Red Wolf's Return. Mary Forbes J.

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СКАЧАТЬ she returned to her PC, changed her footwear, then retrieved camera and notebook from her duty bag. Move it or lose it, Meg.

      She ignored the double entendre at the sight of Ethan heading for his truck. Was she prepared to reestablish their friendship, or would she let him go…again?

      

      He drove with the window down, left arm on the sill, shifting the gear shift effortlessly on curves and hills. She watched his booted feet work the clutch and gas.

      A small waterfall streamed through her abdomen at the sight of his bare brown calves and knees, forearms and biceps. She imagined their strength, the texture of compact muscle, how his skin—the color of dark-roast coffee with cream—would contrast against the paleness of her own.

      Snapping around, she viewed the tiny lake skimming through the trees beyond the side window. What was she doing, thinking of skin and muscle and color—of Ethan Red Wolf—this way? She had trained herself never to think of men sexually, not for seven years, not since Doug Sutcliffe and before him…

      Ethan.

      Young and stupid, that’s what you were back then, believing you had what it took to entice a man. Believing that, no matter what, a man would see you as a woman.

      Laughable, was what it was. Laughable because here she was in what much of the world still deemed a man’s job, toting a gun, wearing a mask of authority. Hiding.

      Losing a breast to cancer tended to make a woman a tad more self-conscious. Especially when the man she’d married—the doctor she’d married—saw her as an altered person postsurgery.

      And she would bet her badge, if Ethan knew, he wouldn’t draw pictures of her with silk locks and youth on her side. He would not remember moments from an era long dead.

      And he damn well wouldn’t be glancing across the cab of his pickup with those eyes that embraced the secrets of the earth, and set her pulse off-kilter.

      Well, to hell with him. To hell with them all. She’d gotten this far, hadn’t she? Did her best to raise her son, create a secure and loving home for him, whether or not he appreciated those aspects in his hormonal, independence-seeking stage. Hadn’t she?

      Damn it. She just needed to stop smelling the man beside her, needed to quit inhaling the scent the sunwarmed breeze brought through the window: that musk of hard work cleaving to skin.

      You’re sniffing like a dog, Meg.

      God, she needed a life.

      Eight minutes later they arrived at Ted’s Landing, a dilapidated pier so called because it had once anchored the float plane of Ted Barns—until Ted sold the plane and relocated to Kentucky.

      Ethan brought the truck to a stop, dug out two iced water bottles from the glove box. After handing her one, he shoved open the door and climbed down. “We walk from here.”

      “I know,” Meg retorted, uncapping her bottle and following him around the hood.

      Did he think she couldn’t recall the rugged topography around Blue Lake? And that Ted’s Landing and a couple of other isolated flat acres were the only areas upon which people had built cottages and cabins? Before Ted’s Landing existed, this very spot had been hers and Ethan’s place to park, their spot to begin hiking two miles through dense bush to their boulder.

      She stared across the miniature body of water that was more lagoon than lake. On its opposite shore, a bounty of autumn robes sheathed the rugged hills. Softening her voice, she asked, “Do you come this way often?”

      He lifted a shoulder. “I circle the lake four or five times a week with my camera and sketchpad.”

      Almost twenty miles on foot over some of the roughest geography within the county. But then, he’d always been a man at home in the outdoors, capturing beauty others missed. In her home office, Meg had hung this year’s calendar, printed with his photographs. September offered her favorite, a ladybug on a single blade of blueeyed grass sprouting amidst a cluster of river stones.

      Evidently done with talking, Ethan cut through the tumbling rock and willows edging the lake, and Meg, focusing on his back, hurried into the woods after him. Twenty minutes later, hoping the sweat under her arms lay invisible on her gray short-sleeved shirt, she followed him into blue-sky sunshine once more.

      The first thing she detected was how much the place had retained its identity over the past decades, and the countless details he’d sketched in the interview room. The elephant-sized boulder still nudged the shoreline, though cattails now led the way into the water. Behind the big stone, the cliff caught the late-morning sunshine, while willows and shaggy shrubs ascended the rock-embedded bank to the ledge that housed an immense eagles’ nest. From this angle, Meg had always thought it resembled one of those behemoth ladies’ hats popular in the 1920s.

      “That thing must weigh a ton,” she remarked, staring up eighty feet. “Do they still come back every spring?”

      From under the bill of his ball cap, his eyes were mystic. “It’s not the same pair, Meggie.”

      That had been here when they were teenagers. Kissing on that rock.

      “Of course not. I was just wondering if this spring’s pair returned the way the others did.”

      “The nest was empty for a lot of years with the shooting range so near. This spring is the first I saw a pair return to nest.”

      “I’m sorry, Ethan. I know how much you loved the eagles.”

      His eyes were fathomless under the cap’s visor. “So did you.”

      She had. As teenagers, they’d hidden among the trees and between kisses observed the birds with telescopes and binoculars, recording hatching times and feeding times and behaviors of both parents and young.

      Taking a swig of her water, Meg stepped toward the boulder. “Show me where you found the injured bird.”

      They went through the procedure step by step, she clicking pictures and rewriting the statement, he describing again what he’d discovered, where he had spotted her son and Randy Leland shooting at the deadwood along the shore. She snapped close-ups of the splinters in the driftwood, then of the twenty-two shells strewn among the rocks.

      When it was done she presented the statement of his verbal explanation. “Mind reading it over, ensure it’s correct?” She pointed below the last paragraph. “Sign at the X.”

      He reached over, slashed his name across the bottom of the last page.

      “You’re not reading it?” She had expected him to examine every nuance of what she’d written.

      He pushed the notebook more securely into her hands. “I trust you, Meggie.”

      How could she respond to that? Trust was not something she expected from men. Ethan hadn’t trusted her in the past when she’d needed him after the death of her best friend Farrah, and Doug hadn’t trusted Meg’s oscillating emotions after her surgery, and Mark, the man she’d dated four years ago…He had understood even less than Doug or Ethan.

      “Call me Meg,” she said, focusing on the present, the tangible, the necessary, hoping annoyance would set СКАЧАТЬ