North Country Man. Carrie Alexander
rawhide laces and thick lug soles.
Every instinct told her there was something not quite civilized about him. Perhaps it was his scent—wild and woodsy and musky, utterly foreign to her. Or perhaps it was his barbaric aura—as if he could wrestle a cougar and crunch bones between his teeth.
Claire shivered. She prided herself on her self-sufficiency and adaptability, but this encounter was too much even for her. The man was overwhelming.
Not to mention his sidekick, the bear cub. The little beast stood on its hind legs and batted at her thigh, snagging her trousers. She cried out, backing away. DKNY separates weren’t made for bear cub abuse. The lightweight wool would not hold up to even a playful clawing.
“Stop it, Scrap,” said the man. He threw Claire’s impromptu baseball bat into the brush, and the cub scrambled after it to investigate, grunting with pleasure as it worried at the undergrowth, rolling back and forth like a giddy toddler.
Claire scrubbed a hand over her face in disbelief. Nope, he was still there. Solid as a tree trunk. And watching her, his eyes predatory beneath a pair of thick brown brows. “What are you doing in the woods at night with a bear cub?” she asked, sounding accusatory rather than merely curious. Her nerves were on edge, and it showed.
“Out for a walk.” Almost self-consciously, he touched a brown paper package that lay flat against his right side, tucked inside his belt.
Claire’s insides went hollow. She thought of the paper-wrapped bottles her father and his cronies passed around the back room of the family gas station. Then she thought of the liquor signs in the window of the Buck Stop and drew herself up haughtily in defense. “I see.” Her hands shook, so she tucked them into fists inside the cuffs of her sweater.
Between the night and the man’s beard, she couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought he smiled. Briefly. “Fact is, you’re the one who’s out of place,” he said, his deep voice seeming as mild as he could make it. He squatted to pet the cub, who’d emerged from the brush dragging the stick.
Claire blinked. He’d crouched purposely, she thought. To minimize his size.
He knew she was afraid of him.
“You ran your car off the road?” he asked.
“Um, no…” She wasn’t sure she wanted him to know the full extent of the situation. Her position was too vulnerable.
“I heard the crash.” The cub tumbled head over heels, and he scratched its belly. It really was rather cute and cuddly, no bigger than an oversize teddy bear. “That’s why I backtracked.”
“I didn’t run it off the road,” she insisted. “It was your fault.”
The fleeting smile again. “Mine?”
“I saw you on the side of the road. I thought you were a bear. You distracted me.”
“That so?”
She swallowed thickly. “There was a deer—it might be injured.”
He stood, stepping closer so he loomed over her. “You hit it?”
Claire fought not to back away from his sudden aggression. Never show fear. Having faced down corporate connivers and street toughs alike, she was not a weakling. She would not cower.
“I don’t know for sure. It jumped—right over the car. But there was a thud. And it left a dent. That’s why I was looking. I thought— I mean, I had to know…”
He let out a breath and backed off to a less invasive distance. “If the deer jumped your car, it’s probably all right. There’s no sign of it?”
“N-no.”
“Was the thud hard enough to rock the car?”
“Not really. More of a glancing blow. The car went off the road because I lost control after I slammed on the brakes. I wasn’t going very fast in the first place.”
“Then the deer will probably survive.”
“Oh, thank heaven,” Claire gushed. “I’ve been having Bambi trauma flashbacks. I’d probably cry if—” She felt her cheeks coloring. Now, why had she said that? Female emotions were not valued in the cutthroat corporate world; they probably weren’t acceptable here, either.
She continued more briskly. “Tell me, is this sort of thing common in these parts? Do bear cubs substitute for domestic pets? Are the woods populated with Grizzly Adams look-alikes?” Her tone lightened. “Do deer fly?”
Do bearded, disreputable—yet strangely compelling—backwoods characters lurk in the bushes specifically to ambush spooked foreigners?
The man drew his eyebrows down, further screening his eyes. She had no clear idea of his face—it was obscured by the beard and the deep shadows. She almost wanted him to come closer again, just to see the shape of his lips. The color of his eyes.
Almost.
“Do wolves howl at the moon or the man in it?” he said, unexpectedly.
Her eyes widened. “Good question.” She hesitated, but her wry sense of humor had kicked in. “Do sharks swim at midnight?” she countered.
“Ah. Do the stars twinkle at noon?”
“If a cell phone rings in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
He laughed. A nice, rumbling laugh. “I sure hope not, eh?” Again, he sobered quickly. Obviously he hadn’t opened the liquor yet. “Did you bring one—a cell phone?” he asked. “Have you called Triple A?”
“So there is Triple A out here in the boonies?”
“Sure.” He shifted from foot to foot. Considering his size, the movement was on a par with the tremors of an avalanche. “Jimmy Jarvi at the Five-Star Oil station takes Triple A calls. Might take him a while to reach you, is all.”
“Yeah. Like what—a week?”
“I couldn’t say. Never signed up for Triple A myself.”
“Well, I’m not sure that I need the assistance. My car’s running—”
“Do cars ever run wild?” he cut in, musing out loud, then seemed sheepish that he had. “Sorry.”
A smile twitched the corners of Claire’s mouth, but she purposely returned to the matter at hand. “I crashed into the bushes. Hit a log. If I can get the car onto the road, it should run—” her lips curved “—just fine.”
“I’ll give you a push.”
She shoved her bangs out of her eyes and looked him up and down. His clothes—a faded chambray shirt and sturdy canvas pants—were worn but clean. Perhaps he wasn’t as disreputable as all that. And he certainly looked like he could push a semitrailer out of a swamp. One-handed.
“Thank you,” she said. Wings fluttered in her stomach. A disconcerting reaction, seeing as she’d decided he was safe despite the bottle tucked inside his belt. And her judgment was always sound. Always. “I would appreciate that.”
He stepped into the long grass to let her go first. She glanced from the disturbing stranger to the playful cub, her sense of the absurd expanding proportionally. None of this was what she’d expected, but for some reason she couldn’t wait to see what came next.
There were times in every woman’s life when all she could do was roll with the punches.
Or the cub, as the case may be.
WITH THE TOE of his boot, Noah Saari gave Scrap a boost off the rotting log. The orphaned bear cub grunted with surprise and sat down hard on its round rump, confused by its abrupt removal from the center of action.
Noah leaned over the hood of the woman’s sedan, keeping one eye on Scrap and the other on the spinning front wheels. “Goose it,” he hollered over