Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven #1) - J.R. Ward Page 0,8
I track the pack numbers and locations throughout the preserve, and study patterns of behavior from feeding to breeding. I also work with our vet to monitor health. The gray wolf population all but died out in the Adirondacks and Upstate New York in the late eighteen hundreds, but they were reintroduced here on the preserve in the sixties when the balance of everything tilted.”
“Balance?”
“Biological systems are all about equilibrium. You take one piece off the table, everything rebalances in ways that are not always beneficial. The best thing to do is leave nature alone. Humans don’t like to do that, though—” She stopped herself. “Sorry, I’m on my soap box.”
“Don’t apologize. I like your passion.”
Lydia cleared her throat. “Do you have any questions for me? About the job?”
He tilted his head to the side. “Yeah, how do you keep tabs on them?”
“Them? Oh, the wolves, you mean. They have GPS chips, just like domesticated dogs, and we have monitoring cameras posted around the preserve. I also get out in the field and use drones from high altitudes. We have two thousand acres here so it’s a lot to keep track of.”
“That’s really interesting.”
“You’re humoring me.”
“I have no sense of humor, actually.”
Lydia laughed. “What?”
“No, it’s true. I can’t tell jokes and I rarely smile.”
Closing the folder, she frowned and sat forward. “That’s really a shame.”
“It is what it is. I have other skills.”
“You never laugh? Ever.”
“No, not really.” He shrugged those powerful shoulders. “It’s just a gene I don’t have.”
“I’ve never thought of humor as a recessive trait. Were your parents also comedy-challenged?”
His stare got a faraway look as if he were running through his family tree. “Well, there was my Uncle Louie. He was the black sheep of the family, laugh wise.”
“How so?”
The man with the strange, beautiful eyes refocused on her. “Knock-knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Uncle Louie.”
“Uncle Louie who?”
“See? It’s not funny.”
“Wait, what?” Lydia shook her head and laughed again. “That’s not a punch line.”
“Which is my point. He tried one, pathetic knock-knock joke and it’s a disaster. It has no punch line.”
Holding up her palm, she really tried not to smile so much. “But I thought he was the black sheep of your—that would mean he can tell a joke.”
“No, that’s how far down the unfunny hole we are. Even the black sheep can’t get far at all. We’re just that sad.”
As Lydia shook her head, she didn’t dare try to hide her smile behind sipping from her coffee mug. She was liable to have something come out of her nose.
“You’re funnier than you think you are, Daniel Joseph.”
“Will it get me this job? Because if I need to stand up on a stage and—well, do stand-up, I will?”
“I’m not sure how that would help with the nuts and bolts of things.”
“Well, have you got anything that’s broken I could demonstrate on?”
Try our executive director.
“How much do you know about toilets,” she said under her breath.
“Take me to your plumbing, ma’am.” He got to his feet. “I’m in.”
“Really?”
“If the toilet’s broken, you’d call your handyman, right? Rather than waste money on a guy with a wrench decal on his truck. So let me fix it for you.”
Lydia stood up, too. “It’s in the women’s bathroom.”
“Show me.”
Coming around her desk, she felt a pressure of speech that made no sense—and a tingling in her body that made the kind of sense she didn’t want to think about. She also had the desire to flip her hair over her shoulder, which was ridiculous: Considering she was calling a man in to do a job she could probably figure out herself, she was not going the ingénue route. Nope.
Pride goeth before the flirting.
“Here we are.”
Out in the hall, she pushed a door wide, and got hit in the face with a wall of strawberry: Pink walls, pink stall, pink sink, pink pink. And the air freshener on the counter as well as the hand soap and the lotion followed the Nesquik theme.
As Daniel coughed behind her, she was not surprised. “Candy likes the smell.”
“There certainly is a lot of it to go around.”
“And here is the patient.” She hipped the stall door open. “We’ve been having trouble with it—well, since nineteen seventy-three if you go by Candy’s timeline.”
When Daniel came forward, she eased back against the tile wall—and still there wasn’t enough room. So she got a brush of his soft shirt on the back of her hand, and more of that cologne in her nose.