“Never cry? No one knows what life is going to bring, Shannon. What emotions will build up inside and need release.”

She could have pointed out that her exact words were that she wasn’t going to cry alone, but she didn’t because he was right. Although she might wish with all her heart that life wouldn’t kick her in the gut again the way it had when Summer died and again when their marriage had ended, no one could look into the future. “What kinds of things build up inside you, Cord? Maybe I should know, but I don’t.”

“Nothing anyone else doesn’t experience.”

“I’m not so sure. I’d like to hear about it.” Instead of saying anything more, she simply continued to meet his gaze, challenging him to step away from what they’d begun with this conversation.

He started slowly. “I’ve worked with so many people, seen them go through so much. Sometimes it turns out right, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“When it doesn’t, who do you talk to about it?”

He didn’t answer her, but then, he didn’t have to. She knew he had no one. He’d had her for a brief while, and he had Matt; he needed more than that. She wished she’d allowed herself to acknowledge that before now, but there’d always been distance between them. “Cord, I was scared to death when I started my business. Sometimes I’m still scared. If I can tell you that, can’t you do the same?”

His body rocked slightly, away from her and then closer again. She heard a rustling in a tree to her left and guessed that there were birds in there. As before, she waited.

“Something happened to me last year,” he said. “Something that…”

“Something that what?”

“I was in northern Idaho teaching advanced life support to a group of paramedics when we got a call about a sports car that had run into a truck. There were kids in the car, two of them the daughters of the man who’d organized the class.”

“Oh, no.”

“I worked beside him for hours cutting those kids out, getting them stabilized and into helicopters to be air-lifted to the nearest trauma center. Doug couldn’t go with his daughters-I drove him the ninety miles.” Cord ran his fingers through his hair, grabbing still-damp chunks and holding on to them. “Doug told me about their births, his divorce from their mother, how he’d finally gotten custody of them. The whole time, we didn’t know whether the youngest one would live or whether his seventeen-year-old would keep her leg.”

Shannon’s heart went out to him.

“By the time we got there, both girls were out of danger. But they had to have surgery that night. It was just Doug and me until morning when his sister got there. The longest night of Doug’s life.”

And one of the longest of yours, too, she suspected. “I’m glad you were there for him, that he wasn’t alone.”

“So am I,” he said on the tail of a long, slow blink. “When it was over and we knew his daughters would come out of it in one piece, I left Doug with his sister, went outside, walked right past my car in the hospital parking lot, and kept on going.”

She held her breath, every piece of her being focused on Cord. “You walked…” she prompted when he simply stood with his eyes now locked on the horizon. Don’t stop now, please! she begged.

“For miles, hours. And I cried. Relief. Exhaustion. Everything that had boiled up inside me. Sometimes, Shannon, there’s nothing to do but cry.”

He had cried, this man who hadn’t shed a tear at their daughter’s death; at least, she hadn’t seen him give way to the grief that had consumed her. “It helps,” she whispered despite the hard, hot knot in her throat.

“Yeah. It does.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say after that. Yes, Cord’s career brought him in constant contact with life-and-death struggles. He’d seen more of what was raw and basic in the world than most people ever would, but he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t have some response to those struggles-a response she’d never truly considered before now. Why? Had he been that careful to keep his emotions from her, or hadn’t she known how to read the signs?

Too late, a voice inside her head mocked.


Afternoon.

Cord had known that the storm was dying long before the clouds began breaking up. Shannon had cheered when a weak, brief ray of sunlight touched her, but he couldn’t share her excitement.

He couldn’t sense his son’s presence.

True, the trail Matt and Pawnee had left behind was clear enough that he was in no danger of losing it, but the tracks told him that Matt had been walking with the determination of youth, while Cord was hampered by ground that sometimes briefly held secrets and made the search for answers tedious.

Matt would have to spend at least another night on the mountain. If he’d taken his son with him or given him the knowledge he’d already had at that age-

For maybe the fourth time today, Cord tried to shake himself free of the pounding inside his head. He knew how to be a bloodhound, how to walk and work and sacrifice and think of nothing except his goal.

But this was his son, and his son’s mother was with him and she, too, would have to endure another night of empty arms.

“Cord? Please, wait a minute.”

He straightened and slowly turned around. Because his attention had been focused on the faint road map of Matt’s journey left on the ground, it was several seconds before his eyes focused clearly on her. She stood some five feet away with the horses, which she’d been leading on either side of her. Splotches of color still highlighted her cheeks. Her eyes glistened from the effort of sorting through never – ending patterns of light and shadow-and maybe from unspent tears.

“I should be grateful.” She shook her head slightly as if she was aware of what her eyes had told him. “It doesn’t look as if it’s going to rain anymore. The birds have come out of hiding and I saw a butterfly a few minutes ago. If Matt stands in the open where the breeze can get to him, his clothes ought to dry. If the storm had gotten worse, well…”

“A storm’s nothing to fear.”

“Nothing to fear? Cord, you aren’t ten.”

“No, I’m not. Still, there’s beauty in rain and snow. The forest changes during a storm, becomes one with the wind. If you know to tuck the forest around you, let it absorb you, then a storm surrounds you but doesn’t frighten.”

Shannon ran the back of her hand impatiently over her forehead. “I don’t know who this ‘you’ you’re talking about is, but I didn’t come here to be surrounded by rain and wind and cold. I don’t want it for my son.”

She had an incredible presence. She might say she had no desire to be in the wilderness, but she belonged here. Jeans became her. A cotton blouse fit her as naturally as some women wore silk. And her body-her body with its long, lean limbs, competent hands and slender yet broad shoulders-was made for a life-style beyond walls.

Her breasts and hips and thighs were made for a man. For him.

Despite everything, he had never stopped wanting her.

“I’m trying to make it easier for you,” he said in an effort to place a smoke screen over what he was thinking and feeling. “Some children, especially those who’ve never been told that a storm is something to fear, see one the same way I do.”

“Children don’t like loud, sudden sounds-like thunder. Lightning frightens them. They don’t like being cold and wet and hungry and…and lost.”

She was right, of course. And as she stood up to him, he realized he had no more defenses against her than a leaf caught in the wind.

With an effort, he turned his attention back to the ground. “What you’re following now…” she said, “can you tell whether we’ve made any ground?”

“No.” He hated having to say this. “No. We haven’t.”

She drew in a quick breath and he barely stopped himself from reaching for her. “I’m sorry,” he started to say.

A sound, faint as a midnight whisper, pricked at him. He froze. He forgot where he was, what he’d been saying, even who was with him.

A rifle shot. Several miles away, and distorted by the rocks it was echoing off. So faint, most people wouldn’t hear it.

The sound was repeated.

For two, nearly three minutes, he remained with his senses open and receptive, but nothing else came to him. Finally, reluctantly, he brought himself back to where he was and ignored his heart’s erratic pounding.

“Did you hear something?”

Shannon hadn’t made any attempt to keep the combination of tension and anticipation out of her voice. Maybe she was beyond any pretense. He wanted to tell her about the shots; he didn’t want to carry this burden alone or have to find a way to battle cold fingers of dread alone. But someone with a rifle was on this mountain and, if possible, he wanted to spare her from knowing what she couldn’t do anything about.

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure?” When she leveled him a gaze, he wondered if he could keep anything from her.

“There are a million sounds out there, Shannon.” His throat didn’t want to work. “I can’t be sure of all of them.”

“I’ve never heard you say that before.”

Where did she keep those memories of him? “We don’t have much more time. It’s going to get dark-”

“Not for another four or five hours.”

“Five hours isn’t going to get us far enough.”

In the seconds that followed his words, he could hear her breathing. He didn’t need to probe into her to know what she was feeling and battling.

He knew because the same war was raging in his own soul.

This search was different from all the others. Love for a ten-year-old boy had gotten in the way of what he needed and wanted to do. He could fight the emotion, but it would only return, slamming into him just as memories of making love to Shannon did. Because he wasn’t up to the battle, he could only force himself to go on, to acknowledge why his heart felt so heavy.

He cared, truly cared for only two people in this world. He was trying to find one before that distant, deadly sound did. The other-

She looked so brave and determined and trapped.

Without moving, without having any control over what was happening, he reached out with his heart and absorbed her emotions.


“What the hell are you doing?”

“A deer! Didn’t you see-”

Chuck didn’t care what, if anything, Andrew might have been going to say. Cursing, he yanked the rifle out of his client’s hands and trained his binoculars in the direction Andrew had shot. Although he stared for several minutes, he didn’t see anything, but between the clouds and the sun trying to break out from behind them it was no wonder.

“We’ll have to go look,” he grumbled. “But I can guarantee you, you didn’t kill any damn deer.”

“How do you know?”

On the verge of telling Andrew that he couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn if he was standing inside it with the door closed, he hoisted Andrew’s rifle over his shoulder and started walking. Behind him, the three men chattered like drunken schoolchildren over whether Andrew had indeed made a kill and if he had, what the chances were that it was a trophy buck.

He wished they had. That way he could stop baby-sitting these overgrown morons and pick up some clients who understood that being caught hunting out of season would net him a lot more than a simple fine. He’d already been arrested twice, forfeited his hunting license, and been leveled fines that he’d had no intention of paying. Getting nailed again wasn’t what bothered him since bureaucrats were lousy at collecting, but the last thing he wanted was jail time.

Jail time?

He’d shoot all three of these jokers and leave their bodies for the buzzards before he let that happen-them and anyone else who tried to stand in his way.


“Something.”

Something. What in God’s name did that mean? When Shannon turned anguished eyes on him, Cord gave her a shuttered look, then leaned forward in the saddle, a deeply tanned hand on his horse’s neck. His eyes, now trained on their surroundings, grew even darker. His nostrils flared, and she almost thought she could hear him drawing in deep, revealing breaths.

What did he see, smell, hear that others couldn’t? Was it possible that the spirit that moves in all things spoke to him?

She prayed so.

When Cord moved, it was to slide off the mare and land, silently, on rain-soaked earth. He stepped away from the animal and in a matter of seconds disappeared into the dense forest. She tried to listen, but there were so many sounds that she couldn’t begin to sort them out. She thought of how quickly the woods had swallowed Cord and how wonderfully wild he’d looked with evergreens framing him.

Cord hadn’t told her to follow him and she knew better than to infringe on his space. She waited, not knowing enough, and yet trusting that eventually he’d come back and tell her what he’d learned. She’d accept whatever it was, just as she accepted this raw and unwanted physical need for the man who’d turned her from a girl into a woman.