Wolf at the Door Read online

  ‘I did, Miss Barnes. I surely did,’ he said quietly, and as he returned his attention to the food before him, she caught another glimmer of what had to be laughter in his eyes.

  Kelly fumed inwardly. How dare he laugh at her! she thought. Flaunting his blonde companion like a trophy before her. What did she care who he spent his nights with?

  ‘I was only being polite,’ she said quite unnecessarily, and was rewarded with another half-grin.

  ‘Of course,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Well, I was!’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, shrugging as if to rid himself of an annoying mosquito or fly.

  Kelly felt increasingly foolish, unable to control her own thoughts and emotions, or, worse, her tongue. She knew that no matter what she said, it would only lead her deeper into trouble, but she couldn’t gracefully back away. Damn the man, she thought. It wasn’t right that he should have such an effect upon her, especially when she didn’t even like him.

  Nonetheless, she didn’t avoid the opportunity, as he ate, to study his strong, muscular wrists and hands, the set of his powerful neck, where curling salt’n’pepper hair rolled up out of the neckline of his khaki shirt. He was a handsome devil, she had to admit, although not in any really conventional fashion. The silvery hair was vivid against his deep-tanned face, and his piercing eyes even more so as he looked up to catch her studying him.

  ‘You want to buy it, or are you just looking?’ he asked with a wry grin.

  ‘I ... I was just thinking that some women would pay a healthy price at the hairdresser to achieve the colour you’ve got naturally,’ Kelly replied lamely.

  ‘Indeed? But how do you know it’s natural?’ he replied, then laughed aloud at her flushed response.

  ‘You ... you just don’t strike me as the type to have it dyed,’ she replied, struggling to hold her temper. She could almost feel the solidifying atmosphere around them as the other men gradually became aware of the conflicting confrontation.

  ‘Oh,’ Grey replied with one sooty eyebrow raised in query. ‘And just what type do I strike you as?’

  ‘No type that interests me,’ she flared back, angered at having so neatly trapped herself Grabbing up her tray, oblivious to the half-full plate and coffee-cup, she strode back towards the kitchen with her back rigid in anger, ignoring the whistle that followed her perky manoeuvre and knowing as she did so that it wouldn’t have been Grey Scofield who did the whistling. That, she decided, certainly wouldn’t fit his style.

  By lunchtime she had regained her composure, assisted by finding that her kitchen duties could now be reduced to a purely supervisory role and that she could devote .some time to the administrative aspects of her work. She took only a light snack for lunch, especially compared to the full-scale meals the men of the camp seemed to require, and she was gone from the kitchen area when, or if, Grey had his midday meal.

  At dinner that evening she chose to stay in the kitchen, helping out where she was needed, and it wasn’t until the meal was virtually over that she realised Grey hadn’t shown up at all. Nor did he arrive for breakfast the following morning, or all of that day either, and by dinner time she was edgy and sharp with everyone, despite knowing her real anger was with herself for allowing the tall grey-haired man to affect her so strongly.

  Even during her drive into Grande Prairie the following morning, she kept finding her mind drifting to re-focus into the strength of Grey’s profile, or the quirk of his vivid mouth, and once, the angering sight of him sitting with his lovely blonde companion in the restaurant.

  There was little actual business to be done on this trip to town. Kelly had some correspondence to mail, a few things to check up on, but mostly she was just going in to visit her father and check on his progress. She arrived in Grande Prairie before the shops were even open, having left Kakwa camp shortly after the midsummer dawn and without having waited for breakfast. Even that early, however, the bustling traffic made it difficult to find a parking space downtown.

  Once she had the heavy pick-up truck parked, she sat for a moment and simply watched the world go by, all of it seemingly comprised of rough-hewn oil workers in their khaki or olive-green shirts and trousers, clumping heavily in sturdy, lace-up work boots or high-heeled riding boots. Headgear ranged from baseball caps with long, grease- stained bills to fancy, expensive cowboy hats in a multitude of colours.

  A boom town! Difficult indeed to imagine that Grande Prairie, as Canada’s most northerly city, was on virtually the same fifty-five-plus degrees as Moscow and the vast wilderness of Siberia.

  A town where waitresses and barmaids made unbelievably huge salaries, and where the unemployment problem was created not by a lack of jobs, but by a lack of somewhere for people to live. There were more jobs than people, and during summer more people than the existing accommodation could hold. There was a growing number of itinerant workers living just outside the city in tents because the housing boom couldn’t keep up with the demand for accommodation.

  To Kelly’s eyes it was like a whole new world, so vibrant, so totally alive despite the squalor of trucks that were filthy with mud and grease because the time to clean them simply couldn’t be spared, despite the throngs of loud, rough, vigorous men on the footpaths and the dense traffic on the streets. It was like nothing she had ever seen in her life, and she was half afraid to leave the safety of her own vehicle and throw herself into the throngs on the street — yet equally half afraid not to, for fear of missing something.

  There was a bustle and an excitement that was contagious, for some reason even more so now than during her first few days in the city, when she had watched the crowds without realising how fortunate she had been in arriving without notice to find her father’s small but well-stocked home awaiting her.

  Hospital visiting hours wouldn’t start for some time, so she strolled the streets downtown, peering excitedly into shop windows, and once they opened, into the fascinating interiors of the shops themselves. She had to stand in line for ten minutes at one cafe just to get a cup of tea, but even that delay was filled with wonderment at the mixture of accents and voices that boomed through the small cafe.

  Polish, Ukrainian, French-Canadian, the occasional nasal twang that denoted an American, the soft patois of the native Metis people, those of mixed Indian and white blood whose language could be anything from almost-French to one of several Indian dialects. It was a rich, heady mixture that took in most of the European accents and racial types.

  Geoff Barnes, to Kelly’s delight, seemed much improved from her visit only days before, and though he spoke sadly of yet another fortnight in the hospital and a long period of convalescence after that, she was heartened by his improved colour and obvious return to something like the father she remembered.

  He was, however, somewhat less than equally pleased at her own appearance.

  ‘It’s not much wonder you’re having trouble with Grey Scofield if you run around dressed like that,’ he muttered with a disparaging glance over her checked shirt and jeans. ‘Just because you’re living out in the bush it doesn’t mean you have to dress like one of the boys as well.’

  He brushed aside her protestations about the folly of wearing a fancy dress to drive more than a hundred miles to town over questionable roads in a pick-up truck.

  ‘Ridiculous! You’ve got the house here; go out and buy some decent clothes this afternoon and put them on there. In fact, stay over tonight while you’re at it ... see a show or something. And when you come back to see me this afternoon, I want you looking like my daughter, not somebody’s teenage son.’

  She would have been angry with him, except for the memory of a lovely little dress she had noticed in one shop window that morning. It was a pale green, ideally suited to her slender, diminutive figure, and ideal also for getting dressed up to go out in the evening without looking far too overdressed in a town where half the dining-out crowd in a restaurant were dressed up and the rest were in working gear.

  ‘Buy it!�
�� her father ordered at her tenuous mention of the garment. ‘In fact buy half a dozen of them for all I care. Goodness, girl. We can afford it, you know.’

  He grinned engagingly, then a slight spasm of pain crossed his face and Kelly realised she had stayed too long; he was tired.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she consented. ‘I’ll buy out Grande Prairie if it’ll make you happy. And I promise to look more like a girl when I come this afternoon. Or would you like me to give that a miss? You look very tired all of a sudden.’

  ‘No way,’ her father denied stoutly. ‘I’ll be fine by this afternoon, and even better to see you looking civilised for a change. Now off you go.’

  She went. And several hours later she was wheeling the truck into a parking space near her father’s house, idly wondering why even the city’s residential streets should be clogged with vehicles.

  She needed three trips to unload the bags and boxes of clothes she had purchased since leaving the hospital. In addition to the pale green dress, she had found four other suitable dresses, two pant suits and various other items of clothing that suited her admirably. Perhaps her favourite, however, was a gay green-and-white gingham frock with a peasant neckline and flowing, carefree lines that accentuated her femininity without drawing undue attention to her youthful size.

  When she finally finished unloading her purchases on to the living room sofa, it was the gingham she opened first, intending to wear it to visit her father that afternoon.

  But with two hours before the visiting time, she was suddenly struck by her own tiredness, and after taking all her purchases into the bedroom she had used previously, she stacked them on a wardrobe and laid herself down on the bed with the idea of grabbing just a quick nap.

  She slept fitfully, her rest punctuated by a series of flickering images, half-formed and vague, of wild animals hunting in the forest. Where she herself fitted into the dream, she never did figure out, but Grey Scofield was there as the gaunt, wild leader of a wolf pack, moving with a free, almost ghostly ease of movement that was both terrifying and irresistible.

  Even in the dream, one of those vague types that occur only in the half-world between sleep and wakefulness, Kelly was aware that she should have been there, should have been prancing in a red fox pelt far ahead of the wolf pack, using cunning and vixen know-how to keep herself safe. But although she saw the dream through the eyes of a watcher, she could not see herself at all.

  Marcel Leduc was there; he pranced behind the leader in a reddish-brown pelt that matched the hair of the living man. The eyes of the reddish wolf were those of the French- Canadian, though his face was never clear.

  And suddenly, to the amazement and fearful surprise of Kelly as the dream-watcher, the blonde vision from the restaurant was there also, a lithe, graceful she-wolf with a coat so stunningly white-blonde it gleamed like sun-fire, and ice-blue eyes that seemed to see Kelly watching her.

  The she-wolf led the grey leader into a dance of leaping, joyful pre-mating, and when her eyes weren’t locked with his, leading him on, they flashed like mocking beacons, derisive and laughing at Kelly. The two animals ran and bounded and turned back upon themselves like the flickering of an open fire, the grey wolf unheedful of everything in his quest for the female, but the pale, white-blonde one clearly aware of the watcher and mocking her.

  They gambolled through the meadows, into and out of huge, park-like timber, and finally to the edge of a high, glass-clear mountain river that Kelly’s dream mind recognised as the Kakwa River above the falls. Smirking, the she-wolf drew her follower into the crystal, sparkling waters, swimming with powerful movements downstream to where the waters sped over the high rim of the bedrock, past the enormous cave beneath the waterfall’s crest, to thunder in a cacophony of spray on the rocks below.

  And where the dream had been silent, it suddenly look on noise and dimension as the gaunt grey wolf gave himself to the pull of the current, allowing the river to carry him downstream to his pale feminine counterpart, or to the falls themselves.

  Kelly seemed rooted, unable to follow the descent except in her vision, and this outraged her. Throughout the earlier part of the dream her third-person status had followed the wolves like a shadow, but now she was rooted in one spot, able only to watch as the two figures dwindled in size on their downstream journey.

  Her sight dimmed by distance, she saw the blonde figure emerge from the rushing, sun-drenched waters, shake like a dog and then suddenly rear .itself erect in a dramatic resumption of human form. But the other figure, the grey one, was captivated by the torrent, and she heard a yodelling howl as it was dragged towards the brink of the falls amid the roaring hiss of the river.

  Again that awesome howl, this time taking on a note of desperation as the water surged louder ...

  Kelly’s eyes snapped open, suddenly wide awake as she realised the yodel, and indeed the hiss of falling water, was more real than dream. The sound came again, , this time a definite yodel against the noise of the shower in the bathroom next door, and she flung herself from the bed in a single scurrying motion.

  Her clothes lay where she had laid them, and without thinking much about it she grabbed up the gingham dress and slipped it over her bare shoulders as she stalked towards the bedroom door, her bare feet soundless on the carpet. The bathroom door was shut, and for the moment she ignored it as she scurried to the kitchen and grabbed up the first weapon she could find, the carving knife.

  It never occurred to her to take the course of common sense — straight out the front door and into the relative safety of the street. Indeed, she would wonder later at whatever devil possessed her to result in five foot three of red-haired girl sneaking up on the closed bathroom like an Indian on the warpath.

  She was almost there, moving inch by inch as she tried to bolster her nerve, when she suddenly realised that the noise of the shower had ceased.

  Kelly stopped, one foot in the air and the knife poised in her hand, but even as her mind tried to assimilate this new circumstance, the bathroom door opened.

  ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ The voice took on a rising note at the end of the question, but once glance at the pale eyes told her that it wasn’t a note of fear.

  Indeed, Grey Scofield’s eyes held only a heaping measure of bewilderment as he stood, casual yet poised for motion if it should be necessary, naked but for the towel that encircled his trim, muscular waist. His generous mouth was quirked in a half-grin, and his eyes sparkled beneath the mop of curly, still-wet hair that dripped tiny sparkles of water on to his broad shoulders.

  Nowhere was there the slightest indication that he found it unusual to emerge from the shower to be confronted by a knife-wielding redhead, and his total calmness struck at Kelly like a physical blow.

  She herself was anything but calm. The surprise of finding her unexpected visitor was Grey Scofield was enough in itself to make her speechless, but the sight of that immensely masculine form so close, and so close to nakedness, only made things worse.

  ‘Wha ... what are you doing here?’ she finally stammered, putting down her upraised foot and dropping her hands to her sides as if no longer aware of the foot-long knife in her hand.

  Grey’s eyes flashed with subdued laughter. ‘Well, I could be going to a Roman tea-party,’ he grinned. ‘Or...’ with a significant look at the knife Kelly still held ‘... I could be preparing myself to be a virgin sacrifice. But actually I was just taking a shower.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant and you know it,’ she snapped, her anger rising to replace the confusion inside her. ‘What are you doing here, in my father’s house?’

  ‘1 thought I just answered that,’ he replied calmly. ‘But I suppose you want to know what right I have to be taking a shower in your father’s house? Simple, actually. Since there’s such a shortage of accommodation in town, we agreed it would be easiest all round. He uses my house when he’s in Calgary, if that helps explain anything to you.’

  ‘So you just come and go as
you please, without asking permission or anything?’ Kelly knew the answer before she asked, but she simply had to say something in the face of her growing nervousness of this man. Why hadn’t her father told her about this arrangement?

  ‘Well, I was going to ask your permission,’ he replied with a wicked grin, ‘but you looked so peaceable, sleeping, that I didn’t have the—’

  ‘You ... you Peeping Tom!’ Kelly burst out, her freckles disappearing in the flush that rose from her throat at the thought of Grey Scofield looking in on her asleep, wearing only her gauze-thin panties.

  ‘Make up your mind,’ he laughed. ‘It was either that or be rude. And I can assure you I didn’t make a great production of looking you over; I’ve seen half-naked women before.’ He paused, and then: ... although seldom any quite as attractive as you, if that helps.’

  ‘It does not!’ Kelly’s embarrassment had turned quickly, congealing to a white-hot, blazing anger, and her fingers tightened on the handle of the carving knife as if she wanted nothing more than to carve out his laughing, sneaky eyes. Which wasn’t far from true, she knew.

  Grey glanced at where her knuckles showed white on the knife hasp, and he shook his head sadly. The laughter stayed in his eyes, however, when he spoke.

  ‘All right, I apologise. Although why, I really don’t know.’ He glanced down at the knife. ‘And now, unless you’re honestly planning roast Scofield for dinner tonight, why don’t you put that thing away and put the coffee on. I’ll join you as soon as I’m dressed.’

  ‘You can make your own damned coffee!’ she flared. ‘And your own dinner as well.’

  ‘Have it your way,’ he shrugged. ‘But I am going to get dressed, if you don’t mind.’ And without another glance at the knife, he shouldered his way past her and disappeared into the house’s second bedroom, padding wolf-like on his bare feet.

  When the door closed behind him, Kelly closed her eyes and shuddered back a scream of absolute frustration, her entire body trembling with the urge to throw something at him. Then she returned the knife to the kitchen and fled to her own room.