Chapter Three
The absolute gall of this man.
Lettie stomped up the distance between the ground and her van, sliding the side panel door closed behind her. It didn’t have the effect she was going for, but hitting her shin on the removable wood square cube she used as a chair sure did. “Mother—!”
Twisting her back toward the driver’s seat, she nearly tripped over the ledge into the shower. Her van wasn’t big enough to throw a temper tantrum, but that sure as hell wasn’t going to stop her.
She’d imagined coming face-to-face with Rome so many times over the past six months, and not a single word she’d rehearsed had come out right.
The situation was all wrong, too. When had he started working for the National Park Service?
Why hadn’t he told her? Might have something to do with the stonewalling and silent treatment he’d implemented since leaving the divorce papers on the dining room table and effectively cutting himself free of her life, but he could’ve at least given her a heads-up.
Randy. This was his fault. She didn’t know how, but the fact Rome and Randy had grown up together in Montana was the most logical explanation.
Struggling to get her breathing under control, she listened to the low voices penetrating through the insulated van door and windows.
Even with inches of metal between them, she could pick out his voice.
Feel it working its way through her as quickly and easily as nighttime cough syrup.
He’d always been able to do that. It didn’t make sense.
There was no scientific proof or support that a voice could have that kind of effect on the human body other than the connection between infants and their mothers, and yet, her breathing had slowed the longer she listened to him recount his hunt for Sam to the rangers that’d responded to her emergency call.
“Get it together. You can do this. You’re a professional.
” She scrubbed one hand down her face and grabbed for the first aid kit under the kitchen sink.
The collision with her removable stool had cut deeper than she’d realized.
Blood trickled down into her now dirt-caked socks.
She’d gotten so caught up in getting to Sam, she hadn’t stopped to shove her feet into her boots.
She was better than that. She wasn’t reactionary.
She thought everything through before making a decision or acting on it.
That was who she was. Who she needed to be.
But having Rome here…
No. She wouldn’t make any mistakes. Sam couldn’t afford her to.
Cleaning up the newest corner-shaped dent in her shin—because it certainly wasn’t the first or the last—Lettie discarded the bloodied alcohol wipes and strapped a Band-Aid across the wound.
She really needed to find someplace else for that damn chair, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room left in the van, and it really was convenient to open up the side panel, drop the stool wherever she was and get to work on her laptop.
“It’s not your fault.” Okay. Was she really talking to a square piece of wood?
Not a great sign of mental health, but she had been out here in the middle of the park for six months now without much human interaction.
She was just mad. At Rome for showing up here unannounced, with a rifle slung over his shoulder and the determination to put down a bear Lettie had invested years into studying.
And at herself. For not being prepared to see him again.
Three knocks resounded through the van, each more punching than the one before it.
Rome. Who else would have the ability to irritate through a series of knocks but him?
Smoothing imaginary wrinkles from her T-shirt and jeans, she wiped the sudden flush of clamminess from her palms. Then wrenched the door open.
The van shuddered as the door hit the end of the track, and Rome’s eyes widened slightly at the setup inside.
Huh. She hadn’t thought he could be surprised from what he’d shared from his childhood, but there was a first time for everything.
“Did you need something, Ranger Foster?” Foster.
She used to have that name. She’d been damn proud of it, too.
Before everything had gone to hell. She couldn’t keep thinking about it.
She’d moved into the middle of the desert to avoid thinking about it and everything she’d lost at the sight of those papers.
Not just him. The house, their nights where they cooked together, their friends, the sex, the minutes they stole between her next work trip and him heading into another interview.
Gone. All of it was gone. And it wasn’t ever coming back.
Her grip on the van’s door handles tightened until she could practically feel her knuckles coming through the skin along the top of her hand.
It took a second too long for Rome to meet her gaze, and a burn of self-consciousness flared through her.
What did he see when he looked at her now?
Not his wife he’d abandoned. Not the scientist he’d never respected.
Not a friend or a colleague. Maybe a drifter living out of a van.
She didn’t care. She couldn’t make room for his expectations in her life right now. She had too many others to live up to.
Rome cleared his throat, low and gravelly. So similar to what he sounded like in the morning after waking. The effect rumbled through her, brushed against things that hadn’t gotten a whole lot of stimulation in the past six months. “I’m not a ranger, Dr. Foster. You can just call me Rome.”
“Larson.” Her insides recoiled from the flinch in his expression, but what was she supposed to do? Pretend she hadn’t gone back to her maiden name? “My last name. It’s Larson.”
Shifting his weight between both feet, he seemed to search for something—anything—that might distract him.
He’d stored his rifle into the slots of his backpack he’d specifically designed, leaving his hands to flex under the stress at his sides.
“Right. Makes sense. Bet your parents were happy about that.”
It was her turn to flinch. To look at something other than his stupidly handsome face to focus.
Because of course while she’d limited herself to showering every four days and getting her workouts in by hiking the surrounding cliffs, he still looked like…
that. With a head of dark hair, a few days of growth around his jaw and above his lip, and piercing brown eyes that always seemed to see more than she intended despite the dark sunglasses offering protection.
He’d kept in shape, maybe even had put of a few more pounds of muscle and leaned out around his waist. The tattoos down one forearm seemed darker, too, with a couple new ones toward his wrist, and her stomach flipped.
She’d loved tracing the artwork up his arm in the quiet moments their schedules lined up.
It’d felt like some kind of meditation they’d both needed when things got strained, and damn it, her fingers tingled with the need to give in now.
He looked good, as much as she hated to admit it, but attraction had never been their problem.
It was everything else that came after. Lettie crossed her arms over her front, leaning against the side of the van while the sun arched overhead.
“They don’t know I’ve changed my name. I haven’t…
told them about the divorce. I haven’t told anyone. ”
One second. Two. The pressure of his gaze from behind those sunglasses built behind her sternum. He didn’t seem to know what to make of that, shaking his head. “I guess that’s your prerogative. Um, I came over here because I found your bear’s GPS tracker.”
That made her stand straighter. “What do you mean, his tracker?”
Offering her the device rangers had installed on Sam three weeks ago, Rome waited for her to take it.
The five-sided Pentagon tag didn’t look like much, but it transmitted the same data as ear tags and collars previously used to track bears around the country to GPS satellites.
This one used the black bear’s hair to hold it in place instead of piercing the animal’s skin.
It was meant to be temporary. All they’d needed was to track Sam until someone could confirm he was responsible for the deaths of now four hikers in the park, but she hadn’t expected it to fall off this soon.
Lettie reached for the device she’d helped design to tag animals around the park without having to resort to ear tags or collars.
It didn’t look as though there was any damage, but she and her team had tested tag times up to fifty-eight days due to the rate Sam molted and shed his fur.
The tracker shouldn’t have fallen off so soon.
Unless it’d been torn off. “Where did you find this?”
“About fifty feet from the bloody pinata.” He pointed at the device. “This is what you’ve been working on, right? The tracker you spent so much time developing.”
“It’s a prototype.” Now? He was interested in her work now? Her stomach soured. She smoothed her thumb over the top of the tracker. No blood or scratches. It was still active. Her gaze snapped to the forested area where she’d found the hiker in the tree. “Do they… Have the rangers found an ID?”
“Not yet, but we haven’t been able to get to the remains.
We’re waiting on law enforcement rangers with all their gear.
” We. He made that single word sound so simple, including himself in the efforts to understand what’d happened.
It hit harder than she expected. She used to be included in a we.
We’re having dinner with the Allens this weekend.
We need to get Lysol wipes at the store.
One day we’ll make it to Cancún. But there were no more we’s.
At least, not ones that included her. “His pack was recovered a few feet east of the scene. It’s torn through.
Food and other personal items scattered everywhere. Four deep slashes across the canvas.”
She closed her eyes against the implications.
He’d already made his point clear. He believed Sam was responsible for these deaths, but Lettie couldn’t see it.
Not with as much as she knew about this specific black bear.
Sam liked berries—strawberries were his favorite—and salmon, insects, and yeah, sometimes garbage.
He liked to swim in the Virgin River when he thought nobody was looking and scratch the hell out of bark for fun.
He stomped his front paws when he got too close, but he’d never shown an inclination to attack a human.
Never her. And not unless something had threatened him.
This was bear country. Hikers were warned to store their food and garbage responsibly, going as far as to seal it in bags to keep bears from picking up on it in packs.
So had the hiker drawn Sam in accidentally?
Or something else? “I need to see the body.”
“Lettie, there is no body.” Her gaze snapped to his at the use of her nickname, and suddenly she was looking straight into his eyes.
The sunglasses were gone—brown with a little gold in one eye drawing her in all over again.
How many times had he looked at her like this?
Like nothing else in the world mattered except the conversation between them?
How many times had she taken that for granted?
Rome pointed back toward the scene as another vehicle kicked up dirt across the tree line.
Law enforcement officials had arrived with their body bags and forensic kits.
“There’s nothing left but a bunch of broken bone and goo. ”
Her attention cut to said goo stuck to his jacket. “Did you see the laceration across the hiker’s throat?”
Rome took a step back, the divots between his brows deeper than a moment ago, as though trying to mentally picture the victim’s face through the branches he’d been left to decompose on. He nodded, still unsure. “Yeah.”
“Then you noticed how clean it was. Straight across the throat. Thinner than the slashes in the backpack, right?” Lettie took a step down, putting herself on even ground, though he towered over her by a few inches.
Rome had never used that difference to intimidate her.
Distance was his style. “In all your hunting experience, did that laceration look like it came from an animal attack?”
Rome stared at her, then cut his attention over his shoulder. Toward where the law enforcement rangers were closing in on the remains with their heads craned back to get a look at the job ahead. “No.”
“Because it wasn’t.” She’d never been so sure of anything in her life. “That hiker, whoever he was, was murdered, and I think whoever killed him is using Sam to cover it up.”