Page 5 of Hunted By Wolves and Shadow
Iwasn’t sure what to think of this handsome stranger in my grandmother’s house. He was acting as if he had every right to be here, and I couldn’t deny he was charming, but Grandma Ruby wasn’t exactly known for being friendly. One only had to look at where she lived to know she wasn’t fond of company. I really hoped I wasn’t meeting my grandmother’s much,muchyounger paramour, because, I did NOT want to think about that. Although, I wouldn’t fault her taste…No, bad brain.
Wolf looked close to my age, somewhere in his twenties, so I was sticking with the firm belief that he was a gardener. Nothing more. Just…no.
“And where is she now?” I asked, dragging my thoughts back to Grandma.
An odd expression flickered over his eyes, so fast it might never have been there. “She left before conditions deteriorated. I wouldn’t expect her to return anytime soon.”
I twitched Grandma's curtain to the side. Mist swirled up to her garden gate, closer than I'd ever seen it come before. The thickest of it normally clung to the dark woods but lefther clearing and the path alone. The memory of snapping jaws flushed my body with hot fear and I hugged my arms around myself.
“You’re safe in here, Emi. Don’t worry.”
Wolf’s calming words infused me with warmth. Having someone notice that I needed comfort was unsettling. “You know,”—I studied Grandma’s visitor—“that is exactly what some sort of crazed hunter-slash-ax murderer would say to put me at ease. You aren’t going to ax murder me, are you?”
He held up empty hands. “No ax.”
“Reassuring,” I teased back, aware that a gardener would know the ax lived out by the wood pile. Oddly, in spite of a sharpness to him that spoke of competence and self-assuredness, I didn’t sense danger. I still wasn’t pleased to be stuck here with a stranger, but the peril outside was far greater than what I sensed from him.
“How long have you done Ruby’s gardening?”
Grandma Ruby was fiercely independent, surviving alone out here, so I trusted her judgement in allowing this man to be here. Besides, it wasn’t like she had anything to steal unless he was inexplicably drawn to moth-eaten afghans and multitudinous bundles of dried herbs. But his presence niggled at me.
Was her age catching up to her? Did she need more help? She could have asked me. I would have come more often.
Unless…unless she didn’t want that. My heart fell.
“Only recently.” Wolf turned away as he answered
Grandma was careful. She wouldn’t have let just anyone in here. My surprise at finding that she trusted him alone in her home only told me he was a man who’d earned her confidence. Not a very open or loquacious man, certainly, but likely a good one. With a strong back for gardening. And strong muscles. And a very nice, um…face. Yes. I was looking at his face.
I swallowed.
While he poured a glass of water at the kitchen tap, I studied him. Most Anterrans had light hair, and Wolf was no exception. His was light brown, warm like cinnamon, and it looked like it hadn't had a proper cut in some time. The ends were uneven and long enough that they curled in every which direction. I wanted to comb my fingers through it and tame it, but that thought would not help the lingering heat in my cheeks, which was absolutely, definitely, totally, only there because of careening into him earlier.
His broad back flexed as he turned off the tap and those muscular shoulders under his threadbare shirt reminded me how wide and firm his chest had been against me. My cheeks flamed.
“Emi.” He startled me, and I looked up to find him holding out the glass of water, amusement lighting his face. His eyes were an unusual grey, pale enough to be almost silver. “You look thirsty.”
Was that a smirk?
“I’m, uh—a bit out of breath. From the running.” I gulped the water down gratefully, then changed the subject. “Now what?”
He shrugged. “We stay here until it's safe out there.”
That made sense, but I hoped we weren’t stuck past nightfall.
Carrying my water, I padded to the couch and sat at the end facing the fire. Wolf must have been keeping it stoked because it flickered merrily with an occasionalpopof sap. The warmth leached the last of the cold from my bones, and I relaxed against the cushions as Wolf joined me at the other end.
It was nice to talk to someone who didn’t already know all about me for a change. I rarely got to meet new people, only the occasional merchant or traveler, and that attractive trader that Grandma used sometimes, but I hadn’t seen Locke in many moons now.
We chatted idly, taking it in turns to check outside the window. Wolf was tight-lipped about himself, answering my questions in short sentences.
He lived “nearby.”
He'd been a gardener for “a few annums now.”
He had worked for Ruby “several times.”
“Yes,” he had family in the area.
