Читать книгу: «A Babe In The Woods»

Chapter One

She was being watched. She knew it.

She continued to rock the chair, gently, almost lazily, pushing against the weathered grain of the porch floor with one 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.

He carried himself with confidence, loose-limbed and yet ready. Ready for anything. A man who could deal with the elements, and not just survive but be made stronger by them, even more able to face the challenges of a world as wild and rugged as he was.

Her gaze went to his face. It was a face of raw, rugged and uncompromising strength. His cheekbones were high, his nose straight, his jaw square. He had the faintest hint of a cleft in his chin. He could have been utterly gorgeous if not for a hardness that lingered in the turn of his mouth. His hair was neat and short, but sweat-darkened, and she suspected it was a shade lighter than the dark chocolate it looked to be. His skin had the weathered look of a man who spent a great deal of time outdoors, and the coppery tones of it made the gray of his eyes seem deep and cool, like the gray of icy mountain creeks.

His eyes were watchful, wary and weary.

Beyond weary. The man was exhausted.

Then a movement over his left shoulder drew her gaze from his. She could feel her eyes widen and her mouth drop open.

Peeking over his shoulder was a baby. A baby! With one tuft of shiny black hair sticking straight out from its head, and with black button eyes and fat red cheeks with grimy tear stains running down them.

“Are you alone?” the man asked.

The exhaustion she saw in his eyes was echoed in that voice—a deep voice, raw as silk.

Still, it was not a good question to be asked by a complete stranger. A man who had watched for a long time before he had made his presence known. Who might never have made his presence known if she had not flushed him out with a shotgun blast. The question was not asked out of any kind of friendliness.

“No,” she lied, instinctively, “I’m not alone.”

Some tension leaped in him, coiled along his muscles. A man ready for anything, including a fight. With a baby on his back.

“Who’s with you?” he asked, his eyes scanning the cabin behind her.

“None of your business.”

“Who’s with you?” he asked again, quietly, but with some unmistakable iron in his voice.

“My friend Sam,” she said defiantly. A nice name. Sturdy sounding. Strong. Loyal. Which is why she had given it to the big bay gelding she used for her saddle horse.

“Why didn’t Sam come out when you fired off that shotgun?” he asked. Something in him relaxed. The faintest hint of amusement lit those eyes before the weariness and caution drowned it.

“Why didn’t you?” she snapped back.

“I thought you might shoot me.”

“I still might.”

“You’re not a very neighborly kind of person,” he pointed out, mildly.

“Me and Sam aren’t much used to neighbors.”

“But you’re used to shotguns.” Something, not quite a smile, lifted a corner of that firm mouth. “You and Sam.”

He had obviously figured out Sam was fiction, but she tried again, anyway. “That’s why he didn’t come out. He’s used to me blasting off that old shotgun at varmints.”

The stranger’s smile, thankfully, died before it was ever completely born, and cool eyes scanned her face, then the clearing and then the cabin, before returning to her. “You’re alone,” he decided.

She wanted to insist she wasn’t, but knew it was pointless. She suspected this man’s intuition was as fine-honed as her own was. Maybe more so. Despite the weariness, there was an alertness about him that reminded her of wild animals poised on the edge of danger, getting ready to flee. Or fight.

He’s in trouble, Storm thought, bad trouble.

She wondered why she did not sense imminent danger, then realized that her intuition had been known to let her down in this one critical area. Men.

“Are you lost?” Her eyes drifted to the baby. It was pounding one chubby fist against the man’s shoulder and had another tangled in the dark silk of his hair. A lesser man might have winced or tried to unlock the baby’s determined grip, but his attention remained totally focused on her. As if she might make a dash for that shotgun. People who were lost were usually not quite so on guard.

Still, she wished he was lost. That his presence here was uncomplicated—that he had become separated from his wife on a Sunday hike.

But he did not seem to be the kind of man who would get lost. Or be on a family hike, either. Her eyes went to that telltale finger. No gold band. And no little white line where one might have been a short while ago. She considered herself a quick learner.

“I need a place to stay.”

She stared at him.

“I was up here years ago. I remembered the cabin.”

He could be anybody. He’d probably kidnapped that baby. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would find taking a baby on a hiking trip a whole lot of fun.

“A place to stay? Here?”

“Only for a couple of days.”

Oh, great. Now he was appealing to her softer side. A man by himself, she could say no to easily, firmly. But a man with a baby?

He pitched forward a step, and she saw with sudden horror that there was a small pool of blood where he had stood before.

“You’re hurt!”

“It’s just a scratch.”

She could see a red stain now spreading around the side of his shirt, just above the waistline of his jeans, from his back.

She went forward. Suddenly she didn’t have to think at all. She went behind him. She could tell he didn’t like that one little bit. Like an old-time gunslinger, he didn’t like having his back exposed.

The baby was in the top part of a backpack not designed for babies. Bungee straps secured the unusual cargo. She stretched up, unstrapped the cords deftly and took the wriggling little bundle down. If she was taller, she might have been able to see what else was in the pack, and it might have answered some questions for her. But she was not taller, and the next five seconds did not hold much promise of her growing.

The man smelled faintly of soap, overlaid with woodsy aromas of sunshine and sweat. And blood. She glanced down and saw the dark-red stain just above his right hip.

She hoped to hell he wasn’t gun shot. They were a hard ride from the trailhead and a half hour to the tiny hamlet of Thunder Lake after that, if she could get her cranky truck to start right away.

Why did she think he had been shot?

He could have caught himself on a branch. Or fallen on a rock.

The baby gurgled at her and tried to insert pudgy fingers in her nose. It diverted her attention from the man’s presence, though even not looking at him, she could feel him. It was as if electricity hummed and hissed in the air around him, and made her quiet clearing vibrate with tension.

The baby’s weight was solid in her arms. She didn’t think she’d held a baby before. A baby was a rare commodity in a town like Thunder Lake. When there was one around, a baby, Storm avoided the ruckus. And now she knew why. It made a person kind of go all soft and mushy inside, even when a man was dripping blood all over her yard.

“Come on,” she said, lugging the baby up the stairs. Her mind raced. An injured man and a baby had just showed up at her cabin. He was relieved that no one was here but her, a woman on her own. Maybe she was the one with trouble. Bad trouble. She ducked a little pink finger aimed at her eye. The baby clouded things. It was hard to consider the possibility of menace in the merry presence of the child.

The man paused behind her on the porch. She glanced over her shoulder to see him unloading the shotgun. He slipped the shell into his pocket.

There’s plenty more where that one came from, buster.

The cabin was small and cozy inside. A primitive wooden table stood at its center, and a potbellied wood burner was in the corner. Two sets of rough open cupboards were on either side of a sink with a hand pump for a faucet. There was one tiny window, and in a rare fit of domesticity Storm had nailed up two squares of checkered red fabric that passed for curtains if they weren’t inspected too closely.

Her visitor went and pulled back the matching curtains that separated the bunk beds from the main cabin area. When his inspection proved they were alone, the last of the tension relaxed out of those hard muscles. He turned to face her.

“This has changed. You can sleep a crowd in here now,” he commented of the six bunks. “How come?”

“It’s an army training center. I’m expecting the troops at any moment.”

“Led by Sam?” he asked dryly, slipping his arms from the backpack straps and letting it slide to the floor, taking in the rest of the cabin in a glance.

His gaze rested for a moment on the early-blooming wildflowers she had stuck in a tin at the center of the table when she’d first arrived. Now she was sorry she had done that. She thought it made her look somewhat vulnerable, which was not the appearance she wanted to give right at the moment.

“I better have a look at that wound,” she said.

“It doesn’t qualify as a wound.”

“Well, whatever it qualifies as, you’re dripping blood on my floor, so sit down.” She shoved a chair back for him with her foot.

He looked narrowly at her, unaccustomed to taking orders, though she suspected he may have given a few in his day. His compliance was reluctant. He winced when he sat down.

He picked up a brochure on her table, and she resisted an urge to snatch it from his hand, to keep her secrets, while she probed his.

“Storm Mountain Trail Rides,” he read out loud. “Come and see the beauty and panorama of Canada’s great north by horseback. Day, overnight or weekly excursions. Limited to five riders. Mid-June to mid-September.” His eyes flicked to the bunks, counting, and then went back to the brochure. “Led by fully qualified guide Storm Taylor. What the hell kind of name is that?” he muttered. “Storm?”

“I’ll have a look at that wound now.”

But he wasn’t done with the brochure. He flipped it over, and there was her picture with her name under it.

“So,” he said, “Storm of Storm Mountain, you’re getting ready for your trail-riding season to open. No guests booked, for what, three weeks?”

“You’re getting blood on my chair,” she pointed out. “I think we’d better take care of that.”

The baby made a sound somewhere between a mew and a squeak.

“I think he’s hungry,” he said.

His concern for the baby’s well-being was somewhat reassuring. Storm held the baby at arms’ length. He. His lashes were thick and sooty as a chimney brush. He waved his chubby arms and legs at her and gurgled. He was wearing plain blue terry-cloth pajamas with feet in them. He seemed content, like a baby who could wait while she saw to a man bleeding all over her furnishings, humble as they might be. She considered where to set him. The counter or tabletop seemed like a good idea, but given his roly-poly build he might roll off like a live beach ball. Instead she plopped him down on his padded fanny on the floor.

He flopped forward at the waist and grabbed at a dust mote.

“Does he crawl?” she asked dubiously.

The man gave the baby a measuring look. “No.”

But Storm felt he was guessing. He didn’t know if the baby crawled. She had the awful feeling he didn’t know much more about that baby than she did.

Well, maybe a little more. He knew the baby was male.

The baby captured the dust mote and after trying to put it in his ear and his eye, he finally managed to cram his prize into his mouth.

Storm leaped forward and dug it out. The baby chomped happily on her fingers with his toothless gums. It should have been utterly disgusting, but for some reason it wasn’t so bad. Casting one more look at the man at the table, she went and scooped her bedroll off one of the bunks, unrolled it and put the baby on it. She hoped his diaper wouldn’t spring a leak on her only bedding.

The baby flopped over even further, until his nose was practically touching the sleeping bag, and then with a mighty grunt, pushed his legs out behind him, so now he was lying on his stomach. He flailed away, grunting with exertion.

Storm watched for a moment, fascinated, then turned to the man at her kitchen table.

“Take off your shirt.”

“I hardly know you.” That hint of a smile again.

She wondered if he used that smile to disarm people, because there was no answering warmth in his gray eyes, only watchfulness, appraisal. He was measuring her every move.

I’m in trouble, she thought, but kept her voice steady. “And that’s how it’s going to stay,” she said firmly. “Take off your shirt.”

He pulled his shirt tails out of the waistband of his pants, flinching when the fabric pulled at the clotted blood at his side. He unbuttoned, revealing to her slowly the broad swell of his chest, the rock-hard cut of pectoral muscles. He slid the shirt off, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from gasping at the absolute male perfection of him. His skin was bronze and silky over sinewy muscles. Hair curled, thick and springy, over the broad, hard plain of his chest. The hair narrowed down to a taut stomach, then disappeared inside the waistband of his jeans.

She turned abruptly. What was wrong with her? This man had arrived on her mountain and at her cabin with an attitude that aroused all her suspicions. She needed to keep her mind crystal clear so that she knew how to deal with this troubling situation. Patch him up and send him on his way, or patch him up and be on her way? What was not going to happen, what was not even a possibility, was sharing her cabin with him for a few days.

Not that he had to know that just yet.

On the top shelf of one of her open cupboards was a first-aid kit, and she took it down and sorted carefully through the bandages, painkillers and swabs.

When she turned back to him, she saw that he had straddled the chair so she could get a better look at his wound. His broad and naked back was enough to cloud anyone’s thinking! Again, she was taken by the color of his skin. Bronze. It made it look warm and silky, skin that invited touching.

She bent quickly and looked at where the blood blossomed like an obscene crimson flower slightly above and to the side of his hip. When she cleaned away the blood, it really did look like a scratch, a mean scratch though, deep, wide and ragged.

“How did you do this?”

“I was trying to chop my way through a mess of brush. The ax swung back and clipped me.”

She studied the wound, thinking it was at least possible, though the wound seemed to be in an odd place and the edges of it not clean enough to have been caused by an ax. She continued to suspect the wound was the result of a gunshot, though if it was a gunshot it was superficial, a graze. Her brothers would say she read too many suspense novels.

“Which way did you come in from?” she asked, striving to sound casual.

He hesitated. “From the east.”

“That’s a tough way to come in.” She didn’t say a weird way. He had come cross-country, from a little-known logging road. It explained why she had seen no sign of him on her trail.

Doing her best not to hurt him more, she finished cleaning around the wound. His skin felt exactly the way she had known it would feel—like warm silk wrapped over steel.

She continued to probe, trying to keep her questions conversational and casual. “What would make you come here? With a baby?”

“We’re on vacation.”

“A vacation?” Too late, she tried to snatch back the skepticism out of her tone.

He shrugged, and she glanced up from her swabbing of that cut, to see his eyes on her, hooded, measuring.

She turned hastily from him to her humble kitchen counter and mixed up Jake’s favorite old family formula to put on the injury.

“This place doesn’t seem like it would be first choice for someone with a baby to take a holiday,” she ventured, glancing back at him.

“Really?” he said evenly. “Fresh air. Great fishing. What is that?”

“Turpentine and brown sugar. It kills infection.”

“No kidding?” he growled.

“Kerosene oil works, too, but you have to be careful with it. It’ll blister the skin.”

“Really?”

“And a bit of chimney soot and lard will work, but it’s messy.” She offered these folksy little gems to him partly to take his mind off the pain, partly to make him think she was just a naive mountain girl, not sophisticated enough to be even contemplating the possibility he might have kidnapped that baby.

“My brother Jake would have put a spiderweb on to stop the bleeding, but I’ll just use one of these regular bandages.”

“Shortage of spiderwebs?”

“I think the baby is eating them.”

He chuckled at that, a reluctant and dry sound deep in his throat.

She unrolled medical gauze around his entire lower body, back to belly, to hold the bandage in place and keep pressure on it. It was amazingly hard not to touch a man while doing that, so she simply surrendered to the circumstances.

A mistake. Every time her hands grazed his skin, his muscles, physical sensation rocked through her. She had never been struck by lightning, thank God, but she was pretty sure it would feel just about like this. She felt a need so naked and demanding it set her teeth on edge. Where had it come from? This sudden need that felt greater than a need for food or water. To be kissed hard and held soft.

Not by this man!

A stranger, with a suspicious wound, and a baby she did not think was his.

The air around him practically tingled with danger, mystery and an aura of exotic worlds she knew nothing about.

She had a lot of questions to ask and she ordered them in her mind as she bent to the task at hand, knowing, even before she asked, that his answers would not satisfy her curiosity, nor lessen the sense of danger vibrating off him in waves that were unmistakably sensuous.

“You’re trussing me up like a mummy,” he complained.

“Since you mention it, where is junior’s mommy?”

“She died. She died when he was born.”

“And you’re his daddy, right?”

A flick of emotion in those complicated eyes. “Right.”

She felt a shiver go up and down her spine as she registered the lie, but she said with absolute calm, “Well, you’re welcome to the cabin. It’s primitive but if it’s fresh air and fishing you’re looking for, you’ll find plenty of both here. I have to move on, but if you need me to leave you anything—”