“Peachy.” He shifted his bag to the other shoulder.
Five minutes later, we turned off Main Street onto the first dirt road that climbed up toward the mountains. Foot traffic died away. Under the tall trees, the clean May air held a hint of refreshing chill, but Micah didn’t put on his jacket. As werewolves, we did better in cool weather than hot.
“This is me.” I pointed down a curving drive that vanished out of sight behind a copse of poplars.
“Closer to town than I’d expect,” he said. I figured he meant the risks of getting spotted running in fur.
“I need electricity and a telephone line, for my business. I used to have a cabin up higher.” I pointed to where the foothills rose behind us. “Back when Hank actually ownedHandyman Hank’s,and I was the hired hand. But when I took over, I had to be more accessible.”
“So that’s what you do?” Micah walked up my driveway beside me, looking around and scenting the air. “Repairs?”
“Yep. Jack of all trades. I can repair your pipes, your fence, your roof, pretty much anything you want fixed. I’m not licensed for electrical work, but I know the basics if someone just wants a switch replaced. Plus I cut trees, work on landscaping. Anything that’s a one-man job.” I grinned at him. “Rent a hubby, basically.”
As the trees hid us from the road, he stopped. “And are you a hubby?”
“Me? No.”You know better than that.But maybe that one moment in time hadn’t defined him the way it defined me. After all, he’d put a ring on Janet’s finger less than a year later. “How’s Janet, by the way? Any sons?”
“We lasted two years. Not even.” He shrugged. “No kids. Never tried to mate-bond with her. She wanted to leave that town in the dust from the moment she moved out of her father’s house. Hollywood or New York, somewhere she could become a star. She thought I’d go with her and when I said no, she took off on her own.”
“She was a very pretty girl,” I admitted.
“Smart, too. And ambitious.” A hint of softness curved his lips. “She did make a couple of movies, bit parts, as Janine Crue. Better than Janet Applebaum. So at least I gave her a name. I hope she was happy. I haven’t heard from her in twenty years.”
I didn’t want to talk about Janet, but I needed to know. “Did you miss her?”Do you still?
“Some, at first. I don’t think I was ever in love with her, but I sure as hell was dazzled by those tits.” He laughed softly. “I missed the sex and her sense of fun, but not the fights. She wanted me to stand up to Dad.”
Something you never did.But then, Micah’s father had been our Alpha. I ran across state lines rather than stand up to Alpha myself. “And after Janet? You didn’t remarry?”
“Nope. The war came along. The world changed. And you? You never found a pack, a mate?”
I turned toward my cabin rather than meet Micah’s eyes as I said, “Happy bachelor, that’s me.”
I’d thought about joining a pack, many times. Especially when loneliness had dug in deep after the war, when the band of brothers I’d fought with splintered and vanished in the wind. I could’ve hidden my homosexuality from an Alpha, maybe. There was only one man I’d never been able to resist. I didn’t lust after random men, at least not enough to betray me. But the hate of the packs for queer men was a visceral thing, deep and vivid, well beyond the practical contempt that made Alphas purge their packs of criminal wolves and careless wolves and crazy wolves.
Werewolves hated the queer among us, not just as a risk to successful hiding from humans, but perhaps for how one man loving another cut into the heart of our traditions. As many times as I’d imagined joining a pack, I’d imagined knowing I was that thing they all loathed. Smiling and running with men who would tear my throat out, if they saw the real me. I knew I’d rot away inside and die. So I’d been lone the last twenty-five years.
I beckoned to Micah. “Come on, let’s get you settled.”
My cabin had once been Hank’s, before he sold it to me and moved to Boulder to live with his daughter. In addition to an airy, open main room with exposed beams, I had a kitchen nook, a bedroom, bathroom, and a spare room I used for storage. Micah set his bag down by the front door and looked around.
“Not bad, Lee. It suits you.”
“Thanks.” I shut the door and threw the latch, a thousand questions tumbling in my head. The one that made it out of my mouth was, “Why are you here?”
“You invited me?” Micah smiled at my growl. “Just kidding. If you mean here in Highcrest, I was simply passing through for work.”
“Work? Out here in the boonies?”
“I’m a photographer. Landscape and wildlife. A client’s doing a book on North American mammals and wanted me to get pictures.”
“And by some chance, you passed through the town I live in? Even though I made sure no one with our old pack knew where I was?” I’d changed my name and cut all contact back in the Depression years. Then, after the war, I’d moved again and washed up here. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“Yep.” Micah’s grin faded. “Or something.” He turned to stare out the big window that gave us a view of the Teton mountains, their gray rocky slopes reaching to the sky. “I was in Yellowstone, and when I had three dozen rolls of exposed film and all the bison photos a man could want, something pulled me south. I’ve always followed my instincts, and this was the same. Except here, at the end of the rope, there’s not a lynx or a mountain goat, but you.”
You could call me a mountain goat.I gave my inappropriate humor a stern reprimand. No goating of any kind around Micah. I groped for something to say that wasn’t driven by past pain. “Wildlife pictures? Isn’t that hard, the way critters act around us wolves?”
“Not that different from anyone else. They don’t like ordinary humans either. I stay downwind and use powerful lenses. And I can scope out an area in fur, get a scent for where they live. Gives me an advantage.”
