Force Of Nature Read online

  Confessions would distance him and possibly drive him away completely. Lack of transportation and destination wouldn’t stop him. A man who had survived twenty years in a wilderness would find a way.

  “Can you talk about what happened in Alaska, Hunter? Do you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember…all of it.” A shadow crossed his face.

  “I’m sorry. If this is too painful, you don’t have to talk about it.”

  “I’ll have to eventually. From what I’ve seen on TV, the press won’t be as easy as you are.”

  “True. Once this story hits, you’ll be bombarded with questions.”

  “If I stay.”

  Hunter dropped the bomb and it lay between them, ticking. The truth was out and there was no way to take it back. Now everything she said, everything she did would be tempered by the knowledge that she could light the fuse and blast the ground from beneath her feet.

  He scooted his chair back, and she saw it as a symbolic gesture. He was already pulling away from her. Soon the student wouldn’t need the teacher. Soon he’d be on his own.

  “When the plane went down I remember thinking, we’re all going to die.”

  He began telling his story quietly, and she leaned forward in order to hear. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to hold his hand or grip his arm, anything to anchor herself, anything to anchor him.

  “I don’t know what happened after that,” he continued. “I don’t know how they died. All I know is that when I regained consciousness I was in a cave surrounded by wolves…and I knew my parents were dead.”

  “How frightening that must have been for you.”

  “Yes. I was afraid. But I was also hurt and weak from lack of food and water.”

  “How far were you from the plane?”

  “I don’t know. Years later when I went back, I tried to calculate. I think the wolves dragged me about three miles.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Not when you consider that it was late winter and huskies, which are most like their wolf brothers, can pull enormous loads over snow. A nine-year-old boy would have been a cinch for six wolves.”

  “I didn’t know anything about wolves or wolf behavior,” he continued. “I figured they had eaten my parents and were getting ready to eat me.”

  “I highly recommend it,” she said.

  The minute the sassy retort was out of her mouth she wished she could take it back. But there it was, as bold as his conversational bomb.

  His smile was lazy and knowing. “We can arrange that.”

  “Then I’d miss the story.”

  “The story can wait.”

  She didn’t protest when he ripped off his pants, nor when he reached for hers. She offered no resistance when he positioned her on the floor and drove into her. Hannah anchored herself to the leg of the table and shouted her pleasure to the waning sun. And her relief.

  She was selfish to the core, taking what she needed without regard to Hunter. As he pounded into her she kept telling herself that he was receiving as much pleasure as she, but a small insistent whisper kept saying, You’re the one who needs this, Hannah. You’re the one who needs to hold on.

  What was she going to do when it was time for him to go? How would she survive after she sent him off to reclaim his rightful place in society? How could she breathe without Hunter?

  Her fear made her greedy, insatiable. Or was it merely the man?

  As if he’d read her mind Hunter scooped her up and spread her on the table among the broccoli and the strawberries. Fruit and vegetables flew in every direction as he ravished her, starting with her breasts.

  Every inch of her skin was sensitized. Every bone in her body ached for him. He teased her diamond-hard nipples with teeth and tongue, and when she caught his hair and strained closer, he pulled them deep into his mouth and suckled.

  She was going to stay on that table forever. She was going to close her eyes and pretend twenty years in the wilderness had never happened. She was going to immerse herself in ecstasy and never resurface.

  “Yes, yes, yesss,” she murmured, and then when he left her breasts, she moaned, “Nooo.”

  He smiled at her. “I’m not finished with you yet.”

  “Goody.”

  His chuckle was deep and sexy, his tongue hot and hard as it left a burning trail down her body. She wrapped her legs around his neck, and when the spasms overtook her, she reached for support and landed her hand in the whipped cream, going soggy and warm.

  Hunter reached for the bowl, smeared cream on her breasts, then started all over again.

  “I wouldn’t have survived that first winter if it hadn’t been for the wolves.”

  Hannah kissed his hand and cuddled it to her cheek.

  They were sitting on the sofa in front of a fire he’d built. Sometimes he thought he could never get enough of the toasty warmth, and other times he felt as if he might suffocate. This was a night for warmth.

  Hannah lay against his chest with her legs stretched along the length of the sofa. Her silky robe was loosely belted and fell open so that he could see the play of firelight against her skin.

  He couldn’t get his fill of looking.

  “This reminds me of that night in Denali,” he said. “The time I saw you beside the campfire.”

  She tried to twist around to face him, but he held her tight. “Don’t move. I like you like this.” He chuckled. “I liked you that night, too.”

  “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Don’t you?” He slid his hands under her robe and ran his fingertips across the soft mounds of her breasts.

  “Of course, I do. I was just being coy.”

  “You’re bold, Hannah. Always be bold with me.”

  When she didn’t reply he resumed his story. “I didn’t see the wolf pups at first. The mother brought them to me one by one then lay down beside me while they fed. Every now and then she would nudge my face with her nose.”

  Memories swamped him, and he had to stop talking.

  “She fed you?”

  “Yes. I was injured and too weak to leave the cave. It wouldn’t have done me any good anyhow…a nine-year-old boy without adequate clothing nor a single weapon trying to find food in three-foot-deep snow.”

  “It took enormous courage to do what you did, Hunter. And a powerful will to survive.”

  He tightened his hold and kissed the top of her head.

  “I regained strength quickly, then the alpha male started bringing me meat. I threw up the first time I ate raw elk.”

  “But not the second?”

  “No. I had no weapons and no skills to survive the wilderness in winter. I learned to eat like a wolf, to live like a wolf and to think like a wolf.”

  “All that time the search party was looking for you not three miles away. Did you think you would be rescued?”

  “Yes. At first. Especially after the snows melted. I learned a lot that first summer. I applied what I’d learned in Scouting plus what I was learning from the wolves…how to stalk small game, how to sense danger, how to travel downwind from the enemy and how to camouflage my own scent so it wouldn’t betray me.”

  “They stayed with you, then?”

  “I went with them,” he laughed, remembering. “They insisted.”

  “How does a wolf insist?”

  “When the pack got ready to move, Whitey would catch my hand in his mouth and tug. He was the alpha male, the pack’s leader. I had names for all of them by summer.”

  “With his stamp of approval, the rest of the pack had to accept you.”

  His admiration for her went up another notch.

  “You’re right…you did your research before you went to Denali.”

  On the long flight home, she’d told him about her assignment there, never knowing that he understood. And he’d witnessed at close range the passion she brought to her work, the passion she brought to everything she did.

  “I do thorough research before I underta
ke a new assignment.” She caressed his thigh. “Usually.”

  “I’m glad you made an exception with me.”

  This time when she swiveled to look at him, he didn’t protest. She gazed deeply into his eyes…and beyond. Her gaze penetrated his heart, his soul.

  “What made you stay so long?”

  He’d wondered when she would ask the question…and how he would answer.

  “Hunter,” she traced his face. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. It’s none of my business. Really.”

  That’s when he knew he would tell her the truth, or as much of it as he could. He wasn’t sure he even knew the whole truth. What man is ever certain of his motives?

  “You know I could have found my way out?”

  “That’s obvious. Any man who could survive the wilderness for twenty years without benefit of any modern convenience or commercial trapping, let alone modern medicine, is bound to have figured a way out. Especially a man with the IQ of a genius.”

  “That first year I kept thinking I would be found. The next I was too busy figuring ways to survive to invest any time and effort in finding a way out.”

  “And after that?”

  “For the next few years I tried to walk out…as soon as the snow melted. I was young and scared… I always turned back.”

  “You were in one of the most remote sections of Denali,” she said. “Nobody went there much until about three years ago.”

  “I was fifteen before I saw another human being. I wouldn’t have survived those six years without the wolves. They were more than my protectors. They were my teachers, my friends, my family. By the time the trapper invaded our territory, I had become a wolf.”

  “When I first saw you in the moonlight, I thought you were a wolf.”

  “I had taken on their posture and their habits. Though I could never learn to speak their language, I did learn to communicate with them.”

  “How?”

  “I used gestures, but mostly our communication was telepathic.”

  He didn’t elaborate. That part of his life was still too private, too personal.

  He remembered the year he’d turned fourteen how Whitey had seemed to understand his longing for a companion of his own. He was coming of age, his sap was rising, and he had nowhere to turn.

  Whitey had encouraged a liaison with one of the young females in the pack. Hunter had politely declined, but that year he realized he would soon have to leave the pack and make his own way.

  Fortunately for Whitey, he didn’t leave that year.…

  “The year the trapper came everything changed,” he told Hannah.

  “I never knew his name. I didn’t know about his steel traps until one of the young females in the pack got caught. She’d lagged behind the others in a hunting party. We were too busy with the young moose we’d brought down to miss her. Finally Whitey missed her and we backtracked, but we were too late. By the time we got there, the trapper had already taken her.”

  “How horrible for you.”

  “More horrible for Whitey. He got caught in one of the traps. I was able to free him, but that day I came to view man as my enemy.”

  “I understand,” she said, though nothing in her experience had prepared her for dealing with a man who had stayed so long with the wolves that his identity was linked to theirs.

  Would the bond ever be broken? Would Hunter ever truly embrace her world?

  “I didn’t try to leave anymore after Whitey got caught. The wolves needed me, and finally I’d found a way to repay them.”

  He didn’t speak for a long time. Instead he buried his hands in her hair then let it sift through his fingers.

  What was he thinking? What secrets was he keeping?

  Hannah didn’t dare ask. She had to let him tell his story in his own way.

  She’d heard of kidnap victims identifying so strongly with their kidnappers that they would do things they would never otherwise have done. Become criminals, even.

  How much more strongly Hunter would have identified with the animals who had saved him, succored him and loved him.

  Then there was the element of fear. Even people in safe environments sometimes feared change. For Hunter, leaving Denali was not merely change, but a complete metamorphosis.

  “Over the years I saw only two more men, both trappers. If I had revealed myself, they might have led me out. Or they might have killed me.”

  There was another long silence. The fire burned low; the logs crackled and split.

  “I discovered I didn’t want to be found. I didn’t want to leave…until you came.”

  He turned her onto his lap, and as he bent toward her Hannah wrapped her arms around him and held on, held on tight.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  December 1, 2001

  I’m marking the days on my calendar until our anniversary. I don’t know why. Michael has not shown the least bit of progress, not the tiniest sign that he’s getting ready to come out of his coma.

  “Anne, it has been six months,” Clarice told me on the phone this morning. “If you keep going to the nursing home day and night, you’re going to end up in the hospital.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “Whitfield.”

  The state hospital for the insane.

  Sometimes I feel as if I’m already there…watching old movies with a comatose man, flirting with him, cajoling him, sleeping with him. Trying to seduce him, for heaven’s sake.

  I’ll do anything to get him back. Anything!

  “I can’t stop,” I told Clarice, and she said, “I know. I just worry, that’s all.”

  And then because she’s such a good friend who always tries to encourage me, she said, “Medical science is coming up with new cures every day.”

  “I don’t think coma is something you cure.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Of course I did. I was just being ornery, is all. If Michael stays in his coma I’m going to need an attitude adjustment or nobody will be able to stand me.

  “I have two tickets to the theater tonight,” Clarice told me. “I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty and I don’t want to hear any argument.”

  Michael used to love the theater. We had season tickets to the community theater, and every time we traveled to Boston or New York we would always try to see a few plays.

  I think the renewal notice for this year’s season tickets came last month. I tossed it in the garbage can.

  What does that say about my state of mind? If I’m not careful I’m going to become a dried-up, thin-lipped pessimist. I don’t even want to think about it.

  “What’s playing?” I asked Clarice.

  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  That certainly describes me to a T, but I didn’t say that to Clarice. She must be so tired of me dwelling on my own troubles all the time. My children, too. I’m even tired of myself. I’ve become a boring woman, somebody with a one-track mind.

  “Okay, but I have to go by and see Michael.”

  “Before or after?”

  “After, I think.”

  That way I can stay, but I didn’t tell Clarice. She would try to talk me out of it. She thinks I’m not getting enough rest.

  But I can’t bear to make a brief visit, as if Michael is nothing more to me than a distant relative…or even a stranger, the kind of poor forgotten soul good churchgoing people visit out of compassion. Or pity.

  Michael hates pity. That’s one thing I won’t do. I will never pity him. No matter what. No matter if he stays.…

  Oh, I won’t even think about that possibility. I need to focus on bringing him home.

  There must be something I haven’t tried, something that will blast him out of the safe cocoon of deep sleep and make him want to come back to me. Make him come back to me.

  I glance at the calendar. Nine more days till our anniversary. I remember the one we spent in San Francisco three years ago. Michael had to go for a conference of high-altitude filmmakers
, and I went along because I love being with him. Anytime, anywhere, but especially in that romantic city on the west coast.

  The day of our anniversary he slipped out of his meeting early. We drove along the coast and stopped at beaches along the way to admire the view, but mostly to hug and kiss and admire each other. Oh, we were so in love.

  Are. We are in love.

  We stopped to watch the sunset and although it was December and the water was cold, we pulled off our shoes, rolled up the legs of our jeans and cavorted in the waves.

  Our feet got so cold we buried them in the sand, then wrapped my red cape around us and watched the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t. Maybe it was beautiful simply because Michael was there, holding me close.

  Afterward we had dinner at our favorite restaurant high in the mountains, cold noses, wet jeans and all. When we got back to our room Michael put on our favorite blues CD and we danced to our song. “Wonderful Tonight.” The song that perfectly describes how it is with us…always wonderful.

  We made love all night. I’m not exaggerating.

  We are still insatiable. Even at our age.

  Oh, I can’t possibly let him go. I can’t possibly let Michael remain lost from me.

  Tonight I’m going to take the music box, the one we found in San Francisco two days after our anniversary, the one that plays “Wonderful Tonight.”

  If Michael doesn’t respond to that, I don’t know what will bring him home. I just don’t know.

  December 2, 2001

  I’m so exhausted I can barely sit up…and so excited I can hardly hold my pen.

  Last night when Clarice and I went to the nursing home after the play, I said, “Michael, darling, I’ve brought something for you to hear.”

  I wound up the music box and set it on his pillow, then stood beside his bed holding his hand. I would have stretched out beside him if Clarice hadn’t been there.

  But I’m glad I didn’t. I might have missed what happened next.

  I was standing there holding onto him while Eric Clapton sang our song, and all of a sudden Michael’s eyelids began to quiver.