Rocky Mountain Lawman

chapter 4



Sky returned to the hill overlooking the valley to paint. Her mood had changed dramatically, though, and she didn’t quite see anything the same way. The colors didn’t sparkle the same for her, and even the changing play of light didn’t capture her interest.

She lay back on her tarp, staring up at the deep blue sky overhead, and realized that her desire to recenter herself with this trip had been interrupted. First by that Buddy guy, then by her dissociation the day before, and now by the memory of the way she had responded when Craig brushed her hand and squeezed her shoulder. Simple, meaningless touches, but they’d hit her like an emotional explosion.

Too much had hit her. As an artist, she knew how easy it was to get blown out of the water sometimes. To lose touch with that creative spark inside her. She knew just as well that sometimes the only way to handle it was to make herself pick up a brush and smear color on canvas, even if it would never amount to anything.

But she didn’t reach for her brushes or paints. Instead she lay there trying to sort her way through all that had happened, trying to figure out what had triggered her and why the hell she wanted to be attracted to a man, any man, so soon after her breakup.

Rebound? Maybe. Looking for some reassurance that she was an attractive woman and a good lover? Most likely. But the rest of it?

She closed her eyes, thinking over yesterday morning, trying to put herself back in the courthouse square and get in touch with what she had been feeling. It was the blank windows and closed doors, she decided. Craig had been right about it.

Her awareness of those doors and windows should have alerted her to the fact that she was slipping in time. She hadn’t consciously lived with that fear in a long time. In Iraq it had been different. Covered windows and closed doors had become menacing to her. The need to know what was behind them had often been nerve-racking. She knew exactly what Craig had meant when he said that for a while he couldn’t stand closed doors even in his own apartment.

It was an odd thing when she thought about it rationally. For most of her life, a closed door had been a protective thing that kept the world at bay. So much better with a lock, to keep threats out, not that she’d lived in fear. Still, a closed door had been comforting, a bulwark.

Then Iraq. Walking and driving down streets where she couldn’t see what was happening in those secret interiors had taught her a whole new way of thinking and feeling. A way she had believed she was past.

Apparently not.

Sighing, she sat up and looked around the valley. Good sight lines. Even Buddy’s approach had been shocking only because she hadn’t been expecting it. Now that she was on higher alert, or REDCON Three as the military called it, she wouldn’t be caught unawares again.

No, she wasn’t allowing herself to become entirely lost in thought, not now, not anymore. She heard every little sound, and her eyes moved restlessly, checking out every movement. Like in Iraq.

Not good. She couldn’t live in this state again, not if it wasn’t necessary. But maybe it was.

Craig certainly seemed to have some concerns about Buddy now, and after the way the guy had shouted at her and called her a spy, she shared them. Even if he was only slightly unhinged, it was best to take care.

But she wasn’t going to cede ground, and she wasn’t going to turn tail, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to walk away while Craig dealt with this.

Again, rationally, that seemed like an extreme reaction. It was his job, after all, not hers. She was supposed to be on vacation. Yet she saw how alone he was out here most of the time, and she wasn’t going to bow out. While he could probably get reinforcements if he needed them, the fact was he didn’t have them right now.

So she was going to sit here, being an extra pair of eyes for him, keeping watch on things across the valley.

Probably exaggerating her own importance, she thought wryly, but old training just wouldn’t lay down and die. Hadn’t she just faced it again yesterday?

Call it sentry duty, she thought. Early warning system. Beside her on the tarp lay the radio, itself like a sudden arrival from a past she’d tried to completely leave behind.

Though women weren’t supposed to be combatants, war had changed enough that it was unavoidable. Riding as part of a supply convoy, being shelled by RPGs at a base...women in uniform were as much a part of that as any man. Hell, they’d even given her a weapon to carry, and taught her how to use it. She’d been in a couple of firefights, certainly not as many as a scout patrol, but she’d been caught up in them anyway, in narrow streets with boarded windows and locked doors. She hadn’t been safe from improvised bombs on the roads, either. She’d been in two convoys that had been hit, and she’d lost more than one friend.

So she had some scars. One of them had evidently been opened yesterday. Maybe the unexpected encounter with Buddy had softened her up in some way, lowered her guard against her own memories. Add to that talking to some of the vets at that meeting, which had dragged up a few memories, and then looking at those doors and nearly blank windows along the street had finished the job.

That was probably it. She’d just better keep her guard up for a while. While it was just an unfortunate confluence, not likely to reoccur, she sure didn’t want to go away inside herself again. She needed to be able to trust that she wouldn’t do that. Absolutely needed to.

Yeah, she had something to prove all right. To herself.

She picked up her camera, pulled the lens cap off and used the telephoto lens to sweep the valley and Buddy Jackson’s place across the way. It was an act of defiance she needed to make. Spying? She’d show him.

Unfortunately she didn’t see a damn thing. Not even anybody walking around Buddy’s property. Some spy. Almost laughing at herself, she trained her camera farther up the valley. She kept hoping she might spot a wolf, although she had been assured she probably wouldn’t even know they were around unless they howled. Still, she hoped.

But her small act of defiance lifted her spirits. She capped her camera and set up her easel with the canvas she had daubed paint on a few days ago. Her spirits lifted even more as she looked at the colors she had chosen. Amazing, but when she looked out over the valley she saw those colors had changed in just a couple of days, some growing brighter, some darker.

She was ready to paint again.

* * *

Craig was working his way slowly along Buddy’s side of the mountain, checking streams that ran down narrow gorges to the valley below, all the while trying to get closer to Buddy’s property. He wanted to see if those trip wires wound around the entire perimeter, and if so, what they were attached to.

Seemed like a stupid thing to do for an alarm. In these woods those wires were apt to be bumped by a lot of things that weren’t human, not exactly what he figured Buddy was worrying about.

Damn trip wires seemed extreme any way he looked at it. Hikers and hunters could read Buddy’s signs and wouldn’t misinterpret the barbed wire fencing.

Giving a mental shrug, he kept Dusty heading slowly up the rugged slope beside the brook, although at this point he could fairly well say this brook wasn’t dammed. But it kept him riding within sight of Buddy’s property. Between the trees he glimpsed the fence and the trip wires when the sun reflected from them.

A long time ago, the property had been cleared of trees right along the boundary on both sides. At least Buddy had let some of the brush grow back to stabilize the soil, but not so much that Craig couldn’t catch sight of the wires.

He was just ambling along, checking his watch from time to time, thinking that soon he’d head on back and see if Sky had come out to paint and if she wanted to stay at the cabin again. He kind of hoped she would. She’d been easy, undemanding company, and it had been nice to share the place with her. A change.

A snort from Dusty brought him out of his woolgathering and he looked around immediately. Some animal? Dusty rarely reacted to anything except wolves or bears, but he saw none.

However, as he glanced toward Buddy’s place he saw two things that troubled him. That movement among the trees on Buddy’s property appeared to be a man in a camouflage. Maybe that Cap guy. Buddy ought to tell him that camouflage worked better when you held still.

But then he saw something else, and drew rein. Dusty halted, shaking his head and pawing once.

“Sh, sh...” He patted Dusty’s neck and slid back on the saddle just a bit, a cue to hold still.

Something was being built just inside the fence. All the way out here, two-by-fours were rising in a skeletal shape.

Damned if it didn’t look like a watchtower.

His neck prickling with the awareness of being watched, Craig turned his attention away from the watchtower as if it didn’t interest him at all. He dismounted, holding Dusty’s reins, and walked away from Buddy’s property toward the gorge, pretending to look down into it for obstructions. Cover. Act like it didn’t matter what the hell Buddy was doing on his own property.

But as he pretended to scan the gorge up and down and the tumbling stream below, his mind was totally focused on that structure behind him.

It would have to grow a lot taller to see over the old-growth trees, but as that wouldn’t have done a lot of good anyway, unless you were expecting trouble from above, its only purpose could be to post a guard on the fence line.

He’d known Buddy for three years now, and never before had the man gone to anything like this extreme. Something had changed, and Cap’s arrival seemed to be part of it. He had to find out who that guy was. Or Gage did. The balance had been changed somehow.

What the hell were these guys up to? Why in the world would they think they might need an armed perimeter? The possible answers to that question didn’t settle Craig’s mind at all. Nothing was going on around here or anywhere nearby that constituted that kind of threat.

Unless someone on Buddy’s side of the fence was doing something illegal or, worse, planning something illegal. It sure wouldn’t be the first time such things had happened.

He remounted and rode farther up along the gorge, acting as if it were all he was interested in. He found a place to cross it, then came back down the other side, taking his time, acting as if he hadn’t a thought in the world except to check the water flow.

But all the while he was turning possibilities around in his mind, none of them good.

* * *

Sky carefully placed her canvas in its carrying box as the afternoon faded, leaving the light flat and unattractive. She hadn’t seen Craig at all that day, or anything else for that matter. But she had hoped, foolishly, that Craig would show up.

But why would he? she asked herself. After her withdrawal yesterday, he’d be wise to avoid her. No guy could possibly be interested in a woman with that kind of problem.

But then she scolded herself for even thinking of it. Damn, she’d just been through an emotional wringer over a breakup, finding out her boyfriend thought she was a lousy lover and that he’d been cheating on her. Hadn’t she come out here trying to convince herself she wanted nothing to do with a man ever again?

She could have laughed at herself for her inconsistency except right now it didn’t feel funny. What the heck was going on with her?

She felt even more foolish because she had packed up enough of her things so she could accept his offer of spending the night at the cabin. But he’d have to show her where it was, and evidently he wasn’t going to.

But why would he? She hardly knew the guy, but it was painful anyway. He hadn’t had to make the offer if he didn’t mean it. That seemed almost cruel.

She wouldn’t have thought him the type, but as she’d amply proved, she was no judge of men. Apparently she couldn’t tell a nice one from a creep.

Sighing, trying to buck herself up and convince herself not to take things so hard, she finished packing up and began her trek back to her car. The trail through the woods was quiet except for some birdsong and ordinarily soothing, but evidently nothing was going to soothe her today. Silly or not, she was feeling rejected.

Of course, Craig could have just gotten busy with something he couldn’t just drop. He probably had all kinds of duties he needed to fulfill. Then she wondered why she was making excuses for him. He was just a near-stranger who had been nice to her a couple of times. She had no right to expect more from him.

She was putting her supplies in her car when she heard a truck approaching. She straightened and watched as a forest service vehicle came around the bend in the road and pulled up behind her.

It was Craig, and he climbed out with a smile. “I was afraid I’d miss you,” he said cheerfully. Evidently he didn’t begin to imagine the emotional loops she’d been running through as the day passed. Why would he? She was nobody special to him.

“I was just leaving,” she said. She hated the way her spirits lifted at the sight of him as much as she hated the way they’d spent the day nose-diving because he hadn’t showed up.

“Did you want to spend the night at the cabin?”

“I’d been thinking about it.”

“Good.” His smile broadened. “Let’s get going. Food will be slim pickings, though, since I didn’t get to town.”

“I filled a cooler with enough for two,” she admitted, now that it seemed safe. Odd to realize that she hadn’t been feeling safe because she had thought he might be avoiding her. That was over-the-top, surely.

Maybe she ought to just get into her car right now and drive to another state before she grew any more foolish than she already had. But running from things wasn’t her style.

She followed him a mile up the dirt road until they took a left turn into a narrower, bumpier track that she remembered from the other day. Vaguely. She had only been starting to emerge from her psychological isolation at that point and was certain she couldn’t have found her way back here.

Dusty was already in his corral, grazing contentedly on rapidly thinning grasses. A water trough near the cabin had been filled, and some kind of feed had been poured into a concrete basin.

“He looks happy,” Sky remarked as she climbed out of her car.

“He’s always happy,” Craig answered. “He’s got a good life, plenty of exercise, open spaces and food. I’m kind of like him myself.”

Maybe so, Sky thought as Craig insisted on carrying everything inside—her painting supplies, her suitcase and her cooler. As the evening crept up on them, it began to grow chilly. Sky grabbed her jacked off her backseat and pulled it on. Quite a contrast to Tampa at this time of year, she thought. You could have two or three seasons in just one day here.

“Want me to start the fire?” Craig asked as he came out of the cabin yet again.

“How fast is it going to cool down?”

“Air’s thin here, so pretty fast. Let me get some more wood and kindling.”

She walked around the cabin with him to help, and carried three split logs inside. “Don’t you guys keep food here?”

“Not much. This cabin isn’t often used unless someone wants to be out here for a while studying something. So there’s not a whole lot beyond what I’d call an emergency kit. Survival stuff. I don’t like to use it before we’re ready to restock for another year.”

That made sense to her.

They dropped six logs beside the stove in a wooden box, then Craig went out to split some kindling. Once again she followed him, feeling a bit like a puppy. He was good at splitting wood and asked her to carry a few handfuls of splinters and dust inside while he gathered up thicker strips of wood.

Sitting on the chair she had occupied the night before, she watched him build the fire with quick, practiced movements. “How would somebody do that if they didn’t know how?”

He glanced over his shoulder as he squatted in front of the stove. “There’s a small propane torch in one of the cabinets. Even a tyro could get a blaze going.”

She chuckled, and was glad to realize her mood had improved dramatically. For all the wrong reasons, but it was still an improvement.

With the touch of a single match, the tinder caught and soon flames were dancing along the thicker strips and igniting the bark on the split logs.

Craig remained squatting, watching until he was sure it was burning well, then closed the stove’s door.

“So how did your day go?” he asked her.

“Absolutely nothing happened. I didn’t see anything, either.”

“Good. I guess Buddy got the message.”

“Apparently. What about your day?”

“That was a little more problematic. I tried to radio you to tell you I was headed your way, but you didn’t answer.”

“Really? The radio didn’t even crackle all day. Oh, sheesh!” Rising, she went over to her bag and pulled it out. “I can’t believe I did that! It was off.”

He straightened and gave her a crooked smile. “I guess you really didn’t want to be disturbed.”

But she didn’t find it amusing. Still holding the radio, she returned to the chair and sat staring at it. This wasn’t good. “This isn’t like me.”

Craig pulled up the split log bench and sat close, facing her. “Maybe it’s the altitude change. We’re just about eight thousand feet here.”

“Maybe.” But she doubted it.

“Talk to me, Sky. I’m sure I’ll understand at least some of it.”

He probably would. The question was how much of herself she wanted to expose.

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “I’ll tell you something about me. Fair enough?”

She nodded and reluctantly looked up from the radio. She didn’t want to gaze at that attractive face again, into those gray eyes that seemed almost bottomless at times. He drew her, and she was uneasy about that pull. It couldn’t possibly lead to anything good, not in the long run.

“I’m thirty-four,” he said. “I separated from the marines at twenty-two, then went to college. I studied biology and I’m a thesis away from my master’s in wildlife conservation.”

“Really? That’s impressive.”

“It’ll be impressive when I finish the thesis. I’m planning to spend the winter on it. I’ve been collecting data since I joined the Forestry Service six years ago but the university is starting to get impatient with me.” Another of those half smiles. “Can’t say I blame them. Anyway, never married, never felt the urge. Most women can’t stand the way I live my life.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m in the woods a lot. Even in the winter. Too much of a free spirit, I guess.”

“I can understand why you like it out here. I like it, too. If I made enough from my painting, I’d get myself a cabin just like this one and paint full-time.”

“Yeah?” He seemed to like that. “You wouldn’t go crazy from isolation?”

“I hardly notice isolation when I’m painting. Maybe that’s one of the things that drove my ex-boyfriend crazy about me. He said I didn’t pay him enough attention.” She resisted mentioning the lousy lover part. “Between my work with veterans, which sometimes drained me, and the times I’d lock myself in my studio endlessly, he felt neglected.”

Craig tilted his head a little, clearly thinking about it. “The guy sounds selfish to me.”

“He sounds ordinary,” she argued.

“Maybe so. I guess I’m strange. I wouldn’t have a problem with any of that, maybe because I’m the same way myself. I occasionally stay in the field for a week or more at a time. Sometimes I get radio calls asking if I’m still alive.”

Sky felt her mouth tip into a small smile. “For me it was a knock on the door.”

“Ha!” He slapped a hand lightly on his thigh.

“But what exactly do you do in terms of law enforcement? Is it dangerous?”

“Not usually. I run across campers and hikers, check them out, make sure they aren’t headed for trouble, that they’ve got the proper permits if they’re planning to hunt or fish. Sometimes I run across poachers. That’s a little more dangerous.”

“What in the world do they poach? Elk? Moose?”

“Some of that, of course, but my biggest headache comes from bears. There’s a demand in Asia for bear parts—paws, claws, gall bladders. Lots of money in it for a poacher.”

“I never thought of that!”

“Most people don’t. These types go far beyond someone who kills an elk for food. They can kill dozens of bears on a single trip.”

“I admit I don’t much like bears. Well, actually I’m afraid of them. But going after them like that is wrong.”

“Bears will mostly leave people alone if we don’t get in their way. But to go out and kill dozens of them just for small pieces that can bring a lot of money—that goes way beyond killing to eat, or even killing for a single trophy.”

He gave a slight shake of his head. “Then we have any number of people who, if left to their own devices, would drain every stream and creek of fish. There’s a reason for size and catch limits. We do what we can, but somehow we always wind up having to restock in some places.”

“What other things do you deal with?”

“The whole gamut, basically. Right now I’m worried that there isn’t enough water in the stream in the valley where you’re painting. We had enough snow, the spring thaw didn’t start much earlier than usual, so there’s no obvious reason that stream should be running so dry so early. It looks more like late July or early August. That suggests there may be some obstructions causing problems on the feeder creeks. So far nothing.”

“You have a full plate.”

“Keeps me busy,” he admitted. “But I like it most of the time.”

“How much trouble do poachers give you?”

“Most skedaddle, figuring they can come back. They’re only likely to get angry when I confiscate their booty or equipment, or want to arrest them.”

“Do you often?”

“Every now and then, if I have evidence. The ones who really tee me off are those who use traps.”

“Traps have always struck me as so inhumane.”

“I agree with you.”

Relaxing, she was finally able to put the radio aside. The cabin was warming, and she slipped off her jacket. When he fell silent, she guessed he was waiting for her to do her share of talking. She wasn’t quite ready yet, though.

“So these trappers. They can hurt more than animals, too, right?”

“They sure can. They cover the traps with pine needles so they’re not obvious. They could just as easily trap a hiker, but so far we’ve been lucky.”

“Do you have help?”

“It’s a big forest. I only cover part of it. And if we catch wind that something big is going on, we work in teams.”

“Good. It’s got to be dangerous enough facing down a couple of poachers, never mind a larger group.”

“You’d know.”

She supposed she did. Benefit, if you could call it that, of having been in a war zone. “It’s funny, but I never thought about this stuff. I think of national forests as peaceful places where people going hiking, fishing and camping. I don’t even think about the hunting, and never poaching.”

“No reason you should.”

“When I first saw you I thought you were pretty heavily armed and I wondered what happened out here. Now I know.”

His smile was almost as warm as the fire. She liked the easy way he smiled, and wished she could emulate him.

“So you’re on vacation?” he asked.

“I guess you could call it that. A little R and R of my own.” And this was it. The questions would start coming and she’d have to decide how much she wanted him to know. Then she wondered why it should even matter, since she probably would never see him again. There was nobody safer to confide in than a stranger. But she deflected anyway. “Any more problems with Buddy?”

She saw it happen. His face closed, and she sensed his withdrawal, telling her that he realized she was putting up barriers. And if she was going to put up barriers, so was he. An unexpected ache struck her then. Man, surely she didn’t really care yet what this man thought of her.

“Well, he’s building a watchtower along his fence line. Seems a little extreme.” Then he rose and went to open her cooler, keeping his back to her as he checked on what they could make for dinner.

She was being hypersensitive, she told herself. Way too much. It wasn’t as if she had some deep dark secret in her past. Well, except for her ex telling her she was a lousy lover, and there was no reason to broadcast that. But Craig had already seen the one thing she most didn’t want others to know about her, that she could dissociate, however rarely. If she had any real secret, that was it.

“My boyfriend broke up with me a few months ago,” she volunteered. “It was ugly. I started to feel dead inside, you know? Eventually it struck me that I was holding back with the vets I was working with, and that wasn’t fair to them, or even helpful, so I decided to get away from everything. Try to find the parts of me that seemed to have gotten either gutted or worn out.”

He pivoted as he squatted, and looked at her over his shoulder. His expression was kind. “You picked a good place to refresh. Well, except for Buddy.”

“Yeah, there is that.”

He turned back to the cooler. “You spared no expense, I see.”

“I figured since you were kind enough to offer me lodging for a few nights, a mini banquet was the least I could do. I hope it’s possible to cook on that stove, though. For all my military training, I never got much past heating an MRE.”

He laughed and rose. “Trust me, nobody can outcook me on a woodstove or open fire.”

“Show me how?”

“With pleasure.”

But something had changed, and she was quite certain she was responsible for it. She had caused him to grow cautious with her shutdown, and now that she had she wished she could backtrack and be more open. Yet she didn’t know where to start. There was a lot of her past she didn’t want to look at, and working with vets had made her more of a listener than a talker. So what now?

What now proved easy with Craig, though. He walked her through cooking chicken breasts with some of the Marsala wine she had brought to drink, boiling pasta in a small pot, roasting some yellow squash and zucchini on a flat pan. “Not a whole lot of spices to work with, but we’ll manage.”

She wondered if she was going to remember any of his tutelage at all, because her awareness of him as a man seemed to be overwhelming her thoughts. Each accidental brush of their hands or arms made flame leap to her nerve endings. A deep ache was trying to grow between her thighs, and it seemed far more important than how to cook on a woodstove.

While they ate, she managed to suppress the longings he awoke so easily, or at least bank them like the fire in a stove. All the while, she knew they were apt to burst into flame again. Desperate for a different line of thought, she tried to bridge the gap again. “Did you always want to be a forester?”

His gray eyes twinkled in the lamplight. “Well, I can vaguely remember wanting to be a fireman, then a policeman. Or maybe it was the other way around. At one point I was determined I was going to be a truck driver.”

“When did that change?”

“I was about twelve at the time. We were on a vacation, Oregon I think, and I saw clear-cutting for the first time in my life. Don’t ask me why, but that offended me at such a deep level I mentioned it, and my dad responded that they’d plant new trees.”

“But?”

He shook his head. “I looked at the big old trees, and those huge swaths of scars over the mountainsides, and thought about how long it was going to take for those big old trees to grow back. I’d be an old man, I figured. Then I started wondering about what all the wildlife did after the loggers came through. The birds, the bears, the raccoons, the beavers, all of it. Then it began to rain as we were driving through one of those cuts, and I watched soil start to wash away.”

She put her fork down and studied him. “You were very aware for a twelve-year-old.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I just know by the time we finished that trip I was into it. Researching everything I could find about the effects of clear-cutting and so on, and before long I’d made up my mind I was going to save forests.”

“That’s wonderful. Truly. But how did the marines fit in?”

“Military family all the way back. Tradition. Every son must serve. Frankly, it never occurred to me to do anything else. It was how I was brought up. What about you?”

“Much more mundane. I needed a job, my father wasn’t well and the army seemed like the answer as well as a place where I could do something really useful.”

“Some answer. Did you always want to paint?”

She picked up her fork again. “This chicken is really good, Craig. Thanks. As for painting...” She looked back over the years. “I guess it’s something I’ve always done. It’s always been when I was happiest, usually. I’m not sure it was ever a conscious decision, but I know one thing—if I can’t paint, I get unhappy very quickly.”

It was, she thought as she listened to herself, a very boring story. But only on the surface, because there had been nothing boring about her tours in Iraq, and there was certainly nothing boring about working with vets who had serious problems.

But at least he didn’t press her for more detail. Boring as it all sounded, why would he?

After dinner and dishes, he suggested they sit outside for a while. The night woods seemed magical to her, with a whole different atmosphere than the daytime. The air had grown cold but she hardly cared as she stretched out on her tarp on a bed of pine needles and looked up at a sky so full of stars she could hardly believe there were so many. She had seen them before, of course, in the desert when the air was clear and there were no lights, but it was a hard thing to remember exactly, just because of the sheer volume.

“It’s so beautiful here,” she remarked. “So peaceful. It’s hard to believe anything bad could happen here.”

“Depends on what you mean by bad. Nature can be as ugly as it is beautiful.”

“So you don’t romanticize it?”

“No way. I just love it the way it is.”

She liked that attitude and figured it was probably the best one to have about most things. Of course there were exceptions, but she didn’t want to think about the ugly side of life right now. She was enjoying the stars and company too much. And that awareness she had been tamping down sprang to life again. Damn, he was close, but not close enough. “I have a friend who has one of those fancy cell phones with a GPS. She points it at any place in the sky and it will tell her what stars she’s looking at.”

She heard him stir. “Let me guess,” he said with gentle humor. “You’d rather not know the names.”

“What good would it do me? The names are artificial. The beauty isn’t.”

“Like wildflowers?”

“Exactly.” A shiver ran through her as a cold breeze snaked under her jacket.

“Want to go inside?”

“Not yet.”

“Then let me help keep you warm.”

He startled her by curling up beside her and slipping his arms around her. He did it so naturally, as if it were something they’d done before, but she froze anyway. Was he making a move? Part of her hoped he was, and part of her feared it. But already she could feel a warm tingle between her legs, feel her nipples grow firmer as if reaching for a touch. All sense seemed to be slipping away, and even the stars seemed suddenly filled with aching anticipation.

“It’s funny,” he said. “Given my job, I’m a categorizer. I have to be able to describe every damn thing in order to understand and report on what’s happening. I can’t imagine seeing things the way you do.”

So he wasn’t making a move. Disappointment washed through her, but at least it allowed her to relax, at least a little. “Labels have their uses,” she finally said. “I imagine it wouldn’t do you much good to report that something spongy and green seemed to be eating holes in trees.”

His body shook a little, probably with a silent laugh. “I think I’d get fired.” Then, “Sh. Listen.”

She heard nothing at first except the sigh of the breeze in the trees, and the hoot of a distant owl. Straining her ears, she waited, holding her breath as much as possible.

Then, from a long distance, she heard a lonely howl. “Wolf?” she whispered.

“Sh. Wait.”

Half a minute later, the howl sounded again, but this time before it finished, another joined it. Then another. Each one was differently pitched, making an incredible harmony. As she listened, she could almost hear the howls moving even farther away. Then, rather abruptly, they stopped.

“Wolves,” he said, answering her finally.

“That was so eerie, but beautiful. How many?”

“Just a few of them. When they harmonize like that, it sounds like there are more. If you wait, it shouldn’t be long before the coyotes start. They often let the wolves know they’re around, claiming territory.”

“Is it different?”

“A lot higher pitched, with yips. More like a dog than the wolves’ howls.”

She had totally relaxed into his embrace, feeling warm and secure, and now it seemed natural to turn her head a bit so that her cheek rested on his shoulder. After a while, it appeared the coyotes had no urge to stake their claim. She didn’t care, though. It suddenly seemed like staying right here forever would be a great thing to do.

A man was holding her and she wasn’t nervous. The night was quiet and soothing, and even the chilly air felt good on her cheeks. Why in the world would she ever want to leave these moments behind?

Then the brief fantasy crashed. “Better get you inside,” Craig said. “You’re going to turn into an ice cube.”

The only thing that saved her from protesting was knowing how much she would reveal. She didn’t want to be vulnerable to a man, not ever again.

She did a fairly decent job of convincing herself of that, too, as she rose and folded her tarp.

Just an interlude of watching stars and listening to wolves. Not one thing more.