Morning Light

by Catherine Anderson

  “You okay?”

  “Fine,” she assured him.

  Clint had been so interested in her story that he’d forgotten to watch where he was going. He drew to a sudden stop.

  “What?” she asked tautly. “Did you hear something?”

  He released her arm and drew his flashlight from under his belt. “Shit,” he said under his breath.

  She pressed closer to him. “Is there something out there?”

  There was a multitude of things out there. Clint just couldn’t say for sure that his truck was one of them. “It’s fine. No worries. I’m just trying to get my bearings.”

  Sammy, Clint’s baby sister, had a strict rule against vile language, especially in mixed company, but that didn’t stop him from thinking, Fuck, with a big F. He’d lost his bearings. A horrible urge to laugh came over him, only frustration quickly burned it away.

  He turned in a full circle, trying to get a fix on the stars. Yeah, right. The tree canopy overhead was so thick that he could see only patches of sky.

  “Oh, God. We aren’t lost, are we?”

  “I have never been lost in my entire life,” Clint assured her. “I know exactly where I’m at. I just don’t know precisely where our camp is from here.”

  She made a faint squeaky noise. “Oh, God. We are lost.”

  “We are not lost. Just be patient and let me get a fix on which direction we need to go.”

  Only that was impossible. It was too damned dark to see the surrounding terrain. Despite his disavowals, he was, quite simply, lost. Somehow he didn’t think that news should be shared with a city slicker whose eyes were already wide with fright.

  So instead Clint seized hold of her again and began doing precisely what he’d railed at her for doing: He wandered around in the woods. Keeping a tight grip on her arm, he finally stumbled into a small clearing where he could see the sky and get his bearings.

  “The truck is due west of us,” he informed her.

  Pulling her close to his side, he set off again, helping her over logs, grabbing her closer when she almost fell, and hating the necessity because it felt really good when her slender body pressed softly against him.

  Loni MacEwen was one fine armful of woman.

  Chapter Four

  When they got back to camp, Loni resumed her search for firewood, keeping the truck and trailer in sight this time. While she worked, Clint pitched the tent and attached space blankets to the interior walls with Velcro tabs to insulate against the cold. Then he took the coffeepot down to the river, filled it with water put through a compact hiker’s filter, and returned to camp to lay a fire for morning.

  Loni stood near the tent, shivering and rubbing her arms. “Please tell me you don’t expect me to sleep in this thing.”

  Clint crouched down to arrange the firewood she’d collected. “The tent is all we’ve got for shelter.”

  “You want me to sleep on the ground under that swatch of flimsy nylon in a wilderness area full of wolves, bears, and cougars?”

  Clint wished now that he hadn’t dwelled quite so much on the predatory prowess of mountain lions. “Trust me, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “Famous last words. Bears attack people in tents. I’ve heard about it on the news.”

  “Those were grizzlies. Around here all we have are black bears. As a general rule the only time they bother campers is if food is left out.”

  “I’d still rather sleep in the truck.”

  He watched as she collected her sleeping bag from inside the tent and hurried to the vehicle.

  “You won’t be very comfortable in there,” he called after her. “Or warm, either.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Watching her ungainly ascent into the vehicle, Clint had to swallow back a chuckle. Up with first one foot and then the other, she twisted, grabbed for purchase, tried standing on her tiptoes to get one buttock up on the door runner, and finally resorted to crawling in. This tactic involved some interesting maneuvers that stretched the borrowed jeans taut across her rump, lending a whole new definition to the term skintight and making him appreciate as never before the fact that he had excellent night vision.

  As she bedded down on the backseat, Clint wondered how she would manage in the middle of the night if nature called. He went to the truck, swung up over the tailgate, and searched for a feed bucket, which would at least provide her with something to step up on to enter the vehicle more easily.

  Moments later, when he tapped on the rear door window, she came up on her knees, the pale oval of her face inches from his on the opposite side of the glass. He stepped back as the portal swung outward and the interior dome light came on.

  “Yes?”

  She sounded disgruntled and a little breathless—a result, he felt sure, of her recent and difficult ascent into the vehicle. “I found you a bucket. It’ll simplify matters if you need to”—he broke off right before he said, “take a leak,” and quickly came up with—“use the restroom during the night.”

  Even with the light behind her and her face in shadow, he saw the scowl that pleated her delicately arched eyebrows. “I’m sorry?”

  In Clint’s social circle, when someone said, “I’m sorry,” with a questioning inflection, it equated to, “Pardon me?” or “Could you repeat that?” So he raised the pail a little higher and tried again. “For in the middle of the night, just in case nature calls. It should make things a lot easier for you.”

  Her eyebrows arched higher. “You expect me to—” She broke off, stared at the bucket for a long moment, and then shook her head. “No, thank you. That’s very thoughtful, but I’d rather just…you know.”

  Clint didn’t know, so he lowered his arm, studied her for a long moment, and then upended the bucket on the dirt. “Suit yourself. But I’ll leave it here, just in case you change your mind. I apologize for the long step up. This is my ranch vehicle, and when the fields go soft, the jacked-up undercarriage is all that keeps it from high-centering in the mud.”

  She fixed him with those large eyes. How, he wondered, could anyone’s eyes look so damned beautiful in the semidark? It was as if they absorbed every flicker of moonlight and turned to molten silver. Made a man want to take a deep breath and dive in.

  Pressing a slender hand to the base of her throat, she said, “Oh! It’s a step? I thought you meant for me to go in it.”

  Clint glanced down. It was a five-gallon feed bucket and wide across the brim. He rubbed beside his nose, a habit of his when he couldn’t think what to say. Experience should have taught him by now that two rubs always served him better than one.

  “Sweetheart, if you try sitting on that bucket you’re liable to fall in. You’re not that broad across the beam.”

  Silence. And then she laughed. It was a nice sound, he decided, light and almost musical, definitely a huge improvement over the gal who’d bleated like a sheep.

  “Thank you. I think.”

  He went back over what he’d said and wanted to kick himself. Nothing like telling a woman he’d been taking measure of her backside. The brief lull in conversation gave him time to determine that he’d only dig himself a deeper hole if he said anything more. He circled the vehicle to open the front passenger door.

  Still sitting up, Loni flashed him a questioning look. He popped open the glove compartment and fished through the contents to find the spare magazine for his nine-millimeter pistol.

  When she saw the ammunition case, she asked, “What do you need that for?”

  “I probably won’t need it,” he replied. “It’s just a safety precaution.”

  “A precaution against what, chipmunks?”

  Clint couldn’t help but laugh. She had a good sense of humor. He was coming to enjoy her wit. “I was thinking more of the cougar.”

  “Aha! And you wanted me to sleep in that tent?”

  “It’s highly unlikely that the cougar will come near our camp. They’re timid animals, and they usually try to avoid humans.” He pushe
d on the uppermost cartridge to make sure the magazine was full. “That said, a female mountain lion might be desperate with hunger at this time of year, especially if she’s nursing kittens. When I’m in a wilderness area I always err on the side of caution.”

  “You’d actually shoot her?” Concern laced her tone. “What about her babies?”

  “I’d fire warning shots first. The sound normally frightens animals away. If that failed, and it came down to your life or the cougar’s, I’d have no choice to make.” He winked at her. “Just for the record, I’ve done a lot of riding in wilderness areas and was forced to kill an animal only once.”

  She twisted around to sit more erect, fully visible to him now through the console space between the two front seats. The sleeping bag sagged in thick folds around her waist. Even with her dark hair in a tangled mass of curls around her shoulders, she managed to look pretty. “What forced you to kill an animal?”

  “I was a teenager at the time, and my father was still a novice at trail riding. We hobbled all our horses and put them out to graze. When we weren’t watching the lead horse wandered off, and all the others followed. We were left stranded out in the middle of nowhere and had to walk back to base camp carrying as much of our gear and supplies as we could, saddles included. We were in for a long trek and ran out of food.”

  She looped her slender arms around her knees. “What kind of animal did you kill?”

  “A rabbit. That was only an appetizer for the six of us. Fortunately my dad was more skilled at hunting and kept us from starving. After that we went on short trips until we became more experienced at wilderness riding.”

  “Did you ever find the horses?”

  “Oh, yeah. They were at the trailhead waiting for us.”

  Her cheek dimpled in a teasing grin. “I’ll bet you never hobbled the horses again.”

  “Sure, we did.” He slipped the magazine into his shirt pocket. “We just made sure they were effective hobbles and put cowbells on the horses so we could tell where they were without watching them constantly.”

  “So that’s why you packed those cowbells. I thought they were for scaring away bears.”

  Clint chuckled. “Black bears really aren’t that much of a problem. If you get between a sow and her cubs, you may have some trouble on your hands, but for the most part they avoid humans. If you make enough noise along the trail, they’ll usually clear out of the area.”

  “I still think I’ll pass on sleeping in the tent, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Just so long as you understand that you’ll have nothing but the tent to sleep in once we hit the trail.”

  She muttered something indiscernible.

  “Now would be a good time to do what we can for those blisters.”

  He closed the door, strode to the back of the truck, and rummaged through the packs for the first-aid satchel. Moments later, when he circled around to the rear passenger door again, Loni was sitting on the edge of the backseat with her bare feet dangling in the cold night air. The dome light behind her ignited her dark hair, creating a golden nimbus around her head and shoulders. Clint set the opened kit on the floorboard. Bracing one foot on the bucket, he curled a hand over her slender ankle, lifted her foot onto his knee, and shifted in the illumination to get a close look at her heel. The blister was an angry red.

  “No broken skin yet,” he noted. “That’s a good thing.”

  Her foot was small, with a high arch and dainty toes. Clint had never had a foot fetish, but as he painted her blisters with a clear liquid-bandage product, he finally understood why some men did. Red alert. She was a very pretty lady, but they were out here on a serious mission, and complicating things with physical attraction wasn’t a good plan.

  She shivered when he grasped her other ankle. He glanced up. “Cold?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  If she wasn’t cold, why was she shivering? He also noted that her voice sounded strained. Was it possible that she found him as attractive as he did her? Most likely not, he decided. She was probably just cold and didn’t want to complain.

  When the first layer of liquid bandage had been applied, Clint leaned a shoulder against the door frame to wait for it to dry. “One word of caution: If you do get up during the night, don’t wander too far from the truck. All right? I’d hate for you to get lost again.”

  “Don’t worry. I learned my lesson on that count.”

  He checked to see if the medication on her heels had dried and then applied another layer. “That should help protect the blisters come morning. Just make sure you wear the wool socks Sammy lent you, two pairs if the boots are a little too big.”

  “That’s a good idea. I didn’t think of it.”

  Clint closed the first-aid kit. “I don’t know about you, but I’m worn out. I’m thinking it’s time to turn in.”

  “Me, too.” She shifted on the seat and extended an arm to close the truck door. “Good night, sleep tight.”

  The portal slammed shut before Clint could reply. He watched her through the window until the dome light blinked out. Then he fetched his saddle and sleeping bag, found a flat area at the opposite side of the fire pit, and prepared his bed. Before pulling off his boots, he went down on one knee, crossed himself, and whispered his nightly prayers, a habit drilled into him since childhood. Back then he’d always begun with, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Over the years he’d altered the words, but the essence remained the same. The day was done, and he needed someone up there to keep an eye peeled while he grabbed a little shut-eye.

  He lay down, pillowing his head on the saddle. A glance at his luminous watch revealed that it was almost three in the morning. At this time of year in the Oregon Cascades, the sun rose just a few minutes shy of five thirty. Damn. In a little over two hours he’d have to be up and ready to go.

  With a weary sigh he zipped up his sleeping bag, settled his hat over his eyes, and tried his damnedest to fall asleep. Unfortunately thoughts of Loni circled in his mind, holding drowsiness at bay. A multitalented psychic? He’d heard of clairvoyants, but clairaudients were new to him. Where he hailed from, folks who heard voices got hauled away to the loony bin. And what the hell was a psychometrist?

  A grin settled on his mouth as he recalled their heated exchange in the woods. He admired that she’d given back as good as she got. Macy’s? She was definitely a city girl through and through, but despite her lack of wilderness know-how, she seemed game to stick with this for however long it took.

  Still sitting up with her feet outside the sleeping bag to let her heels dry, Loni watched Clint Harrigan prepare for bed, cowboy style. She couldn’t believe he meant to use a saddle for a pillow, just like she’d seen in the movies. When he suddenly went down on one knee and crossed himself, she experienced a strange, tight sensation at the base of her throat. There was something formidably sensual about a strong, rugged man genuflecting in a wilderness area and bowing his head to pray.

  Loni couldn’t drag her gaze from him, and the longer she stared, the more pronounced the tightness in her throat became. A purely knee-jerk reaction, she assured herself. It was like coming upon a priceless work of art and being entranced by the sheer beauty of it. A man limned in silver by the moonlight, hat in hand, broad shoulders hunched, his posture blatantly masculine and yet supplicant, both at once.

  All around him ponderosa pines loomed like giant sentinels. Yet when Loni broadened her scope, the trees seemed minuscule compared to the mountains, and the mountains, in turn, were dwarfed by the immenseness of the sky. They were all just tiny specks of humanity, she thought bleakly. How frightened Trevor must be right now, a little boy lost in all this vastness.

  The thought made her heart hurt as she shimmied into the sleeping bag and drew the downy folds close for warmth. With the darkness pressing in on her like a thick blanket, she, too, crossed herself and prayed.

  It seemed to Clint that only seconds passed before someone was shaking him awake. He tipped his hat back
, cracked open his eyes, and saw Loni kneeling beside him. In the faint light of predawn she looked more like an angel than a flesh-and-blood woman, her oval face and delicate features as flawless as fine ivory. In his sleepy state he momentarily entertained the notion that she wanted to join him in his sleeping bag, a possibility that he didn’t find distasteful.

  No such luck. Instead of moving closer she sat back on her heels. “We’re on the wrong side of the river.”

  “What?”

  “Trevor is on the other side of the river,” she repeated.

  Coming slowly awake, Clint sat up and smoothed a hand over his hair. “How did you suddenly determine that?”

  “The compass. When I was trying to go to sleep something about the compass kept nagging at me, but I couldn’t think what it was. It finally came to me in a dream.”

  “A dream?” Clint had dreams as often as anyone. In his experience they were mostly a lot of bunk.

  “I do my best thinking when I’m not trying to think,” she explained. “When my brain was finally at rest, the answer came to me. In all my visions of Trevor using the compass, the needle was pointing north.”

  “So?”

  “The river was behind him.”

  Clint rubbed his eyes and blinked to clear his vision. “Holy shit,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. When he thought of all the treacherous terrain that lay to the north between the river and the first paved highway, he cringed. “Are you certain he’s on that side?”

  “I’m positive. Portland is to the north. Right? I think Trevor and Nana are trying to go home.” She rubbed her hands over the denim stretched tight over her bent knees. “I know it’ll be a big pain in the neck to load the horses back up and move to the other side. I wish it had dawned on me sooner, but it didn’t.”

  Clint unzipped the sleeping bag, bracing against the cold as he reached for his boots. “It’s not your fault.” Tugging his socks up, he added, “And it won’t be that much trouble to load the horses. They’re all accustomed to it.”