Free The Alpha's Daughter by Jacqueline Rhoades Page A

her jacket
and folded it neatly over the back of a chair. "Big, hairy, grumpy,
growly…" She spread her hands wide. "Oh! Wait a minute. Grizzly
Bear!"
    "I'm not that bad," he said following her
into the kitchen and the way he lifted his nose and sniffed only
added to his bearlike image. "Smells good."
    "Roast beef and you are that bad." She opened
the oven and pulled out the pan. The meat was rare and juicy. "I
found some onions for roasting with the meat and some potatoes in
the bin. Give me twenty minutes and we'll have supper. You want
vegetables?"
    She didn't eat much that was green, but
unlike many of her kind, she wasn't adverse to the idea. They'd
always had vegetables when she was little and she'd developed a
taste for some of them. Like their wolf cousins, wolvers were meat
eaters and used bread and potatoes to hold the meat or sop up the
gravy.
    "Don't know if we have any."
    Jazz pointed to the big, open closet behind
the back door. "You've got like thirty jars of green beans back
there and some purple things I think are beets. There's a whole lot
of other stuff back there, too. If you don't eat it, why do you
have it?"
    "Because they eat it, so they pay me with
it."
    Jazz paused in taking plates down from the
shelf. "They pay you in green beans?"
    "Sounds funny when you put it like that." He
reached for the plates and flatware she'd gathered and set two
places at the table.
    "Sounds funny no matter how you put it." She
handed him two glasses.
    "You don't realize how poor most of these
wolvers are," he told her. "They pay me in cash when they have it,
but mostly they pay with what they can spare; milk, eggs, chickens,
that chunk of beef there, piglets from a spring litter."
    Jazz looked out the window over the sink at
the beasts rooting around in the mud. "Those aren't piglets."
    "They were when I got 'em."
    "You can't possibly eat all that stuff in
that tin box you call a refrigerator," she said. It was packed full
to bursting.
    "What I can't eat, I give away."
    "So let me get this straight. They give you
all this food to take care of them and you give it right back."
    "No," he chuckled, "Those that have it give
it to me and I give it to those that don't. They give me canned
goods, too. Vegetables are cheaper to raise than meat and I've been
thinking a lot about that. Did you know that wolves get a lot of
the vegetable nutrients they need by eating the stomach and
intestines of their kill?"
    "No, can't say I did, but I could have
happily lived my life without that picture in my head." She'd never
been tempted to hunt as a wolf and preferred her meat in nice neat
packages.
    "Not many wolvers eat wild anymore," he went
on, ignoring her comment and warming to his subject, "Even when we
hunt, we tend to drag it home and process it. There are some
maladies I've heard about and seen that modern wolvers suffer from,
but I don't see those things up here and I'm wondering if that
isn't because these folks are too poor to eat a strict but
nutritionally limited diet of meat."
    Once started, the man who didn't talk much,
didn't shut up. He talked while Jazz disappeared into the closet to
retrieve a jar of green beans. He talked while he carved the meat
and she mashed the potatoes. He talked his way through supper and
she listened.
    He cared about these people and he took good
care of them without any thought to how much they could pay. This,
too, was new to Jazz whose father and by extension his pack never
did anything for anyone without calculating the profit first. As
she listened, she couldn't decide if her grizzly was simply a good
man or had a screw loose in that amazing brain of his.
    And listening to him talk, there was no doubt
in her mind that his brain was amazing. He not only treated these
people with care and respect, he studied them in order to better
understand their species. He wanted to help not only the wolvers of
this pack, but every wolver on the planet.
    "That's what all those papers are," Jazz
finally