Snowfall

by Lainey Reese

  Poncho gave an agreeing grunt and tried to sneak another bite to the dogs.

  “Poncho.” Ashley slugged him this time, hard enough that he yelped. “You make my dogs into beggars and you will wake up to me standing over you with a sledgehammer.” Then she shoved from the table and took her dishes to the sink. “I didn’t want you here. But now that you are in my home, I’m not going to sit all day while you two are out there in those woods.

  It’ll make me crazy, waiting all day not knowing if you’re hurt and need help.” She turned and leaned against the counter with her arms folded under her breasts and a determined gleam in her eye.

  “Not gonna happen, Slim,” Jake said, following her example and bringing his dishes up to the sink. “It’s dangerous. We’re trained for this, we’re prepared and we know what to expect. You are just going to do whatever it is you usually do all winter and not worry about us.”

  She looked at Poncho, who was still staring at her—slack jawed after her unkind threat. Unfortunately, he was no help once he recovered from his shock. “No way, Ash, I’m with him.”

  “Fine,” Ashley said with a sniff, “I guess it wouldn’t matter to you big, strong, manly men that I know where the cougar hunting paths are then?”

  That stopped them both, but Jake recovered first and said, “No. No it won’t. If you’re too ornery to save us time and tell us we’ll just have to find them ourselves.”

  “Hmm.” Ashley studied her nails and pulled out the big one. “So, I guess it also won’t help to tell you I know where the den is either? Both dens.” Then she walked away while the two of them sputtered, and Jake started cursing like a sailor.

  It took weeks to find the hunting trails of a wild cougar and most dens were never found. That she already had this information would save them time and resources that they couldn’t afford to waste. With more cursing Jake faced the fact that she was going with them and tried to come to terms with it. It wasn’t easy. The thought of her out there in danger was wreaking havoc in his gut.

  “Man,” Poncho said with a supportive thump on his shoulder. “You got your work cut out for you with that one.”

  “You got that right.” The two of them cleaned up the kitchen in silence, Jake’s mind moving past worry and on to the fact that a month’s worth of tedious and freezing work was magically behind them and what that would mean for the job.

  That night they were all cold, wet and starving. Including the dogs. Ashley had led them to the trails and the two dens. Both were closer to her home and campground than either man was comfortable with. They set up motion-activated cameras and collected scat samples to try and ascertain what the cats were eating.

  As soon as they entered the mudroom, Ashley shed her outer gear and stuffed her feet into bunny slippers. Then she dropped to her knees and started drying the dogs with the towels she had stacked by the door. Jake and Poncho did the same, minus the bunny slippers. “Thanks.” Ashley didn’t try and stop them. The dogs had earned their care and kept them all safe. Besides she was so beat. Even if they hadn’t done so on their own she would have asked for help cleaning them up.

  “Of course,” Jake said with a full smile as he dodged Grover’s own version of a thank you—his drool-coated tongue. “These guys earned themselves a steak dinner, least we could do is help with the rub down.”

  “Mmmm,” Ashley groaned. “Red meat. I’ll pull some out on my way to check on Apollo. You guys fire up the grill.” She stumbled out with bunny ears flopping.

  “Must be love,” Poncho said as he grabbed a new towel and started on the last wet dog. “That girl is wearing long johns, had a runny red nose and pink fuzzy bunnies on her feet yet you’re smiling after her like she was a swimsuit model.”

  Jake looked at him and grinned. “If it ain’t love, I’m going to be in trouble when the real thing does hit.” He finished drying the dog and trotted after her. long johns or not, they were wrapped around a mighty fine ass and he was going to see if he could get his hands on it before she covered it up with more layers.

  He stopped to wash, no matter how much the lady liked her dogs, he was sure no woman would be seduced by a man who smelled like one. Then was brought up short as he stepped into her room.

  She stood with her back to the door rambling to Apollo about the day they’d had wearing nothing but a miniscule pair of panties. If he’d been capable of coherent thought he’d have quietly backed out of the room and closed the door. But staring at the curve of her back and the perfect inverted heart of her ass, rational thought fled, leaving only instinct.

  He moved on silent feet and slid his hands along the curve of her hips. When she jerked in surprise he held tight. At first she tried to turn to face him but must have realized she was topless and instead clasped her arms across her breasts and hissed at him, “What are you doing in my room? Haven’t you heard of knocking?”

  He smiled, dipped his knees a little so that when he pulled her in tighter to him, that perfect backside was nestled in just the right place. He kissed her shoulder. “I would have knocked, if you had closed the door.” He nibbled his way up her neck and whispered into her ear, “Were you hoping I’d follow? Hoping I’d find you all but naked and do what I’m doing right now?” Then he sucked her lobe into his mouth and hummed when she gasped and shuddered for him.

  “Of course I left the door open, I, um, I live a-alone.” Her words were slow and breathy and Jake took that as encouragement enough. His hands slid further along her hips, following the delicate elastic of her panties until they met in the middle, and then he delved lower. They both groaned when his fingers found her. She was smooth skin and downy curls, and she was already swollen and damp for him. While desire clawed like an animal in his gut he slid one hand lower to find and enter her with his longest finger while his other hand zeroed in on her clit.

  Her hands left her breasts and she dug nails into his wrists, intending to stop or urge, he couldn’t tell because all she did was cling. Not giving her time to decide, he called on every skill he had to keep her right where she was. “C’mon, Ashley,” he panted in her ear. “Let go. Let go and let me make you come.” She looked back at him, her eyes gone to emerald. What she saw in his face must have been enough. With a catch in her breath and a nod she gave in to him.

  She leaned back into his chest, tangled one hand in the hair behind his neck and braced the other hand against his thigh. Her trust galvanized him. With a growl he bent and tugged her panties down and off. He pulled her back into position and thrust his fingers into the melting heat between her thighs. The tight flesh gripped and pulsed around his digits like a hungry mouth, and he thought the top of his head was going to explode. “Yes, like that.” He bit her where shoulder met neck and sucked hard enough to leave a mark while her honey flowed hot and sweet into his hands. Her nails dug in, and he felt all her muscles clamp seconds before her keening cry echoed in the room. Jake groaned as he felt the flood and pulse of the orgasm tearing through her. He held her through the aftershocks. Soothing and cosseting as the tension melted from her frame and she became as limp and pliable as melted wax.

  With a muttered curse, he used her hips to turn her to face him and locked his mouth to hers. He lifted her into his arms with a growl of need. She wrapped her legs like a vise around his hips and kissed him like it meant her very life. With a groan he grabbed a cheek in each hand, turned to brace her shoulders against the wall, and ground her against him for several earth-shattering moments.

  It was an effort that cost him more than he cared to examine, but he pulled away from her and let her legs slide to the floor. His body screamed in protest, but his heart knew that if he wanted her to accept him for more than one night, he couldn’t take her in an ambush.

  His hands slid from their death grip on her ass, before he let go completely. She grabbed them and brought them to her heaving breasts with a whimper. For thirty seconds of heaven he dropped to one knee and plundered with mouth and hands the breasts that had been oc
cupying his fantasies for the last three months. Then forced himself to stand and back away.

  He hoped she couldn’t tell what it was costing him. He knew to the pit of his soul if he gave in and took her right now, right now was all he’d ever get. She stood there quivering and gloriously naked, her thighs glistening with the orgasm that he’d given her and did the only thing he could trust himself to do. He ran.

  Ashley felt her jaw drop. She took two steps and peeked out the door, but he was long gone. “Jake?” Nothing. “Eagle?” Still nothing. She looked down at herself just to make sure she hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. Yup. She was naked and her body was damp in all the right places. She looked back down the hallway. Still no sign of him. “What the heck?” she muttered to herself. She looked at Apollo, but he didn’t have an explanation for what happened either. Not knowing what to think, she marched to her master bathroom and started a shower. She’d get to the bottom of this once she was able to pull herself together. Then Dr. Jacob Eagle Feather was going to have some explaining to do.

  As she showered, she thought about the day they’d had. All the times she’d looked up from adjusting some piece of equipment and caught him staring at her, and the times he’d looked up and she’d been the one caught staring.

  He worked with a sexy level of focus that made her want to follow him around like a puppy. It was obvious he loved what he did, and that he was in his element out in the wild. The long mane of his hair was cinched at the base of his skull in a leather tie that distracted her again and again. When that wasn’t triggering her, his voice as he described the science behind what he was doing was enough to give her professor fantasies.

  For the three months he’d been hounding her she’d been able to keep the attraction she felt for him at bay. Now, her first full day with him and already he’d gotten her naked. Maybe that was the real reason she’d been so set against him staying here.

  She turned her face into the water and tried to let it wash the confusing thoughts from her mind.

  Jake was in the shower too—a much colder one. It didn’t help. He could still feel her in his arms, still taste her on his tongue. With ill grace he gave in to the inevitable, turned the water temperature to scalding and took himself in hand. No longer trying to fight it, he let his mind wander where it would. Flashes of Ashley whirled through his mind as he stroked with strong pulls on his flesh. He mixed reality with fantasy and pictured her gloriously naked, her breasts rounded and glistening in the shower while her nipples were darkened and erect. He bit back a moan as he imagined her leaning forward, her rosy lips parting and taking him in. Pumping faster, he imagined the hot, wet cove and silky tongue bathing his cock. He pictured her cheeks hollowing as he thrust in and out of that gorgeous mouth. With a groan he came, hand pumping furiously while he braced against the wall for support and imagined her drinking every last drop from him.

  Chapter Seven

  The smell of fire-grilled meat greeted him when he came from his room twenty minutes later. Ashley was walking into the kitchen with a platter stacked high with some of the best-looking steaks he’d ever seen. She laid it in the middle of the table where a bowl of potato salad and a platter of corn on the cob already sat. He looked at her in amazement. “How’d you do all this?” A ding sounded and she turned to the oven, pulling out fresh rolls, and he felt his knees go weak.

  “It wasn’t much really,” she said, bringing the rolls to the table and setting them down on a trivet. “The corn was frozen, just had to boil ’em for a few minutes. The potato salad is homemade, but I made it yesterday before you guys showed up. And the steaks just take ten minutes or so on each side on the grill.” She reached for a roll and slathered on some butter. “The rolls are brown-n-serve.” But she smiled at him with obvious pleasure that he was impressed with her meal.

  “Well, regardless, this is awesome and we can’t thank you enough,” Poncho agreed around a mouthful of steak and the three ate in a barely contained frenzy.

  Ashley tried to stop at what her normal portion would be, shocked at how hungry she still was. “I feel like I could eat for another hour. What’s the deal?” When she tried to take her plate to the sink, Jake stopped her, motioned for her to sit back down.

  “The deal is that you probably burned enough calories to eat about three times what you just put away. If you are going to keep going out with us, you are going to have to feed your body a lot more than what you just ate.” He scooped another helping of salad on her plate and forked up another steak, thankful she’d made extras. “Keep going. Don’t worry that you’ll make yourself sick. Your body will tell you when it’s had enough. Just listen to it and keep eating ‘til you’re full.” Then he forked up another steak for himself and dug back in.

  Ashley only managed about half of what he’d put on her plate before she dropped her fork and groaned, “I’m out. That’s it. If I eat another bite I think my stomach will explode.” Jake wasn’t convinced that she’d eaten enough to make up for what she’d burned today, but he let it go. Her stomach was only so big after all. He had a feeling in an hour she was going to be back in here riffling for dessert.

  She pushed from the table with a satisfied sigh and started clearing dishes. With a rueful shake of her head she said, “This potato salad was going to last me all week, fellas. Gone in one meal? If that’s the way it’s going to be every night, we are going to run out of food in a month.”

  The men chuckled and stood to help with the cleanup. “It shouldn’t be that bad after this week, Slim,” Jake said while Poncho started loading the dishes he handed him. “We laid almost all the cameras we had today, maybe one more day like today and then we just have to monitor them. Most of the hard work is done. In fact the only really hard work we have left ahead is catching one so we can get some bloodwork and tag it.” He saw Ashley take a calming breath before she turned to face him.

  “How close do you have to be to tranq one?” She looked from him to Poncho and back again. “Do the guns have the same range as a regular rifle?”

  Jake wasn’t going to comment, but Poncho had other ideas. “We don’t use the guns, Slim,” he said, his face set in a serious expression that she wasn’t used to seeing on him. “They are bad news, and we don’t use ’em.”

  “But,” Ashley looked at Jake, confused, “I don’t get it. They use them all the time. I watch Animal Planet almost every day and they are always using them.”

  “TV doesn’t show you the reality, Ashley,” he said, drying his hands with a dishtowel. “On TV it looks like a little fluffy dart. It looks like the animal gets a small sting, takes a few steps and falls asleep. The reality is that that fluffy little dart is a syringe full of narcotics topped off with an explosive. An explosive that breaks bones if they hit anywhere near one. It hurts and scares the shit out of the animals. Do you know what they do when they’re scared? They run. Just think how much distance a cougar can cover in the twenty minutes it takes for the narcotics to kick in. We’re talking miles and miles, Slim. And that’s assuming it knocks them out at all.”

  “That’s assuming they don’t turn ’round and charge us.” This from Poncho. “I’ve seen a big cat turn and charge when it got hit by a dart. Guy needed over a hundred stitches and the cat had to be shot to save his stupid ass. We don’t do tranq guns, Ashley. We trap ’em and tranq ’em up close.”

  Ashley’s eyes got big and round at that. “We have been using this method for years,” Jake cut in, “It sounds scarier than shooting from a distance, but it’s safe. Safer for the animal and for us. I swear.”

  Ashley met his confident gaze and weighed what they said. She wasn’t an animal expert. As much as she loved her dogs and wildlife documentaries, she didn’t have a doctorate in wildlife biology like Jake or animal husbandry like Poncho. So she tried to swallow her fears and trust that the information they were giving her was fact. They would do what was best, and she would leave it all in their hands.

  The next two weeks were filled, from su
nup ’til sundown, with painful, grueling work. Neither Jake nor Ashley found the energy to face what had happened between them. Days started early and ended late. The cold messed with the equipment, the snow kept them in constant agony—because fresh powder may be fun to ski in but it was murder to work in—and the cats were nonexistent.

  They became like ghosts. Never triggering the motion detectors on the cameras or the trip wires, but always leaving behind evidence that they’d been there. In thirteen days the only thing caught on film was the prey animals, snowshoe rabbits, deer and even a moose. But no cougars.

  They left their paw prints all over the sites, and at one site left a bloody yet mostly intact elk. That sight had the dogs whimpering in confusion and sent Ashley back to the cabin early. She was as heartbroken and confused as her dogs at the waste of life.

  “What are we dealing with, Poncho?” Jake asked angrily, looking at the elk. “It killed it, but didn’t eat. Even the belly is intact. What the hell kind of predator does that? It’s like he killed it for sport.” Poncho didn’t have an answer any more than he did though. The two set themselves to the grisly task of documenting the kill site. One thing they found was the cat had a hell of a bite radius.

  Chapter Eight

  When they got back to the cabin, Ashley was splitting firewood. Both men stopped in awe. Jake felt the unease he’d carried since the elk melt away as he watched this strong, beautiful woman do work that some men would balk at. “You know, Ponch,” Jake said, not taking his gaze off her, “I think I’m going to marry that girl.”

  Poncho wrapped an arm around his shoulder and said, “Amigo, I knew you were gonna marry her the first day we got here and she pulled that shotgun on you.” He chuckled ruefully. “See, even now you’re smiling when you think about it. Anybody else would still be pissed.” Poncho pulled away and headed for the mudroom. Jake headed for Ashley.