Sleep would not come. It wasn’t the cold, though she had certainly been warmer, nor was it the utter silence of the night that lay beyond the fragile walls of the tent. Those simple things she had learned to accept. The thing that kept her from sleep was as complicated as only the human heart could make it. She could no more shut off thoughts of Luke, and her own confused feelings about him, than she could turn around and go home and give up on everything she had fought so long and hard to achieve.
It was almost a relief when the howling began again, more distant this time but very clear and almost sweet. Joey forced her muscles to relax, listening to the patterns as the cries rose and fell in their own ancient rhythms. She could hear no threat in the sound. It was natural, part of a world that was meant to be.
But it was no clinical desire to discuss the laws of Nature that brought Joey up out of her sleeping bag and made her don the parka she had set beside it. She tugged on the boots that lay just outside the tent and crept toward the fire.
He was still there, a dark, motionless shape against the dying embers. His head was tilted back, his posture so intent that Joey froze in place to gaze at him in wonder. As howls chorused the night, he cocked his head, his eyes closed and nostrils flared as if savoring the most beautiful music. When he rose to his feet, it was with a single fluid movement so inhumanly graceful that Joey’s breath caught, only then did he turn his head to look at her.
The green-gold eyes were swallowed up in blackness, pupils wide as they caught a splinter of firelight. Joey understood in that instant that he did not know her. His muscles bunched as if in preparation for attack, he quivered and gathered himself—and Joey gasped “Luke!”
He froze in midmotion, perfectly, utterly still. Then recognition came, and the muscles that had tensed so ominously relaxed again. “Joey.” His voice was momentarily dull and strange, as if it came from some great distance.
Tightening the parka about herself, Joey went toward him cautiously. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I heard the howls—and since I couldn’t sleep, I thought I’d ask you about those wolves.”
Luke blinked. He seemed to come fully back to himself at last, and there was no sign of anger or antipathy. A slow smile altered the fire-carved planes of his face. “What do you want to know?”
The moon had risen and begun its slow arc across the sky when Joey found herself drifting on the seductive tide of Luke’s voice, her eyes heavy as sleep coaxed her into surrender. She jerked and shook her head, stifling a yawn, Luke fell silent and regarded her from the short distance that separated them.
“You’ve had enough for one day, Joey,” he said softly “You need your sleep for tomorrow.”
Her head spinning with images of wolves and Luke’s nearness, Joey almost protested. A yawn overtook the words, defeating any hope of clinging to the contentment of the past hours, she half-smiled sleepily and lurched to her feet. She was bone-tired, with aches where she didn’t know muscles existed.
“Good night, Luke,” she murmured.
He met her eyes briefly and looked away, into the dying fire. “Good night.”
Joey hesitated, longing for something she couldn’t define. She wanted to recapture the ease that had been between them as he’d talked to her of wolves and the wilderness he loved, to see the lines of his face relax as he lost himself in another world she could only touch the fringes of. But he was closed off to her again, now, lost in a different way that excluded her completely.
With a sigh Joey turned back for the tent, shedding her boots outside and bundling up her parka in the corner of the tent. She took a sip from her canteen and zipped herself into her bag, certain that sleep would come quickly and grant her the rest her mind and body needed. But she founded herself waiting—feeling the empty space beside her like a void that stole sleep utterly and left her staring into the darkness.