Open Arms (6 page)

Groaning again, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and tried to envision getting to her feet. The idea seemed laughable.

Swaying, tottering, holding on to the wall for support, Tammy carefully opened the door of Julie’s guest room. She stood in the hallway, listening. Julie’s door was partway open, and she heard her friend’s steady breathing.
Still sleeping. Lucky duck.

Tammy snuck down the hall to the bathroom, her bare feet silent against the wooden floor. She poured herself another glass of water and gulped it down on the spot –
God, the tap water out here is so fresh and cold
– and then poured one more to take back to her room.

Once back in the guestroom, the door closed tight, Tammy wondered if she would risk looking out the window. She feared the sun would burn her eyes right out of her head. But the draw of the mountains was too much; she had come to love looking at them, much to her surprise, and knowing they were there, just behind the closed drapes, was as enticing as ever.

She screwed up her eyes as tight as she could while still being able to see, and pulled the drapes aside. The mountains appeared, snowy and cold, but somehow welcoming.

Tammy’s eyes drifted down, down to the bushes just under her window. The bright green was beautiful against the pure white snow, and she smiled. Then something caught her attention and she looked more closely, her brow furrowed. The snow next to the bushes was all broken up. What
was
that?

Tammy leaned forward, her forehead pressed against the cool window. As her eyes focused and her exhausted brain clicked in to gear, she saw what was there and she gasped. Footprints. Large paw prints, to be exact, and a large round spot.
Oh, my God
.
The wolf was right there – sitting outside my window. During the night? It was there for a while, no doubt: that round patch is where it was sitting and not moving.

In her mind, Tammy imagined a large gray animal sitting under a cold, bright full moon, staring up at her window while she slept. She shivered.

Chapter Four

On Monday morning at ten o’clock, the entire staff of Open Skies Ranch and Tammy were sitting in the restaurant, sipping coffee and listening intently to Phil.

“OK, so. Jake and I went out yesterday and found the tracks down by the stables and up near the Big House, and they’re way bigger than coyote tracks. I’d say that Jake is right, and he saw a wolf.”

Everyone sighed and stirred in their chairs.

“Hold on, guys. On the whole, I think it’s fine. I did some research online yesterday, and wolves have been spotted in the Colorado Rockies a bit more over the past few years. Generally, they stay away from people, so I’d guess that Jake just saw an especially curious one.” He shrugged. “I’d be surprised if we saw it again, to be honest.”

“But don’t wolves attack people if they’re hungry?” Maria’s eyes were wide with fear.

“Maria, hon,” Phil said gently. “There are over 300,000 elk in this state, and the population is out of control and so any wolf around these parts has plenty to eat out there in the wild. I read how there’s actually a lot of support in Colorado for wolves to be integrated in to the natural order, to keep the elk population within reasonable limits. The majority of people here in Colorado want wolves reintroduced to the Rockies, but seeing as they’re killed in huge numbers up north – in Montana and Idaho and Wyoming – they rarely get this far south.”

“Why are they killed up there?” Tammy asked. “If they’re so important to the natural order and the animal food chain and all that?”

Phil shook his head. “Misinformation about them, mostly, and irrational fears about how they kill livestock and attack kids and pets. Predator removal programs, and government-sanctioned permits that allow hunters to legally shoot way more wolves than other animals, like bears or mountain lions. Lots of people hate ‘em, and there isn’t enough being done to really change how they’re seen.”

“So… this one beat the odds, right?” Julie said. “Survived somehow, and got all the way down here, and is still in one piece. I’d say we have a duty to protect it, if we can.” She looked at the others. “What do you all think?”

Everyone nodded except Maria.

“Maria? You still worried?” Rob asked.

“Yes,” she whispered, shifting under all the eyes turned her way. “But I’m sure you’re right.”

Phil smiled at her. “Yeah, well. Jake and I aren’t experts by any stretch of the imagination. So this morning I called a friend of mine to come by and look around a bit, give us her thoughts. She knows a lot about wolves, and has been trying to get them reintroduced here in Colorado. I’ll have her talk to us after, OK? You can ask her anything you want.”

“OK, good,” Maria said in obvious relief.

Phil looked at his watch. “Kim will be here in about twenty minutes. I’ll bring her around, introduce you all to her. You can talk to her then. Alright?”

Everyone nodded and got to their feet.

Julie, Jake, Tammy, and Phil walked outside together and looked around. Mattie came down the stairs of the main building and joined them.

“Mattie, do you know anything about wolves?” Julie asked her. “You’re from Montana originally, right?”

“Yep,” Mattie said. “And what Phil said in there is just about right, about where I come from. Back home, folks are scared to death of wolves killing their livestock, and farmers and ranchers just shoot on sight, most of them.”

“Have you ever seen a wolf?” Tammy asked her. “Up close?”

Mattie leaned against the wall, crossed her arms loosely. “I did, once. When I was a small girl – maybe seven or eight years old.”

“What happened?” Phil said.

“Oh, I was sneaking around way past my bedtime, wandering around the forest at night and just being a dumb kid, you know. And this gigantic wolf just appeared in front of me. Stood there and stared at me, not moving a muscle.”

“What did you do?” Tammy asked.

“Froze up. Stopped breathing. Thought about dropping dead on the spot from fear.”

“Yeah, understandable,” Jake said. “So what did you actually do?”

“Waited. And the wolf – it was just so beautiful, I remember that. Its eyes shone in the moonlight and it was so… so…
calm
, somehow. Just sitting there, almost challenging me to be brave and stare it down. And I did, and after a minute, it just turned around and walked away.”

“Wow,” Julie said. “It never even moved towards you?”

“Not one inch. It just waited, and I waited, and then it was all over.” She looked at her spellbound audience. “I never told my Daddy, ‘cause I knew if he knew about the wolf being so close to the house, he’d track it and shoot it, just on principle, and I didn’t want that. I had looked in to its eyes, you know, seen its soul, almost. After you look at another living creature like that, it takes a damn hard person to kill that creature. You have a bond, and it’s not that easy to treat the other’s life so cheap.”

Jake flashed back to David Reid, Julie’s father, dying in his arms. Dave’s mint-green eyes – the eyes that stared at him from Julie’s beautiful face every single day – had shown Jake his soul as he lay there. Jake knew what Mattie meant about that bond making the other person’s life more valuable, more personal. When Dave died, Jake thought that he’d die too.

The sound of a car engine broke the silence and everyone looked down the long, winding dirt road to the main gate. A blue pickup was driving slowly towards them; it passed the corral and climbed the hill from the stables to the main building. The truck pulled up a few feet from the group, and Phil stepped forward to greet his friend.

The woman who climbed out of the truck was dressed in black jeans and a gorgeous brown leather jacket and black leather boots. She had a red scarf wrapped around her neck, loose and fluttering in the breeze, and she was one of the tiniest people that Julie had ever seen. She was used to being the shortest person in a group, but she had more than a few inches on Kim. She admired the woman’s sleek black hair as it blew around her head, streaked with warmth from the morning winter sun.

“Kim!” Phil stepped forward and gave her a hug; his strong arms wrapped around her tiny frame and she disappeared in to his broad chest. “How you doing, girl?”

Kim stepped back and gave Phil a brilliant smile. “Good, as ever. You?”

“Good.” Phil turned to the others. “Everyone, please meet Kimana Beck. Kimana, this is Julie, Jake, Tammy and Mattie.”

Nods all around and Kimana smiled. “You can call me ‘Kim’, if you prefer. And thank you, so much. I’m so pleased that you called me. I have a very big personal interest in wolf protection.”

“Yes, Phil said that you know a lot about them,” Jake said. “He mentioned you’re trying to get them reintroduced to the state?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I am. It’s been my mission for years.” She glanced around the ranch and hotel and then towards the foot of the mountains. “It seems odd that a wolf would venture so close to the buildings – the Rockies are right there, offering shelter and prey. Strange. Can you show me exactly where you saw it?”

Jake nodded. “Yeah, that was me. I’ll take you to where we found the footprints this morning, down by the stables and then again up at the Big House.”

“Thank you.”

“I think I’ll stay up here, if that’s OK,” Julie said. “Rob and I have a meeting this morning with the builders about the new cabins. Do you mind?”

“No, it’s fine,” Phil said. “We’ll call if anything comes up.”

Julie nodded and she and Tammy watched as Jake, Phil, Mattie and Kimana walked away, down the hill to the open prairie.

Tammy turned to Julie. “You know, it sounds crazy and horrible to say this, but I’ve never met a Native American before.”

“Really?”

Tammy shook her head. “Never. In New York, I was surrounded by a million nationalities and languages and cultures, all the time and everywhere, but I never – not once – met a Native American. Isn’t that sad?”

“I know what you mean.”

Tammy stared down the hill at the small group walking away, then cocked her head. “OK, well. You get to work. I’m going to take a truck and head in to Clarity to pick up a few things.”

“You what?” Julie asked. “You sure? I can get someone to drive you in, if you want…”

“No, it’s OK. I want to go myself.”

Julie hesitated, feeling protective. But then she looked at Tammy, and she relaxed a bit. Her friend was happy and optimistic and almost completely back to herself. It was time for Julie to start treating her the way she had done until five weeks ago.

“Alright,” Julie said. “You’ve got the keys?”

Tammy produced them from the back pocket of her jeans. “Mattie gave them to me this morning.”

“So, you’re all set. See you later. Drive safe, OK?’

“Yes, ma’am.” Tammy winked and headed around to the back of the building, to the staff parking lot. Mattie had shown her the pickup truck they used for hotel and ranch stuff: runs in to town for feed and supplies for the horses; trips by Manny and his kitchen staff to buy some food from local farmers.

She unlocked the door and clambered in. Even with her long legs, it was still a bit of a stretch and she giggled to herself, imagining Julie or Kimana trying to climb up to the driver’s seat. She started the engine, waited a few minutes as it warmed up. Tammy sat and gazed up at the mountains, looking at the snow-tipped trees and the clear blue sky overhead.

Her thoughts turned to Rob, to the blue of his eyes. She hadn’t really seen or spoken to him since the day before, when she sat in his office and told him that she was going back to New York in a month. At the meeting this morning, he sat quite a distance from her, and although he gave her a warm smile from across the room, she had wanted a hug. She wanted to be pressed up against his large, strong body, his heartbeat against her own.

She shook her head.
Nope. No way for this to work out
. And really, what did she and Rob have in common, anyway? She had learned quite a lot about Rob the night that she had stayed at Julie’s. They had sat up all night drinking wine and then tea and then coffee – they had watched the sun rise and then finally fallen in to bed around nine o’clock in the morning. Tammy had asked all about Rob; she hadn’t been able to help herself.

She learned that Rob was a college graduate; he had his MBA from Daniels College at the University of Denver. Apparently, he had won a place in the highly-competitive one-year program, and graduated top of his class. He was smart, way smarter than she was, obviously. Tammy had scraped by in a general Fashion Design degree in community college. At the time – so many years ago, now – she really thought that she could make it as a designer. She had been young and excited and enthusiastic, and she had loved working with color and material and fluid lines.

But school had been hard for her, it had always been hard. Julie had found the energy and drive to fight her way through, despite everything, but Tammy just didn’t have that in her. So she got a mediocre degree from a mediocre school and ended up having to temp wherever she could find work, trying to support herself until she found a job in design or fashion.

A cleaning job turned in to a waitressing job; that turned in to a secretarial job and
that
turned in to more secretarial jobs. The hours were long, the commutes were brutal, the money was a straight-up joke, and she had no energy or creativity left when she got home. She stopped sketching after work and started vegging out on the sofa watching brainless TV. Eventually, her ambition faded and then it died.

Now, she was now pretty much stuck in temporary office work, though the job she’d had when she was attacked in the alley had been pretty OK. Well, sort of. It was a pain to have a boss like Reg who micro-managed every damned thing, but she had kind of liked the predictability of it all. She didn’t have the job any more, of course: she was fired within three days of being beaten and left in the snow and cold. She couldn’t even be too upset about it; she didn’t have any kind of contract, and that was reality.

Rob, though. He had education and job experience –
real
experience. Working in large companies, running marketing departments, heading up sales teams. Julie said that he was one of the main reasons Open Skies was such a raging success, and Tammy believed it.

So. He was intelligent. He had a good job. He ate healthy and he worked out. He wore suits. He drove an expensive car. He even had a great apartment, Julie said, and he’d done most of the work himself. He had bought it for next-to-nothing, and then spent every weekend and evening for a year doing it up: sanding the floors, knocking down walls, painting. Julie said he had even done the whole kitchen himself, as some kind of creative project – he built the cabinets from scratch. He’d had a house-warming party when it was done and he had moved in and even though Julie hadn’t been there – it was about three years ago, long before she had even heard of David Reid or Open Skies – she had seen the pictures. She said the place was fantastic.

His girlfriend had been there in the pictures, too, Julie said. What was her name? Carol? Karen? Well, whatever. She was long gone now, off to Hong Kong or someplace. She had accepted a glamorous banking job and had left Rob behind. So even his girlfriends were super smart and successful and – according to Julie – stunning. Carol/Karen was gorgeous, with long brown hair and huge brown eyes and a perfect curvy figure with long, slim legs. She sounded like what would happen if someone mashed Julie and Tammy together in to one body: tall and slim, with curves and breasts. Tammy hated her, even though she’d never met her.

She sighed and revved the engine a bit, then backed out. She headed to Clarity, determined to enjoy her time alone, away from Open Skies. She decided to pop in to a café for a Cappuccino and a piece of pie, and then she’d go and buy some clothes, maybe something bright and flirty and fun. It was totally wasted on everyone here, of course, but what the hell. Tammy was OK with that; it was completely
fine
that Rob wasn’t even the tiniest little bit interested in her.

Well. Maybe she wasn’t
totally
OK or fine with that.
**
Kimana Beck stared down at the tracks in the snow.
Unbelievable. A miracle
.