“Yes,” he said definitively. “We can do the beavers next.”
She grinned at the enthusiasm of his response.
They bade farewell to Ranger Ralph and took more time on the hike back to the truck. Darcy’s step was buoyant with victory. She’d done what she set out to do, for once. Maybe the Goederts had been lying about the job when they hired her, and maybe Darcy hadn’t been qualified to work with people with substance abuse problems when she started, but she’d figured it out anyway.
“This was good for you,” she told Teagan decisively as they reached the trailhead. “I knew it. Wilderness therapy really does work. I bet you didn’t think about drinking the whole time you were out there, huh?”
“I couldn’t possibly think about anything else while trying to commit so many important facts about wolves to memory,” he said, but his smile was warm and lingering as he looked directly at her.
Darcy ducked her head, her cheeks suddenly heated. She peeked at him sideways to be sure he wasn’t making fun of her—she’d toss him right out of the truck if he was—but instead his face was contemplative.
“This is what you should do,” Teagan said. “This. You shouldn’t be fixing generators. You should be doing this.”
“Yeah, Iknow,” Darcy said. “That was the entire idea of my job with the Goederts. I just got screwed over when it was too late to find something else for the summer.”
“You should quit your job. Go to school full time. I looked up the GI Bill—you get a stipend. Finish your degree and get that park ranger job. You’d be good at it.”
Darcy laughed at how he assumed the world worked. That all the bills got paid, that she passed all her classes, that all the government benefits arrived right on time. “You should quityourjob,” she said.
“I can’t. Or I can’t yet, anyway. But there’s nothing stopping you.”
She snorted again. “Okay, well, first of all, I don’t have a car, I don’t have savings, and if I tried to go to school full time, I’d just flunk out again.”
“You wouldn’t flunk out.”
“I alreadydid. When I was twenty. I lost my scholarship, had to drop out of the ROTC program, went and enlisted just to pay the Navy back.” She decided not to mention that she was failing out again right now.
“You’d probably take it more seriously now than when you were twenty,” Teagan said.
Darcy thought she’d taken it pretty seriously the first time around too, but she was buoyed by his assumption that she was smart enough to finish her degree, and she thought she’d just roll in that for a little while rather than disabusing him of the notion. When she failed her summer classes, it was going to be hard enough to reregister for the fall.
“Maybe I should just run off naked into the woods to live with the wolves,” she suggested after a minute.
Teagan gave a stutter of a laugh. “That’s a... career plan for sure.”
“I’d be good atthat.”
“Hard to fail at naked in the woods with the wolves,” he replied. “Though the vegan diet might be difficult to accommodate.”
“I’m not a vegan,” Darcy said heatedly. “I eat honey. And eggs, if I know the situation with the chicken.”
“What’s the situation with the chickens of the Yellowstone woods, then? Acceptable?”
“Mmm, good point. I’d probably have to eat meat, wouldn’t I? I guess that would be okay if I ran down the game myself.”
“I’m getting such a mental picture of this,” Teagan said, and he turned his head to smile at her again. She had a sensation like riding her bicycle down a hill and taking her hands off the handlebars when she made her next suggestion.
“I’m not sure I could kill the moose or whatever though,” she admitted. “Pretty sure I couldn’t. You should come too, after you quit your job. You can do that part.”
“Kill the moose?” he said, voice rich and full of laughter. “I’ve worked in an office building my entire adult life. I couldn’t even cook the moose.”
“I betyou’rerelated to Teddy Roosevelt. You can handle the moose.”
“Only on my mother’s side,” he said with that wide, crooked grin. “Distant cousin.”
“Well that settles it,” Darcy said, feeling ridiculously as though something had in fact been settled. “We quit our terrible jobs, quit everything, and live off the land here in Yellowstone.”
It was hard to keep her eyes on the road as she waited for Teagan to reply. Because of course it was a joke. But she wanted him to be in on it with her. She wanted him to agree that this was the good stuff, much better than whatever was waiting for him when he went back to New York.
