“But I—” The unanswered message to Rose nagged him. Something was going on at the foundation, and nobody was telling him what it was. And if positions had openedtoday for the winter jobs Darcy wanted, she ought to apply for them today. HR managers often went straight down the list of applicants in the order received. There wasn’t cell service outside of the park headquarters and most of the way back to Big Sky, so this was his last chance to work on them until tonight. “I actually ought to stay here while you go,” he said. “I can finish your application. And I’m waiting on a couple of calls.”
Darcy halted, eyes widening. She turned to stare at him, face utterly appalled.
“You want to stay in the cafe and work instead of seeing wolves,” she repeated in disbelief.
“Well, I don’twantto, I—”
“Give me my phone back,” Darcy demanded, hand outstretched, palm up.
Teagan put a protective hand over his back pocket and took a step away from her.
“If I didn’t say it earlier, you don’t owe me the animal tour or anything else, if you need to work on your applications—”
“Give me my goddamn phone,” she said, more insistently.
“Hold on,” he said, taking another step back, natural stubbornness rising to the forefront of his mind. Five unanswered messages, Nora had left him. If he wasn’t there when she called him back, she’d think he was blowing her off. “I can’t quit doing my job just because I’m out in Yellowstone, and you—”
Darcy lunged. She knocked into him shoulder first, trapping him up against the side of a weather-beaten Ford Bronco. He had at least six inches on her, but she was packing a lot of muscle on her frame, and she got him pinned before he could sputter out a protest.
“Your. Fucking. Job. Can. Suck it,” Darcy grunted asshe wrestled for the phone. She wrapped her arms around his midsection and thrust her hands in his back pockets, fishing for it.
He yelped her name, but she ignored him.
“Give up!” she panted. “This could be your only chance in your whole joyless life to see this.”
Her breasts were jammed up against his chest as she determinedly groped him in furtherance of her goal, but for once,don’t get a hard-onactually worked as a mantra. His knees sagged, and she plucked the phone from his pocket. She backed away with it raised victorious in the air.
“You are unbelievable, do you know that?” he gritted out as Darcy stuffed her phone into her bra, giving him an eyeful of pale skin and electric blue satin. He couldn’t decide whether he was annoyed, embarrassed, turned on, or some heady combination of the three.
“That’s what every boyfriend has said before andafterdating me, so yeah, I do know,” Darcy said, oblivious to the discomfort her reference to other, more fortunate men engendered in Teagan. She pointed to the truck. “We’re wasting time if we wanna be there before they finish lunch! Hut hut.”
Darcy had the keys turned in the ignition before he had finished buckling his seat belt. She tossed the phone back to him as she hit the accelerator, and they took off for the east exit of the park headquarters in a squeal of tires and a cloud of dust. Teagan glared at her, because he was going to lose signal as soon as they got a hundred yards away from the visitor center.
“This is happening, Teagan,” Darcy insisted. “No more work today. It’s Saturday, and we’re gonna see some awesome wolves, and you are gonna be glad you did.”
I’m so sorry, Nora, Teagan imagined apologizing to the board chair.I’ve been kidnapped. Let’s talk in two weeks instead, okay?That’s what his mother would have said. Of course, his mother wouldn’t have worried about meeting fundraising targets in the first place; she’d had some knack for it that he had not inherited.
This was all going to crash down on him as soon as he got back. The world didn’t go away if you ignored it. But what was he going to do, walk back alone? He gritted his jaw.
“Do you even like your job?” Darcy burst out as they pulled onto the main road when he still hadn’t responded.
Teagan opened his mouth to automatically respond that yes, of course he liked his job, he sent seven thousand underprivileged kids to art programs last year, this was a dream gig—but he found that he was unable to lie.
“I’m happy to be making a difference,” he answered instead, but Darcy wasn’t fooled.
“You’re not. You get this pissed-off look on your face like you just got orders for Diego Garcia every time you think about work.”
“Diego Garcia?”
“A shitty base in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Anyway, it’s really weird that you stay in this job you hate.”
“I don’thateit,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure that was true. “And even if I did, I haven’t finished the restructuring I started after my mom died.”
He didn’t know when he’d be finished. Putting the family foundation back on course had seemed like a thing he could do when Nora had brought it up. At his mother’s funeral, he remembered with a frown.
But he should have been able to do it. He had an MBA.His last name was on the front door. He hadn’t expected that two years in, the foundation would still be doing the corporate equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck: the endowment only supported about half the grants it made every year. It was still precariously reliant on his monthly fundraising—a job he was definitely not doing from Montana. Teagan hunched his shoulders at that unwelcome thought, but it couldn’t inspire the kind of fear it had three weeks ago.
“You know what I mean. Yourjob’s never going to fuck you,” Darcy said.
