The Return of Cord Navarro

Chapter 9

Risking a call while Shannon was still asleep, Cord learned that the sheriff had spent much of the night trying to discover more about the whereabouts of the suspected poachers but so far had nothing to report. He hoped that would change once people, particularly forest service and ski resort personnel, were up and about. After getting his old friend to repeat his promise that he wouldn’t say anything to Shannon, Cord settled back on his sleeping bag and waited for his ex-wife to wake.

It didn’t take long, and he wondered whether she’d somehow sensed his scrutiny of her or if dreams of their son had gotten between her and her need for sleep.

“You’re up,” she said, no surprise in her voice. “I swear, you can get by on less sleep than anyone I’ve ever known. Either that or-nothing happened, did it?”

“No, nothing did. I’m sorry.”

She sat up and he realized that she’d worn a man’s undershirt to bed. For a moment, uncertainty and a jealousy he’d never admit surged through him; who had given her the white cotton? Then he remembered. They’d been married only a few months when she discovered how comfortable his shirts felt, especially when her growing belly made it impossible for her to wear many of her clothes and they didn’t have the money for a maternity wardrobe. Now, although he was out of her life, she still clung to a piece of the past.

After storing away that piece of information, he asked her how she’d slept. Her answer was noncommittal. She studied him for several seconds until he realized she was trying to decide whether to crawl out of her sleeping bag with him watching. Although he should have done the gentlemanly thing and turned away, he didn’t. Instead he made no secret of his interest in her. With a sigh, she threw back the bag and stood. Beneath the shirt, she wore only underpants, which peeked out from under the hem as she pushed herself to her feet. Her legs were as long, as finely muscled as he remembered them. Those muscles, the way she used them to play him, control him, pleasure him…

She returned his gaze, waiting until he’d taken his attention from her legs. Then, “When are we going to get going?”

“As soon as you’re ready,” he told her, his thoughts torn between memories of things better forgotten and the need, the drive, to run his hands along her legs.

“It’ll just take a few minutes. Cord, I don’t like you looking at me that way. It makes me feel…”

“You’re a beautiful woman.”

She blinked and for a second her mouth sagged. “I’m grungy and stiff, not beautiful.” When he didn’t say anything, she ran her fingers through her hair, a gesture that looked sensual, which he was sure was the last thing she’d intended. “What’s for breakfast?” she asked. “I could kill for some bacon and eggs.”

“When we’re done with this, I’ll make some for you.”

“Will you?” She sounded wistful and still off balance. “I’ll tell you what. You do the frying. I’ll tackle the waffles. Matt loves them-he always has.”

“I know. I made them for him when you were in the hospital after Summer’s birth. They were the only things he’d eat.”

“You did? I neglected Matt so much then. If you hadn’t been there-All I could think about was Summer, pray for a miracle.”

“Don’t,” he warned. “Leave her in the past. She doesn’t belong with us today.”

“Doesn’t she?” Shannon retorted. “Cord, you and I had two children. How can you act as if she never existed?”

Suddenly his anger matched hers and, not thinking, he reached into his rear pocket and pulled out the waterproof wallet that held his identification and a few pictures. Stalking over to her, he held one of the pictures out to her. “Maybe I didn’t carry her inside me the way you did, Shannon, but I held her in the hospital. I fell in love with her. She’ll always be part of me.”

Shaken, Shannon ran her fingertips over the faded picture of their infant daughter. She hated seeing the tubes and needles that had been connected to Summer for the five days of her life, but that wasn’t what kept her staring at the photograph. She had a picture her folks had taken of Summer, which she kept in her room; she’d never known about this one, or that Cord carried it with him. Memories of that time, of the deadly helplessness and despair in the face of overwhelming birth defects, hit her hard, but she fought them off.

“Did you take this?”

“Yes,” he said, and although she wasn’t ready, he closed his wallet and put it back in his pocket. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“But you did because I accused you of -” Of what? Of acting as if Summer never existed? Teeth clenched against emotions she didn’t understand, she stared up at her ex-husband. “Cord, I…”

“It’s all right if you cry.”

“Cry? I used to,” she whispered as his suggestion, his unbelievably gentle suggestion, rocked her. “So many things would set me off. But, Cord, I’ve learned that tears don’t change anything.”

“No. They don’t. Don’t talk about her. Not here. Not this way.”

“Don’t talk? That won’t stop me from thinking about her. Don’t you know that?”

He said nothing.

“When Summer died, I thought I’d died with her. I know the doctors told us before she was born that she wouldn’t live, but that didn’t stop-I couldn’t stop myself from loving her.”

I fell in love with her. She’ll always be part of me. Those words had come not from her but from her ex-husband. “You never shed a tear. I needed you to cry with me, but you didn’t.”

“Would that have changed anything?”

“I don’t know!”

“She’s in a better place now. With my grandfather.”

She didn’t feel strong enough for Cord’s words. Self-control might last no longer than a single breath. Still, held there by the reality of Summer’s picture, she was incapable of moving. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard Cord say what he had about their daughter. The day Summer died, he’d placed his hand on the incubator and mouthed words about the spirit world and Gray Cloud being there to show her the way.

When she and Cord had finished saying their goodbyes to Summer and walked out of the neonatal room, he’d put his arm around her and held her against his hard side. He’d said something, words that rumbled and jumbled, words she couldn’t hold on to. She remembered burying her face in his chest and crying until her head pounded and she thought she might die. Maybe he’d gone on talking. Maybe he’d fallen silent.

It didn’t matter. She hadn’t wanted to hear that Gray Cloud was caring for Summer when her own empty arms ached.

Cord should have known that.

Her husband’s arms should have been strong enough to hold back the world.

Instead, two days after the funeral, Cord had gotten a call from the state police in Nevada. He was needed to find an older man who’d wandered away from his fellow campers and was lost somewhere in the stark wilderness around Virginia City. If Cord didn’t get there as soon as possible, the man might not survive.

Damn him and his all-consuming career! He’d had that to give his life direction. That and his faith that Gray Cloud would take care of Summer.

What she had was the echo of his stiff goodbye and a nursery with no baby to fill it. How could she possibly study for tests that no longer mattered, be what Matt needed in the way of a mother, think of things to say to Cord when he called?

She hadn’t asked him to stay and mourn with her. If he didn’t understand that she needed him more than they did the money to pay off Summer’s medical bills-

Her bare foot hit a rock and she barely righted herself in time. Biting down on the inside of her mouth, she vowed to think of nothing except finding Matt. But Cord was only a few feet away, his back to her, giving her a view of the pocket where he kept his picture of Summer.

Until this morning she hadn’t known he’d taken one.

Maybe, if he’d told her about it and they’d stood together and studied their daughter’s features-maybe…

Cord could hear Shannon breathing. It was a whisper sound, a message he understood but didn’t know what to do with. It was possible she was now thinking about Matt and had to fight down her fears, but maybe her mind was still on what they’d said, or almost said, to each other a few minutes ago.

She’d said he should have cried with her when Summer died, making it sound like an accusation. Now he wished he’d been able to make her understand that, because of his grandfather’s wisdom and teachings, he’d found a peace that transcended grief.

But her grief frightened him, took him back to his sixteenth year. His tears had come the day Gray Cloud wrapped an ancestral doe skin over his frail shoulders and stepped out of the cabin they lived in. It was in Gray Cloud’s eyes; he was going away. Going home.

For a night and a day Cord had sat inside the cabin, tears staining his cheeks. Then, when he couldn’t cry anymore, he followed his grandfather’s tracks into the wilderness. The old man had died curled under the blanket that had been handed down through generations of Utes. He took the blanket because it was now his, buried his grandfather in that peaceful place, and cried again.

Now, suddenly, he stopped, body wire-tight, listening. It took him a moment to sort out what had caught his attention. A deer was hidden maybe thirty feet away. He signaled to let Shannon know. After a few more seconds he sensed the deer moving away, and went about getting ready for the day.

Summer lived here. He wondered if Shannon would ever know that, or why he’d given their daughter an Indian name. If the time had been right, if she’d ever indicated she wanted to hear this-if he’d known how to say the words-he’d have told her about where he’d gone the night after Summer died. He’d heard his daughter calling to him and left his sleeping wife, stepped into the night, and gone looking for her.

Because they’d come back here to be near Shannon’s parents for the birth, he’d wound up at a small, clear pool of water fed by spring runoff. It was near this spot that he’d buried Gray Cloud and where he’d spent the night telling his daughter how much he loved her and that her great-grandfather would always been there to take care of her.

When he’d taken Summer’s picture in the hard – smelling, too bright hospital, he’d wanted to explode from unspent tears.

Beside the pool, watched by an owl, talking to two people he loved, he’d lost his grief and found serenity.

But he hadn’t been able to guide Shannon to his peace and now they were trapped together in the wilderness with nothing in common except the boy who’d been over this ground yesterday but could be anywhere now.

He needed to find Matt, for himself, and for Shannon.

Because Matt had come across a deer trail and was following it, Cord and Shannon were able to make easy progress. Still, about an hour after they left camp, Cord called a halt because he wanted to see how well her pack fit. She turned her back to him and stood passively while he adjusted the shoulder straps. He would have believed she felt nothing, cared nothing for his touch, except that her fingers were tightly clenched.

Lightly clamping his hands over her shoulders, he turned her toward him. “It’s going to be a long time before we overtake him,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

“I do know. And it doesn’t matter.”

Although he should get started again, he continued to face her. She stood slightly below him on the hill with the sky draped around her, looking smaller than she usually did. She’d run a brush through her hair before rebraiding it and washed up as best she could, her simple chores reminding him of the femininity that simmered-waited-beneath her practical clothes.

“What’s going on inside you?” she asked abruptly. “What do you feel? What do you think about when you’re trying to find a sign, any sign, that Matt came this way?”

“I don’t feel, Shannon.” It was a lie, but a necessary one. If he opened so much as a crack to his emotions this morning, she might step boldly inside-might expose herself to too much.

“I feel sorry for you. Sorry and…I don’t know. Damn it, I don’t know!”

“I don’t know what more you want me to say.”

“I’m sure you don’t. I think, finally, I understand that. It’s just-maybe I still want different what can’t be different. I wish to God I didn’t. It would be easier for me, maybe easier for both of us.”

“What do you want changed?”

She stared at him as if she had never expected to hear that question from him. Answering her gaze, he looked as deeply into her as he could, but he couldn’t reach far enough. If he’d ever once touched her heart, it had been a lifetime ago.

“For us to be able to go back again, to be wiser, honest,” she whispered. “Oh, Cord. It should all be behind us, shouldn’t it? Okay, I guess I’ll always regret that you and I…when we should have clung to each other, shared as we’d never shared before – it didn’t happen.”

No. It hadn’t. Summer’s death had changed something inside Shannon and he’d never truly understood what that was. She’d pulled away from him, buried herself. He’d had no idea how to reach her. “You never gave us a chance.”

She blinked, looked off balance. Wounded. “/ never-You had no idea I might not be there when you came home that last time? That I couldn’t stand mourning our daughter alone, that I needed you…”

He couldn’t let the conversation continue. Matt was waiting for them to find him. And if Shannon went on, she’d only open wounds she’d spent years healing. He didn’t want her hurt any more than she already was. “You know why I had to be gone.”

“Oh, yes. Yes. We were drowning under medical bills and that had both of us scared. But, Cord, there’s another kind of drowning-of the soul. Of love.” She dragged her hands along her temple and grabbed twin handfuls of hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just so raw right now that-”

Although he simply nodded and returned to tracking, he was left with the realization that nothing about their conversation felt complete. The few times she’d spoken to him after that horrible day when he’d walked into an empty apartment stripped of her essence, she’d said only that his silence had been more than she could stand.

Nearly seven years ago they’d gone their separate ways. Neither of them needed any more pain.

But it hadn’t all been pain. She’d once been more important to him than life itself. Around her he’d felt whole. Vulnerable and incapable of telling her how much she meant to him, but whole. All she’d had to do was stand in front of him and hold out her arms to him and he would have died for her.

She’d once owned him heart and soul. Didn’t she know that?

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through mouth and nostrils to clear his head of the cobwebs she’d always been able to spin inside him. Matt. Today was about Matt.

Still, because he was tracking with his eyes and not his ears, he didn’t need the silence she said she hated. After a few minutes, he drew her attention to a tree trunk that deer used to rub their antlers against, pointed out some black bear sign, and even showed her the entrance to a fox den nestled under a moss-covered boulder.

“How do you know where to look for a newborn fox or where a deer has bedded down?”

“Time and experience. My grandfather. John Muir.”

“The naturalist? What are you talking about?”

“He and Gray Cloud spoke the same language. I learned from both of them.”

Shannon didn’t speak, but he easily absorbed the questioning in her eyes. Looking out across an endless carpet of green, he sought inside himself for an answer. “Muir believed that everything in nature fits into us, becomes part of us.”

“You-”

“Not me. There’s more to Muir’s philosophy than that-about rivers flowing, not past, but through us, vibrating every fiber and cell of our bodies, making them glide and sing. Those aren’t the exact words, but it expresses the way I feel when I’m here. Part of nature.”

“Part of nature.” She breathed the words. “I never knew you had that kind of poetry in you.”

Made a little uneasy by what he’d revealed about himself, he gave her a casual-too casual-smile, “I try to hold on to what Gray Cloud told me because I believe there’s a timelessness to his wisdom.”

“Yes, there is. I’ve never thought about that before.”

“Not just him. I’ve found other sources, Indian prayers-Rachel Carson, William Wordsworth, George Washington Carver. Carver said that if you love something enough, it will talk with you. I love being out there where I can hear nature talking. I can’t imagine that ever changing.”

“That’s-” Her eyes glistened. “Beautiful.”

Without knowing he was going to do it, he touched a tear caught in her right lashes. She smiled, a slight, shy gesture. “Anyone can become tuned in with nature,” he went on, the words tumbling out of him simply because she’d smiled at him through tears he was responsible for. “All they have to do is listen and observe and love that world. You live out of doors. You must know what I’m talking about.” “I…think so. I don’t have the words you do to draw on, but they touch me.” She blinked away her tears and tried another smile. “Obviously they do.”

Although he turned to gaze at his green and brown and blue world, he sensed her eyes still on him.

“I don’t think you would have done that at eighteen,” she whispered. “Told anyone, not even me, about the poetry that has meaning for you.”

“No,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have.”

“Maybe it’s because you were still finding out who you are. I say that because I felt the same way. Growing up takes longer than we think it’s going to, doesn’t it? Eighteen isn’t nearly as mature as we’d like it to be.”

“No. It isn’t.”

After a few minutes of silence, she began talking about caring for orphan rabbits and a fawn whose mother had been hit by a car. Then, when he thought she might have run out of anything to say, she told him she’d seen so many deer this year that she barely paid any attention to them. But she could never dismiss the sight of an elk. Matt, too, had a fixation about them and when one occasionally came into the pasture with the horses, he considered his day complete.

Then, when the trail they were. on briefly became as clear as a highway, she admitted she wanted to buy a mountain bike so she could find and explore paths like this. She said she enjoyed most of her customers. A few had unrealistic expectations of what horseback riding on a well-worn trail was like and she’d had to learn how to deal with her customers’ reactions.

His attention spread between her and Matt’s erratic progress, he told her about competition between different law enforcement agencies and how that sometimes complicated his work.

He described the untouched view of natural forest land from his deck. She smiled, a little wistfully, he thought, then asked if he’d ever gotten the wide-angle lens for his camera he’d been talking about. He had, he said, surprised that she’d remembered.

As the day dragged on, he learned more about Shannon’s interests than he’d ever known and felt gifted because she wanted him to understand those things about her. Listening to her talk about her admiration of a local wildlife photographer, he was again struck by her enthusiasm for life.

That was what he’d fallen in love with-that and the way she’d freely given him her body and, he’d thought, her heart. What had scared him back when he was too young to truly understand the complexity of love had been the totality of his response to her body. Even with her walking behind him, out of sight much of the time, his body remembered.

Getting his work off the ground had put a great deal of strain on their marriage, but it had been nothing compared to the aftereffects of Summer’s death. Was it possible to mend what they’d once had? Maybe he-they-shouldn’t try. After all, they’d each built new lives for themselves. However, life had brought them back together, at least briefly.

He was halfway through telling her about his reaction to spotting a massive grizzly while being flown into Denali Park in Alaska by a ground-scraping bush pilot when he spotted a series of unexpected prints. Because he’d stopped to study his surroundings innumerable times, he didn’t think she would be alarmed when he did it again. Still, he was glad she couldn’t see inside his head.

Three or four people-men, probably, by the size of the prints-had been here in the past couple of days. The rain had washed away some of their tracks but not enough that he couldn’t draw out the information he needed but didn’t want. Their boots were new; they carried considerable weight on their backs, which altered their stance; they walked not like people out for a leisurely stroll, but cautiously and with purpose in mind.

Hunters?

The men followed the deer trail for another fifty yards before veering away from it. Although he continued to look for them, the prints didn’t reappear. Hadn’t they known what they’d come upon? he wondered. He wanted to go back to where he’d last seen the tracks, but if he did, Shannon would ask why he’d left the trail, and he’d have to tell her he was being forced to ask himself whether it was more important to find Matt or men with rifles.

Matt, his heart decided for him. Besides, the men had been here before his son. They might be miles away by now and no longer representing a danger to Matt.

Maybe.

And if they were, all the police in the world couldn’t do any more than he was. But was it enough?

“There.”

Shannon had waited hours to hear Cord say that. Now it was nearly dark; there was precious little strength left in her legs, and the thin air at this altitude had given her a headache. She stood near Cord and watched him spread his fingers over what looked to her like nothing except a thousand years of forest litter. “What? What is it?”

“Where he spent last night.”

Last night seemed so incredibly long ago. Hadn’t they gotten any closer than that? “That’s all you know? That he slept here?”

“He slept well. He barely moved.”

“Oh. Thank heavens.” She sank to her knees beside Cord and, as she’d done before, touched the ground he indicated. No matter that she was deluding herself. For a few seconds at least, she could pretend Matt had left some of his heat behind for her. What had Cord said earlier? That if someone loved something enough, it would speak to that person without words. He’d been referring to nature; she thought of Matt. And of Cord. “He seems so far away.”

“I know.”

Despite everything that was going on inside her, her thoughts caught on the emotion laced through Cord’s words. They shared a parent’s love for a child, and that love would bond them for as long as they lived. Why had she not allowed herself to see that earlier? “I feel cheated,” she admitted. “There ought to be a string attached to him. I should be able to pull on it and bring him back to me.”

“I know.”

“That’s how you feel? As if he’s just out of reach?”

“More than just. Damn it, much more.”

“Cord? Don’t, please.”

“Don’t what?”

“Talk like that. It scares me.”

“What do you want, then?” He spoke with his hands on his thighs and his head turned toward her, but his face was in the shadows, making it impossible for her to read his emotions. She would have to go by what he said, and that wasn’t enough; his few words had never been enough. “I can’t tell you I’m not frustrated. You have to know that.”

He sounded much more than just frustrated. He’d told her that everything in nature could fit inside the human heart, but right now he didn’t sound at peace with either himself or the world they were in. Was it because he’d piled the long, disappointing day on his shoulders and didn’t know how to shake it off?

Or maybe he knew more than he’d told her.

Concerned now more for him than for herself, she took his hand and pressed it to her waist. She was dimly aware of how unwise the gesture was, but she could no more stop herself than she could tell her lungs to cease breathing. This man was the other half of her son’s existence.

Still a vital part of her life.

“I do know how frustrating this is,” she told him gently. “But, Cord, you found his trail and where he spent last night.”

“Yes.”

“Then think about that, not what you still have to do.”

“I can’t help it.”

No one had ever heard that raw and uncensored tone from him. She was certain of it. She accepted his honesty both as a gift for her alone and as proof of how much this search had taken out of him. “Tell me what you’re thinking now. Please.”

He tensed and then released the tension in a long, deep sigh. She felt the hand she held move and accepted it when he laced his fingers through hers. The sun was nearly done with its work for the day and the moon hadn’t come out yet. She thought of their son having to look up at the sky alone, with the universe surrounding him, and then tore her mind free. She couldn’t help Matt tonight, couldn’t do anything more than send him a silent message of love. His father was here and maybe Cord needed her as much as she needed him. Had he ever before? Had she ever asked herself the question? “I have to know what’s going on inside you,” she begged. “I know I keep asking you for that, but, please…”

For a long time he simply stared at her in the deepening gloom. Then he turned his attention to their intertwined fingers. He lifted her hand toward him and touched his mouth to her knuckles.

“You really want to know what I’m thinking?”

“Yes.” She kept her eyes off their hands, breathed, tried to think. He kissed me. And the night-the night was for them alone. “Yes, I do. Cord, I know so much about your silences, I’ve tried to reach beyond them. Please, no more, not tonight.”

For the second time in a matter of seconds, he kissed her wind-chapped knuckle. A jolt filled with equal sparks of ice and heat raced through her. She breathed again; it didn’t help.

“You saw my silence as a barrier?” he asked.

Incapable of speech, she nodded.

“I wish you’d told me before,” he said.

“I wish I’d known how to, gently, without carving a wedge between us. Cord, please.”

His mouth worked; she all but tasted his effort. “I’m comfortable not saying much,” he told her. “It’s what I grew up with, what I was taught.” Still holding on to her, he shifted position until he was sitting cross-legged, so close that their knees touched. “You know that.”

“Yes, I do. But, Cord, so many times I didn’t know what to do with your silence. I needed you to talk to me. I still need that. Try-that’s all I’m asking.”

He began by telling her about the first time he saw his grandfather. He’d been six or seven, living hand to mouth with his mother, when they went to visit this strange old man who lived all by himself in a cabin without electricity or running water.

“I could hardly wait to leave,” he admitted. “He kept looking at me without so much as acknowledging my presence. I barely understood anything he said. Later, my mother told me Gray Cloud spent so much time by himself that he didn’t know how to carry on a conversation. She understood him, at least a little, because he’d passed in and out of her childhood, but she had to work at it. And she told me that sometimes she didn’t like what he said.”

“What did he say?”

Cord released her hand, shrugged off his backpack and helped her out of hers. Only when he was done and they were back to sitting with their knees touching did he go on.

“I think he was critical of the way she lived,” he said. “Because she wasn’t interested in the old ways.”

“A generation gap.”

“That and other things. He and my grandmother were divorced when my mother was very young. I don’t know what went wrong between them-he never said.”

“No. I imagine he didn’t.”

“I’m sure my grandmother’s family didn’t want him around. It hurt him deeply not to be in touch with his child-maybe that’s why he had so little to do with people. I don’t think he knew what to do with his grown daughter. I remember the criticism in her voice when she told me he didn’t understand that the world was changing and she couldn’t live in a hut and spend most of her time in the wilderness.”

“But you did. And it worked for you.” Her body belonged to her again, but she didn’t trust it to remain that way. She wanted their time together to go on forever.

“Yes, it did. Once, not long before Gray Cloud died, I asked him why he took me in after my dad split and my mom died. He said it was in my eyes-that mine were the same as his.”

“Yes, I think they were.”

“Do you? I don’t know whether he had legal custody of me-I don’t think that kind of thing concerned him. He said I had to go to school because that’s what every other child was doing, but he had little use for the institution. He never once let anyone tell him how I should be raised. People, like principals and social workers, tried-he ignored them. He never told me why he’d changed his life for me, shared it with me-just that there was something in my eyes.”

She became aware of the way her heart was beating. It seemed to work in fits and starts, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, always making its presence known. Hurting and yet singing at the same time. She’d gone beyond tears simply because Cord had said more to her tonight than he ever had before. “He never told you he loved you, did he?”

“No.”

Cord’s simple word seemed to echo in the now-solid night. Mindless of the danger, she took his hand and once again held it to her middle. She felt him looking at her. What did it matter? She no longer cared that she’d begun to strip herself naked to him. “It hurt, didn’t it?”

“Hurt?”

“Surely you wanted to hear words of affection from him. You had a right, the right of every child.”

“I knew. It was in the way he treated me, the things he taught me. What we shared.”

Tonight it sounded precious. “What did you share?”

“Things. So many things. Listening together. Sitting in the mountains, melting into them, watching nature go about its life. We did that together.”

Shivering, she fought for words. “But a child needs to hear certain words from the people in his life. You tell Matt you love him. You know what he needs.”

“I learned from you.”

She went hot; ice touched fire again. Tears raged inside her but she fought them.

He leaned forward slightly and increased the pressure of knee against knee. “It came so naturally to you. Nursing Matt. Holding and rocking him in that comfortable old rocking chair you bought. Singing to him. Showing him that it was wonderful to smile. I’d watch the two of you, the way he studied your face as if it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. Then he’d smile and you’d show him how to make it bigger.”

She shivered, fought a sob. “What about love, Cord?” Silent? Cord Navarro? Not tonight, not for these few precious seconds. “What did I do that guided you?”

He hesitated, as if leery of entrusting her with too much of himself, but she held on with hand and heat and heart, desperate to keep the suddenly precious channel between them open.

“What you said to him. And to me. Actions as much as words.” He took a deep breath and she could tell that he was looking around at his surroundings. Then he stared at her again and she was glad it was only the two of them.

“There was no way you could stop yourself from expressing what was in your heart,” he said. “That love boiled up inside you and spilled over to engulf Matt. And, for a while, me.”

A sob again slashed through her. She fought it, only barely aware of her fingers boring into his flesh. “Cord?” The word came out a whimper. When she tried again, it sounded the same. “Cord? Why didn’t you say this to me before?”

She felt his forefinger rubbing against the back of her hand, a strong, yet gentle gesture. “Maybe what I felt was caught too deep.”

Someone else might have laughed at his hesitant explanation, but she understood. It went back to Gray Cloud and before that a mother overwhelmed by the responsibility of a child. In her mind and heart she saw the little boy he once was, a boy desperate for love and clinging as best he could to what was given him. Or maybe he’d been born self-contained, self-confident. It didn’t matter, did it? “Why is it different tonight?”

By way of answer, he looked upward. The moon had just begun its journey over the tips of the shadow trees. The cool, distant source of light was a little more than half full with a gentle rounding on one side that gave promise of more to come. It struck her that Cord was like that, much more than a thin sliver of emotion but not yet having reached what he was – she hoped-capable of.

“It still isn’t easy for you, is it?” she whispered. “Talking about emotions.”

He grunted.

“Cord, nature speaks to you. Shares its secrets with you. Sharing with another human being isn’t any different, not deep down. I’m trying to be that person, at least for now, listening in ways I didn’t…wasn’t capable of before.”

He was fighting within himself, at war with something she could only guess at. She wondered if he understood how much she wanted to give him of herself, now. Finally. For long, hungry minutes she waited for him to give her another glimpse of himself so she could do the same in turn and damn the consequences.

Instead, “He should have enough food. Kevin said-”

“Kevin? We’re talking about you, not Kevin.”

“We’re here because of Matt.”

His words, his undeniable words, stripped her of anger as quickly as the emotion had assaulted her. “I know,” she said. “Oh, God, I know.” The sounds eddied and she didn’t bother repeating herself. No longer caring-or maybe caring too much, about everything-she reached out as if to grab her pack with its food supply.

He stopped her. Filled with the strength that had brought him here, he gripped her arms and pulled her close. She should have been prepared for her body’s reaction. Hadn’t she felt the contrast of heat and cold twice already tonight and known of the danger? But when he touched her, she became nothing and everything just the way she had all those years ago when she blindly, naively loved him so much she didn’t know if she could stand it.

“We can’t fight,” he whispered. “We don’t dare.”

She knew that, but with the sound of his heart pulsing through her and his capable hands holding her so near, she was aware of precious little except him.

I need you. Senseless, insane, I need you. She tried to pull away. He wouldn’t let her. She ended the battle she hadn’t wanted. “Cord?”

“Shannon? Please, I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Is it my fault?”

“Your fault?”

“That Matt’s out here? Never mind. I don’t have to ask. I’m the one responsible for his wanting to prove himself and not having the necessary skills to accomplish that. What I need to know is, how do you feel about it?”

She struggled to make sense of his words. He’d opened himself up to her and was asking for honesty in return. She wanted to give him that and erase a little of the distances that separated them.

But another distance, or rather the lack of one, had made its impact.

He felt far warmer than any summer night she’d ever known. Cooler than the moon that had briefly vied for her attention. There he sat with his incomplete and yet incredibly honest words, his life-hardened body, his mouth so close that its very nearness robbed her of a certain will and made her desperately hungry. She hadn’t exorcised him from her body after all, had she? What had made her think that possible?

He sat there looking as if he didn’t quite believe he’d taken hold of her, his eyes saying he was ready for her to resist him. But night sounds and sights and smells had begun to sweep over her and claim her for their own.

Most of all, there was him.

She leaned into him, asking with her body, shutting off her mind, accepting the truth about herself. He answered by standing and pulling her against him until they were pressed together chest to hips. So long-how long had she wanted this?

He hadn’t moved and his body continued to call to her and there wasn’t a half inch of her that didn’t know what that call of his felt like. She had only one answer in her.

She felt the stretch in her neck as she rose to meet his mouth. He covered her lips with his, a simple, complex, life-giving kiss that raced through her until the message in their embrace touched her heart. She was instantly flooded with memories-memories of that other lifetime when youth and wonder and love and physical hunger had her in their grip.

He’d met her with barely parted lips, but that soon changed. She felt his mouth open, slowly, tantalizingly. To give herself strength, she clamped her arms around his neck and waited. On fire, she waited.

He gave her access. Still mindless, she touched her tongue to his teeth and asked entrance. Something cool lapped at the back of her neck, but she ignored the unexpected breeze. For the past hour, her feet had been aching. Now the warmth boiling from deep inside her laced a slow trail down her legs until even her toes felt the impact.

Trusting that he wouldn’t leave her, she released his neck and slowly ran her fingers into his thick, coarse hair. In silent response, he pressed his palms into the small of her back. He’d done that a thousand times in the distant past when just looking at each other had stripped away the world. She arched herself toward him, stopping only when his hard body gave no more.

Sealed together.

Could she remember what he needed most in a kiss? She tried to put her mind to the massive question but it snaked out of reach.

His exploring tongue slowly worked its way into her. She closed her teeth gently around him and gave herself up to the magic of the other ways she’d once surrounded him.

Lovemaking. The promise was within her grasp-a teasing, testing memory that felt like hot coals applied to the heat already pulsing through her.

He’d once known her body, explored it as he explored his beloved wilderness. Maybe cherished both in the same way.

But that was yesterday. Years ago. Tonight his fingers and hands and tongue and lips felt totally new. Surely he’d never filled her so full of life before. She would have remembered that.

She would have learned how to control her reaction.

But those lessons, if they’d once been hers, rushed away like butterflies caught in the wind.

She felt fingers along the side of her neck. She leaned into him, thinking to surround him, but went weak instead.

With her hands still in his hair and her palms resting over the pulsing veins at his temple, she covered his mouth and chin and cheeks with hummingbird kisses. Her body, needing more, fought her, but she refused to listen to its cry.

“Shannon?”

Her name on his lips. She touched her tongue there as if doing so could draw the sound deep inside her. She wanted to be able to say something that might reach him in the same way, but years of silence and distance stood between them, and she didn’t know how to begin to bridge that. What she could do was let him know how she felt about him at this moment-gentle and tentative and frightened and eager, wondering if there was a journey to begin, asking him to help with the decision.

He didn’t speak again. His hands inched lower until he’d cupped them around her buttocks and pulled her against him. He was ready to capture her, hard and alive and urgent.

She fought her own urgency, her mind nearly screaming in its need for that precious first step.

First step? A mountain to climb? Maybe. A bottomless ravine? Maybe.

With an awful wrench, she resisted him. At the same time, fighting herself, she continued her whispering kisses. She prayed he understood how dangerous what they were doing was and how it might explode at any moment. She should be able to tell him, to get him to go at the pace she was trying to set so they wouldn’t lose it all.

But they’d lost so many years, so much love. Maybe they should remain buried behind those years. If not, if there was something to their time together, the journey needed to be taken slowly.

Didn’t it?

Why couldn’t she think?

He pushed her away from him until she could no longer cover him with her questioning kisses. She felt his eyes dig into her, felt his own battle.

Understood, suddenly, the true meaning of danger.

“We can’t-it isn’t-” she began.

“You don’t want…”

No. Not that. Surely not that. “Cord? What we’re doing, it’s-we’re insane. We know better. We should.”

“And you don’t want it.”

If he’d asked a question she could have told him how wrong he was, but he’d misinterpreted and she suddenly felt too exhausted to try to explain. Wondering how long it would take her body to release his memory, she twisted away from him until a full foot of night air separated them.

“You’re wrong,” she whispered. “I want. Oh, how I want.”