Spirit of a Hunter (19 page)

As the shivers trying to jump-start heat quaked through her body intensely enough to register on the Richter scale, a hole opened in his chest. He couldn’t stand the thought of letting her down. The way he’d let Tommy down. The way he’d let Anna down.

* * *

R
ELIVING THE IMAGE
of the pack floating away from her grasp again and again, Nora followed Sabriel blindly, weaving as if she’d had too much champagne. The lingering scent of smoke from the forest fire made the air hard to breathe. The steaming charred tree trunks forged a landscape straight out of a nightmare.

She hugged the crackling space blanket he’d dug out from his wet pack after she’d insisted she could walk on her own, but felt no warmth. Her fingers were stiff. Her legs filled with cement. Her frozen muscles ripped with each tetanic contraction against the cold.

Her purpose, her identity, her watch, her precious locket containing Scotty’s picture—had all gone down with that pack. She gulped, trying to dislodge the lump in her throat. Scotty’s medicine. Getting it to him had been the whole reason to come along. How did she expect to win a fight for Scotty’s custody when she couldn’t hold on to her son or to his medicine?

If she lost Scotty, it would be her own fault.

No, she told herself sternly, fighting the cold and the fatigue that cramped her muscles. She forced herself to take one more step. And another. Until her head
throbbed as if her skull had shrunk around her brain and her throat bled from holding in her grief so that it wouldn’t spill out, exposing her broken soul.

Sabriel stretched out a hand and helped her over a tangle of roots. “Can you walk a little longer? I want to get to those big boulders over there, so we can hide the fire from horizontal observation.”

“I thought you said no fire.”

“This is an emergency.”

“Won’t the Colonel’s men see the smoke?”

“Chances are slim the way I’m going to rig it up.”

Knowing a fire was imminent, the cold didn’t bother her as much as it had only a few moments ago.
I’m going to be warm again. Soon, I’m going to be warm
. Warmth would help her function and functioning would get her back on the trail to Scotty.

She shuffled along, hunched over, head bent down, and it seemed to take endless minutes to reach their destination. Head still bent down, she ran into Sabriel’s pack, looked up expectantly and saw the nice flat ground behind the ring of boulders.

“Is this where you tell me to take my clothes off and tell me body heat is the only way to get warm?” she asked through the knocking of her teeth.

“This is where I tell you to take off your wet clothes so the cold doesn’t sap what little warmth you have left. I make you hot soup. Then I build a fire to dry your clothes.”

He unfolded his sleeping bag from the dry bag in his pack and unzipped it so it made one big blanket. “Come on, get out of your clothes, then wrap up in this bag.”

He turned his back to give her privacy, took out his small stove and got water boiling to make the soup.

“It’s a cliché, you know,” she said as he stirred a soup packet into a cup of hot water and she discarded the last of her wet clothing.

“What’s a cliché?”

A shiver racked through her body and her clacking teeth added a background of castanets to her speech. “Falling into cold water, having to use body heat against hypothermia.”

Amusement lit fire in the green of his eyes. “Have some soup.”

“Books and movies.” She sighed at the warmth of the soup against her frozen hands. “I’ve seen the situation a dozen times.”

“Is that so?” He wrapped the space blanket over the top of the sleeping bag.

How crazy was it that she was disappointed he didn’t lean over and kiss her as he had under the falls?

As shivers rattled her bones, her teeth, her brain, she sipped the burning soup. He gathered dry wood, started a fire, propped branches to form a lean-to. Heat radiated against the boulder behind her. But it wasn’t enough. The cold went too deep.

She told herself it would have to be enough. She needed to survive.

Sabriel gathered his pack and slung it on his shoulders.

“Where are you going?” Nora asked.

“I’m going to make sure we hear anyone coming close.”

The Colonel’s men, he meant. When they didn’t find their burned bodies, they would come looking for them.

Sabriel returned half an hour later, poured another cup of soup for her. He stepped out of his clothes, down to his boxer briefs, then draped them against the lean-to that held hers. His long, lean limbs sparked a terrible and inappropriate yearning. For body heat, she told herself, but it was more than that.

Thoughts fizzled as he came closer, a warrior brave in all his glory against the backdrop of a rising moon.

She silently unclamped a corner of the crinkly blanket and sleeping bag, invited him in. He was cold, too, she rationalized. The sooner they both warmed up, the sooner they could go after Scotty.

Then she made the mistake of looking into Sabriel’s eyes. They turned dark under the light of the moon, the bucking light of the fire, watchful, a hunter taking stock of a cornered prey. The wide-open pupils stirred with something dangerous, something barely controlled, and a spark of fear lanced her stomach as he settled beside her under the blanket, thigh-to-thigh, shoulder-to-shoulder, body hard and strong.

“It won’t go further than this,” he said, his voice strangely gruff.

“No, no, it won’t.” She brushed away the rattails of her still-wet hair, fed off the fire’s rising heat, off the heat he generated.

“Unless you want it to.”

Her pulse leaped. Her throat went dry. She was back under the water, the falls pushing her down,
pounding her against the rocks, her breath gone, her mind a whirl.

A duel clashed—yes, no. You’re crazy. Not the right time. Not the right place. Not the right man. Then, yes, please, yes.

She leaned into his shoulder, kissed the jumping pulse at the hollow of his neck. Pine and mint and musk had never smelled so good.

His hand skimmed her throat, his palm rough against the tender skin, and she turned, exposing more of her vulnerable neck. This crazy response had to stop. She was a mother. She had a child to save.

A body to warm.

His hands rubbed and stroked, spread a tingling sensation across her frozen limbs. Her breasts swelled, ached. Just life coming back. But, oh, it felt so good. She hadn’t realized how long she’d been half-alive, how long she’d pretended that settling was enough. Closer, she needed him closer. She arched into him. Her gaze connected with the green fire of his.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t stop.”

* * *

S
ABRIEL WANTED
to do something, anything, to soothe away the fatigue and fear lining her face. He should stop. He should warm her another cup of soup and leave it at that. But it was more than soup he wanted to give her. The need ran through him in a fever, made him shiver. He had no right to feel this way. No right to want her. She was his responsibility. She was depending on him to save her son’s life.

He shouldn’t care or want or need.

But he did.

And the last thing he needed with Boggs so close was to get lost in the all-consuming dark pools of her eyes. Not while the part of his brain that was still operating was screaming that she was in danger.

Under the heavy white gaze of the moon, she stretched out beside him on the insulating bed of leaves he’d built for her. Her eyes, God, her eyes. Lost, gentle eyes. Their intensity, a pull he couldn’t resist. And he forgot to close the gate, to shore up the fence. He forgot he didn’t want to feel, couldn’t afford to feel anything if he was to stay sane.

She anchored her hands to his neck, arched her body to his and opened like a flower to receive him. He sighed, gave in to his weakness.

Her smooth, soft skin slid under his palms. He made himself taste. He made himself touch. But all the savage edge cutting through him wanted was to devour. Hunger he hadn’t known was that sharp, that ravenous bolted through him, stripping all common sense.

Her response spanned the scale from shy to eager until he was as twisted around as she was. The depths of those big, brown eyes sucked in his darkest emotions, fading them, and the part of him he’d fenced in after Anna’s death broke loose.

He moved into her, and she moaned, giving herself to him, not a surrender, but a reel that took him higher and higher until he could finally breathe free.

* * *

T
HE HEAT OF THE FIRE
, reflecting off the boulders behind them, the insulating thickness of the leaves, made their hideaway a snug nest that had Sabriel almost too hot.

Body loose and warm, Nora traced the fineline tattoo of a tiger on his left pelvic girdle, gave equal attention to the intricate dragon decorating the right side. He remembered the day he’d walked into the tattoo parlor and, with each prick of the needle, renewed his resolution to go on living. Each design had taken six painful hours under an artist’s hand and turned his life in a new direction.

“What do they mean?” she asked him, her speech un-slurred now that she was warm again.

“Strength, loyalty, dedication and fierceness in battle.”

“From your Army days?”

“After. To remind me that life is a precious gift. That I had to keep fighting.” That he could not let evil win.

“Mine isn’t as fine as yours.”

“Yours?” He arched a brow.

She rolled over until he could see the faded blooming lotus at the base of her spine. “I had it done at seventeen.” She laughed a short, sharp laugh. “I wanted to look older, wiser.”

He traced the twining vine with a finger, felt her shiver of desire electrify him all over again.

He’d been careful, so careful, not to let anyone too close, not to get sucked into a relationship that would strangle him. He liked doing what he liked when he liked, not having to check in with anyone whenever he wanted to head to Boston, or the mountains, or to any damn
place he pleased. Marriage might work for Falconer or Reed or Skyralov, but it hadn’t worked for him.

And he wasn’t in love with her. His stomach roller-coastered in a painful flux of tenderness. He cared, sure, but that wasn’t the same as love, and he shouldn’t mistake one for the other. With her big, brown eyes and her kiss-me mouth and that surprising brace of steel in her spine, she’d already taken chunks out of his hide.

His tight control over his personal space had slipped because of the situation and the stress and the fact that body heat
was
the most efficient way to deal with hypothermia.

Survival required desperate measures.

He didn’t need the responsibility of a woman in a heapful of trouble. And she didn’t need a man without a heart. She needed time to heal, time to find her legs, time to realize she had more grit and gumption than the Colonel had led her to believe in all those years of relentless control. Sabriel couldn’t give her what she needed.

He rubbed at the irritation cramping the back of his neck. He’d known she was trouble, hadn’t he? From the second his phone rang. Breathing room. They both needed it. And she’d need a way to save face and pretend this hadn’t happened. He slid out from under the sleeping bag blanket.

“Where are you going?” The bloom of good sex still painted her cheeks the pink of desire.

“Tending the fire,” he said, and found his irritation going up a notch at his defensive tone. “Sleep while you can. We need to get moving soon.”

He closed his eyes and reached for her, planting a soft
kiss on her forehead. Her skin was warm and soft and tasted just this side of heaven. His brain started to fog and his body to yield. Hell, he was sunk.

* * *

T
HOUGH HE
’
D MEANT
to stay awake, his body and brain had rebelled and he’d fallen asleep next to Nora. He stirred awake to the sound of silence.

Nora’s body was folded into his in the nest of leaves and sleeping bag and space blanket. His hand guarded her heart, his pulse beating in time to hers. Her hand covered his, keeping it in place.

A Ranger sleeps with one eye and one ear open. How fast he’d shed all of his training. Slowly he sat up and reached for the dry clothes on the lean-to.

No hush of whispering trees. No song of birds. No busy scamper of squirrel. Just the eerie quiet of doom.

The fire was down to embers. Night hadn’t yet crowned with the pale light of dawn. The scent of storm weighed the air. And the hairs on the back of his neck writhed in warning.

Then the world cracked with the terrifying sound of a landslide.

Chapter Twelve

“Get up,” Sabriel said, shaking Nora’s shoulder. “We have to go.”

“What’s wrong?” She sat up groggily, frowning. “What’s that noise?”

“Our alarm. The Colonel’s men are back. They triggered one of the tripwires I rigged up.” He threw her clothes at her, then smothered what remained of the fire with dirt. “We have to head back to the falls.”

“Why?”

“That’s where the next sign is.”

There wasn’t time to argue or discuss, so he didn’t give her any. He grabbed the sleeping bag, stuffed it in the pack and hustled her toward the river into the fog of dawn. Knowing the toll Nora’s fall into the water had taken on her body yesterday, he hated to push her, but he had no choice.

At the river, he “slipped the stream” to lay a false trail, then entered the river on rocks. Nora gamely keeping up with him, he moved upstream, staying in the center, to
prevent floating debris and silt from compromising the direction of their travel, then walked out backward.

At Toby Falls, Tommy’s sign pointed them to a rickety shack old Will used as his summer home base. Illegal on federal land, but Will wasn’t one to care about most people or rules. And some official would have had to find it—and him—to hand out a fine. Something that wasn’t too likely.

“We can go two ways,” Sabriel said as he destroyed Tommy’s sign. “We can go the short, hard way and save an hour, or go around an easier climb.”

“Short is good.”

Her skin was still pale and he didn’t want to push her too hard. “You’ve got to speak up if the climb gets to be too much.”