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“If you’re not here.”
“So, you won’t take off unless he comes?”
“Right.”
“And if that happens and I’m not here, where do I look for you when I arrive?”
“We’ll work all that out. There’s a lot to do. We’ll need to plan to be off the grid for a while.”
“Living in the wild?” he asked. “Just us and two wolves?”
“Sound too rough for you?” Her words were probably meant as a tease, but her tone was full of uncertainty. Was she worried he’d turn her down? That thought mentally jolted him. Since he’d met her, he’d worried about the day she walked away from him. It’d never occurred to him that she’d worry about him taking a hike.
“Sounds like paradise.”
Oakley’s smile was like the sun emerging from a dark storm. “It sure does.”
It definitely sounded like paradise to Oakley. She’d love to try living like her ancestors, making the trekthrough the seasons and across the land, following the pack. Could she survive?
Of course. She knew how to hunt, what plants were safe to eat. Her father, and then the Army, taught her how to build emergency shelter, survive the cold, the storms and man.
Could she be happy living a nomadic life? She cut a look at Gunner, suddenly wondering what such a life would be. Would the day in and out togetherness, the effort required to survive, provoke snipes, and dissatisfactions?
Maybe thinking she could live the way her ancestors did was a fantasy. No, there was no maybe to it. She couldn't, because society would no longer allow it. The only way to live such a life was for everyone who ever knew you to believe you’re dead.
She wasn’t ready for that. Heck, she didn’t know what she was ready for. She dove into this thing because of the wolves, and she was still determined to continue working with them. But her motives for doing so had started to change.
That was largely due to Sadie Three Rivers, her Aunt Grace’s best friend since birth. Meeting Sadie changed her, and Sadie did it with one question. “Do you, of all people, Oakley Rising Wolf, believe that turning the wolves of the nation into servants of the government is an act of salvation?”
To her shame, Oakley had never looked at it from that perspective. Now that she had, her objective seemed to be losing nobility. She wanted to work with the wolves, but how could she advocate for turning them into something they were never designed to be? Trained to do man’s bidding.
That wasn’t their purpose. And they deserved to live the way nature intended, as part of a pack. Had she turned her life upside down for something that was a bad idea? She had no doubt that some still thought it a noble cause, but she was no longer sure.
She thought about that every day. Was her goal a form of exploitation? She was ashamed to admit that it could be viewed that way. At the very least, it denied a breed of magnificent animals something integral to their well-being. Freedom.
Oakley’s ideas started to change, and soon so did her goal. She knew how to stop Mason from getting into bed with Samir and protect the wolves at the same time. Sometime soon, she would talk to Gunner about it. But not until she had her plan fully developed.
At present, she was in the initial phases of planning and saw two goals that had to be reached to achieve victory. First, help the wolves find and integrate with a pack, and second, make sure if Samir came into the wilderness looking for them, he could not hurt them, even if that meant he was never seen again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Gunner looked in his rear view as he drove away. For the first time in his life, he wanted to put on brakes, turn around and go back. He didn’t have to deploy, but he did have things to take care of before his retirement was official.
But damn, he didn’t want to leave her.
How the hell did that happen? Gunner wasn’t sure how to deal with it.
But then he wasn’t sure how to deal with a lot of what was going on. Like yesterday. They took the wolves out before dawn and didn’t return until twilight. Just as they set foot inside the gate, Oakley and both dogs froze. Not just stopped and looked around, but froze, lifted their heads, and sniffed the air.
They remained that way for close to a minute, a minute in which he listened, trying to discern what had them so transfixed. When Oakley suddenly snapped to, she looked at him. “There’s someone here we need to meet.”
“How do you know that?”
“The smell is different.”
“Do you hear what you just said?”
“Yes.”
