Wild by Jill Sorenson Page A

before, too. But he was so used to adoring women, he hadn’t recognized it.
    “I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable,” he said. “I didn’t mean to.”
    Helena steeled herself against those words. She didn’t want to feel a connection to him. It was harder to resist a man who cried for his sister and apologized in earnest. “I’m not giving you the cold shoulder. This is just my personality.”
    “If you say so.”
    “You don’t believe me?”
    “I’d rather know what I did to offend you.”
    She clenched her fists around the metal rung, making a revving motion. He was using his sneaky conversational skills on her, and they were working. She couldn’t deny him a simple answer. “I thought you asked me out as a joke.”
    “Why would I do that?”
    “To make the other guys laugh.”
    “They did laugh,” he admitted.
    “I saw them.” Later that afternoon, she’d spotted him with a group of male keepers. She’d walked by them on her way to the staff building, and they’d started guffawing like hyenas as soon as they thought she was out of earshot.
    “Louis told me you didn’t have a boyfriend. He set me up to get shot down, so yeah. They laughed their asses off.”
    She glanced over her shoulder at him again, evaluating his sincerity. It sounded like something Louis would do. Those guys loved to play pranks on each other, the dirtier the better. She should have considered this explanation before.
    “They weren’t laughing at you,” he said. “And I would never ask out a woman as a joke. That’s a dick move.”
    She flushed at his implication. She had assumed the worst of him. “I don’t always know how to interpret people.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It doesn’t come easily to me. I’m better with animals.”
    “I’ve gathered that.”
    “I’m also not a native English speaker.”
    “You’re not?”
    “I’m from Iceland. We speak Icelandic there.”
    “Huh.”
    “I wasn’t fluent until the third or fourth grade. So I got teased for having a weird accent, among other things.”
    “Like what?”
    “My height and lack of…good humor.”
    “Oh.” Exactly the same things he ribbed her about.
    “They called me Morticia Addams.”
    “Morticia Addams is sexy.”
    Her stomach fluttered with warmth. Her classmates hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but Josh did. She believed that he found her attractive—and it felt good to be wanted. On the other hand, he was young and hot-blooded. Judging by the amount of flirting he did, he had a roving eye and an overactive libido.
    “I tease you because I like you,” he said. “That’s why I asked you out, too.”
    “You like a lot of women.”
    “Is that why you said no?”
    “You know why I said no.”
    “What if you didn’t have a boyfriend?”
    “I did, and I do, so let’s drop it.”
    “Okay,” he said, agreeable. “Tell me about Iceland.”
    “It’s cold, and isolated, and surrounded by water.”
    He laughed at this terse description. “Why did you leave?”
    “My dad sent for us when I was five.”
    “He came here first?”
    “He was born here. He got stationed in Keflavík near the end of the Cold War.”
    “Navy?”
    “Air force.”
    “How long was he there?”
    “Long enough to get my mother pregnant.”
    “So you didn’t meet him until you were five?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Did you like him?”
    “I don’t remember much about him,” she said, which wasn’t quite true. He’d been brash, and affectionate, and handsome. She hadn’t understood what he was saying half the time, but she’d liked him. “He died when I was eight.”
    “Shit,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”
    She was sorry, too.
    “Have you been back to Iceland since then?”
    “Once, when I was sixteen. We went for my grandmother’s funeral. By then I was so Americanized I could hardly speak Icelandic.”
    “Were you sad?”
    She didn’t know if he meant the loss of her grandmother or the loss of her language. “Yes,” she