A Groom For Red Riding Hood. Jennifer Greene
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too.
If she were home in Georgia, it’d be warm by the first week in March. Not blizzard-mean-cold like here. In her Georgia hometown, too, no single woman would be visiting a single guy, in his lair, after dark, unless she was volunteering for big-time trouble.
Now that’s ridiculous, Mary Ellen told herself impatiently. She wasn’t staying. She was just going to drop off the Crockpot. Twice now, he’d gone out of his way to help her, and manners required a thankyou. The only danger she was risking was a frostbit tush from standing out here in the dark like a witless goose.
She took a breath, marched to his doorstep and used her elbow to knock. The knock only created a muffled sound, but the door promptly flew open. Warm air flooded out. She only had one quick, daunting glimpse of a giant whose shoulders were never meant to fit in a compact trailer-size door.
“Finally Red Riding Hood arrives. I was starting to get worried, afraid you’d get lost trying to find the place.”
“Red...?” The Riding Hood tag startled her. Could he possibly know how wary she felt about walking into a wolf’s lair? But then she caught the flash of an easy, teasing grin, and it clicked real quick where he’d picked up the fairy-tale association. She was wearing a hooded cherry red jacket and carrying goodies through the woods. Pretty hard to deny she was natural prey for a tease, and she had to smile back. “No, I had no trouble. Your directions were great.”
He reached down the steps to take the heavy pot from her hands. “This smells great. Come on in.”
She shook her head swiftly. “I can’t stay—”
“You have to work tonight?”
“No. I only work four nights a week. It’s just that I only meant to bring you dinner. To thank you. Not to take up any of your time—”
“You’re going to make me eat alone? When you’re already here? And I haven’t had anyone to talk to all day but wild animals?”
His mournful tone made her roll her eyes—he couldn’t pass that off as blarney in Ireland—but damn. He made her feel awkward about taking off without at least sharing some conversation. Gingerly she stepped inside. “I’ll just stay a couple of minutes,” she insisted.
He didn’t seem to hear her, and he hadn’t let go of the pot yet. He sniffed. “I haven’t had a homemade ragout in a hundred years. Is it okay if I admit my undying love for you?”
“It’s just stew,” she said dryly, but drat the man, he was downright forcing her to chuckle.
“Just stew is real food. You don’t understand. I’ve either been opening cans or eating Samson’s cooking for weeks now.” Once he set the pot down, he hustled her out of her red jacket and made it disappear, then gave her white tunic sweater and jeans a once-over. She’d been careful about her choice of clothes. The jeans were old, not tight, not fancy, and the bulky sweater concealed her figure more effectively than a nun’s habit. There was nothing in his view, absolutely nothing, to cause the sudden lazy, masculine gleam in his eyes. “Good thing you’re a shrimp. There’s not a lot of space around here for two of us to move around.”
She chuckled again, and this time felt the tension in her shoulders easing. Would a man call a woman a shrimp if he had seduction on his mind? He was being funny, natural, just plain nice. It was past time she kiboshed the electric nerves she felt around him. She never used to be so paranoid, not until Johnny burned her, and it was ridiculously egotistical to imagine that Steve represented any danger to her. He was positively nothing like Johnny.
“Your place isn’t so small. In fact, it’s a lot bigger than it looks on the outside,” she commented as she looked around.
“So sit and make yourself comfortable. You can have the seat of honor. You want wine, beer, soda?”
“Nothing, really, but thanks.” His “seat of honor” was the only chair, a tweedy recliner in gray hues. A long couch matched it. Both were his size—heck, she could have curled up and slept in the chair—and the small living area overlooked the kitchen ell. The bar-style table was ivory colored, the charcoal-shaded carpeting cushion-thick. A short hallway of closets led to a shadowed bedroom—where he’d tossed her jacket—and she saw the tucked end of a Hudson Bay blanket in the wedge of light.
The trailer wasn’t big enough for a party, but there was ample room for him to move around. It was hard for two to maneuver, though. She slipped off her boots and dropped in the chair when she saw she was going to be in his way. He opened and closed cupboards, taking out plates, silverware, napkins. His TV was on, tuned to the news, but without sound. He kept up an easy conversation.
“I have a place in Wyoming. A little house, on a spread of land by a creek. That’s where I grew up, out West, but I’ve had the trailer for years. Sometimes I’m gone months at a time with my work, and I’d go nuts trying to live in motels and finding rental places. This way I can have my own stuff with me.”
“So...you go wherever the wolves are?”
“Not always wolves. But they’re my love, and I seemed to have ended up specializing in them whether I planned it or not. I worked for the EPA for a while, then hooked up with the National Park Service. For this project I’ve been loaned out to the state of Michigan—their DNR, Department of Natural Resources. Never seems to matter who’s signing my paychecks, I end up doing the same thing. There just aren’t a lot of people who get real excited about tackling a wounded wolf, or moving a pack of ‘em. Maybe it’s like a doc who overspecialized. There’s nobody else who does the job—or really wants the job—so I’m the stuckee.”
“You’ve traveled all over?”
“From Mexico to Alaska,” he confirmed. “The red wolf, gray wolf, Mexican wolf—they’re all threatened. Only three places on the planet where they’re not, though lots of people are sympathetic to the cause. The UP here has really worked at it—set up a Michigan Wolf Recovery Team, and backed that up with good laws and stiff penalties for killing wolves. But the bottom line is that when a wolf’s causing trouble, the easiest solution is to shoot him—or trap and put him in captivity, out of harm’s way. Nobody’s to blame for that. A problem wolf, wild, part of his pack, in his own environment...he doesn’t make it real easy to help him. It’s just a lot easier for someone who knows the species to take the ball.”
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