Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven 1)
Hopefully not because Lydia was right and he’d killed the animal.
Rick brought his duffel over with him, and he led with his stethoscope, pressing the metal disk to the chest wall. Moving it around.
“Do you have the vitamin K? You brought the vitamin K, right?”
Lydia’s voice was right by him and he jerked back. She had repositioned herself at the wolf’s muzzle, lifting that head into her lap, stroking the mottled gray fur of the ruff. For a moment, Rick became lost in the way her fingers soothed through the—
“Can you let me finish my exam first,” he said. “Before you start prescribing antidotes?”
“But you have the vitamin K?”
Rick peeled back the jowl. The gray gums, the sluggish, uneven heart rate … he knew what was going on, and not only because this was the third wolf they’d found in this condition in the last month.
“I’ll do what is medically appropriate”—turning away, he grabbed his penlight—“when I’m ready. And can you please put his head back on the ground. Thanks.”
As he returned to the animal, she did what he asked—sort of. She scooted to the side, but stayed bent over, still calming the wolf.
He separated the eyelids and shined the light in. Nonresponsive pupil.
Rick went to click off the little beam when a raindrop landed on the wolf’s cheek. As the crystalline droplet coalesced and then slowly trailed off the fine facial fur, he glanced at the sky. Strange, the moon had been showing when he’d come down the trail and was still—
“Oh, Lydia,” he said.
When she looked up at him, their faces were close together. So his hand didn’t have far to travel.
As he brushed the next tear off her cold cheek, she stopped looking at him. And refocused on the wolf.
“Just don’t let him die,” she whispered.
Rick felt time slow to a crawl. In the lunar glow that filtered down through the pine boughs, Lydia’s face was cast in loving light, the planes and angles that made her who she was visually enhanced by the illumination. Her naturally highlighted hair, which was pulled back into a ponytail, had tendrils that curled by her ears and at her neck. And her lips were a promise of things that kept a man up at night and distracted him during the day.
Rick now also looked away. “Of course I won’t let him die.”
On so many levels, he was not surprised that this woman was making him promise something he couldn’t deliver on. But an inspired heart could make stupid out of anybody.
It also made you pretty frickin’ lonely.
But who was counting the benefits of unrequited love.
ONE HOUR AND forty-five minutes after Lydia found the wolf in the veil, she was on the ATV heading back out into the preserve. The sun had now fully risen over the mountain range, the rays piercing through the pines and making her think of gold coins spilled from God’s pocket. Up ahead, the trail was as empty as it had been before, nothing but shadows cast by all that beautiful light—
The engine sputtered without warning, the interruption of the smooth purr the very last thing she needed. Cranking the gas, she was relieved by a surge of speed, but it didn’t last. All forward momentum ended as the horsepower choked off and the vehicle’s heavy, knobby wheels and complete lack of aerodynamic design dragged her to a standstill.
“Damn it,” she muttered as she tapped on the gas gauge.
The red pin didn’t budge from the E on the far left.
“Shit.” Dismounting, she looked up and down the trail. “Shit.”
She resisted the urge to kick one of the big back tires, opting instead to take her frustration out by locking grips on the back grate and leaning her weight into a shove. When the ATV was off on the shoulder, she put it in park and took the keys.
Starting off at a jog, she rounded the corner on the trail, her footfalls steady. About a quarter mile later, she came to the pattern of trunks that marked where she had seen the wolf’s eyes in the darkness. She followed her own shoe prints into the trees and stopped when she came to the disturbed place in the pine needles where the wolf had collapsed, and been treated, and finally, been carried out to the ATV.
After a moment of sad helplessness, she kept going, heading farther away from the trail. As she went along, she diverted around the pricker bushes, the rotting stumps, the occasional fallen pine. She followed a gradual decline that took her to the water shed trough that cleaved a descent through the elevation’s west-facing flank. When she came to the river way, she looked up the pathway of polished rocks. The spring rains had not started, so the torrent that would rush over them a month from now had yet to get going. Soon, though, there would be so much more than damp sand and mud between the boulders and stones.