Rain of Fire (20 page)

As the hotel security guard paused with his hand raised to knock again, Kyle heard Nick’s voice through the cabin door. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me.” She spoke to the wooden panel.

The outside light came on and Nick opened the door wearing a pair of boxers. His body was as compact and muscular as Kyle remembered, his nipples tight against the night chill.

“There’s been a landslide in Gardner Canyon,” she said. “The highway is blocked. I think there must have been an earthquake, maybe several.”

With a gesture, Nick dismissed the guard and drew her in out of the weather. “I thought I heard something a while ago.”

When he failed to turn on an inside light, she limped over and switched on a lamp.

“My God.” His green eyes darted from her wet hair to her bare feet. “Are you all right?”

“I think so. I was on my way to Gardiner for a snack when … the mountain came down.”

Nick started toward her and seemed to realize he was less than dressed. Turning away, he scooped up a pair of sweat pants and drew them on.

She spoke to his back. “I helped get some people out of their RV after it got swept into the river. Lost my shoes in the mud.”

Still bare-chested, Nick turned and stared at her. “No wonder you look like that. Get out of those wet clothes and into my shower before you catch your death.”

Kyle wasn’t deterred from the reason she’d come. “Wyatt’s not at his house …”

Nick’s jaw set. “You make a habit of dropping by in the middle of the night?”

“After I left the slide, I came back up to his place.”

Nick picked up a shirt and slid his arms into the sleeves. His brusque motions suggested he was irked at not being the first person she sought after such a close call. “From what I saw when I got here,” he said, “you two are pretty tight.”

Though something had felt different today in Wyatt’s office, especially when he’d touched her cheek, an automatic denial rose to her lips. “He’s got a gal. A lady who works with Wolf Advocates.”

“That’s where he is, then.” Nick walked toward her, smiling once more.

“He must be with Alicia,” she said, “but I tried to call and her number’s unlisted.”

“Think,” Nick urged. “What are the chances you and Wyatt were both on the canyon road at the exact moment of the slide?”

Considering how she’d overreacted during the storm at her home last night and again during the earth tremor when she was in the chapel, Kyle nodded reluctant agreement.

With his shirt unbuttoned, Nick stood before her. In the lamp’s glow, he looked impossibly young as he gestured to the rustic wood walls. “Think this might be the same cabin?”

“Don’t know.”

He moved forward, and despite her sodden condition, he slipped his hands inside her jacket to barely graze the sides of her waist. “There’s nothing we can do about Wyatt or the landslide tonight.”

Nick’s touch resonated along her nerves the way his voice had when she’d first heard it again this afternoon. How tempting it would be to go into his arms, but some deeper instinct warned she couldn’t simply start up where they’d left off.

She raised her hands to gesture him away.

“You’re bleeding,” Nick said sharply, grabbing her wrists and turning her palms up.

She stepped back. If he started ministering to her wounds, she’d still be in this room at dawn. “I’ve got first aid supplies in my bag … I shouldn’t have awakened you.”

“Kyle … wait…”

Before she could change her mind, she let herself out into the night. The wind had picked up, colder and dryer as the clouds began to break apart. As she walked away from Nick’s cabin, and she did believe it was the same one they’d shared so long ago, a little voice told her he was right. Wyatt was warm and secure in bed with Alicia.

And she was playing the fool to walk away from Nick’s offer of the same thing.

For a moment, she almost turned back, but reason said it would be like jumping into black and icy water, with no sense how far down the bottom lay.

Kyle started toward the hotel. With her feet already wet and achingly tender, she slogged despondently through freezing puddles in the parking lot.

From somewhere up on Sepulcher Mountain above the hot springs came a howl that prickled her skin into goose bumps. She’d heard a lot of coyotes, but this full-throated call sounded as though it came from a larger animal. One of those wolves Alicia and her fellow workers had brought in from Canada to repopulate the predator system.

An answering howl from behind the hotel reminded Kyle that as soon as they were provisioned, she, Nick, and Wyatt would be on their way into the Yellowstone backcountry.

All her muscles knotted in anticipation. Going back to Earthquake Lake had not had the desired effect of laying her ghosts. Rather, they had risen up to taunt her, turning her into a crazy woman who climbed out windows into rainstorms and tried to call Wyatt’s girlfriend in the middle of the night.

A wolf bayed again. A quarter-moon shone in the clearing sky, each day shrinking toward Brock Hobart’s next alignment.

Wyatt rapped his knuckles on the door of Alicia’s townhouse beside the Yellowstone River in Gardiner. He was still sopping, though the rain had let up. The point was driven home when she opened her door and gasped, “What happened?”

“Landslide at the canyon bend.”

“You could have been killed.”

“Baby, for a minute I thought I had been.” He stepped inside, his rain-soaked clothes dripping onto the tile floor. Running his truck heater full blast on the way down hadn’t chased away the cold, or the edginess at realizing how close to disaster he’d been.

As soon as he was in the clear, he’d stopped and used his cell to call 911 and report the slide. Then he waited for the emergency crews, standing in the road with his flashlight to stop anyone coming up, before they rounded a blind curve and crashed into the dam across the highway.

“Come into the kitchen.” Alicia wore a leopard print robe gathered at her waist with a black satin sash. It gapped to permit a glimpse of her breasts while she pushed Wyatt’s parka from his shoulders and hung it over a kitchen chair. Turning back to him, she struggled his T-shirt out of his waistband and up over his chest. He raised his arms to let her draw it over his head.

“Take off those wet jeans and get straight in the shower.” The wind had soaked his pant legs to the crotch.

When he finally came out of the bath, replete from the blessed solace of hot water, she waited with a steaming mug of something to drink. He laid his glasses on the nightstand and the candles giving off a sandalwood aroma became wavering points of light.

Alicia fussed over him and gave him sips of green tea he determined was laced with brandy. He got naked beneath the smooth covers and drank tea again, thinking of asking for more brandy.

Before he could, Alicia walked out of the room and came back with the bottle. She poured for them both and slid in beside him, her warm flesh slippery through silk. She kissed him and her lips clung in a way that pushed back the danger and the cold night.

She raised her head and looked into his eyes. “I love you,” she whispered.

Wyatt ran both hands through his hair, parting its damp waves. He swallowed and resisted the impulse to clear his throat. The last time he’d told Marie he loved her, it had been the rote habit of the long married. He hadn’t really listened to himself, and neither, apparently had she. Less than two days later he came home from the fabricating company and found his wife and her clothes gone.

Alicia waited, the air seeming to thicken between them. Her dark eyes shone with hope.

It would be so easy to go with the flow, but long habit kept him from committing without thinking things through. There was one thing, though, that she might appreciate.

He pushed himself upright in bed, jostling her. “Could you find my keys?”

Her eyes narrowed and she flounced out of bed, shoving the bedroom door open a little harder than necessary. “Need your wallet, too?” she called. “It’s pretty wet.”

“Just the keys.”

Alicia came back and sat on the edge of the bed as he sorted the jangling mass. Hoping she’d understand there were words he couldn’t say, he twisted the ring and removed the extra house key. “You should have one of these. Look out for the place while I’m gone.”

Wyatt drew her down in bed and snuggled her against his side, feeling fortunate at tonight’s narrow escape. Considering he, Kyle, and Nick were going into the backcountry for the new moon, he had to hope Brock Hobart was a head case.

E
arly in the morning, Wyatt drove his pickup around the vehicles queued at Yellowstone’s north entrance. “Morning, Teri,” he greeted the female ranger who waved him through the employee gate and returned to turning away tourists in the traffic line.

With the main road from Gardiner to Mammoth closed by the slide, only Park Service workers would be permitted to take a dirt track up through the hills, a route that had been the historic access into the park. As Wyatt turned his truck onto the road usually reserved for one-way downhill, he checked his rearview mirror for Alicia in her Navigator. She was meeting some clients at the hotel for a wolf watching tour.

This morning he’d awakened to find her pressed against him, her arm twined across his chest. When she told him again that she loved him, eyes gleaming, he had smothered her words with a kiss.

As for why he was holding back, he reminded himself she was used to Dior while he led a simple ranger’s life. Though both of them were originally raised on ranches, hers was a broad expanse of South Texas scrub, home to her father’s collection of purebred Angus and exotic imported Axis and Fallow deer. Wyatt came from hardscrabble acreage in a valley north of Bozeman where his father and he had taken care of chores morning and evening.

Yet, while he drove over the sage covered hills, he decided his reluctance to commit had nothing to do with their diverse backgrounds. Alicia was a trouper who enjoyed fieldwork. Her neat townhouse in Gardiner wasn’t ostentatious, and her outdoor clothing came from the same catalogs he shopped.

They could make things work. There was no reason not to … except for the vague yearning that stirred in his chest at the memory of Kyle’s troubled eyes, and her recent refusal to talk freely to him.

Wyatt pressed the accelerator. The final leg of the uphill track wound back down above Mammoth. From this elevated vantage point, it looked like a toy town thrown together from different game sets, ancient buildings mixed with modern.

As he emerged from the dirt road onto the paved parking lot, he passed the hotel where Kyle and her old flame had spent the night.

Kyle greeted the ranger raising the United States flag outside Park Headquarters. With last night’s rain a memory, the sun had risen over the tabular top of Mt. Everts. A rime of predawn ice was melting from rooftops and parked vehicles.

At her side, Nick moved lithely through the frosted grass, his boots making crunching noises. He raised his arms over his head and stretched like a cat, expanding his chest to inhale deeply. Following his lead, Kyle took in the bracing air, though she walked more gingerly, her feet sore from the stone bruises she’d gotten on the slide.

“You still worried about Wyatt?” he asked.

Before she could reply, she followed his gaze across the lawns to the Resource Center. In front of the building, Wyatt was getting out of the Bronco.

She shouted his name. He turned and she waved, resisting the impulse to run over and hug him.

Wyatt waited for them outside the entry. With a glance at Nick, he said, “I trust you passed a pleasant evening.”

“And an even better night,” Nick rejoined.

“That’s more than I can say for myself.” Wyatt thrust his thumbs into his jacket pockets and leaned against a porch post. “After midnight I was driving down to see Alicia”—did Kyle imagine a faint emphasis on his girl’s name?—”when the side of the mountain came down into Gardner Canyon.”

Kyle gasped. “I was driving down, too, and almost got wiped out by the slide.”

Wyatt’s dark eyes held hers. “Are you all right?”