Alaskan Sanctuary (11 page)

He opened his eyes, looked around and realized he’d fallen asleep in his car. Again. This was becoming something of a nightly occurrence. What hadn’t become part of his routine, however, was seeing Piper’s lovely, yet confused, face peering at him through his driver’s side window.

Oh, no.

She waved, and Ethan was struck with the nonsensical thought that waking up to the sight of her glacier-blue eyes was rather nice. Too nice.

Then the forlorn melody of a wolf’s howl pierced the darkness, and he came to his senses.

He hadn’t planned on sleeping at the wolf sanctuary. He’d just wanted to keep an eye on things to make sure whoever had defaced the cabin wasn’t coming back. Tate had kept his promise and was stopping by regularly, but the police couldn’t be there twenty-four hours a day.

The night after the graffiti had been found, Ethan had had trouble sleeping. Common sense had told him it was because his head had been resting on a hotel pillow, and he’d made a vow a long time ago to avoid hotels as much as possible. But though he’d hated to admit it, he’d known the reason for his restlessness ran deeper.

He still felt responsible, at least partly, for what had happened. So it had seemed reasonable enough to get in his car and head up the mountain. It had been an attempt to put his mind at ease. To make him stop worrying about Piper up there all alone. It wasn’t supposed to become a nightly thing.

Somehow, it had.

He sat up and rolled down his car window, since Piper didn’t appear to be going anywhere. “Good evening.”

“Good evening?” She narrowed her gaze at him. “It’s ten o’clock.”

“So it is.” Ethan glanced at his watch. It was seven after ten, actually, which meant that Tate would be making another drive-by in approximately eight more minutes.

Ethan would know. He’d witnessed every late-night stop, minus the instances when he’d fallen asleep. The Gold Rush blend coffee from the Northern Lights Inn was good stuff, but caffeine could do only so much. The fact that he couldn’t get a wink of sleep in his bed, but seemed to have no trouble falling asleep out here, wasn’t something he cared to examine.

“So what exactly are you doing here this time of night? You’ve been off the clock for hours.” Piper’s gaze swept the inside of his SUV and lingered on the down sleeping bag spread across his lap. “Oh, no. I think I know what’s going on here.”

Ethan sighed.

Now she’d no doubt demand to know why he was keeping an eye on her, and he’d be forced to tell her the truth. The rest of it, anyway. He’d have to tell her that the graffiti on her cabin had been a little more serious than he’d let on. Either that, or let her think he was some kind of stalker.

“Ethan.” She bit her lip. Given her fearless streak, she seemed far less irritated than he thought she would be. “Why didn’t you tell me? I know we’re not exactly the best of friends. Actually, you’re sort of my enemy...”

Her enemy. So he was either an enemy or a stalker. Neither option was all that flattering.

“...but I could have helped if I’d known.” She reached through the open window and gave his arm a squeeze.

He didn’t have a clue where this conversation was going, but the simple tenderness of her mittened hand on his arm brought about a sudden tightness in his chest. He cleared his throat. “If you’d known what?”

“That you don’t have anyplace to stay.” Her hand tightened around his arm in a gesture meant to comfort, to sympathize.

Only then did Ethan understand what was happening. “You think I’m
homeless
?”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” For once she was looking at him with the same kind of compassion she normally reserved for her wolves. Because she thought he was some helpless creature in need of rescue.

As such, it rubbed him entirely the wrong way. “You can’t be serious. Why in the world would you think I’m homeless?”

If Ethan hadn’t been so annoyed at the moment, he would have probably pointed out that the northern lights had begun to make a subtle appearance in the sky behind her. He might have told her how their shimmering pink glow looked almost like stars falling into the gold waves of her windswept hair.

She crossed her arms, and he forced himself to focus on her patronizing gaze. “For starters, you’re sleeping in your car.”

Point taken.

Still. Homeless? He had a home. Counting his room at the Northern Lights Inn, he had two homes at the moment.

Yet here you are, sleeping in your car. At a wolf sanctuary, no less.

“I am not, nor have I ever been, homeless.” What would his father say if he knew that his only son, heir to the Pinnacle Hotel fortune, had just been mistaken for a transient person? Ethan let out a little laugh. He couldn’t help himself. “Quite the opposite, actually.”

Piper lifted a brow. “What does that mean, exactly?”

The lights in the sky behind her deepened to violet, casting her in an ethereal glow that softened Ethan’s indignation, no matter how hard he tried to keep a grasp on it.

“It means that I grew up in a home that had six hundred and sixty-eight rooms, not including ballrooms and the like,” he said quietly.

She rolled her eyes. “Right.”

“I’m not joking. Six hundred and sixty-eight rooms. Thirty-one floors.” Over one thousand crystal chandeliers. He left out that particular detail. Why he was telling her any of this at all was a mystery.

He blamed it on his semiconscious state. Or possibly the auroras.

The notion that the aurora borealis, or the northern lights, had any significant meaning was antiquated. They were a natural scientific phenomenon. Nothing more. But the beauty of the lights was undeniably haunting, and since the beginning of time, myths and legends had been created to explain their sudden appearances. He’d even heard them called
revontulet
, which was Finnish for
fox fire
. In Finland, the lights were so named for a fox sweeping its tail across the snow, spraying it up into the sky.

Strange. Ethan hadn’t thought about the fanciful fox story in a long while. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an aurora, although he could recall with perfect clarity the first night he’d witnessed one.

He’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours straight, pulling an all-nighter at the park after illegal trapping activity had been uncovered in the area. They’d lost one coyote, and another had been severely injured. Their pack had been reluctant to leave. They’d kept circling Ethan as he’d carried the hurt animal along the banks of the Last Fork River, yelping and howling. A coyote’s cry was so distinctive that once you heard it, it lived in your memory until the day you died. That night, in particular, their eerie melody seemed to brand itself on Ethan’s soul. Then a wisp of amber had appeared above him, so faint that he’d thought he was imagining things. It faded in and out, growing larger and more luminous until the entire horizon glittered like a canary diamond.

Cradling that coyote in his arms, hands and face numb from the cold, Ethan had looked at the shimmering sky and realized he was the happiest he’d ever been. He was doing something he loved, something meaningful, and had never felt so much a part of nature. So close to God. Words he’d read in Sunday school as a child had come flooding back, like a gift from an unseen hand.

And I looked and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the sky.

Those memories belonged to a different man. A man Ethan no longer knew. But right here, right now, with a halo of amethyst light surrounding Piper’s exquisite, delicate features, that man didn’t feel so far away.

Ethan’s chest grew tight. He tore his gaze from her and focused instead on the frayed sleeping bag in his lap.

“You grew up in a home with
seven hundred
rooms?” she said, teeth chattering from the cold. “Who
are
you?”

Good question.

“Do you want to get in, and I’ll explain?” He leaned over and pushed open the passenger side door.

“Okay.”

He expected her to hesitate, but she didn’t. She bounded around the front of the car, her breath dancing in the wind, hair streaming behind her. Pink ribbons in the light of the violet Alaskan sky.

She slid onto the bench seat beside him in a rush of winter air, enveloping him in the scent of snow and evergreens. “So tell me about your family’s castle. Did it have a turret and a moat? Don’t tell me...you had a fire-breathing dragon as a pet, too.”

“Yes. A rescue dragon, actually. Poor thing grew up in the bathtub of a boy’s dorm room.”

“That story sounds vaguely familiar.” She pulled off her red mittens and gave him a playful smack with them. “I’m impressed.”

“By the castle? Don’t be.”

“No, silly. By the fact that you actually made a joke.” Her smile seemed lit from within, and Ethan realized it wasn’t the northern lights that were casting a glow over the moment. It was her.

What was he doing? He should be asleep in bed right now. He definitely shouldn’t be here, telling her about his childhood. “It was a hotel, not a castle. The Pinnacle in Manhattan. My family—my father, rather—owns it.”

“Oh. Wow.” She looked at him as if he’d just sprouted wings. “So you’re rich.”

“No. My father is rich. Big difference.” It was a massive difference. Big enough to drive a wedge between him and Susan long before his troubles after the bear attack had permanently changed things. “Besides, growing up in a luxury hotel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Trust me.”

“You mean you’d rather be wrapped up in a sleeping bag in the front seat of a car in subzero temperatures?” she asked, her voice going almost unbearably soft.

It was moments like this, when he caught a glimpse of her softer side, that his own walls began to fall. Being gentle and open didn’t come easy to her. Ethan knew as much. He understood better than anyone the need to hide behind a fearless exterior.

His chest grew uncomfortably tight. “Something like that, yes.”

“You are full of surprises, Ethan Hale.” She fixed her gaze on his, and it was as if she were seeing him for the first time. The real him.

And it was too much. Too much exposure, too much light, like walking into the sunlight after years spent in darkness. A beautiful, blinding delirium.

Then she asked him a question, and the light became sickeningly bright. “Why haven’t you told me that you came to Alaska to be a park ranger?”

Ethan grew very still. He couldn’t have heard her right.

“Ethan?”

He cleared his throat. “How did you find out?”

“I was at the church thrift store tonight helping out with a...um, project, and Zoey Wynn was there. She said that you worked at Denali National Park with her husband.”

Only a handful of people in town knew about his past. Of course Piper would become friendly with one of them. Just his luck. “Ah. I see.”

“You act like you despise everything to do with the wilderness. You let me go on and on about the National Nature Conservatory. You’ve even seen me struggling with all the grant paperwork when you could have helped. I barely got the application in on time. Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because it’s not something I talk about.” Why was he still sitting here having this conversation? He’d already exposed more of himself than he had to anyone in a long time. A
very
long time. He wasn’t ready to go down this road. Not with her. Not with anyone.

“I don’t understand, Ethan. Talk to me. Help me understand.” She rested her hand on his arm again, this time without her mitten. Skin on skin. The butterfly delicacy in her touch told him that she could carry his truths in gentle hands, and Ethan felt something inside him begin to unfold. “Please.”

He made the mistake of looking into her eyes, filled with tender invitation. And he couldn’t stop the words. He simply couldn’t hold them in any longer. “There was a bear.”

“A bear?” Her forehead creased in confusion. “In Denali?”

He nodded. “A grizzly. It attacked a camper in the park, and I was there. I saw the whole thing. I tried to help. I tried screaming. I hit the bear. I pulled out fistfuls of its hair. I tried everything. Everything...” His voice had grown hoarse, his throat raw from the rustiness of the things he’d been unable to say for so long.

“Oh, no.” Piper’s hand fluttered to her heart. “Please, no.”

But Ethan could tell that she already knew how the story ended. She just didn’t want to believe it.

“It was only the second fatal bear mauling in the park’s history. A freak accident. That’s what everyone called it.” Ethan swallowed. With great difficulty. “But they weren’t there. They didn’t see what I saw. Things I can never forget, no matter how hard I try.”

“So you left Denali?”

“Yes. I couldn’t stay there. I tried. I was married at the time, to my high school sweetheart. Things hadn’t been going well. Truth be told, they never had, even from the start of the marriage. We were too young, too naive. The mauling was the final straw. She went back to New York, and I ended up here.”

He wasn’t sure how long they sat in silence after he’d told Piper his story. Two minutes? Ten? Long enough for Ethan to become painfully aware of the feeling blooming between them like a tremulous bud pushing through the snow. Rare and beautiful. But doomed.

“I came here after a breakup, too,” she said quietly.

Ethan couldn’t have been more surprised. She’d never mentioned a prior relationship. It seemed silly to think that her closest ties had always been with the wolves, but that’s what he’d assumed. “You were married?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Engaged.”

“It didn’t work out?”

She let out a little laugh that was laced with far more pain than humor. “I found out he was already married. He had an entire family that I knew nothing about. So no, it didn’t work out.”

“Piper...”

“Don’t feel sorry for me. Please. It was for the best.” She nodded. “He lied. Why would I ever want to be with someone who lied to me like that?”