A serenity washed over him as he sat on the bed, his hand lightly resting on Pepper’s shoulder. He sipped at the lemon-flavored tea he’d brewed. Out in the living room, the soft snap of the fire enhanced his tranquillity. Leaning over, he nudged a curl back from Pepper’s temple, and she stirred. Damn, he hadn’t meant to wake her. He saw her lashes slowly rise, revealing drowsy blue eyes.
“Jim…?”
“Everything’s okay,” he said quietly, keeping his hand on her shoulder. She started to rise, but he applied just enough pressure to let her know he wanted her to go back to sleep.
Rubbing her face, Pepper smiled softly. “What time is it?” How dangerous-looking Jim was, she thought sleepily, dressed only in faded Levi’s, his chest dark with hair and his shoulders thrown back with natural pride. Her body responded automatically to his quiet presence. His hand was warm against her. The intimacy he’d established with her was powerful.
“Fourteen hundred hours.” He grimaced. “My military background is showing again, isn’t it?” And he chuckled.
Pepper laughed softly and slowly sat up, the quilt spilling around her waist. She felt no embarrassment as she watched his eyes narrow with appreciation of her.
“I remember my mother making me read the Greek myths when I was nine or so,” Jim said as he handed Pepper the cup of tea and rose from the bed. He walked to the closet, found a pink velour robe and brought it back to her. Trading the tea for the robe, he said, “One particular myth involved Diana, the Huntress. She captured my imagination because she did everything the boys did—but did it better. She was an athlete—a prototype, I think now, looking back on it, for the women of today.” He enjoyed watching Pepper rise slowly from the bed and slip into the robe.
Placing the tea on the dresser, he went over to her. “You’re a modern-day Diana.”
It was so easy for Pepper to open her arms and receive him. “I’m not interested in being anyone’s role model, thank you very much. I know what I enjoy doing, and that’s all that counts. Personally, I just couldn’t handle doing an eight-hour-a-day desk job.”
Jim leaned down and captured her mouth, sharing her warmth and vulnerability. Then, easing away, he smiled at her. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Pepper smiled and touched his hair. It was thick and silky. “When the man of my dreams wakes me up, why should I mind?”
“I got thirsty,” he said, gesturing to the tea. “Want some?”
“At this hour, it’s better than coffee.”
“Come on,” he murmured. Slipping his arm around her waist, he walked her out to the kitchen, where he made her sit down while he brewed another cup.
Pepper propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “Do you realize how delicious you look right now?” she asked huskily.
Jim glanced over his shoulder at her as he stood at the sink, refilling the old copper teakettle. “No.” He grinned and looked down at his bare feet sticking out from beneath his Levi’s. “Somehow, I don’t think this uniform of the day would make it most places.”
“It only has to make it here.”
Jim’s heart mushroomed with joy at her heartfelt comment as he set the kettle on the stove. He realized that, in his sleepy state, he’d zipped up his jeans, but neglected to button them, leaving his navel revealed. “There’s a difference between you and Diana,” he teased mischievously, buttoning up. “She was a virgin and refused to let any man touch her.”
“I wouldn’t like to be Diana,” Pepper said decidedly.
Sauntering over to her, Jim stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “No,” he rasped, “I wouldn’t like it, either.”
Leaning back against him, Pepper gazed up into his shadowed face, its strong planes accentuated by a slight growth of beard. “Am I dreaming? Are you really here? Is this real?” she asked, only half joking.
Jim heard the quaver in Pepper’s voice. He squeezed her shoulders and came around and knelt at her side. Facing her, he slid one hand behind her waist and held her hands with his other one. “I’m real. This is real. What we have is real,” he said quietly, holding her luminous gaze.
“I’m scared, Jim. Scared as hell.”
“I know you are. So am I.”
“I worry….” Pepper shrugged. “I mean…I’ve never felt like I do when I’m with you.”
He cocked his head. “What do you mean?” He ran his thumb across the top of her clasped hands. Her skin was firm and soft. Inviting. An ache began building in him again, her mere closeness fueling his desire.
“Something about you touches me so deeply—on such a primal level—that I stand in awe of it,” Pepper admitted shakily. “John never touched me in the same way. It was different. With you, I feel your intensity, and you arouse an answering intensity in me. This may sound silly—maybe you’ll laugh—but I feel as if you’re my wolf mate—the one my soul has been searching for all these years.” She gave him a shy look and realized from his expression that he wasn’t taking her words lightly.
“Wolves mate for life.” He pursed his lips, then lifted her hand and placed a small kiss on it. Raising his chin, he held her gaze. “I think we deserve to spend some time together, don’t you?”
His voice was dark, velvety. Pepper struggled against her long-ago promise to herself not to get involved. “Yes…”
Jim smiled a little. “We’ve had a lot of hurdles to overcome to get this far, sweetheart.”
She sat very still. His hands felt almost hot against her own. She saw the commitment in his eyes, heard it in his voice. “How much time do we have?”
“I’m due back in seven days, shortly after Christmas. If Jason isn’t in Maui, we’ll have to start the search for him all over again. But by that time, this new team, if they get lucky, will probably know one way or another.”
“I see….” Pepper knew she’d made a personal commitment to Jim simply by loving him. She’d already broken her promise to herself, she admitted. In fact, her heart had ignored that promise from the beginning when it came to him, she thought wryly. Yet Jim hadn’t said he loved her. But in fairness to him, she hadn’t said it, either. Did she dare call it love? How could she not? Fear warred with her instinctive inner knowing.
Jim got up and embraced her gently. The teakettle was whistling on the stove. “I know your relationship with John taught you a lot of good things and bad things, sweetheart. In a way, we have all the time in the world—but I know that hasn’t been your experience. You have to trust me on this, Pepper—we’ve got time. Hang on, I’ll get you a cup of tea.”
Amazed that he seemed able to read her thoughts, Pepper watched him putter around her kitchen. Jim belonged, there was no doubt. He looked totally at home here. And she had to admit that she’d never seen him as relaxed as he was now with her. The tea made, he held out his hand and led her into the living room, where they sat down on the large merino rug in front of the stove.
Jim maneuvered Pepper around so that he could lean against the end of the couch and still have her nestled in his arms. The fire crackled in front of them. “Better?” he whispered near her ear.
“Much.” Pepper sipped the tea carefully as they sat in the early afternoon silence, the glow of red-orange flames dancing around the cabin’s cozy interior. Outside, it was snowing again, and the windowpanes were frosted with a thick coating of snow. Setting the teacup on her robed thigh, Pepper sighed and leaned back against him.
“So you can stay for a week?”
“Yes.”
“I just never dreamed you’d come back into my life, Jim.”
“I never stopped dreaming of you coming into mine.”
His voice was filled with irony, and she twisted to look up at him. “Nothing has ever felt so right to me as this,” she said.
“Me, either.” Jim inhaled the fragrance of Pepper’s hair and enjoyed the feel of her, supple in his embrace.
Her robe had slipped off her leg, revealing the length of her calf. He frowned
and leaned forward, running his hand across its smooth expanse. “Is that an old injury?” he asked, indicating a ten-inch scar that ran nearly the length of her calf.
“Hmm? Oh, that.”
“How did it happen?”
“On the Crown King fire in Arizona a couple of years ago.” She shrugged. “If you’re a smoke jumper you can expect all kinds of injuries, Jim. That’s why I’m glad I met Michaela, with her homeopathic practice. Without her, I’d have been laid up a lot more and a lot longer.”
“Where did you get this other one?” He pointed to a scar on her other knee.
Pepper heard the concern in his voice. Setting the tea aside, she turned around and crossed her legs, her knees pressing against his. “What is this? Are we going to compare our war wounds?” she teased with a smile, trying to dispel the worry in his eyes.
“That’s a big scar, Pepper.”
“So?” She made her eyes large. “You should see the one under my left arm. It’s a puncture wound I received at the Patterson fire, just outside of Phillipsburg, as a matter of fact. You remember the Storm KingMountain fire in Glenwood, Colorado, which took the lives of fourteen smoke jumpers?”
He scowled. Who could forget that tragic fire, which had taken so many dedicated and courageous lives? “Yes, I remember it.”
“We had a similar situation in the Patterson fire,” Pepper said. “It was a hot day—a red-flag day, warning us of high winds. My team and I were moving down into a valley similar to the one in the Storm King fire, and we had a blowout. I had run back down to warn another Hotshot team, because not all of them had radios, when the fire exploded all around us. I got to them and helped them because I knew the woods in this area so well. When a tree fell over, one of the branches gored me. If it weren’t for Susan, my fire-team partner, I’d have been dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “We were running for it when a burning pine fell across our planned escape route.” She raised her arm and pointed to her upper rib cage. “The branch punctured my left lung. I had so much blood in my lungs, I nearly suffocated on the helo ride to the hospital.”
Jim captured her graceful hands in his. “I never realized how dangerous your job was,” he murmured.
“As if being a Recon isn’t twenty times more dangerous, Jim Woodward! And don’t give me that pained expression, either. I hope we’re not going to have our first fight over our respective careers.”
He grinned. “Not a chance, sweetheart. I see enough fighting in my line of work at the Pentagon. I don’t want home to be a battleground, too.”
Pepper caressed his cheek. “Michaela saved my life when I got that lung puncture. Because we were so close to Phillipsburg, the Forest Service called and asked for her assistance as emergency backup. On the way to the hospital, in the ambulance, she gave me a remedy that stopped most of the hemorrhaging. So you see, I have a homeopathic guardian angel. Too bad you don’t!”
Laughing, Jim surrendered to her logic. “Remind me to thank Michaela for giving you the remedy that helped my arm.”
“Talk about scars,” Pepper murmured, sliding her hands up his newly healed arm. “That was a terrible cut, Jim.”
“I had a great nurse—a woman who stole my heart, then took care of it for me. How could I not get well under her care?”
Pepper digested the sincerity of his tone. “I still think you’re a figment of my lonely, overworked imagination.”
“Finish your tea,” Jim coaxed. “Dreams can’t make love. I’ll take you back to bed and we’ll see if I’m a dream or not. Deal?”
Her lips curved tenderly. “Deal.” There was desire in his eyes—and in his touch as he moved his hand slowly up and down her thigh beneath her robe. A new joy, a thread of real hope moved through her. In three days, she would take him home with her to Anaconda for Christmas. What would her parents think of Jim? Her whole family would be there. Suddenly, Pepper felt a wave of happiness like she’d never experienced—and she knew it was because of the man who held her in his arms.
Chapter Thirteen
Jim sat with a cup of freshly made hot chocolate in his hand. Pepper was in her mother’s very busy kitchen, preparing the Christmas Eve meal. He looked down and noted the whipped cream and cinnamon sprinkles on his chocolate—a thoughtful touch. A strong burst of love washed through him. From where he sat, he could see Pepper standing at the sink, preparing the stuffing for the huge, twenty-five-pound turkey. To her right stood her aristocratic-looking mother, Mary Sinclair. Though in her fifties, she was almost as tall as Pepper, her short black hair sprinkled with gray. Their laughter was nearly identical, and Jim now knew who Pepper took most strongly after. To Pepper’s left stood Molly Sinclair, Cam’s wife, who looked tiny in comparison to the other two. Molly was blond and delicately boned; it was tough to imagine that at one time she’d been a navy test engineer on the most modern fighter planes. All three women were laughing and chatting amiably as they worked. Unfortunately, Pepper’s grandfather had the flu, so they wouldn’t be visiting for the holiday.
Jim smiled and took another sip of the rich, warm chocolate. Happiness seemed to ring through the Sinclair household nonstop. At the moment, Warren Sinclair, Pepper’s father, was having a serious talk with Cam by the fireplace. Warren was tall and spare, his hands long and artistic—like Pepper’s. He was in his mid-fifties and wore a white cotton shirt topped by a brightly striped red-and-white sweater. Cam was a few inches shorter than his father, lean and obviously fit from his military duties. The navy test pilot had his elbow resting on the mantel, his brow furrowed, eyes intense. Jim smiled to himself. Yes, Cam needed someone like Molly, who was like a cheerful patch of sunlight, to counterbalance his intensity and seriousness.
Molly and Cam’s two children, three-year-old Jennifer and one-year-old Scott, played happily around Jim’s feet. He leaned over and made sure that blond-haired Jennifer, who decidedly took after Molly, had the coloring book and crayons nearby so she could continue her exploration of creativity on paper. Scott, on the other hand, was the spitting image of Cam, his hair thick and black and his eyes clear, pale blue with a startling intensity to them—just like his father’s.
Jim glanced at his watch. It was 1100, and two more families, friends of Molly and Cam, were still due to arrive to spend Christmas with them. Dana and Griff Turcotte were flying in from Pensacola, Florida, where they both worked as instructor pilots. From Miramar Naval Air Station near San Diego, Lieutenant Commander Maggie Donovan-Bishop and her civilian pilot husband, Wes Bishop, were flying in, too.
The Sinclair house was large, a turn-of-the-century three-story Victorian home that had originally been built by Sinclair ancestors when silver mining was at its peak in Montana. Jim had been immersed in the family’s stories of the mining era, when the Sinclairs had been among the local elite. But as silver production died off in the 1930s, the family had become destitute like much of the rest of the country. This generation of Sinclairs—Warren and Mary—had turned economic disaster into success. Warren ran a fishing-expedition service with clients from around the world who wanted to fish the state’s famous trout streams.
Jim allowed Scott Sinclair to climb into his lap. The boy was tired—he’d been up since six this morning, wanting to touch every bulb and light on the ten-foot-high blue spruce that stood, brightly decorated, in the corner of the expansive living room.
Last night they had all worked together to decorate the tree, and Jim couldn’t remember ever having so much fun or laughing so hard. Now Scott snuggled against him, resting his head tiredly on Jim’s shoulder and closing his eyes. Jim wrapped his left arm around the boy and watched him drop quickly off to sleep. His gaze returned to Pepper. Again his heart expanded with such joy that it continued to catch him off guard, made him inhale a deep ragged breath as he tried to believe his good luck.
Pepper wore an ankle-length, red corduroy skirt, a dark green angora sweater and comfortable shoes with bright red socks that matched her skirt. Earlier, Molly had placed a sprig of holly
and berries in Pepper’s hair, and now her cheeks were flushed as she talked animatedly with her mother and Molly in the kitchen. She had pushed the sleeves of the sweater up to her elbows in order to make the dressing. Jim sighed, glanced down at the sleeping tiger he held in his arms and continued to sip the delicious hot chocolate. Life didn’t get much better than this and he knew it.
The past three days had been bliss for him and Pepper. Yesterday a brief storm had passed through, dropping another foot of snow, and they’d gone alpine skiing for part of the day. He was sore today from the unaccustomed form of exercise, but it had been a great day. Pepper had packed two thermoses of hot chocolate and a lunch, and they’d shared another snow picnic in the middle of the forest, the towering Douglas firs stately and awe-inspiring around them.
Jim finished the cup of chocolate and saw Cam looking his way. The navy pilot wore Levi’s, loafers and a dark green flannel shirt and Jim smiled to himself. He, too, had opted for comfortable civilian clothes: tan chinos, an off-white fisherman’s sweater and hiking boots.
“Looks like Scott finally crashed and burned,” Cam said as he came over and gently eased his son into his arms. He turned Scott around and allowed him to sink across his shoulder.
“I’d say he’s about used up his energy for this mission,” Jim agreed as he watched the pilot gently hold his son. It was good to see men who enjoyed being fathers, who weren’t afraid to show their full range of emotions with their children—unlike many of the stoic father figures of the past, who’d remained apart from their families in many ways.
“Thanks for babysitting,” Cam said with a chuckle. He turned, carrying his son down the hall toward one of the many bedrooms to continue his nap. Jennifer quickly got up, leaving crayons and paper behind and followed her dad.
“Playing babysitter?” Pepper asked as she wandered in, wiping her hands on a dish towel. How wonderfully handsome Jim looked, she thought. The cream color of his sweater emphasized his dark good looks, and when he lifted his chin, his green eyes narrowing on her, she felt giddy with joy.
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