Page 8 of Danger In The Backcountry
She knew that sound. Air stuck in her chest as Lettie straightened. Heavy footsteps dragged through the dead leaves and broken twigs from behind. Moving slower than she wanted, she turned to face the threat.
“Sam.” His name caught in her suddenly dry throat. She licked her lips, but it was as though her entire body had dried up in the night.
The black bear stood little more than twenty feet away, his thick coat matted and crusted with brown flakes. Blood. His snout, too. He looked tired, almost feral as he tracked her every move. She couldn’t run. Couldn’t scream. All she had the mind to do was stay as still as possible.
“You know me? Remember? We’re friends. I give you strawberries. Though I don’t have any on me right now.” Her fingers twitched to find something—anything—she might have to use as a weapon against him. Her soul would fight tooth and nail not to harm him, but no matter how much time they’d spent together over the past six months, she couldn’t discount the danger that came with a hungry bear. And Sam looked hungry.She took a step back, trying to add distance between them, but the bear growled a warning again. She raised her hands in surrender, as if he would understand the gesture, and hoping like hell he didn’t consider her a threat. Or breakfast.
She didn’t get the chance to find out.
Before Sam charged straight for her.
Chapter Eight
He had only a split second to act.
Rome collided with all five feet, three inches of his ex-wife and whipped her behind him. Black fur, yellow teeth and over three hundred pounds of mass bore down on him as he raised the rifle. And took aim through the scope.
His heart shot into his throat. His entire body centered on that one shot. Adrenaline dumped into his veins. One shot. That was all it would take to put the animal down as he’d done with so many others. Every second counted. Every slight adjustment.
“No!” Lettie slammed into the long barrel of his rifle, throwing off his balance.
His finger clamped down on the trigger, and the rifle bucked against his shoulder. An earsplitting shot arced to the right of the black bear. A tree a dozen feet away exploded in an array of bark and shattered wood.
Lettie pulled her hands back with a hiss, cradling them against her chest as the black bear let out a gut-twisting, defying roar before lunging for the opposite trees.
The shot had scared the animal off from attacking, but Rome’s pulse refused to come down. It took too many seconds to get his head on straight as he studied the brush where the bear had disappeared. Turning on Lettie, he lowered the barrel of his weapon to the forest floor. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. His damn shoulder ached from the gun impacting at the wrong angle. He’d had it. Right there in his sights. He could’ve ended this and gotten the hell out of this place. Away from her. Butonce again, Lettie had interrupted his life plan. “Are you out of your mind? I could’ve shot you!”
Her mouth parted. Eyes wide. From the incident in which they’d both nearly been mauled by a black bear or from him raising his voice, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t actually give a damn. Lettie shook her head. “I told you. You can’t shoot him. He’s part of my study—”
“Screw your study. He was ready to kill you, and don’t think I didn’t notice you were trying to talk him down.” A decade-long rage slipped through the seams of his control. Rome scrubbed a hand down his face as the past minute played across his memory. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t do his damn job if she was going to intervene every step of the way. “Then again, I’m not sure why I’m surprised. You’ve always chosen your work over anything else, including your own health. Difference is I just got to see it in person.”
Clutching her hands to her chest, she took a step back as though to rewind time. “What is that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t have the energy to get into this with her. He’d spent the past ten years holding his tongue. He could do it until he managed to get the hell out of this park. And once he filed the divorce papers, he wouldn’t have to see her ever again. She’d already sold the house, they didn’t have any kids. Nothing stopped him from moving on with his life. This was just a nice reminder. “Nothing.”
Rome headed back for the campsite. He’d managed to pack his belongings, but Lettie would need to get her gear together before he set off to follow that damn bear. He was close. All he had to do was finish this. The bear was a danger to every hiker it came upon, more so now that it’d broken from its hibernation patterns and hunting grounds. Sam the Black Bear had become unpredictable and feral in the weeks rangers had lost track of him, and now without his GPS tracking device attached, Romewould have to do this the old-fashioned way. Lettie’s feelings be damned.
“That doesn’t sound like nothing.” Her uneven steps thudded behind him, but he wasn’t going to slow down to help her manage keeping up. She’d volunteered to accompany him on this trek. She needed to figure out a way to stay alive. “It sounds like you’ve practiced exactly what to say to me in the past six months and have been waiting for the right moment to unleash how you really feel.”
He pulled up short, turning on her. “So what if I have? Doesn’t change anything between us.”
“That’s not all of it though, is it?” The fire in her eyes guttered. Lettie clutched one hand, smoothing her thumb over her palm, and the memory of her grabbing on the barrel of his weapon right before the bullet had ripped down the barrel etched deeper. Hell. The explosion of gun powder and force would’ve heated the metal in an instant and burned her hand.
The fight rushed out of him as realization struck. He took a step to counter the distance between them. “Give me your hand.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” Shouldering his weapon by the strap, Rome pried her hand from her chest with a hiss of surprise. Angry welts and bright red skin peeled and bubbled diagonally across her hand. He didn’t give her a choice to pull away as he dragged her the rest of the way to the campsite and tipped his pack upside down with his free hand. The first aid kit hit the ground and broke open. “Injuries out here in the middle of nowhere can get infected faster than you expect. When you’re hurt, you tell me, understand? Your life might depend on it.”
She didn’t fight as he tipped his water bottle—still ice cold, thankfully—over her hand and cleaned any debris she might’ve picked up in the past couple of minutes. “I hardly think a burn isgoing to be the death of me, but maybe next time you won’t try to shoot an innocent bear so I don’t have to grab your gun.”
That rage he’d shoved deep into his core over and over throughout the years burned through the cracks in his composure, but he kept his mouth firmly shut. After drying the wound, he applied a thick layer of burn ointment and secured gauze around her palm before tying it off. “Shoes. Off. And don’t tell me you’re fine.”
She didn’t argue. A miracle in and of itself. Sitting on her rear end—a little harder than he imagined she meant to—Lettie toed off her boots without undoing the laces.
“There’s your problem. Your laces are too loose. If you can slip in and out of your boots, they’re not tight enough. Your boots are sliding back and forth, rubbing against your socks and the bottoms of your feet.” He tossed her boots in the dirt beside him and stripped off her socks when it became clear how long it would take for her to do it with one good hand. Angry skin and liquid-filled bubbles peppered the undersides of both feet. “Damn it, woman. You’re going to be the death of me.”
They were losing precious seconds to catch up with her black bear. Hell, maybe that was her intention.
