Rain of Fire (9 page)

This must have been the woman in Wyatt’s bed Thursday evening.

M
eet Alicia Alvarez with Wolf Advocates,” Wyatt introduced, his arm around her yielding waist.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kyle’s hand extended to Alicia, though she did not smile. “Your group had a major influence in getting the wolf back into the park.” Her voice sounded a little stiff.

Wyatt smiled at Alicia. “You remember I told you about my dissertation advisor, Dr. Kyle Stone of the Utah Institute of Seismology.”

As the two women shook hands, Wyatt marveled at the differences between them. Though many would have judged Alicia more feminine, Kyle’s combination of confidence and handsome carriage carried a powerful punch, as evidenced by a passing male who took in the way her jeans fit before checking Alicia out. Come to think, the distinction between the women went deeper than the physical. Kyle was the person he’d most like to have a beer with and talk about what made Yellowstone tick.

Alicia’s eyes, rimmed in something that made them look larger than usual, continued to dart from Kyle to Wyatt. “What are you two doing at the hotel?”

Her implied accusation set him on edge.

“Fieldwork,” he replied. “We’re staying in the cabins.” He glanced at her fancy dress and sandals. “You?”

“I’m meeting some people for dinner … staying here tonight…” Her look suggested an invitation to her room. “Tomorrow I’m taking them wolf watching in Hayden Valley.”

“Do you have time to join us for a drink?” It might smooth things over.

“I’ve got a few minutes,” Alicia allowed.

As they settled into chairs, she continued to eye Kyle. “Have you ever modeled?”

“Goodness, no.” Kyle looked as if the idea was preposterous. “I was in one university or another for eleven years, and after that I did research and taught.”

“Very well, I might add,” Wyatt interjected.

A strained silence fell.

Reaching for her beer, Kyle winced and lowered her arm gingerly.

“Are you okay?” Wyatt leaned forward.

“What’s the matter?” Alicia asked.

“We were out on the lake this afternoon during that quake,” Kyle said. “I slipped and banged myself on the side of the boat. It’s nothing.”

“It didn’t look like nothing,” Wyatt disagreed. “You have a bad bruise under your arm.”

“How did you see her naked side?” Alicia asked tartly.

Kyle met the challenge in the thirtysomething woman’s snapping eyes. In the academic environment where both sexes worked together on as equal a footing as possible, she wasn’t used to dealing with insecurity. For that was clearly the root of Alicia’s animosity, along with an apparent fantasy that there was something between Kyle and Wyatt.

As the silence lengthened without her or Wyatt explaining how he had seen her bruise, she decided to change the subject. Figuring women liked compliments, she nodded at the collar of gold that lay heavily around Alicia’s neck. “That’s a lovely necklace.”

Alicia’s gaze took in Kyle’s earrings, along with the ring of fine webbed turquoise from the Kingman mine in Arizona. Kyle had selected it because it reminded her of one her mother wore on her sixth birthday. That ring had not been recovered.

“I understand academia doesn’t pay,” Alicia observed, evidently finding the silver jewelry wanting.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Wyatt said. “Being a ranger doesn’t either.”

Kyle had had enough. She rose to her full height, suppressed another wince at her injured side, and looked down at Alicia. “I disagree about the pay. Teaching is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, turning out fine students like Wyatt, who take jobs that pay not in dollars but in quality of life and helping others.”

Someone called Wyatt’s name from the entrance to the dining room.

“There’s dinner,” Kyle said. She walked away toward the podium where the dining room manager waited.

After a hearty steak dinner alone, while Wyatt remained with Alicia and joined her and her clients in the dining room, Kyle walked beside Yellowstone Lake. The darkening water was still unsettled, but now she could blame the brisk wind that had blown up in the past hour. The temperature was dropping rapidly, clouds rolling in from the southwest. She’d not checked the forecast since morning, but the unmistakable smell of snow emanated from the thick-bellied bank as it approached.

Despite the cold, she was still steaming at the scene in the sunroom. She and Wyatt were here to work, as Alicia was supposed to be. The very suggestion that Kyle and he … her face warmed even with the lake wind buffeting her cheeks.

She turned her attention to the road rimming the shore. A lobby exhibit informed that the present hotel drive was once part of the Grand Loop Road, back in the stagecoach days.

Franny had told Kyle that her first husband’s parents met at the Lake Hotel at the turn of the twentieth century. She tried to imagine the Chicago heiress and the Westerner, a man a lot closer to the family’s Nez Perce roots due to his mother being a half-breed. That must have been an even more brow-raising combination than Francesca di Paoli turning up to wed a Wyoming dude rancher.

Kyle envisioned the old days; the hotel drive lined with carriages, the lobby alight with electric bulbs. Each evening an orchestra had played after dinner, now echoed in the piano player or sometimes a string quartet in the lounge. She found it interesting that people thought of the 1890s as a long time ago. When your focus measured geologic time, man’s tenure in the park seemed the blink of an eye.

Watching the sun sink over the trees behind the hotel, Kyle reflected that the period after sunset and before dark always fascinated her. It was as though each evening presented a dare, to watch the light fade minute by minute and see how long she could remain indifferent.

Using the excuse that she was getting chilled without the parka she’d left dripping over the shower rod in her bath, she walked briskly through twilight toward her cabin.

Once there, she unlocked the door and entered the spare and chilly room. Some fiddling with the electric heater set in the wall revealed it was on a fifteen-minute timer so she anticipated a fitful night of sleeping and waking to reset the dial.

Kyle undressed, took a hot shower, and donned a soft flannel shirt to keep her warmer. Then she lay back on the too-short bed. With her rangy build, she felt the polar opposite of Alicia with her full breasts and rounded behind. Thank God, she’d always been comfortable with the way she looked and at ease with her own company, like having dinner alone in the dining room.

She had been fine with Wyatt staying with his girl… the yearning centered in her chest tonight was not for him. It was much more basic.

Being reminded of a world designed for couples made her ache for her own vanished youth and the man she had loved and lost.

Twenty-year-old Kyle rode shotgun in Nick Darden’s Chevy as he pulled away from the Calico Palace Pizza Parlor in Jackson, Wyoming. A typical Wednesday evening at geology field camp, except for the miraculous fact that Kyle had Nick to herself.

Back in June, the students had assembled at a 4-H camp near Alpine, forty miles south of Jackson. For the first three nights, the food was okay, wholesome and filling, if not exciting. Roast beef, mashed potatoes, and green beans; then chicken, rice, and salad; followed by ham, slaw, and red Jell-O. On the fourth day, the kids they shared camp with changed and the cycle began again.

Kyle and some of the others had fallen into the habit of driving up the Snake River Canyon to Jackson for dinner, never mind that the monotonous camp fare had been paid for. Somehow, tonight she and Nick had been the only ones who wanted to go.

It was funny. The first time Kyle had seen him, she’d not been impressed. With sun-streaked brown hair about the same color as his eyes and summer tan, he looked monochrome. Then he smiled and the gimlet glint of his irises suggested she was included in an excellent joke.

Evenings, Nick played his guitar in the barracks and the students sang along. The high point of camp so far had been his performance at The Golden Horseshoe Bar in Alpine. Before an eclectic mix of RV campers, sheepherders from surrounding ranches, and geologists, Nick took the stage almost shyly, situating himself with care on a bar stool. He made it all the way through the first verse and half the refrain before the assembled company realized he was singing the praises of “Charlotte the Harlot, the Cow-punchers’ Whore.”

This evening, Nick drove through the town of Jackson and south. Mountains loomed on either side of the road, made visible by a full August moon. Kyle tried to ignore its baleful eye and focused on their approach to Astoria Hot Springs, an ancient resort with tourist cabins separated from the main highway by a bridge across the Snake River. The camp was the last outpost of light before they headed into the steep-walled canyon.

Watching the ragged outcrops of limestone, Kyle told herself that going to dinner with Nick didn’t mean anything. He treated everybody in camp to the same brand of disrespectful banter that made him seem a friend until she realized it kept him at a distance.

She studied his profile in the dash lights. His nose wasn’t large, but it had a little bump as though he’d broken it. It gave him a little boy quality that seemed to match his can’t-take-it-seriously attitude. His lashes were long for a man’s, dark whispers against his cheek.

Kyle turned away so he wouldn’t notice her looking too long. A steep embankment whizzed by.

Without warning, a sudden flash of motion caught her eye. Headed straight for the passenger door, a huge boulder rolled and bounced down the road cut. She had no time to think or speak before the rock smashed into the pavement scant inches behind the Chevy, blasting apart with a crack that shot shrapnel against the rear bumper.

Nick swerved. “Holy shit!”

Kyle looked back in time to see the largest broken chunks bound over the edge and disappear into the gorge.

The Chevy fishtailed and came back under Nick’s control. He put his arm around Kyle’s shoulders and drove one-armed while her fingers clutched his shirt.

“Hey, hey,” he soothed. “We cheated death.” But rather than stop to look at his car for damage, he accelerated. “I’m getting out of this canyon. That rockfall might have been caused by an earth tremor.”

Kyle felt as though a hand reached inside her chest and clenched off her breath. She’d been doing all right with field camp, steering clear of other students’ weekend excursions to Yellowstone and Earthquake Lake. Another ten miles of steep-walled gorge unfolded interminably as she pressed her head against Nick’s shoulder and willed the boulders above to remain in place.

Finally, moonlight revealed the mountains receding and being replaced by the blessed broad flats along the Palisades Reservoir. Once in the open she felt better and became aware the drive would be over soon. With Nick’s arm around her, it was easy to want more.

The final half-mile was on the 4-H camp’s dirt road. The Chevy drifted a bit on the curves, gravel pinging the undercarriage.

Nick pulled up in front of the barracks and stopped with a jerk. “The eagle has landed.”