Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) by Kat Martin Page B

thundercloud that had just passed in front of the sun.
    “For chrissake, are you nuts? You never run from a bear or any other big game animal!”
    She swallowed, too scared to give him one of her usual witty retorts. “I think I’m either going to faint or throw up. I’m not sure which.”
    “Shit.” Propping the gun in a notch on the side of a tree stump, he eased her down on the stump beside it. “Put your head between your legs.”
    She just sat there, pale-faced and shaking, so Call did it for her, his big hand locking around the nape of her neck, easing her head down more gently than she would have imagined.
    “Christ, what is it with you? You’re a frigging magnet for disaster.”
    She lifted her head too quickly and a wave of dizziness washed over her. Call shoved her head back down.
    “What … it … is,” she answered from between her legs, “is I live here, in case you’ve forgotten.” She slowly lifted her head, beginning to feel a little less shaky. “The bears and everyone else”—she drilled him with an including-you look—“are going to have to get used to it.”
    He stared at her with those fierce blue eyes, then began to survey the area around the cabin. “If that’s the case, then you’d better not leave garbage out to attract them. Surely Maude told you that.”
    She frowned. “I didn’t leave out any garbage. I might be new up here, but I don’t have a death wish.”
    “Then what’s that sitting over there?” He tipped his head toward a black plastic sack next to a pine tree, not far from the back door of the cabin. “Looks like garbage to me.”
    Charity got up from the stump and walked over on still-shaky legs to examine it, opening the bag that was only loosely tied shut. “It’s breakfast and lunch scraps from Friday, but I thought Buck burned them along with some of the trash he’s been cleaning out of the sheds. I guess he forgot.”
    Call gazed up the hill toward the property north of the Lily Rose, but Buck’s cabin was a good way farther along the road, well out of sight from where they were. “Yeah, that must be it.”
    “Will he be back?”
    “Buck or the bear?”
    Her lips quirked. “The bear.”
    “Not today. Hopefully, never.”
    “Was it a grizzly?”
    “Black bear.”
    “It must have been a grizzly. It wasn’t black—it was brown.”
    He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe her. “Black bears come in lots of different colors. Grizzlies are a whole different species. You have to learn which is which and you have to react to each of them differently.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “I mean you have to be aggressive with black bears. With grizzlies, the best thing to do is lie down, pull yourself into a protective ball, and play dead. The bear might maul you a little, but at least you won’t get killed … not usually, at any rate.”
    She sagged back against the trunk of the pine tree, her face pale again. “That’s comforting.”
    Call sighed in exasperation. “Dammit, Charity, don’t you know anything about living out here?”
    “Obviously not as much as I should.”
    “I can’t imagine what a woman like you is doing up here by herself in the first place. You did come on your own? No husband, no boyfriend, right?”
    She straightened, beginning to get annoyed. “I don’t need a husband to do something I’ve always wanted to do. Maybe I should have learned more about the animals around here and less about the history of the area, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have come.”
    “This is hard country. Bad things happen up here. Unless you’ve been wearing blinders, by now you’re beginning to see that. Why don’t you accept my offer, sell this place, and go home where you belong?”
    Home where you belong. They were fighting words to Charity, right along with be a good little girl. Her lips tightened. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? For me to sell out and go home. Then you could have your precious privacy