by Jessie Evans
Unlike Colt.
Colt, who had lied to her and deceived her and made her believe he was falling in love with her, when really he was just killing time—and getting his rocks off—until he left town in nine days.
Nine days. He would be gone in nine days and who knows when—or if—she would ever see him again. Daisy had said he was going back into the marines as part of the ground force, the troops in the most danger and the most likely to get killed in action.
Fresh tears filled her eyes, welling up until they spilled down her cold cheeks. She knew she should hate him, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel anything except scared for him, ashamed of herself for being so gullible, and breathlessly, hopelessly sad.
She had stupidly believed she would be the one who would help Colt put his bad boy days behind him for good. A part of her still wanted to believe that this was all some big misunderstanding and that he would be able to explain the pain away.
But Daisy had seen the letter telling Colt to report to his old base on January second herself. There was no confusion. There was just black and white and one very naïve woman with a knack for getting herself in bad situations. Back in Chicago, she had been a failed nerd gone wild, embarrassed in front of her coworkers and shamed by an idiot she never should have dated, let alone slept with.
She had assumed she’d seen rock bottom, but this was so much worse.
Because she loved Colt. She had always loved him and the past few days had transformed that simple, earnest, childlike love into a passionate torch of emotion. She’d thought she’d found the end of the road, the arms that would never let her down, the One who could be trusted.
She had bounced back from Clarence’s betrayal in a month or two, but after this she would never be the same again. She couldn’t imagine looking into another man’s eyes and letting all her defenses fall away. Not that she’d had a choice with Colt. From the first time he’d touched her, she’d been helpless to control her emotions. She’d been a goner that first afternoon, no matter how hard she’d tried to convince herself that she could have a casual relationship.
She should never have given in to temptation. She’d been aware of Colt’s reputation and seen him break one heart after another when they were growing up. She should have trusted the facts and common sense, not that voice in her head whispering that love could work miracles.
Once again, she had been the architect of her own misfortune and had no one to blame but herself. She’d known better. She really had, but she’d let herself fall head over heels for Colt anyway.
Phoebe was halfway to another epic sob fest—not caring if her tears were turning to tear-sicles on her cheeks—when she heard the first distant howl.
She froze, ears straining and anxiety prickling across her skin. For a long moment, there was nothing but the soft hush of snowflakes falling to the already drifted forest floor. And then, like a message from the universe assuring Phoebe that things can always get worse, a second howl echoed through the trees, significantly closer than the first. It was followed by a third and a fourth, one to her right and one to her left.
This wasn’t a lone wolf, it was a pack, and from the sound of it, they were quickly closing in on her location. At this rate, she’d be surrounded in a matter of minutes.
“Oh no,” Phoebe whispered, trembling with a mixture of terror and adrenaline. She tried to tell herself that she had never heard of a hiker being attacked by wolves this close to town and that this time of year the animals wouldn’t be hungry enough to risk messing with anything but their usual prey.
But she’d had enough bad luck to know that the odds were not in her favor—especially this week. If there were going to be a freak wolf attack, she was going to be the one in a million hiker torn to bits.
Which meant she had to pull her teary self together and figure out a way to avert certain disaster. This time, there would be no one coming to her rescue. She had to rescue herself or take her chances with the wolves.
As another round of howls keened through the increasingly dark and ominous forest, Phoebe hurried to a tree with a bottom limb low enough for her to reach from the ground and began to climb.
She was nearly ten feet up when the branch beneath her foot bent in half, sending her sliding back down the way she’d come. She clutched at the trunk, managing to slow her fall and find a foothold before she tumbled all the way to the ground. But she lost a glove in the process, the waterproof fabric slipping off her hand, leaving her skin exposed to the rough bark.
By the time she recovered her balance, she was bleeding from an abrasion on her right palm, sending drops of bright red dripping down to stain the snow as the graceful gray shadow of a wolf glided into view beneath her.
Colton
Not far from the barn, Colt spotted what he thought were fresh footprints headed toward the ridge. He called Tucker, but his brother said there were prints headed toward the rear of the property as well. Unsure which belonged to Phoebe, they decided to stick with their original plan to split up.
A few minutes later Colton aimed the snowmobile toward the ridge and gunned it up the trail, silently praying that he would be the one to find her. He had to get to her and explain. He couldn’t stomach the thought of Phoebe in pain because of him. He had to find her and make this right before she decided to hate him forever.
It wasn’t long before the swiftly falling snow covered any sign of the tracks on the trail, but Colton kept to the path, pressing deeper into the woods. If Phoebe had turned back, he would have run into her. That meant, if she’d taken this trail, she was still on it.
He guided the snowmobile through the drifts for a mile and then two, but paused when he reached the lightning-scarred tree that marked the three-mile point on the trail. Most people wouldn’t have been able to get this far in the limited head start Phoebe had on him. But Phoebe wasn’t most people. She was incredibly fast, in amazing shape, and probably righteously pissed off.
All of those factors could have combined to give her the speed to cover ground quickly.
Colt thumbed the gas, sending the vehicle surging back up the trail. He’d give it another half mile. If he didn’t see some sign of her by then, he’d stop and call Tucker and regroup.
It could be that she’d walked up the driveway to hitch a ride on the main road leading back toward town. It would make sense. His gut told him that Phoebe would want to be alone when she was upset and that despite her newly developed wild side she was way too much of a rule follower to risk hitching a ride, but he could be wrong.
Colt was second- and third-guessing himself, so desperate to find Phoebe he’d completely lost the level head he had always been known for. He was about to call the house and ask his mom to take a drive toward town to see if she spotted Phoebe on the way, when he topped the next rise and his heart jerked hard in his chest.
Not a hundred feet ahead, Phoebe was halfway up a limber pine, hugging the trunk while a pack of wolves circled beneath her.
As Colton came into view, the animals turned assessing gazes in his direction, but didn’t run away. Colt cut the gas, his thoughts racing as he assessed the situation. Everything he knew about wolves said that the animals should have scattered when they heard the snowmobile approaching or at the very least when they caught a glimpse of him. The fact that they were still here, loping back and forth in front of the tree, waiting to see what he was going to do next, wasn’t good.
For some reason, this pack had lost their instinctive fear of humans, which meant they might not respond favorably to the techniques he’d learned to intimidate wild wolves. But he had no weapon, no desire to kill the animals if he could help it, and he had to get Phoebe out of that tree. Now.
She hadn’t even turned to look at him. She was straddling a limb with her eyes closed and her forehead bowed to rest on the trunk, looking pale and justifiably terrified. She could be going into shock or suffering from exposure. There wasn’t any time to waste.
Trusting his gut
, Colt thumbed the gas again as he unzipped his coat and held his left arm up and out to the side, making himself appear as large as possible as the snowmobile surged toward the wolf pack.
“Get on. Get out of here. There’s nothing here for you. Go on, get!” He shouted the words in his best clean-your-act-up voice, the one that had scared the piss out of new recruits misbehaving in his dorm back when he’d been the officer in charge on his floor. “Get! Go on!”
All too quickly, the vehicle ate up the freshly powdered ground between him and the pack. The smaller wolves crouched low and scuttled away a few steps, but the largest wolf, a golden-eyed male with a “make my day” expression on his lupine face, didn’t waver.
The animal stood his ground, staring Colt down as he continued to flap his coat and yell. Colt silently wondered what the fuck he was going to do if he didn’t succeed in scaring the alpha away. He was good at hand-to-hand combat, but he’d never had reason to fight anything with teeth and claws and he didn’t want to start now.
Thankfully, as he got close enough to the tree that he was forced to ease off the gas, the pack leader suddenly took off into the trees, followed by the rest of his wolves. Colt came to a stop in the snow, watching the animals flow over a fallen tree like water washing over stones and disappear into the woods, moving so silently it was no surprise Phoebe had been surrounded.
Thank God she’d had the sense to climb a tree and stay there until help arrived. He was so grateful to see her—and to see danger moving away from the woman he loved—that he forgot she was most likely angry with him until she said in a rough voice—
“Go away.” She sniffed, tucking her head closer to her chest. “I don’t want to see you.”
“Phoebe, I can explain,” he said. “Come on, sweetheart. Let me help you down, get you somewhere warm, and we can talk.”
“I’m not your sweetheart.” She sucked in a breath that emerged as a soft sob. “You’re leaving. So just leave and leave me alone.”
“Baby, you can’t—”
“I’m not your baby, either,” she said in a louder voice, swiping the tears from her face with her fist. “Now go away. I’d rather take my chances with the wolves.”
Heart lurching, Colt swung off the snowmobile and came to stand at the base of the tree, looking up at the bottoms of Phoebe’s snow boots, dangling on either side of the limb she sat on. They looked so little from this angle. She looked so small and vulnerable, hugging the wide trunk of the tree, that all he wanted to do was get her down and hold her.
But first he had to convince her that this had all been a misunderstanding.
“Phoebe, look at me,” he said. “I wasn’t going to leave. Not without telling you and having a long talk with you about it first.”
“It’s only nine days away. When were you going to tell me—the night before? And what does it matter anyway,” she said, pushing on before he could answer. “You’ll still be there and I’ll be here and I’ll probably never see you again. And you might even get k-killed and then I’ll have to go to your funeral and I don’t want anyone else I love to die. Because I love you, even though you’re a huge asshole.”
She broke off with a sob, a pained, strangled sound that broke his heart all over again. He had to get through to her, but he had a feeling he wasn’t going to have much luck staying here on the ground. Phoebe wasn’t one to take words too seriously. She needed to look into a person’s eyes and see the truth for herself.
With a sigh, Colt reached up, grabbing the lowest limb and pulling himself up into the tree.
Phoebe glanced down, scowling at him through her tears. “What are you doing? I told you to go away.”
“I’m not going away,” Colt said, continuing to climb. “I wouldn’t leave someone I hated out here alone with a wolf pack this close, let alone the woman I love.”
Phoebe sniffed, her mouth trembling as she scooted farther back on the limb she was straddling, putting as much distance between them as she could when he settled onto the limb beside her. “You have a weird way of showing you love someone.”
“The only reason I asked Daisy not to say anything about the letter was because I wanted to pick the time to tell you,” he said gently. “I didn’t want to ruin your Christmas or rush things too much. I thought if I could have a couple more days to—”
“To bang me before you told me you were leaving?” she supplied with a huff.
“This had nothing to do with banging,” he said, holding her gaze, even when she shot him a scowl so exaggerated it would have been funny if she weren’t so upset. “Seriously, Phoebe. This had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with making sure I didn’t scare you away.”
The creases between her eyebrows smoothed just a little, becoming a wrinkle instead of an impassable canyon. “You’re the one leaving.”
“Not without you,” he said, dying to take her hand, but realizing she’d probably slap him if he tried. “I haven’t even decided whether or not to take the commission. A lot has changed in just a few days and I wanted time to think and a chance to talk things over with you before I made the final call.”
He paused, gathering his courage, wishing he could wait to say what he was about to say, but he couldn’t risk losing Phoebe. He couldn’t hold anything back, not even the stuff he was worried might scare her. “But if I do decide to sign back up and you want to come with me, we won’t be able to live together on base unless you’re my wife. And I already know I don’t want to spend another night away from you if I can help it.”
Phoebe’s eyes went wide, wider, and yet wider still until he couldn’t hold back a huff of laughter.
“See,” he said, his throat tight. “Now you know why I wanted to wait. I just wanted a few more days. Everything felt like it was going so perfectly.” He shrugged, before adding in a softer voice, “Like it was meant to be.”
He glanced up, not encouraged by the stunned expression on her face. “Maybe I was wrong, but I thought maybe in a few days it wouldn’t scare you to hear me say something like that. And that’s the only reason I didn’t tell you the truth.”
Phoebe swallowed, sniffed, and blinked several times as her troubled eyes searched his, but she didn’t say a word.
She was quiet for so long Colton’s stomach had started to turn inside out when she finally whispered, “You really mean all that? You were really going to ask me to go with you?”
“No, I was going to ask you to help me decide whether we should go or stay,” he said, willing her to believe him. “Because if we’re going to build a life together, we should make big decisions together, don’t you think?”
Phoebe nodded. “Yes,” she said, seconds before her face crumpled and fresh tears spilled down her pink cheeks.
Colton reached out, getting as much of his arm around her as he could in their awkward position. “Don’t cry, Phoebes,” he said, patting her shoulder. “I’m sorry, I never wanted to make you cry.”
“You d-didn’t.” She sniffed, but the tears kept coming, streaming from her big brown eyes. “I should have waited to talk to you before I ran away. I just have such terrible luck and for a person who graduated magna cum laude I make stupid decisions sometimes. I didn’t want to believe you were one. I wanted to believe that you felt the way I felt, but when—”
“I do,” he assured her, searching her face. “Assuming that you want to keep me around for as long as possible.”
She nodded again, her tears thankfully starting to slow. “I do. I love you, Colt. I’ve always loved you. It just feels like part of what I was meant to do with my life.”
“Me too,” he said, wishing he could kiss her, but with her luck he wasn’t going to risk any in-tree acrobatics. “So can we climb down and go home now? I’d like to make sure you don’t have frostbite and eat some Christmas Eve dinner and then take you home and make love to you until there is no doubt in your head that you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Her lips trembled. “Okay,
but you have to stop saying romantic things for a little while, or I’m going to start crying again and probably fall out of the tree while I’m trying to get down.”
He nodded seriously. “All right. We can talk about unromantic things. Like picking up some mealworms from Mom and Dad’s compost shed for Godzilla before we leave.”
“Gross,” she said, her smile sending a bolt of happiness and relief shooting through his chest. “And his name is Sir Licks-a-Lot.”
“He told me he didn’t like that name,” Colt said, shifting position until he was standing on a limb a few feet below Phoebe’s. “He wants something that more accurately reflects his badassery.”
She grinned as she shifted her leg over the limb. “Maybe Godzilla can be his middle name.” She held her hand out between them, making Colt frown as he caught sight of the torn skin of her palm. “I lost my glove and scraped up my hand.”
“Ouch,” he said, helping her down onto the limb above his.
“And blood dripped down onto the snow,” she continued, holding onto the tree with her good hand. “And I was afraid it was going to whip the wolves into a feeding frenzy and they were going to figure out how to climb the tree and eat me alive.”
Colt glanced around the tree, grateful not to see any sign of the pack. “Let’s not talk about possible nightmarish scenarios until we’re back home, okay?”
“I’m making you superstitious,” she said, as he hopped down into the snow and held his arms up to her. “Aren’t you afraid of hooking up with someone with such bad luck?”
He motioned for her to drop down, refusing to say another word until she was on solid ground. But as soon as she took his hand and landed on her feet in the snow beside him, he cupped her face in his hands, looking deep into her eyes so she would know that what he was about to say was serious.
“I am not afraid of your bad luck,” he said. “The only thing I’m afraid of is not being around to catch you when you fall.”
“Then I guess you should stick around for a while,” she said, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Because I’d like to keep an eye or two on your back, too.”