A Babe In The Woods. Cara Colter

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СКАЧАТЬ foot. Waiting. She wasn’t really worried. Not yet. The old pump-action shotgun resting outside the cabin door, an arm’s length away, gave her a sense of security.

      It was probably an animal.

      She was accustomed to this sensation. Of thinking she was alone, in the bush, a million miles from the nearest human being, when suddenly she would feel it. Watched. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of the woodland spy—the flick of a deer’s tail, the back end of a bear going the other way—but usually she did not.

      A horse, probably Sam, neighed noisily from the corral behind the cabin, a comforting sound. Save for the cheerful bickering of the birds in the forest that ringed the small clearing, it was quiet. A little breeze, fresh and cold coming off the mountains, teased the tendrils of dark hair that had fallen out of her braid. Shoots of tender green grass were beginning to poke up and she almost imagined she could smell spring. Everything was normal.

      But she did not relax and the sensation of being watched did not go away. When the hackles rose suddenly on the back of her neck, she knew intuitively it was not an animal out there watching. Slowly, she stretched her hands over her head and then flung them wide, straight out from her shoulders. Her fingertips touched the shotgun. Straining slightly, her hand closed around it, drew it close. She pulled it onto her lap and rocked.

      “Might as well come out,” she called. “I know you’re there.”

      Silence.

      Shauna Taylor, nicknamed Storm by her brothers, had arrived at the cabin, accessible only by horseback or by foot, a short while ago. She had not even emptied her pack boxes yet, had opted instead for a quiet moment on the porch as evening fell. She cast her mind back along the trail trying to think if anything had been unusual, out of place. But there had been nothing, save for the number of trees down on the trail after last year’s heavy winter. It had taken her a long time to clear them, and she was small to be handling a chain saw. Jake, her oldest brother, had told her to wait a week, and he would come with her and handle the heavy work.

      But she knew ranch work, and he would still be calving in a week. And besides, she was not one to wait. And certainly not one to let a man do anything for her that she could do for herself. Even her brother.

      Still, her independence was costing her now.

      Her muscles ached with fatigue.

      That was probably all that was wrong. She was tired. Exhausted. To the point of imagining things.

      She scanned the clearing in front of her. She had given the cabin a name in a moment’s whimsy. Heart’s Rest. Last year she had burned the name onto a wooden sign that was nailed to a towering lodgepole pine just beyond the stone fire pit and the scraggly, rock-lined bed where she had planted wildflowers. Purple mountain saxifrage. Fairy slipper. Fireweed. Indian paintbrush.

      Contentment crept up on her, and her fingers relaxed slightly on the shotgun. She was probably imagining things.

      She hoped she was.

      Still, her other brother, Evan, was fond of telling her she had the most highly developed sense of intuition of anyone he had ever met.

      It came, she supposed, from spending so much time alone, loving the solitude of these high and lonesome places. It came from spending more time with horses than people, and the language of her equine friends was the one of intuition, not words.

      It came, she supposed, from growing up in the care of her two brothers, far older than she, on a remote ranch in the Coast Mountains west of Williams Lake, British Columbia. Hopelessly unqualified to raise a small girl after their parents had died in a cabin fire, Jake and Evan had unintentionally let her run wild. She knew the forests and mountains around their ranch as well as she knew her own face in the mirror.

      She felt safe in these wild places, connected in some way to the immense creative forces of the universe; looked after. Even now, with something out there, she felt confident. This was her turf, and she could handle whatever came her way.

      The only time in her life she hadn’t felt safe was when she had gone to the University of Alberta in Edmonton for two years. Her brothers, surprisingly resolute, had told her it was okay with them if she became a rancher someday, but first they wanted her to know a bigger world. And, truth be told, Storm had felt a strange and tingling eagerness to know a larger world, too.

      But the city had been a shock—dodging cars, having to worry about walking alone at night, locking doors.

      It was no way to live.

      A twig snapped.

      She pumped a shell into the shotgun chamber. There were really no places left where a person could be absolutely alone. Hunters and hikers found their way to these isolated spaces. And it didn’t bother her.

      Unless they tried to be sneaky about it.

      Sneakiness bothered her. A lot. Her intuition had failed her once, back there in Edmonton. When she’d been fooled by a too-handsome face and a smooth way.

      She wondered if her brothers would have laughed, seeing their tomboy sister experimenting with makeup. She’d even bought a skirt, ridiculously short, now that she thought about it. Dorian’s eyes widening with appreciation had made that little scrap of material worth its enormous price.

      Storm curtly turned the memory off and listened. She told herself to smarten up. It wouldn’t really be fair if she took a shot at some unsuspecting hiker because she detested sneakiness.

      The truth was she would have dearly liked to pump a few rounds into the air around Dorian, just to scare the living daylights out of him. Once she’d found out the truth.

      Married.

      The snake had been married.

      If she was alone up here at her mountain retreat, it didn’t matter. And if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t hurt to show she knew how to handle the gun and was not afraid to use it.

      Boom! Take that, Dorian.

      She shot high, into the air. The sound of the shotgun blast echoed over the quiet clearing. Casually, she pumped another shell into the chamber. At first she thought she had failed to flush out whatever kind of varmint hid in the trees.

      And then a thin and reedy wail flowed into the silence left by the blast of the shotgun. Storm’s mouth fell open and she leaped to her feet. She set the shotgun down and raced down the cabin’s crumbling stone steps and across the clearing toward the sound.

      Because there was really no mistaking that sound.

      Even for a woman like her who refused to even hold one.

      There was a baby in those woods.

      A man slipped out of the trees before she was halfway across the clearing.

      Storm skidded to a halt.

      He was an imposing man, maybe two inches over six feet. He was incredibly broad across his shoulders and through his chest, and that broadness narrowed dramatically at his flat belly. His legs were long and lean, the clean line of hard muscle evident through the fabric of heavy denim. His khaki-colored shirt-sleeves were rolled up, revealing a naked length of very powerful forearm. The first few buttons of his shirt were open, showing a tangle of dark, curling chest hair.

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