Maui Winds

by Edie Claire

  He sighed as he smoothed a hand down her back. He wished he could take her home with him, but she would never make it in Alaska. She wasn’t bred for it. She had no undercoat for insulation, and her long, shaggy beige hair would only mat with snow and ice. He had a strange suspicion that The Beard had acquired her as a pup believing she was half pit bull — perhaps the offspring of his male. She could be half pittie… but only if the other half was Afghan hound. Her muzzle was long and thin, and her chest was narrow and deep rather than broad. If The Beard had been expecting a pit bull pup, he would have been sorely disappointed.

  Wolf’s jaws clenched. He didn’t know why The Beard had done what he’d done, and it was probably best if Wolf didn’t think about it. Both the humane society and the police were on the case now, and one broken hand was causing him enough trouble. The dog was safe now, and she would recover. Wolf was glad that Kenneth was showing interest in her, because she would likely need care longer than Wolf himself would be around.

  He stared down at the bulky splint with a scowl. He might as well admit it to himself. His right hand was useless. The data collection he needed to complete — his sole reason for being on Haleakala — had been difficult enough to do solo after he’d lost his undergrad assistant. There was no way he could finish it now. The equipment took two good hands just to carry and set up, and he needed his right hand in particular to adjust and fine-tune the controls.

  If his hand had to stay splinted for even three weeks, there was no point in his staying here at all. He had to start on Frosty Peak by the first of June; the weather window was too short to take chances with. Up there the splint wouldn’t matter so much — he had an intern for the summer who could make up the difference. He’d simply have to delay finishing his data collection here on Maui until the fall, when he could work his instruments solo again. Of course, in order to get back here, he’d have to scrape together extra funds that weren’t in the budget. Enough for a second round-trip airfare for himself and the gear, living expenses for the time extension…

  He sighed again, leaning his head back against the doghouse roof. He didn’t know how he would find the money, and he hated that he’d brought such an expensive inconvenience on the project. What’s more, he didn’t want to leave yet. An image flashed in his mind of sparkling dark eyes and sexy dimples, and he chuckled sadly. Three days ago he would have been happy to get back to Alaska anytime. Maui had been a fun diversion, but it was getting too hot for his tastes, and despite the island’s reputation as a singles’ playground, he’d been here four months without meeting any women who really interested him. But then he’d met Ri, and she interested him very much, dammit. He’d been looking forward to spending a few weeks with her.

  Now all he’d get were a few lousy days.

  Wolf opened his eyes, and his head jerked up when he saw a figure approaching through the early evening haze. Speak of the devil… It was her. She was wearing the same eye-catching shorts and scoop-necked top she’d been wearing when he drove her down the mountain this morning — and which he’d had emblazoned on his brain ever since. Only a woman from Maine would stroll around at this elevation in the cool of the evening and not even bother to don the jacket that was tied around her waist.

  “Hello,” he called out with a sly smile, feeling as if he’d been caught. “How was the champagne?” As she stepped closer, he could see that her shoulders were sagging. And although she smiled back at him, her brow was furrowed and her eyes showed no sign of their usual sparkle.

  In short, she looked as depressed as he felt.

  “The cruise was nice,” she answered, opening the gate and stepping into the run. She looked down at Bella, who had not even lifted her head. Wolf saw the dog’s eyes flutter, but she was way too relaxed to bother with greeting a stranger.

  “Will she be okay if I sit down in here, too?” Ri asked.

  “She’d love it,” Wolf answered, smiling as Ri plopped down to sit cross-legged on the grass beside them. Ri stretched out a hand to let Bella sniff her fingers, but Bella was already asleep again.

  “Poor thing,” Ri said quietly, looking at the dog’s wounds. “What happened to her?”

  Wolf followed her eyes to the shaved patch on the side of the dog’s chest. The wound was still grisly looking. The vet had decided against continuing with the bandages, since Bella kept chewing them off and the cone had completely freaked her out. But Wolf would make sure her wounds stayed clean. “Her ‘owner,’ if you want to call him that, broke a beer bottle over her ribs,” he answered.

  Ri made a quick, horrified intake of breath. “No!”

  Wolf nodded, his expression grim. “Cracked two ribs and shattered the bottle. She had shards of glass embedded in her side, and she cut up her tongue trying to get them out.”

  Ri looked mildly ill. Her eyes took in Bella’s swollen paw. “She cut her foot on the glass, too?” she asked quietly.

  “Most likely,” Wolf answered. A wave of guilt washed over him. “She holed herself up under his shed afterward and stayed there for two days. I didn’t know what had happened to her. I wondered where she was, but I thought maybe he’d given her away to someone or that she’d wandered off.” He shook his head in annoyance with himself. “I should have searched for her sooner.”

  Ri’s doe eyes fixed on him. “Don’t blame yourself,” she said firmly. “How could you have known?”

  Wolf held her gaze a moment, saying nothing. The woman had a gift for saying what he needed to hear.

  Somehow, that only depressed him more.

  “You don’t look like someone who just got back from a carefree day of cruising on the ocean sipping champagne and watching dolphins,” he said, anxious to change the subject from himself. He was also curious to know what had happened to her. She looked exhausted — emotionally, if not physically.

  Ri’s response was to blow out a breath, straighten her shapely legs, and brace her hands behind her. She dropped her head back and stared up at the sky — or where the sky would have been if the slope weren’t socked in by clouds. “The cruise was fine,” she said in a gravelly deadpan. “It was wonderful, actually. The food was good. I’ve discovered a love of passion fruit and mango smoothies that isn’t going away any time soon. I even got to see my first spinner dolphins. We saw a couple whale spouts in the distance and I met a whole bunch of really nice people.”

  She went quiet for a moment. Her words were pleasant but her face was drawn into a scowl. A really adorable scowl. Wolf had never known a woman who could look sexy while she was scowling, but he was beginning to think that Ri Sullivan could look sexy no matter what she was doing. That perfect little body of hers was so solid, yet so agile, so lean, and yet so wonderfully, deliciously curvy…

  Down, Boy. Wolf forced his gaze back to her face. He didn’t have time. Ri wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of girl.

  “But?” he prompted, trying to keep his tone light. “You can’t tell me there isn’t a ‘but’ coming in this story. What’s got you so down?”

  Ri’s eyes slid his direction without her head moving. It was a comical expression. “Down?” she said sarcastically. “Me? Sriha Mirini Sullivan is never down. She gets knocks sideways, occasionally. But that is all.”

  “So sorry,” Wolf said with amusement, wondering how she got such a bizarre name. “So what’s knocked you sideways?”

  Ri dropped fully on the ground — ironically, sideways — and faced him. “My, you have a lot of questions today.”

  Wolf was taken aback. Him, asking too many questions? He’d never been accused of that before. How terribly hypocritical of him.

  Before he could respond, Ri cracked up laughing. “Just kidding. I don’t mind. In fact, I probably should vent to someone before I break something. So congratulations, you’re elected.”

  She spun around and sat up again, and Wolf’s head nearly spun in kind at her contortions, both physical and verbal. The verbal were amusing, but the physical were torturous — to him.

>   “So I get there,” she began with animation, “and the first thing I see are a bunch of utility trucks…”

  Wolf found himself captivated as Ri recounted the events of her day, beginning with a flooded office, a suspended internship, and the dreamlike champagne cruise. She was a talented storyteller, using not only a wide variety of voices and facial expressions to engage her audience, but throwing her entire body into her act. Not only did she have Wolf in the palm of her hand, but she even woke up the dog. Bella lifted her head and watched Ri curiously, thumping her tail in approval whenever Ri’s antics made Wolf chuckle aloud.

  “So Lachland is nice enough to get the three of us this car for the week, and it’s still just the middle of the afternoon, so we could go pretty much anywhere and do anything and where do you think these guys want to go?”

  Wolf had had enough of an introduction to the characters of Will and Bryant to see where her story was headed. “A bar,” he guessed.

  “Yes, of course,” she confirmed sarcastically. “So we end up at this dive in Lahaina — some boring little hole with nothing special about it except that they’ve got this particular kind of draft that Will wants to try — and by the end of his first beer the guy starts turning into this totally different person.”

  “Uh-oh,” Wolf commiserated. He kept his tone joking in concert with hers, but the topic wasn’t one he took lightly. It reminded him too much of the mother he’d never had.

  “He wasn’t drunk exactly,” Ri qualified, “I don’t think. The stuff just turned him into an immature buffoon. I swear it was like he regressed to middle school before our eyes. All of a sudden he was giddy and goofy and awkward… his voice even got an octave higher!”

  She shook her head with exasperation. “I tried to get them to talk about where we could take the car, what we might all like to do together, but once Will got pre-pubertal, I couldn’t get them to commit to anything other than driving the road to Hana one day. So then I suggested we take separate days with the car, so they could do whatever they wanted on their days, and they both flipped out on me and said they didn’t want to go any days without the car and they wanted to stay together and it was all going to be great.”

  Wolf watched as a devious sparkle lit up her eyes. “And you agreed to that?”

  She smirked. “I appeared to. Then I lifted the keys from Will and drove us to Ho'okipa Beach Park to look for the monk seal.”

  Wolf laughed. “Did you see it?”

  “No,” Ri replied with a pout. It was a cute pout, coming from those luscious lips of hers, but Wolf wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that.

  “The resident seal was not in residence,” she continued. Then she smiled. “We did see at least a dozen green sea turtles, which was fabulous. And it was exciting to watch the windsurfers. We were actually managing to have a pretty good time, acting like adult marine biologist people, until I went back to check for the seal one more time and they decided to stay down where the surfing action was.”

  Wolf waited. He could tell by the way her perfectly formed little eyebrows were slanting that whatever happened next had made her furious.

  “So I’m waiting by the car at the agreed-upon time,” she went on, her voice dropping to a dramatic drawl, “and fifteen minutes after that, the jerks arrive. With dates.”

  Wolf tried not to laugh out loud at the expression of disgust on her face.

  “These girls say they’re locals just hanging out for the day,” she continued. “They’re wearing bikini tops and jean short-shorts and carrying practically nothing with them. And for some reason which doesn’t appear at all mysterious to anyone but me, these women are fawning all over Will and Bryant like they’re the most gorgeous men they’ve ever seen. Now keep in mind — Will’s liver still hasn’t processed all his beer, so he has the social acumen of an eleven-year-old. And Bryant is wearing a wedding ring! So at first I’m thinking these girls are either out to pick their pockets or steal our rental car, but after five minutes of listening to them giggle over Will’s attempts to pronounce Ho'okipa while ‘accidentally’ making a belching sound, I’m really not sure they’re smart enough to be thieves.”

  Now Wolf was laughing out loud. Bella, seeming to want in on the action, scootched up to his chest and licked at his face with her swollen tongue. “Easy girl,” he said, giving her an enthusiastic rub. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  Ri smiled at them both a moment before continuing. “But the girls didn’t waste too much time before they got around to what they were really after. Guess what? They’ve been out surfing all day — without boards, I guess, or getting their hair wet — and now they’re ever so hungry. Next thing I know, all five of us are in the car heading towards some great little restaurant in Pa'ia that they just love.”

  “Now, see there!” Wolf teased. “And you thought those girls weren’t smart. They had those guys pegged. Everyone knows Maui tourists are loaded.”

  Ri humphed and planted her hands on her hips. Her beautifully curvaceous little hips.

  “Tourists may be loaded, but interns are not,” she argued. “Neither of them has a dime to spare, but the idiots put the bill on their credit cards anyway. And this place was not cheap. I had to order a frickin’ side salad. With water! And then I had to sit there staring at an empty plate for half an hour while the girls kept ordering drinks!”

  Wolf couldn’t stop chuckling. “Sounds like a great time.”

  “That was just in the restaurant!” Ri insisted, her voice rising. “When we finally got out of there, I kept hinting that it was time to take the girls back to the beach and the guys flat out ignored me. Bryant had the keys then and I couldn’t get them away from him — he hadn’t driven yet and he hadn’t been drinking, either, so I had no excuse. But no one could decide where to go, so for the next forty-five minutes he’s just randomly driving around while Will is playing octopus with this girl in the back seat next to me — and this is not a big car. It’s a Nissan Sentra. A compact. Will couldn’t even tell where she stopped and I started!”

  Wolf was practically rolling on the grass now. As horrible as Ri’s day sounded, he loved that she was able to see the humor in it.

  “Well, that did it for me,” Ri declared. “I told Bryant I was ready for them to drop me off at home and then they could go do whatever the hell they wanted. But then he got mad and said that wasn’t fair, that he hadn’t gotten to drink yet and that they were going to need a designated driver to get them and the girls back to their place.”

  In a blink, Ri’s good humor vanished. “He told me this to my face,” she went on in a low voice. “A man with a wife and two-year-old son back in Florida, who he left behind barely a week ago. Even as he was saying it, he had his hand stretched across the front seat of the car stroking this girl’s thigh.”

  Wolf sympathized with her disgust. Her eyes shot a wary glance at him, then she drew in a deep breath and rallied her spirits.

  “So, being the easily bullied little lamb that I am, I said that of course he had a point, and that under the circumstances he and Will really should go for broke and take the girls to the hottest spot on the island. Which I happened to know all about, since my swinging local cousin had just let me in on the secret.”

  Wolf cocked an eyebrow skeptically. “Kai? Said what now?”

  Ri chuckled. “You know, the revolving bar in the clouds? I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. It’s at the top of Haleakala.”

  A smile spread slowly over Wolf’s face. There was no bar at the top of Haleakala. The entire area was a national park. The only thing at the summit was an overlook for visitors and a scientific observatory that was closed to the public.

  “So I directed Bryant up the mountain to the park entrance,” Ri continued mischievously, “but darn the luck — when I got out to pay the entrance fee, wouldn’t you know I saw a note posted there announcing that the bar was temporarily closed?”

  “Shocking,” Wolf deadpanned.

  “It was,” R
i agreed. “But only to the guys. The girls had been saying all along that there was no bar up here, but they were tipsy, so naturally Will and Bryant paid no attention to them. And then, sadly, the evening’s designated driver bailed on foot, and poor Bryant had to drive all the way back down the mountain sober.”

  “You mean you deserted them?” Wolf joked. “In their time of need?”

  Ri sighed, even as she grinned. “I’ve probably just ruined any chance of carrying on a decent working relationship with either of them the rest of the summer.” She fell flat on her back on the grass, then reached out a hand and offered to let Bella sniff her fingers again. “But seriously. Enough was enough. Maybe the girls were actually having fun. Maybe they were just seeing how many freebies they could rack up before they ditched the idiots. I don’t know and I don’t care — more power to them. But as for Bryant,” her face darkened. “No way was I going to help that asshole cheat on his wife.”

  Bella finished sniffing. Ri’s expression softened as she began to stroke the dog’s head. Bella responded by closing her eyes.

  Wolf watched Ri pet the mutt with a queer, unsteady feeling in his center. “Do you have dogs?” he asked before he could stop himself. What kind of off-the-subject question was that?

  Ri didn’t seem taken aback. She didn’t even look up at him, but continued smiling serenely at Bella. “We used to. Bernese Mountain Dogs. We had Callie first, when I was little. Then we had Dorie. She died a couple years ago, but my parents were empty nesters then and they wanted to travel, so we didn’t get another one. I’ve missed having a dog around.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Ri’s creative energy seemed temporarily spent, now that she’d gotten her anger off her chest, and Wolf felt a sudden, fierce urge to lift her spirits. “What will you do now? Are you going to demand at least one day with the car by yourself?”