This news took Darcy aback. How could she possibly have known that? Not only had she not known that, nobody elsehad ever edited her resume, which meant it was probably a mess.
“I guess you could look at it,” she admitted, even though she winced to imagine him finding all her misspellings. “If it’s not too big a hassle.” She turned her face into her arms and put her hands over her head. This sucked the most.
She’d been nothing but bitchy to him all day long, and he’d been nothing but understanding in response. It was just one more reason to be angry at herself. One man in the entire world treated her with respect, treated her like she knew what she was doing, and she was doing her best to change his mind on that.
Teagan paused again. “Do you want me to do it right now? I can download Word to your phone.”
“I thought you wanted to go hiking,” Darcy deflected, face still hidden.
“Not as much as you want a better job though, right?” he asked gently.
Darcy swallowed hard.
“Okay,” she muttered.
When she didn’t reach for her phone, Teagan pulled his mouth to the side, considering. “Do you want me to just make you a resume from scratch? I’ve done all the hiring at the foundation for the last two years, so I’ve seen a lot of them.”
That prickly feeling had returned to her nose and throat. Jesus, no guy had ever worked this hard to get her out of her clothes, assuming that’s what he wanted. That was what men usually wanted when they were nice to her on a sustained basis, though Teagan had been slow to work himself up to the proposition.
She could wish they’d met under different circumstances,if that’s what he wanted, because she knew what she would have done. Two years from now, when he was good and sober and spending a week at the Lake Yellowstone Hotel to catch the bird migration and Darcy had somehow found work in forestry, that would have been a nice time to meet him. She wouldn’t have minded a little proposition then. Would have enjoyed watching him sweat over how to palm her a room key after the fireside lecture. Would have been in a position to drag him out into the woods with a quilt and six-pack of O’Doul’s.
The more troubling possibility, in fact, was that he was just like this. Sweet. Kind. She had no idea what she’d do about that, under any circumstances.
“Yeah, please,” she said, eyes still closed. “I can send you my DD-214 from the Navy. It’s got most of what I know how to do listed on it.”
•••••
Darcy ate a second basket of fries as Teagan copied and pasted on her phone. He doubted that she was really impressed at his knowledge of shortcuts on Word for iOS, but that painfully defeated expression on her face had eased, either from the food or his promise to work on her job application materials. This small, solvable problem was a welcome distraction from the meeting request he’d found in his personal email.
For the past three weeks, Rose had responded to his every call checking in with some variation on “Everything is fine/get off the phone and go sit in the woods/don’t you think I can do my job without your micromanagement?”
But today in his personal email inbox, Nora, the chair ofthe board of directors, had forwarded a calendar request for 9:00 a.m. Eastern on the following Friday. Teagan was invited to join by phone, but it appeared that the other members of the foundation’s leadership would attend in person. Rose had scheduled the meeting. The agenda was vaguely and ominously described asFoundation Strategy. Teagan had left a polite message with Rose asking about the purpose of the meeting, but she had not responded while Teagan was seated at the diner. So he played with the formatting on Darcy’s new resume as he waited for Rose to call him back on Darcy’s phone.
Darcy licked salt off her fingers, momentarily distracting him from his weighty choice between Times New Roman and Palatino. She caught him staring at her mouth and gave him a tight smile, though she thankfully didn’t seem to notice the flash of an obscene thought across the barest surface of his mind.
She wanted her resume to stress her ability to lift seventy-five pounds and operate a variety of motor vehicles, but if she wanted to be a park ranger someday, Teagan thought he might also make her resume look a little more managerial class.
Darcy’s phone chirped with a notification. She startled with interest.
She immediately snatched the phone away from him to look at the screen. Then she made a wonderful noise. A breathy growl of pleasure and surprise deep in her throat, a noise that hit Teagan right in his gut and sparked immediate jealousy of whatever had caused that noise. Her face lit up with joy.
Before he could ask what had occurred to put thatblessed look on her face, Darcy thrust her phone back into his face.
“Look!” she said, dropping it into his confused hands before he could focus on the screen. “We gotta go right now.”
Teagan barely managed to pull out his wallet and drop an indeterminate number of bills on the table before Darcy began physically dragging him from the cafe. She wrapped a hand around his bicep and tugged when he didn’t move fast enough, then slid her hand down to his own palm and laced her fingers with his as she pulled him toward the parking lot.
“Where are we going?” he asked, digging in his heels. The last two times someone had hauled him off to an unknown destination, he’d been taken to rehab and then to someone else’s job interview. Twice was bad enough, but three times would make a really unfortunate pattern.
“Junction Butte pack brought down an elk by First Meadow. We can see them from Slough Creek Trail.Ifwe hustle.”
“We need to see a dead elk?”
“Wolves, Teagan,” she said, beaming at his bemusement when he did not join in her excited squeals.
Teagan had just recently recovered from his last encounter with the top of the food chain, and he was only able to muster a halfhearted smile.
“I promised you something good!” Darcy crowed, even though she had made no such promise, and had in fact dragged him out here primarily to pursue a job she still didn’t have an application for. “Even better than beavers.”
