“Although?” Momentarily she couldn’t help feeling distracted. She wasn’t the stay-cool type. She reliably fell apart in any crisis. Now was no different—she was scared enough to lose her cookies. How he could have formed such a mistakenly inaccurate impression of her was downright confounding.
“Although—” lazy, easy humor glinted in his eyes again “—it’d sure help a lot if you could loosen that death grip you’ve got on your ski poles.”
She glanced down. She had no idea her fists were glued to her ski poles until he started peeling her gloved hands loose. Once that was accomplished, the ski poles dropped in the snow. Then, with the gun anchored between his knees, he slowly fitted her arms into his parka. The size of his jacket was big enough to fit over her own, but stuffing her into the second coat was a cumbersome process. She couldn’t help him. Her stomach was too busy doing flip-flops.
Her response to his closeness wasn’t sexual. It couldn’t be. Sex was the last thing on her mind, not just because of the situation, but just because. Other women seemed to feel an automatic jet pull near a virile male hunk. Not her. Her hormones had never flipped on like a light switch. She had to know a guy. She had to think about it.
Since sexual awareness couldn’t conceivably be causing the dancing flutter in her stomach, she decided it must be the...strangeness. He’d given her a lot to take in. He worked with wolves. That was tough to imagine. He promised he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. It was even tougher to imagine her believing that—heaven knew, she’d suffered consequences from mistakenly trusting men’s promises before.
She’d been reasonably fine. Until he moved so close. When he wrapped the scarf around her neck, his wrist brushed her cheek. The muffler carried the warm male scent of his skin, and his touch aroused a shivery lick of feminine nerves. She tried to prop Johnny’s mental picture in her mind’s eye, which invariably reminded her of the mistakes she’d made. Only it didn’t work this time. Steve wasn’t Johnny. He wasn’t like any man she’d known before, and she had the sudden disoriented feeling that he could be far more dangerous than his wolves.
His towering height blocked the view of the woods, the world, the pale afternoon sun. She hadn’t seen his face this close before. The weathered lines around his eyes and forehead were as ingrained as granite. He hadn’t gotten those character lines playing checkers in a warm parlor. He knew what he wanted. It wasn’t a life playing checkers. There was steel in his square jaw, wildness in his unkempt hair and rough, straggly brows. His touch was gentle with her, but she couldn’t stop thinking that it didn’t have to be. With his powerful build, she couldn’t imagine anyone stopping him from doing whatever he wanted.
When he zipped the jacket straight to her chin, his eyes met hers. He didn’t say, Make up your mind, Mary Ellen. He didn’t say, Damn, but I’m tempted to give you something a lot more serious to worry about than a few old wolves. It was just in her mind, that he was sizing her up in an intense, intimate way. He didn’t want her. For pete’s sake, he didn’t even know her. She was just imagining silly things because she was so shook up.
“They quit,” she said.
“Quit?”
“The wolves. They’re quiet. They quit howling.” When he stepped back and glanced around, the breath whooshed out of her lungs. “I don’t see them. Do you think they’ve left?”
“No. They’re around. But since they’ve moved out of sight, they’ve apparently made up their minds to behave. Which leaves me with a tricky decision,” he murmured.
Again, his eyes peeled on her. Again, she felt a curling sensation, as if her whole body was warmer than buttered toast. Foolishness. She was wrapped in double layers of down; naturally she was hot. It had nothing to do with the way he was looking at her. “What’s this tricky decision?”
“I’m not about to leave you alone,” he immediately reassured her. “I have a pickup over the next rise, about a quarter-mile walk from here. I’ll take you home. But it would help a lot if you wouldn’t mind sticking with me for a few more minutes.”
“Sticking with you?”
“I’m in a bind,” he admitted. “When I first heard the wolves kicking up a fuss, I was halfway through feeding the pups. There’s seven of them, a couple I left hungry. It would take time to drive you home and get back here. It’d just be a lot easier to finish the job right now, but I don’t know how shook-up or scared you are—”
She could have told him how scared and rattled she was. The instant she got home, she fully anticipated indulging in a nice long case of the shakes. She loved cats. She loved schnauzers. But this singular experience with wolves had permanently cured her of any desire to be anywhere near this particular animal again in this lifetime.
But damn. He’d saved her behind. Twice now. And he’d mentioned the pups, but she hadn’t made the connection that he had anything to do with them. The debt she owed him sat on her conscience like guiltladen lead, and geesh, what was a few more minutes of heart-hammering terror? “It’s not that I’m shook-up,” she assured him, and then had to clear her throat. The giant lie had almost caught in it. “But you’re the one who needs to get out of the weather. You have to be freezing without your jacket. You’ll catch cold.”
Over his jeans, he was only wearing a gray alpaca sweater. The garment stretched over his muscular chest, a thick-weaved, scratchy wool, practical and warm enough for a dash outside but hardly for working in these temperatures. “I’m cold,” he admitted, “but the pups are real young. So young that their survival at all is real iffy.”
“So it could matter, if they were fed right this instant, huh?” She gulped in another guilty breath. Babies were babies. How could she be responsible for babies going hungry? Still, she’d only asked him a question. She hadn’t said yes, sure, I’d love to stick around and risk my life for another few hours. Yet his response to her single hesitant comment was a devil-slow masculine grin.
“I could have guessed you’d say yes. Nothing much throws you, does it? And it’s possible that we’re pushing our luck, but I don’t think so. White Wolf wouldn’t have backed off if he hadn’t made his mind up about you. Still, we’ll just take this slow and easy. Have you ever seen baby wolves?”
No, she’d never seen baby wolves—or ever planned to. For two exhilarating seconds, her fragile ego basked in his respect for her courage, but that soaring sensation didn’t last long. He was so totally mistaken. She hadn’t earned that respect. She had no guts. She’d just never managed the assertive art of saying no—a personality flaw that had majorly contributed to her landing in hot water in the past.
She’d never been in hot water quite like this, though. Quicker than a smile, he’d taken her hand. Before she could draw a nervous breath, they were crossing the white sugarcoated valley. In the open. Easy prey for wolves or bears or anything else. He’d scooped both her skis and his gun under one arm, so it wasn’t as if he could aim that rifle quick, even if he had to.
They climbed a ridge, ducked around a stand of white pines and scrambled down a knoll. The new snow layer was fluff, but beneath that lay an ice crust, tricky footing in just her ski boots. Even though he had to be freezing in just that sweater, he never moved fast and he never loosened his grip on her hand. The thick gloves prevented any personal contact, but his secure hold felt like being plugged into a direct socket of strength. He wasn’t going to let her fall.
He kept talking in that lazy, calm baritone of his. Talking was a necessity, he told her. Wolves
