Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [108]
Their mouths met and melded. A great relief went through her and she let out the breath she’d been holding. They felt good together, a scary thing in the midst of the maelstrom surrounding them.
Her focus shifted from her own response to his. Running her palm up the back of his neck, she slid it into his hair. He gave a sharp gasp and she moved to press her lips to the hollow at the base of his throat. Until this moment, she’d been competing with a memory. Now she was the one in his arms.
She laughed in soft victory, flushed with the power to give him pleasure. This wasn’t a thing like the amorphous hunger that had seized her with Deering. This made her feel both exhilarated and secure, despite her conflict with her daughter.
Steve deepened their kiss and his hands became more urgent. She wanted this with him, because of the chords of need he touched in her.
In the same moment that she realized Devon could come back at any time, Steve pulled back gently. “I hate to say this,” he said in a voice thick with regret, “but after what happened with Devon, you don’t want her to find me here tonight. Especially, since I can’t trust myself to keep hands off.”
He was right, much as she hated it. There was no doubt that if he stayed they were going to end up on one of the beds in a most compromising position.
“There’s more,” he went on. “I just crashed a meeting at the Visitor Center where they’re considering an evacuation.”
“Oh, God. What if Devon doesn’t come back?” Clare almost hoped she had hooked up with some guy who’d feed her and drive her away from here, rather than have her wandering cold and alone in the dark. Her backpack lay abandoned on the bed, so she had no money or ID.
“There’s nothing we can do tonight,” Steve said. “I’ll sleep in my truck and check back in the morning. If she doesn’t show by then we’ll put out a missing persons report through the Park Service.”
She stood at the cabin door and hugged herself while he walked away. A car passed, its headlights illuminating his back as he headed purposefully up the narrow lane between the cabins.
In case Devon came, Clare left the door unlocked. For hours, she strained to hear approaching footsteps or the creak of the latch. Outside, the wind rose to a moan.
Devon was out there somewhere while the octopus continued to spread its arms through the night. Punching her pillow, Clare tried to tell herself that she could take the front line against the beast, though Billy Jakes’s death made her want to give up the fight.
A branch scratched the cabin window like fingernails on a chalkboard.
With a sigh, Clare turned on the light, found her great-grandmother’s journal, and opened it at random. The entry was dated after the flood in 1927, but Laura was recounting a story about fleeing a forest fire that burned in Yellowstone around the turn of the century.
That steep west slope on Nez Perce Peak must be unchanged by years, still the Devil’s own playground of sharp and treacherous boulders that shifted beneath our feet. In the suffocating dark, I thought that each step might be my last before falling away in a slide of serrate lava rock.
Even Cord’s arms failed to warm me through our night on the rock face. Sleep eluded and the pungent smell of burning wood came to us on the wind.
In the morning, we achieved the ridge top. Our place was marked by an ancient, twisted pine, reaching gnarled limbs into the smoky morning sky. The tree seemed to grow from a cairn of boulders that men might have made. I wonder now if perhaps the Nez Perce piled the stones about the old tree’s base as some kind of sign.
The sight that greeted us on the east side of the divide was astounding. Like the raging heart of a furnace, fire swept toward us through the tops of the trees, leaping from one to the next in the space of a single heartbeat.