PRINCE OF WOLVES

by Susan Krinard

  "I hate to say it, but I'm glad you're back," she said with a wry smile. "If those were your friends again out there, looking after me, I'd hate to see your enemies."

  His arm was rigid, ungiving beneath her fingers, though he did not draw it away. "I'm sorry if you were frightened," he said softly, staring into the fire. "It wasn't my intention.You were never in any danger." Suddenly his tone grew remote and almost cold. "You didn't want to come back to the cabin, so there wasn't much choice."

  Joey released his arm and backed away from the heat and strength of his body. "You're right, of course," she said with equal chill. "Next time you should ask your friends in for dessert, or coffee at least. They've earned it."

  In the small space that separated them Joey felt the gulf that lay between all she had known in her life and everything he was—everything she could not understand. Not only of him, but also of herself. She rose at last, unable to bear the dissonance between them, and retreated to the tent. She left its shelter just long enough to hang her day clothes out on the line for airing and hurried back to the warmth of her sleeping bag.

  Sleep would not come. It wasn't the cold, though she had certainly been warmer, nor was it the utter silence of the night that lay beyond the fragile walls of the tent. Those simple things she had learned to accept. The thing that kept her from sleep was as complicated as only the human heart could make it. She could no more shut off thoughts of Luke, and her own confused feelings about him, than she could turn around and go home and give up on everything she had fought so long and hard to achieve.

  It was almost a relief when the howling began again, more distant this time but very clear and almost sweet. Joey forced her muscles to relax, listening to the patterns as the cries rose and fell in their own ancient rhythms. She could hear no threat in the sound. It was natural, part of a world that was meant to be.

  But it was no clinical desire to discuss the laws of Nature that brought Joey up out of her sleeping bag and made her don the parka she had set beside it. She tugged on the boots that lay just outside the tent and crept toward the fire.

  He was still there, a dark, motionless shape against the dying embers. His head was tilted back, his posture so intent that Joey froze in place to gaze at him in wonder. As howls chorused the night, he cocked his head, his eyes closed and nostrils flared as if savoring the most beautiful music. When he rose to his feet, it was with a single fluid movement so inhumanly graceful that Joey's breath caught, only then did he turn his head to look at her.

  The green-gold eyes were swallowed up in blackness, pupils wide as they caught a splinter of firelight. Joey understood in that instant that he did not know her. His muscles bunched as if in preparation for attack, he quivered and gathered himself—and Joey gasped "Luke!"

  He froze in midmotion, perfectly, utterly still. Then recognition came, and the muscles that had tensed so ominously relaxed again. "Joey." His voice was momentarily dull and strange, as if it came from some great distance.

  Tightening the parka about herself, Joey went toward him cautiously. "I didn't mean to startle you. I heard the howls—and since I couldn't sleep, I thought I'd ask you about those wolves."

  Luke blinked. He seemed to come fully back to himself at last, and there was no sign of anger or antipathy. A slow smile altered the fire-carved planes of his face. "What do you want to know?"

  The moon had risen and begun its slow arc across the sky when Joey found herself drifting on the seductive tide of Luke's voice, her eyes heavy as sleep coaxed her into surrender. She jerked and shook her head, stifling a yawn, Luke fell silent and regarded her from the short distance that separated them.

  "You've had enough for one day, Joey," he said softly "You need your sleep for tomorrow."

  Her head spinning with images of wolves and Luke's nearness, Joey almost protested. A yawn overtook the words, defeating any hope of clinging to the contentment of the past hours, she half-smiled sleepily and lurched to her feet. She was bone-tired, with aches where she didn't know muscles existed.

  "Good night, Luke," she murmured.

  He met her eyes briefly and looked away, into the dying fire. "Good night."

  Joey hesitated, longing for something she couldn't define. She wanted to recapture the ease that had been between them as he'd talked to her of wolves and the wilderness he loved, to see the lines of his face relax as he lost himself in another world she could only touch the fringes of. But he was closed off to her again, now, lost in a different way that excluded her completely.

  With a sigh Joey turned back for the tent, shedding her boots outside and bundling up her parka in the corner of the tent. She took a sip from her canteen and zipped herself into her bag, certain that sleep would come quickly and grant her the rest her mind and body needed. But she founded herself waiting—feeling the empty space beside her like a void that stole sleep utterly and left her staring into the darkness.

  She sat up at last, dragging the sleeping bag with her to the entrance of the tent. There was no light but the eerie glow of the waning moon, it was just enough for her to make out Luke's form as he moved about the fire, extinguishing the last stubborn embers. When he had finished, he settled back into a crouch, head dropped between his shoulders, as still as if he intended to spend the entire night in that lonely place.

  "Aren't you cold?" Joey heard herself call out across the clearing. She shivered, pulling the edges of the sleeping bag up around her chest. "I am."

  Luke started, he tilted his head without turning, and Joey knew he had heard.

  He did not move for an endless moment, Joey strained for some tiny change, some indication of his intentions. At last she dropped back into the tent, closing her eyes with a defeated sigh. The sleeping bag was all that she needed, more than enough to get her through the night.

  It was some extra sense that warned her when he entered the tent, blocking the scant moonlight as he sealed the flap behind him Only the faintest rustle of fabric attended his movements, as he unrolled his own sleeping bag and stretched out beside her, the soft sigh of his breathing mingling with her own. Her eyes saw only a shadow in darkness, but she didn't need sight. She closed her eyes again and smiled.

  "Good night, Luke," she whispered.

  Chapter Nine

  "Look there, Joey." Luke gestured across the gentle bowl of the valley that encompassed his lands. "Tonight we'll camp a little way up the slope of that ridge, tomorrow we'll be over it."

  Joey squinted and reached for her binoculars, focusing them where Luke had indicated. Between tonight's campsite and the one they had just left, forest stretched out almost unbroken, rising here and there in gentle swells. The ridge of mountains they would cross dropped down into the saddle of a pass, a place more easily crossed than the high peaks to either side. Even those forbidding sentinels were dwarfs compared to some of the ranges beyond them.

  "It'll take most of tomorrow to cross, and our stop after that will be on the other side." He said no more, shifting under the weight of his pack and briefly checking hers before setting the pace.

  Comfortably warmed by the morning's breakfast and a good night's sleep, Joey felt more than ready to tackle the day's challenges. She listened with interest to Luke's occasional comments on the route they followed and the animals and plants they encountered. They startled a shy, late-wandering red fox into flight across their path, a blur of rust amid the green and brown of forest undergrowth. Black bears gorged on autumn berries, fattening for the winter; Luke and Joey respectfully detoured around them. The animals here had little fear of man, even the mule deer paused to stare as they crossed the meadows before bounding away with their stiff-legged gait.

  And Luke belonged here, as much as any of the creatures they had encountered. This was his world, not that other domain of mankind. Joey tried to imagine Luke amid the towering skyscrapers of home and failed.

  It was late afternoon when they began the gradual ascent up the side of the ridge that marked the pass through the mount
ains. Joey felt her muscles strain against the pull of gravity, she was glad now that Luke had insisted on carrying the greater portion of the load.

  When Luke called a halt at the night's stop, she blew out a loud breath of relief and struggled free of her pack, flopping to the ground beside it. Luke looked as serene as if he'd taken a half-kilometer jaunt, his appearance not in the least worsened by two days on the trail.

  Joey sighed and thought about her mirror. She was almost afraid what she might see in it—and more afraid of what Luke saw at that very moment. As if he'd read her thoughts, he turned to look down at her. There was no criticism in his eyes, they almost glittered, as if in amusement.

  "I'll get a fire started and some hot water going. There's a stream that feeds into a small pool just beyond those trees, you're welcome to use it, though I'd ask you to skip the soap for the time being. Even that can pollute the water." Though his tone was serious, as it always was when he discussed such things, his eyes remained friendly; Joey grimaced at an itch that seemed to travel over the entire surface of her scalp instantaneously.

  "I guess I look pretty awful, don't I?" she said wryly, tugging at her loosened braid.

  He almost chuckled ."Awful? Not you. You hold up very well on the trail." His eyes were intent on her, sweeping along her body in a way that made her tense and shiver.

  "As compared to whom?" she said lightly.

  "Ah." He turned away, suddenly very interested in removing articles from his pack. "There could be no comparison."

  The casual charm with which he said the words reminded her of when she had first met him, his attempts to pursue her as just another woman to share his bed. It jarred in a way she could not quite understand.

  Something made her throw caution to the winds then. "You never talk about your background, Luke. Or your past."

  He looked up again, and there was the first hint of a frown on his face. "There isn't much to talk about," he said with a shrug. "It's not important."

  "I disagree." Joey stood up and brushed the dirt from the seat of her pants. "There's a lot about you I don't understand, Luke. And I'd like to." Ignoring the warning that sounded in her heart and the slow flood of heat that rose in her face, Joey plunged on deliberately.

  "Maybe it's just that I don't like mysteries. But since we're stuck with each other for a while, I think it's reasonable to learn more about each other. Don't you?"

  "Reasonable?" Luke's tone was almost mocking, though whether it mocked her or himself Joey couldn't guess "Does reason have anything to do with this?" Suddenly he turned the full intensity of his hypnotic gaze on her, and she felt herself swaying under the impact. And then he released her, almost before she could realize what was happening.

  Joey shook herself. "I don't know how you do that, Luke. But it only makes me want to know more. I like to know what I'm dealing with. Who I'm dealing with."

  He stood up, a length of rope in his hands. "Have you forgotten, Joey, that this is a business relationship? I take you to the place you need to go, and when it's over, you'll be leaving town. That arrangement seemed to suit you when we left. I don't see that anything has changed." Turning away in dismissal, he strode across the rocky ground to rig the rope between two sturdy saplings; Joey felt the slow burn of anger compel her to follow.

  "A business relationship. Is that truly all you think is between us?" Appalled by her own words, Joey stopped dead in her tracks, but it was too late. He swung around to face her, and the old menace was back in full force, cold and primitive.

  "I thought you'd learned, Joey. There is nothing between us and can't be." He jerked from stillness with a snap as he forestalled the protest that rose, unbidden, in her throat. "No questions. I can't give you answers." His face almost contorted then, a brief flash of pain. "Until you leave my territory, there can be no peace for either of us. Don't you understand?"

  In the silence that followed, Joey tried to assimilate a flood of thoughts and feelings and memories into some meaningful pattern. None of it made sense, and his words did not clarify anything. Anything at all.

  "I don't understand," she said at last, softly. "I don't understand anything about this, or you. You've never bothered to explain. Why did you come after me in town, and then act the way you did at the cabin? Why? Why am I so repulsive to you now that you want to see me gone? Don't you think you owe me the businesslike courtesy of an explanation?"

  Luke shut his eyes, tightly, as if to block out the sight of her. "I can give you no answers." Each word was forced, drawn out from the depths of something like despair. Joey almost flinched, almost stepped back, remembering the bizarre juxtaposition of savagery and tenderness he had shown at the cabin. But he did not move, and she found within herself the courage to continue.

  "I won't accept that. It isn't fair to expect me to. I need to understand, Luke—and somehow I will."

  With the softest of curses, Luke spun suddenly on his heel and strode off into the brush. Joey stood there for a long moment and set about searching for stones suitable for the evening fire. The mindless task kept her occupied until Luke returned with firewood, and then she slipped off to the pool to bathe her face and rinse her hair.

  When she had finished, she rocked back on her heels and twisted her hair into a fresh braid, shivering as drops of water spattered her cheek. Her reflection in the cold, pure water told her what she needed to know. If she had lost a large part of her certainty, the one thing she had not lost was her determination.

  It was only a matter of showing Luke just how determined she could be.

  Luke tasted the scents borne on the evening breeze as he made his way toward camp, Joey had already begun cooking a side dish and had heated her usual coffee—that much was clear half a kilometer away. He'd had unusual luck in his hunt that night, and the sizable hare he had caught was already gutted and skinned. The small predators of the forest who had watched him from a safe distance had quickly disposed of what he'd left.

  The time away from camp, and from Joey, had given Luke time to think. No human being had ever had the distressing effect Joey Randall had on him, no woman had even come close. Her insistence on questioning him about his past had presented him with a problem he had no hope of solving. He could not tell her what she seemed so determined to learn, he could not begin to explain why she had driven him to behavior even he found inexplicable.

  This had never happened to him before. He had no more control over it than he had over the indifferent stars that flickered in and out behind the lacy silhouettes of firs against the darkening sky. She had no conception of what her mere closeness did to him—and he could never take the risk that she might find out.

  Shifting the hare in its skin sack over his shoulder, Luke bared his teeth. He had done everything possible to keep his distance, and for a time he'd hoped she would make it easier for him by keeping hers.

  When he had left camp, after starting the fire and erecting the tent, he'd spoken to Joey not at all beyond warning her that he might be gone an hour or two; she'd merely stared at him with that familiar stubborn lift of her chin. He had felt her eyes tracking him, but seldom had he been able to bring himself to meet her gaze. That in itself was a deeply unnerving experience. It confirmed everything he had realized about her—and about himself.

  He could still dominate her if he set his mind to it. But it was as if all his will to do so had fled, and in the long run it would gain nothing but further pain.

  Pungent smoke drifted across his path as he crossed the border of trees and into camp. She was sitting by the fire, her expression turned inward, cradling a cup of coffee in her hands. She looked up as he approached, though he knew he'd made no sound that could warn her. One more proof that she could feel his presence with senses beyond those that humans usually possessed. One more proof, and one more burden.

  He did not meet her eyes as he set the hare up for cooking, though never for an instant did he fail to sense her watching him, focusing her own undefined strength and pit
ting it against his without knowing what she did. Or what she was.

  When his tasks were done and he could put it off no longer, Luke crouched across the fire from her, keeping that barrier between them. His defensive rage had leeched away, but it left him vulnerable, the direct reproach of her gaze told him she would not give up, just as she had promised. He knew that of her, as he knew it of himself.

  He could maintain the silence, until she felt compelled to break it, he could continue to fight her off with all the carefully suppressed ferocity at his disposal. He knew neither method would work—not with her. There was one other way to keep her at that safe distance where she couldn't break his control. She wanted words. Words were not his favorite means of expression, they were man-made constructs that had no true place in his world. Usually, with the others, they hadn't been necessary, after the beginning. Joey wanted more than he could give—but he could give her something to make her believe she had what she wanted.

  Letting his muscles relax into a pattern of indifference, Luke met her eyes. The gold-flecked depths of them, fringed by dark lashes, had the terrible ability to weaken his most powerful resolve, he braced himself against them and against the sight and smell of her and said, "You wanted to know something about my past, Joey."

  She tensed in startlement, her eyes widened, the full curve of her lips parting on a breath. He remembered the feel of those lips under his own, the soft oval curves of her face, the silky texture of her hair. He closed his eyes long enough to stop the litany and what it did to him. When he opened them again, her face was coolly expectant.

  "I'd like to know more about you, yes," she said quietly.

  He sighed, knowing he revealed himself by the flicker of her eyes. "What do you want to know?"

  For a long moment Joey considered, her head cocked, as if she had expected him to launch into a detailed autobiography. He half expected her to demand that he tell her about the other women who had come before, but she surprised him.