The Dark Place

She found his right hand and moved it to her breast, gently molding his fingers around the yielding flesh. Then, after she seemed to be asleep, she lifted his hand, kissed the back of it, rubbed her cheek against it, and placed it again around her breast.

'Why are you wearing clothes?” she asked sleepily.

'You told me to put them on. Do you want me to take them off?'

'Well, certainly.” But when he began to move, she clamped his arm down with her own, keeping his hand on her breast. “No. Too comfortable. Want to stay just like this. Besides...'

'Besides what?'

'Besides, it feels so decadent being naked next to a fully dressed man. I feel like a harem girl.” She giggled softly and began to breathe slowly and deeply.

'Julie...” he whispered. He'd nearly said it again: I love you.

'Hmm?” she said from a million miles away. Then she laughed again, sighed, worked her buttocks still more securely against him, and quieted.

Gideon lay there, his mind inflamed and perplexed. Did he love her? Not likely. Love as he knew it—and he knew it—came maybe once in a lifetime, and he had had his once; an overflowing, never-to-be equaled once.

A cool, predawn wind with a touch of moisture carried the scent of pine bark and sent strands of Julie's hair drifting over his face. It was the dear that had done it—homely, old-fashioned word. Nora had called him dear sometimes. Or had she? My God, were the memories already dimming?

But they weren't already. It was three years, three long years in which no one had called him dear and—of this he was certain—in which he had never once said or wanted to say to anyone, “I love you.'

He moved his left arm slightly to ease the pressure of her body on it. Julie adjusted automatically, as if they'd been sleeping together for years. She caressed the hand on her breast, loudly kissed the empty air, and in a sleep- furred voice murmured, “Gideon.'

His throat tightened and hot tears sprang unexpectedly to his eyes. He took his hand from her breast to enwrap her more fully in his arms and bent his head forward so his lips were against the downy, sleep-fragrant nape of her neck. “I love you,” he whispered tentatively to the soft flesh.

That wasn't bad at all. No queasy fluttering in his chest, no deeper, twisting knot of guilt. It felt good, in fact, to say it after all this time. Premature, of course—he'd just met her—but good.

He tried it out again. “I love you,” he murmured, his mouth still against her. “I think,” he added sensibly, then snuggled closer to her warmth and fell asleep.

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Chapter 10

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With a twig, Gideon prodded at the powdery gray charcoal in the circular fire pit and watched it emit a few dusty wisps.

'Well, something was certainly here not too long ago.” He bit his lip. “Someone. Not for at least a day or two, but since the last rain. Otherwise the charcoal would be matted down.'

'A very woodsmanlike observation,” Julie said.

Gideon gestured at the two-foot slabs of bark that stood on end around the pit, forming a three-quarter circle. “What do you make of these?'

'Heat reflectors?'

'Could be. Could also be a screen to hide the glow. Notice how the opening faces the back of the ledge, away from the valley. From below, you'd never know there was a fire going up here.'

'From below, you'd never know there was anything up here.'

She was right. From their camp they had raked this mountainside with binoculars but had been unable to find the ledge. Yet from here there was a clear, broad view over Pyrites Canyon. The gravel bar on which they'd camped was in plain sight almost directly below, on the other side of the stream. The orange backpacks they'd left behind were clearly visible—just as visible, Gideon thought, as they themselves would have been in last night's pellucid moonlight.

The ledge was obviously deserted and apparently abandoned, but Gideon was jumpy and vaguely apprehensive. Even in the daylight, with birds singing vigorously, he had continued to feel under scrutiny. Julie did, too. He could see it in the way her eyes darted at little snaps and creaks from the woods.

The ledge, about seventy feet long and thirty feet wide, was screened and camouflaged by trees that grew on it and on the slope beneath. Above, a forested, nearly vertical bluff rose two hundred feet. Below, the barely discernible path that had led them to the ledge, as it had led the Zanders, dropped steeply toward the river far below.

Part of his uneasiness, Gideon knew, stemmed from the weather. The temperature had dropped, and there was a high, pearly overcast, as heavy and solid as a stone roof. Underneath that, somber, iron-gray clouds were moving in from the west to pile and swirl against the mountains. Yet there was no wind. The air seemed viscous and torpid, dank and raw. Julie said the rainy season was on the way.

As they approached the eastern end of the ledge, Julie wrinkled her nose and frowned.

'Yes, I smell it too,” Gideon said. “And I know the stories. Bigfoot lairs are always supposed to be pervaded by an awful stink. Or is that the Abominable Snowman?'