Wolf at the Door

chapter Eight



Which brought him to the Woodbury Barnes and Noble. Of all the days to meet somebody potentially cool and thoroughly hot. Yeah, this day. Of all the days to think maybe picking up and moving to a patch of the corn belt wasn’t insane. Yeah, this day.

Now here she was, all kinds of cute . . . and from the Cape, too!

It might be no coincidence. Perhaps fate has pushed us together, into this modern-day watering hole. Perhaps fate is working through a retail coffee chain to get the kind of scone that doesn’t make this girl throw up.

“Do you believe in fate?” he asked her.

The hotness that was Rachael Velvela sipped her Green Tea Frappuccino. “Next you’ll be asking me my sign.”

He could feel his face get warm as he flushed. “Yeah, not too lame and dated, right?”

“It could be worse,” she teased. “You could have asked me if I needed sexual healing.”

Ohhhhh, I wish she hadn’t said that. Just what I need: a five thirty P.M. boner.

He was surprised it hadn’t happened earlier. Rachael had the most beautiful freckles he had ever seen. Her hair was a rich dark brown. A color to make a sable tear out its own fur in jealousy! Okay, so dark brown. Her skin was lightly tanned, enough so it looked like she went out and about in the summertime but didn’t obsessively lay out on beaches and frequent tanning salons. She had over a dozen freckles sprayed across her nose and cheeks, the kind that increased in summer and sort of hibernated the rest of the time, and lovely dark eyes that tilted just a little bit at the tips. Her eyes almost exactly matched her hair.

She made her tank top and cardigan and jeans look like wedding finery. He had lived for several years with a woman who never bothered with makeup, and could see Rachael didn’t, either. So it boggled the mind to wonder how gorgeous she could be if she sat down and tried.

But! He would not be distracted. Because a simple let’s-getacquainted question had become much more important to him. “I’m serious: do you believe in fate?”

“The jury’s not in yet,” she said after a long moment. He had the impression she was giving the question serious thought, really taking her time to come up with the right answer, or what would be the right answer for her. “A week ago I had no idea, none, that I’d move my entire life to Minnesota.”

“Get out. Wow, no idea?”

She shook her head.

“Well, jeez, I hope nobody got hurt or sick in your family . . . It’s none of my business why, but—”

“No, no, that’s all right.” Another Splenda-infused sip. “I’m sort of in the family business. And when my cousin says go, we go . . . the whole family’s dependant on us going to work when we’re supposed to, and on doing a good job. So it might be inconvenient and arbitrary, but it’s also important. After all,” she added, smiling, “I get access to the company checking account. It wouldn’t be fair if I expected all the perks and none of the work.”

He had bought a slice of pound cake and a chocolate and banana smoothie (she had insisted, nicely but firmly, on buying her own snack) but was too excited to touch either one. “So you just picked up and relocated? Just like that?”

“Exactly. Relocated. Yes.”

“Have you ever been away from your family before?”

“Not for more than a few nights. Most of us—well, there are two kinds of families that live on the Cape. The ones who have kids who can’t wait to leave and never come back, and the ones who have kids who never leave. Guess which ones we are?” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s only now that I’m out here that I realize what a scared little country mouse I’ve been. Complaining and wanting to scurry back to my hole.” Rachael’s upper lip actually curled, like she was a fox about to bite. It was cute and scary, an interesting combo. “Pathetic. My cousin wouldn’t have believed it to see me. But I didn’t expect . . . everything’s really different.”

“Do you miss them?”

“Oh . . . miss them?” She blinked her big dark eyes at him, like a sexy Bambi. With weirdly sharp canines—she obviously wasn’t a vamp, but she sure had a cute overbite. “I haven’t really been gone long enough to . . . well . . . I guess if I think about it . . . yes. I miss them.”

Her smile widened . . . and then she burst into the fiercest tears he’d ever seen.