Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,25

of her mouth. She was always careful, and she was her daughter’s role model! You didn’t wear a tight sweater and tell the guy about your sore thighs, and then tell him you liked it strong. She hadn’t realized how it would sound until she’d said it, or actually until Dyma had kicked her, but now that she had? Could she be more obvious?

And Thing Three. The snowmobile guy, who was proof, if she’d needed it, that, yes, whatever Dyma thought, and whatever a petite eighteen-year-old could wear and look darling, a grown woman with a small frame and a triple-D cup could not wear that same thing without looking like she wanted action. She knew that. She’d known it for twenty years. Why had she picked tonight to forget it?

But, yeah. The snowmobile guy. Kris was about to jump straight into it, and that wasn’t going to end well, so she jumped first. She picked out the kid who’d almost run her down—easy enough to do, because the other kid was taller and chubbier—and said, keeping it friendly, “Well, hi. What a surprise. How are you? Remember me?”

The group hesitated, then stopped, and she went on, “We’re the ones who were around the bison with you when all the, uh, excitement happened. I’m glad I saw you again. I wanted to ask how you were doing. That was pretty scary out there.”

The kid glanced at one of the men—his dad, probably—then back at Jennifer. “Nah,” he said. “It was OK. The bison was just warning us to stay away. I’m sorry I almost hit you, though.”

“You didn’t almost hit anybody,” the man said. The one who’d been telling the kid to pose with the bull. He wasn’t going to be winning any Father of the Year awards for that, and he wasn’t winning one now, either. “You were missing her all the way,” he told his son. “And that animal only got spooked in the first place because everybody started yelling and waving their arms. He was fine up till then.”

Kris said, “Seriously? You want to go there, after you took off and left your kid to be chased down by that bull? And yeah, I had to knock this lady out of the way of his snowmobile. She’s bruised up, but she’s going to be OK. Thanks for asking.”

“He’d have missed her,” the guy said again.

“Well, no,” Kris said, “he wouldn’t have. He was headed straight for her, and regular people can’t jump that fast.”

Regular people? What did he mean, regular people? He’d better not mean older people. Unfit people. He’d really better not mean chubby people.

“They tell you, stay twenty-five yards away from bison,” the other guy, Owen, put in calmly. “It’s a good rule. A bison’s not a wolf or a grizzly, but it’s plenty big.”

“They’re basically cattle,” the belligerent guy said. “And nobody stays twenty-five yards from cows.”

The others in the group were shifting some. Restless, looking to get out of here, because confrontation was unpleasant, and it was awkward. Jennifer knew how they felt. She wasn’t sure whether she was glad or sorry about this. She was glad to see the kid was OK, and it was exciting, she guessed. It was drama. Had she mentioned, though, how much she hated drama?

Owen’s tone was still completely mild. “That’s true in a way, and not true at all in another. I’m a rancher myself. Bison are wild, not domesticated, and yeah, there’s a difference. Difference of not being bred for hundreds of years to be easy to handle, for one thing. And bulls? No matter what you breed for, they’re a whole different story. My buddy here got on the wrong side of one of my bulls the other day and ended up flat on his back, thanking God there was a gate between them. You don’t want to mess with a bull.”

Kris said something under his breath. It sounded like, “Thanks, man.”

“Anyway,” Owen said, “guess we all learned a lesson, huh?” He clapped a big hand on the kid’s shoulder. The kid’s knees practically buckled. “Tell you a secret. The best lessons are the ones you learn the hard way. They stick the longest.”

The dad looked like he dearly wanted to say something else but was choosing not to. Jennifer could see why. Owen was enormous. He had to be six-five, six-six, something like that, and his shoulders were about a yard across, too. In a plaid flannel shirt and jeans now instead of