Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 121735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“Looks like you’ve stayed in the New England area.”
“I prefer the cold, so getting me any further south than Pennsylvania is tough. Oh, and yeah, sure, I’ll take a drug test and agree to a background check. I have nothing to hide.”
He’d handwritten the responses on the application form, everything in neat, block letters.
“So you like cold weather?” she asked.
“Yes, and I need to be outdoors. That’s why what you’re looking for is good for me. I can take care of your trails, your buildings, your vehicles. I can handle anything from plumbing to electric to Sheetrock.”
“A Dan of all trades.”
“You got it. And I’m not afraid of long hours, either.”
“You were born in Rochester, huh?”
“Yup. But we moved around a lot. Mom had to take what she could find for work. She was pretty much on her own with me. Small family, you know the drill.”
Lydia looked up. There was no emotion showing on his face, but like that would have been appropriate? He was here for a job, not an amateur therapy session.
“I come from a small family, too,” she murmured.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Just my granddad and me. We stayed put, though, until he died.”
“I’m sorry you lost him. Where’d you grow up? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“The Pacific Northwest, actually.”
“Ah, so that’s why you’re here. You like the trees and the mountains.”
Lydia smiled. “Yup, exactly. I’m an outdoor person, too.”
“What do you do here?”
“I’m like the census taker for wolves. 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.