by Cindy Gerard
Abel went to extreme measures, it seemed, to not only live in nature, but to commune with it. Towering Norwegian pine grew in such close proximity to a massive log cabin that she wondered how he’d managed to build it among them. He’d taken special care not to disturb the huge, gnarled roots that extended out of solid rock like crooked, arthritic fingers. Every twisted claw that bent back in on itself had been filled with soil and planted. Wild iris, baby strawberries, sweet williams, nodding columbines and a dozen other varieties Maggie recognized but couldn’t name filled the mini flower beds, becoming one with the forest floor, enhancing the natural drama of the landscape.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, her awe overriding the last of her trepidation. “Look.” She nodded to a spot farther up the slope. “Listen.”
The exotic and elusive sound of wind chimes had drawn her attention, as well as the multitude of bird feeders catering to everything from hummingbirds, to chickadees, to finches, and a dozen other varieties that flitted from one to the other even as they stood there watching.
“What is that?” She pointed to a spot farther from the cabin.
Blue drew his brows together. “A salt lick. Deer love ‘em. That’s a mineral block beside it. And from the looks of things, they like the corn he must feed them, too.”
Telltale corn chaff and deer tracks littered the ground, lending credence to Blue’s conclusion.
“The man grows flowers, feeds birds and deer, hangs wind chimes,” she said expansively, then voiced aloud the thought that had been hammering at her. “How could anyone suspect him of being involved with anything as hideous as poaching bear?”
She turned to Blue, her conviction firm, until she saw the look on his face. It was a look that made her blood chill by degrees.
“Sonofabitch,” he swore under his breath as his gaze locked on a spot past hers.
With a weary breath and a grim set of his mouth, he walked over to a shed that was built into a rock wall. When he reached it, he hunkered down to get a better look at whatever it was that had drawn him there.
Maggie’s heart hit her ribs like a rock fired from a slingshot. “What?” she asked anxiously, following him as he examined the barrel-shaped apparatus partially hidden under a canvas tarp beside the shed.
“What is it?” she insisted, coming up behind him, her footsteps muffled by the moss and pine needles blanketing the forest floor.
Blue didn’t answer her. Abel did.
“It’s a live bear trap.”
Maggie and Blue spun as one toward the sound of Abel’s voice. Hershey made a whining noise deep in his throat, the hair on his back trying to bristle in the moment before he spotted the wolf dog, Nashata, by Abel’s side.
Maggie sucked in a sharp breath, her hand flying to her throat. “Abel. My God. You scared me half to death.”
He didn’t speak. He just stared at her, his eyes darkened with what she recognized as disappointment and betrayal.
“I’m a little surprised myself,” he said finally, and let Nashata go to Hershey, who was now gamely wagging his tail. “Surprised to find you here, that is.”
Filled with feelings of guilt for intruding, her smile was forced. “Blue thought it might be nice to pay you a visit.”
Abel’s gaze swung to Blue’s and locked. A muscle flexed in his jaw as he gave a jerk of his chin and his satin black hair, hanging loose and long about his bare chest, fell back behind his shoulders. “I’ll just bet he did. Find what you were looking for, Hazzard?”
Maggie felt a sick, sinking sensation deep in her stomach as she watched the two men’s eyes clash.
“I’m sure Abel has an explanation for the trap,” she said quickly. Too quickly, her voice defensive, protective and not a little bit pleading as she looked back to Abel for confirmation.
“I’m sure I do,” Abel said stiffly. “The problem will be getting anyone to listen.”
With a long, hard look at J.D. he turned and walked away.
Torn between a need to go to him and slink away like the snake she felt she was, she just stood and watched him go.
“Come on, Maggie,” Blue said, his voice hard as he snagged her arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
Maggie was unnaturally quiet on the short ride back to her bay. But then, he wasn’t much better, J.D. acknowledged grimly as the Cessna glided up to her dock. It was nearly dusk when he eased out of the cockpit and turned to her, offering her a hand out. She ignored it, climbing out of the plane on her own steam. For a moment, all he could do was stand there.
He’d known she was upset. She had every right to be. And he was partially to blame.
Steeped in regret, damning himself for a fool and Greene for disappointing her, he couldn’t think how he was going to make it up to her. Because of him, she’d had to face head-on the disappointing possibility that Greene was not the man she thought he was. Because of him, she’d been confronted with some damning evidence that might put Greene behind bars.
“Nice going, Hazzard,” he grumbled under his breath. “This trick definitely fits under ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time.’”
It had seemed like a good idea. He’d gotten a sense over the past few weeks that she’d had a need to see Greene again, if for no other reason than to make sure he was all right. As it turned out, he should have listened to her and not set down.
He saw again the bear trap and the look in Greene’s eyes. Yeah, he wanted this poaching business stopped, but not at Maggie’s expense. And while Greene had always been a suspect, J.D. really hadn’t wanted to find out he was involved. While the presence of the trap wasn’t conclusive evidence, it sure as hell pointed a finger straight in his direction.
After making the Cessna fast, he walked the slope to the cabin. Maggie was curled up in a chair by the window, staring out over the bay, her face blank of emotions.
A silence as heavy as his regret hung in the air as he slowly walked to her side. “I’d have done anything to have spared you that.”
After a long moment, she met his eyes. The ice in them chilled him to the bone. “Anything but miss the opportunity to take advantage of my friendship with Abel.”
The rancor in her tone hit him like a broadside blow from a two-by-four. Before he could collect himself enough to react, she slammed him again.
“I thought you were different. I counted on you to be different.”
J.D. just stood there, stunned by words made all the more cutting because of the accusation in her eyes, unable to connect with why it was directed at him. He knelt by her chair, then stared at empty air when she rose and deliberately walked away from him.
Something inside him snapped as he watched the rigid, closed-off set of her shoulders. Something deep and elemental that demanded she make sense of her actions and accusations, something that held court to a rapidly building anger.
Jaw set, brows creased, he let out his breath between clenched teeth. Rising, he propped his fists on his hips and stared at her back. “What are you doing?” Panic, coupled with anger, bore down hard. “What the hell is this about?”
She turned back to him, the ice in her eyes sullied by a heartbreaking regret. “It’s about manipulation. It’s about trust. I trusted you. I trusted you…and you used me.”
He’d never been in an earthquake. Never experienced the ground rumble and shift and drop out from under him as he stood helpless to let it happen. He felt like he was in one now. Everything that was important to him seemed to crumble beneath his feet and dump him into a deep and unforgiving chasm.
He reacted like a man caught on the edge of disaster with a tight, controlling leash on his emotions, with an unswerving determination to come out of it alive. “I’d like to play this cool, Stretch. I’d like to stand here and take this, tell myself you’re upset and let it go. I’d like to…but right now, I just haven’t got it in me.” His gaze bore into hers, hard and demanding. “Explain, please, exactly how I ended up the bad guy in all this.”
She shook
her head, tears glistening. “It was so easy, wasn’t it? You knew Abel wouldn’t welcome you, so all you had to do was come up with an excuse to take me to see him. Once you got me there, how could you not take advantage of the opportunity to try to catch him in the act?” The hurt in her words was eclipsed only by her conviction. “I don’t even know why I’m surprised. I should be used to it by now. Someone has always found a use for me if it meant they could get what they wanted.”
He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. He counted to ten. Then twenty, and was afraid even then that if he didn’t go very, very carefully he just might have to hit something—like the wall. And for the first time in his life, he realized he had the capacity to be a violent man.
The force of the discovery rocked him. Blood pounded in his ears as he struggled to regain control and filter through his emotions. With more strength of will than he thought possible, he settled himself down. And he forced himself to see through the anger she directed dead center at him.
He’d sensed the change in her back at Greene’s. He’d attributed it to shock. He’d seen the hurt and had read it as disappointment in Abel Greene.
What he hadn’t seen—what in retrospect he should have realized—was that the raw, crippling emotion clouding her eyes with accusations of betrayal was not directed at Abel but at him.
He saw it now. She made sure of it. It was all there. Disappointment, clear and cutting. Outrage, pure and perverse.
“You’re reaching, Stretch,” he said, fighting to keep the anger from his voice. “You’re reaching real far.”
He swallowed hard, made himself breathe and tipped his head toward the window and a night that seemed bright in comparison to his dark disappointment.
“You know…trust runs both ways. I’m trying very hard right now to trust that this really isn’t about me. I’m trying damn hard to trust that you’ve just suffered a major disappointment and since I’m the one who’s handy, I’m the one taking the blame.”
Her silence filled the room, heavier than stone, as damning as a guilty verdict. He turned back to her, looking for a sign that the truth of his words had reached her. But in that protective gesture she’d used with such regularity in the beginning but which he hadn’t seen for weeks now, she crossed her arms tightly beneath her breasts, distancing herself even further.
“What happened to you?” he demanded when she drew further into herself and turned her back on him again.
He wasn’t having any of it. He stalked up behind her, gripped her by her shoulders and spun her around, making her confront him. “Who hurt you? Who hurt you so badly that you need to blame me for the damage he’s done?”
He let out a deep breath when she stood silent and defensive before him. “Why can’t you see that I’m not him?”
Abruptly, he let her go. “Damn you. Damn you, Maggie,” he gritted out, unable to bite back his resentment. “You owe me a helluva lot more than stubborn silence.”
After a last penetrating look that begged her to confide in him, he swore under his breath and turned away.
He had to get away from her. He had to get away from her now, before he said something he’d regret even more than he regretted her lack of faith in him.
“I can’t do this by myself,” he said, hearing both the plea and the weariness that he felt. “I can’t fix things if you won’t tell me what’s broken.”
When more silence was her only response, he snagged the doorknob and wrenched it open. “I’m outta here.” Then he stopped short when Abel Greene’s brooding face stared back at him from the other side.
For a moment J.D. couldn’t react. He just stood there, working hard on salvaging his bruised pride, working harder on keeping one fist wrapped around the doorknob and the other at his side. Nothing would make him happier than connecting with Greene’s granite-hard face just because it happened to be handy—and because he knew it would feel damn good to knock him down.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he snarled.
Greene didn’t budge an inch. “The trap,” he said, meeting J.D.’s glare, “is for a cub I’ve heard prowling at night. I think the poachers got its mother. If I can trap it and transport it north, it’ll have a fighting chance of surviving.”
J.D. squared his shoulders and studied the big man’s face. He knew without questioning why that he’d just heard the truth. That didn’t mean he was in a mood for expounding on that revelation. “And you came over here in the dark to tell me that.”
Greene cast a narrowed glance over J.D.’s shoulder to Maggie before going on. “I came because I found the poacher’s camp. Looks like they’re planning another hunt. When I spotted activity tonight, I radioed the DNR. Thought you might want to be there when they make the bust.”
Greene’s stoic, unruffled calm triggered a corresponding calm in J.D. He let out a deep breath. The opportunity to work off his anger by taking part in the downfall of the low-life scum who had been exploiting and wasting a resource as unique and peace-loving as the black bear was exactly what he needed.
“How many and where are they?” he asked, stepping outside, barely aware that Maggie had followed him out the door.
“Three, maybe four men. They’re holed up in the Gators.”
“The Alligators? Damn. No wonder we couldn’t find them.”
The Alligators were a maze of islands, the channels in between booby-trapped with humpbacked and razor-sharp rock piles lying just under the water’s surface. One wrong maneuver through the series of spines that resembled the reptile that gave them their name and you could rip the bottom out of a boat. Or shear a prop and end up stranded or sunk. Or worse, in rough water, be rammed against the treacherous shoreline. The Gators were Legend Lake’s version of the Bermuda Triangle. Only a fool or someone wanting very badly not to be bothered would ventureinto such dangerous water.
And only someone like Abel Greene, who knew the lake like the back of his hand, would risk searching for the poachers in there. Fortunately for the black bear, his risk had paid off.
“When did you find them?”
“A couple of days ago. I’ve been watching to make sure I knew what they were up to.”
“How long’s it going to take us to get to them in your boat?” J.D. asked as they walked hurriedly across the dock.
“An hour maybe. The lake’s calm tonight. The DNR’ll be about a half hour behind us, providing they can follow my directions and find their way in.”
“And just what do you two think you’re going to do until they get there?”
Until he heard her voice-—and the urgency in it—J.D. hadn’t realized that Maggie was scrambling along behind them, listening to every word.
Greene’s appearance at her door with news of the poachers had momentarily deflected his attention from her to a more tangible target. Her voice and the worry on her face, however, brought back the immediacy of her accusations and triggered a fresh wave of anger.
“This doesn’t concern you, Maggie,” he said, his words sounding every bit as hard as he wanted them to be.
“It doesn’t concern you either!” she insisted, ignoring him and appealing to Greene. “This is something you should leave to the law. You’re not trained to capture dangerous criminals!”
J.D. clenched his jaw, strode to the Cessna and jerked open the cockpit door.
“All the DNR boys asked is that we keep them in sight until they get there,” Abel put in, in an attempt to calm Maggie down while J.D. reached into the cockpit and stuffed everything from a flashlight to a pipe wrench to a roll of duct tape into a knapsack.
He handed it down to Abel, who was already in the boat.
“We won’t be in any danger,” Abel added as J.D. stepped in beside him.
“Then I’m going, too.”
“No,” J.D. said flatly when she made to scramble in after him. “No way.”
“You’re not my boss, Hazzard. And neither are you, Abel,” she added hastily as she jerked on the sweatshirt she’d
snagged on her way out the door. “If you’re going, I’m going, and if you dump me out, I’ll follow in my own boat.”
“You don’t know how to run a boat.”
She jammed her arms into the sweatshirt and tugged it over her head. “Then it’ll be on your head, won’t it, if I get lost or drown out there.”
J.D. glared from her to Abel.
“We’ve got to get going, Hazzard. Make the call.”
J.D. let out a deep breath, already regretting what he was about to say, but knowing he didn’t have time to argue. “All right, dammit. But you stay in this boat when we hit the island and you keep yourself low and quiet, got it?”
She didn’t say a word.
“You got it?” he repeated on a near roar, and was rewarded when she flinched, then gave him a sharp, defensive nod before she plunked down beside Hershey, who was already firmly ensconced in the bow.
She avoided his glare when he shoved a life jacket into her hands and ordered her to put it on. He took small comfort when her eyes flared fire, but she did as she was told.
Abel’s flat-bottom fishing boat cut through the night waters like a sharp blade slicing through soft butter. Maggie rode with her back to the open lake, silent and more than a little solemn as she watched the two men, their heads bent together, talking strategy above the motor’s hum.
She sat in the bow, hugging her arms around herself to ward off the chill of the night wind buffeting her—and the icy, empty look in Blue’s eyes when they occasionally strayed her way.
She ached as she watched him and Abel. Abel’s proud features were sharpened by night shadows and intensity, the ragged destruction of the scar on his face highlighted by moon glow and determination. He was a man much misunderstood. A lonely man whose integrity was overshadowed only by his mysterious aloofness. A man whose lonewolf demeanor left him open for accusations and distrust.
And then there was Blue. Blue, whom she had fallen in love with. She was so afraid to admit to that love that she had tried to dnve him away tonight. Blue, who had never wanted to believe the worst in Abel, and with a simplicity that shamed her, accepted Abel’s explanation about the trap without hesitation. It was an acceptance she suspected Abel had received little of in his life.