Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,29

really know how to ski, and I had to get out of those … those tracks they have on ski trails and grab Dyma, and I …” She clutched her glass tighter. “It was pretty scary. One of the wolves was big and brown. It was huge. But the other one … It was white, and it seemed … in charge, somehow. It turned and looked at us. It looked at me. It started to cross the river toward us, and I was so scared. I told Dyma to back up, to get going, but I couldn’t do it myself. Bad skier, like I told you, and anyway … it was like I was frozen. It didn’t cross the river, though. It just stood there and looked at me. And I think … I don’t know how I could tell. But I think its eyes were blue.”

She shivered, a long, rolling shudder. He was getting fear. He was. But he was getting something else, too.

Fascination. The kind of pull when you knew it was dangerous, you knew it was wrong, and you wanted it anyway.

That kind of fascination didn’t necessarily end well. But how could you resist that ride?

He said, “So what did you do?”

“Once they went back to the elk, I did turn around. I told Dyma to ski fast, and I skied as fast as I could myself, even though I knew it wasn’t anything like as fast as a wolf can run. I told myself I’d fight if they came after me. That I’d hold them off as long as I could. At least it would distract them. That’s all I could think to do.” She tried to smile. “And I tried not to fall down.”

His chest hurt, and somehow, he was taking her hand. It turned in his, and he looked into those golden eyes, at all the honesty and all the emotion there. Like he could see into the heart that had held only had one thought: to hold those wolves off so her daughter could escape. He said, “It really did feel like you could have died.”

“It did, even though I don’t think wolves attack people. I mean, I’ve read that they don’t. But it felt … intense. Why did it look at me for so long, if it wasn’t thinking about attacking me?”

He frowned. “Wait. How long is that trail?”

“Uh … the guy at the ski shop said four miles one way? Four and a half? Something like that. But we didn’t get all the way up it.”

“Jennifer. It was nearly starting to get dark when we met you. And it had started to snow.”

“Oh.” She got still again. “You’re right. Well, that was … really stupid. The guy at the shop said we’d have plenty of time to get up there and back. He made it sound quick. I guess it depends how fast you ski.”

He was still holding her hand. She didn’t make a move to pull it away, so he kept hold of it. He said, “Maybe what you felt wasn’t the real danger at all. Maybe the wolf did you a favor, getting you to turn back.”

They’d have been alone out there otherwise, in the dark. Even if they’d had lights with them, skiing after dark here would be more than dangerous.

It wasn’t so much the animals, or even the geysers with their near-boiling water. It was the disorientation, the impossible burden of being outdoors, in an unfamiliar place, amidst swirling snow, darkness, and cold. He was from North Dakota. He knew about snowstorms, and he knew about cold.

They wouldn’t have come back from that.

“Boy, do I feel dumb,” she said, and now, she did pull her hand away. “I didn’t know how slowly we’d ski, and I’m from a different time zone. But that’s no excuse.”

She was looking upset, like she was imagining the same scenario he was. She and Dyma huddled in the snow in the freezing dark with no idea where the lodge was, Jennifer holding her daughter close, trying desperately to keep her warm, knowing that morning wouldn’t come soon enough.

He said, “You know that thing I was reading?”

“About the Indians?” He could practically see her yanking her mind away from disaster.

“Yeah. The Mountain Shoshone, who hunted bighorn sheep out here. They didn’t use horses. Too steep for horses. They figured out ways to trap the sheep instead up on those slopes. And maybe because they were agile over high ground, good athletes, and they