Struggling up out of the depths of sleep, her eyes drenched in tears, she whimpered, “No, it’s Laura. Oh God, Hunter, I think she’s really in trouble!” And with no more warning than that, she threw herself into his arms.
Seven
She was soft and warm from sleep and too damn enticing to be holding in the middle of the night, when a man was at his most vulnerable. The second he instinctively caught her against him, he knew he should have released her immediately and put some distance between them. He’d been dreaming of her, of kissing her, his traitorous body aching for her in his sleep, and dammit, his heart was still pounding! He had no business touching her, not when all he could think about was pulling her down to his sleeping bag with him, but he couldn’t make himself let her go. Not when she was this close.
Cursing himself even as his arms wrapped tighter around her, he huskily shushed her. “Shhh. She’s fine. You just had a bad dream. Why don’t you crawl back into your sleeping bag and let me fix you something hot to drink? I’ve got some instant hot chocolate—”
“No! Please!” she whimpered, clinging to him. “I just need to hold on to somebody for a second.”
Somebody. Anybody. His jaw held back an oath as he told himself that she was just looking for reassurance and any warm body would have done. But it wasn’t just anybody she was draped all over—it was him—and he could feel every soft, enticing curve of her. His blood stirred and heated, and he was helpless to stop it.
His jaw rigid, he silently ordered himself to put a stop to this now, before things got out of hand. But when he finally found the strength of will to bring his hands to her shoulders and draw her away from him, he took one look at her tear-drenched eyes, and all his fine resolves crumbled. She was hurting, and all he could think about was making her feel better.
“C’mere,” he growled, and swept her onto his lap.
Naomi knew she was probably going to regret this later. But it was late and her defenses were down and she couldn’t carry the burden of worrying about Laura all by herself anymore. Hunter wrapped his arms around her and made her feel safe when she’d have sworn no man could ever make her feel that way again. Then, when she was sure that was all she needed from him, he kissed her and shattered the loneliness that seemed like it had been with her forever. She could have no more resisted him than an eagle could have resisted the temptation to soar on the wind.
He wouldn’t stop with just a kiss this time; she was sure of it. In spite of the fact that she had a daughter, she wasn’t all that experienced and wanted to tell him. But she couldn’t find the words to say that her only other experience was with James, her only other point of reference a man who put his own wants and needs first and only thought of her in passing. Because of him, she’d never been able to see what all the fuss had been about sex. It was nice, but hardly the thing that made the world go round.
Or so she thought until Hunter eased her down to his sleeping bag and tenderly began to make love to her. Braced for quick, impatient hands, she could only shudder when he seemed perfectly content to just touch and explore and caress her. Confused, she caught at his hand and unconsciously clung to it like it was a lifeline. “Aren’t you—”
“Shh,” he murmured, trailing slow, warm kisses down her throat and over her breast. “Just relax and let me take care of you. That’s it,” he said in a low, rough voice when he beaded her nipple with his breath alone and drew a soft, startled gasp from her. “Don’t think. Don’t do anything but feel.”
Bathed in firelight, his hands gentle and sure on her, she couldn’t do anything else but feel. Fascination. It was there in every long, slow stroke of his hands, in the blind, hungry kisses that followed, in the husky words of praise he rasped in her ear. He drenched her in sensations, until her senses blurred and her heart thundered and she couldn’t remember her own name.
And then, when she thought she couldn’t possibly feel anything else, he showed her just how wrong she was. He kissed his way down her body, and she cried out as needs that were already past bearing sharpened with intensity. Tension tightened every nerve ending, and as the storm raged outside, so did the one in her blood. Hot, restless, her lungs straining, she clutched at him, drawing him back up to her, into her.
A groan was ripped from his throat, and whatever control he had left snapped. As the wind howled outside and the firelight danced on the ceiling, he set a rhythm that rivaled the wildness of the night. There was no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but here and now and each other. In the flickering light of the fire, his eyes met and held hers, their fingers intertwined. Intimacy took on a whole new meaning. And when they raced for the stars and shattered into a million pieces, they held each other like they would never let go.
The blizzard blew itself out during the night, and by morning the sky was crystal blue and the wind was calm. If it hadn’t been for the frigid temperatures and the foot of fresh snow that covered the ground, no one would ever know the storm had happened.
Standing on the front porch of the cabin, Naomi watched Hunter carry their gear out of the cabin and couldn’t help but wonder if the hours she’d spent in his arms had been nothing more than a figment of her imagination. She’d woken an hour ago to find herself back in her own sleeping bag in front of the fire and Hunter repacking the backpacks. He’d mumbled a gruff good-morning to her and asked about her wrist, but since then he’d had little time for conversation. On the few occasions when he had spoken, his shuttered expression hadn’t encouraged any personal discussions. If he’d wanted to tell her how he felt about making love with her, he couldn’t have picked a better way.
Hurt lodged in the region of her heart, and she told herself she had no one to blame but herself. What in the world had gotten into her? She wasn’t adventuresome when it came to men—she never had been. When she’d met James, she’d been a shy, unsure virgin, and she hadn’t even considered going to bed with him until she was convinced she was head-over-heels in love with him. Since she’d discovered just what kind of a lying lowlife he was, she hadn’t let another man so much as touch her.
Until Hunter.
Somehow he’d slipped under her guard and gotten past her defenses, and she’d let herself forget why she couldn’t trust him or any other man. Well, it wouldn’t happen again. He obviously regretted the night as much as she did. If he wanted to act as if nothing happened between them, he wouldn’t get an argument out of her.
“All right, that’s it,” he said as he stored the last of their gear on the snowmobile. “Let’s go.”
Without a word she climbed onto the machine behind him and tried not to notice how her heart kicked into a faster rhythm at his nearness. She was still sore from her fall yesterday, her wrist still splinted, but as he slowly took off, she was able to hold on to him without having to completely wrap her arms around him. For that, she was profoundly grateful.
With a fresh layer of snow covering everything, the mountains looked like they had been swept clean by the storm. The drifts were eight feet deep in places, and it quickly became apparent that any progress they were going to make would be slow. Not that there was much chance of them locating any tracks. What the new snow hadn’t covered up, the wind had obliterated. When Hunter took them back to the spot where they’d last spied James’s footprints the night before, there was nothing but unblemished snow in every direction for as far as the eye could see.
Her heart sinking, Naomi couldn’t hold back the tears that flooded her eyes. She whispered thickly, “What do we do now?”
For the first time since he’d made love to her last night, Hunter touched her. Covering her good hand, which was curled around his waist, he patted her reassuringly. “Don’t give up hope yet, honey. I know things don’t look good right now, but if nothing else, we know the storm stopped James in his tracks just like it did us. And since we know he’s on foot, that means that when he was forced to take shelter last night, he couldn’t have been any farther than a day’s walk from where he crashed the
snowmobile. That’s where his tracks will start today. We just have to find them.”
He made it sound so easy. The only problem was that a day’s walk from the snowmobile in every direction could cover hundreds of acres in wilderness. How could they possibly stumble across a single set of tracks in all that? It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
But what other choice did they have?
Since James’s tracks were headed north the last time they saw them, they continued in that direction, driving back and forth across the mountain for what seemed like hours. Their eyes straining and narrowed against the reflection of the sun on the snow, they looked for anything that might indicate someone had been that way recently, but there was nothing.
Worry eating at her, Naomi told herself they hadn’t come all this way only to lose Laura now. They would find her. They had to! Then she smelled smoke.
His nose lifted to the cold, crisp air, Hunter caught the scent, too. Braking to a stop, he cut the engine to the snowmobile and scanned the clear sky above the treetops off to their right. Off in the distance a thin trail of smoke climbed skyward. “Bingo,” he said softly.
“Do you think it’s James?” Naomi asked as he climbed off the snowmobile and unloaded their packs from the back. “What are you doing? Aren’t we going to check out that fire?”
“Not on the snowmobile, we’re not,” he said grimly. “If that’s James up there in the trees, I’d just as soon not announce our presence until we’re ready to surprise him.” Arching a brow at her, he drawled, “You are, I assume, coming with me?”
He couldn’t have kept her away, and they both knew it. “I plan to be right behind you every step of the way.” Her heart pounding at the thought of finally having her daughter safe and sound in her arms again, she quickly scrambled into her backpack. “Let’s go.”
On foot in the deep snow, it took them nearly thirty minutes just to climb to the ridge where they’d spotted the smoke. Impatient, frantic with worry, Naomi wanted to throw caution to the wind and go running through the trees in search of the campfire, but Hunter kept her close. His brown eyes narrowed and wary, he didn’t intend to let Naomi take the lead until he knew what they were walking into.
But holding her back became impossible once they spied James frantically adding wood to a campfire in the middle of a small, sheltered clearing notched by rough, granite boulders on three sides. She took one look at the small figure lying by the fire and burst through the trees.
“Laura!”
Whirling from the fire, James glared accusingly at her. “This is all your fault! If you had stayed home and given me a chance, I would have brought her back. But, no! You had to come after me and force me to go higher into the mountains than I’d planned. Because of you, we got caught in that damn storm last night and nearly froze to death. It was so cold and I couldn’t find any wood to build a fire until the sun came up, and now I think it’s too late. Laura—”
Naomi’s heart stopped dead in her chest. With a strangled cry, she rushed to her daughter’s side, only to find her still and unconscious and her skin far too cold in spite of the fact that she was wrapped in James’s coat and lying close to the fire.
“No!” she cried. “You bastard! What have you done to her?”
“I didn’t do anything,” he retorted without remorse. “If you want to blame someone, look in the mirror—”
Furious, Naomi didn’t even bother to answer him. Dismissing him, she whipped off her own jacket and tucked it around Laura’s small frame, then quickly gathered her up into her arms. “Mama’s here, sweetheart,” she whispered brokenly, rocking her. “Mama’s here. Everything’s going to be okay.”
But Laura’s eyelashes didn’t so much as flutter, and she was as still as death in Naomi’s arms. More scared than she’d ever been in her life, Naomi lifted terrified eyes to Hunter as he reached her in four long strides and knelt down beside her. “Hunter, please,” she choked. “Help her.”
Her cry broke his heart. Wanting to take her into his arms, knowing there was no time, he squeezed her shoulder reassuringly and quickly pulled his cell phone for his pocket. “Just hang on, honey,” he said huskily as he punched in his cousin Rocky’s number. “Help’s on the way.”
Refusing to even think about what he would do if Rocky was out, he heaved a silent sigh of relief when she came on the line herself. “Fortune Flying Service. Rocky speaking. Can I help you?”
“Rock, thank God! This is Hunter—”
“Hunter? Dammit, didn’t anyone ever teach you to check in once in a while? I’ve been worried sick about you! Lucas said you’d gone up into the mountains with Naomi Windsong to look for her little girl, and I was afraid you got caught in that storm last night.”
“I did. Listen, Rock, I need your help.” Quickly and succinctly, he gave her their location and a brief rundown of Laura’s condition. “How long will it take you to get here? We’ve got her by the fire, but I don’t think there’s any time to spare.”
“Then I’m bringing Lucas with me. Don’t worry—it won’t take me long to round him up. He can be here in five minutes. While I’m waiting for him, I’ll notify the police that Laura’s been found and Barker is with you. Then we’ll be on our way. Don’t let her warm up too much, Hunter,” she advised. “That’s when we lose them. The body doesn’t shut down until it starts to warm up, so we want to make sure she’s at the hospital when that happens. Just hang on. We’ll be there as quick as we can.”
Hunter didn’t doubt for a minute that she knew what she was talking about. She was not only a licensed EMT, but she also owned and operated the only search-and-rescue service in that area of the state. A crackerjack pilot who didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word fear, she’d started her flying service ten years ago when everyone thought Kate had died in a plane crash in South America. With the fleet of small planes and helicopters that Kate had bequeathed her, Rocky’s business had quite literally taken off. Since then she’d rescued innumerable hunters and skiers from the mountains and saved countless lives. If anyone knew the dangers of frostbite and how to prevent deaths from freezing, it was Rocky.
Hanging up, he told Naomi, “Rocky’s on her way, sweetheart, and she’s bringing Lucas with her. She said we need to move her back from the fire. We don’t want her to get too warm.”
“But she’s freezing!”
“I know, honey, but there are reasons.” And he didn’t intend to tell her what those reasons were until he absolutely had to. She was just barely holding herself together now as it was. If she had even an inkling that the real danger to Laura would be when her body temperature began to rise, he didn’t even want to think what that would do to her. “We just need to keep her comfortable until help gets here. It won’t be that long—I promise.”
In actuality, it only took forty-five minutes before they heard the whopping beat of the helicopter blades, but it seemed like a lifetime. Still refusing to take responsibility for what he’d done, James continued to try to blame Naomi, but he was beating a dead horse. Hunter figured that later Naomi would rip him up one side and down the other for what he had done, but for now, she just crooned to Laura and ignored him. Then Rocky was setting the helicopter down in a clearing a hundred yards away, and the only thing that mattered was getting Laura to the hospital.
Carrying Laura, Hunter quickly turned her over to Lucas, and then he was helping Naomi into the helicopter. Over the roar of the blades, he shouted, “I’ll see you when I get back to town!”
Startled, she grabbed for him. “No! You’re coming with us!”
He wanted to—God only knew how much—but someone had to get their gear and the snowmobile back to town. And there was only room in the helicopter for one more person. And as much as he wanted to be there for Naomi when she realized just what kind of danger Laura was in, James had a right as Laura’s father to be there instead. Even if he was the one who had put his daughter’s life in danger.
Motioning to the other
man to take his place, he stepped back. “You’ll be all right,” he yelled to Naomi when she tried to tell him something over the noise of the blades. “Go on!”
Sliding the cargo door shut before she could protest further, he signaled to Rocky that it was all clear for takeoff. Giving him a thumb’s-up, she sent the helicopter rising gracefully into the sky. Standing in the snow kicked up by the force of the rotating blades, Hunter watched the craft head south until it disappeared from view. He’d never felt so alone in his life.
Eight
The flight back to town would always be a blur to Naomi. Lucas Greywolf frantically worked over Laura, keeping a constant watch on her vital signs while Rocky radioed the hospital emergency room to warn them of their estimated arrival time. They were in a race against time, and no one had to tell Naomi that the situation was critical. She could see it in the grim set of Lucas’s mouth, hear it in the terseness of Rocky’s tone as she spoke quietly into the radio. Finally, the seriousness of his daughter’s condition must have penetrated James’s selfish need to cast blame. Strapped in beside her, he sat quietly, his eyes never leaving Laura’s deathly pale face as Lucas started an IV.
He was obviously feeling some remorse, but Naomi felt little sympathy for him. She hoped he was suffering—it was no more than he deserved. Because of his stupid need for revenge, he’d nearly killed her baby. And nothing he could say or do could ever make up for that.
The Clear Springs hospital came into view then, and Rocky swooped down on it like an avenging angel, setting the helicopter down right in the middle of the heliport the Fortune family had donated to the hospital five years ago. The blades were still whirling overhead as doctors and nurses came running with a stretcher, and before Naomi was ready to let Laura out of her sight again, she was being whisked away into the emergency room.