Wild at Heart: A Kincaids of Pine Harbour Novel

by Zoe York

  He usually didn’t have any problems connecting to kids. But something about Sam—well, Sam wasn’t a kid. That was the problem. He was older than his years, and Will didn’t know how to deal with that. He probably wouldn’t sort it out before the end of the school year, and then the kid—young man—would have all summer to resent having to come back to these halls and be seen as not ready for anything yet.

  As Will walked to his truck, he added two things to his to-do list for the following morning.

  get to school early enough to practice his free throw in privacy

  look into summer jobs for fifteen-year-olds

  He hoped search and rescue training would be boring as hell. He wasn’t sure he had the bandwidth for anything else to land on his plate right now.

  Catie had twenty minutes before she needed to be at the Search and Rescue Training Centre. That meant she had time to squeeze in one more appointment.

  This one was both personal and professional.

  Mac’s Diner sat on the outskirts of Pine Harbour, taking up a sprawling chunk that bordered on a forest. Just inside those dense woods was a popular snowmobile trail, giving the owner a rare, steady supply of winter customers. In the summer, it was a popular stop for locals and tourists alike.

  And once upon a time, it had been Catie’s first workplace. She started with bussing and doing the dishes, then graduated to being a waitress when her mother got her real estate license and left the position.

  Of all the residents of Pine Harbour, the man in the kitchen was by far the one she was closest to. Frank Jenkins was a cross between a mentor and a father figure to her.

  And today, she had the slightly awkward but mostly delightful task of finding out how his love life was doing now that she’d played matchmaker.

  Frank had been the unlikely (to some, not Catie) star of the recent bachelor auction. In her first year organizing it, she’d tossed out the previous guidelines and gone in a different direction entirely. Fewer boring hot guys, a wider range of ages, gender, and personality types on the auction block, and a hell of a lot more money raised for the Pine Harbour Animal Shelter.

  A win-win for everyone, but especially Frank, whose date on auction had been five nights of dinner, personally prepared by Pine Harbour’s favourite cook, and served in the winner’s choice of locations: the corner booth at the diner, a special guest table in the diner’s kitchen, or at the winner’s residence on Frank’s nights off.

  While Catie had maintained a certain distance from observing how all that went down, she’d kept her ear to the ground, and town gossip reported the winner—Moira Calhoun—had taken Frank up on all three of those options, in progressive order, and then Frank had taken two extra nights off.

  Frank never took extra nights off.

  Catie had swallowed her curiosity, but two months had passed without any further gossip about Frank and Moira. Even the unkind whispers from people like Frances had faded away. That part was a relief. Catie hated the way Frances layered unnecessary judgement on otherwise understandable curiosity. And she would know how it felt—it had been pointed her way more than once.

  But if Frank was the reason things with Moira were going cold, Catie wanted to intervene. It was time to bring it up with the man himself.

  She took off her hot pink blazer and hung it on a hanger she kept in the back of her car. Then she touched up her lip gloss before heading inside.

  In the diner, she waved at the waitress, but didn’t break her stride as she headed straight to the kitchen.

  “Hairnet,” Frank barked when she stepped inside.

  She rolled her eyes, but complied with his request. “Nice to see you, too.”

  “I’ve been swamped.” His lips twitched in an almost smile. “Ever since that bachelor auction of yours, there’s a whole new wave of regulars here.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she mocked gently.

  “That wasn’t very subtle, the way you did that. Highlighting local businesses.”

  Other people she had talked onto the auction block included her friend Lore D’Angelo, a bartender at The Green Hedgehog; Esther Kim, a local radio personality who also owned an art gallery on the highway; and Campbell Mills, who owned a moving company that employed army veterans.

  “I wasn’t trying to be subtle. Then, or now. I came in to ask how things are going with Moira.”

  “What kind of things?” He moved to the window that overlooked the dining room and pulled a new order off the carousel.

  “Have you talked to her recently?”

  “She comes in sometimes.”

  “Frank!”

  He wagged his finger at her. “Catie, I see you playing matchmaker. That’s not subtle, either. It’s not necessary. Don’t you worry about me and that woman.”

  “You were our top bachelor because that woman wanted to have dinner with you five nights in a row.”

  “It was fun.”

  “Frank, the rumour mill is churning.” A slight exaggeration for effect. “She likes you.” No exaggeration there.

  “And I like her.”

  “So maybe you should call her.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can see her again.”

  “I don’t know if I want to.” He shrugged.

  She threw her hands in the air. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Not fix me up with anyone else.” He tossed some onions on the grill. “I didn’t mind doing the auction. That was fun. And it was also fun spending a week feeding Moira. Sure. But I don’t want a girlfriend. At my age?” He laughed. “Listen, missy. You want for others what you really want for yourself. The sooner you realize that it’s you you should be setting up on dates, and not everyone around you, the happier you will be.”

  Catie propped one hand on her hip. “Don’t worry about me. Finding someone to crush on is on my to-do list. But I can’t force the issue, not until Mr. Right moves to Pine Harbour. Whereas your Ms. Right spent fifteen hundred dollars to hang out with you.”

  “It was a tax-deductible donation that Moira would have made anyway, in honour of her three cats.”

  “We’ll agree to disagree, and I’ll follow up next month.”

  Frank laughed. “You’ve got me in your calendar for welfare checks, have you?”

  “Someone has to!”

  “All right.” He jerked his head to the front. “Go on, get out of here. But come back soon, because I like your face. Are you staying to eat?”

  She shook her head in the negative. “I have a thing.”

  “You always do.”

  “I like to keep busy.” She stopped at the door. “Hey, can I put you on the auction block next year?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Moira might bid on you again.”

  “And if she does, I’ll be happy to spend another five days with her at that point.”

  Chapter Three

  Catie had been inside the Search and Rescue Team’s training building three times before. Once, when she picked up the application form in the fall, again when she returned it two months ago, and last Friday for the official try-out.

  Each of those times, the only person there was Tom Minelli, the park ranger who also served as the SAR manager. Now that she was officially joining the team, she’d be introduced to everyone else.

  She wasn’t the only new member today. Her friend Lore had also been specifically recruited by Tom, both of them being added to increase the gender diversity on the team.

  It was the latest commitment Catie had made to this town where she grew up, this town she had once fled from, and had now come back to almost by accident. And ever since she returned, she’d found herself volunteering to change everything that she didn’t like about Pine Harbour growing up.

  Not that twelve-year-old Catie had any opinion about the SAR. But when thirty-year-old Catie heard last fall that the team was overwhelmingly male, and they were looking to change that, she reached out. What would it entail? And could she find v
olunteers for Tom?

  She liked making connections for people. It served her well as a real estate agent, and helped her as a hairdresser, too. As she showed people through homes and when they sat in her chair at the salon, they opened up and told her their problems.

  If she could provide a resource that would lead to a solution, that made her happy. But more importantly, it made life a bit easier for those people, which in turn made the town better, and in a long chain reaction of events, more welcoming and therefore appealing to new residents.

  Deep down, she knew what she wanted most of all in Pine Harbour was fresh blood, and to welcome those newcomers with open arms.

  Which reminded her—she needed to set up a meeting with the defunct Welcome Wagon coordinators and see if they could get something started in that arena again.

  Her calendar groaned at the thought, because all those months ago, Catie hadn’t been able to find many women or non-binary friends to volunteer for the SAR. So she threw herself into a winter-long physical training program, with the help of Isla, who used to be a captain in the army.

  At least Catie wasn’t bored. That was the glass-half-full way to look at what she was juggling over the summer.

  Inside, Tom greeted her and pointed her in the direction of the kitchenette, where she was pouring herself a cup of coffee when Will walked in. She was prepared for this moment, because she had the advantage—she knew he was on the search and rescue team.

  He, on the other hand, had no idea she was part of the new trainee class.

  It was probably a bit of dirty pool, keeping this information from him. On the other hand, it wasn’t like he was a big fan of getting updates from her. And at some point over the spring, when he got tight-lipped and cool towards her, she decided she didn’t need to go out of her way to be fair.

  If she bent at all in the direction of fair, when he didn’t go out of his way for her in the slightest, it would get all off-balance and weird. And her feelings about him were weird enough already.

  He looked like he had come straight from work, wearing a dark blue polo shirt over slim-cut khaki pants. It was weird how she had a catalogue in her head of his different looks. This was what he wore to school most of the time. He wore a suit some of the time, but usually not. She didn’t have a percentage, precisely, but maybe only ten percent of the time. (Definitely not more than fifteen percent. It wasn’t once a week, which would be twenty—)

  She cut the Hot Guy Math off in her head before she got to the part where she thought he looked best in the faded blue jeans and worn band shirts he wore on weekends.

  It wasn’t helpful for her brain to spend any time on the ways in which Will Kincaid’s thighs filled out denim—or straight-front khakis, or his army uniform, for that matter—because the truth of the matter was, he didn’t want her attention. Will didn’t like Catie.

  Once upon a time, he had been friendly. In the way he was friendly with every other person in town. And she’d inflated that general kindness to strangers into the potential for something else, something dangerously like the childhood crush she’d once had on him.

  He was seven years older than her, so he’d barely known she existed as a teenager. She’d been in the same grade as his youngest brother, Adam, and there had always been something about the studious second oldest Kincaid brother that did it for her, even before she truly knew what that phrase meant.

  Now her latent attraction to him—past latent attraction, she corrected—was bizarre, especially because he went out of his way to be downright rude whenever they shared the same space.

  For example, the way his eyes flared wide as he approached the coffee carafe and found her lounging next to it. “What are you doing?”

  “Having a cup of coffee.”

  “And why are you doing that here?”

  “I’m a new volunteer.” She liked the cool, crisp way she said the last word. It made her sound unaffected by his presence.

  “You can’t—” When every other set of eyes within earshot turned in his direction, he set his jaw tightly and nodded. “Great.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.” She nodded, too, then straightened up and sauntered past him, taking a chair.

  The seats were arranged in an open circle, so everyone could see a white board on the wall—and still see everyone else sitting around the circle at the same time. Which meant she had a front row seat to observe Will, all tightly wound and bitter about God knows what.

  He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and studied it carefully until all the seats were full and Tom stepped up alongside the whiteboard and wrote on it, 12 Weeks.

  Beneath that, he scrawled August—OSRTC.

  “Today is the first day of a twelve-week training programme, as we onboard the new trainees. At the end of the training period, you’ll complete your Basic Searcher certification test, and join the team for real. But as you all know from your intake interview with me, we are also actively recruiting team members who can compete in the Ontario Search and Rescue Team Competition in August. I’ll pass it over to Will to explain a bit about that.”

  Will nodded curtly. As he talked, he looked at everyone in the room except Catie, although his voice didn’t carry any of the tension from the coffee exchange. He sounded smooth and confident. “This seven-event test of skill, ability, knowledge, and endurance is like a heptathlon for SAR, and some of it requires experience, but we’ll pair up new trainees with veteran team members to cover that off. This will be our first year competing, the first year we’ve had a big enough team to enter, so we have no expectations.”

  “But we do want to win,” Tom interjected.

  Will laughed, his mouth splitting wide into a white-toothed, laugh line bracketed grin, and everyone else joined in, even Catie, to her surprise. The way he chuckled, and kept going warmly, was infectious. “We will do our absolute best, but anyone who doesn’t want to deal with our fearless leader’s disappointment if we don’t win should plan to carpool with someone else.”

  That led into an interesting overview of the logistics for the competition, and suddenly twenty minutes had zoomed by. Tom cut himself off as he was about to go into providing documentation for employers granting time off, and pulled up a chair.

  “I’m getting ahead of myself. Can you tell I’m excited to have this many new trainees at once? I’m thrilled. We’re a small town, and you all showed up. This is awesome. So to get us back to the twelve-week training schedule, tonight is a chance to get to know each other, and once we do that, I’ll go over the gear we recommend you collect in the next three months. But first, we have a tradition when we welcome new members. We go around the room and share what made us want to join.”

  Tom went first, then nodded to person next to him. One by one, everyone shared their story.

  When it came to Will, Catie expected a variation of what she had just heard: a love of the outdoors, giving back to the community, or the appeal of learning new skills.

  And it was all of that, in a sense, but not in the practiced, makes-for-great-PR kind of way the other origin stories were.

  Instead, he looked at the floor and cleared his throat awkwardly. “I’m here because I lost a kid once. He went on an adventure, from school, in the dead of winter. It was the worst day of my professional career, and one of the worst in my entire life.”

  Tom gave all the new recruits a funny expression which made sense as soon as he interjected. “My nephew, in fact. But we found him, and got him back to his mom in one piece.”

  Will sighed and nodded. “It was impressive how Tom and the rest of the crew here worked together. Nothing I learned in the army or as a teacher quite compared to it, even with all the similarities in terms of training and professional guidelines. So I joined the Search and Rescue Team the next day. And it’s been…what, five years?”

  “Yeah, you’re one of the old-timers now.”

  “I’ll never forget the moment that Eric’s teacher reported him missing after recess.�
� Will paused for a moment, raw emotion tightening his face. “I knew in my gut that he wasn’t just in the bathroom, that he had left the school property. First I called 911. And then, after I handed that phone over to someone else in my office, I had to call his mother.”

  She could have heard a pin drop, the room was that still.

  “Those moments are burned into my memory in a different kind of way. And understanding that kind of trauma is an important piece of doing search and rescue work. I resisted my first group debrief after a search. It felt unnecessary and invasive. But thanks to this group training, I knew it would help, and I knew my initial feelings around it were part of that trauma response. As searchers, we experience that differently than the family members or friends who report a missing person. I feel strongly about this piece of our work, and it has changed me as an educator as well, so if anyone has any questions about that, at any time, just reach out to me.”

  Obviously, Will cared about children—that was his chosen profession. But this was a deeper level of empathy, one that Catie hadn’t expected from him. She’d thought he would be more about the business of education, rather than Mr. Big Feelings. It was nice to hear, and see.

  Tom nodded. “Thanks, Will. That’s great.”

  There were three people sitting between Will and Catie, and it took all three of their introductions for her to swallow around the lump that had formed in her throat. But when it was her turn, she pulled it together.

  “How about you, Catie?”

  “I heard you needed women for the competition,” she admitted. “I feel like I should have a better reason than that, though. I really appreciate what everyone else has shared, and relate to many of the stories. I know what it’s like to be an outsider, new to the Peninsula—I’ve done that twice, I guess—and how a newcomer’s enthusiasm for the wild nature can get them into trouble. So if we’re talking about ways to relate to the people we help, I understand that part of it.”