Page 14 of Wilderness Daddy

“How come you’re not in bed?” My father’s face pales and he rushes to her. “You need your rest, Carmen.” He looks around. “Where’s Beth?”

“I sent her home. I wanted to wait up for you. You’ve been gone so long.” She looks at me. “Did you have a good time? Any ladies catch your eye, Landon?”

“It was wonderful, Mom.” I bend to hug her frail body. Her smile lightens the heaviness in my chest. I would do anything for her. And despite my earlier refusal, I decide anything includes marrying Akari Takahashi. “Let me help you to bed.”

“Answer my question, Landon Steed.” She playfully swats at me. “Give a mother some hope.”

“Maybe,” I say, and smirk at her teen-girl giggle. I turn to my father as I grab the handles of my mom’s wheelchair.

“Dad? I’ll do it.” He looks at me, his eyes wide and I nod to reassure him we’re talking about the same thing. “But I have a condition.”

I roll my mother to the stairs, scoop her out of her chair, and carry her up to her room. She’s not heavy, weighing less than a hundred pounds now, but my breath is labored from the agreement I’ve just made.

“What are you two talking about?” my mother asks, curiosity making her frown.

“Just business, Mom. Nothing for you to worry about.”

Once my mother is settled in bed, I wordlessly leave my father drinking a brandy in the great room, grab my keys, and head out. Tonight I’ll be sleeping in my cabin. I need space and the peace I only find in nature. My father won’t argue. But first I need a beer.

Stella’s is a dive, but it feels right especially on nights like tonight when it seems like the world is too full of people. The hundred-year-old log cabin has been in Stella’s family for generations. When she took it over, she had an addition built on the back and turned it into a bar-slash-hunting lodge. It’s not in the best shape, but it has hunting paraphernalia on the walls, and no one bothers me here. Especially women.

I walk in and wave to Stella, the tall square woman carrying a tray through the bar, and who looks as if she could wrestle a grizzly. Her arms are the size of some of the lumberjacks that frequent her establishment, her voice as deep too, and if you dare stare at her face you’d see she could use a razor as much as any man.

“Landon!” she shouts as she drops the tray full of frothy pint-size mugs at a rowdy table full of burly men. I find a seat at the bar and plunk down. I’m not normally a plunker, but it’s a plunking type of night.

I don’t even notice the blonde in the messy ponytail beside me until Levi, Stella’s tall gangly son, drops mugs in front of us both. I’m used to his three missing fingers and mangled hand, but the blonde isn’t and I see her stare. I chuckle when Levi gives her a toothless smile and she bites her lip. This woman is not Stella’s Hunt Camp, Bar and Grill material. I nod at her.

“Lumberjacking accident,” I say quietly and take a swig of my beer while it’s cold and frothy. She barely notices me. Instead, she stares intently at the group of grungy hunters. I look at them then too, wondering what a woman like her would be doing eyeing them, but that’s when I hear what they’re talking about.

“Sasquatch, Stella, a fucking Bigfoot! That’s what we saw.”

Stella waves off the biggest of the group with a meaty hand and manly sounding guffaw. She shakes her head and her frizzy, shoulder-length brown hair moves with her.

“You probably saw your own shadow, Gillie.” Gillie looks like he could use more than just a shower—more like a hazmat team to spray him down. His scraggly reddish-blond beard is long, filthy, and tinged with gray. It grows in patches on his face and down his neck. I’ve seen him at Steed Wilderness Outpost a few times. He hunts anything, legal or otherwise and brags about it all.

“He ain’t kiddin’, Stella. It was well over seven feet, maybe more, and hairy all over. It growled like a beast too.”

Stella crosses her big arms and looks down her nose at the bearded redhead who speaks. He too could stand a shower. He’s no better than Gillie, but his beard is more manly, which he brags about as often as Gillie brags about his hunts. He’s another Steed customer.

“Sure it wasn’t the wild man, Red?” Stella asks with a thick cocked brow. “He’s big—downright huge actually.”

“This was no man!” a younger, barely drinking age guy says with a tremor in his voice. He’s scrawny compared to the other two and has no more than a few weeks’ growth of facial hair. “Would a man growl at us like we were dinner?” He leans his rail-thin body forward to sip his beer so he doesn’t have to pick it up with shaking hands. “Would he foil our hunts and destroy our camps?”

“The wild man? Hell, yeah, Billy,” Levi says, coming out from behind the bar with three plates of food balanced on his arm. “A man that lives out there becomes part of nature. He’ll protect what’s his.”

“Well, we’re gonna catch us a Sasquatch and not only prove that he ain’t no man, but become famous too,” Gillie says and slams his beer into Red’s with a crack. Lager sloshes over the glasses and onto the table. “Right, Red?”

“Hell, yeah!” They roar in laughter while the thinner kid looks like he might faint at the thought.

“I’m not going back up there. Screw that! One run-in with that beast was enough for me.” Billy hunkers down in his seat and focuses on his beer. “I’m going home.”

“You’ll do as you’re told, boy! Your mama didn’t raise no pussy.”

“What’s this wild man about?” The blonde beside me speaks up, drawing the attention of all three men, Stella, Levi, and me.

“Hey, pretty lady. Come over here and I’ll show you something as big as a Sasquatch,” Red says, patting his crotch and laughing, showing teeth a dental hygienist would resign over.

She ignores him, watching Stella instead for an answer. I shoot Red a warning look. He only curls his lip at me. He’s drunk and belligerent although he doesn’t need to be drunk for that. More than once I’ve had to deal with him at the outpost because he’s made one of the cashiers uncomfortable. And none of Steed’s girls get uncomfortable easily.

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