AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yeah, but we were having fun, and that’s important too. And truly? This is fun too. But I agree with you, honey. I think we have about a mile to go,” he said.
The rain was still pouring down on them, the lightning flashing all around them, the thunder rumbling overhead.
“That’s the same bear we smelled earlier,” she said.
“Yeah, it sure was.”
“Good. I’m glad we don’t have a whole slew of them to worry about.”
“Me too.”
They finally reached the cabin, and he set her down on the porch, shifted, and ran through the wolf door. He quickly unlocked the back door for her. She came in, and he locked up. Then they hurried to take a hot shower. She figured they’d just warm up, clean up, and return to bed to sleep, but showering with him was never conducive to sleep, and after washing up, they began making love in bed instead. Now that was the perfect way to get back to sleep on a wild and exciting bear-chasing night.
Chapter 22
The next morning, Kayla and Nate got up late again, loving these lazy mornings after such wild days and nights. They decided to take a walk through an area they hadn’t checked out before and spied something unusual. When they partially unearthed it, they realized it was an illegal old moonshine still with rusting copper barrels and tubing near a stream.
They laughed about that and continued on their way. About a mile from the cabin, Kayla saw an unusual purple plant and was going to take a picture of it but then realized it was the peeling from some unusual fruit instead. Purple with long spikes. She didn’t know what it was. Neither did Nate.
He got on his phone and Googled it and found it was a kiwano, horned melon. He laughed. “I thought it was something alien growing out here.”
“Me too.”
They continued to hike until they reached a boulder the size of a house split in two, the path going between the two halves. “This is really cool.” She took pictures of them standing in between the two boulders. “Glacial age, betcha.”
“Yeah, for sure.”
They finally returned to the cabin and went swimming first. They showered and made grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches for lunch, made love to each other, and then napped. When they woke, it was another trip to the lake for swimming. For dinner, Nate was grilling chicken wings, and she made mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans.
This had been another perfectly fulfilling day.
“You know, I might have planned our activities for the most part while here, but you did an outstanding job on planning meals,” she said.
“Thanks, I just thought of what we both liked and what would be easy for me to grill.”
“Well, everything has been delicious.” They really did complement each other. “Hey, did you want to just take a walk tonight? Not as wolves? Hopefully the weather will hold out.” She ate another chicken wing. She felt she could eat a couple dozen at a sitting all by herself, they were so good.
“What about your shifting?”
“I should be good. So I figured we’ll take a much shorter excursion than we did when we were chasing the bear.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
They cleaned up the dishes after they finished eating, and before it got dark, she and Nate went hiking on one of the trails near the river—a short hike thistime because of her shifting issues and also because the weather was so iffy. Storms were coming in after a while, or they’d stay out longer, but they wanted to see the sunset at the lake too. When they returned home, they wouldn’t have the view they had here.
They were headed in a different direction than they’d gone on any of the other hikes, hand in hand, nuzzling, periodically kissing—a nice, leisurely walk, not like on the earlier ones where they were trying to get somewhere to see something in particular. She was so glad they were having such a great time despite all the interruptions in their vacation earlier.
As much as she knew she shouldn’t be thinking about anything but just her time here with Nate, the news they’d heard about the housebreakers kept bugging her. “It’s so disappointing that those guys all lawyered up and won’t say anything incriminating about themselves. Which means they have to be guilty about more than just breaking into the cabin—and of course coming after us, though they denied they had done anything more than taking a walk after breaking into our place.”
“Yeah, like any of us believe that when they were in full search mode. Not to mention they were armed and pissed off that we bit the tires on their truck and they couldn’t leave. At least when Everest’s father insisted that we were charged with cutting the tires, Peter proved that a wild animal had bitten the tires and ours too.”
“True. Though I can’t imagine how breaking into our cabin, armed to the teeth, could be twisted around into us doing some criminal act against them.”
“I know, right? That’s what Everest’s dad and his team of lawyers are all about.”
“The guns they were carrying were all registered to their owners, so they couldn’t be charged on that, but one of the guns might have been used in the killing of Manning. The police wouldn’t know for sure because Peter and his men couldn’t find any bullets or spent casings. We thought a weaker link would come clean about all that had gone on, but Everest’s lawyers sure made certain they all kept their mouths shut.” That had really frustrated Kayla. “Money could probably get them all off any charges—even murder, if they were responsible for it.”
“I agree, as much as I hate to think they’d get away with it.”
