Sullivan's Promise

by Joan Johnston

  It seemed having her here was going to wreak havoc in a lot of ways he hadn’t expected. In any event, he was glad Cody was no longer in the room. Pete’s arrival meant he was going to be forced to relive the moment he’d found the mauled body of his brother, in order to describe the gruesome scene for the deputy.

  He turned to Pete and asked, “What is it you want to know?”

  VICK KNEW TOO much about grizzly attacks—male grizzlies could weigh upward of eight hundred pounds and have four-inch claws—to look forward to Sullivan’s interview with the deputy. From the grim look on his face, Sullivan wasn’t looking forward to recounting the moment either.

  On the other hand, his answers to the deputy’s questions would contribute to the Wildlife Human Attack Response Team’s decision about the grizzly’s fate. If the bear had been surprised and was defending its cubs or a kill, in which case it had been acting naturally, it would be left alone. If it had made an unprovoked attack on a human, it would be tracked and killed.

  “Do you have any of the weapons Mike was carrying with him at the time of the incident?” Pete asked.

  “I found his shotgun on the ground after the helicopter airlifted Mike out. It’s in my truck. Whatever else he had with him would still be racked in his vehicle, which I haven’t retrieved from the scene.”

  “What rifle does he use?” Pete asked.

  “A Remington Model 700, .375 caliber. Why are you asking?”

  Instead of answering Sullivan’s question, Pete asked, “Had Mike’s shotgun been fired?”

  “I presume so, since the grizzly left a trail of blood.”

  “Did you look to see if it was fired?”

  Sullivan’s brow furrowed. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Would you get his shotgun now, so we can check?”

  Sullivan rose from the table and headed out the kitchen door without grabbing his coat. While he was gone, Vick asked, “What’s going on, Pete?”

  “Let’s wait for Rye to get back.”

  He returned moments later breathing hard, a surprised look on his face, with the Remington 700 twelve-gauge shotgun broken in half, revealing that both barrels were fully loaded. “What the hell’s going on, Pete? This hasn’t been fired. How could you possibly know that?”

  “I wasn’t sure,” Pete said. “But it was a possibility.”

  “I’d swear I saw a trail of blood,” Sullivan insisted.

  “I’m not questioning what you saw. I got a call from the hospital to come collect evidence of a gunshot wound.”

  “Mike was shot?” Sullivan blurted.

  Pete held up a plastic evidence bag containing a crumpled 10mm bullet. “Mike was shot. Most likely before he was attacked by the grizzly, because the damage the grizzly inflicted concealed the bullet wound in his shoulder until the doctor got him into the operating room.”

  “How did that not kill him?” Sullivan murmured, staring at a bullet big enough to take down a grizzly.

  “It hit the piece of metal the Navy put in Mike’s shoulder to hold it together,” Pete said. “Can you believe the luck?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything lucky about my brother getting blasted by some idiot or torn up by a bear,” Sullivan snapped.

  “Sorry, Rye. You know what I meant.”

  Sullivan waved a hand to acknowledge the apology. “Any idea who did it?”

  “Not yet. I’ll be headed out to the site in the morning to see if I can find any spent casings or tracks from whoever was there with Mike.”

  Sullivan rubbed the back of his neck. “Who the hell would want to shoot Mike?”

  Pete met Sullivan’s gaze and said, “My best guess is he caught someone poaching, and not poaching just any game, but an endangered species.”

  “Someone was hunting a grizzly?” Vick interjected.

  “I suspect whoever it was saw a target of opportunity,” Pete said. “Most grizzlies won’t be out and about for a couple more weeks.”

  Sullivan groaned in disgust. “I told Mike not to take that damned park ranger job, but I couldn’t talk him out of it.”

  Vick knew Mike worked part-time as a Montana park ranger in the Flathead Lake District. Sullivan’s brother was renowned for catching poachers. Apparently, this poacher had decided he wasn’t willing to pay the stiff fine and perhaps face jail time for his offense.

  Pete continued, “Either the poacher had already shot at the grizzly and hadn’t managed to kill it, or Mike somehow got between him and the grizzly, maybe even protecting the man from the grizzly, or the grizzly from the man, and Mike ended up getting both shot and mauled. We won’t know the truth until he wakes up.”

  Vick bit her lip to keep from saying, If he wakes up.

  “Did the doctor tell you how Mike’s doing?” Sullivan asked.

  “Just that he survived the surgery and is in a medically induced coma until the swelling in his brain goes down.”

  “Did you see Darcie?” Vick asked Pete.

  “She was in Mike’s room when I spoke to the doctor,” Pete said.

  “How’s she doing?” Vick asked, unable to imagine any reason for Darcie not to have called Sullivan to update him once Mike was out of surgery.

  Then she remembered the results of Sullivan’s blood test.

  “Her eyes were pretty red from crying,” Pete said. He shrugged uncomfortably and added, “Mike looked pretty bad.”

  Vick met Sullivan’s troubled gaze. Had Darcie been crying for Mike? Or did her tears have something to do with what she feared Sullivan might have discovered when he gave blood? “Maybe you should go back to the hospital tonight to be with your mom and Mike,” she said. “I can take care of Cody.”

  Sullivan’s shoulders tensed, and his lips flattened to a thin line. “Let’s wait until she calls.” Then he turned to Pete and said, “I want to make the trip back to the attack site with you tomorrow. If you give me a ride, I can pick up Mike’s truck. He left it on a logging road before he hiked into the forest after those cows.”

  “Sure, Rye. You should come along, Vick,” Pete suggested. “You know the team values your opinion in these situations.”

  Vick regularly kept track of decision making that affected grizzlies in Montana, and she very much wanted to join the two men. The fact that the grizzly was wounded wasn’t good news. Even though the bear might be innocent of wrongdoing, it would need to be hunted down and moved to a remote location. A wounded grizzly might not be mobile enough to stalk its usual prey, or hunt down the seeds and berries that were part of its diet. It could become a danger to humans when looking for easier pickings, including human garbage or ranchers’ cattle, and might need to be killed.

  Vick very much wanted to keep that from happening. “Do we know for sure the grizzly was defending a kill?”

  “It made a pretty good meal out of one of my calves,” Sullivan said.

  That was more bad news for the grizzly. She wished she could go along and see the situation for herself. Normally, it was what she would have done. Not this time.

  From the moment she’d committed herself to her life’s work, it had consumed all her energy and emotion. Since Sullivan was Cody’s custodial parent, he made all the choices where Cody’s care was concerned, and her visitation had been strictly limited.

  For the very first time, that wasn’t true.

  She could probably find a sitter for tomorrow and join the hunt for evidence. But she wasn’t willing to give up even one of the precious moments she’d been offered to spend with her son.

  Vick smiled apologetically and said, “I need to be here to take care of Cody. I think we’ll be going to the hospital tomorrow to see how Mike is getting along and visit with Darcie.”

  “You’re more than welcome if you change your mind,” Pete said. As he rose and headed for the door, Sullivan followed to le
t him out. As Vick cleared the table, she heard them making arrangements for Pete to pick Sullivan up in the morning. When Sullivan returned to the kitchen, he picked up another stack of dishes from the table and brought them to her at the sink.

  “I usually rinse mine before I put them in the dishwasher,” she said.

  “Don’t have a dishwasher.”

  “What?” Vick couldn’t imagine such a thing. Her father, King Grayhawk, was the richest man in Wyoming. Not only did their enormous ranch house in Jackson Hole have the most-up-to-date appliances, they always had a maid to help with the cooking and cleaning up. The first thing Vick had done in the tiny cabin she’d bought was install new appliances, including a dishwasher.

  “Mom and Dad used to like doing the dishes together,” Sullivan explained. “She’d wash and he’d dry. They enjoyed spending the time together talking about their day.”

  “So now that your dad’s gone…”

  “The three of us kids stepped in to take turns doing the washing and drying.” He shot her a rueful glance. “Believe it or not, doing the dishes together provided the perfect opportunity for me to discuss ranch business with Mike.”

  With Mike hospitalized for the foreseeable future, Vick realized that she and Sullivan would be doing the dishes together each evening at the sink, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. She filled the sink with soapy water and watched as he grabbed a dishtowel from the horns of a ceramic steer attached to the wall next to the cabinets.

  She washed and rinsed a plate, handed it to Sullivan, careful not to touch his hand, and said, “Well…What should we discuss?”

  RYE COULDN’T BELIEVE the situation in which he found himself. Imagine doing the dishes, like an old married couple, with Lexie Grayhawk. It was unbelievable. And unbearable. It was too much like what he’d imagined when he’d woken up the morning after their single, unforgettable night together. He’d wanted this, exactly this, with the woman he’d found in the most unlikeliest of places…only to find her gone without a trace.

  He’d known, the day Lexie showed up out of the blue on his back doorstep, he was going to have to deal with all those unfinished feelings, those unrequited dreams, he’d left behind in Jackson Hole. Instead, he’d ignored them. Suddenly, the mess of emotions he’d been stuffing away like unwanted junk in an overcrowded closet came tumbling out.

  “You realize this doesn’t change anything,” he said as he took a plate from her and began to dry it.

  She shot him a wary look from blue eyes that reminded him of faraway oceans, but her voice was calm as she replied, “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t forgiven you.”

  “You’ve made that plain.”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “Have I asked for your trust?”

  He threw an arm out to encompass the kitchen, his home, his life. “You’re here. Inside the walls I vowed you’d never breach.”

  The glass she was washing plopped back into the dishwater as she turned to face him. She leaned back, drying her hands on a towel hanging from a knob on the cupboard under the sink. “You’re not being fair.”

  “I don’t have to be fair. My job is to protect my son.”

  “Cody is our son,” she quietly corrected. “And I resent the suggestion that I would ever do anything to harm him.”

  He felt a spurt of irritation because the truth was that since that first awful abandonment of their child, she’d proved herself a responsible and loving parent.

  “I thought you’d quit,” he said. “I thought you’d give up and go away, like a lot of weekend parents.”

  She lifted her chin, letting him see everything she was feeling. “I almost did.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because the joy of spending time with Cody outweighed the unbearable anguish of saying goodbye to him every time he left.”

  He hitched in a breath. He’d seen that ache of loss in her eyes more than once when she’d dropped Cody off on a Sunday evening. He’d pretended he didn’t, because acknowledging her pain meant admitting his part in causing it. Now and again, she’d asked for more time with their son, but he hadn’t allowed it. He’d wondered why Lexie hadn’t taken him back to court and convinced himself she was probably relieved that he’d limited the time she had with their child. Otherwise, she would have fought harder to change their agreement.

  Instead of being grateful that Lexie hadn’t gone to battle with him, he’d been resentful that she made him feel like an ogre for not giving her more time with Cody, just because she asked for it.

  He’d made a promise to her, when he was awarded custody of their child, that she’d never spend one more second with Cody than the law allowed. It was getting harder and harder to stick to it.

  “You brought this situation on yourself,” he said, feeling rotten for causing the sorrow he saw in her eyes.

  She gave a short, sharp nod. “You’ve made sure I paid for my mistake. If you want me gone from here, just say the word.”

  There it was. He could banish the evil enchantress from his castle with a single word, or maybe two, since it took that many to say, “Get out.” But he couldn’t get anything past the horrible, swollen knot in his throat.

  She waited another heartbeat, and when he didn’t speak, turned back to the sink, finished washing the glass she’d dropped, and handed it to him without deigning to look at him.

  He kept his gaze focused on the glass he was drying, but he could feel the electricity arcing between them. He’d accomplished nothing by speaking, just ratcheted up the ill will between them, which was, he realized, a defense mechanism. It was time he admitted what he’d been denying for years. He wanted her. Wanted her in the most primal way a man could want a woman.

  Except, that was the problem, wasn’t it? What he wanted was at odds with his good sense, which told him he should keep his hands to himself and his thoughts as far away from Lexie Grayhawk as he could get.

  Rye’s father had taught him that no excuse was good enough to justify doing something wrong. Mistakes weren’t forgiven or forgotten. Rye had learned to judge people by their actions. Lexie had already hurt him twice, once by walking away after their night together without so much as a hail or farewell, and again by caring so little about the child they’d made together that she’d been willing to give him away to strangers.

  When he was younger, and a lot more gullible, he hadn’t agreed with his dad. He’d tried giving folks the benefit of the doubt. But a man who “accidentally” failed to deliver the amount of hay he’d promised had to be watched, because bags of feed often turned up short the next. Why put yourself in that position?

  So no second chances. No wavering and giving in. No forgiveness, unless you wanted another dose of headache…or heartache.

  It took Rye a moment to realize Lexie was draining the sink. “That’s it?” he said, drying the last plate and stacking it with the rest in the cupboard.

  “All done. I was going to supervise Cody’s bath, unless you want to do it.”

  He saw the yearning in her eyes to do the job herself and told himself he was only giving in because she wasn’t going to be around for long. “You do it.”

  He saw both relief and gratitude in her eyes and felt small and petty again. Which irked him because he wasn’t the one who’d done wrong. She was.

  He bit back a gasp when her breast made contact with his biceps as she brushed past him. He stood perfectly still as his body reacted in a way he would rather it had not. She paused and glanced up at him, before hurrying from the room.

  He ached for her.

  Rye grunted with disgust. At this rate, he’d be a wreck long before Lexie Grayhawk was out of the house.

  You aren’t the only one feeling a visceral response. You saw the flush on her cheeks. You saw the flash of heat in her eyes when she looked into yours. W
hy not just go to bed with her? There’s no way the sex will be as good as you remember it. When you realize that, you can get her out of your system once and for all.

  Whenever their night of passion invaded his dreams, Rye saw Lexie’s blue eyes shining up at him, remembered the salty taste of her skin, and imagined their sweat-slick bodies twined together as they slid over a precipice and fell into a well of pleasure so deep he had no desire to climb out. Rye had never felt more connected to another person. His feelings had been more than physical. Their night together had been…Hell. He had no words for what he’d felt that didn’t sound sappy, especially considering how Lexie had walked away, like the whole experience hadn’t been…He hesitated, stumbling over the word that came to mind. Then he sighed and savored it, even if he did feel like a fool for remembering every goddamn transcendent moment of their night together.

  As the vivid memories rose, Rye’s body hardened to stone. Hell and damnation! If he couldn’t forget what had happened between them, it stood to reason she couldn’t either. So maybe the idea of sleeping with her again wasn’t so crazy.

  And if pigs had wings, they could fly.

  VICK GOT CODY in and out of the bath with only a little trouble and a lot of laughs. But after she’d read him a story, he didn’t want her to leave his bedroom.

  “Stay with me, Mommy.”

  Vick’s nerves were still ragged after her confrontation with Sullivan in the kitchen. The attraction was there; it had never gone away. She’d never tried to deny it. She’d simply done her best to ignore it. That wasn’t as simple to do when they were confined under the same roof.

  She sat down beside Cody and brushed a blond curl from his forehead. “It’s time for bed, sweetheart.”