Chapter Four
Callan broke eye contact and finally reached for a paper towel. “By the way, my cousin is an idiot.”
Kate was confused. “Your cousin?”
“JT. The one who brought his guard animals with him to confront you.”
“Ah. Yes.” She remembered hearing JT refer to Callan as “cousin.” “But those weren’t just any ol’ animals. Those were wolves.”
His gaze sharpened on her. Those pale hazel-brown eyes turned more gold, and he leaned forward. “What makes you say that?”
“I know the difference between dogs and wolves. And those were wolves.”
“What caused you to know the difference?”
“There was an incident.”
“Tell me about it?” His face was open and he reached toward her to tuck a stray hair behind her ear.
She crossed her arms. “I don’t really want to. I don’t like talking about it.”
“But it’s what caused you to become so terrified of wolves, yes?”
“Yes.” She nodded.
He uncrossed her arms and took her hands in his. “You were a frozen block of ice when I came upon you this afternoon.”
“Fine.” Kate glanced around the kitchen. “Mrs. Brighton doesn’t keep alcohol stocked around here, does she?”
“Probably not for guests. We can go shopping for some whiskey moonshine if you’d like.”
That was a shocking proposition. She refocused on him. “I thought moonshine was illegal.”
“Only if you aren’t willing to pay the government the taxes you owe on your profits.”
“Oh.”
He lifted one hand to her cheek and cradled it. The palm of his hand and tips of his fingers were calloused. “You were saying...”
“I wasn’t, but here goes nothing.”
Callan slid his hand down her jaw and retook her hands in his.
His touch ignited her and consoled her all at once, and she felt better already for it. “My best friend and I were around ten years old at the time. I remember the summer clearly.” The trees surrounding the overlook, the beautiful scenery could do nothing to erase the nightmarish images from coming back to her as if they had happened yesterday. “Our town was growing quickly. I remember my parents having conversations amongst themselves and saying things like the town council only seeing dollar signs in front of their eyes. I now know that my parents meant tax dollars coming in from new housing developments and bringing in new businesses, but at the time, I had no idea what they were talking about.
“All I knew was that a bunch of the play areas my friends and I would go to for playing kickball or kick the can or stuff like that during the summer were no longer available or no longer safe for us to play at. There was a ton of construction all around and my friend, Ellie, wanted to find a new wooded area in order to build a fort slash dollhouse.”
Callan squeezed her hands and reassured her with his smile. She gave him a small smile. At least she hoped it was a small smile. It might’ve been a grimace.
“At the time, we hadn’t known that all that construction was also pushing wolves out of the area and into the increasingly smaller and smaller wooded areas available surrounding our town. I know that now, logically, and I remember hearing that afterward.”
“Afterward?”
“Ellie thought they were just ‘big doggies.’ Her words.” Kate shook her head. “But something inside me told me to stay back. To stay away.” She couldn’t describe the attack. She didn’t want to relive those moments through the spoken word. “She lived, Ellie did, but huge sections of her body were mangled. A friend of ours had stopped by my house looking for us to play with. My mom had told him we were out looking for a place for a new fort, and he found us because he heard our screams. He was on his bike.” Kate shook her head again but the image wouldn’t leave. “I don’t know how Ellie managed to make it home. Adrenaline can override a ton of the body’s signals, I know that for a fact. Because there were parts of her that didn’t look human when she got on William’s bike, and yet she rode it home. He and his bike saved her life. There was no way I could’ve carried her home and she certainly couldn’t’ve walked home.”
Kate closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath of chocolate-chip-cookie-scented clean mountain air. “Ellie was never the same again. As far as I know, she never rode a bike again. I think she eventually walked, but her parents moved the family away from our town and we never kept in touch like I should’ve tried.” She opened her eyes again and looked into Callan’s. “To this day, I don’t know why that pack of wolves attacked her so ferociously and they left me alone. I wish I knew. At one point, there was so much blame going around from her parents, they even accused me of causing the attack since I came out of it without a scratch. But the blaming me bit didn’t last long because William stuck up for me saying that I wasn’t as close to the animals, yet I was there screaming my fool head off.”
“He said that?” Callan asked with a slight smirk.
“Maybe not the ‘fool head’ part. But it became easier for her parents to blame the town council and the developers and everyone else, which is why they finally moved.”
“Sounds like they wouldn’t have appreciated you trying to keep in touch with their daughter anyway.”
Kate shrugged one shoulder, as if it hadn’t hurt as much as it did. “Possibly not, but she’d been my friend and I’d witnessed her go through something traumatic that changed her life in every fundamental way possible. I was there. I should’ve at least tried to contact her when we were older.”
“You know you can still try.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I can see how that incident would make you terrified of dogs. And of course, wolves.”
She pulled her hands out of his and hugged herself, wrapping her arms around her waist. “Yeah, there’s not much I can do about that. But the funny thing is, it was soon after that that I began dreaming about this one wolf.”
Callan sat up straighter, his focus even more intense, even though she hadn’t thought that was possible. “This one wolf? What wolf is that?”
“This is going to sound so stupid.”
“Go on. My family has always believed in the power of dreams.”
Kate let out a long, slow breath. “I’ve been dreaming about this one wolf for almost twenty years. It’s almost all white except for these dark brown points on its ears and at the top of its head. Almost like the markings of a Siberian husky. But it’s most definitely a wolf. After Ellie, well, I know what wolves look like. Anyway, it also has these golden yellow eyes. At least that’s what they look like in my dreams.”
“Have you dreamed of any other wolves? Maybe any of the wolves that attacked your friend?”
“Nope. None of them. Just the one.”
Callan recaptured her hands. “I saw the sketchbook in your bag while I was carrying you.”
“You with the carrying thing again.”
He gave her a look of mock disbelief. “Of course. I’m not going to let that go.”
She made a rude noise, which Callan proceeded to ignore.
“Anyway, the sketchbook. Do you happen to have any pictures of this wolf you’ve dreamed about?”
“Not in that book. That one’s brand-new. I bought it for this trip specifically. But I do have some pictures scanned in on my tablet as well as just drawn on my tablet. It’s up in my room.” Kate hesitated. “I could bring it down here. Or...” She stopped again. “You could come upstairs with me and I could show you all of my sketches.”
Callan tilted his head. “You sure?”
* * *
No matter how she answered, Callan wasn’t going to let anything go too far.
“Yes, I’m sure.” She said the words carefully, but that only reinforced his decision to make sure they didn’t do anything tonight. She’d gone through a traumatic event and was still dealing with the emotional ramifications of that. He didn’t want her to regret any of her time with him at any point.
Especially after hearing how terrified she was of wolves. Because of course his mate would be terrified of the very thing he was. That’s the way life worked out for him.
No, he hoped to snag her with her feelings for him all on their own, with no outside influencing events in the way.
She took his hand and led him back through the house to the foyer. After popping into the sitting area to grab her bag, she then led him upstairs to her room, and paused outside the door.
“Now—”
“We’re not going to do anything but take a look at the drawings you want to show me. That’s it. In fact, if you want, you can just get your tablet and we can go back downstairs to take a look at your sketches in the sitting room.”
She exhaled. “No, it’ll be fine.” She smiled at him. “I don’t know why I trust you, but thank you for what you just said.”
“I mean it.”
“Somehow I know that.”
He saw that her room was still designated as the parents and one kid room, and her bags were on the smaller bed.
“I haven’t had a chance to unpack yet. Obviously. My plan had been to get my walk in and get some sketching done before it got too dark. Of course we know how that went.”
“Did you get any sketching done?”
“Actually I did.”
“Then part of it went right.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a sketchbook, smaller but thicker than the one she’d been carrying. “Here. You can take a look through this first. I need to change out of these clothes so I don’t get dirt on Mrs. Brighton’s bedspreads or that beautiful chair.” She pointed to the one chair in the room, upholstered to match the colors of the room. “I’ll be right out.” She got some clothes from her duffel bag and disappeared into the small bathroom.
Callan tried not to think about Kate in the bathroom changing clothes. Because at some point, changing clothes meant she’d have to be some portion of naked and he very much wanted to see that. But he’d promised her they wouldn’t do anything and he’d promised himself he wouldn’t betray her trust—because that was going to be all too easy to do later on when she found out what he was—so he forced his mind from his mate in the bathroom back to why she’d brought him up here in the first place.
He sat on the edge of the bed and focused on the sketchbook she’d put in his hands. He began flipping through it and the talent shining forth from the pages floored him. Each page came to life, whether it was people at parks, on their own or with their pets, or animals in city settings. And then he came upon the pictures of the wolf. Many pages of them.
She’d drawn it just as she’d described, like an arctic wolf, but with brown points along its ears and on the top of its head. Its eyes didn’t have any color in the pencil drawing, but the irises were definitely lighter than some of the surrounding shading.
Callan continued flipping through the pages, studying each of her wolf drawings. The thing he most noticed was that none of the pictures showed the wolf as being vicious. Teeth weren’t displayed and it wasn’t snarling. In each picture the wolf had an almost friendly countenance, and that’s not what Callan had expected. Especially not from her description of today’s incident plus her childhood trauma.
There were other drawings in the sketchbook of just nature scenes, with no animals and no people in them at all. Which gave Callan an excellent idea. That meeting with his sister this afternoon—had it really only been this afternoon?—where she wanted artwork for each of the guest cabins, and now having met Kate and seen her sketches. Kate drew magnificent pieces of art and he wanted her to draw for him. All he had to do was convince her.
Callan looked up as Kate came out of the bathroom. He hadn’t thought it was possible, but somehow she was even more beautiful than before. To him, she was stunning. She’d cleaned up, put on a different Atlanta PD T-shirt, and her hair was pulled back in a long, sleek ponytail. She looked angelic to him. Part of that might have also been because the light from the bathroom was shining behind her.
“So, what do you think?”
About how she looked? No. That couldn’t be right. “About what?”
“About my sketches, of course.”
Duh. “I think you are an amazing artist. You said you used to be a sketch artist. What do you do now?”
“Ah. I was a sketch artist for the past ten years for the Atlanta PD, but I just recently put in my resignation.”
“That explains all of the T-shirts. But remarkably, doesn’t answer my question.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “I’ll get to that. But yeah, I pretty much stocked up on PD gear for my workouts and casual clothes. They were cheap and easy to wash and wear. I should probably invest in some different clothes now...or at least some cover-ups.”
Callan pulled her a bit closer, not wanting her beyond arm’s length away. “Go on with your story.”
“My best friend, Cindy, put me in touch with a few professors she works with at a research university outside of Atlanta. A couple are interested in my sketching abilities. They have grants available to them in different areas at different times of the school year. One particular professor wants me to do some scientific sketching for a specific research paper he is working on.”
“Wow. Okay. So what are you doing up here?”
“Oh. I haven’t had a vacation in a while, and Cindy recommended that I come to this area to rest and relax. Wait ’til I talk to her. I guess she’s from this area, but she certainly didn’t mention wolves and crazy people.” She shook her head. “The fact that I’ll be doing some scientific sketching on different animals had me wanting to take my vacation near some wilderness anyway. Up here in the mountains gives me a lot more nature to be able to sketch than staying in the Atlanta area. Since I also grew up playing around wooded areas when I was a kid, I thought this might be a good escape. Boy, was I wrong.”
“You do realize there are dogs everywhere, all over the country, no matter where you go, right?”
“I do realize that, I’m not stupid. But I also know that those weren’t just dogs. Those were oversize pet wolves of some sort. Also, that one guy was absolutely insane. He was talking to the wolves as if one of them was actually going to answer him. That’s crazy.”
“Most people would say that the fact I could reach out to you mind to mind was crazy.”
“That’s okay. I would tend to agree with them on that. I can’t seem to do that again so I think it was a fluke. Something that happened during the heightened emotional and highly tense situation.”
“You do, huh? Have you not ever heard of telepathy?”
“Of course I have. But usually it’s just crazy people who actually believe that stuff is real or claim that they can do it.”
“So you’re counting yourself as crazy.”
“Absolutely. In fact, tomorrow, I probably won’t believe it even happened.”
Callan didn’t know what to make of that, so he let it go. He wanted to get back to the task at hand. He had what he hoped was plenty of time to convince Kate that magic and other unexplained phenomena really did exist. “I have a business proposition for you.”
She looked at him with one arched brow.
“My—” Callan didn’t want to say pack “—family and I are in the process of trying to turn our many old lodges and cabins into guest lodges and cabins. We’re hoping to start up an all-inclusive adventure vacation resort. The meeting I was in when Mrs. B called me—”
“I’m so sorry about that.”
Callan wasn’t sorry. At least not over the part about getting to meet her. He was sorry she had to go through the trauma of facing wolves that brought to mind her childhood nightmare as well as sorry that she had to deal with JT and his idiot friends. “It was my sister telling all of us that we needed artwork on the walls of these cabins and lodges, because the walls are hideously bare. At least according to her they are. After looking through your sketchbook—”
“You haven’t even seen my electronic portfolio yet.”
“I would like for you to consider doing the artwork for our cabins.”
* * *
Kate couldn’t believe her ears. “The artwork.”
“Yes.”
“For cabins.”
“Yes.”
“How many cabins are we talking about here?” she asked.
He shifted on the tiny bed, his stature making the bed look even smaller than it already was. “We currently have fifteen ready for check-in as soon as we start taking reservations. We need to make sure there are several things in place first before we take that first call, but we have at least ten other lodges that need fixing up that can be added to the resort.”
“Fifteen sketches due right away.”
“Well, technically, I think my sister wants there to be at least two pieces of art in each cabin. She wants one in the main room and one in the bedroom.”
Kate shrugged and threw her hands out wide. “Of course she does. Thirty pieces.”
“Yep.”
“And you’re not talking simple little small pieces either, are you?”
Callan shook his head and settled further back on the bed. “Well, no, probably not. They’d need to be twenty-four by thirty at the least for the main room. Maybe eighteen by twenty-four for the bedroom.”
“Any particular requests for subject matter?”
“Does this mean you’ll do it?” Excitement shone all over his face, as well as permeated her sixth sense.
“Subject matter?”
“Just what you have here in your sketchbook. You already draw exactly what I’m looking for.”
“What about what your sister is looking for?”
“Eh, she came to us about the artwork problem, but didn’t present any solutions. I have a solution.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
“But you will.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “You’re awfully cocky.”
“And I don’t think you want to turn this down. Not based on all of these drawings. And like you said, I haven’t even seen your electronic portfolio. But if you’d like, we can send that to my sister.”
“What about wolves?”
Callan furrowed his brow and looked puzzled. “What about them?” An undercurrent of nervousness seeped in.
“What about them as subject matter for some of the pictures?”
His nervousness waned. “That should be fine. But maybe not that same wolf over and over.”
“Hmm. No, probably not. What about the wolves in the area?”
His expression went blank and the nervousness was back. “What about them?”
“Aren’t they a danger to any of your guests?”
“That’s one of the things we need to work on getting in place. We’re working on security and safety.”
“Okay.” Kate let the topic go for now. She was too excited about the idea that someone might actually want to pay her for her work. And not just her work to get the bad guys, but her work as an artist, and as someone who loves to draw nature and people enjoying it. “I want to see the cabins before I commit to anything.”
“That sounds fair enough. But it’s too late tonight and you’ve gone through enough today. You should get a good night’s sleep and I’ll come pick you up in the morning.”
Here was her chance to start living the life she wanted by making her own choices and not just letting things happen to her. She could let Callan leave and wait to see him in the morning, or she could say what she really wanted and take the risk that he might want that, too. “I know you don’t have a change of clothes with you, but I really don’t want to sleep alone tonight.”
“Kate.”
“At least, not alone in this room. We don’t have to do anything and we can still get some sleep, but there are two beds and I just don’t want to be by myself. I’d like for you to stay if that won’t cause you too many problems.”
Callan gave her a wicked grin, one that shot sparks all throughout her body. “It just so happens, I do have a change of clothes in my truck, which happens to be parked outside. If you’ll let me have the room key so I can get back in the house, I’ll run outside and get them.”
Kate immediately went to where she’d set down the key. “Are you sure?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m very sure that I don’t want to be by myself.”
“Then I’ll be right back.” He jogged out of the room.
Kate moved her bags from off the single bed and stuffed them in the drawers of the dresser. She’d already washed up and changed clothes, even though she was still just wearing regular clothes. But since he would be, too, she figured she’d stay in what she was wearing to help out with the not-going-to-do-anything-tonight decree. She pulled the pillow from underneath the covers on the twin bed and settled at the foot of it.
Callan re-entered the room just as she was sitting again. He headed straight for her and stopped abruptly. “This is your room. Why are you on the small bed?”
“Oh, maybe because you’re a giant and you need a giant’s bed to sleep on.”
“I think I’m too tired to argue with you about that tonight.”
“Good, then it’s all settled.”
He disappeared into the bathroom and Kate lay down. She turned on the night light at the base of the bedside lamp and turned out the main light. She yawned and could barely keep her eyes open while she waited for Callan to return so she could turn out the light.
The next morning, she vaguely recalled three things: Callan turning out the light, telling her “good night,” and kissing her on her temple. She much more clearly recalled dreaming about wolves. Lots of wolves. Wolves fighting wolves.
And her white wolf led the group that her dreams said were the good guys.
Awesome.