Page 18 of Shame the Devil
A group was coming out of the restaurant, passing through the bar area. A couple kids, and four guys. So?
Owen said, “The snowmobiles.”
Now Harlan saw it, too. One of the guys, the one who’d had his helmet off out there. Tall, a little beefy, and with a wide stance. The body language of a man who wanted to proclaim his status to the world, or who’d just done something incredibly stupid and was spinning his brain hard, trying to reset things to where he came out on top again. Or, possibly, trying to think up the way he’d explain this to his wife.
Because, yeah, there were no women in the party. Maybe that was why the beefy guy was checking out Harlan’s redhead, his eyes going up and down her body in her oh-hell-yeah ribbed sweater and tight jeans like he was measuring her for fit. He’d left the wife at home, so he thought he could look all he wanted.
Harlan saw that, and he saw something else, too. He saw the way she noticed how the guy was looking at her, and the way she tensed. Like she was just waiting for him to say something, and she knew it was going to be bad.
He didn’t spend time asking himself if he wanted to get into this. He went ahead and got into it.
8
Thing Three
Jennifer hadthree things that she needed to take care of. Right now.
Thing One. She needed to explain about Dyma. That was sweet of the other guy—Owen—to have hot cider with her, but Dyma was looking at him withwaytoo much of her cute-and-fun, the Miss Adorable animation she couldn’t seem to help. And what if it wasn’t sweet at all? What if it was just manipulation? It didn’t take much talent for a guy to think, “I’ll have the same drink as her! Bonding!”
Which brought her to Thing Two. She needed to get control of hermouth.She wasalwayscareful, and she was her daughter’s role model! You didn’t wear a tight sweater and tell the guy about your sore thighs, andthentell him you liked it strong. She hadn’t realized how it would sound until she’d said it, or actually until Dyma had kicked her, but now that she had? Could shebemore obvious?
And Thing Three. The snowmobile guy, who was proof, if she’d needed it, that, yes, whatever Dyma thought, and whatever a petite eighteen-year-old could wear and look darling, a grown woman with a small frame and a triple-D cup couldnotwear that same thing without looking like she wanted action. She knew that. She’d known it for twenty years. Why had she picked tonight to forget it?
But, yeah. The snowmobile guy. Kris was about to jump straight into it, and that wasn’t going to end well, so she jumped first. She picked out the kid who’d almost run her down—easy enough to do, because the other kid was taller and chubbier—and said, keeping it friendly, “Well, hi. What a surprise. How are you? Remember me?”
The group hesitated, then stopped, and she went on, “We’re the ones who were around the bison with you when all the, uh, excitement happened. I’m glad I saw you again. I wanted to ask how you were doing. That was pretty scary out there.”
The kid glanced at one of the men—his dad, probably—then back at Jennifer. “Nah,” he said. “It was OK. The bison was just warning us to stay away. I’m sorry I almost hit you, though.”
“You didn’t almost hit anybody,” the man said. The one who’d been telling the kid to pose with the bull. He wasn’t going to be winning any Father of the Year awards for that, and he wasn’t winning one now, either. “You were missing her all the way,” he told his son. “And that animal only got spooked in the first place because everybody started yelling and waving their arms. He was fine up till then.”
Kris said, “Seriously? You want to go there, after you took off and left your kid to be chased down by that bull? And yeah, I had to knock this lady out of the way of his snowmobile. She’s bruised up, but she’s going to be OK. Thanks for asking.”
“He’d have missed her,” the guy said again.
“Well, no,” Kris said, “he wouldn’t have. He was headed straight for her, and regular people can’t jump that fast.”
Regular people? What did he mean, regular people? He’d better not meanolderpeople. Unfit people. He’dreallybetter not mean chubby people.
“They tell you, stay twenty-five yards away from bison,” the other guy, Owen, put in calmly. “It’s a good rule. A bison’s not a wolf or a grizzly, but it’s plenty big.”
“They’re basically cattle,” the belligerent guy said. “And nobody stays twenty-five yards from cows.”
The others in the group were shifting some. Restless, looking to get out of here, because confrontation was unpleasant, and it was awkward. Jennifer knew how they felt. She wasn’t sure whether she was glad or sorry about this. She was glad to see the kid was OK, and it was exciting, she guessed. It was drama. Had she mentioned, though, how much she hated drama?
Owen’s tone was still completely mild. “That’s true in a way, and not true at all in another. I’m a rancher myself. Bison are wild, not domesticated, and yeah, there’s a difference. Difference of not being bred for hundreds of years to be easy to handle, for one thing. And bulls? No matter what you breed for, they’re a whole different story. My buddy here got on the wrong side of one of my bulls the other day and ended up flat on his back, thanking God there was a gate between them. You don’t want to mess with a bull.”
Kris said something under his breath. It sounded like, “Thanks, man.”
“Anyway,” Owen said, “guess we all learned a lesson, huh?” He clapped a big hand on the kid’s shoulder. The kid’s knees practically buckled. “Tell you a secret. The best lessons are the ones you learn the hard way. They stick the longest.”
The dad looked like he dearly wanted to say something else but was choosing not to. Jennifer could see why. Owen was enormous. He had to be six-five, six-six, something like that, and his shoulders were about a yard across, too. In a plaid flannel shirt and jeans now instead of ski clothes, you could tell that he didn’t just look big with layers on, hewasbig. He wasn’t fat. He was just huge.
And yet he looked harmless. The one who looked dangerous was, oddly, Kris. Maybe six-two or six-three, and still with some serious shoulders, but made of leaner muscle in contrast to his friend’s bulk. His hair was dark blonde and cut aggressively short, almost spiky, his bright blue eyes and pretty much every other part of him were shaped as perfectly as a man’s entire self could be, and he was almost certainly too handsome, but right now, he looked exactly like the wolf. Alert. Aware. Ready to go.
She shivered, and all that attention and focus of his shifted to her. And she shivered again.
He said, his voice quiet, “It’s OK. It’s over. Have a seat.”
