Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,33
head out of the restaurant and through the bar with Dyma—and, yeah, she had some walking-away moves—and asked Owen, “Ready for that beer now?”
Owen said, “I could drink a beer.”
The bar was packed by now, as a place would tend to be when it was the only possible choice, because even so much as walking out the front door wasn’t an option. Being stuck here like this made Harlan itchy. He was more of a next-place guy than a put-down-roots guy, but once you showed up at Yellowstone in the winter? There was no place else to go.
Maybe the itchiness was due to more than that, though, because the two of them had no sooner dropped onto barstools than a thirtyish, outdoorsy blonde with legs that wouldn’t quit, who looked like she could ski all day long and then come back for some real fun, walked up to them and asked, “Excuse me. Aren’t you Harlan Kristiansen?”
“Who?” Harlan asked.
“The football player. You are, aren’t you? I saw you in that insurance commercial.” She was taking a good hard look at him—all of him—then glancing at Owen. “And you’re somebody, too. You have to be.”
“Everybody’s somebody,” Owen said gravely.
She hesitated another minute, and Harlan said nothing. Which, yeah, was rude, and probably didn’t happen to her much, since she was the high-gloss type, but he wasn’t going to encourage her. Finally, though, she headed off, back to a table where another woman, a brunette, waited. Harlan caught her out of the corner of his eye, pointing him out, working up her courage for another approach.
Owen said, “Maybe take the beers to my room,” and Harlan said, “Yeah. Sounds good.”
See? Trapped. On the other hand, they were having breakfast with Jennifer and Dyma tomorrow, doing some skiing with them, and then, obviously, coming back here, because there was no place else to go. Which would be the plus side.
Which was also why he needed to have this conversation.
“My room,” he told Owen when they’d headed down the hall. “It’s got two beds.”
When they were each sitting with their back against a headboard and holding a bottle of beer, Owen said, “This reminds me of my rookie season.”
“Except that we had TV and the internet,” Harlan said.
“Did they have the internet back then?”
Harlan sighed. “Man, the generational stuff is just going to get worse, isn’t it?”
“If you go after the mom? Probably.”
Harlan stopped a second, then said, “It’s one weekend.”
Owen took a swallow of beer. “Yep.”
“See,” Harlan said, “this is the problem with meeting women who’ve got depth. Depth just complicates things.”
“You saying you’re not going after her?”
“How can I, if I’m about to tell you that going after Dyma would be a dick move?”
“Because Dyma’s eighteen and Jennifer isn’t? Also—you think I don’t know that? Seriously, bro? She’s in high school.”
“I also think,” Harlan said, “that she spun your head all the way around.”
“It’s not my head that’s confused,” Owen said. “My head gets it.”
“So that’s a no, then,” Harlan said. “On both counts.”
“Yep,” Owen agreed. “That’s a no.”
11
Can’t Sleep. Can’t Sit
There was noise outside Harlan’s window. An eerie sound, like a horn.
It wasn’t the freaky near-scream of coyotes. He’d heard plenty of coyotes. He didn’t think it was wolves, either, though he’d sure like to hear those. He listened some more, then went over to the window and shoved it open. The snow swirled in, and the subzero air nearly sucked the breath out of his body. Like playing in Green Bay. Or like playing on his high-school field, in a flat, frozen land where football was the only thing there was. His ticket out.
The sound came again, much louder now, and he recognized it. Owls, two of them, calling back and forth to each other.
He listened a while more, getting colder but feeling better, then shut the window, grabbed the coffee-table book again, and looked them up.
Great horned owls. Dark spirits of the night, according to the Cheyenne. Moving silently with their fluted feathers, seeing in the dark, swooping down on their prey without warning, the horns on their heads symbols of their fearsome power.
Huh. They didn’t feel sinister to him. They just felt powerful. He’d heard them like this once in high school. The dead of winter, when football was over and there was no baseball yet, when he’d linger in the weight room to delay going home. One night, he’d driven up to find his mom out on the porch, her coat on, hugging herself.