Taming His Montana Heart(67)

Still holding onto Shaw’s back, she straightened and looked to her left and right, even behind her. Because he was keeping to a slow pace, she could make out the individual trees. Her understanding was that the bear’s den was on the side of a hill. Since they were on level ground and nearing a meadow it wasn’t realistic to expect to see where bear cubs and their mother spent the winter, but she could imagine.

She couldn’t say when whimsy shifted into awareness, just that one moment she was mentally picturing a pair of cubs wrestling with each other. The next she was looking at—

“Shaw!”

The snowmobile stopped. “I see him.”

The wolf was standing near a large downed evergreen not a hundred feet away. Watching them.

“What’s he doing here?” Shaw asked as he turned off the machine. The wilderness’s wind-whispers barely registered.

She nearly didn’t respond, nearly listened to the voice of reason that said this couldn’t be happening but was. “Maybe he’s been following us.”

“Staying in the trees, keeping pace with us.”

“Curious. Nosy.”

“Is that it?” Shaw directed his question at the motionless predator. “Or did you decide to do something that—got inside us somehow and unlocked…”

Shaw didn’t need to finish. They’d each revealed secrets, detailed their separate traumas, acknowledged flaws, exposed what they’d once believed would forever remain inside them.

Maybe the wolf was responsible and maybe he had nothing to do with what had happened in the cabin. It really didn’t matter. What did was that she and Shaw had trusted each other with the truth.

“I want to take a picture,” she said. “One that’s just for us.”

“You don’t want to show it to anyone?”

“No.”

“Good.”

The wolf hadn’t moved since they’d spotted it. As she drew her smartphone out of her snowsuit pocket and snapped several shots, she was tempted to thank the predator for being so accommodating. It was crazy to think she could get close enough to touch him, but she could imagine.

Still holding the phone, she mentally got off the snowmobile and started toward the wolf with Shaw beside her. The wolf’s ears swung forward as he waited for them.

Shaw’s hissed breath brought her back to reality. What she’d dismissed as part of the shadows around the downed tree separated itself from the shadows and joined their wolf.

A second predator. Smaller than the first.

A pair.

Just like her and Shaw.

The End