Chapter 10 #2
Reason had started to creep back in during that cold moment. He was the first guy to show interest since Earl, and she was still fending off the PTSD, and Wolf was in no frame of mind to be getting involved with anybody.
He was holding the tent flap for her and looking at her with kindness in his eyes. Kindness. Shoot, he was also hearing the voice of reason.
She ducked inside the tent, suddenly feeling the chilly night more than before. Kneeling beside their pile of things, she took out the rechargeable space heater, inserted the battery she’d forget she’d brought along, and turned it on. The thing would run twelve hours on a full charge.
She shed her coat and turned around because Wolf had come inside.
His back was to her as he zipped the tent flap closed, moving way slower than seemed warranted.
She wasn’t ready for common sense to take over between them.
Not now, not yet. In the morning, maybe.
So she peeled off her clothes and stood there naked when he turned around.
Brave feat accomplished! But standing there was cold, so she crawled into their joined sleeping bags.
He shucked his clothes on his way to join her, and his haste made her feel like a love goddess.
And then they were all tangled up in each other again.
Only this time, he didn’t let her lead like he had before.
This time, he set the pace, and he set it slow.
As he rolled onto his back, pulling her on top of him, Wolf ran his hands over every part of her body while they kissed, like he was committing her to memory.
When he followed suit with his lips, she felt worshipped, and their lovemaking lasted long into the night.
Wolf
He didn’t think he’d ever felt as warm, as fulfilled, or as relaxed as he did when he fell asleep with Camellia wrapped up in his arms after the most slow, sensual lovemaking he’d ever experienced.
It was powerful, and in its aftermath, he felt changed and couldn’t identify how.
That feeling lasted right up until Camellia sat up fast, sucking in a loud breath and letting all the heat out of their love nest. He frowned at her, then he sat up, too. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s someone outside.” She sounded certain.
He crept out of the bag, reaching for his pants and pulling them on, followed by his shirt and hoodie, which he’d removed as one and replaced the same way. He ducked down near their supplies and located the biggest knife they had. “Stay here, okay?”
“Yeah, no.” She’d been getting dressed too and was already pulling on her jacket. She grabbed the rubber mallet they’d used to pound in the tent stakes with one hand and a flashlight with the other.
He stepped out, and she came right behind him, her mallet hand resting on his shoulder.
She aimed the flashlight beam ahead of them.
Something rustled behind the tent, and she swung the light that way fast, but that put her in front of him, and he didn’t like that.
He moved ahead of her without a lot of caution but held his knife ready.
She aimed the light, and he saw motion caught in its beam.
Something darted through the thicker woods.
Then he tripped and fell across something. Someone.
He scrambled up, and Camellia shifted her light, then gasped. “Ranger Dan!”
The old man lay on his back, eyes closed, face lax, and there was blood coming from one side of his head. Kneeling beside him, Wolf checked his pulse in the darkness, because Camellia had moved her light away.
“He’s alive,” he said. “I need the light, Camellia.”
“It was him,” she said. “It was Earl. I know it.”
Wolf found the ranger’s radio on his belt and used it. “Ranger down, ranger down. Campsite um—what is it again, Camellia?” Then to the radio, “Is anyone there?”
The reply came immediately, and Wolf answered questions, keeping his eyes on Camellia as she paced away, aiming her light in the direction of whatever or whoever they’d seen. “It was him,” she kept saying. “I know it was him.”
“Camellia,” he said. “Please, I need the light. Ranger Dan is hurt.”
That got her attention. She turned and hurried back, kneeling beside the ranger, aiming the light at the wound in his head. Wolf watched her for a few seconds, trying to see if she was okay. She looked terrified and shocky.
She met his eyes, blinked. “I have a first aid kit in our gear.” She tore away so fast she kicked up dirt, and was back five seconds later with the little white kit from her dad’s everything-we-need stash. She knelt, opened the kit, and passed him gauze pads.
He tore off the paper wrappers and pressed several layers of pads to the Ranger’s bleeding head wound.
Camellia said, “We’re here, Dan. You’re going to be okay. Help is on the way.” She reached for his hand to comfort him, then frowned and said, “He’s holding something.”
“He’s what?”
She pulled a crumbled piece of paper from the old man’s clasped hand, smoothed it, and aimed her light at it. “It’s a list. Names, addresses, phone numbers, dates… Oh! The dates are all yesterday.” She paused a moment. “These are river tour reservations.”
“Looks like it was torn from a book,” Wolf said when she passed the sheet to him. He was still holding pressure on Dan’s head wound with his free hand.
“He was coming to see us, clearly, and he was bringing this,” Camellia said. “This is a clue. He must’ve remembered something or learned something more, and this is related. It has to be.”
“But why would anybody bash him over the head about it?” Wolf asked.
“It wasn’t about you. I’m telling you, it was Earl. Ranger Dan probably came upon him out there watching our site like the freaking creeper he is."
“Did you get a good look at him, in the woods just now?”
“No,” she said and stared into his eyes as if daring him to contradict her. Then the sounds of motors buzzed nearer as four-wheelers’ headlamps bounded out of the night and gathered around them.
Camellia snatched the paper from Wolf’s hand and quickly folded it into her jacket pocket. Medics with cases gathered around Ranger Dan, and the two of them got out of their way. One, the fellow who seemed to be in charge, asked them what happened.
Camellia said, “I heard something, and it woke me. I think someone hit the ranger with that rock there, near where he fell. We saw someone run off. Or we think that’s what we saw. And I think it was my ex-fiancé, Earl Stafford.”
The other rangers on the scene looked at her, skepticism in their eyes. “But you didn’t see him?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Wolf was worried because there’d only been a sudden flurry of motion. It could’ve been a bird taking flight, or a deer spooking. He hadn’t seen anything, and he didn’t think Camellia had either. She looked his way, locked eyes with him briefly, then lowered her gaze.
Camellia
Camellia didn’t think Wolf believed her. There was worry in his face when he looked at her, not worry that her ex was about to murder her, no. The kind of worried look you give your parent when they repeat the same story three times in a row or put their car keys in the toaster. That look hurt.
Maybe…maybe it had just been physical between them. It had been really physical, after all. Boy, had it ever! She got a little tingle every time she thought about it, despite her thorough disappointment in him at the moment.
But she no longer doubted herself and realized she never should have.
She had been feeling spiders crawling up and down her spine too frequently to doubt own senses.
Earl was here. It’d probably been him following them as they’d hiked up to the shack.
Had he seen their frenzied passion on the stony trail and followed them back to discover their campsite, so he could watch her day and night like he had before?
The medics loaded Ranger Dan onto a stretcher and put him onto a small trailer attached to the back of one of the ATVs.
Then they drove off to meet an ambulance on the camp road as one ranger questioned Wolf.
Another one was still talking to Camellia, but his words were a droning buzz.
Her mind was too busy calculating her chances of survival here, in the middle of nowhere, with a companion who didn’t believe she was even in danger.
She replied to the questions on autopilot, told the ranger about her ex-stalker and how she’d heard from him again just before this trip, and how she’d seen his Blazer and thought she’d seen him here.
She told him all of it, and he didn’t take a word of it seriously.
She could tell. There wasn’t a female ranger among the group.
If there had been, maybe things would have been different.
But as her mother had been teaching her for her entire life, men don’t have clue what it’s like to be a woman.
They can’t understand or empathize. We’re like aliens to them.
“He could have fallen, hit his head on that rock there,” muttered one of the men near the spot where the old man had been lying.
“Maybe he had a stroke or a heart attack or something,” said another. “That could’ve caused him to fall.”
Camellia rolled her eyes. “Am I free to go?” she asked, still on autopilot.
“We don’t have anyone registered on this site,” said the one in charge. He was lean with gray hair and stern eyes. “Why is that?”
“We were near a cliff, and she sleepwalks,” Wolf said. “So we moved to an empty spot and planned to re-register in the morning.”
He nodded slow and said, “See to it you do that.” Then, to Camellia, “You can go.”
She headed back to the tent and felt Wolf’s eyes on her but didn’t look back. She was on a mission.