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She owed that giant big time.
He’d get his thanks—if she ever saw him again—but right now she had other things on her mind. Her skis hissed through the new-fallen snow. She was still new to the sport, still prone to an occasional clumsy tumble, but getting better. As she worked up a rhythm, the crisp air pinkened her cheeks and stung her eyes.
Every day she trekked farther and explored new directions. She’d been so crushed when she first moved here. Occasionally she still thought about Johnny. Occasionally she still woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the nightmare of a bride in a white dress, standing in the church for a Christmas Eve wedding, the guests all there, the whole town waiting for a groom who never showed.
That humiliating memory still made her cringe, but she’d slowly realized that that singular rejection wasn’t the real source of her hurt. It was being wrong, one too many times. It was feeling, once too often, the stone weight of being unloved and unlovable. Johnny had turned out to be a turkey, but Johnny wasn’t the real problem. Her self-respect was in more crumpled pieces than a broken cookie.
That cookie refused to instantly glue back together—but she was working on it.
When she brushed against a pine branch, snow shivered down in a shower of fluffy crystals, making her chuckle. It wasn’t so hard, being happy. It wasn’t so impossible, to laugh again. Being alive was riches enough, and she was discovering more riches every day.
She poled to the crest of a hill, and then, bending her knees, sailed down to the belly of a small valley. At the bottom she stopped, breathless and exhilarated, and yanked off a glove to check the compass in her pocket. Northeast. If she kept going in that direction, eventually she’d hit Lake Superior. Even if the landscape was totally unfamiliar, she had her bearings, wasn’t afraid of being lost. She zipped the compass back into her jacket pocket again, and was just refitting her glove when she saw the animal.
Fear never occurred to her in that first instant. He looked like a dog. A Siberian-husky type. He had a long snout and pointy ears, and mesmerizingly liquid black eyes staring right at her. His luxuriously thick pelt was almost as stark white as the snow. Her eyes softened. Lord, he was gorgeous, and standing motionless from a knoll thirty feet from her, as regal and silent as a statue.
“Hey, boy,” she said softly. “Are you lost?”
Her tone was as gentle as a whisper—she’d fallen in love on sight—but his response to her was distinctly different. At the first sound of her voice, he bared huge pointed teeth and snarled, his growl so ferocious that her throat closed.
It wasn’t a dog. She knew it in a pulsebeat. No husky was that big; no tame animal made wild, feral sounds like that. It had to be a wolf.
Every muscle in her body clenched up and locked. She couldn’t swallow. Adrenaline shot through her veins in an ice-cold rush.
The wolf paced another five feet closer, snapping threatening growls the whole time. It wasn’t hard to get the message. He didn’t like her. She’d have been thrilled to turn tail and run, only damned if she wasn’t too scared to move. She heard another snarl and whipped her head around.
Another one. Lord. Another two—no, three. At least three of them. The others were multicolored, their pelts ranging from dark charcoal to streaky gray. None of them were as huge as the white wolf, but the few pounds difference was hardly reassuring. She sensed as well as saw that she was being circled. They were moving. Pacing slowly in the snow, ducking in and behind trees, but keeping her in sight.
She’d have wet her pants if she had time.
There was no time. Panic sealed her throat. She had a flash memory of the afternoon she’d idiotically considered suicide. She’d never meant it. She’d just been so angry with herself—being stood up at her wedding had been a last straw in a long history of humiliating, embarrassing screwups. But geesh. At her most stupid, she’d never really wanted to die. And for sure she didn’t want to die all alone, torn to shreds in the middle of the north woods by a pack of wolves.
It was positively an uphill, difficult and darn near insurmountable job to earn her own self-respect. But she wanted a chance. Come on, God. I’m trying so hard, but I need a little time. How about a bargain. You get me out of this, and I’ll never mess up again as long as I live. I’ll be so good you’ll be astounded. I’ll be so good that I’ll be astounded....
The white wolf lifted his head and howled.
The sound echoed in the lonely woods like a cry from her own heart. She swallowed on a shattered breath. Tears welled, unwanted nuisance tears, blurring her vision when she desperately needed to see.
The wolves circled closer. The word run screamed through her mind, but it was easier to think than act. She could hardly run hellbent-for-leather wearing cross-country skis. There were trees all over the place, hardwoods as well as heavily branched pines, but her skis made climbing any of them just as impossible. There had to be a way out of this. She just had to think.
“Stand still. Don’t run. Don’t move—just stand real still.”
She heard the human voice. A masculine voice, but just then she wasn’t picky. One chord of that low masculine baritone and relief sang through her pulse like an opera aria. She whirled around. Nothing—not death, bombs or taxes—could have stopped her from aiming for that voice. “Oh, God, I’m so glad you’re here—”
“For cripe’s sakes, listen to me! Don’t move!”
Two
Mary Ellen obediently froze. Her heart even started beating again. She recognized the giant from the restaurant, although she barely looked at him. Her eyes glued straight on the gun he was carrying. The nice, long, big gun. She wasn’t going to die. The wolves weren’t going to get her. He had a gun. “Shoot ‘em, for pete’s sake!”
“Now, just take it easy. I’m pretty sure we don’t need to go that far.”
His slow, lazy baritone took her back. “In case you haven’t noticed—” personally, she thought he’d have to be myopic and deaf not to notice “—I think those wolves are planning to have me for lunch.”
“Yeah, I can see they’re not too happy with you.” He glanced at the wolves, then back at her. “Try to see it from their viewpoint. A human is their worst enemy. And you didn’t just barge into their territory. You wandered within twenty-five yards from a nest of their pups. They’re just trying to protect their young.”
Conceivably he thought she needed this information. She waved her hand in front of his face. One of them seemed to be under the illusion they had time for a casual chitchat. It wasn’t her. “I’m sorry I upset them. You’d never believe how sorry. If I could disappear into thin air, trust me, I’d be glad to. But that not being an option, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d at least aim that gun—”
“I’m afraid it isn’t the kind of weapon you think it is. It’s just a tranquilizing gun. No bullets. And yeah, I can shoot them if I have to, but it’s a lousy choice. The sedative would put them out for several hours. They’d be prey to the elements, other animals, and they’d be affected by the drug for a couple of days. Just relax, okay? They aren’t doing anything but growling at you. They’re entitled to give you a lecture. You screwed up.”
“Nothing new about that. It’s the story of my life,” she muttered.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. I can’t think. Geezle beezle, they’re still circling!”
“I know. And I know you’re scared, but you’re staying real cool. I’m proud of you. Most men would have lost it by now, but not you. You’re holding it together just fine. We’re gonna keep talking, okay? And while we’re talking, I want you to toe the catch on your skis. Real slow, real careful, see if you can get them off. Just forget the wolves. Look at me, straight at me.”
He had everything wrong. She wasn’t staying cool; she was a pinch away from totally losing it, and positively she’d done nothing to make the stranger—or anyone else—proud of her. Yet she looked straight at him, because he’d asked her. And she managed to awkwardly, clumsily toe off her skis, because he’d asked her to do that, too. The man had a Pied Piper voice—throaty and husky and hypnotizingly seductive. He could probably coax a nun to strip with that wickedly sexy voice, but that hardly explained why she obeyed him. There was only one possible reason why she did what he asked.
She’d lost her mind.
Circumstantial evidence wasn’t a fair way to judge a man, but she could hardly fail to notice clues that he wasn’t necessarily operating with a full deck. The wolves were snarling and circling and charging around. He was as calm as a spring breeze. Mary Ellen took that as a teensy hint that he needed a reality check. For reasons she couldn’t imagine, the front of his parka and jeans were hard-packed with snow. The hood was thrown back, revealing a shaggy, disheveled pelt of jet black hair. It looked as if his hair was decorated with dry leaves, which made no sense. Making even less sense, he was unzipping his parka as he slowly walked toward her.
She’d instinctively trusted him in the restaurant, instinctively sensed that he wasn’t the kind of man to prey on a vulnerable woman. Then and now, she should have remembered that her judgment about men wasn’t worth a Las Vegas dollar. Obviously she’d been mistaken about the intelligence in his shrewd blue eyes. No way he could be too bright when it seemed to have missed his notice entirely that her life was in imminent danger. Hells bells, so was his. The wolves sounded restless and hungry and mean and ferocious. And her damn fool of a giant was peeling off his jacket in freezing-lung temperatures as if he had nothing better to do.
“What I want you to do,” he said gently, “is put on my coat.”
“You want me to wear your coat?”
“And my muffler and gloves.”
“And your muffler and gloves,” she echoed. Vaguely she wondered if she’d landed in the twilight zone. She had experience, extensive experience, in embarrassing messes. Coping with situations that no sane woman would normally land herself in was really her forte. Somehow, though, nothing had prepared her for holding a witless conversation with a madman while surrounded by wolves.
“They know my scent.”
“Swell.”
Her deadpan comment was hardly intended to arouse his sense of humor, yet his mouth curved in the crack of a grin. “I’m getting the definite feeling we’d better backtrack a few yards. My name is Steve. Steve Rawlings. And I guess I just assumed you knew who I was. My being around has raised a lot of talk in town.”
“I’m new in Eagle Falls. And not exactly on the chitchat gossip circuit.”
He nodded. “So you didn’t know.... These wolves are my problem. My job. By profession I’m an ethologist. I study and work with animals like wolves, and specifically I’m working with this pack. It’d be my responsibility if anyone was hurt because of them, and I’m for sure not going to let anything happen to you, okay?” He gave her a moment to take in that information, then calmly went on. “The reason I want you to wear my coat is that it has my scent. They know me. In fact I’ve known White Wolf, the alpha male, since he was a pup. I don’t want to kid you—we’re in dicey waters. Wolves aren’t dogs—they’re wild animals. It’s dangerous to trust any wild animal. But I think we’ve got a great chance of this working.”
He’d reached her by then. The blasted man was so tall that she had to tilt her face to meet his eyes. “If you’re trying to be reassuring, I hate to tell you, but you’re failing big time. I’m real close to throwing up.”
“Nah. You’re staying real cool, real calm. I knew you would. When I saw you in the restaurant, I thought to myself, now there’s a lady who wouldn’t lose it in a crisis—no, no, quit looking at them. Look at me. Take it easy. You’re doing just fine. Although—”
“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 had acute hearing. Talking let the animals know where he was, who he was, and a steady, soothing tone helped communicate that he meant them no harm. Wolves were nervous by nature. They had reason to be.
Mary Ellen had no idea if he was successfully calming the beasts, but his low, husky voice was working an unwilling magic on her. He didn’t talk about anything but the wolves. She wondered if he realized how much he was revealing about himself.
Isle Royale, he told her, was less than a thirty-mile stretch across Lake Superior from here. Since the late fifties, the island was one of the few places on the continent where the endangered species of gray wolf was protected. A few years ago, though, the species had started dying out. Numbers dropped from fifty to eleven. No one could pin down the problem. The wolves had an ample food supply; the winters weren’t that harsh; neither disease nor age seemed to be the contributing factor. They simply weren’t breeding. The best theory seemed to be genes—that the three surviving packs were too inbred. The wolves needed a new gene pool if they were going to survive.
“So two years ago, I flew in White Wolf. He’s from Alaska—where I was working then. Carried him, his best girl and two more from that pack, and settled them on the island. They seemed to be doing fine. They mated and bred, and everything was going hunky-dory—until this winter.”
Normally the icy waters of Lake Superior created a formidable barrier between the island and the Upper Peninsula. But that stretch of lake had frozen before, in winters as violently cold as this one. “The damn doofuses walked across on the ice floes. They got it in their heads that they wanted to set up housekeeping on this side. Not a brain in their idiot heads.”
It was hard for Mary Ellen to think of wolves in affectionate terms like “doofuses,” but clearly Steve did.
“No one wants them. No one’s ever wanted wolves. People don’t mind a romantic story about them, like Jack London wrote or Walt Disney filmed, but find one in your backyard and that attitude changes real quickly. Man has always been afraid of wolves—it’s as simple as that, and no laws have ever protected them from being hunted down. They need to be taken back to the island, partly because the whole species isn’t going to make it—not without this new blood—and partly because their chance of surviving here is worse than a bookie’s odds. So that’s what I came here to do—transport them back to the island. Only damn, I hit a little snag I never expected.”
“A snag?” She couldn’t imagine what he’d consider “a little snag.” He mentioned rounding up the wolves and transporting them to the island as if this were an ordinary project for him. Even trying to picture the act boggled her mind.
“White Wolf’s mate was shot several days ago. And unfortunately, she’d just given birth to a litter of pups less than ten days before that.”
“Someone shot the mother?” Her voice was small. Minutes before, she’d been in a bloodthirsty rush for him to aim that gun and shoot to kill. That white behemoth of a wolf—and his cronies—had terrified her. Still did. But she hadn’t thought of the wolves as vulnerable then. She hadn’t pictured a young mother hunted down, leaving a nest of helpless newborn babies. “I guess I should have expected that something had happened to the mother. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t have any reason to be feeding the pups if the mom was alive.”
“Well, normally if a mother wolf dies, another female in the pack will take over. She’ll bond with the pups and start producing milk. Only there’s only one other female in the pack. She’s no spring chicken and that didn’t happen. So I’m feeding them formula five times a day. Unfortunately they’re just too young and weak to move right now. And the rest of the pack—they won’t leave. Not without their young. There isn’t a human alive who can understand a wolf’s loyalty. He’ll sacrifice his life to protect those he loves. They take care of each other. That instinct is as strong in wolves as their need to eat or breathe.”
Steve grabbed her arm when she stumbled on a slick ridge. She hadn’t been looking where she was going, but at him. His face was ruddy from the cold, yet the temperature didn’t seem to bother him. He released her arm quickly, but the gesture had protected her from a fall as automatically as the wolves he’d been talking about. His affinity for the animals was no accident, she mused. He was like them. A lone wolf. A man who valued loyalty, who willingly made personal sacrifices for something he cared about, who was instinctively protective of others around him. He’d obviously chosen his work and his life-style. That kind of strength—that kind of loneliness—was beyond anything she knew.
But being a loner...Mary Ellen knew a lot about that. She’d lived her whole life with the tag of misfit.
“So,” she said, “how long are you stuck with this problem?”
“It’ll be at least a month, maybe more, before the pups are strong enough to be relocated. And the whole thing is a gamble. Someone would say a stupid gamble, trying to keep them together. It’s not like I couldn’t ship the pups off to some zoo—there’s no problem finding people willing to take care of them. But they’d never make it outside of captivity if I separated them from the pack now. They imprint on the grown-ups. The older ones teach them how to survive in the wild, something no human could do. It’s real iffy whether I can keep them all safe for that long. There’s a town meeting this Thursday. I know damn well they have in mind voting an open season on my pals.”
She glanced at him again. His voice never fluctuated from that slow, lazy drawl. He made that town meeting sound like nothing more challenging than a Sunday stroll. Yet it had to be hard, being an unwanted stranger with an unwanted cause, and she couldn’t imagine the guts it would take to face down a townful of people who viewed him as an enemy.
She knew how it felt to be judged, so it was probably natural that she felt a compelling emotional tug for him. She was a loner, too, but a misfit not by choice. For an instant she wanted to reach out and touch him as if they shared a personal bond—when there was no bond. He had guts. She didn’t. He had strength to burn, volunteered for difficult situations. Her response to the difficult situation with Johnny had been to cringe, get an itchy case of hives and then duck and run lickety-split, like the coward she was. She looked away. “I guess you’ve had to deal with that kind of problem before?”
He never got around to answering her, although when he suddenly stopped walking, she wasn’t sure why. The craggy ridge looked no different than the landscape they’d just traveled—wild and woody. There were no footprints in the snow, no sign any human had ever discovered these primitive backwoods. The forest was dark, deep, endless, winding around hills and snow-swept, jutting crags of land. Then, though, she spotted an olive green box, like the kind of case people packed drinks and sandwiches for a picnic in.
Steve bent over and pushed the top off. The box definitely wasn’t being used for picnic supplies. Strange-looking baby bottles were packed around hot-water sacks. He unwrapped one and showed her. “I got the bottles from the hospital in Houghton. They’re meant for babies with cleft palates, but they work just as well for pups too young to suckle.”
She edged closer, her arms wrapped around her chest. A wisp of a smell hit her nostrils—strong enough to make her nose crinkle.
He chuckled. “I should have warned you. The formula isn’t exactly aromatic.”
“Good grief, what’s in it?”
“Piles of disgusting stuff, from raw egg yolks to vitamins. Trying to fool them that this is their mama’s milk has been an uphill trip, I’ll tell you. But never mind that. Are you ready to fall in love?”
Her eyes flew to his faster than a shooting comet. “I beg your pardon?”
Slowly, lazily, he studied her face as if the color in her cheeks was the most fascinating thing he’d seen in a blue moon. “You’re not all that sure what you think, are you? You don’t think you’re gonna be tempted into caring. A lot of people don’t. A wolf’s a wolf, and these little guys don’t come out of the womb looking like a Walt Disney cartoon. They’re born wild and wary, a real handful, no interest in being tamed. But I just have this strange feeling, Mary Ellen, that you’re gonna fall hopelessly in love.”
He was talking about the baby wolves, of course. Not him. Not them. Not for a moment—not even for a millisecond—had she thought he meant anything else. It was just the low timbre in his voice when he said her name...she didn’t realize he even knew her name...that made her suddenly shiver. She shifted her attention from his gaze at the speed of light, looking all over for some sign of the nest or a den or someplace where the pups might be. “So where are they?” she asked impatiently.
“Right here.” Stuffing two bottles under his sweater, he bent under the shadowed branches of a spruce, and then went belly flat in the snow.
