Western Lovers:Cowboys & Biologists (8/31)
Title: Western Lovers: Cowboys and Biologists <8/31>
Author:sassywitch
Beta the patient and talented charlieisagirl
Pairing: OB/DW
Rating: NC-17 for the series, PG-13 this chapter.
Summary: David is a hard, jaded warrior, Orlando is a biologist tracking Big Cats on the Double L.
Feedback: Feedback is my writers crack, which is not to be confused at all with plumbers crack.
Disclaimer: Not at all true in reality. These men whilst adorable and perfectly happy to slash themselves, their actual relationship is something that they only know. This story is adapted from a series of books that I adored when I was younger written by Elizabeth Lowell.
Word Count: 2974
Previous Story: Can be found here
Previous Ordaisy chapter: As suggested by < lj user="mystery_ink"> can be found here
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1| Chapter 2 | Chapter 3| Chapter 4| Chapter 5| Chapter 6| Chapter 7
Posted to: fellowshippers, monaboyd and ordaisy
Header Art: Courtesy of the incredibly talented loki_girl.
Author’s Notes: Thank you to everyone who has pushed and prodded me into working on this. Special thanks to Dylan_dufresne.
~*~*~*~*~*
The elemental harmonics of a wolf’s howl shivered over the land before dissipating on the wind. David froze, listening with every fiber of his body. The sound came again, rising and falling, a song sung to the primal memories that existed in every human soul. The eerie ululation faded into the wind. Silence reigned once more.
“A wolf’s howl has to be one of the most beautiful sounds on earth,” David said in a hushed voice.
Orlando didn’t disagree. He had heard only one thing more compelling- David’s deep voice when he looked at him and told him that any man who had him would never let him go. Even now Orlando could hardly believe David had said it, had meant it, and then turned away, picked up his rifle and calmly asked if he was ready to go hunting.
The memories made Orlando’s fingers tremble as he cupped his hands around his mouth and answered Baby with a call that was more musical than a shout and less structured than a yodel. When he finished, David was looking at his expectantly.
“Baby’s just checking in,” Orlando explained. “Now we know where he is and he knows where we are. No cats, though.”
David nodded. “He won’t hit cougar sign on this side of the stream unless a new cat has moved in since I was here last. Once Baby gets to the other side of the stream, though, it shouldn’t be long before he hits a trail. A young female staked out her territory there two years ago.”
“How young? Did she have cubs?”
“The first year she didn’t mate. But this year there was some real caterwauling around here for the two weeks she and her mate traveled together.” The left corner of David’s mouth lifted a bit and he added blandly, “Seems like the young females always scream the loudest.”
“There’s a reason they scream,” Orlando said before he could think better of it.
“Really? What?”
Alright, how am I going to get out of this one? Orlando asked himself wryly, caught somewhere between embarrassment and amusement.
“Er, take my word for it.” He said, knowing his cheeks were bright with something more than the burn from the chill wind.
“Give me some words and I’ll see how I take them.”
“Better yet,” Orlando said quickly, thinking of a graceful exit from the topic, “I’ll give you a textbook on cat anatomy.”
“Did you bring it with you?”
Orlando sighed. “No.”
“Then we’re back to words.”
Orlando suspected that he was being teased. David’s eyes had a definite crinkle at the corners. He took a deep breath, reminded himself that he and David were both adults, and began speaking as though he were in a graduate seminar.
“Male cats are built to begin, but not to end, copulation. Therefore, disengagement must be rather uncomfortable for the females.”
David gave Orlando a sideways glance. “I must be missing something.”
“Barbs,” he said succinctly.
The sleek gold of David’s beard shifted a bit as his mouth quirked, but he said only, “Can’t be all that bad-”
“Spoken like a true alpha male,” Orlando muttered.
“-Because the older females keep coming back for more.” David finished, ignoring Orlando’s interruption.
Orlando saw the gleam in David’s eyes and knew that David was teasing him. He struggled not to laugh. It was impossible. The wicked light in David’s eyes reminded him of Baby’s when he had danced up to him with a mouthful of forbidden socks and lured him into play.
David listened to the rippling warmth of Orlando’s laughter and silently decided that it was even more beautiful than a wolf’s wild song. David fought the impulse to put an arm around Orlando and hug him to his side, and then to bend down and taste plump lips that had been tormenting him at every moment.
I should have left yesterday, storm or no storm. If I stay much longer I’m going to reach out and take what I need more than air.
Having Orlando would be like sinking into fire, all hot and clean and wild, no boundaries, no restraints, nothing but the two of us and the fire burning higher and higher.
A wolf’s howl leaped and twisted in the wild silence, calling to them, demanding their attention.
“He’s found cat sign!” He looked eagerly around the landscape, trying to decide on the quickest route to Baby. “It could be bobcat, I suppose.”
“I’m betting it isn’t,” David said promptly, heading toward the creek. “There’s a big old fir on top of that rise. The lady cougar likes to lie up beneath the lowest limbs and watch the land.”
“Hurry.” Orlando said, following. “Once Baby starts running, we may not see him again until he’s ready to come into the cabin and chew the ice out from between his toes.”
David moved swiftly down the slope toward the creek that gleamed blackly between low banks of snow. Despite the snow that had fallen yesterday, neither David nor Orlando needed the snowshoes they had tied to their backpacks. Only in the steepest ravines or in the densest forest was snow-pack more than six inches deep. Yesterday’s storm had filled in minor hollows and ripples, leaving behind a pristine surface that took and held tracks as though it had been designed for just that purpose.
Baby howled again. Then came a series of short, excited barks.
“He’s seen the cat!” Orlando said.
“Will he call off?”
“Doubt it. Not after being shut up in a car and then in the cabin.”
David leaped the stream with a lithe power that made Orlando think enviously of a cougar. He judged the distance to the other side and skidded to a stop. If he jumped he’d be asking for an icy dunking on landing and a twisted ankle into the bargain.
“Go on.” Orlando urged. “I’ll catch up as soon as I find a safe way across. Try to get a look at the cat so we can identify it if we see it again. Once they’re forty feet up a tree, cats are damned hard to see, much less identify, even with binoculars.”
David hesitated for only an instant before he took off up the rise toward a big fir tree.
Orlando trotted- and occasionally slid and slithered - along the side of the creek, muttering about boulders concealed by snow and other traps for the unwary. Finally he came to a place where sun or wind or both had cleaned the rocks of snow. He jumped from boulder to boulder across the stream and headed up the rise. Soon he was following David’s tracks.
Lord, that man runs like a big cat. No slipping, no struggling for balance, nothing but clean, long-legged strides.
Baby’s barks were faint now, continuous, and very excited.
Sounds like the cat is up a tree. That was fast work. Hope David got a good look at it before it was too late.
When Orlando got to the top of the rise, he saw the place where the cougar had been stretched out on the ground beneath a low limb, watching the world in relaxed silence until a loudmouthed black wolf had appeared. Then all hell had cut loose. The cougar - for the size of the tracks left no doubt that a cougar had made them rather than a bobcat - had exploded out of cover, sending a shower of snow from lower branches. The cat had hit its full running stride instantly, racing over the sparsely wooded slope, heading uphill as cats always did when pursued.
Baby’s barking ended abruptly, telling Orlando that David had already caught up. Cocking his head, Orlando listened, heard nothing to indicate that the chase was anything but over, and returned his attention to a particularly fine set of tracks the cougar had left. Baby wasn’t going anywhere now. Neither was the cat. The tracks, however, were at the mercy of the rising wind and the sun. He had to photograph the tracks before they lost their fine, crisp edges.
Automatically Orlando took off his backpack, opened it and went to work. He pulled out camera and ruler, lined up the ruler close to the tracks, adjusted the camera’s macrozoom lens and triggered the shutter. In the forest silence, the snick, snick, snick of the shutter and the faint rubbing of his clothes against the snow when he knelt there were the only sounds. When he was through measuring and photographing the prints, he took out a notebook and began to record information.
Orlando was halfway through a sentence when he had the distinct feeling of being watched. He spun around. David was standing less than an arm’s length away, one shoulder resting against a tree.
“Good Lord, David, you’re a quiet man!”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Orlando pushed a deep breath out of his lungs to slow his hammering heart, took a better grip on his pencil and resumed recording his observations.
“Did you get a look at the cougar?” Orlando asked.
“It’s the young female, she wintered well. Coat is thick and smooth, no sign of hesitation in her stride. I can’t be positive, but I think she’s nursing cubs. Her teats were swollen.”
With a startled sound Orlando jammed his notebook and pencil into his jacket pocket. “I’d better go call off Baby. I don’t want a new mother getting panicked.”
David lifted Orlando’s backpack and started back up the trail. “Don’t worry about the cougar. Last time I saw her, she was stretching out on a limb to watch Baby jawing at her from below.”
“Will I be able to see her?” Orlando asked, unable to hide the excitement in his voice.
“Some.”
“How much?”
“The black tip of her long, thick tail.”
“Figures,” Orlando muttered. “Seems like all I ever see of my cats are silent ghosts sliding away at the corner of my eyes.”
When David and Orlando arrived at the fir where Baby was leaping and yapping, not even the tip of a tail was to be seen. Orlando called off Baby and went to work examining the tree through binoculars. Finally he spotted the cougar partway up the big evergreen.
The cat was indeed stretched out along a hefty limb, watching the activity below through half-closed eyes. So well did the cougar screen herself with greenery that Orlando wouldn’t have seen the animal at all if she hadn’t yawned. The motion revealed an astonishing length of pink tongue as well as teeth of intimidating size and sharpness. The yawn ended, the jaws began closing, and the pink tongue vanished.
An instant later, so did the cougar. Occasional tufts of snow rained down, revealing that the cat was still moving somewhere within the drooping, multiple arms of the tree. No matter how hard Orlando looked through the binoculars, he couldn’t see so much as a patch of the cat’s thick, tawny fur.
Baby whined coaxingly, tired of having to be silent.
“Nope.” Orlando said to Baby as he lowered the binoculars. “Fun’s over.” He turned to David. “Are you sure she was nursing?”
“It’s more of a hunch. She’s healthy, but tires fast, even for a cat. She took to the tree real quick, even though Baby wasn’t close to her.” David shrugged and squinted up into the tree with ice blue ices. “I’m no expert, though.”
“I’ll take your instincts over the expertise of anyone I’ve ever worked with. You’re a very noticing kind of man.” Orlando reached for his pack, which David was still holding in one big hand. “Let’s try backtracking from that big fir. If you’re right about her having cubs, she’ll have a den too. Maybe we can find it.”
“It would make our work a lot easier.” David agreed.
Orlando heard the word our and felt a shiver of pleasure travel through his body. But if David realized what he had implied, nothing was revealed on his face.
“The cougars over on the other side of Mortensen Ridge,” he continued, “have much bigger territories. Up here, the countryside supports more deer, so the cats get by with a lot less land. Even so, they can cover twenty, thirty miles a day looking for prey or for a mate or just keeping their boundary markers fresh.”
“Speaking of food, my lunch is in my backpack.” Orlando tugged discretely at one of the straps David held.
“Hungry?”
Orlando looked up. David’s pale blue eyes were very clear, the lashes surrounding them were ragged slices of sunrise, and he was watching Orlando with an intensity that made his breath shorten.
“Yes, I’m…hungry.”
His voice was too husky, but Orlando was helpless to change it. Something in David’s eyes was making his blood shimmer wildly through his body, leaving chaos in its wake. Orlando would have moved, but felt unable to take so much as a step. Motionless he waited for David to say something.
“David?” Orlando whispered finally, looking up at him, wondering what was wrong, why he felt as though he were on the edge of a cliff and only had to spread his wings and fly…or fall endlessly, spinning away into infinity like a snowflake on the wind.
David saw yearning and uncertainty in Orlando’s wide brown eyes, hissed a searing word through his teeth and let go of the backpack. The straps slid through Orlando’s fingers. He grabbed at it with both hands, but it was David’s extraordinary reflexes that kept the pack from being dumped into the snow. Instead of giving the pack to Orlando, he slung it over one shoulder and turned back the way they had come.
For a moment Orlando was too unsettled to follow. He watched David stride through the widely spaced trees. He moved with strength and silence that should have frightened him, but it did not. David’s male grace and power tugged at Orlando’s senses, just as the realization that he had never seen David in anything but dark clothes tugged at his emotions.
He wants me. He’s never made any secret of it. So why won’t he even kiss me?
The thought of being kissed again by David made Orlando’s blood shimmer wildly once more. His breath came in hard and ragged, and he wanted nothing more in that instant than the feel of David’s lips on his own.
Lord, if Mark had had this effect on me, we’d be married by now, shagging like bunnies at every possible opportunity.
The thought of actually physically consummating his attraction to David went through Orlando like lightning, shaking him. The touch of those long sure fingers, the slow caress of David’s breath against his skin, the sensation of bare skin caressing bare skin, hands caressing him. Strong restrained hands caressing his body wantonly.
Orlando’s breath rushed out, leaving him dizzy and disoriented. He blinked and took several slow breaths as he looked around in the manner of a person who has awakened in a strange land. The snow-brushed trees were unchanged, the white glitter of sunswept snow was the same, and the tracks still showed as blue-white marks in the snow. Nothing in the world around him had changed.
Yet everything had changed. For the first time in Orlando’s life, his own inner world, the untouched, inviolate privacy of his dreams, had been transformed by the presence of a man. And not just any man, but the virile, restrained strength of David.
I’m falling in love with David.
No. Scratch that. It’s past tense, over and done with, and I was the last one to know.
Baby whined and nudged Orlando’s hand. Absently he stroked Baby’s big head. Baby ducked, caught Orlando’s gloved hand in his mouth and tugged. Immediately he had Orlando’s full attention.
“You’re right, Baby. It’s time we left the mamma cougar in peace. Or is it lunch you’re after, hmm? Does your sharp nose know that all the food left with David? Or do you sense that he’s making off with my heart as well as my pack?”
Yellow eyes watched Orlando alertly.
“Yes, I know,” Orlando said in a low voice. “It’s stupid of me to let someone walk off with something vital. But my lack of sense is nothing new. A smart man would have followed everyone’s advise and let you die after finding you in that trap rather than take a chance on getting savaged while trying to teach a wild young mostly-wolf to trust people again.”
Baby cocked his head to the side, listening to Orlando with every fiber of his mostly-wolf being. Then he made a soft sound deep in his throat and turned his head to look out across the land.
“Okay, boy, I get the message.” He swept his arm in the direction that David had gone. “Go catch up with lunch.”
It was like releasing a catapult. Within three seconds Baby was low to the ground and his tail streaming out like a dark banner. Orlando followed more slowly, needing time to get a better grip on his unsettling thoughts.
David won’t be an easy man to love. He’s a winter man, shut down deep inside, waiting for a spring that hasn’t come.
On the heels of Orlando’s thought came another, a realization as unflinching as the winter itself.
Don’t kid yourself. You’re going into this with your eyes wide open or you’re not going at all. David isn’t waiting for spring. He probably doesn’t even believe spring exists. He’s caught in his own ice age. That’s quite a difference.
It’s a difference that could break your heart.
Yet even knowing that Orlando could no more walk away from David now than he had been able to walk away years ago from a wild young wolf made savage by pain.
Chapter 9