Page 10 of Danger In The Backcountry
“You had a choice. You chose not to voice it.” It took everything she had to put one foot in front of the other when the tightness around her chest urged her to crawl back in his sleeping bag and forget. Forget that she’d been blindsided. Forget about him turning her life upside down. Forget theloneliness and the missing half of her heart. “Just like you did that night.”
Rome turned on her. “Excuse me?”
“You left those divorce papers on the table without saying a word to me about how you felt. You moved your things out before I got home from work. You didn’t even ask me for the divorce. Your lawyer was the one who reached out to me.” And maybe that had hurt more than not having a straight answer as to why he’d torpedoed their marriage. That he couldn’t even summon the consideration to talk to her directly. “How long were you hiding the fact you didn’t want to be married to me anymore? Weeks?”
He didn’t answer, his mouth smoothing into a thin line. The fingers on his left hand fisted tight, accentuating the slim line of pale skin across his ring finger. Right where he used to wear his wedding ring.
“Months?” Her heart shot into her throat, making the next question crack. Tears burned in her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them fall. Larsons didn’t cry. They didn’t let themselves stumble. Ever. “Years?”
“I went to see a divorce lawyer two weeks before that night, but you’re right. I should’ve said something long before that.” Rome faced her fully, exhaustion playing across his face, under his eyes. It was the first break in his composure she’d witnessed…since he’d left. Though she wasn’t sure if all that time counted, considering he’d made an effort not to reach out all these months. No calls or messages. No emails or drop-ins to get anything else he might’ve left in the house. He’d simply disappeared from her life as though he’d never existed in the first place. “Problem was, I’d been trying to reach you for years, Lettie. You tried. For a little while. You’d rush home for dinner or take a couple days off here and there so we could make it up to Montana or to your parents. But I saw the effort it took for youto be with me when all you really wanted to do was work on your next paper or run figures from your latest study. The effort was there, but you weren’t. Not really.”
Every cell in her body went cold despite the rising temperatures.
He took a step toward her, his exhales playing across the skin of her neck and jaw. Softening his voice, Rome met her gaze with nothing but honesty. “And then you started working on your GPS device, and nothing else mattered, including me. We were living two separate lives, and by the time I left, I realized I didn’t even know who you were anymore.”
It was as she thought. He’d been ready. Ready to see if she would fail, if she’d pass whatever test she hadn’t even known she’d been drafted into the night of their anniversary. Lettie swallowed, loud enough for him to note the movement. Cotton coated the insides of her mouth as she steadied herself. “You didn’t try.”
A hardness she’d seen turned on her parents or anyone else who’d dared insult or offend her slipped into his expression. “All I ever did was try, Lettie. I tried to get you to prioritize our marriage. I tried to get you to take better care of yourself. I tried to get you to invest in something other than your job. I tried to be enough for you, for you to see I was right there standing in front of you, that I loved you, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t matter.”
Her chest felt as though it would explode. Sam had nearly killed her, but this, his admission, would finish the job. He really believed he wasn’t enough for her? She wouldn’t have gotten this far without him. The late nights staying up with her when she had a paper due the next day and the dinners he’d prepared to make sure she wasn’t relying on takeout. The reminders to shower after four days of hunkering down to finish analyzing the dataset she’d collected and coming up with excuses as to why she’d missed Sunday night dinner with her parents. Again.He’d been there while she’d struggled to outperform her male counterparts in her PhD program and build a career long after she’d graduated. He’d always been there. Until he wasn’t. And that hollowness hurt. “You mattered. More than you know.”
“Yeah?” He took a step back, releasing her from the intensity in his dark gaze. Looking out over the gold-drenched landscape toward the mountains to the east, Rome shook his head. “Must’ve missed all your calls and the messages you sent after I left.”
Another failing of hers. Another strike to hold against her.
“You want to know why I left without saying anything or waiting until you were home to ask for a divorce, Lettie?” He adjusted his hold on his rifle as though the familiar weight of his weapon would ease this entire conversation. “Because I knew you wouldn’t fight back. And seeing that in person—watching you give up on us—that would’ve broken me.”
Rolling her lips between her teeth, she bit back a retort as he took the lead through the next crop of trees. He was right. She hadn’t fought back. She’d signed those papers without reading through the divorce decree mere minutes after finding them on the dining room table, packaged them in the yellow manila folder beneath them and walked it out to the mailbox to send back to his lawyer. She hadn’t cared about any of it. The house, the cars, their assets in the retirement accounts and checking and savings. She would’ve given him everything without a fight.
Because she’d known. The missed getaways, the dinners she hadn’t come home for, the nights when she hadn’t come home at all. The calls she’d taken during Christmas dinner, rescheduling his birthday celebration in favor of another biology conference, the decrease in their sex life because she was Just. So. Tired. It’d all worked to build a career she was proud of, that her parents were proud of. At the cost of the one person who’d made it happen. Rome.
And yet he hadn’t asked his lawyer to finalize the divorce.
Lettie followed after him, keeping a safe distance away. Forbidden tears streaked down her face.
Chapter Ten
He’d lost the tracks.
Sweat built along his hairline and the back of his neck, but it was the pressure to locate the next sign of the black bear that tunneled through his calm. The sun beat down on his scalp, the prickling of a burn starting, and hiking his body temperature higher. Coupled with the muffled breathing behind him—Lettie wouldn’t dare let him know she was out of breath—they’d have to stop to recover soon.
She hadn’t said a word in the past two hours since he’d admitted his greatest fear, keeping a steady pace-behind him along the trail. He’d gotten used to her silence over the years, the way she fell straight into a project and barely came up to eat or sleep or take a break. This silence felt different. Controlled. Heavy. Strained. She wasn’t lost in a research study, trying to get a hold of one of her colleagues to confirm data figures or drafting an article for her next submission to a journal. He’d accused her of single-handedly killing their marriage when he’d been the one to take the shot.
Rome navigated off the path of crusted red dirt mixed with sand of some long dried up, forgotten body of water and headed for the nearest shade. They’d charged ahead after that damn bear all morning and had yet to catch up with the animal. Black bears were fast, but this one seemed to be on a mission. Slinging his pack over one shoulder, he extracted his metal water bottle and took a deep slug of warming water as he leaned up against the frame of the oversize pine. Heat swayed throughthe branches on a low phantom wind, but the shade provided enough relief from the direct sun. The bark crumbled at the slightest brush of his clothing, having gone too long without a good rainstorm. They hadn’t come across a stream during their trek. They’d run out of the last of their resources if he didn’t find them someplace to refill their bottles by sunset.
They’d hit the point of no return.
They could turn around right now and make it back to her van with just enough water and food left over to arrive safely. Or they could push on, relying on nothing but the map in his pack and his instincts to find her bear. “We’ll rest here for about thirty minutes. Eat, drink and reapply your sunscreen.”
Lettie dragged her feet off the trail to join him under the shade, almost collapsing like a marionette whose strings had been severed. Splaying across the dirt, she didn’t seem to mind the tinges of red sticking to her clothing and hair as she closed her eyes against the dance of trees overhead. She was exactly as he remembered, with her habit of chewing the skin off her bottom lip. Small patches of dried blood along the delicate pillow of her mouth told him she’d been biting pieces off all morning, and Rome found himself smiling at the absurdity. He’d missed that. The familiarity and ridiculousness of that single habit while hating the fact she hurt herself in the process. He’d gone as far as to switch her ChapStick out for peppermint infused. When that hadn’t worked, he coated her lip products with hot sauce. None of it had made a damn bit of difference. Lettie Foster—Lettie Larson—wasn’t the kind of woman to let anyone stop her from doing what she wanted.
“I didn’t know you’d be here.” He took another pull of his water but stowed the bottle to preserve what was left. Crouching against the tree to repack his water, he extracted a pack of jerky. He scanned their immediate surroundings before opening the bag. As much as he wanted to catch up to Sam, they didn’t needthe bear in a frenzy or to ambush them a second time. Terror still clung to his nerves as he recalled the seconds between when he’d realized Lettie hadn’t returned from taking care of her personal needs and seeing a three-hundred-pound black bear lunge for her. Everything in him had gone still and broken at the thought of losing her like that. Rome cleared his throat, more to clear his head than get the dust out of his system. “When Randy offered me the job to find your bear, I didn’t know you were assigned to work in Zion.”
He and his best friend would be having that conversation once he’d located the bear. Randy—for all the good the superintendent had done for Rome, since he’d decided to leave Lettie, with giving him odd jobs, a roof over his head and a steady paycheck—should’ve warned him what he’d be walking into. Who he might face.
“Would you have taken the job if he’d told you?” They were the first words she’d spoken in two hours, and a rush of raw relief coursed through him. Her voice had always triggered some kind of chain reaction in him, since that first moment she’d introduced herself as his tutor all those years ago. Every cell in his body had hated the thought of needing help to get through his classes, an argument he’d made to both his science and math professors, but his upbringing had gouged large gaps from his education. He’d needed her to graduate, and despite his assumptions, the pretty blonde with pale skin who told him she hardly stepped foot outside and with a mouth that had most likely brought many men to their knees, had never once made him feel less than during their lessons. In fact, the woman currently sprawled across the ground as though hoping it might swallow her whole had been one of the very first people to see him as more than the outcasted teen who’d been raised by the wild.
Her question snapped him back from the past. No. Yes. Hell, he didn’t know what he would’ve done if Randy had been upfront with him. It didn’t matter now though, did it? They were stuck together in the middle of nowhere hunting for a bear she’d do anything to save from him. Problem was, no bear, no paycheck, and with less than a hundred dollars in his wallet, Rome couldn’t afford to not to finish this job. “You should eat something now. We’ll have to get moving soon enough, and I don’t want to draw anything else that might want to eat us.”
