Stormwalker Read online

  His hunger was forgotten as the coyote stepped into the edge of the firelight. Cullen felt every muscle in his body tighten as he stared into those golden eyes. For an instant, he was almost hypnotized by their gleaming depths, and he suddenly understood a rabbit's fascination with a diamondback. The coyote's upper lip drew back, displaying a terrifying length of fang, and Cullen slowly raised the pistol. If he could hit the animal right in the head, the impact of the slug would stop the coyote before those fangs could reach his throat.

  If he missed... He gave a mental shrug and refused to consider that possibility. He was a good shot. And he had quite an incentive to be accurate. He pulled back the hammer and his finger curled around the trigger. Just another second.

  Suddenly another shape launched itself out of the darkness. Cullen threw his arm up in a reflexive action, protecting his throat, but he was not the target. The coyote was. Cullen had only a brief glimpse of a massive shape and a muzzle drawn back in an enraged snarl, and then the two animals disappeared from the firelight in a mass of rolling fur and teeth. He could hear their guttural growls and see their movements, but they were well outside the range of the fire's light.

  Bracing himself on the rock wall behind him, he dragged himself to his feet. The battle sounds ceased suddenly, and he heard a scuttling noise as the defeated combatant conceded the fight and ran. There was a moment of silence, and then Cullen heard a sound that sent ice water through his veins. It was a howl that echoed in the quiet night, a long ululating wail that announced death on four feet.

  Wolf. Cullen tightened his hold on the revolver. It wasn't possible. Bounty hunters had long ago cleared wolves out of this area. But the shadowy form that stepped into the firelight was too big to be a coyote. Cullen's finger contracted a little tighter on the trigger, but he didn't pull it. Man and animal faced each other across the firelight for a long moment before the animal calmly sat down, licking traces of blood from his muzzle. His golden eyes stared at Cullen unblink-ingly, but he made no move to come any closer.

  Cullen relaxed slowly, taking in the animal's un-wolflike markings. A wolf mix, maybe. But just because he appeared to be part dog didn't mean he wasn't a danger. Feral dogs could kill just as efficiently as their wholly wild cousins. This animal had driven off the coyote, but that didn't mean he didn't see Cullen as a meal.

  It seemed as if the two stared at each other for hours, but it could only have been a matter of minutes before Cullen heard the unmistakable sound of someone or something large approaching. Hardly daring to hope that it might be what it sounded like—he'd been hoping for too long—Cullen stepped forward, keeping the fire between himself and the wolf dog. The animal was staring into the darkness, and it was obvious that he was familiar with whatever was out there.

  The first horse to come into sight was a beautiful bay quarter horse, but Cullen barely noticed its rider, looping the reins around the saddle horn and stepping out of the saddle. Cullen's attention was all for the exquisite little palomino that followed, or more exactly for the palomino's rider.

  "Sara." His voice cracked, rusty with lack of use. She slid out of the saddle and ran toward him, and Cullen forgot all about his injured leg as he took a quick step toward her. His knee buckled and he would have gone sprawling, but there was suddenly a solid shoulder beneath his arm and an arm around his waist, bracing him. He was hardly aware of the support.

  His arms closed around Sara, hugging her with rib-cracking strength, as he buried his face in her hair. He'd always known she wouldn't rest until she found him. Holding her close, he realized that he was going to make it. He wasn't alone anymore.

  Chapter 11

  It was some time before Sara became aware of anything beyond the fact that Cullen was alive and with her again. Her fingers stayed wrapped around his, as if she feared that loosing her hold on him would result in his disappearance. Her chest hurt with the conflicting urges to laugh, to shout and to cry. The tears that streaked her face provided a needed release for all the emotions that tumbled inside. Cullen's eyes were equally bright, and Sara knew he shared the same confusing mix of emotions.

  Cody saw the two of them settled beside the fire and then proceeded to set up camp and feed the horses. It wasn't until he came over to the fire and sat back on his heels across from Sara and the boy that Sara seemed to remember his presence.

  "Oh." Her eyes widened with guilt as she realized that she hadn't even introduced the two men. "Cullen, this is Cody Wolf. He's the one who found you. Cody, this is my nephew, Cullen."

  "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," Cody murmured as he shook hands with Cullen.

  Cullen smiled. "Thank you doesn't seem quite adequate somehow. I'd offer you a seat but I've had all the furniture sent to the cleaners."

  "Don't worry about it." Cullen's gutsiness reminded Cody of Sara, and his smile warmed. "How bad is the leg?"

  "The leg?" Only then did Sara remember the way Cullen had dragged his leg when he'd come to meet her. "What's wrong with your leg?"

  "The knee is pretty busted up."

  "Mind if I take a look?"

  Cullen measured the other man for a long moment. What he saw was lean features, shadowed by a ragged beard, and eyes that glittered green in the firelight. He nodded.

  "Be my guest. But it doesn't look too pretty."

  "I suspect I've seen worse." Cody came around the fire and knelt beside Cullen, deliberately placing himself between Sara and the injured leg. "Sara, why don't you heat up some soup? He looks like he hasn't eaten a decent meal in weeks.".

  Sara's mouth set mutinously. She knew exactly what Cody was trying to do. But before she could say anything, Cullen spoke up.

  "I could probably eat a small bear and come up hungry," he said.

  Her protest died unspoken. There was no doubting Cullen's sincerity.

  While she prepared soup and opened a can of meat, Cody eased apart the leg of Cullen's pants. Cullen had split it along the seam and tied it together with a crude thong. Cody's breath hissed out when he saw the swollen purple mass that bore little resemblance to a joint. His eyes swept up, wondering if the boy realized how bad the injury was. Their eyes met, and Cody saw acknowledgment and acceptance. Without a word, he tied the pants leg together again and stood up. - "How bad is it?" Sara handed Cullen a mug of soup, her eyes seeking Cody's. He shrugged.

  "It's way beyond my skills. They should be able to patch it up in a hospital."

  "I'm lucky to be alive." Cullen's matter-of-fact tone made it impossible to offer any sympathy on the damage to his leg.

  "We didn't have a way to bring Bill with us, so we left him where he was." Sara brought the words out hesitantly.

  Cullen stopped eating, his face tightening in a way that made Sara's heart ache. "It's a good place for him. The only thing he loved more than the wilderness was flying."

  "It must have been pretty terrible." The words seemed hopelessly inadequate.

  "His chest was crushed and he had a fractured skull. He never regained consciousness." Cullen shrugged. "God knows why I'm still alive."

  Sara bit her lip, searching for something to ease his pain. But Cullen was not yet ready for sympathy. He picked up his cup, making it clear that the subject was closed.

  He drank the soup hungrily, feeling its warmth sink in and fill the hollow in his stomach. He ate the meat more slowly, savoring its flavor.

  "Is that your dog?" He nodded his head to where Dog sat.

  Cody shrugged. "We keep company. It's a little hard to say that Dog belongs to anyone."

  "You might want to check him for wounds. He tangled with a coyote that's been trailing me for a few days."

  By the time Dog had been carefully examined and treated for minor scratches, Cullen was beginning to show signs of giving in to exhaustion. Cody glanced up from Dog in time to see Cullen drag his eyelids upward with a visible effort.

  "I think it's about time we turned in. You and Sara can take the tent."

  Cullen was too exhausted to arg
ue, and a few minutes later he was sleeping heavily, rolled in his sleeping bag. Sara lingered outside, watching Cody feed the fire 1 and clear a space for his sleeping bag.

  "Won't you be too cold? We could make room for all three of us in there."

  He stepped around the fire to stand beside her, cupping his palm around her cheek. "Without you sharing my bed, I'll be cold no matter where I sleep."

  She leaned against him, wrapping her arms around his waist. "I can hardly believe that he's really okay. If it wasn't for you—"

  "If it wasn't for a lot of things," he said, cutting her off. He didn't want her gratitude. His fingers slid to the nape of her neck, tilting her head back to receive a slow, arousing kiss. When he released her, Sara gave a breathless little laugh.

  "If you wanted to make sure I'd forget to say thank you, you almost succeeded." She raised up on her toes to brush a quick kiss across his mouth. "Thank you, Cody."

  She disappeared into the tent, but Cody didn't move for a long moment, staring after her with an arrested look in his eyes. He didn't want her gratitude. The only thing he wanted from her was... her love.

  He spun on his heel and strode over to his sleeping bag, but he couldn't walk away from the realization that he was in love with Sara Grant. Not the heady, reach-for-the-moon kind of love he'd known once or twice when he was a boy, but a deep, searing emotion that had sunk slowly into his heart and mind. He cursed under his breath as he tugged his boots off.

  Crawling into the sleeping bag fully dressed, he tried to shut out the thought. It was late. They had to make an early start tomorrow. It had been a very emotional few days. First finding the crash, and then trailing the boy. He was overly tired. That's all it was. He was just overly tired.

  He reached out and fed a few pieces of wood into the fire. Closing his eyes, he made a concentrated effort to fall asleep, but—as vividly as they'd ever been in his dreams—he saw Sara's eyes. A clear violet when she was happy, stormy gray when she was upset or aroused. He shifted restlessly, trying to shut out the image, but his mind refused to let go.

  He spent a restless night, waking periodically to feed the fire, his dreams haunted with images of Sara in all her moods. Not the kind of dreams that had drawn him into the mountains. Those had stopped with the finding of the crash site. These dreams reflected only the turmoil in his own mind. At some point, Dog moved to lie down along his side, stretching his bulk out on the edge of the sleeping bag. His presence seemed to offer not only a physical barrier against the cold but a buffer to the ragged circle of Cody's thoughts. Cody at last fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, waking two hours later as the sky lightened from black to purple to sullen gray.

  He rolled awake, his mood as gray as the storm clouds. He jammed his feet into his boots and coaxed the smoldering coals back to life. The temperature had dropped since the day before, and he was grateful for the sheepskin lining of his jacket. But nothing could warm the ice that was settling in around his heart. Falling in love with Sara Grant was quite possibly the stupidest thing he'd ever done.

  They were night and day. She lived in a city of millions and he lived miles from his nearest neighbor. She was all fragile strength and he was rough edges. Now that they'd found her nephew, they had absolutely nothing in common. When they got down out of the mountains, she would go back to Los Angeles and he would continue as he always had, taking care of the ranch and talking to the horses far more than he did to people.

  And once she was gone, he'd forget all about her. In a few weeks, she would be nothing but a half-remembered dream. The thought echoed hollowly but he refused to acknowledge that forgetting Sara Grant might not be that easy.

  ❧

  The trip down out of the Rockies was both easier and more difficult than the journey up had been. They knew exactly where they were going and they were able to take a more direct route from where they found Cullen than the one they'd had to use in reaching the wreck.

  Cody spent some time redistributing the packs to give Cullen a horse to ride and then they spent even more time rigging up a support for his injured leg. At first, Sara found herself hovering over her nephew, hardly able to believe that he was really there. After a while she adjusted to the reality of his presence and she began to notice other things.

  Like the fact that Cody seemed to be avoiding her. It was so subtle that at first she thought it might be her imagination. The withdrawal was more mental than physical. He didn't get up and move if she sat down next to him. He answered when she spoke, but given a choice he sat on the opposite side of the fire from her, and he never addressed her first if he could avoid it.

  It was just because they were no longer alone, she told herself two days after they had found Cullen. Things had changed but it wasn't clear just how they'd changed. Maybe he thought she wouldn't want Cullen to know they had been lovers. And she wasn't sure herself on that point. Cullen was fond of David, though the two of them had absolutely nothing in common except Sara herself. She didn't want Cullen to think that she'd thrown David over on a whim, but she wasn't ashamed of what had happened with Cody, either.

  But then, she supposed it really didn't matter that she was uncertain about how to handle the situation, because Cody had apparently made the decision for her. She almost doubted her own memory. Could this polite-but-distant stranger be the same man who had made love to her, teaching her things about herself she'd never known? He'd taught her not only passion, but also how to reach deep inside to find her own strength. He'd taught her that she could survive anything and come out on top.

  She glared at Cody's back, frustrated by the way her thoughts went around and around without ever settling on an answer. She couldn't come up with an answer on her own, and getting Cody to talk to her was about as simple as catching a greased pig.

  They could even have talked as they rode, but he used Cullen as a shield. If the trail was wide enough to ride three abreast, he placed Cullen in the middle, and if it narrowed down to where they had to ride two abreast, Cody either rode ahead and left her with her nephew or he and Cullen rode together. The problem was that he was much better at maneuvering than she was.

  Right now, he and Cullen were at the front of their small caravan. The lone packhorse trailed behind them, leaving Sara to bring up the rear. She huddled deeper into her heavy coat, glaring at the drifting pattern of snowflakes in front of her. It had been snowing since morning. The threatening storm had finally descended, not with a clap of thunder or bolts of lightning, but with a whisper of white flakes.

  The snowfall was deceptively gentle. From the looks of the clouds, it wasn't planning on stopping anytime soon, which meant it wouldn't be long before the paths out of the mountains became blocked with snow. She had seen the worry in Cody's eyes when the snow began to fall, but he hadn't said anything.

  In fact, he hadn't said anything to her in ages, but he seemed to have plenty to say to Cullen. Her lower lip thrust out in an unconscious pout as she stared at the two males. She was ashamed to admit it, but she couldn't deny a niggling feeling of jealousy. The rapport between the two of them had been so instantaneous and complete that it seemed to shut her out. She should be grateful that they liked each other. She was grateful.

  Stormwalker

  Cullen was a vital part of her life and it was important that he like Cody because Cody was... What? Was he going to be anything at all in her life once they returned to civilization?

  Sara's irritation might have been eased if she'd been able to hear the conversation between the two men.

  "I really appreciate what you've done for me." Cullen gritted his teeth as his leg was jostled by the rough trail. "I was beginning to wonder if I was going to make it."

  Cody glanced at him, noting the lines of pain beside the boy's mouth, but helpless to do anything about them. "I have a feeling you just might have made it without help. You're a lot like your aunt. Stubborn as a mule and you don't give up."

  "I see you've run into the core of steel that runs beneat
h Sara's fragile exterior."

  Cody smiled at the apt description. "That just about describes her."

  "She's had to be stubborn. When my parents died, she fought the state tooth and nail to get custody of me. They thought she was too young to take care of a twelve-year-old boy. I suppose she was too young. She gave up a lot."

  "I don't think she's ever regretted it." Cody leaned forward to brush snow off Dancer's neck.

  "No, I suppose she hasn't. She's got a strong sense of responsibility." Cullen reached up to brush the snow off the brim of his hat.

  All around them the world was white, deceptively beautiful. The autumn grass was covered with a fresh blanket of snow, still thin enough to be brushed aside to allow the horses to graze, but growing ever deeper, a promise of things to come.

  "She gave up her career for me."

  Cody turned to look at him, one brow rising in silent question. "I thought she was a model."

  "She is, but that's not what she started out to be. She was an art major in college and her professors thought she had a very bright future as a sculptress. She'd done a little hand modeling to pick up some extra cash, but she had to have a solid income before the state would give her permanent custody of me. She worked like a slave until she could show them some contracts and prove that she could make a good living as a model."

  "What about her art? Has she kept up with that?"

  Cullen shrugged. "Sculpting is hard on the hands. She wouldn't get very many jobs if her nails were short and she had calluses from the tools. I've tried to persuade her to pick it up again, but she won't. I think maybe it hurts too much to work at it part-time. Sara tends to be an all-or-nothing kind of person. She can't do things by half measures."

  "No, I don't suppose she can." Cody didn't have to turn to look at her to picture that stubborn chin. With shame he remembered the times he'd watched her soothe lotion into her hands and had chalked it up to vanity. He'd never really stopped to consider that her hands were her source of income, just as his horses were his.