“I don’t know if there’s any time limit on grief. Or anger.”

Chase stared. “It’s the anger I mostly feel now. How did you know?”

“You lost something important to you—I don’t need to hear the story to know that. I can hear the mountains in you when you talk. I sensed them in you when…”

“When, Lily?” Chase murmured, her fingers closing around Lily’s. “When?”

“When we walked by the lake,” Lily whispered, her gaze searching the depths of Chase’s eyes, the deep blue of the sky. The dark clouds of old pain had passed, for now, and a weight lifted from Lily’s heart. “When I watched you swimming at dawn.” She took a deep breath. Too much had been said already to pretend nothing had passed between them. “When we kissed.”

“See?” Chase rubbed her thumb over Lily’s palm. “Told you I was lucky.”

Lily smiled around the sadness for Chase’s loss. “I—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Sarah stated in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sorry at all, “but Nat’s on the radio looking for you. Says they need you up at Crandall’s trailhead—some dogs have treed a bear, and Fish and Wildlife are requesting an assist.”

Chase frowned and pulled her phone from her pants pocket. “Hell, it’s dead. Never got a chance to charge it.” She rose and glanced at Lily. “Sorry.”

“Of course, go,” Lily said.

Chase hurried away, and Sarah said, “When did you run into her? I didn’t know she was back.”

Lily reached for her coffee. “She was coming back from a swim.” Technically true. “I was up early—it’s so quiet here at night, I can’t sleep.”

Sarah frowned. “I told Nat she’d just gotten back, but that’s what it’s like this time of year.”

Lily had an anxious moment, thinking about the physical toll of Chase’s job after what Chase had told her about her injury, and then just as quickly reminded herself that Chase was fit and healthy or she wouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place.

“She loves it,” she said quietly.

“She tell you that?” Sarah asked, an odd curious note in her voice.

Lily rose and smiled, thinking about moonlight walks and kisses. “She didn’t have to.”

Chapter Nine

Lily glanced up from the computer where she was finishing a notation on the last of four teens who’d presented to the walk-in clinic that morning with complaints of intestinal distress. Apparently they’d decided to pick their own blueberries the afternoon before. After she’d determined what they’d eaten was a close relative of a blueberry, not quite as well-tolerated by the human intestinal tract, but fortunately, not poisonous, she’d prescribed some symptomatic relief and given them all a pass on the day’s activities.

Expecting to see another of the group, she half rose behind the counter in surprise. “Chase!”

“Morning, Lily.”

“Did you just get back?” She’d looked for the Jeep out her bedroom window as soon as she’d risen and hadn’t seen it. Chase looked surprisingly awake after what Lily presumed was a night of work. And Lily’s morning took on a new dimension of expectation. Chase.