The Cynic and the Wolf by Julie Steimle (ebook voice reader TXT) 📕

there also. The Christmas groups were leaving. The lodge needed to be decorated for their New Year celebrations. Someone suggested they do a whole High School Musical karaoke moment, but the others retorted that if they wanted it they should be the ones to run it. Audry finished scrubbing the last pot and left before they got into an argument over it. Apparently one of the staff was madly in love with Zac Effron, and everyone else was sick of hearing about him—including her.

She went to get her skis.

Audry was out on the snow and headed to the ski lift in a handful of minutes. But while she got in line for the chair lift, she noticed those three guys who had chased her that morning were heading for the parking lot. She could not tell if they had been caught and had paid the fine or not, but from their looks she figured they had decided to go home rather than mess with her. They must have realized that she really knew the owner of the establishment, and they clearly didn't want any trouble.

"You're that girl, right?" a feminine voice to her right asked.

Turning towards the source of the voice, Audry saw a cluster of four college-aged women waiting in line behind her, each one fashionably prepared to ski. "Excuse me?"

"Yeah, it's her," a different woman from the group said. They were also pretty girls, the kind of coeds that quickly joined sororities and giggled incessantly. This one's cheeks were a little pink on top from the sun. She looked directly at Audry as she said, "You're that girl whom the owner to his place was talking to. Do you really know him? Howard Richard Deacon the Third?"

Audry grimaced. "I know him enough. He signed the permission form allowing me to use his land for my Master's thesis."

"So you've talked with him," a brunette from the group asked with eagerness in her eyes.

Shrugging, Audry moved up in the line for the lift. "As much as I want to."

"What? Isn't he nice?" one of them asked. Her makeup seemed too perfect to be hidden behind ski goggles. Her mascaraed lashes were certainly way too long and would probably hit the plastic cover. Audry had a feeling she never intended to do any real skiing.

The others stared at Audry, waiting perhaps for some scandalous report on the young wealthy rogue.

But Audry sighed wearily at them and said, "Nice enough. Look, I'm just not interested in him. I have a boyfriend. And even a wealthy multi-billionaire cannot compare to him."

The ladies stared more. They were grinning as if drooling.

"Your boyfriend must be one really hot hunk of meat," one of them said.

Audry cringed, turning.

"I mean, if Howard the Third asked me," she continued. "I'd totally sleep with him. He's hot."

"I know!" one of the other ladies squealed.

Disgusted, Audry pointed to the lodge. "Have at it gals. When he wakes up from his nap, I am sure he will be raring to go."

They shared eager looks. "Really?"

Audry shrugged. "He's a rich playboy, isn't he?"

Three of the four grew almost fan-girl giddy with excitement. But the fourth leaned away and said, "But he really isn't. He doesn't party. And I heard he was hardly dating anyone back at Brown University. And he hadn't even kissed Selena Davenport."

"Then maybe he is gay," Audry suggested, thinking that was more likely. He had the good looks and a certain fashion sense. Gay men generally were more careful with their appearance than straight men. Maybe it had to do with an awareness that to draw in the one they wanted they needed to have a more attractive visual display. Men were visual creatures after all. Audry wondered if that was something worth studying. She might suggest it to Harlin.

"I don't think he's gay," one of them said, smirking back at Audry.

Audry raised her eyebrows. "Oh no?"

That woman nodded. "Yeah. A gay guy would flirt with the guys—and he doesn't. And Howard the Third does flirt with the girls."

Audry frowned, not sure she saw that. "Really? Which girls?"

"Jealous?" one of the girls asked, grinning.

"No," Audry said back, irritated.

"If he knows you have a boyfriend, I am sure he wouldn't flirt with you," that one girl who knew about Selena said. "I hear he is a supreme gentleman."

Audry stared, not believing that either. And yet… he had interfered when those guys were chasing her, and he did know she had a boyfriend. And despite being a quick-mouthed meat-eater, he was never rude to her. But ‘supreme gentleman’? What did that even mean? And for that matter, did they even exist? She hardly knew any. Besides, she had always dated troublemakers until Harlin. So maybe she didn't know what a gentleman was. The term 'gentleman' to her always meant a man who used social norms to hide his animal side—because men were simple, passion-driven animals. Sure, they could reason and all that. But their hormones always overrode their logic. And though men didn't believe they were like that, Audry knew that if a man was given a choice between a plain yet intelligent woman who could contribute a great deal to a relationship and a stupid yet beautiful woman, he'd choose the stupid beautiful woman most of the time. Which was odd since in the animal kingdom the females were the plain ones and the males were the flashy, colorful ones. It was a conundrum which had always bothered her.

"So ladies," their friend said, "I don't think he's a player."

"But he's got a player's ringtone!" one of them giggled.

"I'm hungry like the wolf…." Three of the girls chorused together.

Their friend laughed, nodding.

Audry flushed. She decided to leave the ski lift line. Skiing could wait.

A player's ringtone… That was the second bunch who had said that. It was starting to creep her out.

Going back to the lodge, Audry decided to do some catching up on the internet instead. She hung up her skis, took off her boots, and tromped up the stairs, feeling out of sorts. Kicking off her snow pants, she slipped into her fuzzy socks and went to YouTube as soon as her computer booted up. YouTube was full of things that were happily distracting.

While on the net, it was also a habit of hers to pull up multiple tabs and go back and forth from her favorite sites. She usually listened to YouTube podcasts while perusing emails, her Twitter and Tumbler, and posting animal pictures on Pinterest. Pinterest was actually a guilty pleasure because there she also looked at fangirl stuff which she never openly admitted to liking—popular trends which her friends sneered at as shallow. She regularly saved pictures of Tom Hiddleston, Alex Pettyfer, and Taylor Lautner, keeping herself updated on their movie news. She also had a pin board just on vegan dishes. There was another one called 'Bucket List' marking her favorite travel destinations. So far she had only completed two destinations on the list—Paris and the African savanna. She still had Mumbai, Dubai, Egypt, and Tibet left. She also wanted to go to that restaurant where giraffes ate off people's plates, the one in Nairobi.

But after sitting a while in her chair, her legs started to get stiff. Her back and arms began to ache. She could never really sit still for more than a couple minutes at a time, if that. It was another reason why she was not looking forward to going back to classes at NYU. Audry hated sitting still at a desk.

Getting up to stretch her legs, Audry decided to climb the stairs for exercise then walk around the lodge. She switched socks and shoes for that.

Up and down. Up and down. Audry soon veered into the lodging areas. This hallway was larger with a handful of special order rooms, the highest and largest of which was the Deacon suite. She had heard the Deacon suite was let out only to families with children when the Deacon family itself was not using it, which was interesting. Audry had never been in it, though she had been in one of the other single rooms. Those rooms were beautifully comfortable.

Passing all those doors, she went down the broader, main stairs. It was an open switchback going down four floors, which from the second floor opened into a balcony that overlooked the public lodge. As Audry went down toward the main floor, she noticed across the way in the 'reading nook' was Rick. His nose was in a hardback book which she didn't recognize.

She wanted to avoid him. Audry was still smarting from those things those girls out at the ski lift had said about the ringtone. Yet before she reached the main floor, Rick lifted his head as if he could smell her. Seeing this, Audry quickly stepped behind a low wall between two plinths supporting the vaulted ceiling, crouching down. The poinsettias standing atop the wall gave her enough cover so that she could make her way down and out of sight without being seen.

Audry sniffed herself. Was her shampoo or lotion too strong? It hardly had any scent that she could detect, but then she was used to her own smell. She peeked back once more to see if he had gotten up, but Rick had merely looked around then put his face back into his book.

 Taking her walk around the lodge, going down to the lower level of the main floor where there was an open lounge for ski patrons, Audry watched the snow through the front window. And though her mind drifted back to the reading nook, realizing she wanted to pick up something to read, she didn't dare go in. She was sure Rick was still there. In fact, Audry grumbled in herself, it was like everyplace she went that rich boy was there. It was annoying.

Audry decided to go into the kitchen.

Leaving the windows, she marched directly up to the second level of the main floor, going quickly past the reading nook and the cafeteria to the swinging doors.

Immediately inside, Audry wished she hadn't come. In the kitchen, they were chopping meat and putting it in a marinade.

Passing through the kitchen as quickly as possible, Audry made her way back to her room.

Unfortunately, she was back where she started—bored.

Digging through her bags for something to read, Audry took out her Kindle, on which she had about five hundred novels. Yet staring at it, she realized she had read all the ones she cared to already. Never had she been this bored before. So, with no other recourse but to go back onto the internet and download a new book, Audry did so.

Admittedly, Audry also had a few guilty pleasures in the fiction industry. And Audry blushed as she perused titles like Blood and Chocolate and Breaking Dawn, which (in her circle of friends) was not worthy to be read. They liked naturalist books about real people and events, and biographies—which was great and all. But there were days Audry wanted to escape the 'real world' and step into something a little more magical. She wasn't an out and out fantasy fan. But she did like her supernatural romances. Yet at school she had hid The Vampire Diaries where her roommates could not find it, and she chuckled along whenever people made fun of Bella and Edward's romance because she didn't want to get any flack for liking 'that sort of thing'. She felt cowardly acting that way, but there were some kinds of peer pressure that was more difficult to withstand than others. She could get righteously indignant about veganism as she had solid real world principles to back her view up with. But her gothic novel fetish? That was just a matter of taste and ‘popularity’.

While looking up books, searching for supernatural romantic fiction, she found a peculiar blog. It was called Everything Werewolf, run by a guy who called himself Anonymous_Wolf. He had done a movie review on the Red Riding Hood film with Amada