That evening as Roxie and Dylan were preparing dinner, someone knocked on her door, and when she answered it, she was surprised to see Luke standing on her front doorstep, smiling at her and looking a little sheepish. “Uh, sorry, I left one of my bags on the other side of the bed. I thought I had gathered everything up earlier.”
She swore he wasn’t telling the truth and suspected he wanted a reason to come back and see them. What if they’d been in the middle of something private?
He smelled the aroma of beef stew cooking in the kitchen and said, “That smells good.”
“I’d invite you to stay for dinner but I’m sure the Silvers already have plans to feed you there,” Roxie said.
“Oh, they said I can eat over here if it’s all right with you.”
“Are you sure? We have plenty of extra food for all of us, but I don’t want to upset the Silvers if they plan to have you eat with them. I’ll just give them a call.” Roxie wasn’t sure if Luke was telling the truth. He appeared to be anxious about things, and given the way he’d shown up here, she suspected he felt more comfortable with them, or with Dylan, in any event. Then she frowned. “Did they just drop you off here?”
“Yeah, they said it was all right if I ate here,” Luke said.
But he hadn’t made sure it was all right with Roxie! She got on her phone and called Lelandi. “Hey, it’s Roxie. I guess one of you dropped Luke off here to get his other bag.”
“Yes, and he said you invited him for dinner.”
Roxie sighed. “Okay, well, he’s certainly welcome to join us anytime, and once Dylan leaves, he can still come over to see me at any time he wants.” She wanted to remind Luke that Dylan wasn’t hanging around. But then she wondered if that was why he wanted to be here. To hang around here to get to know Dylan more because he was leaving soon.
“I think he wants to see more of Dylan,” Lelandi said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Maybe, if it’s all right with you, he can visit sometimes during the week. The kids want Luke to go skiing with them tonight, and he said he wants to. After dinner, he can head over to the lodge and ski with them,” Lelandi said.
“Yeah, that certainly works.” Roxie thought Lelandi was a wonderful and caring pack leader. Luke couldn’t be in better hands.
“Then Darien will pick them up from the lodge tonight.”
“Okay. I’ll let him know. Thanks, Lelandi.” Then Roxie set her phone on the dining room table. “Serve up three bowls of stew, Dylan. Luke’s staying for dinner and then going skiing with the Silver triplets. But you know, Luke, you should really ask me if it’s all right first to come and have dinner with us.”
“I was afraid you would have said no.”
“I wouldn’t have. But we might have been going out for dinner or not made enough food for three. And you need to be honest with the Silvers and with us.”
Luke took in a deep breath and exhaled it. “Okay. About the skiing…” Luke said, hurrying to set the table as if he wanted to show how helpful he could be since he got a reprieve from eating dinner with Darien’s family. “I wondered if Dylan could go too.”
“No,” Roxie said, frowning at Luke.
Dylan chuckled and Luke laughed. “Ohmigod, you two sound like you’re mated already. There’s hope yet,” Luke said.
“He can’t go, even if he’d love to, because of his head injury. If he banged it again in a bad spill, it could have dire consequences,” Roxie said, pouring everyone a glass of ice water.
“Yeah, she’s right, as much as I hate to admit it, or I’d take you right up on it. Roxie could even go skiing with us.”
“Exactly.” Roxie sat down to eat with them.
“But you might turn into a wolf?” Luke asked her before he began eating his stew like he hadn’t been fed in forever.
“No. I should be good now since I was a wolf already this morning. But I’m staying at home for Dylan.” Roxie saw Dylan open his mouth to speak and she suspected he might tell her to go ahead and ski, but she gave him a look that said not to, and he quickly concentrated on spooning up some of his stew instead. Luke needed to be with the Silver triplets to have some fun if he was going to get to know them.
Then Dylan said, “Yeah, just in case I feel worse.”
She was worried about asking Luke how it was going with the Silvers in case he said he hated it over there, but she had to know if the reason he was here was that he was really unhappy being with them. “So how are things going with Darien and Lelandi and the triplets?”
“Oh, they’ve been great. They gave me a room of my own. Lelandi said that it had been Jake’s room, but he was now living with his mate, Alicia, in their own home, so he didn’t need it any longer. I played computer games with Benjamin. On some of them, he’s way better than I am. They said they’d get me my own computer so I could use it for homeschooling and playing games. Jake took his computer with him, but he left his desk behind. Everyone’s super nice. Darien is very much the alpha in charge of everything. Lelandi is more laid-back, but she’s just as alpha, and it’s funny seeing how much control she has over him. The triplets love it. But they’re only fourteen, you know.”
“You’ll meet some other teens who are older,” Roxie assured him.
Then they finished dinner, and they heard a knocking on the door. Roxie went to answer it. Darien and Lelandi’s triplets were there, smiling. She was surprised to see them here, but maybe they wanted to make sure Luke went with them skiing. “Is Luke ready to hit the slopes?”
“Yeah, coming!” Luke called out, hurrying to take his empty bowl into the kitchen. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome. Have fun skiing,” Roxie said.
“We will,” the kids all shouted and headed off to the ski lodge.
Dylan joined her at the door and smiled. “He seems to be happy enough. It’s all going to be an adjustment. Even if he’d stayed here, it would have been.”
“You know, he must have been an only child. So that makes a difference too—to be suddenly living with not only foster parents but a few kids he doesn’t know when he was used to being an only child,” Dylan said.
“At least Lelandi will know how to cope with it. Sorry for speaking for you when Luke asked if you wanted to ski with him.” She began clearing away the rest of the dishes.
Dylan put the leftover beef stew in a container and set it in the fridge. “You were only looking out for me.”
“I was afraid you would say yes, and I would have to contradict you.” Roxie put the dishes in the dishwasher.
He began scrubbing the pot they’d cooked the stew in. “No way would I have told him I was going skiing. I would love to, in truth, since you have such a lovely ski resort here and the powder looks great. But I could see injuring myself in some mishap, even just breaking a leg, and then how would I explain that to my boss? I can’t return to work because the doctor put me on medical leave for a head injury, but I can go skiing? Yeah, it wouldn’t look good at all.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I could see you having to look for a new job then.”
“In Silver Town? Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.”
She smiled. “I’m sure you enjoy your job.”
“I do.”
“Hey, like Luke said, we have a new movie theater in Silver Town. Would you like to go and see something? They even have those recliner seats and two of the theaters are 4D.” She checked her phone.
“4D?”
“Yeah.” She found a thriller she wanted to watch. “What about this one?”
He raised his brows as he read the description. “Yeah, I’m all for it.”
“We can buy our tickets online and pick our reclining loungers.”
He looked at her phone. “Yeah, these seats would be good. Not too close to the screen and in the middle so we can really see the whole screen.”
They headed out to the theater in her car since his truck was still parked at the lodge. “Why don’t we pick up your truck on the way back, and you can park in the garage since you’ll be here for the rest of the week. That way if we have hail, your truck will be protected.”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks. I guess you don’t have much trouble with car theft, vandalism, or break-ins at the resort.”
“Not usually, but we have had some incidents with not-so-nice guests, just like Jim and his hunter friends staying in two of the rooms. We did also have hail this summer that caused a lot of damage.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Which reminds me,” she said and called the front desk at the lodge. “Hey, Eliza, can you cancel the reservation for Dylan’s room?”
“Sure thing,” Eliza said.
“Thanks!”
When Roxie and Dylan arrived at the Silver Town Theater, she said, “A lot of work went into this to make sure it still fit in with the quaint feel of an old, western silver town in Colorado but at the same time with lots of lighting and to make it feel modern and unique.”
“It looks great.” They went inside, and even though they’d just had dinner, he bought buttered popcorn and bottled water for them.
This was so much fun. The theater was so new, she hadn’t even gone to it with a date yet. Just with her family once. Roxie and Dylan found their seats and sat down to watch the movie. They finished their popcorn, and he reached over and took hold of her hand. He was so sweet.
She snuggled next to him. The theater was cold, but mainly she enjoyed getting warm with him. The thriller was great, a real edge-of-the-seat twister. The American family was trying to get out of a country in the middle of a coup.
What made it even more exciting was that the seats moved, throwing Roxie and Dylan and the rest of the movie patrons forward as the family in the movie jumped across the top of one building to a much lower one down below. Everyone in the theater shouted “Whoa!” or “Oh!”
Rain poured down on the family, and a spray of water hit Roxie and Dylan. They laughed. Then the family got onto a scooter, the two adults and two kids all squished together, trying to reach the embassy for protection. They took a hard right to avoid the rebels, and the theater seats rocked that way, and then the family took a hard left down another street and the theater seats moved that way. Then the scooter was going down a steep set of stairs, bumping all the way as the theater seats bounced and tilted forward.
Everyone in the theater was laughing.
The family reached the embassy, but it had been destroyed, and they had to find another way out. They managed to get into a rowboat and made it across a river to the neighboring country and got asylum, the rain pouring down, while a mist of water squirted out at Dylan and Roxie.
She just loved this theater. Dylan was laughing as they left the room. “Now that is 4D. I loved it,” he said. “I’ve never been in one like this. I noticed an ice cream parlor near here. Would you like to have an ice cream treat?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That would be great.” She drove them to Silver Town’s Sweet Dreams, a new ice cream shop. It was decorated as a 1950s ice cream parlor, and everyone loved the new addition to the town.
“A root beer float for me,” Roxie ordered.
“I’ll get a toffee and chocolate-chip hot fudge sundae.” Dylan brought out his credit card.
“You know we’ll have to run as wolves after this,” she said. “We’ve eaten so much, and I’d love to stretch my legs—running as a wolf this time. But do you think you’ll be okay if we do it?”
“Yeah, I was fine last night, and like you, I wouldn’t mind working off some of the extra calories we’re having,” he said, paying for their ice cream. Then they sat down at one of the tables and began eating their delightful desserts. “You can shift again, right?”
“I sure can. I’m good now.”
“Good. Then that’s just what we’ll do.” He offered her a bite of his toffee and chocolate-chip ice cream topped with hot fudge and whipped cream.
She smiled, thinking how cute he was to share his treat with her, and ate it. “Ohmigosh, that is really good.” She’d never thought of combining toffee ice cream with chocolate. Then she held out her root beer float. “Want a sip?”
He chuckled. “Yeah.” He took a swig. “Now that is really good.”
“Yeah, everything they make here is.”
They caught a few wolf-pack members’ eyes, and they smiled. The word would spread through the pack for sure.
As soon as they finished their treats, they returned to Roxie’s house. “Why don’t you move your truck into my garage and then we can run as wolves. Do you want to run with the family or just the two of us this time?”
“I’d like to run with just you this time, if that’s all right with you.”
“Yeah, it sure is.” She always ran with some members of her family, so this was different for her. But she was going to enjoy this time with him. Once he was gone, she would be just running with the family again. She had to admit she liked that they could just strip and shift, then run. They didn’t have to wait to get the kids ready as wolves.
“I’ll be right back.” Dylan took off to get his truck, and it wasn’t much longer until he was parking in her garage and joining her in the house.
Then she saw Luke’s bag by the dining room chair where he’d been seated for dinner.
Dylan glanced in the direction she was looking and laughed. “Looks like Luke will be back.”
“Do you think he left it on purpose?” Roxie pulled off her jacket.
“Maybe, or the triplets distracted him and he forgot about it.”
“He’ll have to come for it tomorrow. We’re not waiting around for him tonight to return for it,” she said.
“Yeah, right. I wish he had a working phone and we could text him.”
“I’ll text Lelandi and let her know we’re going running as wolves and he forgot his bag again.”
“All right.” Dylan continued to strip off his clothes.
She texted Lelandi and got a text back from her: I’ll tell him. We’re getting him a new phone tomorrow.
Roxie texted: Great! He needs one. We’re off to run as wolves.
Lelandi: Enjoy!
Then she put her phone on the table and hurried to finish stripping really quickly while Dylan shifted and headed to the door. She soon joined him, and the two of them took off on their wolf run.
She really wanted to check out the area where Luke’s tent had been, but she thought that Dylan should have another night of rest first. If he was feeling better in the morning, they could run as wolves before dawn and check it out.
For now? She was just having a fun run with the hot wolf. Running with him as a couple was glorious.