Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [128]
She killed the hotel room lights, but it wasn’t dark. A red glow from the neon hotel sign filtered through the drapes like the eerie night beauty of the Mink Creek. Thankfully, the blowup had stopped her and Deering from having sex. She couldn’t call what they’d been about to do making love.
In the half-light, she stripped off her boots, socks, and pants. Wearing only her T-shirt, she climbed onto the king bed and stretched out.
Dammit, she and Steve could be good together. Her breath caught as she remembered the urgency with which he had pulled her to him last night. How his lips had felt smooth against her chapped ones. He’d made her feel connected, something foreign now that she was used to making her own way.
She sensed her heart beating, not faster, but she could feel her pulse as though she was more aware of life flowing through her. Her hands rubbed the quilted, paisley-print bedspread, heating with the friction. Steve’s skin would be warm if she stroked her fingers over his back.
With a final adjustment, the tumblers fell into place inside her. The moment when she went from ‘what if’ to certainty that she wanted to make love with him. There would be time for second-guessing back in Houston if she was wrong about them, but what a lost opportunity if they never tried.
Clare spread her arms and legs and imagined that Steve’s weight pressed her as it had in the fire shelter when his eyes had sparked a message. She looked at the connecting door that led to his room.
Steve shed his denim shirt and boots and sat on the bed he’d hoped to entice Clare into. That wasn’t happening because it was always Deering, Deering, Deering. What a great pilot Deering was, she’d said. It was Steve’s fucking problem that he was afraid to fly.
He’d had time to go over that one a dozen times on the drive from Old Faithful. If Garrett hadn’t been there, he’d have told Clare how it pissed him off.
He should say to hell with her.
The urge for a real drink, not some sugary concoction, surged. What if he went down to the bar for a bottle?
He reached for one of his boots and started putting it back on. Clare would be gone soon, back to her real world while he continued his role of ‘the widower who needs a good woman’ in Mammoth.
Steve stopped, his hands at the laces. If he went downstairs, if he started drinking again, Shad Dugan would exile him.
Poised on the edge, he weighed the smoky glow of a good scotch against Mammoth beneath a clear winter sky. White drifts, piled as high as houses, casting blue shadows on the snow. Freezing air stung his nose and lungs while he made the short walk from the old stockade to the administration building. The bar on the door clanked as he pushed into warmth and found Moru Mzima pouring coffee and checking out the cherry pastries someone’s wife had baked.
He’d climb the worn stairs to his small corner office, awash in morning sun and cluttered with stacks he called his piling system. He always savored days devoted to research. Only in winter when park visitors were few could an interpretive ranger find that kind of luxury.
After a few days spent snowed in, the space between the walls always seemed to narrow. That was when he and Moru would head off on snowmobiles into the park interior. Jouncing over the washboard surface formed by the machines, they were warmed by insulated snowsuits, gloves, and helmets, even while traveling fifty miles per hour through subfreezing air.
On the return, he never failed to thrill at the way the world changed at the innocuous notch that edged the vast white expanse of Swan Lake Flat. In the narrow apex of Golden Gate Canyon, the road began a seemingly endless spiral, through the jumbled giant blocks of white travertine called the Hoodoos, sidehilling beside a sweeping vista at least thirty miles up Blacktail Deer Plateau. Winding past the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs and the old military cemetery, onto the parade ground and . . .
Home.
Clare had been the