The part of the building closest to the house was built as an office. This was the place he worked, now that he had started again. Of course, he worked for himself these days and he did it at a leisurely pace that would have shamed him four years ago. Back then he’d been consumed with the business of business, caught up in the never-ending race to make more and more money.
And for what?
Nothing he’d gained was worth what it had cost him.
Nothing was worth the loss of his wife and three-year-old little girl.
Don’t go there, his mind warned. There was no use torturing himself when it wouldn’t do an ounce of good.
In the past four years, at least he had learned that much. That no matter how much self-loathing he heaped on himself, no matter how much guilt he suffered, nothing could change what had happened on the road that snowy winter night a week before Christmas. Nothing could undo the fact that he had put his job—his ambition—ahead of his family, and because he had, the two people he loved most in the world were dead.
It had taken him nearly four years to accept their loss, but in the end he’d had no choice. His family was gone but he was alive, and he owed it to them to go on. It was time he continued the business of living, and in building this room he had made a start at doing just that.
Call pulled out the leather chair behind his desk, sat down at his computer and flipped on the switch, waiting with more patience than he used to have for the screen to light up and the desktop programs to appear.
The office was state-of-the-art: three computers, a laptop, and a couple of high-speed laser printers. The computer served as a fax and telephone answering machine and one computer was connected to a rain gauge, aerometer, barometer, and hydra sensor. With that equipment and what weather information he could download, he could do a better job than the weather service of predicting local weather.
Living this far out of town, getting on-line had posed a challenge at first, but satellite technology had come a long way, allowing him lightning-speed downloads, and more recent improvements now gave him uploading capabilities as well.
Mostly, he used the computer to keep track of his investments, to buy and sell stock, and do a little consulting. He wasn’t interested in more than that. If he’d learned one thing from his mistakes, it was not to let ambition get in the way of what was important in life.
Things like watching a sunset, or feeling the glide of a canoe through the pure blue waters of a lake.
Or absorbing the warmth of a woman as she took him deep inside her.
Call’s whole body tightened. Where the hell had that come from? But he only had to think of the woman in the yellow slicker working out in the rain and he knew. Damn, he wanted his life back to normal, or as normal as it ever would be. Some satisfying, no-strings sex was definitely on his agenda—with Sally Beecham, not his irritating next-door neighbor.
Call clicked his mouse and brought up his calendar, relatively empty now compared to four years ago when meetings and appointments filled his days, often lasting until well past midnight.
Between a scheduled call to Peter Held, a young chemist involved in an innovative hard-drive storage program Call had been working on, and one to Arthur Whitcomb, Chairman of Inner Dimensions, the software game company that had been his original avenue to success, he wrote himself a reminder to phone Sally and ask her out on Saturday night.
He would take her to dinner and afterward he would take her to bed.
He was going to start living again if it killed him.
Sally Beecham was a good place to start.
God, it was beautiful here. Unlike anyplace Charity had ever seen. And yet … in the oddest way, the country seemed familiar. The trees and the mountains, the rivers and the streams, all felt rooted in some inner part of her, somewhere deep in her cells. Perhaps it was the books she had read, for certainly she had read a lot of them. Whatever it was, it felt exactly right to be here.
This morning while Maude cleaned up the breakfast dishes, she decided to go for a walk, take a look at the piece of property she had purchased. Promising Maude she wouldn’t go far, she found a winding path that led up the hill behind the house, affording her a view of the creek and the narrow valley the meandering stream cut through.
Across the valley, wispy white tendrils of low-hanging clouds clung to the sides of the mountains, and the air was so crisp and clear she could see for miles around her. The real estate man, Boomer Smith, had told her the property backed up to millions of acres of forest, and looking at it now, it was easy to believe. The trees, mountains, and sky seemed to go on forever.
Inhaling an invigorating breath, thinking of her promise to Maude not to go too far and imagining the sort of wildlife that must occupy such a vast area of uninhabited mountains and woods, she reluctantly started back down the trail.
She had nearly reached the bottom when she heard a noise on the path in front of her. An animal appeared—a coyote, she thought at first, but it seemed bigger than the few she had seen on TV and its fur wasn’t yellow and brown, but gray and silver.
The hair on the back of her neck went up as the animal paused on the trail, his pale gray-blue eyes focusing on her with sudden interest. The beast was taller at the shoulders than a dog or a coyote, lean through the chest, and long-legged, built for power and speed. Wolf, she thought with a sudden chill, trying to recall how dangerous they were and what she should do if she ran across one. But her mind remained blank and completely uncooperative.
She stayed stock-still, frozen in place, hoping the animal would wander away, but it remained exactly where it stood, watching her with keen, intelligent eyes that kicked her already-racing heart into first gear. Her legs were shaking. She glanced down the hill to the house. Shouting for help crossed her mind, but she wasn’t sure they could hear her with the generator running.
The wolf’s mouth opened, showing a set of dangerous-looking teeth. Running might be good, but the animal was standing in the middle of the path, blocking her escape, and she couldn’t figure out how to get around it. Scaring it away seemed her only option. Reaching down, she fumbled for a heavy piece of wood she spotted at the edge of the path, figuring if he didn’t run and decided to attack, she would at least have a chance to defend herself.
Unfortunately, the moment she lifted the length of wood and hefted it against her shoulder, holding it like a baseball bat, the wolf began to snarl and the hackles at the back of his neck went up.
Her knees went weak. What would Max Mason do? But she didn’t remember reading where Max had come up against a wolf and even if he had, she wasn’t as brave as Max.
Her grip tightened on the wood, the wolf began to growl, and her mouth went bone dry.
“Drop the stick,” a man’s voice said from somewhere behind her. “He was mistreated when he was a pup. He thinks you’re going to hit him and he’ll attack in self-defense.”
She knew that deep voice, softer than usual, the calm tone meant to soothe her. Something like relief trickled through her that he was there and she wouldn’t have to face the wolf alone. Very carefully, she knelt and laid the stick back down on the ground near her feet.
The minute she did, the wolf sat down on its haunches and began to wag its tail. Call Hawkins walked up behind her.
“Come here, boy,” he said over her shoulder. “The lady isn’t going to hurt you.”
She stiffened a little as the wolf started trotting up the path in their direction. But his tail was wagging again and a second shot of relief swept through her. The animal sat down at Hawkins’s feet as if he belonged there and her relief melted into annoyance.
She turned to