Summer of Fire (41 page)

“You’ve saved my life.” Clare thought of going to change right away, but she was starving. The Coke and candy bar she’d had was a long time ago.

She sank into the wooden chair opposite Garrett.

His serious black eyes held hers. “You doing okay?”

“Better when I find Devon.”

Steve came to them through the throng in jeans and the western shirt he’d worn in Jackson. He gave her a quick once-over that included her haircut, but didn’t say anything.

She and Garrett ordered frosted mugs of beer and Steve a Coke.

Garrett placed his big hands flat. “I found out where Deering flew off to this afternoon. He went to check out a report of some hikers trapped by fire on a ridge.” His expression was graver than she might have expected.

“No one was hurt?” she hoped.

“We don’t know. After Deering flew out toward Nez Perce Peak, he never radioed back. It got dark before they could send anybody to look for him.”

Clare gripped the cigarette-burned edge of the table. “Oh, God. Do you think he’s all right?”

Steve shifted in his chair and made a face that could have expressed pain or a reaction to her concern for Deering.

Clare’s mind flashed to the gilt-edged book on her dresser upstairs. “My great-grandparents were caught by a forest fire on Nez Perce.” What if Deering was on that same peak, down for the second time in a summer? He’d told her of his wife’s fears.

Pizza came; the frozen kind that got soggy when heated. Clare chewed without tasting. Garrett tried to keep up conversation, but while Steve obliged with talk of the ecosystem’s burn recovery she fell silent. Every minute that passed made it less likely that Devon was trying to get a message to her.

Before they parted for the evening, Garrett told Clare, “I promise I’ll phone your room if I hear anything about Devon, no matter what time.”

“Or if you hear from Deering.” She couldn’t help saying it.

Steve pushed up from the table. His chair squealed on the wooden floor that was littered with peanut shells. “I’ll catch you folks in the morning.” His voice was neutral, but Clare detected coolness. He made eye contact with Garrett and passed over her.

As Steve took his leave Garrett told Clare, “The park people and law enforcement in the border towns will keep looking for Devon.” He put out his hand and hers disappeared into his firm grip. She drew strength from his calm certainty that things would work out.

By the time she reached the long upstairs hallway, she heard a door close near hers with a hard note that sounded final.

Biting her lip, Clare went into her own room and slammed her fist against the back of the closed door. What the hell was the matter with Steve? She thought they’d straightened things out about Deering last night.

She killed the hotel room lights, but it wasn’t dark. A red glow from the neon hotel sign filtered through the drapes like the eerie night beauty of the Mink Creek. Thankfully, the blowup had stopped her and Deering from having sex. She couldn’t call what they’d been about to do making love.

In the half-light, she stripped off her boots, socks, and pants. Wearing only her T-shirt, she climbed onto the king bed and stretched out.

Dammit, she and Steve could be good together. Her breath caught as she remembered the urgency with which he had pulled her to him last night. How his lips had felt smooth against her chapped ones. He’d made her feel connected, something foreign now that she was used to making her own way.

She sensed her heart beating, not faster, but she could feel her pulse as though she was more aware of life flowing through her. Her hands rubbed the quilted, paisley-print bedspread, heating with the friction. Steve’s skin would be warm if she stroked her fingers over his back.

With a final adjustment, the tumblers fell into place inside her. The moment when she went from ‘what if’ to certainty that she wanted to make love with him. There would be time for second-guessing back in Houston if she was wrong about them, but what a lost opportunity if they never tried.

Clare spread her arms and legs and imagined that Steve’s weight pressed her as it had in the fire shelter when his eyes had sparked a message. She looked at the connecting door that led to his room.

Steve shed his denim shirt and boots and sat on the bed he’d hoped to entice Clare into. That wasn’t happening because it was always Deering, Deering, Deering. What a great pilot Deering was, she’d said. It was Steve’s fucking problem that he was afraid to fly.

He’d had time to go over that one a dozen times on the drive from Old Faithful. If Garrett hadn’t been there, he’d have told Clare how it pissed him off.

He should say to hell with her.

The urge for a real drink, not some sugary concoction, surged. What if he went down to the bar for a bottle?

He reached for one of his boots and started putting it back on. Clare would be gone soon, back to her real world while he continued his role of ‘the widower who needs a good woman’ in Mammoth.

Steve stopped, his hands at the laces. If he went downstairs, if he started drinking again, Shad Dugan would exile him.

Poised on the edge, he weighed the smoky glow of a good scotch against Mammoth beneath a clear winter sky. White drifts, piled as high as houses, casting blue shadows on the snow. Freezing air stung his nose and lungs while he made the short walk from the old stockade to the administration building. The bar on the door clanked as he pushed into warmth and found Moru Mzima pouring coffee and checking out the cherry pastries someone’s wife had baked.

He’d climb the worn stairs to his small corner office, awash in morning sun and cluttered with stacks he called his piling system. He always savored days devoted to research. Only in winter when park visitors were few could an interpretive ranger find that kind of luxury.

After a few days spent snowed in, the space between the walls always seemed to narrow. That was when he and Moru would head off on snowmobiles into the park interior. Jouncing over the washboard surface formed by the machines, they were warmed by insulated snowsuits, gloves, and helmets, even while traveling fifty miles per hour through subfreezing air.

On the return, he never failed to thrill at the way the world changed at the innocuous notch that edged the vast white expanse of Swan Lake Flat. In the narrow apex of Golden Gate Canyon, the road began a seemingly endless spiral, through the jumbled giant blocks of white travertine called the Hoodoos, sidehilling beside a sweeping vista at least thirty miles up Blacktail Deer Plateau. Winding past the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs and the old military cemetery, onto the parade ground and . . .

Home.

Clare had been the catalyst; the seed to renewed hope when she’d challenged him not to destroy himself. Now he determined to stay sober for all that was important in his life.

He slid off his boot and it clunked to the carpet. To underline the point he pulled off his socks.

In the bathroom, he dashed double handfuls of cold water on his face. He had lost the spare tire and his muscles were defined from the summer’s work. His hair wasn’t ever going to get any thicker, but what there was bore gold sun streaks. His face was bronzed and the puffy bags beneath his eyes had disappeared.

Coming out of the bath, he stopped and looked at the connecting door. Clare was behind it, wearing that silly grizzly shirt or maybe nothing at all. His breathing deepened, or maybe it just seemed the air grew dense. This new, heavy atmosphere defined his body, making him aware of all his sensations. The carpet felt soft beneath his bare feet. His jeans rode low, looser in the past weeks, well-worn cotton against his skin. He ran a hand over his stomach and chest and stared at the thin panel that separated him from Clare.

She was probably in bed now.

He began to pace, as best he could in the small room, a few feet toward the nightstand, about face and around in front of the silent TV to the other side of the bed. If he had any sense, he’d turn on the set to distract him.

He kept moving.

The king bed looked vast and empty, while just beyond that wall Clare was equally alone. On each circuit, he had to pass the door, not once, but twice.

He would never know what had been between her and Deering, but she’d told him it was over. She could have stayed at the Storm Creek camp with the pilot the other night, not gone home with him to Mammoth. She could have let him leave that night in Jackson, instead of sharing her and Devon’s room, sleeping trustfully near him.

Last night, she’d come into his arms. His hands felt full with the pulse of wanting to touch her again, to feel her bare skin full length against him.

Steve slowed his pacing. He was never going to sleep knowing how close she was. He found his palms pressed flat against the door. Slowly, he bent and put his ear against it to hear if she had put on the TV. All was silent.

If he opened this side, ever so quietly, he could see if she had her lamp on. Before he could change his mind, he twisted the turn button on the lock and pulled the door open. The knob-less facing panel looked odd, beveled like a door, but one without promise. If he knocked, she might tell him to go away. Perhaps she would not.

He told himself that it didn’t make sense to start something that was doomed to end with them separated by half the continent.

But for him it was already begun. After four years on ice, it was time to start living again.

With her hand on the knob of the connecting door, Clare jumped at the soft knock. Relief turned her knees to jelly as she opened the door.

Steve leaned against the jamb as though he had all the time in the world, but she felt the fallacy in that; saw the tautness in the muscles of his bare arms and chest. Her heart pounded.

“Steve.” She backed up, flustered. Her hand went to the pulse at the base of her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me downstairs that you wanted to talk to me?”

He hooked his thumbs inside the belt loops of his low-slung jeans. It hitched them down to reveal his navel, encircled with a whorl of golden hair. “We can talk if you like . . . but . . .” His gray eyes were smoky.

It seemed at once a long time and yet might never last long enough, while Steve simply looked at her. His gaze drank in her breasts beneath the grizzly bear T-shirt, down to where it draped boyish hips she’d hated in high school. The way he crooked a brow said he didn’t think her hips were a bit like a boy’s.

He came to her in three swift strides as though he’d forgotten the pain in his knees. Her mouth opened beneath his as if they’d had years of knowing each other rather than a single kiss.

Her fears for Devon were still with her, could never be far from the surface, yet Steve compelled her to lose herself and be shored up with his strength.

He deepened the embrace and she felt his need. His hands defined her in a way she had never thought possible. This might be another brainless decision of the body, the kind of stupid mistake she’d almost made with Deering, but how strong this sense of right.

She was vaguely aware of him stripping off his watch and dropping it onto the bed behind her. That simple gesture touched her as he tried to protect her from being scratched by the buckle.

One of his hands slid down her back and found the bottom of the thin T-shirt. She thought with longing of turquoise lace, tossed into a trashcan at the Storm Creek Camp. Raising her arms, she let him draw the single garment over her head.

She stood before him as naked as the desire in his eyes. She’d imagined them taking it slow; savoring each step that had been too long denied, but her hunger was as fierce as his.

“My God,” he said with undisguised appreciation. He was beyond savoring the view, shucking his jeans and underwear in a single motion to reveal his impatience.

She brushed her palms across his chest and he pulled her to him. The warmth of skin against skin made her shudder deliciously. “Remember when you were younger and this was a huge deal?” she whispered.

He stroked her bare shoulders and lowered his mouth to her ear. “I don’t know about you,” he nipped her lobe, “but for me, it’s as special . . . and as important, as ever.”

“That’s what I was getting to.” She ran out of words as he took her mouth. They went down together onto the bed, she on her back. She was ready, so ready, and he knew.

She reached to touch and found him powerful and equally prepared. He poised above her, seeking, and their eyes met.

He smiled.

As he pressed into her, she felt tight around him, another sign that it had been too long. Her hands roamed and discovered skin as smooth as she’d imagined. He smelled clean, yet the earthy scent of musk rose as she met him. His breath was fast against her cheek and he moaned. The sound of his voice drove her harder.

Dear God, it had never been like this. The urgency of his touch spoke to a sweet sense of yearning in her. This man, this place, this improbable set of circumstances, even her fear for Devon, combined to carry her along like a sweeping wave. Faster and hotter, Steve built to a frenzied motion. Sweat-slicked, driving, driving, until he said in her ear, “With me, Clare.”

She was there. A feeling so piercing and intense that tears filled her eyes, while the clench of her sent him to the brink.