“Want that hot buttered rum?” Harlan asked the redhead. Her eyes looked more amber than gold now, in the lower light. He’d never seen eyes like that. He wanted to keep staring at them. And at her mouth. It had so many curves in it, you wanted to stay there all night.
Well, maybe with a few detours south of her smile.
“You know what I really want?” she said. “Bourbon. My thighs ache, I know they’re going to ache more tomorrow, my day’s been way too exciting, and I have a bruise on my butt that’s three inches across. I’ve earned bourbon. Does your kindness extend to Jack Daniels?”
Harlan just about fell out of his chair.
Yep. Tennessee whiskey.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “My kindness extends all the way up to that bottle they keep on the top shelf. How do you like it?”
“Oh,” she said, “I like it strong.”
Well, hell.
The other girl, the blonde, looked like she wanted to say something, but she wasn’t sure what. Also, Harlan could’ve sworn she’d kicked the redhead under the table, because she jumped.
“So that’s one Jack, neat,” Harlan said, once he had his breathing regulated again. “And what else?”
“I’ll have a hot cider,” the blonde said. “I’m Dyma, by the way, and this is Jennifer.”
“Owen,” Owen said, “and the ugly guy’s Kris. I’m going to start out with hot cider myself. Sounds good.”
Harlan opened his mouth, and Owen shot him a look like, Dude. Do you really want to be Harlan Kristiansen tonight? You sure?
Well, no. Probably not. At least, he didn’t correct Owen. And when he went up to the bar to place the order, nobody recognized him, which was a strange feeling, like being in a foreign country, or maybe a dream. It really had all been about the hair. Now, he was just another guy. It felt weird, but maybe it felt good. Free. That fizzing thing again.
When he headed back over to the table, though, Jennifer wasn’t sitting down anymore. She was standing up, and standing straight, like she had some big announcement to make. Or like she’d been way too out there, and now she wanted to run. She said, “Actually, I needed—”
Owen said, “Hang on. I think this just got interesting.”
A group was coming out of the restaurant, passing through the bar area. A couple kids, and four guys. So?
Owen said, “The snowmobiles.”
Now Harlan saw it, too. One of the guys, the one who’d had his helmet off out there. Tall, a little beefy, and with a wide stance. The body language of a man who wanted to proclaim his status to the world, or who’d just done something incredibly stupid and was spinning his brain hard, trying to reset things to where he came out on top again. Or, possibly, trying to think up the way he’d explain this to his wife.
Because, yeah, there were no women in the party. Maybe that was why the beefy guy was checking out Harlan’s redhead, his eyes going up and down her body in her oh-hell-yeah ribbed sweater and tight jeans like he was measuring her for fit. He’d left the wife at home, so he thought he could look all he wanted.
Harlan saw that, and he saw something else, too. He saw the way she noticed how the guy was looking at her, and the way she tensed. Like she was just waiting for him to say something, and she knew it was going to be bad.
He didn’t spend time asking himself if he wanted to get into this. He went ahead and got into it.
8
Thing Three
Jennifer had three things that she needed to take care of. Right now.
Thing One. She needed to explain about Dyma. That was sweet of the other guy—Owen—to have hot cider with her, but Dyma was looking at him with way too much of her cute-and-fun, the Miss Adorable animation she couldn’t seem to help. And what if it wasn’t sweet at all? What if it was just manipulation? It didn’t take much talent for a guy to think, “I’ll have the same drink as her! Bonding!”
Which brought her to Thing Two. She needed to get control of her mouth. She was always careful, and she was her daughter’s role model! You didn’t wear a tight sweater and tell the guy about your sore thighs, and then tell him you liked it strong. She hadn’t realized how it would sound until she’d said it, or actually until Dyma had kicked her, but now that she had? Could she be more obvious?
And Thing Three. The snowmobile guy, who was proof, if she’d needed it, that, yes, whatever Dyma thought, and whatever a petite eighteen-year-old could wear and look darling, a grown woman with a small frame and a triple-D cup could not wear that same thing without looking like she wanted action. She knew that. She’d known it for twenty years. Why had she picked tonight to forget it?
But, yeah. The snowmobile guy. Kris was about to jump straight into it, and that wasn’t going to end well, so she jumped first. She picked out the kid who’d almost run her down—easy enough to do, because the other kid was taller and chubbier—and said, keeping it friendly, “Well, hi. What a surprise. How are you? Remember me?”
The group hesitated, then stopped, and she went on, “We’re the ones who were around the bison with you when all the, uh, excitement happened. I’m glad I saw you again. I wanted to ask how you were doing. That was pretty scary out there.”
The kid glanced at one of the men—his dad, probably—then back at Jennifer. “Nah,” he said. “It was OK. The bison was just warning us to stay away. I’m sorry I almost hit you, though.”
“You didn’t almost hit anybody,” the man said. The one who’d been telling the kid to pose with the bull. He wasn’t going to be winning any Father of the Year awards for that, and he wasn’t winning one now, either. “You were missing her all the way,” he told his son. “And that animal only got spooked in the first place because everybody started yelling and waving their arms. He was fine up till then.”
Kris said, “Seriously? You want to go there, after you took off and left your kid to be chased down by that bull? And yeah, I had to knock this lady out of the way of his snowmobile. She’s bruised up, but she’s going to be OK. Thanks for asking.”
“He’d have missed her,” the guy said again.
“Well, no,” Kris said, “he wouldn’t have. He was headed straight for her, and regular people can’t jump that fast.”
Regular people? What did he mean, regular people? He’d better not mean older people. Unfit people. He’d really better not mean chubby people.
“They tell you, stay twenty-five yards away from bison,” the other guy, Owen, put in calmly. “It’s a good rule. A bison’s not a wolf or a grizzly, but it’s plenty big.”
“They’re basically cattle,” the belligerent guy said. “And nobody stays twenty-five yards from cows.”
The others in the group were shifting some. Restless, looking to get out of here, because confrontation was unpleasant, and it was awkward. Jennifer knew how they felt. She wasn’t sure whether she was glad or sorry about this. She was glad to see the kid was OK, and it was exciting, she guessed. It was drama. Had she mentioned, though, how much she hated drama?
Owen’s tone was still completely mild. “That’s true in a way, and not true at all in another. I’m a rancher myself. Bison are wild, not domesticated, and yeah, there’s a difference. Difference of not being bred for hundreds of years to be easy to handle, for one thing. And bulls? No matter what you breed for, they’re a whole different story. My buddy here got on the wrong side of one of my bulls the other day and ended up flat on his back, thanking God there was a gate between them. You don’t want to mess with a bull.”
Kris said something under his breath. It sounded like, “Thanks, man.”
“Anyway,” Owen said, “guess we all learned a lesson, huh?” He clapped a big hand on the kid’s shoulder. The kid’s knees practically buckled. “Tell you a secret. The best lessons are the ones you learn the hard way. They stick the longest.”
The dad looked like he dearly wanted to say something else but was choosing not to. Jennifer could see why. Owen was enormous. He had to be six-five, six-six, something like that, an
d his shoulders were about a yard across, too. In a plaid flannel shirt and jeans now instead of ski clothes, you could tell that he didn’t just look big with layers on, he was big. He wasn’t fat. He was just huge.
And yet he looked harmless. The one who looked dangerous was, oddly, Kris. Maybe six-two or six-three, and still with some serious shoulders, but made of leaner muscle in contrast to his friend’s bulk. His hair was dark blonde and cut aggressively short, almost spiky, his bright blue eyes and pretty much every other part of him were shaped as perfectly as a man’s entire self could be, and he was almost certainly too handsome, but right now, he looked exactly like the wolf. Alert. Aware. Ready to go.
She shivered, and all that attention and focus of his shifted to her. And she shivered again.
He said, his voice quiet, “It’s OK. It’s over. Have a seat.”
She nodded and did it, unable to say anything else. All her bravado was gone. This was too much conflict. Too much aggression in the air. Too many … too many things happening in one day. In one week. In one year.
She was not cut out for this. She did regular. She did mundane. She did nonconfrontational.
Kris told the kid, “Owen’s right. We all got a bison lesson. Stay away from those guys from now on, huh?” He smiled with a Hollywood star’s worth of charm and said, as if the confrontation had never happened, “Good to meet you under better circumstances. You all have a good night.” Then he sat down beside Jennifer and told her, “I’ve got to say—I’m ready for that whiskey. How about you?”
Harlan still wanted to deck the guy for dismissing what he’d done to Jennifer, and to his kid. He did his best to get rid of the impulse, though. For whatever reason, she was way too wound up.
Jennifer. It was a little old-fashioned, maybe. It suited her. He was used to the kind of high-gloss women a football player tended to meet, but she was from a different world. The kind of woman you might see at a PTA meeting. With cookies, or something.
She didn’t have gloss. She had warmth. A whole different thing. And she wasn’t wearing a ring.
He wanted to kiss her. Bad.
The waitress brought the drinks, and he lifted his glass and said, “To adventure. And survival.”
The blonde, Dyma, said, “To adventure,” clinked her mug of hot cider (with cinnamon stick) against the others, and took a gulp.
Jennifer said, “To survival.” Wryly, which was interesting. She took a sip of the neat whiskey, sighed, and said, “Or maybe to adventure. You really did ask for the good stuff.”
“Always,” he said.
“There’s something I have to say,” she said. Gearing up for the announcement, the same way she’d done before.
“That you think they’re wolf shifters?” Dyma asked, both her pretty dimples showing. “We had a wolf encounter earlier,” she told Owen. “As in—right before our bison encounter. If I’d known Yellowstone would be this exciting, I wouldn’t have whined about coming. What’s going to happen tomorrow, we get caught in an elk stampede? The grizzlies wake up? What?”
“I can’t believe you whine about anything,” Owen said. “Pretty sure you’re jumping in with both feet every time.”
“A man with outward courage dares to die,” she said. “A man with inward courage dares to live.”
“Easy for you to say,” Jennifer muttered.
“We’re wolf shifters?” Harlan asked. “You’ve been reading the background material too, then. But wait—what wolf encounter?”
“What?” Jennifer said. “No.” She was blushing a little, the pink tinting her cheeks. Maybe that was the whiskey, or maybe it was something else, because she was looking at him. Seriously looking. “You have the same eyes he did,” she said. “At least I think so. That’s an interesting coincidence, but obviously, there’s no such thing as a wolf shifter.”
“Aw,” Owen said.
“Never mind,” Harlan told him. “I’m the only one who’d be a wolf. You’re a bison shifter all the way. I was just thinking that today.”
“No.” Dyma sat up straighter. “No, because the brown wolf was you, Owen.” She got even more animated, her face lighting up, like the energy inside was propelling her onward. “We skied around this corner beside the river, because we were on the … the …”
“The Lone Star Trail,” Jennifer put in. She was looking tense. Troubled. She took another sip of whiskey, then smiled with the kind of determination that meant she was shaking it off. Harlan wanted to put a hand over hers, but he didn’t, because he couldn’t get a read on her.
“And my mom said something,” Dyma said, “but I didn’t hear, and then she skied up beside me and put her hand on my arm and whispered, ‘Stop.’ And pointed. Her hand was shaking. It was really dramatic. And there they were. Wolves.”
“Wait,” Harlan said. “Your mom? Your mom’s here, too? But where … She wasn’t with you when you came out.” They had looked shaken, nearly frantic, especially Jennifer, but—what? They’d left somebody behind? Not possible.
Dyma said, “What?”
Jennifer sighed, took another swallow of her drink, and said, “She means me. I’m the mom.”
9
The White Wolf
Everybody got very still, and Jennifer had to laugh.
She was still keyed up about every single bit of this, but she had to laugh. She asked Dyma, “How long were you expecting me to wait before I told them? I’ve been about to tell them since we sat down here, but all these things kept happening.” And then she told Owen, “She’s eighteen.”
Kris said, “OK. Now you do sound like a mom.” He grinned, though, and she laughed again and finished off her whiskey. It was so smooth, it tasted like you were drinking melted caramel. If melted caramel warmed up your entire self like it was running through your veins, that is. He said, “Need another one of those? I’m thinking ‘yes.’”
“Maybe,” she said. “Normally I’d say absolutely not, but tonight? Who knows. I’m so far out of my comfort zone, I don’t even have a road map.”
“Also,” Dyma said, “I’m nineteen in three months.”
“When do you graduate from high school, though?” Owen asked. “That’s the key question. I’m hoping for, ‘Oh, no, I’m in college.’”
“Nope,” Dyma said. “Four more months for that, but I’m leaving with a whole, whole lot of college credit. I’m blasting through to that B.S. just as fast as I can, and then I’m keeping on going. Places to go. Things to do.” She drummed her hands on the table.
Kris said, “Wait.” He was looking at Jennifer again, the blue eyes intense, and she got that dizzy thing again. Definitely the whiskey. He said, “Indelicate as it is to mention a lady’s age … you can’t be her mom.”
Dyma said, “She’d just turned sixteen when she had me, is why. Barely fifteen when she got knocked up. Some high school career, huh?”
The blood drained from Jennifer’s head. She felt it happen.
Kris put a hand over hers. Just resting there, that was all. He told Dyma, who had some pink in her own cheeks, “That’s a pretty lousy way to put it, don’t you think?”
“Hey,” Dyma said, still trying to brazen it out, “we live in a small town. It’s not a secret.”
Jennifer stood up, still feeling a little lightheaded, and said, “I’ll go … order another round.”
Kris stood up, too. “Sounds good. I’ll go with you. Ready to move on to beer, Owen?”
“Nope,” Owen said. “I’ll take another cider, though.” His brown eyes were watchful and calm, and so was his voice. It was a very deep voice.
Half of Jennifer wanted to make a run for the ladies’ room. Why, though? So Dyma had said that, and it had come out flippant and almost … cruel. It was true all the same, and it always had been. But ... her daughter. For whose sake she’d done all of it. She thought that, too?
She headed to the bar and told Kris, keeping her voice steady, “She’s just excited. This trip is … pretty unusual for us, and she’s grad
uating soon, like she said. She’s halfway gone already, she maybe feels a little guilty about that, and she wants to be …”
“Grown up,” Kris said. “It wasn’t a very nice way to say it, but hey. We’ve all been there.” He told the bartender, “Get us another round, would you?”
“Two Gentleman Jacks neat, two hot ciders,” the barman said. “Coming up.”
“Oh,” Jennifer said. “I was going to get this one.”
“Nope,” Kris said. “My treat. Want to hang out here a second with me, lose some of the drama?”
She hesitated. “I want that so much, you cannot imagine. I hate drama, and yet drama just keeps showing up. I should go back there, though. Talk to her.”
“Oh, I expect Owen’s talking to her,” Kris said. “It’s kind of his specialty, setting people straight.”
“Not if he’s going to yell at her,” Jennifer said. “She’s young, that’s all, and sort of … heady with excitement.”
He sighed. “I definitely believe that you’re the mom. Nope. He knows how. Trust me.”
“It’s one of my rules,” she said, the words somehow slipping out before she could call them back, “that when a man says, ‘Trust me,’ he usually means, ‘Look into my hypnotizing eyes and lose your better judgment.’”
Kris laughed, and even after he stopped, he kept on grinning. The barman put the drinks in front of them, and he touched his glass to hers and said, “You’re pretty special, aren’t you? Look into my hypnotizing eyes and drink up.”
This time, she was the one laughing. He grinned some more, and she laughed harder, until she was holding her stomach, pressing the napkin to her mouth, and eventually, getting the hiccups.
Shame the Devil (Portland Devils Book 3) Page 7