“Look for an orange tag tied to a tree several yards up the road.” He lifted his tripod and carried it down to a flat rock next to the stream for a reference point. “Once you locate the tag, start scuffing the snow just below it. You should find a metal stake driven into the ground.”
She scanned both sides of the ditch as she slowly walked up the gently sloping road. She was about forty yards away when she stopped, plodded to the right side of the road, and started kicking the snow with her boots.
“I found it. Now what?”
Alex looked through the transit lens. “Place the bottom of your stick on the ground beside the stake,” he called out. He straightened with a smile and waved his hand in a twirling motion. “The other bottom end of the stick, Sunshine. The numbers are upside down.”
She snapped her gaze to him in obvious surprise at the nickname, then spun the stick and held it beside the stake. “Okay. It’s set.”
Alex jotted down the number in his transit’s crosshairs, then straightened. “Keep going up the road another twenty yards, look for another orange tag, find the stake below it, and do the same thing.”
“That’s it? Just hold the stick? Tucker could have done this for you after school,” she said as she started up the road through the fluffy snow. “What’s it mean when there’s a green tag on a tree?” she shouted as she turned and walked backward.
“Green?”
She stopped and pointed. “There’s a small piece of green ribbon tied to the limb of that tree. Is there a stake under it?”
“We don’t use green tags for anything. This is a spruce forest; we’d never be able to see them.”
She shrugged and started up the road but stopped again, walked over to a tree opposite where she’d seen the green tag, and touched one of the branches. Alex looked through the transit lens, turning the focus until he could clearly see what she was touching. He straightened with a frown. Nobody used green ribbon in an evergreen forest.
“Scuff the snow under the tag,” he shouted. He looked through the transit again, angling the lens to see her feet.
“There’s nothing here,” she called back. “There seems to be some sort of path leading into the woods, though.” She looked across at the other tag, then back into the woods where she was standing. “It crosses the road right—”
Sarah dropped the stick with a startled yelp and started down the road toward Alex at a flat-out run. “Something’s in there!” she screamed as she splashed through the brook without even slowing down, her eyes wide with terror.
Alex braced himself for the impact and caught Sarah as she sloshed out of the stream. He immediately tucked her against his side and moved off the road before setting her down at the base of a large tree. Before he could even crouch beside her, she scurried further behind the tree and yanked him down. He landed with a startled whoosh just as Sarah wrapped her arms around him tightly enough to make his ribs hurt.
Alex grinned through his wince, not willing to squander this opportunity to hold his wife. His smile widened as he watched a large bull moose step into the road right where Sarah had been standing.
“Easy now, you’re safe,” he whispered into her hair when he recognized this particular moose. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”
She squirmed, trying to see up the road, but he tightened his arms as he watched the majestic bull look across the brook at their truck. Alex let out a barely audible, guttural grunt.
The moose, sporting a rack of antlers that spanned five feet, perked his ears and focused his large brown eyes on the tree they were hiding behind. “Shhh,” Alex whispered against Sarah’s hair. “Don’t make a sound.”
The bull gave a soft grunt of its own, then started walking toward the stream, its cavernous nostrils flaring as it tried to catch their scent. Alex waited until it stepped into the stream, then slowly turned Sarah around—still holding her protectively in his arms—and whispered, “The rut’s over, but this guy is obviously still hopeful. Have you ever seen anything like him, Sarah?”
She sucked in her breath and tried to shrink even smaller against him. “Why is he coming toward us?” she whispered.
“Because he thinks he just heard a lady moose.”
“Y-you called him?” she squeaked. “When you grunted? But why?” she cried in a whisper, trying to look up at Alex while still keeping an eye on the moose.
The bull stopped at the front of their pickup and started licking the road salt off the bumper. Alex gave another soft grunt that made the moose lift its head, zero in on their location, and take several steps toward them.
Sarah squeaked again. Alex stood up with her still wrapped in his embrace and moved to put the tree between them and the moose standing less than ten yards away, eyeing them curiously. The large beast was so close that they could hear him breathing. Alex could also hear Sarah’s heart pounding.
“Sarah, meet Thumper,” he whispered in her ear. “Tucker named him. About three years ago, Thumper came to visit us at the lodge when he was a two-year-old adolescent. He hung around for nearly a week and kept butting his head into one of the skidders parked in the yard, so Tucker started calling him Thumper.”
“H-how come your talking isn’t making him run away?”
“Because even though he’s five now, he still hasn’t gotten any smarter. If anything, he’s grown bolder.”
“Will he charge us?”
“Maybe,” Alex teased, tightening his arms. “If he’s disappointed to learn we’re not the girl moose he heard.”
Sarah sucked in her breath again.
“Then again,” Alex continued, working to keep the amusement out of his voice, “he might decide a pretty little blonde with big brown eyes is even more appealing.”
Sarah leaned to her right to put more of the tree between them and the moose. He felt her heave a calming sigh. “He’s not my type,” she whispered, never taking her eyes off Thumper.
“No? He’s a handsome fellow in his prime, considered quite a catch among the lady moose in this area. Look at him,” Alex said, leaning them back to the left. “If he grunts again, he’s saying he loves you.” Alex bent over Sarah’s shoulder just enough for her to see his smile. “Will you believe him?”
“Just as much as I believed all those other males,” she whispered tightly, darting her gaze to him briefly before looking back at Thumper. “He’s no different. He’s just interested in a good time before he starts looking for his next victim.”
The venom in Sarah’s voice punched Alex square in the gut.
“Go find your own girl, Thump,” he said loudly, waving an arm in the air. “Go on, get!”
Thumper jerked his head with a startled snort, took several steps back, then spun on his rear legs and headed for the stream in a trot that sent clods of snow shooting into the air behind him.
Alex turned Sarah to face him. “Which one of your infamous fan club broke your heart?” he asked. He gave her a gentle squeeze when she only looked up at him mutely. “What did he do—tell you he loved you, take you to bed, then go his merry way? No,” Alex said before she could answer. “He definitely didn’t get you into bed. So how did it play out? What stopped you at the last minute?”
Sarah gave a heavy sigh. “I actually had my bags packed,” she said quietly, her face pale with the obviously painful memory as she looked up at him. “I’d been married to Roland for only two years, and James had been staying at the inn for a week when he swept me off my feet with his offer to take me back to Boston with him.”
“But?”
“But I heard him on the phone in the parlor the day we were supposed to leave. The ferry stopped running at six, so I’d made arrangements with a friends’s husband to take us to the mainland at midnight.”
“But?” Alex repeated, forcing himself to relax his grip.
“But James was talking to a friend in Boston, boasting about how he was bringing his buddy back a hot little surprise from Maine.” Sarah glared up at Alex. “James told him t
o change the sheets on his bed and clear his calendar, because he wouldn’t want any distractions for at least two weeks. And that he couldn’t ever complain again that James never brought him any souvenirs.”
Alex reared back in surprise but didn’t let go of Sarah. “The bastard was bringing you back to his friend? While making you think you were running away with him?”
Her eyes answered for her. Alex pulled her forward and wrapped his arms around her, holding her head to his chest. Holy hell, no wonder she didn’t trust men. She had to have been, what, nineteen? “And so you’ve painted every man since James with the same brush.”
“Just like you think every woman is like Charlotte,” she said into his chest, her body as rigid as stone. She gripped the back of his jacket and tugged until Alex released her enough that she could glare up at him. “Or are you going to stand here and tell me you didn’t immediately decide I was just like her?”
“No more than you’re going to tell me I’m like James.”
Sarah went soft in his arms and smiled. “Does this mean you’re not going to tell me you love me?” she asked, batting her lashes.
Alex let go, stepping back as if he’d just been punched again, and gaped at her. “Not on your life, lady,” he finally said. “Three feet of snow will be covering hell before you ever hear those words from me.”
Her smile turned smug. “Then you just keep on grunting at moose,” she said, stepping around him and walking over to the truck. “Because, like Thumper, you’ll eventually come across a female you can charm,” she finished as she got in and closed the door.
Alex stood staring at her for a full two minutes before he finally walked down to the brook, ignoring the icy water that soaked his feet as he waded across and angrily plodded up the road.
Dammit to hell, she’d done it to him again. The maddening little witch had given him just a peek inside that beautiful head of hers, only to suddenly turn her provoking smile to full wattage and completely disarm him.
It was a defense, he suddenly realized. Blunt, catch-you-off-guard humor backed up by a disarming smile was Sarah’s weapon of choice whenever she found herself in a tight situation. Hadn’t she tried to defuse the tension that first morning in her bedroom by claiming no point, no foul? And down on the dock, when he’d kissed her, hadn’t she suddenly smiled and calmly stated that most men wanted her? And at the hot tub, she’d caught him off-guard by suddenly changing from a cornered victim to a smiling fury.
Whenever things started to get a bit heated, Sarah simply went all soft and feminine on him. Oh, yeah, she knew exactly what an unexpected smile from a drop-dead beautiful woman did to a man. And besides having no compunction about using her considerable charm to disarm a guy, she was damned good at it. If she had smiled at Thumper, they’d probably be sitting in a tree right now, trying to get rid of a lovesick moose.
He was going to have to be more careful in the future. But being forewarned, he would be forearmed the next time Little Miss Dazzling Smile tried to turn the tables on him.
Alex reached down and picked up the surveying stick she had dropped, his mind shifting to how it must have felt when Sarah had realized she was nothing more than a vacation souvenir being brought back to a friend. Damned hurtful all the way to the soul; not that dissimilar to how Alex had felt when Charlotte had told him that getting pregnant with Delaney and Tucker had been nothing more than calculated gambles that hadn’t paid off.
Yeah. Long-term hurtful.
Alex’s absent gaze strayed down the path where Thumper had come out, and he frowned. Instead of broken branches, as there should have been on a well-traveled game trail, he could see where a hatchet had taken off the limbs of several trees. He walked down the trail, rounded the corner, and saw that it continued up the mountain ridge, hatchet marks clearing the way as far as he could see.
He’d dismissed the green tags the moment Thumper had stepped onto the road, deciding a hunter had tied the camouflaged ribbons to mark an active game trail. It wasn’t uncommon for Maine guides to scout an area for deer or moose, and as long as his crew wasn’t cutting an area, the Knight land was open to hunting.
But no hunter ever messed with game trails by cutting them wider. In fact, they were careful not to disturb anything. So who had marked and widened this path? Not snowmobilers. Grady wouldn’t have given the local snowmobile club permission to make a trail through a section they’d be logging later this winter.
A breeze stirred the trees overhead, sending a flurry of snow down Alex’s collar just as the sun disappeared behind a cloud. A deep chill of foreboding raced up his spine as he stood in the center of the man-made trail, and Alex zipped his jacket up and headed back to the road. He waded through the stream, then picked up his tripod and carried it on his shoulder back to the truck. There he removed the transit, put it into its protective case, and set everything in the bed of the truck.
He stood staring up at Whistler’s Mountain, rising above the trees, then finally climbed behind the wheel. He didn’t know which worried him more, the fact that Sarah might never see him as anything more than a horny bull moose or the unsettling feeling that something dangerous had invaded his woods.
Chapter Thirteen
I f the ride home was filled with tension so strong it hummed, the rest of the day proved even more intense. Grady had been home when Sarah and Alex returned at noon, and he had told them someone had broken the windows out of their equipment at the cutting and slashed all the hydraulic hoses. He’d been on the phone since ten, calling for parts to repair them, and Paul had gone looking for Ethan.
Everyone, including Ethan, sat down to dinner that evening and attempted to keep the conversation light for Delaney and Tucker’s sake. Even though the kids knew what had happened, the men suspected it was likely a bunch of bored teenagers causing trouble again, which had been the case three years ago, Sarah learned.
“Delaney has decided to join our fishing challenge,” Sarah told Alex, attempting to keep the mood light. “She said she would love an evening of dining and dancing with her father when we catch more fish than you.”
Alex smiled at his daughter, then turned his piercing blue eyes on Sarah, obviously not pleased she’d gotten around their date by including Delaney. “You don’t consider it cheating, two against one?”
Sarah filled her fork full of mashed potato. “You can choose a partner if you want. Or Delaney and I will limit ourselves to only five traps to match your five.”
“I’ll be your partner, Dad,” Tucker piped up. “We can beat the girls.”
“What challenge?” Paul asked, looking from Sarah to Alex. “I want to be included if we’re having a fishing contest.”
“What’s the prize?” Tucker suddenly asked in alarm. “I don’t want to go dancing.”
“If we win, we can pick our prize,” Alex assured him after giving Sarah one last promising look. “Maybe the women will have to wait on us hand and foot for a week.”
Paul snorted. “They pretty much do that now.”
“They can do my school project that I’m supposed to finish over vacation,” Tucker said. “I don’t want to make a stupid book about what everyone does around here. I’d rather spend my vacation riding the snowmobile Santa’s gonna bring me.”
“Why don’t you take pictures of all the logging equipment?” Sarah suggested. “That way, you wouldn’t have to draw everything. You can make a photo album of everyone’s job, and even include a picture of yourself driving the skidder on the cover.”
Tucker instantly brightened and looked at his father. “Can I use your digital camera?” he asked.
“Sure, Tuck.”
“Sarah, can you remind me to order a new bulb for the ozonizer on the hot tub?” Grady said. “The bulb burned out, and the water’s all fogged up and starting to smell.” He looked around the table. “The tub’s out of commission until we get the bulb replaced, so don’t anyone use it.”
“How long will that take?” Delaney asked, obviou
sly not liking that the hot tub couldn’t be used during vacation. “That’s how I warm up after ice fishing all day.”
“I’ll have it overnighted,” Grady promised.
“Sarah met Thumper today,” Alex said, changing the subject. “He seems to have survived another hunting season okay.”
Paul chuckled. “It’s a wonder, considering he’s got the brains of a bullfrog. I found him standing in the middle of the road the other day, and he didn’t even have the sense to move when I drove right up to him. He just started licking the bumper of my truck. If some hunter didn’t get him, one of our logging trucks sure as hel—heck will,” he finished, amending his language in deference to the children.
Sarah was appalled at how they could talk so callously about an animal they had named. “He’s beautiful,” she said. She held her arms out as wide as she could. “He had antlers this big, and he sounded like a freight train coming through the woods. I ran screaming down the road when I heard him.”
“Thumper wouldn’t hurt you,” Tucker assured her. “He’s too dumb to hurt anyone.” He looked at Alex. “Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, and it’s snowing again, so I’ll be able to ride the snowmobile Santa’s bringing me. You said there’s got to be at least a foot of snow to run it.”
“If we get another six inches,” Alex agreed. “And if Santa brings you a snowmobile. But you can’t ride it on the lake. The cove might be frozen over, but as long as there’s open water still showing in the center, you’re not even allowed to walk on the ice. That’s the rule.”
“I know,” Tucker said with a frown of impatience. “I’m not as dumb as Thumper.”
“Ethan, could you help Sarah carry her Christmas presents down from the attic after dinner?” Alex asked his brother, breaking into a forced smile when Sarah kicked him under the table. “She asked me to help her, but I need to help Tucker finish a project he’s working on.”
Ethan forced his own smile. “Sure,” he said, filling his mouth with ice cream.
The Seduction of His Wife Page 14
