But maybe this doctor hadn’t ever really seen death up close. Heard people you loved dying as you fought to save them. Knew what it felt like to bury your entire family.
So he wasn’t buying Dr. Billings’s bravado, thanks, but he did understand his frustration, translated into anger.
Conner had been simmering in the same fury for over a decade. You didn’t just stand by when something terrible happened to someone you loved.
Still, anger easily turned to desperation, which meant mistakes. And with a bear on the prowl, Conner didn’t want to worry about anyone doing something stupid.
No, this was better done alone, at least for now.
“You stay here and come with Pete,” he said to Dr. Billings. “The rangers will have weapons. I’ll have my radio, and I’ll call if I find anything.”
Conner grabbed the map, folded it. “I won’t go far—just up the trail. Get the lay of the land and see if I can find signs of a grizzly attack.” He stuck the map in his pocket and grabbed his pack filled with the first aid supplies he’d envisioned needing for Liza.
He was striding out the door when he realized it hadn’t slammed behind him.
Oh, shoot. He turned—
“I’m not kidding you, Conner. And frankly, it’s not up to you.” Liza stood on the porch of the mess hall, her hands on her hips, shouldering her own backpack. She looked sturdy enough for travel—a jacket knotted around her waist, Gore-Tex pants, and boots—and the look in her eyes suggested this time she might not run from the grizzly.
She tried to stand him down with a look.
“Liza—”
“Those people blame me. You heard them. And the longer we sit here and wait, the angrier they become. And the crazier I will get, I promise you. I’m not asking your permission. I’m going.”
He strode over to her, took a chance, and put his hands on her shoulders, lowering his voice. “It’s not safe.”
She shot him a look that made him release her before she could shove his hands away. “Seriously? I spent the morning in a tree. So don’t tell me what’s safe. Listen, I know that I panicked and called you. And now you’re here, and, yeah, I’m grateful. Super grateful. And I promise I’m not going to get in your way, but I have to do this.”
Get in his— “I’m not worried about you getting in the way, Liza. But I can’t promise you that you’re not going to get hurt.”
“Are you kidding me? Trust me, if I get hurt, it’s on me. I know that better than anyone.”
He didn’t know why, but he had the sudden feeling they were no longer talking about the search.
“Liza, please—”
“Let’s just go.” She brushed past him, striding up the trail, and he stood there, watching her go.
What was his problem, that his best view of her lately seemed to be her walking away from him?
“Liza, come back here!”
“Keep up!”
Shoot—he scrambled up beside her, nearly at a run. Her long legs stretched out, not slowing, her jaw tight.
“This could turn out very badly, you know. Are you ready for that?”
She hooked her hands into her backpack straps, cutting up the path. “I’m very well aware of the trouble we could be walking into, Conner. And I’m truly sorry that I foisted my problems on you, but right now, in this moment, I don’t care. I’ll do whatever I have to, to find Esther.”
Even, apparently, spend time with him.
He didn’t know why, but for some reason he reached up and rubbed his chest, a burn there, as if she’d just put her fist into the center of it.
“Fantastic,” he said softly and followed her up the trail.
Chapter 8
“The grizzly made good work of your backpack,” Conner said, picking up Liza’s shredded pack from the edge of the overlook. With the sun climbing the sky, slinging long shadows through the forest and across the trail, the sight of the decimated pack sent a shiver through her.
Liza kept her eyes peeled on the trail beyond the overlook, the image of the beast imprinted like a shadow in her head. She simply couldn’t blink it away.
“What did you have in it?” Conner asked, peeling the pack open.
“Some cheese, an apple, maybe some jerky.” She joined him, sifting through the remains, and picked up a canister, the safety lid still attached.
“Bear spray,” Conner said drily.
“Apparently, it’s just for ballast,” Liza said, but hooked it onto the outside of her new pack.
She tried to ignore the delicious tug of a smile on Conner’s face at her lame joke. But it seemed to unscrew the lid on the tension between them.
I’m very well aware of the trouble we could be walking into, Conner.
That had shut down his arguments about her hiking out with him. It also seemed to curb the way-too-enthusiastic greeting he’d given her.
And her painfully eager response.
Whatever had passed between them on that field, it seemed they’d managed to right themselves, find their footing.
Remember.
Still, it didn’t help that every time he looked at her he chipped a little deeper into the wound she’d worked so hard to heal.
Maybe she’d underestimated the danger of hiking out alone with Conner.
Forgotten the damage he could do to her heart.
But he didn’t have to know that. He was simply here to rescue Esther, and she’d be grateful for it.
Liza retrieved her lacerated tablet and crushed pencil box.
“Sorry,” Conner said.
“They’re just drawings.”
He touched her arm. “But they’re your drawings.”
And wasn’t that sweet. She shoved the tablet back in the destroyed pack, her hands trembling, suddenly achingly aware of how close she’d come to being mauled along with said pack.
Conner hesitated a moment, as if he wanted to add something, then got up and paced out to the overlook. “It’s mostly rock here, but I can make out a few footprints.” He squatted, used his hand to measure. “This is a big bear.”
“I know,” Liza said, scouring the trail and finding a print. She knelt, put her hand next to it. “Can I be seeing this right? A twelve-inch footprint?”
“That’s the front print—but yeah. I see some human traces also. Was Esther wearing Keens? The pattern is fairly distinctive.”
“I think so.” Liza came over to where he pointed, near the fencing. “They’re facing away from the view.”
“These aren’t,” he said, and pointed to another pair, bigger. “These look like Converse.”
“Shep wears high tops,” she said, mentally trying out the angle. Oh, Esther.
Conner stood up. “Clearly he was into her,” he muttered.
“What?”
He strode away from her. “Oh, something Shep’s mom said about him not liking her. If a guy sneaks away with a girl, he’s into her.”
“For the moment,” Liza said, but thankfully he didn’t hear her as he strode over to the trail. C’mon, Liza, get over it. Conner obviously cared enough to answer the phone. Just because he didn’t want to give her any promises didn’t mean that certified him as a jerk.
“There’s not much in the way of clean prints beyond these,” Conner said. He headed up the trail, past the point where she’d spotted the bear, and around the bend. His voice rose in a shout. “I think I got something!”
Liza followed him, a chill running through her as she passed the bear sighting to where Conner stood at a huckleberry bush that was splintered and partially uprooted. He was unwinding a strip of royal blue yarn caught in the brambles. “Is this from a sweater?”
She took it, ran it between her thumb and forefinger “It’s from Esther’s backpack. It was something she got at the camp store—we have a bunch of consignment crafts, including knitted backpacks.”
More yarn caught in the twigs twined in the breeze. Here the mountain sloped more gently down to the valley, the terrain covered with t
angled junipers and prickly wild roses, scattered patches of blueberry bushes until the land fell into a sketchy pine forest below. Overhead, the sun was high, nearly at its apex, the sky a pale blue.
“They must have seen the bear and veered off the trail,” Conner said. He had already advanced farther off the trail, through the bramble. “They came through here,” he said, pointing to a patch of trampled wildflowers, their yellow petals crushed in the loam, “but...” He stopped, pulled something from the knot of blueberry bushes. “The bear did, too.”
Fur, grimy and dark. He met her eyes with a bleak look.
Liza brushed past him, headed down the hillside, tripping over roots, cutting through bushes. “Esther! Shep!”
Nothing answered but the cry of a circling hawk hunting prey.
Liza worked her way down the hillside, pushing past the brambles of golden currant, the white blooms of boulder raspberries, the knee-high shrubbery of cascade bilberry. A regular smorgasbord for a hungry grizzly. The hollow in her stomach grew. “Esther!”
Behind her, Conner called out their names, his boots crunching through the tangle of juniper and scrubby maples.
The bushes caught between lichen-covered boulders and rocky wash soon gave way to spindly aspen and the red spires of wild dogwood, then towering white-barked birch.
From here, the land sloped precariously down to the north fork of the Bull River. Liza stopped in a patch of blue columbine, noting the delicate blue-and-white flowers torn and scattered on the ground. “They made it this far,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Conner.
He was on his walkie, calling in to Pete, who was still waiting for the rangers back at camp. Pete’s voice came through, sketchy and thin. They’d left the ridge trail far behind, the reception choppy.
Conner clipped the walkie to his belt, then came down to her. “I find it hard to believe the bear wouldn’t have overtaken them by this point,” he said, squatting to pick up a crumpled flower.
“Maybe it gave up—or what if they spooked it and it ran?”
He stood, hands on his lean hips, surveying the area, his mouth in a grim line.
It dredged up a memory, long buried, of his surveying the striated red-rock scenery of Sedona.
So maybe he had been into her. For an intoxicating summer moment.
He turned to her, his blue eyes catching hers. “Let’s keep going. Maybe they just got lost.”
Perhaps. She fell in after him, letting him part the forest, choose the trail.
With the forest thickening as they descended, with towering white spruce, Douglas fir, and shaggy hemlocks clumping together to form a canopy of shadow, they might have kept running, become disoriented.
At least that was the thought Liza reached for, clung to as she lifted her voice, calling. “Esther! Shep!”
A breeze shivered the trees, raking up the scent of cedar and pine as she and Conner cut around boulders the size of buffalo and over jutting limestone, following runs of ledge rock that corrugated the landscape.
She couldn’t imagine running through the forest without slipping on loose shale, careening down a gully, wedging her foot into a fissure, or face-planting into a ravine studded with chert and other jagged remains of mountain runoff.
They could be anywhere in this tangle of Kootenai forest, wounded, dying.
Conner had stopped, pulled out his map, apparently orienting himself.
“The north fork is about half a mile from here. Certainly they couldn’t have gotten that far, right?”
“Considering I climbed a tree over half a mile from where I encountered the bear, I’m thinking you cover a lot of ground when you’re freaked out.”
Conner looked as if he were sifting through her words. Finally, “Yeah, you’re right. Maybe, with nothing to stop them, they just kept running.”
He folded the map, shoved it in his back pocket, then picked his way down a spree of boulders, grabbing a low-hanging maple branch for support.
Liza scrambled after him, not wanting to lose him.
Under the canopy of forest, the air seemed languid, pockets of cool air lifting the hair off her neck. She pulled out her ponytail, did a quick, loose braid, and let it hang over her shoulder.
They reached a clearing and Conner took out his water bottle, took a drink, again consulted his map. Called Pete and got an update.
“The rangers are on site. They’ve brought tranquilizer guns and are going to track the bear. But if he’s out of the area and hasn’t attacked anyone, then they’ll let him go. So far there’s no evidence of him being a rogue animal—just a guy protecting his territory. It was a male, right? You didn’t see any cubs?”
She shook her head.
“Then he probably thought you were simply too close. He got startled, felt cornered.”
Now that made perfect sense, actually.
“He didn’t have to roar at me. I had no intention of invading his space.”
“He probably did what is called a bluff charge—they aren’t intending on attacking, they just want you to know they don’t like you in their space. Did it pop its jaw, maybe sway from side to side?”
“In a way.”
He frowned.
“He certainly let me know that he wasn’t interested in having me hang around.”
That seemed to satisfy him. “Hmm. Well, if it was a predatory attack, he would have been stalking you. And, in that case, playing dead doesn’t always help. You might have been able to scare him off by throwing something at him or banging a couple of sticks together and making loud noises. Basically making him think that you’re a risk if he decided to attack.”
“Yeah, I can be scary that way.”
This got a return smile. “You have no idea.”
And for a second, the world just stopped. Conner’s smile dimmed. Her breath caught. And, shoot, but the words felt like bait, the kind she couldn’t ignore. “That’s what it was, wasn’t it? I was too scary?”
He swallowed.
Then he turned and stalked away.
Because, yes, she’d hit on the truth. She was too scary—because she’d fallen too hard, too fast, and when she cornered him, he’d felt trapped.
Thirty feet ahead of her, Conner continued calling, his voice devoured by the tight canopy, the knot of forest. The breeze thickened into a shiver, and the sound formed around the flow of a waterfall in the distance. She could imagine the couple running through the brush, over logs, tripping on roots, crashing through bushes—
“Liza!”
The tone of Conner’s voice alerted her, and she spotted him on a rock, gesturing to her. She cut through low-lying ferns, crunchy brown needles, rotted, downed trees and climbed up beside him, tripping as she reached the top of the rock.
He caught her just before she would’ve fallen forward into nothing.
Or rather, into the cool breath of the Bull River. Forty feet down, a stair-step waterfall tumbled over cut rock and boulders to drop another thirty feet into a cauldron of foamy, brown water.
And on an outcropping forty feet down, no more than four feet across, crumpled and still, lay the broken form of sixteen-year-old Shep Billings.
“Oh no—” Liza dropped to her knees, barely aware of Conner’s hand on her shoulder as she braced herself and leaned forward. “Shep!’
The roar of the falls ate her voice. Below, the body didn’t move.
Conner knelt next to her. “We have to find a way down to him.”
“Do you see Esther?”
On the other side of the river the forest continued, dark, snarled.
“No,” Conner said. He gave her shoulder a tight squeeze as he pulled out his walkie.
#
The Great Bear Escape notwithstanding, it seemed like Liza recovered in a quick minute from seeing Shep crumpled forty feet below, pale, maybe even already deceased.
Her voice betrayed none of her panic as she called down to him. “Shep! We see you. We’re on our way.”
Well, Conner was
at least, although the minute he secured his letdown rope to a nearby aspen, Liza picked up the length as if ready to rappel.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She appeared to ignore him, looping the rope through her legs, around her left leg, back around and across her chest, over her right shoulder, letting the rope fall behind her, her left hand gripping the slack and riding below her backside for a brake. She leaned into it, testing.
For a long second Conner just gaped at her. “How did you learn to emergency rappel?”
She backed up to the edge. “I live in the boundary waters of Minnesota. It seemed only logical to take a survival course.”
Right. And she’d called him because…? “Maybe I should go down first.”
“I’m already roped up.” Liza leaned back, into her hand. “I just wish I had gloves—this is going to hurt.”
“Wait.” He pulled a pair from his pack.
She put on his gloves and reacquired her grip.
“I’m right behind you,” he said as she lowered herself over the edge.
As Conner knelt at the edge, his jaw tight, he had the terrible urge to leap all forty feet so he could be on hand to catch her. It had nothing to do with her needing him—which apparently, so far, she didn’t, despite her phone call—and everything to do with the fact that he couldn’t bear to see her get hurt.
That’s what it was, wasn’t it? I was too scary?
No. Not at all. But he’d scared himself, if he were to be honest, with how much he’d wanted to do something crazy, like yes, make her promises, be the guy who stopped living with his crazy no-commitment rules and actually lived the life he’d always dreamed of.
Liza reached the rocky ledge, landed next to Shep. “I’ll send the gloves up.”
She tied them to the rope, and he pulled it up as she knelt next to Shep.
“I’ll be right down!”
Shep lay on his side, his bottom leg broken and jutted out beneath him. Blood pooled under the injury, suggesting an open fracture. His shoulder also looked crushed, the way his head sank into it. He wore a T-shirt and jeans, his skin gray, eyes closed.
Playing With Fire: inspirational romantic suspense (Montana Fire Book 2) Page 10