Free Rain of Fire by Linda Jacobs

smooth things over.
    “I’ve got a few minutes,” Alicia allowed.
    As they settled into chairs, she continued to eye Kyle. “Have you ever modeled?”
    “Goodness, no.” Kyle looked as if the idea was preposterous. “I was in one university or another for eleven years, and after that I did research and taught.”
    “Very well, I might add,” Wyatt interjected.
    A strained silence fell.
    Reaching for her beer, Kyle winced and lowered her arm gingerly.
    “Are you okay?” Wyatt leaned forward.
    “What’s the matter?” Alicia asked.
    “We were out on the lake this afternoon during that quake,” Kyle said. “I slipped and banged myself on the side of the boat. It’s nothing.”
    “It didn’t look like nothing,” Wyatt disagreed. “You have a bad bruise under your arm.”
    “How did you see her naked side?” Alicia asked tartly.

    Kyle met the challenge in the thirtysomething woman’s snapping eyes. In the academic environment where both sexes worked together on as equal a footing as possible, she wasn’t used to dealing with insecurity. For that was clearly the root of Alicia’s animosity, along with an apparent fantasy that there was something between Kyle and Wyatt.
    As the silence lengthened without her or Wyatt explaining how he had seen her bruise, she decided to change the subject. Figuring women liked compliments, she nodded at the collar of gold that lay heavily around Alicia’s neck. “That’s a lovely necklace.”
    Alicia’s gaze took in Kyle’s earrings, along with the ring of fine webbed turquoise from the Kingman mine in Arizona. Kyle had selected it because it reminded her of one her mother wore on her sixth birthday. That ring had not been recovered.
    “I understand academia doesn’t pay,” Alicia observed, evidently finding the silver jewelry wanting.
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” Wyatt said. “Being a ranger doesn’t either.”
    Kyle had had enough. She rose to her full height, suppressed another wince at her injured side, and looked down at Alicia. “I disagree about the pay. Teaching is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, turning out fine students like Wyatt, who take jobs that pay not in dollars but in quality of life and helping others.”
    Someone called Wyatt’s name from the entrance to the dining room.
    “There’s dinner,” Kyle said. She walked away toward the podium where the dining room manager waited.

    After a hearty steak dinner alone, while Wyatt remained with Alicia and joined her and her clients in the dining room, Kyle walked beside Yellowstone Lake. The darkening water was still unsettled, but now she could blame the brisk wind that had blown up in the past hour. The temperature was dropping rapidly, clouds rolling in from the southwest. She’d not checked the forecast since morning, but the unmistakable smell of snow emanated from the thick-bellied bank as it approached.
    Despite the cold, she was still steaming at the scene in the sunroom. She and Wyatt were here to work, as Alicia was supposed to be. The very suggestion that Kyle and he … her face warmed even with the lake wind buffeting her cheeks.
    She turned her attention to the road rimming the shore. A lobby exhibit informed that the present hotel drive was once part of the Grand Loop Road, back in the stagecoach days.
    Franny had told Kyle that her first husband’s parents met at the Lake Hotel at the turn of the twentieth century. She tried to imagine the Chicago heiress and the Westerner, a man a lot closer to the family’s Nez Perce roots due to his mother being a half-breed. That must have been an even more brow-raising combination than Francesca di Paoli turning up to wed a Wyoming dude rancher.
    Kyle envisioned the old days; the hotel drive lined with carriages, the lobby alight with electric bulbs. Each evening an orchestra had played after dinner, now echoed in the piano player or sometimes a string quartet in the lounge. She found it interesting that people thought of the