No.
His heart and body screamed at him to close his eyes again and lose himself in the sensual, equally needful woman who waited for him, but the father part of him, the scared father part had just seen something that turned him cold.
The sun glinting off something in the distance-a rifle barrel?
“Cord?” Shannon clutched at him with insistent fingers. “Cord, what is it?”
“What?” He couldn’t take his eyes off the horizon. Again that deadly dancing shaft.
“What? You-you’re like steel.”
He felt tension radiating throughout his body and knew he couldn’t do anything about it. How could she not be aware of it? What should he say, that he’d just seen something that scared the hell out of him and was going to do the same to her?
Instead he said, “We have to get going. Now.”
“Now? You’re- Without lunch?”
She’d already pulled out of his embrace and was staring up at him, her need-hazed eyes filled with question, doubt, a return to fear, distrust of everything about him. She didn’t care any more about food than he did.
“Go ahead. Eat. I’ve got-”
“You’ve got to what? Damn it, Cord! For once in your life be honest with me! I can’t take any more of this!”
It could be a hiker, a ranger. The human or humans out there weren’t necessarily killers. “Don’t you want to find him?”
Her look, hard and cold and hot all at the same time sliced into him. He already regretted what he’d said, but the words had spewed from him in a knee-jerk attempt to distance himself from her outburst. Although he readied himself for more of het anger, she whirled away and stood with her back to him, fists knotted at her side. “Do it, Cord,” she snapped. “Find him so I can get away from you.”
Although her head pounded, Shannon gave no thought to asking Cord to stop and allow her to rest. Something had happened to him, changed him, just as they were on the brink of-On the brink of what? If only she could think beyond her own emotions, but she should know better than to even try. Cord brought out so much in her, made her crazy.
Maybe, she thought without seeing any humor in it, she was already crazy and had been since the day he walked into her life.
There was incredible danger in thinking back to what had nearly happened between them earlier today, but putting their embrace and what went with it, and the words she’d thrown at him, behind her was impossible. She should know that by now.
They’d come close, so close that it scared her. She’d needed his understanding and compassion and love, needed it desperately. She no more could have kept that from him than she could have once not told him she loved him.
When he’d trusted her with what he carried inside him of the wisdom of the Taos Indians, he’d given her a precious gift she’d just begun to understand. She’d acknowledged his offer in the only way her heart had known, by showing him that she, too, believed in the wisdom of his people.
And then something had happened. He’d heard, or seen, or remembered, and something had ripped him from her and she’d lashed out.
Only something to do with Matt could have done that.
She’d thought his pace relentless earlier but his determination now frightened her so much that she couldn’t remember what she’d said to him, just that those words had been the last they’d spoken to each other. His forward progress was only slightly faster than it had been before because every few feet he had to search and reassess.
During those times when his entire attention was focused on the ground and his hands knotted and his knuckles turned white, she almost begged him to tell her the truth. But every time the words pushed their way to the surface, she held them back.
She didn’t want to know.
Instead she watched Cord and wondered when she’d have the words to ask his forgiveness. Not until he could concentrate on her. He moved so quietly that if she hadn’t been directly behind him, she wouldn’t know he was here. Because he said nothing, he left her free to listen to the voice of the earth around her. Its sound reached her as an ebbing and flowing wave, notes both high and shrill from a scolding chipmunk or deep and low as the wind worked its ageless way through the trees. Her world smelled of hot bark and dirt. They’d recently gone through a burned area and she’d been struck by the earth’s ability to repair and renew itself. She could spend her life here surrounded by the colors of the wilderness-finding herself.
What had Cord said, that the Grandfather is the creator who bathed everyone with his mind and gave life to all things? What incredibly eloquent words.
“He’s still limping”
Cord hadn’t said anything for so long. Instantly she lost her sense of peace. “You’re sure?”
He pointed at something on the littered ground that made little sense to her. Then in a tone so controlled that she could nearly touch the effort of his keeping it so, he explained that Matt was putting more weight on one leg than the other and occasionally dragging that leg.
“It’ll slow him down, won’t it?” she made herself ask.
“Yes.”
“Soon.”
Soon meant in a few minutes or tomorrow, or maybe the day after that. He had to give her more to cling to than that. As weakness hit her, she fought to brace herself. “If we called to him-”
“No.”
He’d been talking with his body angled away from her. She grabbed his arm and pulled him around; he let her. “Why not?”
Although the silence that trailed after her question nearly drove her crazy, she refused to push. Finally, “He’s trying to get home on his own. If he hears us, he might try to hide. In fact, I can guarantee it. He could get careless and hurt himself.”
“Oh.”
“One time-” He glanced away and then met her gaze again. “Once early in my career I went after an older woman who’d gotten separated from a group of senior citizens. She was out there for two nights. Everyone was calling, me included. Finally we found her down a ravine with a broken leg. She’d heard us, gotten disoriented, convinced herself she had to hurry or we’d leave. She didn’t see the drop-off.”
“She panicked. Matt wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t he?”
She freed herself from Cord’s gaze long enough to focus on their son’s footprint. Matt was hopelessly lost, now with an injured leg or foot. What would it do to him to hear his parents’ voices echoing off a hundred boulders? She also didn’t dare let herself forget his damnable pride, his determination to complete what he’d set out to accomplish. “So…so, what do we do?”
“Come to him gently.”
He shouldn’t have pushed her the way he had, Cord admonished himself as he watched Shannon sink onto her knees when night stopped them. Without saying a word, he helped her out of her backpack and then knelt in front of her so he could untie her boots. She was watching his hands, maybe seeing something in the way they worked that he should be keeping from her.
All afternoon he’d waited for a rifle shot, and when it hadn’t come, he’d asked himself if he maybe shouldn’t have taken a chance on trying to call out to the hunters, if that’s what they were, and let them know that a little boy was out there. But they were too far away and if they were poaching, they might hide from him. Besides, Shannon would hear-would realize that he’d already heard sounds that might have spelled their son’s death.
