Ethan woke with a start and banged his head on something. Hard.
He rubbed his rapidly forming goose egg and tried to shake off the disorientation of being jolted out of his slumber. But by what? And come to think of it, where was he? The crick in his neck and the subarctic chill in the air told him he most definitely was not in his bed. Or the plush king-size bed at the Northern Lights Inn. Or any bed, anywhere.
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?”
He lied.
Ethan’s gut churned, and the word Killers flashed in his mind like a warning sign. He still hadn’t told her why he was so worried about her and the sanctuary. He needed to explain. He didn’t want to be another man who lied to her.
He gazed out the window at the snow. It looked almost like cotton candy beneath the soft lights of the auroras, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t ruin the sweetness of this moment. Not just yet.
“Come inside for a while? Please.” There was a tremble in her voice that foretold of the breaking of walls. Of wills. And Ethan knew without a doubt that if he didn’t leave at once, he would cradle her lovely face in his hands and kiss her obstinate mouth. “You must be freezing. I’ve got cocoa. I’ll even forgo the marshmallows, since you’re not a fan.”
How easy it would be to follow her inside her cozy cabin and talk into the wee hours while the auroras swirled overhead. To believe that his presence here had more meaning than just words on a page. To believe that maybe, just maybe, he’d found his way to this place for a reason.
Never had it seemed so easy to believe.
But he couldn’t. Not anymore. And certainly not with her, the wolf woman. Here in the close quarters of the car, with snow billowing around them outside the windows, it felt as if they were somehow protected from the real world. Secluded in their own little snow globe. But that wasn’t reality. Seattle was waiting. It was time to start over. His new life would be a safe one, in a big, anonymous city. No more bears. No more wolves. No more memories. “I should be getting back.”
“To your hotel,” she said flatly. Her next words weren’t spoken, but heavily implied. Because you love hotels so much.
He forced a smile. “Yes, to my hotel.”
“I understand.”
No, you don’t. I don’t understand it myself.
She reached for the door handle, then paused. “Ethan, why are you here? You never told me.”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d go for a drive. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay up here.” He nodded toward the wall on the cabin where the graffiti had been scrawled.
“But the police are keeping an eye on things, and we’ve had no more trouble.” Her lips parted ever so slightly, and the ache in Ethan’s chest became an actual physical pain. “Tell me the real reason. I think there’s more to it than the graffiti.”
Of course there was more to it than that. More than he could admit even to himself. More than he could articulate, when every thought in his head revolved around kissing her.
Time was running out. He needed to put a stop to this. Now, while he still could. “It’s late, and you can stop looking at me like that. I’m not one of your wolves, Piper.”
She flinched. His words had hit their mark with the desired effect. “I don’t... I mean...”
What was wrong with him? He was a mess. And an idiot. Such an idiot that he kept talking when he should have shut his mouth. “I don’t need a champion, Piper. And I don’t need saving.”
An awful silence fell upon them, a quiet that cut to the bone. She gathered her mittens and coat, pushed the door open and fixed her gaze on him, eyes shining bright. “You sure about that?”
She’d seen right through him. Probably because he’d never told a bigger lie in his life. “Piper, wait—”
But it was too late to apologize. Before he could get another word out, she slammed the car door in his face.
He watched her walk away until the swirling snow hid her from sight. Only then did Ethan lift his gaze to the sky, finding it dark and empty. A silent, limitless void. The auroras...they’d gone, leaving him to wonder if he’d only imagined them all along.
* * *
Do not look back. Don’t do it.
Piper’s hands shook as she jammed her key in the front door of the cabin. Her furious exit from Ethan’s SUV would have been far more effective if she could have kicked up some snow in her wake, but the walkway was clear. Apparently someone had shoveled it for her. Someone who she felt like strangling at the moment.
Chalk up another good deed for Ethan Hale. He didn’t even have the decency to play the part of villain properly so that she could feel good about despising him. It was infuriating.
And humiliating. Because for a moment there, she’d thought something was happening between them. At last she’d thought she’d understood him. He’d shared his life with her, his pain, and she’d never seen a man so conflicted. So beautiful.
She’d thought he was about to kiss her. What’s more, she’d wanted him to kiss her. Very much. The intensity with which she’d wanted it had been altogether terrifying.
I’m not one of your wolves, Piper. I don’t need a champion, and I don’t need saving.
How could she have misread things so thoroughly?
Ethan didn’t feel anything for her. He didn’t want her. Nobody ever does.
To top it off, he’d apparently been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Could they possibly have less in common?
And yet...
He’d turned down his family’s millions—maybe even billons—to come to Alaska and work as a park ranger. She hadn’t been imagining those hidden glimpses of a man who felt at home in the woods, among the wind, the trees and her beloved wolves. That was the real Ethan. Somewhere, deep down, buried beneath the pain, that man still lived. The bear hadn’t killed that man. She knew it hadn’t. She also knew she might even be able to love a man like that.
If he would let her.
He didn’t want her. Piper shouldn’t have been so upset. She and rejection were old friends. She didn’t know why Ethan’s dismissal bothered her so much. Beyond what he wrote about her in the newspaper, nothing he thought mattered. At least it shouldn’t. Yet it did.
Maybe because despite all his insistence to the contrary, she had the distinct feeling that no one needed saving more than Ethan Hale. But he was right. She wasn’t the one to save him. The man was full of secrets. And she rescued wolves, not people.
She threw her keys on the kitchen counter and watched his headlights disappear from view through the sheer curtains on the front window. Good riddance. He was gone, and suddenly she felt unbearably lonely.
Her throat grew tight, and everything that had gone on in the past year started pressing in on her. Things she’d managed to not think about in the day-to-day business of life—the ring Stephen had given her on her last birthday, the picture that had fallen out of his wallet that same night when he’d reached for his credit card at dinner, the sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach when she’d seen the smiling faces in the photo. A wife. Two small children.
Piper had known without having to ask. Somehow she’d just known. He’d tried to explain, begged her not to leave, promised to leave his family. Maybe. Eventually.
As if that would have made a difference. She could never have anything to do with breaking apart a family. Families were sacred. Holy. Even more so for someone who’d never been a part of one.
She squeezed her eyes closed. She didn’t want to think about that night any more than she wanted to think about how happy she’d been to find Ethan’s car in her driveway when she’d come home from the tutu-making party. How could she have been so stupid? Again.
She grabbed a winter hat, wound her hair up in a makeshift bun and tucked it inside. Then she pulled her mittens on, zipped her parka all the way closed and walked back outdoors. The moon hung low, swollen and as creamy white as a pearl. She remembered that a February full moon was sometimes called a snow moon, and she could see why, here in this land of perpetual winter.
She didn’t mind the cold. It made her feel more alive, more connected to the world around her. She liked being able to see her breath in the air. She liked the way she could sometimes catch the scent of pine and slow-burning firewood on her clothes, in her hair. As if Alaska were imprinting itself on her, the way wolf cubs imprinted on their mothers.
Imprinting—a lifelong, unbreakable connection to a specific thing—was crucial for wolves. It was what cemented the bond between mother and child. In wolves, it happened when a wolf cub first opened its eyes. The cub saw its mother, and for the rest of its life, looked to her for survival. For comfort. The wolf mother experienced the same phenomenon as she looked into her little cub’s eyes. Biology told her that this tiny creature was a part of her. It was her child, to care for and protect. Forever. A wolf’s eyes fluttered open and a lifelong bond was formed. Unbreakable.
Piper thought it was possibly the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. She wished that human biology could be so simple. What if when a mother first looked into her child’s eyes, an everlasting, unshakable love was born? What if love, real love, happened with something as simple as a glance? Love at first sight. Between a mother and child. Between a man and a woman.
She wished that was how things worked. She wished it so very much. But people were people, and wolves were wolves.
Eyes glowing in the thick darkness, Koko loped toward the fence to meet her. He paced back and forth as she unlocked the gates to his enclosure. First one, then the other.
“How’s my boy, huh? How’s my sweet, sweet boy?” she cooed as he rose up on his hind legs in greeting.
This was what she needed. This. The solace of her wolves. Not her long-lost mother. Not Stephen. Not Ethan Hale. The wolves were her family now. They were imprinted on her heart. They were hers. And they were enough.
They had to be.
She buried her fingers in the velvety cold comfort of Koko’s fur, let him lick the salty tears from her face and wondered when she’d begun to cry.