“It’s not the same thing. I know you always wanted your mom and I to be married . . .”
She looked at him then, her eyes betraying her as they glossed over. “No, Dad. Actually, what I always wanted was for you to show up and rescue me, just like you did them.”
Jackson’s brow furrowed into a pinch. “What do you mean?”
She forced a smile. “Nothing. I’m just happy for you.”
Gopher had one of her shoes. She wrestled it from his mouth and slipped it on.
“Honey, please tell me what you’re talking about.”
It was the softness of his tone that nearly broke her.
But she couldn’t mar his joy with the wounds of yesterday.
“I just wish I’d had more of you when I was younger, is all. Like they will.”
He sighed. “Willow, I wanted to . . . your mom—”
“Dad. It’s all good. Listen, I gotta run.”
And, as if the cosmos might be on her side for once, her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She fished it out. Read the text.
Everything inside her stilled.
“It’s the prayer chain.” She looked up at her dad. “There’s been a mauling.”
2
TWO HOURS LATER, Sam still had to remind himself to take a breath.
To close his eyes, listen to his heart beat.
Remind himself that they’d lived.
Sam sat on a chair in the ER waiting room, his head sunk into his hands as he listened to the PEAK team talk about their miraculous escape.
Maybe not so miraculous as just darn lucky.
Sam wanted to kill Pete—or maybe hug him, he didn’t know. For sure his quick thinking had given them an extra second.
Even if it had enraged the bear.
After all, an ax in the shoulder would probably peeve anyone, especially a protective mother sow. However, for a second, the injury had blindsided her, slowed her down.
Given Sam a chance to get Gage and Bella behind him, for Quinn to leap for the nearest tree, Pete close behind him.
Which left Sam staring down the beady dark eyes of an animal with incisors the size of his fist and claws that Wolverine would be jealous of.
If Sam stepped back from the emotion, slowed down the events of the attack, he could see it better—the hulking, rank mass of beast in the middle of the trail. Bella’s piercing wail as Gage fled with her into the woods.
The thunder of his heartbeat as Sam leveled his gun, even as the animal bore down on him with a roar that ripped through his body.
The kick of his rifle against his shoulder, the shot reverberating against the night.
The bear, undaunted, despite what Sam knew had to be a hit.
The gun self-cocked, another round chambered, as the animal charged.
He pulled the trigger—the gun jammed. Right there in his hands, a dead stick. Sam tripped and fell on his back as the bear stood over him, roaring.
He heard a scream from behind, something feral and fierce, but all he saw were jaws and teeth and—
He shoved the barrel of the gun right into the bear’s mouth.
The bear gagged, reared back.
Sam scrambled out from beneath the claws and simply ran.
He hit the nearest tree and scrabbled up it.
The bear rebounded, charging.
As Sam clung to the tree, certain the animal would knock it down, lights bloomed above them, bulwarked by the roar and wash of the PEAK chopper
Kacey Fairing, former military pilot, using the only tool she had to save him—a dual-engine Bell 429 chopper.
If they’d been in a field, Sam had no doubt she would have set the bird right down on top of the grizzly if it meant saving his sorry hide.
EMT Jess Tagg, hanging out the door, shot a flare at the bear, turning the forest into fire in a flash of brilliant light. The bear reared, and right about then, Ty Remington and Ben King ran up the trail wielding flare guns, having been dropped off by said chopper in the nearby pit. They shot the flare guns off, scaring the bear all the way up the trail to her cubs.
The last Sam saw of the animal, her grimy backside was fading into the darkness of a dying flare.
Sam wasn’t sure if he had screamed, but maybe, since his throat burned and his entire body shook.
At the least, he’d wanted to scream.
Still felt it building inside. Despite the relative calm of the ER and the sound of his team reliving the story as they gathered near the nurse’s bay.
“I couldn’t believe it when Sam just shoved the gun into the bear’s mouth,” Pete was saying, looking unruffled, his blond hair held back by a baseball cap, just a good ole boy hanging out in the woods.
“And then, like Superman, Kacey came out of the sky.” This from Ben King, and of course he’d say that. The guy still stood around with a half-dazed look on his face that Kacey Fairing had decided to give him another chance at being a father to their child.