Jennifer Greene - A Groom For Red Riding Hood

Still, her shift at Samson’s didn’t start until four in the afternoon. Her day was free until then. All her day hours were free.

She pushed off, her cross-country skis forging a fresh track in the new snow. Wonders surrounded her. Raised in the South, she’d never dreamed of snow like this. The rolling pine woods were deep, peaceful, quiet. Where sunlight shot down, the new snow laid on the emerald branches like a white satin glaze. A scarlet cardinal caught her eye. A soft-furred bunny scampered across her path.

She didn’t know where she was going. Didn’t care. She hadn’t misjudged how soul renewing this isolated area would be. There were endless acres of woods and wilderness to explore. Her rented cabin was an idyllic retreat for a woman planning to live as a hermit-monkess. There was no family around for her to disappoint. No town looking over her shoulder, waiting for her next I-told-you-so screwup. And although the Freds and the Georges and the Ben McCreries were giving her fits at the bar, during the day she didn’t have to even see a human being with a Y chromosome unless she wanted to. And there was positively no man appealing enough to tempt her aggravatingly impulsive heart.

An image of a giant with searing blue eyes drifted through her mind.

She let the image linger, simply because there was no harm, no possible temptation involved. She remembered the stranger’s overwhelming height, the impact of his startling eyes. She remembered thinking that he was an incredible hunk, and for the same reason feeling a rare sensation of being safe. Hunks never preyed on her. Her looks were too ordinary.

And for once, her first judgment of a man had been accurate. The whole time she waited on him, he’d been kind and quiet, but there’d been no teasing or come-ons. He just wasn’t the kind of man who would ever be interested in her. Looking at him was like indulging in window-shopping at a candy store when the door was locked. There was no threat of her suckering into those dangerous calories. His face was square cut, strong boned, ruggedly handsome; there was character in the etched lines around his eyes and mouth. She wasn’t likely to forget it.

Nor had she forgotten the way he’d suddenly gotten up and hustled Fred Claire outside. At the time, it barely registered that he was rescuing her. He’d moved like a hunter, swift and sure, hauling Fred outside faster than anyone knew what was happening. He’d never said anything, never came back in. Mary Ellen still didn’t know what he’d done, but when Mr. Jerk returned to his table, he’d been as polite as a Catholic schoolboy and he’d pointedly ignored her for the last three nights now.

She owed that giant big time.

He’d get his thanks—if she ever saw him again—but right now she had other things on her mind. Her skis hissed through the new-fallen snow. She was still new to the sport, still prone to an occasional clumsy tumble, but getting better. As she worked up a rhythm, the crisp air pinkened her cheeks and stung her eyes.

Every day she trekked farther and explored new directions. She’d been so crushed when she first moved here. Occasionally she still thought about Johnny. Occasionally she still woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the nightmare of a bride in a white dress, standing in the church for a Christmas Eve wedding, the guests all there, the whole town waiting for a groom who never showed.

That humiliating memory still made her cringe, but she’d slowly realized that that singular rejection wasn’t the real source of her hurt. It was being wrong, one too many times. It was feeling, once too often, the stone weight of being unloved and unlovable. Johnny had turned out to be a turkey, but Johnny wasn’t the real problem. Her self-respect was in more crumpled pieces than a broken cookie.

That cookie refused to instantly glue back together—but she was working on it.

When she brushed against a pine branch, snow shivered down in a shower of fluffy crystals, making her chuckle. It wasn’t so hard, being happy. It wasn’t so impossible, to laugh again. Being alive was riches enough, and she was discovering more riches every day.

She poled to the crest of a hill, and then, bending her knees, sailed down to the belly of a small valley. At the bottom she stopped, breathless and exhilarated, and yanked off a glove to check the compass in her pocket. Northeast. If she kept going in that direction, eventually she’d hit Lake Superior. Even if the landscape was totally unfamiliar, she had her bearings, wasn’t afraid of being lost. She zipped the compass back into her jacket pocket again, and was just refitting her glove when she saw the animal.

Fear never occurred to her in that first instant. He looked like a dog. A Siberian-husky type. He had a long snout and pointy ears, and mesmerizingly liquid black eyes staring right at her. His luxuriously thick pelt was almost as stark white as the snow. Her eyes softened. Lord, he was gorgeous, and standing motionless from a knoll thirty feet from her, as regal and silent as a statue.

“Hey, boy,” she said softly. “Are you lost?”

Her tone was as gentle as a whisper—she’d fallen in love on sight—but his response to her was distinctly different. At the first sound of her voice, he bared huge pointed teeth and snarled, his growl so ferocious that her throat closed.

It wasn’t a dog. She knew it in a pulsebeat. No husky was that big; no tame animal made wild, feral sounds like that. It had to be a wolf.

Every muscle in her body clenched up and locked. She couldn’t swallow. Adrenaline shot through her veins in an ice-cold rush.

The wolf paced another five feet closer, snapping threatening growls the whole time. It wasn’t hard to get the message. He didn’t like her. She’d have been thrilled to turn tail and run, only damned if she wasn’t too scared to move. She heard another snarl and whipped her head around.

Another one. Lord. Another two—no, three. At least three of them. The others were multicolored, their pelts ranging from dark charcoal to streaky gray. None of them were as huge as the white wolf, but the few pounds difference was hardly reassuring. She sensed as well as saw that she was being circled. They were moving. Pacing slowly in the snow, ducking in and behind trees, but keeping her in sight.

She’d have wet her pants if she had time.

There was no time. Panic sealed her throat. She had a flash memory of the afternoon she’d idiotically considered suicide. She’d never meant it. She’d just been so angry with herself—being stood up at her wedding had been a last straw in a long history of humiliating, embarrassing screwups. But geesh. At her most stupid, she’d never really wanted to die. And for sure she didn’t want to die all alone, torn to shreds in the middle of the north woods by a pack of wolves.

It was positively an uphill, difficult and darn near insurmountable job to earn her own self-respect. But she wanted a chance. Come on, God. I’m trying so hard, but I need a little time. How about a bargain. You get me out of this, and I’ll never mess up again as long as I live. I’ll be so good you’ll be astounded. I’ll be so good that I’ll be astounded....

The white wolf lifted his head and howled.

The sound echoed in the lonely woods like a cry from her own heart. She swallowed on a shattered breath. Tears welled, unwanted nuisance tears, blurring her vision when she desperately needed to see.

The wolves circled closer. The word run screamed through her mind, but it was easier to think than act. She could hardly run hellbent-for-leather wearing cross-country skis. There were trees all over the place, hardwoods as well as heavily branched pines, but her skis made climbing any of them just as impossible. There had to be a way out of this. She just had to think.