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 mean older people. Unfit people. He’d really better 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, he was big. 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.”
She nodded and did it, unable to say anything else. All her bravado was gone. This was too much conflict. Too much aggression in the air. Too many … too many things happening in one day. In one week. In one year.
She was not cut out for this. She did regular. She did mundane. She did nonconfrontational.
Kris told the kid, “Owen’s right. We all got a bison lesson. Stay away from those guys from now on, huh?” He smiled with a Hollywood star’s worth of charm and said, as if the confrontation had never happened, “Good to meet you under better circumstances. You all have a good night.” Then he sat down beside Jennifer and told her, “I’ve got to say—I’m ready for that whiskey. How about you?”
Harlan still wanted to deck the guy for dismissing what he’d done to Jennifer, and to his kid. He did his best to get rid of the impulse, though. For whatever reason, she was way too wound up.
Jennifer. It was a little old-fashioned, maybe. It suited her. He was used to the kind of high-gloss women a football player tended to meet, but she was from a different world. The kind of woman you might see at a PTA meeting. With cookies, or something.
She didn’t have gloss. She had warmth. A whole different thing. And she wasn’t wearing a ring.
He wanted to kiss her. Bad.
The waitress brought the drinks, and he lifted his glass and said, “To adventure. And survival.”
The blonde, Dyma, said, “To adventure,” clinked her mug of hot cider (with cinnamon stick) against the others, and took a gulp.
Jennifer said, “To survival.” Wryly, which was interesting. She took a sip of the neat whiskey, sighed, and said, “Or maybe to adventure. You really did ask for the good stuff.”
“Always,” he said.
“There’s something I have to say,” she said. Gearing up for the announcement, the same way she’d done before.
“That you think they’re wolf shifters?” Dyma asked, both her pretty dimples showing. “We had a wolf encounter earlier,” she told Owen. “As in—right before our bison encounter. If I’d known Yellowstone would be this exciting, I wouldn’t have whined about coming. What’s going to happen tomorrow, we get caught in an elk stampede? The grizzlies wake up? What?”
“I can’t believe you whine about anything,” Owen said. “Pretty sure you’re jumping in with both feet every time.”
“A man with outward courage dares to die,” she said. “A man with inward courage dares to live.”
“Easy for you to say,” Jennifer muttered.
“We’re wolf shifters?” Harlan asked. “You’ve been reading the background material too, then. But wait—what wolf encounter?”
“What?” Jennifer said. “No.” She was blushing a little, the pink tinting her cheeks. Maybe that was the whiskey, or maybe it was something else, because she was looking at him. Seriously looking. “You have the same eyes he did,” she said. “At least I think so. That’s an interesting coincidence, but obviously, there’s no such thing as a wolf shifter.”
“Aw,” Owen said.
“Never mind,” Harlan told him. “I’m the only one who’d be a wolf. You’re a bison shifter all the way. I was just thinking that today.”