Chapter 1
Their eyes met across the icy stream.
Meghan choked on a scream and dropped the tin of Sheppard’s ashes from numb fingers onto the snow bank, scrambling to catch the vessel before it rolled down into the frigid water.
In the few seconds that it took her to recover it, cursing the lost ash that stained the white snow, the wolf across the water vanished.
Meghan knew the difference between dogs and wolves.
She was well-acquainted with huskies and half-breeds and ferocious-looking working dogs that thought all couches should belong to them.
She’d known blue-eyed, long-legged sled dogs with upright ears that might have been cast as wolves in movies, and this was nothing like that.
This was a powerful creature, nothing resembling domesticity in its golden eyes.
It wasn’t well-groomed or lolling a tongue from one end of its long mouth.
It had been intense, focused, and undeniably wild, with paws the size of dinner plates and long gray fur in a tousled mane around its thick neck.
Meghan willed her heart to slow, trying to breathe evenly again as she clutched the tin to her chest. If it weren’t for the disturbed snow just across the creek, she might have thought she’d imagined the encounter entirely.
Wolves in the area weren’t unheard of, but they were still rare, and shy of people. Meghan hadn’t heard any reports of sightings recently.
If Sheppard had been with her…Meghan’s heart squeezed in her chest, making her efforts at getting her breath under control futile. Sheppard would have barked his head off at the first scent of the wolf, wild to protect her, if woefully undersized for a foe like this.
Meghan bowed her head, letting the tears fall as the shock of the contact ebbed away.
Sheppard had been the best dog: half of everything, she used to tease him. Half a lab, half a husky, half a German Shepherd, possibly (he was a lot of dog). His ears were half-floppy, and he only had half a tail, half a brain, and half an ounce of sense.
Only his heart had been whole, and they had shared everything.
He would have thought this was the best adventure of all, because in his adoring eyes, every adventure was the very best. He would have taken complete credit for the wolf’s disappearance, and strutted proudly around in celebration of protecting his human, lifting his leg at the edge of the stream and shoving his face into snow banks like an idiot.
When he was a puppy, she might have worried that Sheppard would try to attack a wolf, over-sure of his own abilities and under-aware of his own vulnerabilities. But Sheppard had grown old and stiff and seemed content, these last few years, to fight with his ferocious bark alone.
Now, of course, she didn’t have to worry about that at all.
Her fingers were going numb around the tin, and her vision was swimming behind tears. She probably shouldn’t be hanging around sobbing like an idiot where she’d just spotted a wolf.
“Goodbye, Sheppard,” she choked, and she sprinkled the rest of the ashes into the stream. After a moment, she used the tin to scoop what she could of the ash-spattered snow into the water as well. It felt disrespectful to leave parts of him there.
Then she scrubbed away her tears and went to work.