Page 1 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
HOLLY
“Oh, no, that poor dog,”Holly exclaimed. “What happened to it?”
The small dog gazed up at her with huge, melting brown eyes from a pen draped in animal-safe garlands. It had clearly grasped the point of a holiday pet adoption event and was trying to look as cute and adoptable as possible.
It had an uphill struggle in this area, because it was almost completely bald except for its head and tail. It had soft, silky-looking fur on its head, fluffed out in a way that made it look like an anime character. Its plumy tail was mixed brown and white in a spaniel-like pattern, and it had feather-like tufts covering its feet, more like a Clydesdale horse (a tiny, really weird Clydesdale horse) than any dog she had ever seen.
In between those puffs of fur, its small soft body, looking like it weighed about twelve pounds or so, was utterly lacking hair, gently patterned with brown patches and pink skin.
“What do you mean, hon?” asked the shelter volunteer coordinator, Mags, passing by with a squirming armful ofkittens. Like almost everyone else over fifty in this town, she was someone Holly had known as a kid, in this case her former third-grade math teacher. It was very difficult to adjust to calling her Mags instead of Mrs. Wilberforce.
“This dog.” Holly tentatively petted its head. It gave her hand a swipe with its tongue. “How did it lose all its fur?”
“I think it’s supposed to look like that, honey. It’s a Chinese crested hairless.” Mags bent over to squint through her half-moon glasses at the cage. “His name is Cupcake.”
“Oh.” Holly petted Cupcake a little more. He wriggled against her hand and gazed up with large, liquid eyes as if to sayTake me home.
Alas, poor Cupcake, this wasn’t going to be your day, Holly thought. She had sworn up and down to Dad before she left that morning to volunteer at the Pine Junction pet adoption open house that she was not going to come home with a cut-rate kitten, a half-off hound, or anything else that they didn’t strictly need around the farm. They already had a farm dog, Rocket, their aptly named border collie.
Cupcake licked her hand again. He was very soft. In fact, his mostly naked body had a warm, hot water bottle quality.
But he was, to put it mildly, not a dog suited for a farm. He would probably take one step outside into the snow and immediately die. Or get eaten by Rocket, or stepped on.
A group of kids from the elementary school descended on the pen of adorable Labrador puppies next to Cupcake. “Oh, Mom, what about this puppy?” a little girl asked, peering into Cupcake’s pen.
“Don’t pet that puppy, honey, I think it has some kind of disease.”
Holly found herself feeling suddenly defensive of Cupcake. By the time she got up from her crouch beside the pen, however, the kids were already passing around cute, fluffy puppies. Holly grabbed a couple of flyers on the shelter’s pet adoption policies from a nearby table to hand to the pair of harassed-looking moms supervising the group.
The Pine Junction community center glittered with holiday cheer. A bright swirling crowd of families and kids filled the room, which had been decked in a sparkling array of tinsel and garlands. Over in the corner, a huge Christmas tree was covered in envelopes for donations to needy families and causes in the community. Holly had already stuffed the handful of stray bills and change that she’d brought along to buy lunch or coffee into one of the envelopes. Even though things were tight back home at the Christmas tree farm this year, someone else needed it more than she did.
Across the room from the pet adoption event, a row of tables were lined up with volunteers sorting clothing for some kind of holiday donation drive. Behind them, a guy was up on a ladder, working on something in the vents. Maintenance guy for the facility, Holly figured.
She had noticed him around, off and on, since she arrived for her volunteer shift. It was hard not to. Rather unusual for her experiences in Pine Junction lately, hewasn’tsomeone she’d known since childhood—or at least, if he turned out to be a grade school classmate or one of her mom’s garden club members’ kids or her big sister’s old high school boyfriend or something, he’d grown up much hotter than expected.
And she felt like she would have remembered him. He had the kind of scruffy good looks that she’d always been weak for, black hair that hadn’t seen a haircut in just a little too long, wide shoulders under a rumpled shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Strong, solid, competent hands, grasping a wrench or repositioning a pipe.
It was none of her business, she told herself. She wasn’t even adopting a dog at this event, so she certainly didn’t plan to bring the handyman home either.
Still, there was no harm in looking at eye candy. She had,so far successfully, managed not to make eye contact. But Holly caught herself self-consciously brushing dog hair off her sweater (it was hopeless anyway) and re-twisting her shoulder-length brown hair into the clasp it kept slipping out of.
To make matters worse, some joker had hung mistletoe up in several locations around the room, including above the puppy pens. Holly had already seen a couple of people notice it and kiss a dog on the head. It was incredibly charming, even if the mistletoe served as an awkward reminder of her current single status.
Firmly she redirected herself away from Eye Candy and back to the pet event, picking up some flyers to hand out with the shelter’s address and policies. After the event was over, she had decided to talk to the volunteer coordinator about what other opportunities were available.
Holly still found it hard to believe that just a few months ago, she would have been living in a high-rise apartment, wearing designer heels, and catching a rideshare to her office job. Now she was wearing an old sweater covered in dog hair, with a loose loop where it had caught on something in the barn, and a pair of muddy boots.
She wasn’t precisely sure that she missed her life in the big city. But what she did miss was—this. Getting out and doing things. Volunteering. Having places to go other than the Olesons’ corn maze and hay rides. She had been back in Pine Junction for three months, and it already felt like forever, as if she’d never left.
Working on the family Christmas tree farm for the holidays was a nice way to recover from the rat race of the city and the sting of being laid off from her office job. But if it turned into her entire life, Holly suspected that she was going to go stir crazy. Volunteering felt like a good bridgebetween the life she used to have—and the life that lay beyond the pink slip that was all she had to show for it.
Whatever that turned out to be.
Holly handed flyers to some more prospective pet parents, including a couple with an adorable little girl cooing and giggling in front of the puppy pen. Mags had told Holly at the start of the event that the puppies would get the most attention, and they certainly did. The shelter had already adopted out a litter of cute mixed-breed fluffballs, a teenage heeler, and a particularly Christmas-appropriate dachshund puppy with one extra short leg who had been, in a stroke of marketing genius, nicknamed Tiny Tim. They’d had a waiting list for that one, and Holly had been happy to see Tiny Tim go home with a family with two teenage children who seemed utterly charmed.
The adult dogs, including Cupcake, tended to languish longer. Holly was happy to see a family clustered around an elderly Great Dane at the end of the row of petting pens, filling out some paperwork with another volunteer. It looked like that old lady dog would be getting a merry Christmas and a forever home.
“Holly!” said an all-too-familiar voice, and Holly stiffened.
