The Snow Leopard's Baby (Glacier Leopards 2)

The plow slowed down, and Jeff came over to it. He recognized the driver, old Nathaniel Evans, who’d been plowing these mountain roads for the last fifty years.

“You’re that young ranger they’re worried about down below,” Nathaniel observed in surprise. “Don’t tell me...one of the Hart boys. Jeff, that’s it.”

“That’s right, sir,” said Jeff. “Listen, I don’t know if you passed a broken-down car on the way up here—”

“I sure did,” Nathaniel broke in. “Not only that, I got out to look in, and there was a baby seat in the back! I radioed in right away. There’s a mother and child out here in the snow somewhere, and I pray God they haven’t froze to death yet.”

“They haven’t,” Jeff promised. “I found them last night, and we’re up at that cabin up on the slope there, you know the one?”

“Oh yes, the McAllisters’ cabin.” Nathaniel nodded his grizzled head. “They come up here all through the year.”

“Good to know,” Jeff said. “I’m going to have to offer them my apologies and give them some payment for using their cabin without permission. But I’ve got Leah and her baby back there, warm and safe—I just need a way to transport them back down to town.”

Nathaniel eyed him knowingly. “You came up here, you know, differently?”

Jeff nodded. Different was code for shifter among the older population around Glacier. “That’s right. So I don’t have a vehicle. You think you could radio back to the rangers and let ’em know where I am and what we need?”

Nathaniel dug a battered radio out of the well between the seats. “I sure can.”

Through a series of exchanges that Jeff could understand from experience, but which mostly sounded like grunts (on Nathaniel’s part) and static (on the radio’s part), the relevant information was conveyed.

“All right,” Nathaniel said finally. “They should be up in forty minutes or so. Good thing I cleared the road right up here for you.”

“Good thing,” Jeff agreed, grinning. “All right, good luck with the snow.”

“Always need it.” Nathaniel tugged his hat further down on his forehead, and Jeff swung the passenger door shut and let him get on with his plowing.

He truly loved this place. Everyone pulled together to help out, and being part of a community that knew about shifters meant that everyone kept the secret together. He wanted Leah and Emily to be just as much a part of it as he was. He wanted people like Nathaniel to squint at them and say, Oh, that’s right, you’re that Hart boy’s little family.

One step at a time, he reminded himself.

He jogged back into the trees before shifting. Nathaniel knew about shifters, sure, but it was drilled into every shifter kid’s head that no matter what, you always waited until you knew nobody could see before shifting. It was safer that way.

He made it back to the cabin in just a few minutes and opened the door to find Emily grabbing for his pant legs and trying to scale him like a tree.

“Whoa!” he said, surprised. “It’s good to see you, too, honey. Here, let me get my coat off, and then I’ll get you.” He tossed it on the hook by the door and swung Emily up into his arms, where she laid her head down on his shoulder. It almost melted his heart.

“Wow,” Leah said from the kitchen, where she was washing up the breakfast dishes. “I thought she was at the door because she wanted to go back outside. I guess she just missed you.”

All right, now his heart was melting. Or growing. Something to make his chest ache, anyway. “I missed you, too,” he told Emily. “Good thing I’m back already, right?”

“How’d it go?” Leah came over, drying her hands on a dishtowel.

God, Jeff wanted this. Coming home, Emily begging for him to pick her up, Leah coming up to him and asking how his day had been...“It went great,” he said, dragging himself back to the present. “Old Nathaniel radioed in, and we should have rangers coming to pick us up in half an hour or so.”

“Half an hour?” Leah’s eyes went wide. “We have to get this place cleaned up. Oh, the sheets...” She cast a guilty eye back toward the bedroom.

Jeff thought about what they’d done on those sheets, and a wave of heat swept through him. Yeah, it would be best to wash them. “I’ll strip the bed. I think I saw a laundry bag in there, so we can just take them with us, and I’ll wash them at my house and return them when I come back to fix the lock and make sure the place is all completely squared away.”

Leah relaxed a bit. “That sounds good. I’ll finish up in here.”

With Emily tucked into the Pack-n-Play with a toy, they were able to get the place reasonably clean in the next quarter-hour. From what Jeff could hear, Emily would have much preferred to be out playing with them and crawling around the cabin.

“Them’s the breaks, kid,” he said sympathetically as he brought the laundry bag out of the bedroom. “You know, one day you’ll be big and you’ll have to help with stuff like this, and you probably won’t like that much better.”

He wondered what Emily would look like then. As a little girl, as a teenager, as a young woman. He hoped he got to see her grow up, learn to talk, start helping with chores, go to school. Maybe even college. Or maybe if she grew up in Glacier, she’d want to be a ranger. They had hardly any women in the ranks, and that was a shame.

Leah came over. “Okay, that’s everything but the Pack-n-Play. Time to get out, missy.” She leaned over the side of the playpen, and Emily immediately dropped her toy and stretched her arms up, straining to be picked up.