Megan squirmed free of the sleeping bag and sat up, only to scramble back under the covers when she realized how cold it was. She reached out one hand to her clothes, sighing in relief to find that Jack had set them by the fire to warm up. She pulled everything under the sleeping bag with her, then contorted in every position imaginable while getting dressed.
She was panting by the time she slipped into her boots and stood up. Not bothering to put on her ski suit yet, she headed behind her favorite tree to take care of business, then hustled back to the fire and slipped into her suit. She grabbed the bottle of water and power bar and headed toward the lake in search of Jack.
She spotted him standing beside his snowmobile, his feet planted wide and his hands on his hips. And though he was a fair distance away, she’d swear she could see a look of disgust on his face. She took her time walking out on a snowpack hard enough that she barely sank in, eating the power bar and drinking water that tasted faintly of beer.
The closer Megan got to him, the more her heart raced with the memory of last night. He looked…he looked…oh damn, she had fallen in love with him all over again!
“Good morning,” she said when she finally reached him.
Jack started to say something, but when his gaze met hers he snapped his mouth shut without saying a word. Two flags of color appeared on his cheekbones. Megan took another bite of her breakfast to cover her smile. The man was actually blushing!
Over their lovemaking last night?
He was such an easy mark. “Do you think you’ll be able to get it up soon—I mean unstuck soon, or are we going to have to walk? Or,” she purred, “we could just cozy back up to the fire and wait for the cavalry to arrive.”
His cheekbones turned nearly purple. He walked around her and headed to shore, still without saying so much as good morning. Megan polished off the last of the power bar and gulped down the rest of her water as she grinned at his back. She was such a bad person, but really, a saint couldn’t have passed up an opportunity like that. Teasing Jack was easier than shooting fish in a barrel.
She stuffed the wrapper and bottle in her pocket and walked around his sled, eyeing it in sympathy. It was stuck up to its running boards in slush that had frozen solid overnight. They’d need a chisel, if not a blowtorch, to free the damn thing.
She turned in a circle studying the landscape, trying to figure out where they were, and realized she had absolutely no idea. She hadn’t been this far north on the lake in ten or twelve years. Megan started walking to the ledge sticking up through the ice, curious about where her sled had gone in.
She could see the tracks Jack had made dragging her out, the rope he’d used, and her helmet lying on the ice several yards away. There were more tracks indicating where he’d walked up onto the north side of the ledge, where the ice wasn’t weak. From there his footprints moved down into the water. She couldn’t see any sign of her sled, since the hole had skimmed over with a thin layer of ice, and she gave an involuntary shiver. Jack must have stripped off his clothes on the ledge, gone into that dark, freezing lake to get the dry sack, then scrambled back out and quickly dressed.
She really shouldn’t have teased him this morning.
There were other tracks going in and out of the hole, as well. Megan walked toward them, giving the ledge a wide berth, and stopped beside the carcass of a half-eaten fish. So, she’d been right, some…thing had been fishing. Something heavy. The impressions in the snow were deep, seven or eight feet long and about three feet wide, and if she wasn’t mistaken, some of them looked to be from a tail. She hunched down and touched the snowpack where what appeared to be a wing had brushed against it, then stood up and started following the tracks away from the hole.
“Get back here!” Jack shouted.
She turned to see that he was stopped halfway out to his sled, his arms full of the fir boughs from their bed. Had he just shouted an order at her?
“Excuse me?” she shouted back.
“I don’t need you wandering off and getting lost. Get back here and help me.”
She propped her hands on her hips. Oh, she was sooo glad she’d teased him this morning. “I never get lost!” she hollered. “And I don’t respond well to orders being shouted at me, either.”
He dropped the boughs. “O-kay then,” he said, his voice turning dangerously low—just like her father’s did when he was nearing the end of his patience. Somehow, no matter how softly her papa spoke, his voice carried an unreasonable distance, just as Jack’s did now. “Would you please come back here and help me get this sled out?”
Megan eyed the tracks leading out onto the lake, heaved a heavy sigh, and started trudging back to his snowmobile. He was mad at the sled, not her, and now was not the time to push him over the edge. Besides, the sooner they got home, the sooner she could ask Kenzie about the creature she’d seen.
But someday soon, she would have to find out what happened when a self-professed pacifist exploded. He could deny it until the cows came home, but Jack Stone was a warrior, and when warriors exploded…they rarely took prisoners. That’s why a smart woman learned the consequences of going too far before she found herself married to one.
Megan stopped to pick up some of the boughs he’d dropped, and tossed them down with the others when she reached his sled. “Do we have something we can use to chisel the ice?” she asked, deciding to defuse the tension with a show of cooperation.
Good Lord, she was turning into her mother!
He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves—even though it was likely only ten degrees out—then pulled a small hatchet from his belt. He got down on his knees and started chopping the ice along the running boards.
“Great. Do we have another hatchet I can use? Wasn’t there one in your saddlebag and one in the dry sack?
“I’ll chop, you watch for planes.”
Wow, a whole sentence. She was making progress. She plopped down on the fir boughs with a sigh. Since he seemed to be more in the mood for listening than talking, Megan decided to broach the subject of how they’d gotten into this mess in the first place.
“Um…about what we saw last night,” she said.
He stopped chopping.
“I think we should keep it to ourselves.”
He straightened to his knees, studying her. “Why?”
“Well…in the first place, nobody would believe us.”
“And in the second?”
“If they did believe us, then everyone in town would likely get all scared. And when people get scared, they sometimes do foolish things.”
“Like?”
Megan sighed. This wasn’t going at all well. “Like they might decide to hunt it down and kill it.”
“It,” he repeated. “Exactly what is it, Megan?”
She lifted her shoulders. “How would I know? I saw exactly what you did, and I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Exactly what did we see?”
Okay, if he wanted her to spell it out, she would. “We saw what must be a long-lost descendant of a dinosaur. You know, like they think the Loch Ness monster is? Only our creature seems to be a cross between a ptero-dactyl and a…a large lizard of some sort. It can fly, so maybe it’s a winged reptile…or something or other.”
Oh, that had sounded intelligent. But she’d be damned if she would say what it really looked like.
Jack apparently had no such reservations. “You don’t think it looked like a dragon?”
“Dragons are mythological. And what we saw was definitely real, so it’s likely reptilian.”
“And the slime I found at the break-ins? Was that from a reptile?”
“It couldn’t be. Reptiles have scales and they’re dry. Amphibians are slimy.”
He sat back on his heels. “So we’re talking about two different creatures, then? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“I have no idea who or what broke into those shops. Maybe the kids concocted some sort of slimy goo to throw you off their trail.”