Wondering at the sudden alteration, Joey trailed off to silence. His eyes, which had taken on a distant expression not focused on her at all, sought hers again. “Go on,” he ordered Joey found herself grateful that the rage she sensed just under the surface of his toneless voice was not aimed at her.
“The wolf saved me,” she concluded. “The same wolf, I think, that I met a couple of weeks ago.” She paused to swallow and observe Luke’s reaction, half-expecting disbelief or derision. But he merely stared unblinkingly at her, as if she had commented on the weather. “I don’t know what else to think about it. The wolf appeared and apparently chased all of the men away. After I swam back to shore, the wolf reappeared. It looked at me for a few minutes and then ran off. I haven’t seen it since. And the men haven’t been back.”
Luke was silent. She could see no evidence of surprise or doubt on his face, even when his eyes searched beyond her to the forest. In fact—Joey shook her head mentally—she could almost swear that he was not surprised at all. That he had heard something he expected to hear.
Amazed at her own surmise, Joey found herself voicing it before she could stop herself. “That wolf—you know that wolf, don’t you?” She was rewarded by his sudden full attention, his eyes grew suddenly paler as the pupils contracted in shock. That question, at least, he had not expected, and Joey felt a sudden flare of smug satisfaction. “Does that wolf belong to you?”
Her satisfaction and sense of having unbalanced him at last was short-lived. Suddenly he laughed—a deep chuckle that rocked Joey back in genuine astonishment. She had heard him make a similar sound before—brief, subdued, edged with cynicism—but this was a fullblown laugh. The laugh seemed as alien to him as this wilderness was to her. It briefly transformed his face from grim severity to something approaching warmth. And then it died almost as quickly as it had come, leaving Joey’s ears ringing with it, and her heart pounding in confusion.
He looked down at her again, some of the humor still lingering in his eyes. “No one ever ‘owns’ a wolf,” he said softly. “But you might say that particular wolf and I are on very good terms.”
Joey took this in, with all its implications, while Luke’s gaze slid back to the trees behind her. The last of the humor vanished. “I can see I’ll have to do something about those men from town. They’ve come here once too often, and it’s about time they learned to stay off private property.” His eyes came to rest on her again with a significance she suspected she was missing.
“I think they may have learned their lesson, thanks to your ‘friend,’ ” Joey said. She could not quite control the shivering that had come over her in earnest, some of its was still the aftereffects of her ordeal, but the air was not getting warmer, and neither was she. Luke’s formidable shadow cut off much of the fading sunlight, and she knew she had little time left to get back. The thought of making the long hike to town, with the possibility of running into those men again, was becoming less appealing by the moment.
As if he had read her thoughts, Luke’s gaze raked over her. She tried to stop her shivering but might as well have asked the wild geese to forgo their annual migration, she could see him take in her condition for the first time. She managed to draw some humor out of the fact that, like most men, he was so completely self-absorbed.
But he reacted. His eyes narrowed again with an entirely different emotion “Perhaps. But I’ll have to make certain of it in any case.” She could feel him step forward even when she kept her gaze turned carefully away from his all-too-intrusive presence. “You’ve been out here too long,” he muttered gruffly. “This is not the time of year to be sitting around in damp clothes.”
Joey almost laughed in disbelief. “You re telling me that?” She couldn’t help herself, she drank him in again from head to toe, and this time, for the briefest moment, the faintest color rose in his tanned face. But it was nothing to the blush that followed in her own when she realized how thoroughly she had once again acknowledged his unclad state. And that awareness of him had never entirely left her, not since he had appeared like a primitive wilderness deity on the beach.