Hot Blooded

if
all that had gone before hadn't been amazing enough, it crouched down on its
forelegs, groveled the tiny distance toward her across the grass, and gave the
very tip of her fingers a pink-tongued kiss.
    Mariann gasped and snatched back her hand. Immediately the wolf sprang away,
trotting toward the trees with its head turned over its shoulder to her. Her
imagination lent it a look of regret.
    It vanished into the bracken without a sound.
    "Wow," she breathed, her hand pressed flat to her pounding chest. Forget sex
dreams with naked strangers. This had to be the most exciting morning she'd ever
had.
    Â 
    UNDERSTANDABLY, Mariann's quarter-mile bike ride to the bakery passed in a
daze. The winding back road she lived on led pretty much nowhere. She didn't see
a single car, parked or otherwise, until she hit Maple Notch's main street. City
people might have been nervous at the isolation, but Mariann loved it through
and through. Because of a promise to her father, she had her cell phone and her
pepper spray tucked into her fanny pack. Truth be told, though, in all her time
here she'd never come close to needing either one to protect herself—not even in
the height of tourist season. No matter her upbringing in the burbs, she'd been
born to be a small-town girl.
    With an absentminded glow of gratification, she pedaled past the country
store and the post office, then turned left at the one stoplight.
    O'Faolain's wasn't much farther. Formerly a carriage house, since her
grandfather's time the bakery had been an adjunct to the Night Owl Inn—and one
of its prime draws. Guests raved about the breakfast baskets left at their
doors, often coming back just for them. The current proprietors, who owned the
land on which her bakery sat, were continuing the partnership.
    The Luces had caused a stir upon their arrival in Maple Notch. With their
flowing hair and incredibly lit physiques, either of the tall, dark, handsome
cousins could have stepped out of the pages of a magazine. The older one, in
particular, dressed like a front man for Armani—perpetually on the verge of
looking too cool for the town.
    Familial relationship aside, rumors that the Luces were a couple seemed
inevitable. Once raised, however, they were quashed with surprising speed. No
gay man, common female wisdom decided, could look at a woman like those two did.
After encountering the younger Luce on his nightly run, the owner of the Clip
'n' Curl declared rather breathlessly that she thought he had "wanted to eat her
up."
    That she would willingly have been devoured was understood.
    If this influx of testosterone weren't sufficient to set tongues wagging, the
cousins were, apparently, filthy rich.
    Workers were hired at ungodly wages: architects, plasterers, even a
sommelier. The neighboring antique shops were beside themselves trying to supply
the inn with period furnishings. No one doubted the Night Owl would be a
Victorian showpiece when it was done. Previously a bastion of shabby kitsch,
soon it would be a gem to swell the breasts of all and sundry with local pride.
    If the Luces sometimes acted as peculiar as they were rich, that was
dismissed as "furrin" eccentricity. They were Frenchmen, after all, and to a
native Vermonter that was strange indeed. So what if they had never heard of Ben
& Jerry's? So what if they slept all day and had some bizarro allergy that kept
them out of the sun? The Luces were giving Maple Notch an unexpected shot in the
arm. As long as their checks kept clearing, no one gave a darn what they did.
    Mariann herself viewed them warily, though the younger of the two, Emile, was
extremely charming. Despite her doubts, she helped them redesign their kitchen
and promised to continue supplying them with baked goods. O'Faolain's, they
assured her, would always be a valued friend to the Night Owl Inn.
    Sometimes she thought she'd have trusted them more if they'd been plain. Her
ex had been handsome, a golden boy with a heart of brass. After a brief,
six-month honeymoon, during which he'd treated her like a queen, he seemed to
view cheating on her as his right: life, liberty and the pursuit of secretaries
in short skirts. When Mariann looked at Emile and Bastien, she couldn't help
thinking: been there, done that.
    If she thought it a little more when she looked at Bastien, that was no one's
business but hers. It wasn't his fault he'd been creeping into her dreams.
    Shaking