3. Doreen
DOREEN
As Hester turned to usher Doreen upstairs, a door slammed distantly out in the parking area, and there was the beep of a horn.
“Sounds like our winter supply of wood’s here,” Mauro said. “I’ll go help unload while you show Doreen the place.”
He went out the front door. Doreen followed Hester to the wide staircase leading up to the second floor. There was house wrap over some of the windows, but Doreen still had a nice view as she climbed the stairs.
The clouds had drawn nearer, she saw, and the tops of the trees lashed back and forth in the wind. It was a good thing she wasn’t going to be driving back tonight. She could tell a storm was rolling in.
Parked near one of the outbuildings, she saw a beat-up red truck with old-fashioned wooden slats enclosing its flat bed. The back was piled high with split wood. Mauro was walking swiftly across the yard towards the truck. Doreen couldn’t see anything of the driver except a flash of a plaid shirt as he moved around behind the truck. She found herself craning at the truck, trying to identify the exact make by pure habit.
“I’ll go out and see if they need help as soon as I get you set up,” Hester said, seeing that Doreen had stopped to look out the windows.
“I can help if you like,” Doreen offered, turning to take a step down without really thinking about it.
“Goodness, no! You’re a guest, we don’t need you tossing wood around.”
Somewhat reluctantly, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom, Doreen went on up the stairs. She kept wanting to look over her shoulder, as if watching Mauro and the red truck guy unload wood was more fascinating than seeing the room in which she was going to spend the weekend.
“I hope you don’t mind if I ask about this,” Hester said. “Delano, your last name—I don’t suppose you’re related to a Walter Delano, by any chance?”
“He’s my brother,” Doreen said. She still felt compelled to keep glancing out the window. All she could see was Mauro tossing pieces of wood off the back of the truck, where the unseen driver must be catching them.
“Oh, wow. Mr. Delano has a sister? I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. He was my school guidance counselor,” Hester explained.
“I know,” Doreen said. Okay, that probably sounded weird. “I mean, he told me one of his students runs the lodge. That’s what made me look it up and book a room. Walt asked me to say hi to you if I saw you here, by the way.”
“Oh, how nice of him. Please tell him hi back for me.”
They were in the upstairs hallway now. Looking around, Doreen asked, “You don’t heat the whole lodge with wood all winter, do you?”
“Oh, heavens no. That would be a lot of wood. No, the firewood is for the fireplace in the lobby. It’s very nice when it’s chilly outside. In fact, we could make a fire for you tonight, since it looks like we have plenty of wood. That’s one of my first and best memories of the lodge, Mauro showing me how to light a fire when I first got here.” Her smile was soft and reminiscent as she stopped in front of the door at the end of the hall and took out a large, old-fashioned key.
“Oh wow,” Doreen said. “I don’t remember the last time I was in a hotel that had actual keys.”
“I know, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? Mauro and I talked about switching over to key cards, but neither of us want to.” Hester looked down at the key in her hand, and her smile turned playful. “I mean, look at it. Why would anyone want to change a piece of art like this?”
She held the key up. It had a heart-shaped head.
Doreen laughed. “Are they all like that?”
“No, just this one. It’s the key to the honeymoon suite. I’ll show you some of the rooms, and you can choose which you want. This one is a bit ... much, so I understand if you’d rather something smaller. But it is the nicest one, and you were promised a spa weekend.”
She opened the door, and Doreen gazed into the room. It was all white and pink and red, with a huge bed piled in pillows and a plush carpet and an open door showing an equally enormous bathroom. This didn’t look like a place for her , big and bold and motor-grease-stained. She felt as if she would smudge the pale pink and snow white just by looking at it.
But just as she had found herself craving a spa weekend of being pampered, she found that she did actually want this too. In fact, she wanted it badly. If she wanted to be a soft, cuddly badger princess for the weekend instead of a do-it-yourself, wrench-wielding mechanic, who was going to judge her?
“Yes,” Doreen said. For some reason, she had a fleeting thought of the wood truck and its elusive owner; strange how things could get inside your head that way. “I love it. Thank you so much. Will it be any extra charge?”
“We’re not going to charge you,” Hester said, horrified. “This is all on us. It’s the least you can do for putting up with banging and clattering instead of peaceful woodland noises, and having to eat with Mauro and me in the kitchen. You can reward us with a nice review.” She glanced out the window. “I’d better go help finish stacking the wood before the rain starts. Here!”
She pressed the key with its heart-shaped head into Doreen’s hand and scurried off down the corridor, calling over her shoulder, “There will be chocolates later! I think we have some!”
Left alone in the huge room, Doreen wandered over to the window. The view was gorgeous. The big front windows of the hotel looked out on the lawn and the road and the drop down into the lowlands, but the room windows looked out on forest and mountains, giving an impression of perfect privacy. The clouds were dense and low now. A little rain spattered the window.
She took a quick look into the bathroom. There was a huge mirror and a sink with a wide countertop on which Doreen’s small handful of toiletries would probably look lonely and abandoned.
Which reminded her: she’d left her luggage in the car. Not that there was much, a single small bag, but she didn’t want to bother Hester and Mauro to fetch it for her. She could easily get it herself.
She left the honeymoon suite and hurried down the front staircase. Out in the yard, the wood unloading was still going on with Hester’s help. The way the split logs were being tossed around, it was clear that the other person was a shifter too.
This might not be the spa of her dreams, but in a different way, it was a dream come true indeed: a place where shifters didn’t have to hide their strength and hold themselves back to avoid human notice.
She went out the front door. There was a wide porch, half of it swathed in house wrap, and a short flight of steps leading down to the front walk and parking area. As she left the shelter of the porch, a few drops of rain struck her head. Doreen decided to go over and see if they needed another pair of hands before the rain hit.
The log truck was parked in front of a large open-fronted shed that was neatly stacked full of wood. Hester was putting a few stray pieces into the shed, while Mauro chatted with the driver of the truck, who stood with one foot on the running board and the door open.
He was tall, rangy, and strong-looking, with dark hair just long enough that it was starting to curl a little. Broad shoulders strained beneath his plaid shirt, and his hands—one hooked into a belt loop of his jeans, the other resting on top of the truck door—were large and capable, dusted with dark hair on the backs. Doreen was a connoisseur of male hands, and these were just the sort that set her motor running, so to speak.
His face was turned away from her, listening to Mauro talk. But she must have made a sound, a snapping twig underfoot or something, because he looked swiftly toward her and she was caught off guard by the brightest, most intense green eyes she’d ever seen. He froze when their eyes met.
And she had the strangest feeling—not that she knew him, but that she should know him, as if they had known each other for their entire lives.
It took her a moment of dealing with that sense of shocked almost-recognition to realize that one side of the stranger’s face was badly scarred, paler scar tissue showing against his tanned skin, twisting into his hairline and his few days’ scruff of beard.
She had only a moment to look at him, because then he turned his face away from her, grunted something at Mauro, swung himself up into the truck seat, and threw it into gear. It all happened so fast that she had no time to react before she was staring at the truck’s wooden cribbing and tailgate as it bounced across the yard and vanished from sight.
“Who on earth was that?” Doreen asked, gazing after him.
“Oh, that’s Wick,” Hester explained. “Warwick. He’s a neighbor. He cuts wood in the forest and delivers seasoned firewood to the lodge. That’s what he was doing, dropping off a load. Of firewood, I mean,” she clarified, turning slightly pink.
“Warwick,” Doreen mused. She couldn’t understand why that one instant of eye contact intrigued her so much, or why he had left so abruptly. “He ... he doesn’t seem very friendly.”
“He’s—er—not. At least not at first. When you get to know him?—”
“—He’s still unfriendly.” Mauro finished the sentence, going past with a large roll of canvas over his shoulder.
Hester reached out to give him a playful shove. “Now stop it. Wick is a good guy.”
“He is,” Mauro said seriously. He began draping the canvas to cover the front of the woodpile, where rain might blow in. “He just keeps to himself. A lot of people in rural places are like that. Sort of like farm cats, they might want to make friends but they’d rather be the one to come to you.”
“Does he have a, um, phone?” Doreen asked.
“No,” Mauro said, while Hester looked at her curiously. “Just mail.”
“But how do you get in touch with him when you need more wood?”
“At the post office. There’s a little town at the base of the road you came up. The postmistress is friendly with the locals, and she passes messages along.”
“Wow,” Doreen murmured. It was like something from a previous century.
Also, it completely blew up her hope of getting Wick’s number.
But someone who didn’t even have a phone probably didn’t want visitors, as Mauro had said. She firmly squashed down her strangely agitated badger.
The rain started coming down in earnest just then, providing a convenient distraction. Doreen dashed for her car, grabbed her bag, and hurried into the lodge. Well, she thought, if it rained all weekend, she had brought a book, and the honeymoon suite seemed like a lovely place to hang out and pamper herself.
She ate dinner with Mauro and Hester in the kitchen, a delicious and hearty pot roast. Hester gave her a welcome box of chocolates afterwards. “Don’t forget recommend us to all your shifter friends,” she said. “ After we’re officially open, that is, a fact that I need to communicate to Mom immediately.”
Doreen couldn’t honestly say that she had very few shifter friends. She knew very few shifters at all other than Walt. She had probably met more shifters today than she had known at one time in her entire life.
Nibbling the chocolates, she climb the stairs to her room, glancing frequently out the big front windows into the rainy dark. She wondered how Wick was handling the rain, and then laughed inwardly at herself. He lived in these mountains; he was probably used to it. And soon there would be snow, too. And why was she thinking about Wick right now anyway? She hadn’t even spoken to the man! He took one look at her and ran away! Really, there was no reason to waste a single further moment thinking about him, but somehow she couldn’t help it. The mystery intrigued her, the memory of his green eyes even more so.
But for tonight, she had the whole honeymoon suite all to herself. She enjoyed a luxurious bath in the suite’s big hot tub, put on the fluffy complimentary bathrobe, and snuggled up in bed with her book and the box of chocolates. Rain lashed the windows, but she was safe and cozy inside.
It might not be the spa weekend of most people’s dreams, but it was the vacation getaway of her dreams.
Still, her thoughts kept drifting back to Wick. Her badger was obsessed, and so was she. In the morning, she thought, she would see what she could learn about him.