Wild Action. Dawn Stewardson
if the three of them figured this was such a great arrangement, why was her intuition saying it had all the makings of a catastrophe?
Close Encounters of the Furry Kind
WHILE SHE WAS ATTEMPTING to get them out of downtown Toronto, Carly got lost so many times Nick stopped counting.
Instead, he started thinking that if she proved to be as good at running a business as she was at navigating, he’d made a wise move by deciding to stick around and keep an eye on his inheritance.
Their conversation was interrupted every time she pulled over to check her street map, which made it awfully disjointed, but by the time they found the Don Valley Parkway and were headed north, she’d managed to tell him a little about most of the animals they owned.
To his relief, the bear was the only potential mankiller in the bunch. Aside from Attila, there were the birds in the aviary, a couple of ponies named Paint and Brush, a parrot called Crackers and a few cats and dogs.
Oh, and she’d mentioned rabbits, as well, but they didn’t sound like much work. They wandered around loose, so it was only a matter of giving them food and keeping an eye on them. Similarly, Rocky, the trained coon, did his own thing at night and slept on the porch roof during the day.
Actually, Nick had assumed there’d be a lot more animals than there were, but when he told Carly that, she gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Trained animals all need to be worked with or they don’t stay trained. That’s where the agency part comes in. We have a lot of animals under contract that are owned by other people. Everything from lizards and snakes to tigers and an elephant.”
When she lapsed into silence, he immediately started thinking about the bear again. “This Attila,” he said. “How did you end up with him?”
“He was orphaned by a hunter—would have died if we hadn’t taken him in. He’d either have starved to death or been eaten by an adult bear.”
Bears didn’t exactly sound like charming animals, but Nick kept the thought to himself.
“So Gus and I bottle-raised him,” Carly went on, “until he got too big to live in the house.”
“Ahh. And he doesn’t mind being in a cage now? All by himself?”
“Oh, he’s not lonely. Bears aren’t pack animals, so he’d be on his own in the wild. And he doesn’t live in a cage. Gus didn’t believe in caging wild animals, and neither do I.”
“You mean…” Nick cleared his throat uneasily. “You mean, he wanders around loose? Like the rabbits?”
“Well, no. He’d find some of the other animals just too tempting, so he’s got a fenced field—with a pond to swim in and a bunker Gus built him for hibernating. We call it his cave.”
Nick nodded, wishing it was January instead of July. He’d be a lot happier if Attila was hibernating, because he had a horrible feeling a fence wouldn’t stop a six-hundred-pound bear that really wanted out of its field. But maybe it was declawed and detoothed and whatever.
When he asked, the look of utter horror on Carly’s face told him there wasn’t a chance. And he’d lay odds it was his forty-nine percent of the beast that included the claws and teeth.
Apparently, Carly did mind reading on the side, because she said, “There’s nothing to worry about, Nick. Attila’s a real pet.”
He nodded, but it was tough to get his head around the idea of a pet that weighed as much as three large men put together. “So…you’re not nervous working with him?”
“No, not at all.”
Without a doubt, that was the best news he’d heard since he’d learned they had a bear. He had every intention of doing his share of the work, for the next few weeks, but he’d be drawing the line at Attila. And that meant it was a darn good thing she had no problem with him.
Carly drove a little farther up the parkway, breathing a sigh of relief when she spotted the exit sign for the highway. She’d missed it more than once in the past and always had a devil of a time making her way back.
“I guess you’ve noticed I don’t have much sense of direction,” she said, pulling onto the exit ramp. “But I’ll be okay from here.”
“Good.”
“That’s how I ended up with Gus,” she went on when Nick said nothing more. “It was because I got lost.”
“Oh?”
“Uh-huh. I grew up in Kingston, which is where my parents still live. But after I finished high school I had a chance for a summer job in Toronto, and I took a wrong turn on the way there.”
Nick eyed her for a minute, making her wish she’d kept quiet. Everybody had faults, though, and surely he couldn’t think that having a poor sense of direction ranked right up there with pulling wings off flies.
“Isn’t there a major highway that runs between Kingston and Toronto?” he asked at last.
“The one we’re on now,” she admitted. “But I guess I wasn’t paying attention and zigged when I should have zagged. At any rate, the car I’d borrowed quit on me, so I walked down the nearest side road until I reached a house—which turned out to be Gus’s. And when we got talking, he mentioned he’d been looking for someone to help with the animals.”
“Then you just moved in with him?”
Nick’s tone made her look at him. Surely he didn’t think…
Just in case he did, she said, “I assume you didn’t mean moved in the way it sounded. I was an eighteen-year-old kid and Gus was fifty-nine, so there was certainly nothing like that.”
“No. No, of course not.”
“Everyone who’d ever worked full-time for him lived in the house. It only made sense.”
“Right. All I was thinking was…most eighteen-year-olds wouldn’t have buried themselves out in the country. It couldn’t have done much for your social life.”
The remark made her smile. Her mother had been worried about that from day one.
“It was worth the trade-off,” she said honestly. “I love working with animals—it’s not really like working at all. So even though I’d only intended to stay through the summer, I ended up never leaving. And Gus gradually became like a favorite uncle to me. He was the sweetest man in the world. It’s too bad you didn’t get to know him.”
“I had no chance to. He cut off contact with the family before I was born.”
She didn’t reply for a moment, trying to decide if Gus would have minded her explaining things. Finally, she said, “He never intended that to be forever, you know.”
“No?”
“No, he assumed he’d eventually be able to cope with seeing her again.”
“Seeing who again?”
Carly glanced across the van once more, her heart sinking when she saw Nick’s puzzled expression. Surely she hadn’t put her foot in it, had she? “Your parents must have told you what happened,” she tried tentatively. “Why Gus left Edmonton.”
“Well…yeah.”
Nick sounded as puzzled as he looked, which meant she had said the wrong thing.
“Actually, my parents told me all kinds of stories about Gus, but I’m not quite sure which one you were referring to.”
“Oh. Well, if you’re not, then