Kai mounted her camel, Booster, as if it came naturally to her. The lights in the corral area were on, casting deep shadows beneath the inky sky. It was 4:30 a.m. and the stars seemed so close she swore she could reach out and touch them. The sky in the Outback was even more impressive than that of the North American Southwest. Here there was more sky than land, and she felt as if she was part of it. As she swung her leg over the saddle in front of Booster’s hump, he turned his imperious head and looked at her. Jake had told her that if a camel felt a person weighed too much, it would start bellowing and bawling. Booster just blinked at her, his black, liquid eyes watching her with childlike curiosity.
Coober finished tying the pack of food, water and sleeping gear on the back of Booster’s saddle. Jake checked the snugness of the load.
“Mate, you’re going to need an elephant gun out there,” Coober announced. Pointing to the leather rifle sheath that hung just behind Kai’s saddle, he said, “You know that a feral bull camel with his own herd will charge if he sees you. He regards gelding camels as a threat and doesn’t know the difference between them and a solitary wild bull looking for a herd of his own.”
“I’ll take the gun,” Kai said. Last night at the hotel, Jake had steeped her in camel lore until she nearly fell asleep from oversaturation. Kai had been surprised to find out that the wild camels that ranged across the Outback were herd animals, much like a wild stallion with his band of mares. And like a stallion, a bull camel would fiercely protect his herd of females. Only, Jake had told her seriously, a twenty-five-hundred-pound bawling bull charging at full speed would deliberately run into them, killing both her and the animal she rode on impact. That was why having an elephant gun was mandatory—it was the only weapon with a large enough bullet to drop a crazed bull camel in his tracks. Of course, the shooting would go easier if the camel she rode stood still during the charge, but that would never happen. Kai would have to shoot a moving target from atop a galloping camel. There’d be no room for error if the situation arose, Jake had warned. Shoot or be killed. It was that simple.
“Yep, I got it. Hold on a moment,” Coober said, and hurried into the tack room.
Jake mounted Rocket and smiled over at her. Kai was wearing her nylon baseball cap with the fabric down, falling to her shoulders like a sheik’s headdress. The sun was fierce and the material would protect her vulnerable neck and shoulders. He wore the same type of hat.
In the deep shadows, he saw her smile back. “Ready for this adventure?” he asked.
“I’d still prefer a horse, Carter.”
Chuckling softly, he chided, “Now don’t go and hurt Booster’s feelings….”
Reaching down, Kai patted the camel’s soft furry hair just ahead of the saddle. She held a braided cotton rein in her hand attached to the nose peg. Booster’s fuzzy ears twitched back and forth with pleasure as she petted him with long, smooth strokes.
“I think he likes you,” Jake said, grinning widely.
Grimacing, Kai sat up. She had to make it seem as if she could handle a camel getting up without being pitched off. Jake had drilled her on the procedure last night. She had to make Coober believe that she was just as practiced as Jake was, to convince the man to allow them to take the camels to Kalduke.
“Here we go….” Coober called as he trotted out of the tack room and brought the elephant gun around to Kai’s side. “Now, missus, you’re sure you can handle this rifle? It’s a Remington .416 Safari and when you fire it’s got a buck that can knock you off this camel.”
Kai nodded. “I’m sure I can handle it, Coober.” She took the rifle and opened the breech to make certain it wasn’t loaded. When she closed it again, Coober handed her a large box of ammunition.
“My advice is put a round in the chamber and keep it locked and loaded, because a feral bull could be anywhere out there. He’ll see and hear you coming long before you spot him, and chances are you’ll have seconds to pull this rifle out of the sheath and get a bead on the crazy thing. You won’t have time to load the gun before he gets to you.”
“You’ve convinced me.” Kai took a bullet and shoved it in place. Locked and loaded the rifle and placed the safety on it, then passed it to Coober to slide into the sheath. When she saw him begin to place the strap across it, she stopped him.
“Leave it off,” she commanded. “If I need that rifle in a hurry, I don’t want to have to play around with a leather snap.”
“Hmm, okay, missus, no problem. Just make sure it doesn’t fall out.”
“Not a chance,” Kai assured him dryly.
Backing off, Coober set his hands on his hips. He looked at the radium dials on his wristwatch. “It’s nearly 5:00 a.m. The sky is going to turn purple in about twenty minutes. Dreamtime is what the Aboriginals call it—a stretch of time preceding the actual light of dawn. Very beautiful. Mysterious-looking, like a purple curtain. Let’s get your camels up, shall we? I’ll open the gate. Jake, you have a compass and a map? You know which track to take out of here?”
“Yes, I do, Coober.” Jake uttered, “Up!” to Rocket. Instantly, the camel lurched, unfolding his rear legs. Jake leaned far back in reaction. While Rocket straightened his front legs, Jake looked over at Kai. She had uttered the command, and he saw her gracefully lean back, her shoulders almost touching Booster’s hips as he lurched forward. Feeling relief, he saw her take the camel’s roller coaster movements in stride, as if she’d done it all her life. Grinning to himself, he waved to Coober, who stood at the gate.
“We’re ready, Coober. We’ve got a satellite phone on us, and we’ve got your phone number. If we run into any problems, we’ll be calling you.”
“That’s great, mate!” He opened the gate and swung it wide.
Jake kicked Rocket, who took the lead out of the gate. Right at his thigh came Booster, whose slobbering mouth was drooling across his leg, but Jake didn’t mind. He’d told Kai to let the camel stay close to him. After all, they were herd-oriented animals, and she didn’t really have to guide him with the rein at all; he’d just naturally stick to Rocket’s hip like glue. That way, Coober wouldn’t suspect Kai had never ridden or handled a camel. She could learn the fine points once out of eyesight and earshot, on the great red desert that sprawled in front of them.
Kai loved the silence. The soft footfalls of the camel’s feet didn’t disturb the darkness as they moved in a northerly direction. Off to her right, she knew, Uluru sat in the darkness, even though she couldn’t see it yet. The gentle swaying of the camel was a huge surprise to her; it was like being gently rocked by her mother in a rocking chair. As they climbed up and over a sand ridge and were heading down the other side, the camels avoiding the clumps of sharp spinifex grass, Kai said, “Dude, this is a cool ride!”
Jake heard the joy in her tone, and his heart lifted. Kai sounded happy. “I told you it would be.”
“This is really something! Better than riding a horse, that’s for sure.” Kai used her heels and nudged Booster closer to Rocket so that they could travel side by side. “I really like this! It’s like riding a gaited horse, you know that? On a regular horse you get jostled around when it trots, but not on a camel.”
Nodding, Jake kept perusing the area around them. “Because of their size and the length of their legs, camels are the Rolls Royces of riding. Their smooth gait makes horseback riding seem awkward in comparison.”
It was still too dark to see much of anything. They had to rely on the camels’ eyesight not to fall into a hole or trip over clumps of grass.
“Amazing,” Kai murmured. Her foot brushed against Jake’s from time to time as the camels swayed in unison down the ridge and back onto the flat desert. “I could really get used to this.”
“I told you it would be a lot of fun. No sore butt from riding a camel, that’s for sure.”
Smiling, Kai looked up. Her smile dissolved. The black sky was changing, in an almost eerie way. “Jake…am I seeing things? Look at the horizon….” Her voice dissolved into an awed whisper, then silence once again surrounded them.
Jake squinted. He saw the night sky about one-third of the way up from the horizon turning a deep purple color. “That is something…. Coober called it Dreamtime dawn.”
Kai stared in appreciation as the blackness melted almost magically from ebony into a deep indigo color. As the minutes passed, she watched the indigo turn to a soft purple. Within minutes one third of the sky looked like a purple curtain hanging down from space. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and Kai recognized in some dim recess of her primal self that what she was privileged to see was something so incredible and magical that there were no words to describe how she felt.
As she swayed back and forth on Booster, Kai felt the color surround her. The sensation was unexpected. Startling. When she looked around, she found that the entire horizon was purple. In the distance she could see ghostly silhouettes of haunting, ghostlike desert oaks and corkwood trees, plus the stiff arms of the spinifex grass, reminding her of giant crochet needles sticking up everywhere. The world, it seemed, had come to a halt to honor Dreamtime.
“Stop,” she urged Jake, and pulled on the rein to halt Booster. The camel slowed to a standstill. They were on top of another sand ridge, with the mystical, silent curtain of purple surrounding them. Everything, including them, became washed in that ethereal, otherworldly color.
Jake pulled Rocket to a stop. He drew abreast of Kai and saw the rapt attention on her face as she stared, wide-eyed, into the purple curtain of Dreamtime. Looking around, he realized all sound had ceased. It was silent in a way he’d never heard before.
“It’s like we’re in a vacuum,” Kai whispered. “No sound, nothing, between here…and somewhere else…. I feel like I’m not here, not there….” She gestured to her body and the camel she rode.
Nodding, Jake felt the same almost dizzying sense of being nowhere and yet everywhere at once. “I can’t put words to it, either,” he murmured.
Kai sat there, gazing in awe. “Have you ever seen anything like this in your travels, Jake? I haven’t.”
He shook his head. “No, not even in the Middle East. I’ve never seen a purple dawn like this. This is…incredible….”
“I feel like we’re in between worlds, between dimensions right now…neither here nor there. It’s such an odd feeling.”
“Yeah, it is.” Jake stared wonderingly at the purple curtain. It was getting brighter and brighter by the minute, the purple turning to a lavender hue as the sun continued its march toward the horizon. “I’ve seen a lot of dawns, but nothing like this….”
Kai felt herself being drawn powerfully into the curtain. “I feel like…well, I could go anywhere I wanted—anywhere at all. That time no longer exists…and that all the dimensions I’ve heard Grams talk about when I was a kid are here. She told me that the universe is multidimensional, that a shaman who was trained could journey between these worlds…. That’s the closest I can come to expressing how I feel about this color and how it’s affecting me….”
Jake heard the wonderment in her husky tone; at this moment she seemed more like a child than an adult. He felt like a child, too, looking at this silent miracle before them. “It reminds me of a rift in time opening up to reveal other dimensions that I’ve read about in science fiction books,” he murmured, his gaze never leaving the drama before them. “An opening in time, a door to the other worlds…”
“I don’t know anything about Aboriginal Dreamtime, but Coober said this was Dreamtime dawn for them. Do they wait for this opening once every twenty-four hours? And then what do they do? Meditate? Do they use it as an opening and journey into it? I want to reach out and touch it, Jake. And I feel like if I did, I’d somehow connect with it. This is so weird, so incredible….”
“I remember my mother telling me that there are places all over the world where you can find doors that open to the other dimensions. She said that Mother Earth is crisscrossed with lines of energy—ley lines is how she referred to them—and where they cross one another, there’s an opening available.”
“This is more than a ley line, Jake.” Kai swept her hand in an arc. “This is the whole horizon from one end to the other! That’s more than just a crossing point, don’t you think?”
“Logically, you’re right. My mother never mentioned a dawn like this one, or the feelings we are having right now….”
Kai sat back in the saddle and allowed the color to penetrate her. She knew enough from her grandmother to shut off her yappy left brain, which was rooted in the third-dimensional world. Instead, she shifted to her right hemisphere, where Grams had told her all her sixth sense equipment was located. Unfocusing her eyes, she let the lavender color infuse her. Instantly she felt a spinning, whirling sensation at the base of her spine. Heat suffused her spinal column like a pleasant flow of warm water and shot upward. In seconds, Kai felt as if she were going to fall off the camel, the vertigo that followed was so powerful and sudden. Gripping the leather-covered pommel with her hand, she shook her head.
“Kai? You okay?” Jake watched her touch her furrowed brow, her eyes unfocused.
“Uh…yeah, I am. I tried to get in touch with that energy and it knocked me for a loop. I almost fell out of the saddle. I’ll be okay. Just give me a minute….”
Jake moved Rocket closer, until his leg touched hers. “My two cents’ worth is that this phenomenon only happens here in the Red Center, and the Aborigines know how to access it and use it. We don’t. We’re not trained for it.”
“I sure would love to have Grams see this,” Kai muttered. She pulled a digital camera out of a pocket of her vest. “I’m going to catch it on film. When we get back, we’ll tell her about this…” And she rapidly took five photos.
“I wonder if it will come out on film.”
She laughed briefly. “I don’t know.” She tucked the camera back into her vest pocket. Looking over at Jake, she said, “Are you ready to walk between the worlds with me?”
Grinning, he answered, “Yeah, in a heartbeat. I can’t think of anyone else I’d want to do it with.”
“What a glutton for punishment you are, Carter.”
“Maybe…” He nudged Rocket forward with his heels and the camel began its downward stroll to the desert floor below.
To Kai’s amazement, not more than twenty minutes had passed before the purple hue faded into what she would call a normal dawn—where golden light arced up from beneath the horizon. Twenty minutes. Her mind whirled with questions as they rode along in companionable silence. Was it a twenty-minute opening that occurred daily? Coober hadn’t said the purple dawn happened every day. Kai was looking forward to seeing if it would happen tomorrow morning, as well.
“There’s Uluru,” Jake said, pointing off to their right. The huge dome of the mountain was silhouetted against the growing light.
“She’s magnificent,” Kai murmured. “Grams would say she was the chief mountain spirit of this region. She’s the only rock around of that size.”
“There’s something so peaceful about watching Uluru come out of the darkness and slowly materialize before us,” Jake agreed quietly. “She’s magical.”
“So, you believe the mountain is a she, too?” Kai was beginning to realize Jake was far more confident in his feeling assessment of energy than her. She felt comfortable being instructed by him in such things and was more than willing to learn from him.
“Feels like it to me. How about you?”
Kai shrugged helplessly.
“My mother taught me to open my heart and send a stream of green color into whatever I wanted to ‘feel,’” Jake stated. “She told me that all things in nature are either male, female or androgynous. Try it. See what you sense.”
Mouth quirking, Kai muttered, “You got a lot more training in this than I did.” And right now, she was glad of it. Jake could be her eyes and ears on the more spiritual vistas of this trip. He was more than that, she acknowledged. He, too, flew a combat aircraft, and was a crack shot just as she was. In so many ways, Jake complemented her. And without his knowledge of the camels, she’d be at a loss over how to reach Kalduke. No, Morgan Trayhern’s order that all teams consist of a man and a woman was seeming more and more intelligent. She’d make sure on her return that she apologized to Morgan and Mike Houston. They were right.
“I’m sure your Grams wanted to share this stuff with you, but you really didn’t want to hear it,” Jake said.
Kai gave a muffled laugh. “That’s the truth! Okay,” she sighed, “I’ll try it….” And she closed her eyes and shifted her consciousness down to her heart. Imagining a beautiful apple-green stream flowing out of it, she sent the ribbon of color toward Uluru in her mind. As she saw it connect and flow around the red sandstone mountain, she felt suddenly suffused with incredibly nurturing warmth and love.
Shocked by the sensations, Kai opened her eyes. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she felt a wave of soothing, cool energy wrap around her, lingering like a mother holding her child in her arms. Blinking, Kai looked toward the dark shape of Uluru in the distance.
“What happened?”
Giving Jake a disgruntled look, Kai said, “I don’t know….”
“Describe it to me.” He noted the confused look on Kai’s face, the way she frowned and rubbed her chest above her heart.
“When I connected with Uluru, I felt an immediate response from her. Warmth, like a wonderful blanket, encircled me. I mean…I felt it, Jake. And then a cooling, soft sensation came next, making me feel so peaceful. It was real. It wasn’t my imagination….”
“What else?” He saw Kai shake her head, a mystified expression on her face.
“Well…love, I guess. I felt like I was a little child again and my mom was rocking me in her arms. It was such a strong, powerful feeling….”
“Uluru likes you.”
She stared at Jake’s stoic profile as he rode next to her. “What?”
“Mountains are like people, you know? Each mountain has a spirit. They like some two-leggeds, and others they don’t. When you connected energetically to Uluru, her response was to send you her love.” He smiled. “See? You called her a ‘her,’ too. She is female. Now you know how you can tell.”
“I thought it was my imagination,” Kai grumped. She was relieved that Jake knew what gender the mountain was.
“Where does imagination end or begin? You know, in physics right now, quantum theory scientists are calling what you just experienced the realm of the imaginal world. They’ve shown that molecules do respond to us when we imagine something…so imagination may not be a figment, after all. It is connected to our real world in some magical way. So what you imagine can be just as real as you touching your skin with your fingers, Kai.”
Giving him a flat look, she stated, “You’re sounding more and more like a medicine person every moment.”
Jake reached down, pulled his water bottle from the pack and took a swig. After wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he screwed the cap back on. “I was interested in what my mother did, and I hung out a lot with her. In the end, my desire to fly was stronger than following the medicine path, but I did listen….” He smiled wolfishly. “That’s probably why Major Houston chose me for this mission, Kai.”
“It was a good choice. Maybe between us we can find the crystal mask.”
Jake watched as the horizon grew brighter and brighter. “So, I’m not just baggage on this trip?” he teased.
Kai managed a humble smile. “Far from it, Carter. And you know it.”
“Guilty as charged,” he chuckled. With the growing light, Jake could see the plants around them in more detail. The camels were walking at a good, swift pace and he was amazed at how they avoided the nasty hooks on the tops of the spinifex grass that proliferated in clumps as far as the eye could see. Glancing at Kai, he said, “After the sun rises, we’re going to wish it were dark again. Coober said it will be a hundred thirty degrees out here today, no problem. As a matter of fact, they’ve had temperatures reach a hundred and forty or fifty, too.”
“We’ll have to endure it.”
“And we’re going to have to stay alert for feral camels,” Jake warned. “Coober said there are plenty of roving herds between Uluru and Kalduke. Every bull has his own territory, and we’ll never know where one ends and another begins….”
“Until it’s too late,” Kai added. Grimly, she looked around. The silence was now broken by the trilling songs of birds. Flocks of black-and-white zebra finches rose from the desert floor, flitting up to land in the trees and shrubs. A pair of orange-and-green mulga parrots flashed by overhead. “For a desert, this place is really alive with animals and birds.”
“Coober said it was.” As they passed a yellow flowering waxy wattle bush, a group of button quail exploded from it, startling the camels. The birds hurried skyward in a flurry of beating wings.
“Was the Middle East desert like this one?”
“No, vastly different. There was a lot less vegetation. The sand was a gold color, too, not red like this.”
“I’ve never seen sand this hue.”
Jake nodded. “It has a high iron content, that’s why it’s so red.” As the dawn brightened and the sun’s rays were minutes away from flooding the desert plain, he said, “This place feels sacred to women. Red sand. Red dirt. Uluru is red. There’s no doubt in me that this is feminine energy at its finest.”
Kai gave him a slight smile. “I feel right at home.” And she did.
“When we reach Kalduke, it will be interesting to see if we can find this elder woman, Ooranye.”
“I really don’t know if she’ll be there or if she’s a figment of my imagination.”
Jake reached down and patted Rocket’s flank. The camel flicked his ears appreciatively. “Remember, imagination is now considered the realm of what’s possible.”
“We’ll find out soon enough, Carter. So far everything I’ve been dreaming about has come true—much to my amazement.”
“If she’s there, I really want to find out about this purple dawn thing. I’m fascinated by it.”
“Makes two of us, but we can’t forget our real objective—the crystal mask.”
Jake looked around at the awakening desert. The sand ridges reminded him of waves on an ocean. “My gut tells me that some Aboriginal people live in a magical out-of-time place, and my bet is she’ll know where the crystal mask is hidden.”
“Let’s just get through this first day, shall we? Between worry over hormone-driven bulls coming out of nowhere, and this murderous heat, I’ve got my hands full just surviving in the present.”
Laughing, Jake agreed. “By the time we stop after dark, we’ll be so tired we won’t be able to put two coherent sentences together….”
Kai gratefully sipped the strong billy tea. She sat as far away from the small fire as she could. Fire was necessary to boil the water and cook their food, but it was throwing off heat she didn’t want after a day spent in the blast furnace of the desert. Tiredness made her thinking groggy. Jake had just come back from hobbling the two camels so that they could forage on the grass around them before they hunkered down for the night.
“Gawd, it’s hot,” Kai griped, watching as he sat down cross-legged on the sand nearby.
“Coober warned us,” he said, pouring the tea from the old copper teakettle sitting on the wire grate across the fire. Jake looked around. The sky was dark now, the stars like huge, glittering globules, so close that he swore he could reach out and wrap his fingers around one of them. Sipping the fortifying tea, he looked over his tin cup at Kai. Her face showed her exhaustion. The temperature gauge on the saddle had registered one hundred and thirty-five degrees at midday.
They’d finally found a grove of wattle trees to provide enough shade to wait out the hottest hours. Then they’d remounted the camels and continued their trek north until dark. They sky had been bright and clear all day, with nary a cloud to provide shade overhead.
Rubbing her arm, Kai hated the feel of grit on her skin. No matter what she did to protect it, it was coated with the fine sand. “What I’d give for a cold shower right now….”
“Makes two of us.” Jake set his cup down and opened the saddlebags. “I’m glad Coober suggested we bring along kangaroo jerky as a protein source. I wouldn’t want to cook anything over that fire.”
“Roger that.” Kai reached out and took a huge piece of the dried kangaroo meat, which resembled a piece of fried bacon in shape and color. Chewing on the salty meat, she muttered, “Tastes a little like a cross between beef and chicken.”
Jake took a bite and chewed it a long time before swallowing. “Know what the Aussies call kangaroos?”
“I can hardly wait for you to tell me.”
“Desert rats. Can you believe that? I guess they do a lot of damage all over the country eating crops, and people hate having them around.”
“Humph.” Kai eyed the jerky. “I think they’re beautiful.”
“I liked seeing them off and on today. I didn’t know they were out here.”
“We saw a lot of wildlife today. More than I expected.” Kai watched the play of firelight across Jake’s strong face. She was struck by the tenderness in his gaze when he glanced at her. Her heart responded and she tried to ignore it. Jake had been considerate and sensitive toward her throughout the day. Kai found herself wanting to trust him once more, as she had when they were childhood playmates. Could she, with her heart so badly scarred?
Though she hadn’t told Jake yet, she had suffered heartbreak more than once after leaving the res. Ted was an F-14 Tomcat pilot in another Navy squadron, and she’d loved him. Yet he’d walked away from her, deciding he couldn’t handle her brazen independence. Surprised now that her heart was responding to another man at all, Kai wondered if she was truly healing from the past. She must be.
Jake leaned back on his saddle, his head resting in the center. He gazed up at the canopy of stars. “This is an incredible place,” he murmured softly. “It sort of reminds me of when we were kids sitting in our safe place.” Slanting a glance to where she sat with her legs crossed, Jake said, “Remember that place we used to meet? That old gray-skinned beech tree that sat halfway up Raccoon Mountain? We had a nice slope to sit on beneath the trunk and branches.”
“Yeah, I remember….” She would never forget.
Hearing the tenderness in Kai’s tone, Jake lifted his gaze toward the stars once more. “There were nights when I’d go up that hill to the beech and wait for you. While I was waiting, I’d lie on my back in that small opening between the trees, my hands under my head as I gazed up at the night sky.”
Brows knitting, Kai chewed on her jerky. “You never knew when I’d be up there or not.”
“That’s right.” Jake chuckled fondly. He finished off his jerky and slid his hands beneath his head. “We didn’t have phones on the res at that time, so there was no way to communicate. At least, not that way.”
“I was always surprised to find you up there more times than not,” Kai admitted haltingly. “I sometimes wondered if you were a mind reader.”
“No, it wasn’t that, Kai.”
She studied Jake’s face in the semidarkness, the light from the flames playing against the clean, sharp planes of his features. His eyes were half-closed and he was looking at the stars. There was such a sense of safety with Jake; there always had been. Now Kai fought that feeling like a wild horse with a rope thrown about its neck. She told herself sternly that not all men were trouble. Over the past year, men had caused her nothing but pain, one way or another, but it hadn’t always been that way. Pursing her lips, she finished her jerky and wiped her fingers on her trousers.
“What was it, then? How did you know when I was coming up there?” A part of her was more than a little curious. Another part didn’t want to know. Because Jake never presented a threat or challenge to her, Kai felt safe enough to allow her curiosity to show.
She watched as he closed his eyes, and she heard him laugh softly. When he opened them again he looked directly at her.
“I’m not a mind reader, believe me. No, I went up there every night my mom would let me. I didn’t know if or when you were coming, but I always hoped you would….”
Stunned, Kai stared at him. “You mean…you were up there almost every night of the week?” That seemed impossible. Yet she lived on the other side of Raccoon Holler, a huge meadow surrounded by old-growth trees. Jake and his family lived three miles on the opposite side. When she was six years old, after being beaten with a leather strap by her drunken father one afternoon, Jake had found her sobbing in the woods about a half mile from the log cabin where she lived. He’d taken her hand, leaned down and tried to dry her eyes with the red-and-white-striped T-shirt he wore. She remembered vividly that he’d pulled it out of the waist of his jeans, hunkered over her and tugged on the end of the material to awkwardly dab the tears from her face. No words had been spoken, but his actions had expressed volumes. He’d then pulled Kai to her feet and taken her to the huge old beech tree where he’d built a playhouse in the branches. They’d climbed the rickety wooden ladder to the platform among the spreading limbs, where they’d sat together.
Jake saw the shock in Kai’s widening eyes. “Yeah, I went up there almost every evening after doing my homework.”
“Even in winter?” she asked, amazed. It snowed often in the Great Smoky Mountains, and it was a cold walk from his cabin up that slope to his playhouse.
Gently, Jake whispered, “No, not during the storms. But when the weather was nice, yeah, I’d tramp up to that old beech. I knew your father had drunken rages, and he’d blow up and beat the hell out of you at any time, in any season. For me, it was important to be there if you needed someone….”
Kai closed her eyes to avoid his searching look. She turned her face away from him, her hands clenching into fists. Forcing herself to relax her fingers, she opened her eyes and stared sightlessly into the dark. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the bark of dingos, wild dogs of the Outback that were similar to the coyotes of North America.
“I can’t believe you did that.”
“I did.”
“All those years?”
“Yeah.”
Heart pounding with uncertainty, Kai couldn’t stop the tendrils of warmth blossoming within her. “You were almost always around when I’d run up there after a beating. I used to wonder how you knew….”
“I didn’t. But I cared for you, Kai, and I didn’t ever want you to cry alone again, as you did that first afternoon I found you….”
“Why?” Kai wanted to cry, but fought the desire with everything in her. Her feelings for Jake swelled and that scared her more than anything she’d ever experienced in her life. She wasn’t ready for another relationship. And she knew so little about Jake. He could be married, for all she knew, although he wore no ring on his left hand.
Lying down, her head on her saddle, her back toward him, she muttered, “Listen, I’m going to sleep. I’m beat. Wake me up at 4:00 a.m.?”
“Sure. Good night, Kai….”
“Night…” She closed her eyes, hoping sleep would bring her escape from her escalating emotions. Being around Jake was stripping her down, making her vulnerable, and Kai just couldn’t handle that. She had a mission to accomplish. The crystal mask had to take priority over everything, despite the longing she had to feel Jake’s embrace once again.