Chapter Seventeen

I t was just breaking dawn when Megan opened her eyes to find herself wrapped up like a mummy in the sleeping bag. The fire was roaring, her clothes were in a pile beside her, and Jack was nowhere to be found. He’d left a beer bottle full of water next to her clothes, along with a power bar—which meant he’d had at least one more stashed someplace yesterday.

Megan squirmed free of the sleeping bag and sat up, only to scramble back under the covers when she realized how cold it was. She reached out one hand to her clothes, sighing in relief to find that Jack had set them by the fire to warm up. She pulled everything under the sleeping bag with her, then contorted in every position imaginable while getting dressed.

She was panting by the time she slipped into her boots and stood up. Not bothering to put on her ski suit yet, she headed behind her favorite tree to take care of business, then hustled back to the fire and slipped into her suit. She grabbed the bottle of water and power bar and headed toward the lake in search of Jack.

She spotted him standing beside his snowmobile, his feet planted wide and his hands on his hips. And though he was a fair distance away, she’d swear she could see a look of disgust on his face. She took her time walking out on a snowpack hard enough that she barely sank in, eating the power bar and drinking water that tasted faintly of beer.

The closer Megan got to him, the more her heart raced with the memory of last night. He looked…he looked…oh damn, she had fallen in love with him all over again!

“Good morning,” she said when she finally reached him.

Jack started to say something, but when his gaze met hers he snapped his mouth shut without saying a word. Two flags of color appeared on his cheekbones. Megan took another bite of her breakfast to cover her smile. The man was actually blushing!

Over their lovemaking last night?

He was such an easy mark. “Do you think you’ll be able to get it up soon—I mean unstuck soon, or are we going to have to walk? Or,” she purred, “we could just cozy back up to the fire and wait for the cavalry to arrive.”

His cheekbones turned nearly purple. He walked around her and headed to shore, still without saying so much as good morning. Megan polished off the last of the power bar and gulped down the rest of her water as she grinned at his back. She was such a bad person, but really, a saint couldn’t have passed up an opportunity like that. Teasing Jack was easier than shooting fish in a barrel.

She stuffed the wrapper and bottle in her pocket and walked around his sled, eyeing it in sympathy. It was stuck up to its running boards in slush that had frozen solid overnight. They’d need a chisel, if not a blowtorch, to free the damn thing.

She turned in a circle studying the landscape, trying to figure out where they were, and realized she had absolutely no idea. She hadn’t been this far north on the lake in ten or twelve years. Megan started walking to the ledge sticking up through the ice, curious about where her sled had gone in.

She could see the tracks Jack had made dragging her out, the rope he’d used, and her helmet lying on the ice several yards away. There were more tracks indicating where he’d walked up onto the north side of the ledge, where the ice wasn’t weak. From there his footprints moved down into the water. She couldn’t see any sign of her sled, since the hole had skimmed over with a thin layer of ice, and she gave an involuntary shiver. Jack must have stripped off his clothes on the ledge, gone into that dark, freezing lake to get the dry sack, then scrambled back out and quickly dressed.

She really shouldn’t have teased him this morning.

There were other tracks going in and out of the hole, as well. Megan walked toward them, giving the ledge a wide berth, and stopped beside the carcass of a half-eaten fish. So, she’d been right, some…thing had been fishing. Something heavy. The impressions in the snow were deep, seven or eight feet long and about three feet wide, and if she wasn’t mistaken, some of them looked to be from a tail. She hunched down and touched the snowpack where what appeared to be a wing had brushed against it, then stood up and started following the tracks away from the hole.

“Get back here!” Jack shouted.

She turned to see that he was stopped halfway out to his sled, his arms full of the fir boughs from their bed. Had he just shouted an order at her?

“Excuse me?” she shouted back.

“I don’t need you wandering off and getting lost. Get back here and help me.”

She propped her hands on her hips. Oh, she was sooo glad she’d teased him this morning. “I never get lost!” she hollered. “And I don’t respond well to orders being shouted at me, either.”

He dropped the boughs. “O-kay then,” he said, his voice turning dangerously low—just like her father’s did when he was nearing the end of his patience. Somehow, no matter how softly her papa spoke, his voice carried an unreasonable distance, just as Jack’s did now. “Would you please come back here and help me get this sled out?”

Megan eyed the tracks leading out onto the lake, heaved a heavy sigh, and started trudging back to his snowmobile. He was mad at the sled, not her, and now was not the time to push him over the edge. Besides, the sooner they got home, the sooner she could ask Kenzie about the creature she’d seen.

But someday soon, she would have to find out what happened when a self-professed pacifist exploded. He could deny it until the cows came home, but Jack Stone was a warrior, and when warriors exploded…they rarely took prisoners. That’s why a smart woman learned the consequences of going too far before she found herself married to one.

Megan stopped to pick up some of the boughs he’d dropped, and tossed them down with the others when she reached his sled. “Do we have something we can use to chisel the ice?” she asked, deciding to defuse the tension with a show of cooperation.

Good Lord, she was turning into her mother!

He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves—even though it was likely only ten degrees out—then pulled a small hatchet from his belt. He got down on his knees and started chopping the ice along the running boards.

“Great. Do we have another hatchet I can use? Wasn’t there one in your saddlebag and one in the dry sack?

“I’ll chop, you watch for planes.”

Wow, a whole sentence. She was making progress. She plopped down on the fir boughs with a sigh. Since he seemed to be more in the mood for listening than talking, Megan decided to broach the subject of how they’d gotten into this mess in the first place.

“Um…about what we saw last night,” she said.

He stopped chopping.

“I think we should keep it to ourselves.”

He straightened to his knees, studying her. “Why?”

“Well…in the first place, nobody would believe us.”

“And in the second?”

“If they did believe us, then everyone in town would likely get all scared. And when people get scared, they sometimes do foolish things.”

“Like?”

Megan sighed. This wasn’t going at all well. “Like they might decide to hunt it down and kill it.”

“It,” he repeated. “Exactly what is it , Megan?”

She lifted her shoulders. “How would I know? I saw exactly what you did, and I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“Exactly what did we see?”

Okay, if he wanted her to spell it out, she would. “We saw what must be a long-lost descendant of a dinosaur. You know, like they think the Loch Ness monster is? Only our creature seems to be a cross between a ptero-dactyl and a…a large lizard of some sort. It can fly, so maybe it’s a winged reptile…or something or other.”

Oh, that had sounded intelligent. But she’d be damned if she would say what it really looked like.

Jack apparently had no such reservations. “You don’t think it looked like a dragon?”

“Dragons are mythological. And what we saw was definitely real, so it’s likely reptilian.”

“And the slime I found at the break-ins? Was that from a reptile?”

“It couldn’t be. Reptiles have scales and they’re dry. Amphibians are slimy.”

He sat back on his heels. “So we’re talking about two different creatures, then? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“I have no idea who or what broke into those shops. Maybe the kids concocted some sort of slimy goo to throw you off their trail.”

“Forensics can’t break it down to any known substance in their data banks.”

They were getting off track here. “You’re assuming one thing has to do with the other, Jack. Just because we saw something last night that we can’t identify doesn’t mean it’s responsible for your break-ins.”

He studied her in silence for several seconds, then started chopping again.

“I’m just saying we should keep this our little secret,” she said through gritted teeth. “What would be the point of telling anyone?”

He stopped chopping and looked at her. “So you don’t think I should ask Kenzie Gregor what the creature is?”

Megan couldn’t stifle her gasp of surprise, and she wanted to kick herself when Jack’s eyes narrowed at her response. She quickly tried backpedaling. “What makes you think Kenzie would know anything about this? Have you even met him?”

He started chopping again.

“Jack,” she growled, just as a fast-moving plane crested the mountain to their east, diving toward the lake and swooping over their heads with a high-pitched roar.

Megan scrambled to her feet and started waving and shouting. The plane nosed up into a steep turn, circled around, and roared past them again, this time not a hundred feet above the lake a few hundred yards away.

“It’s Matt!” she yelped, watching it circle a nearby island before finally setting down on its skis and taxiing toward them.

“You’re not riding back with him. He flies like a maniac,” Jack said, coming to stand beside her.

“He won’t fly like that with a pregnant woman on board,” she called back, running toward the four-seater Cessna that had come to a stop a hundred yards out on the lake. But she skidded to a halt, her excitement turning to dread when she saw Kenzie climb out the passenger door.

Instead of rushing to her, Kenzie stood hunched over beside the plane, his hands braced on his knees as he sucked in large gulps of air. He looked so sick, Megan realized this was probably his first plane ride. She turned her attention to Matt, who was speaking into his radio mike. He finally climbed out his side, focused not on her but somewhere over her shoulder.

“Did you radio Dad to tell him you found us?” she asked Matt, drawing him to a stop in front of her. She finally got his attention, his expression fierce as he gave her an assessing, visual inspection.

“I just spoke with your mother, and she’s calling him now. Grey and Robbie headed out on snowmobiles around midnight last night to look for you. Why in hell haven’t you been answering your satellite phone?”

“Because it’s at the bottom of the lake,” Jack said, walking up beside her. “Along with her sled.”

Matt snapped his gaze to Jack. “What happened?”

Megan stepped between them. “I got ahead of my headlights and ran into open water,” she said. “Jack fished me out.”

She heard a heavy sigh behind her, just before Jack took hold of her shoulders and moved her off to the side. “My sled’s frozen in the slush,” he told Matt, who was suddenly looking amused. “We were chopping it out while waiting for someone to show up. Why don’t you take Megan back with you, and I’ll finish getting it free.”

“And if you can’t get it free?” Matt asked.

“Then I’ll walk back.”

Matt eyed him in silence, then nodded.

“I’ll stay and help,” Kenzie said, finally joining them, though he looked as if a soft breeze might knock him over. He extended his hand. “Kenzie Gregor.”

Jack shook it. “Jack Stone. And I’d appreciate the help, if you don’t mind riding back on a sled designed for only one rider.”

“I’d just as soon walk back, thank ye.”

“I think we should all fly home,” Megan said, not wanting Jack and Kenzie to spend any time together. She looked at Jack. “Dad or Robbie will come back with you tomorrow to get your sled and see about pulling mine out. We can’t leave it in the water for more than a week without getting fined by Inland Fisheries.”

Jack shook his head. “I’ll get mine out now, then come back with your father tomorrow or the next day.” He turned and started walking away.

Megan ran to catch up with him, grabbing his sleeve to make him stop. “Jack, I want you to come back with us now.”

“No, you just don’t want me alone with Kenzie,” he told her quietly, turning so the others wouldn’t hear. “Which makes me wonder, are you worried about his welfare or mine?”

“Fine, then. I hope you both get frostbite,” she snapped, turning to flounce off to the plane.

He pulled her around to face him before she had taken two steps, completely ruining her dramatic exit. “Forget those DNA samples and everything else for today,” he told her, seemingly unaware of—or more likely ignoring—her outrage. “The moment you get home, I want you to go to your doctor and get checked out. You might have gotten some lake water in your lungs and you could develop pneumonia. Have your mom go with you.”

“Any other orders before I leave, Chief Stone?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah,” he said, pulling her against him and kissing the scowl right off her lips. He leaned back just enough to look her in the eyes. “Fasten your seat belt, and see if the name Walker works for you, for our son.”

“We’re having a girl!” She shoved him away, and this time she ran to the plane.

She climbed in the passenger side and fastened her seat belt. “I don’t care what I dreamed last night; you’re a girl,” she told her belly, giving it a pat. “And don’t you worry, I’ll teach you to hold your own in this world. Especially against men.”

Matt climbed in beside her with a chuckle. “Sorry, sis, but you’re having a boy.”

She gave her brother-in-law a smack in the arm. “I wanted to be surprised!”

“Hey, don’t kill the messenger. I didn’t decide the kid’s sex, his father did. Speaking of which, I see he’s back in your life.” He put on his headphones before she could form a comeback. He started the engine, ran through his preflight check of gauges and controls, then gave the plane enough throttle to turn them facing up the lake into the slight breeze. Megan stared out her window, watching Jack and Kenzie on their knees, chopping the sled free.

As the plane’s skis skimmed over the snow and rose into the sky, her gaze moved to the shoreline, where she could see the fire trailing up a thin plume of smoke. When Matt banked left toward Pine Creek, Megan lost sight of their cozy little camp, effectively putting the most wonderful night of her life behind her.