Shannon and gave Tia a kiss on the cheek. Then he grinned at Luc and said, “Maybe you should just get her a hot walker…you know, those machines they use to exercise horses? Put a bridle on her and turn it on…”
“Not funny.” Tia glared at him.
Luc laughed. “As usual, your timing sucks, Jake. I knew I should have left you on that mountain.” With that cryptic comment, Luc gently led Tia from the room.
Jake stared after them with a pensive look on his face.
Jazzy watched Jake and sensed something more than just a light quip. The guy could be such a contradiction—quiet one minute, then acting like a smart-ass and tossing in a crazy insult the next. She’d seen him get the entire room to laughing, but now he just looked sad. “What’d he mean by that, Jake?,” she asked. “Leave you on what mountain?”
Jake turned around and shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
Adam walked in from the kitchen and handed a cold beer to Jake. “It’s gonna be a long night.”
Jake gazed around the room as if judging everyone’s mood, or maybe he was just trying to build up the nerve to tell his tale. Jazzy wasn’t sure which, but she settled back against Logan and waited.
After a brief hesitation, Jake sat down on a footstool in front of Shannon. She rested her hand on his shoulder and he glanced back at her for a long, quiet moment. Then he looked around the silent room again, at everyone who watched him so intently, and sighed.
“Well, if you really want to know…”
Chapter 3
Jake
“There’s no doubt in my mind, if Luc had left me on the hill in question, I’d be dead.” Jake took a long swallow of his beer. Then he held the bottle in his right hand and stared at it for a few seconds as the memories washed over him. So much had happened since that chance meeting high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. His life hadn’t merely been saved.
It had been forever changed.
“Fourteen, maybe fifteen years ago, I was a paramedic, working in the North Bay, in Santa Rosa. My life sucked, to put it bluntly.”
He laughed, but he knew there was no humor in it. There hadn’t been much to laugh about in those days. “I’d reached a point where I was searching really hard for a solution to life’s many mysteries. Unfortunately, I conducted most of my search at the bottom of a bottle.”
He took a swallow of his beer. Shannon squeezed his shoulder and he glanced at her and smiled. She was the only reason he’d even consider telling his story, the only reason he’d ever choose to revisit that disturbing period of his life.
“I’d taken a few days off to go to the mountains. It seemed the only place I had a clear head anymore was deep in the forest, somewhere far away from people and accidents and crap in general. From death. The past week had been absolutely shitty. A little boy without a car seat in a bad accident. We couldn’t save him, but his drunk mother wasn’t even scratched. A toddler who wandered away from her nanny and drowned in a neighbor’s pool. Kids’ deaths were…well, my head was really fucked and I was desperate to get away.”
He raised his head and looked at Jazzy to get the nightmare images out of his mind. She was the one who’d asked, after all. “I’d planned to camp,” he said, “but I took enough whisky to open my own bar. The more I drank, the worse my future looked. I had some rope in my backpack and that stupid saying kept going through my head—give him just enough rope to hang himself. Well, I had enough rope.”
He reached up and touched Shannon’s fingers on his shoulder, desperate for a more powerful connection. She was the one who grounded him. The one who made him whole. She was also the only one who knew the whole story, even though he’d never actually told her. She’d been there, in those dark memories in his mind when they bonded. He had no secrets from Shannon, but he’d never actually told anyone. Never said the words. Not even to Luc. Especially not to Baylor. He’d kept his pathetic past hidden all this time.
As if it mattered. “It was late in the afternoon and I had one bottle of cheap whiskey left. I had it all worked out. I was going to walk as far as I could before it got dark, finish the bottle, climb a tree, and tie one end of the rope to a branch and the other around my neck. I was too big a chicken to jump, but I figured if I was drunk enough, I’d eventually fall off. Problem solved.
“I saw a big oak up ahead and it looked perfect. Branches were all arranged like a ladder. Had a great view of a pretty little valley. I figured it had Jacob Trent written all over it. I took a swallow of the whisky. I remember looking at the bottle and realizing I was running out of booze and I wasn’t drunk enough yet, and that bothered me.” He paused, remembering. “When I looked up, that’s when I saw it.”
Just thinking about that moment, that pivotal turning point in his life, caught him. He didn’t see Anton’s beautiful home or the people sitting around, watching him. He saw the wolf. The most beautiful creature he’d ever seen in his life, the way it stood there, staring at him.
“It was huge. A big, black wolf, but it stopped in the trail, blocking my way, not threatening me at all. I remember staring at it. I didn’t feel at all drunk, or crazy, or even depressed. And the strangest thing happened. It was like it was in my head, like I could hear the wolf’s thoughts, but they weren’t the thoughts of a wolf. They were a man’s thoughts. A kind and sympathetic man.
“I stared at it so long I lost track of time. Suddenly I realized it was dark and the wolf was gone, and I was still standing there in the trail. Still had the rope in my pack and an empty whisky bottle in my hand.
“I figured I’d had an alcoholic blackout. I tossed the bottle, sort of shook myself, and stared at the tree. I knew there was a reason I had to climb it, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember why. Then I heard someone coming up the trail behind me. I turned around, and saw a man I’d never met before. For some odd reason, though, he felt familiar.”
“I asked you if you had a flashlight.”
Jake’s head snapped up. He hadn’t heard Luc and Tia come back inside. Luc stood in front of him, watching him with a sort of half smile on his face, and the memories flooded Jake with a bittersweet sense of the inevitable. His entire life had changed at that moment. “Yeah,” he nodded. “You said you’d gotten too far from your camp and the sun went down before you expected. I had a flashlight. I went with you, back to your camp.”
Luc helped Tia get as comfortable as she could in a chair next to Shannon. Then he sat down on the floor beside Jake and leaned against Tia’s legs.
Jake smiled at Tia. “Any luck?”
She shook her head. “One measly little contraction. Not dilated any more than the last time Logan checked. At this rate I’m still going to be pregnant at Christmas.”
“I highly doubt that.” Jake reached over and patted her knee.
Jazzy interrupted. “What happened when you went back to Luc’s camp?”
“Ah…the rest of the story.” Jake smiled at her. It was so much easier to talk about it than he’d ever imagined, but these were his friends. His pack. “Luc gave me this honkin’ big pill and said it would take away all my cravings for alcohol.” He laughed. “As
