“I know I ran into the trees. They saw me run, thought I’d abandoned them…”
Shame. She felt his shame even more than she heard it in his voice. She spread her hand flat on his back, rubbing the damp cloth.
“You couldn’t let them see you,” she said. “It was instinct.”
He looked at her through the dark veil of his hair, yellow burning beneath the black. “Something in me still remembered what I had to do.”
“So you went out onto the ice in the only way you could. As a wolf.”
She relived it all, down to the paralysis of her muscles and the fear burning in her stomach. She smiled and brushed the hair away from his eyes. “You were very brave, Kieran.”
His smile was twisted with self-mockery. “Not brave. It was only instinct, wasn’t it?” His smile faded. “But you—you were afraid.”
She gathered her legs under her. “Of course I was afraid.”
“Afraid for me.” He moved to get up, and she scrambled back. The torn shirt slid from his shoulders, and he stood before her in all his naked perfection—taut muscles, long clean limbs, innate grace, and inhuman beauty. No longer vulnerable but overwhelming.
Memories of the kiss raced through her mind. She thought she’d put it behind her. Only moments before, he’d been Shadow; she should have been able to look at Kieran as she’d study a wolf in the wild—a magnificent specimen of his kind.
It wasn’t working. It wasn’t working at all.
“Of course,” she said thickly. “You could have died out there.”
She felt rather than saw his movement, the lift of his hand, fingers spread to brush her cheek. Her own body locked against the desperate urge to fling her arms around him, hold him close, know he was alive and safe.
But she didn’t give in. She made a pretense of looking around for his clothes—found his jeans still intact, his boots wearable though the laces had broken in Kieran’s haste to undress before his shift. She gathered the clothing in a bundle and drew in the scent of him, mingled with pine and earth and all the things she loved.
There was something terribly intimate about watching him pull his jeans over those long legs, shrug the ragged shirt over his broad shoulders… Alex folded her arms and stared up through the leafless branches of aspen and birch, the dense green of pine and spruce. After a moment she remembered she had an excellent excuse for moving away.
“Let me just get my snowshoes, and we’ll go back to Julie’s to check on Tracy.” She hesitated. “If you’d rather stay here—”
“No.” Kieran rose, regarding her steadily. “I want to see that she’s all right. And find some way of explaining why I ran.”
“Kieran, they won’t think—”
He only looked at her, and she was effectively silenced. What would they think? A man running away from a child’s danger, in the opposite direction of the rez. And there was the question of Tracy’s subsequent rescue by a great black wolf…
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll find a way to deal with it, one way or another. And no matter what comes of this, Tracy is safe.” She took a step toward him. “She might not be, except for you and your abilities. If you can’t control them yet, you can still learn control. What happened proves that you shouldn’t, you can’t deny your wolf side.”
He didn’t respond but remained bent over his boots, tugging at the broken laces. When he stood, he gave no acknowledgment of her statement. “Let’s go,” he said.
She gave up the argument as they began to walk back to the reservation. She realized suddenly that she was exhausted, and Kieran must be doubly so. He was alive, and Tracy as well; that was enough for today.
More than enough.
* * *
Julie gave a final wave from the doorway as Mike backed her truck down the drive, Kieran and Alex in the seat beside him. Alex’s face was a pale blur through the window; Kieran’s was a mask, as unreadable as it had been ever since the two of them came back to check up on Tracy.