Page 31 of Seven Brides for Beau McBride (The McBrides of Montana #3)

Beau spun on the spot, trying to work out where it had come from.

He slogged towards the far edge of the clearing.

The woods were dark and the lantern didn’t make much headway in the dense blackness; the night was full of moody gusts and the rush of water in the rivulets and creeks as they tumbled downhill.

“Ellie!” he bellowed. “That you?”

There it came again. A mewling kind of noise. He followed it, tripping over tree roots. At least in here the thick tree canopy protected him from the heavy rain. It became just a scattering of restless drops. He pushed his hood back. “Ellie!”

Again, the noise, only clearer now. It was a voice. A girl’s voice.

“Ellie!”

It was definitely a voice.

“Keep yelling!”

Her voice came plaintively through the brooding forest.

“Beau!”

As he drew near, the sounds resolved into words.

“Beau, no, no, no, no, no!”

The voice was coming from above. He stopped, astonished, looking up.

Was she up a tree ?

“Ellie?” He could just make out the pale smear of her oval face in the darkness.

“I said to stay away!” she yelled down at him.

“What?” He lifted the lantern higher so he could see the shape of her against the tree. She was hugging onto the bole of the pine for dear life.

Now that he could see she was alive, he was flooded with rage. She could have goddamn killed herself! People died of exposure in the woods at this time of year.

“I said no !” she yelled down at him. “I told you not to come closer!”

“Are you insane?” he yelled back, approaching the bole of her tree. “What in hell are you doing up there? Why didn’t you go back with everyone else? If you got lost, why didn’t you yell?”

“I did yell!” She was certainly yelling now. “No one heard me. Now get out of here!”

Had she hit her head? She was making no sense at all.

“Oh my God,” she shrieked at him. “Don’t just stand there. Get out of here, before it eats you!”

“Before…” Beau looked around. There was nothing but trees. “Before what eats me?”

“The bear!”

God save him from over-imaginative women. “What damn bear? There ain’t no bears.” There were never any bears, no matter how many times Junebug dreamed them up. And now here he had another infuriating girl screaming bears at him.

“There is a bear,” she screeched down at him. “It’s just over that way, and all your yelling is making it angry!”

“Honey, if anyone’s yelling it’s you!” Beau couldn’t see where she was pointing, and he didn’t care. “Git your ass down here,” he barked. “You’ve got the whole town worried sick.”

There was a deep rumbling sound behind him. Beau spun on his heel. Shit.

There was a bear over there.

He dropped the lantern and hightailed it up the tree as the bear opened its maw and gave a complaining bellow.

“I told you,” she told him, sounding annoyingly smug as he reached her branch.

He looked down in time to see the bear lumbering up to the lantern. It nudged the glass. The heat burned the sensitive skin of its nose, and its enraged roar was so loud Beau felt his ears pop.

“That’s a goddamn grizzly, ” he said, astonished. He’d never seen a grizzly bear in his life.

“It’s certainly rather grumpy,” she observed.

Beau shifted his weight and grabbed hold of the branch above him, to steady himself. The wind made the bough sway beneath them. Ellie was pressed hard against the trunk of the pine, her arms wrapped around it in a white-knuckled embrace.

“How long have you been up here?” He watched the bear anxiously, wondering how the hell they were going to get out of this.

“Oh, since about fifteen minutes into mushrooming…” She sounded rueful. “I didn’t even find any mushrooms.”

“I guess we should be glad it ain’t a black bear,” Beau sighed as he watched the bear circle their tree.

“Why? Are they bigger?”

“No, they climb better.”

“ Better? You mean he might climb up here?”

“I hope not.”

Now that Beau was up close to her, he could see that Ellie was slick from the rain.

They were marginally shielded by the trees, but the spattering was enough to wet her thoroughly.

She’d lost her coat and bonnet and her ugly brown dress was a sodden heavy mass.

He noticed she was trembling from cold and shock.

He did the math. “You’ve been up here for more than three hours.”

“I think it’s four. Maybe five.”

“It ain’t as late as you think. It’s just the rainstorm making it seem dark.”

“My legs say it’s been four, maybe five hours,” she disagreed.

“Don’t you let go of that tree,” he warned her, inching closer. She seemed peaky.

“I wasn’t planning on it. Only, it’s a bit slippery.”

Beau inched closer until he was hard behind her. He wrapped his arms around her and the tree, his arms threading under her armpits. “I’ve got you,” he told her. “You’re okay.”

“That’s nice. But who’s got you ?” She looked up at him. Her face was ghostly pale in the gloom.

Beau winced at the bouncing of their bough. He hoped it could hold the weight of both of them. They were a good fifteen feet up. Beneath them, the bear made a low complaining noise.

“Do they eat people?” Ellie asked anxiously.

“Because it really seems to be interested in me. And I assume not for my conversation. I kept thinking it would get bored and move on but it just sat over there under that tree. Do you think it’s scared of the storm?

Or is it just determined to eat me when I come down?

I read once that bears catch fish right from the stream with their paws.

Do you think it would toss me in the air if it caught me, like I was a fish?

Oh, it looks like it’s sharpening its claws on the bark.

That can’t be a good sign, can it? You don’t think it’s going to climb?

How much do you think it weighs? I can’t imagine something that big climbing. ”

Well, her ordeal certainly hadn’t blunted her tongue. “What’d you do, pick the bear’s personal tree to climb?” He sighed. The animal was definitely settling in.

“I was with Flora and Nancy and we were looking for mushrooms—red ones?”

“No,” he said shortly. “Not red ones. They’re poisonous.”

“Hmmm. Maybe we weren’t looking for red ones, then.”

“Definitely not.”

“Anyway, I started thinking about mushrooms and how odd they are and then I got to thinking about the mushroom in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland— ”

“ Alice’s Adventures in What-land ?”

“Oh, you haven’t read it? It’s delightful. It’s about this little girl named Alice, and this white rabbit who’s always running late—”

“Why don’t you tell me the plot of the rabbit book when we’re safely down and back at the hotel,” he suggested. He tightened his grip on her as their bough dipped in the gusting wind. The rain was strengthening, bitter veils billowing around them, and his hands were stiffening from the cold.

There was another muffled growl. Beau glanced down.

“That wasn’t the bear, that was my stomach,” she admitted.

“I missed the picnic. And I didn’t eat breakfast because I was looking forward to the picnic so much.

I’ve only ever been on one picnic before; the mill ran one for Easter after church once.

They made it compulsory to attend but the food wasn’t very good.

A lot of soggy sandwiches. I don’t like sandwiches much at the best of times, do you?

But that could be because I’ve never really had a good one. ”

“Who on earth did you talk to before I got here?” Beau rested his forehead against the back of her head, trying to work out how to get them down from the tree before the wind blew them all the way to Wyoming. Her braids were wet against his skin. Her hair smelled nice. Like rain on a flower bed.

There was a flicker of lightning and then the distant bass crack of thunder.

Beau groaned. That’s all they needed.

“You didn’t bring any food, did you?” Ellie asked him. She wriggled every time she looked up at him and the sensation of it was alarming. In many different ways.

“I cain’t say packing food was top of my mind when I came belting into the woods to rescue you.”

“Shame, because I’m hungry enough to eat a bear.”

The bear growled.

“Sorry,” Ellie called down to it.

“Stop annoying it.”

“It’s possible it likes my company. Maybe that’s why it’s still here.”

“Stop talking to it, then.”

Lightning chased the woods fulgid white. A few heartbeats later an ear-splitting crack rang out. Ellie moaned as fire blazed in the distance.

Beau swore. “We have to get out of this tree. Away from all the trees,” he told her, striving to sound calmer than he felt. “That lightning means business.”

The lightning was forking directly overhead now, and the bear was pacing and growling below. There was another earth-rumbling crack. Ellie screamed and jumped.

“Stop!” Beau gasped. “Or you’ll send us both tumbling.” He held her tighter. The feel of her in his arms gave him that flustery feeling again.

Crack.

The thunder was so loud it felt like it was inside of him.

It came hard and fast: crack crack crack.

Terrified, the bear bellowed and took off, crashing through the undergrowth in its panic.

“Do you think it’s okay?” Ellie wailed.

“You’re worried about the bear ?”

“The poor thing.”

Beau was more worried about them than the bear.

“Come on,” he said, gently extricating himself from her.

“Now the bear’s run off, let’s get out of here before we get struck by lightning.

” He inched backwards, looking down. Hell, they were a long way up, and all the boughs were thrashing about in the storm.

“How did you get up here anyway?” he asked, abruptly.

He couldn’t imagine her scaling the tree in those skirts.

“I don’t know. The bear roared at me and the next thing I knew I was up here. Like my body had a mind of its own and knew just what to do.”

“Do you think your mind-of-its-own body can find its way down again?”