He finally followed Michael through the great room and into what he knew was Emma’s bedroom. He stopped in the doorway and watched Michael walk over to a window and reach up on the top of the casing, pushing the curtain aside to feel along the molding. When his hand returned, it held a key. He walked over to a long, scarred, unadorned chest and unlocked it.

“Michael—”

“Come here. You need to see this.”

Ben took a guilty look back at the great room, then stepped into Emma’s private domain as the boy lifted the lid on the chest.

It appeared to be full of … frilly things. Woman stuff—doilies, fancy bedsheets, a handmade quilt. And household goods—a teapot and matching sugar and creamer, a dark green candle, a sprig of dried flowers, a crystal vase.

“This is where my aunt keeps her dreams.” Michael lifted the quilt and pulled out a silver picture frame. “She bought this in Portland when she and Kelly took me there for my fifth birthday. Nem said it was for her wedding picture.”

Lovingly rubbing the frame, Michael smiled. “I told her she couldn’t ever get married, that I wouldn’t let any man take her away.” He looked up, and Ben took a step back from the pain he saw in the boy’s eyes. “She told me not to worry, that she’d only marry a man worth loving, and that he would be very hard to find.”

He put the frame back under the quilt and ran his hand over the contents of the chest, touching everything, disturbing nothing. “She told me she’s had this chest since she was ten. I was often with her when she would find something that caught her eye, and she would buy it, bring it home, and it would disappear. It was a long time before I discovered she was squirreling her purchases away in this chest.”

“Why are you showing me this, Michael? A lot of young girls start a hope chest. All of them plan for the day they’ll set up their own home.”

“Nemmy stopped buying things after Kelly left. Once, when we were in a store and I caught her looking at some china, I asked her why she didn’t buy it. She told me there was no more reason to.”

The boy slowly closed the lid and stood to face Ben, his eyes clouded with emotion. “It took me several years to figure out what she meant. Now, I intend to see she gets her dream.”

“Does she blame herself for your mother leaving?”

“In some ways, Nem feels responsible for everything. If a sport comes here and expects to catch a boatload of fish and it rains all week, she feels responsible. If I get caught driving to town, it’s Nem’s fault, not mine. If I run the plane up on a rocky shore and tear the pontoons all to hell, it’s because she didn’t teach me well enough.” Michael lifted his arms and let them fall back. “So she probably thinks she could have done something to prevent Kelly from leaving.”

“So as penance she’s given up her dream of having a home of her own? But this is her home.” Ben pointed to the chest. “Those things should be out, being used.”

Michael shook his head. “No. Nem’s dream wasn’t some unfocused hope. I believe it was aimed at one man in particular. And I realize now that she’s probably loved him since before I was born.”

“Who is he?”

The boy cocked his head and looked directly at Ben. He was silent so long, Ben didn’t think he would answer.

“If I draw you a map, do you think you could find my aunt without getting lost?”

That wasn’t an answer!

And he wasn’t going to get one, Ben realized. This boy was going to dump the problem of his aunt right in his lap, and he wasn’t going to give him a clue.

It was a test. Michael wanted to see if he had a son’s right to ask for help from his parent. He wanted to know if his father intended to take up his battles—not for him, but with him.

So Ben was going to have to find Emma Sands, discover who the woman was in love with, and get her married to the guy. Then he could have his son.

Damn if the boy couldn’t give lessons to Solomon.

“I guess that would depend. Did your aunt take her shotgun?”

“Yup.”

“And that addled moose of hers?”

“Probably.”

It was a diabolical test. A gauntlet of heroic proportions. “You got a compass I can borrow? And a sleeping bag?”

The smile Ben received could have blinded the sun.

The cold, wet forest floor seeping through her wool pants made her uncomfortable, but it was nothing compared to the anger Emma felt as she watched the deliberate desecration of the woods she loved.

Tree huggers were driving spikes into the trees. There were six men, and they didn’t at all look like the fancy environmentalists who had been hounding the state house and the nightly news for the last two months. These men were grubby, disgusting jackals with their own agenda for gaining their objective.

She’d heard about the terrorist act of spiking trees, but that problem had been a distant one, usually in the northwestern forests of the country. Loggers, most of them friends of hers, would come here to harvest these trees, and be ripped to shreds when their chain saws hit those spikes. The saws would disintegrate on contact, sending missiles of sharp, jagged chain into unprotected flesh. Innocent, hardworking men would be maimed and possibly killed.

Emma owned a thousand acres of prime forest herself, and had spent the last ten years adding to the acreage surrounding Medicine Creek Camps. It was to be Michael’s heritage. Whatever decisions the state government made would ultimately affect her, but she couldn’t take sides in this issue. She sold stumpage off her land to the paper and lumber mills, but she was careful what was cut.

That wasn’t enough for the environmentalists. They wouldn’t be happy until all the forested land was rendered untouchable. They were targeting clear-cutting this time, but Emma feared it was just the first of several calculated steps aimed at turning millions of acres of woodland into another forest reserve or national park.

She’d been minding her business this morning, headed for a crystal spring she knew had the sweetest drinking water in the area, when she’d heard the echo of metal thunking against live wood. It was a distinct sound that had rattled around in the forest, and it had taken her a good twenty minutes to find the source.

Now she was wet, and cold, and getting madder and madder the longer she watched. But she couldn’t go charging in, like when she’d rescued Ben. These men were out-of-staters, not neighbors, and they didn’t look as if they would like being discovered.

Yet she couldn’t walk away, either. There was no way she could point out all the vandalized trees, and no way the loggers could take metal detectors to all these trees.

She could scare them off. Stay hidden and blast the air with birdshot, making them think the calvary had arrived. Maybe even find Pitiful and get him to introduce himself, the way he had to Ben yesterday.

Emma checked her shotgun, making sure both the chamber and the magazine were full, then patted her pocket to make sure she had more shells so she could quickly reload. She raised the butt of the gun to her shoulder, aimed it ten feet above the men’s heads, and clicked off the safety.

A large, powerful hand suddenly covered hers, muffling the click of the safety being replaced. Another large hand covered her mouth as a crushing weight landed on top of her, pinning her on the wet forest floor.

She usually wasn’t one to panic, but Emma wildly struggled to dislodge her heavy assailant. Her shotgun was ripped from her hand and pushed away, and she was roughly grabbed by the shoulder and rolled over. Still pinned and her mouth still covered, Emma stopped struggling when she looked up into the iron gray eyes of a very angry Benjamin Sinclair.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t even offer a curse word.

She didn’t even squeak, she was so stunned. The face less than a foot from hers didn’t belong to a city sport or corporate executive. She was looking at a man ready for battle, who didn’t intend to let her win it.