the end of their driveway, to not really helping my mom in the house, to not really completing my applications for an real job at an actual university. One that would use the doctoral degree I’d spent the better half of a decade earning.
I ignored the wood on the porch and walked to the far stacks, the stacks in the trees, figuring I might as well give my parents some time to talk about me. As I bent low to pick up a few stray pieces of wood, I had that strange, unshakable conviction that I was no longer alone.
When I looked up, I saw the wolf.
He stood between two pine trees, so close I could almost touch him. He was a massive animal, and in the darkness he looked entirely black. He turned his head to one side; his cool, golden eyes glinted in the dim yellow glow of the porchlight.
“Holy shit,” I said, stumbling backward.
My words broke the spell between us. The wolf turned and fled. Dropping the wood I’d collected, I backed toward the front porch. My hands shook as I opened the front door.
“I just saw a wolf,” I said.
My parents stared at me, their mouths identical O’s of shock and disbelief.
“There aren’t any wolves here,” Mom said, shaking her head.
Dad cleared his throat and pushed back from the table. “I’ve never seen a wolf here.”
“It was a wolf,” I insisted. “I spent five years studying coyotes in Chicago. I know the difference between a wolf and the other canidae.”
Dad came to his feet and grabbed the flashlight. “Where?”
Together we walked to the end of the row of firewood. I pointed between the trees, and my dad shone the flashlight on the ground. The wolf’s tracks were clearly visible in the light coating of sleet shimmering on the duff beneath the pines.
My dad whistled once, long and low. The prints were as large as my hand with my fingers outstretched. I stared at them in amazement; I’d half expected there would be nothing, that I had imagined the entire encounter.
“Where did he come from?” I asked.
My dad shrugged. “I’d imagine they come down from Canada.”
“Does this mean there’s a pack?” I said, half to myself. “I mean, they’re not like coyotes. They’re social animals. One wolf wouldn’t move alone, right?”
“I don’t know,” my dad said, turning to me with a smile. “Someone should study that.”
CHAPTER THREE
I shivered in the gathering darkness. Crickets started to sing from the sagebrush as the light faded from the pale blue sky. Colin and Zeke had made quite a dent in the twelve Miller High Lifes, and they were completely immersed in a heated discussion about the various merits of different brands of climbing ropes. Thankfully, they didn’t seem to have noticed their doctoral advisor just completely zoned out. I zipped up my fleece jacket and hunched my shoulders against the growing chill in the air.
Dad was right, of course. Seeing the wolf that night sparked something in me I’d thought had died after the divorce. I borrowed Dad’s old Chevy pick-up the next morning and drove two hours to the University of Maine to have lunch with Professor Leclerc, who studied raccoons in Acadia. By the time we’d finished our sandwiches, he offered me a postdoctoral position in his lab. And, by the time the snows retreated and the lilac bushes along the side of my parents’ house flowered, I’d been hired as a professor of wildlife biology at Montana State University, specializing in tracking the wolf population in Yellowstone.
And that night was also when my dreams began.
Almost every night after I saw the wolf behind my parents’ woodpile, I met my dream lover, tall and muscular with golden eyes, long, dark hair, and never a hint of clothing to obscure his mouthwatering body. Sometimes we talked, but mostly the dreams were just sex, an explosion of pure animal lust and pleasure, our bodies coming together and falling apart, over and over. Between my dream lover and my return to the world of scientific research, that November in Maine was the month when my life began to feel like it might actually be worth living, after all.
I hadn’t thought about the wolf encounter behind my parents’ cabin in years. In fact, I actively tried to avoid thinking about my time in Maine. It was embarrassing. None of my peers at Montana State had spent an entire year depressed and living with their parents. None of them had even gotten divorced.
I stood and stretched. “I’m going to check the satellites and then call it a night, boys,” I said. “Remember, we get up with the sun.”
The Wolf's Lover_An Urban Fantasy Romance Page 2
