by Nicole Helm
“Backcountry camping is serious business,” she said to him in her firmest park ranger voice as he opened the camper shell on the back of the truck.
“I’ve been camping before,” Gage replied, moving things around and barely paying any attention to her.
“Backcountry camping?”
“Yes.”
“In the Badlands?”
He hefted out a sigh, stopped what he was doing and turned to her. He folded his arms over his chest, which was a distraction for a moment or two. The cuff of his T-shirt ended right at a bulge of muscle, made more impressive by the crossed-arm pose. Something wild and alarming fluttered low in her stomach.
Which wasn’t important when he was talking about hiking without a permit and without taking the appropriate safety precautions.
“Sweetheart, my father left me in the Badlands for seven nights when I was seven years old. I can handle this. So can you.” Then he went back to his rummaging, pulling out one backpack and then another. They were bigger backpacks than the one she’d brought—these were clearly designed for backcountry camping.
“Put anything you brought that you’ll need in the green one,” he said, as if he hadn’t just confided something truly awful about his childhood.
Since Felicity didn’t know what to say, she did as she was told. She pulled out the things she’d need: a dry set of clothes and a sweatshirt, her knife, hat, water bottle and water treatment supplies.
They were silent as she added her things to the backpack Gage had given her. He shouldered his pack, then helped her with hers, working with her to adjust the straps so it hit her where it should.
“You ready?”
She nodded, though it was a lie. She didn’t think she’d ever be ready for being framed for murder. For hiking, illegally and ill prepared, through the Badlands with Gage Wyatt.
But here she was, and she’d have to face up to it. Ready or not.
* * *
GAGE THOUGHT HE’D managed to escape the uncomfortable piece of his childhood he hadn’t meant to share with her. He didn’t talk to anyone about his father’s rituals. The initiations, the tests. Not even Brady, because though they’d had to go through them at the same times, what with being born on the same day and all, Ace had always kept them separate.
None of his brothers had ever truly discussed it. They mentioned it and laid out the bare facts when need be. But there was no looking into what it had felt like to jump through Ace’s hoops.
Gage had no interest in ever going there.
“Why did he do it?” Felicity asked, as though she could read his thoughts.
Gage shrugged. If he never discussed it with people who’d understand, he sure wasn’t going to discuss it with Felicity. But as they hiked, using a topography map and GPS tracker and his own internal sense of the land, silence ate away at his resolve to forget he’d ever brought it up.
“He called it our initiation,” Gage grumbled, stopping their progress to determine if they should head east or go ahead and climb the column of rock in front of them.
“Initiation to what?”
“To the Sons.” To the Wyatt dynasty. Gage pointed at the map, his father’s voice echoing in his ears. He had to point at the map so he didn’t give in to the urge to cover his ears with his hands and block out Ace’s insidious voice. “What do you think? Around or over?”
Felicity peered over his shoulder. She’d fixed a baseball hat on her head and pulled her hair through the hole in the back. She’d tied her windbreaker around her waist. Underneath she wore a dark red T-shirt. She’d always been a shade too skinny, but working at the park had packed some muscle on her.
She looked more capable park ranger than inconsequential waif. It was a good look for her, one he had no business noticing at all, let alone here and now.
“Looks like around will be better,” she said, reaching over his shoulder and tapping her finger on the paper. “Best place to camp is going to be over in this quadrant.”
He took her advice, ignoring the flowery scent of her shampoo or deodorant or something that shouldn’t be distracting but was.
They started around the column of rock. The sun was high in the sky, beating down on them. It would have been a good time to stop for water, but it seemed like a better idea to find a good spot to camp.
As far away from this conversation as possible.
“Did you want to be in the Sons?”
“Of course not,” Gage snapped at the unexpected question that felt more like a dagger than a curiosity.
“I mean, when you were little. When you didn’t know any better.”
“I always knew better.” You didn’t spend most of your childhood watching your father threaten your mother’s life—knowing she got pregnant over and over to keep him from going through with it—then watch her lose everything when her body simply couldn’t carry another child into this world.
And you couldn’t believe it was the right way of the world when you had an older brother like Jamison, who had spent his first five years with Grandma Pauline, telling you the world could be good and right.
“I’m sorry,” Felicity said after a while, her voice almost swallowed by the wind. Unfortunately, not enough for him to miss it. He didn’t want her apologies, or this black feeling inside of him that threatened to take his focus off where it needed to be.
He ignored her sorry and these old memories, and focused on one step in front of the other. It wasn’t the first time in his life he’d counted his steps, watched his feet slap down on scrub brush. He’d thought those days were over.
But was anything ever really over? Ace could die and there would still be the mark he’d left on hundreds—if not thousands—of people.
And first on that list were six boys with the Wyatt name who had to live with what they’d come from.
“Do you know anything more about... It’s just I never knew my mother. When they placed me with the Knights they said she was dead. I don’t know how. I thought I didn’t want to know. No. I don’t want to know what happened to her or why. But this connects to my father. This half sister I didn’t know I had and who’s now dead. Who was her mother? Did my father beat her like he beat me?”
“Jamison’s working on it,” Gage said, trying to infuse his words with gentleness. What terrible questions to have to ask yourself.
“It should be me. I should go up to my father and ask him those things.”
“Well, maybe you can at some point.”
“Some point when I’m not going to get arrested, you mean?” she demanded irritably.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
She sighed heavily next to him. “I don’t ever want to talk to him.”
Gage gave her a sideways glance. She wasn’t just certain, she was vehement. Her jaw was set, her gaze was flat and those words were final.
“Then let Jamison do the research on the woman and your father.”
She wrinkled her nose, looking at her feet as they walked. “Isn’t that cowardly?”
“There’s nothing cowardly about your family helping you out, Felicity. Where would Jamison or Cody be if they hadn’t let each other help? Where would Cody and Nina be if you hadn’t helped them?”
Felicity frowned, but she nodded. “Water,” she said, stopping their hike and shrugging off her pack. Gage did the same. They took a few sips from their water bottles and passed a bag of beef jerky back and forth. When they were done, Felicity dutifully sealed the empty bag in a plastic zipper bag and stored it in her pack. Ever the park ranger.
“Ready?”
She nodded, and they started hiking again, in silence for a very long time. When Felicity spoke again, he could tell it was a question she’d been turning over in her mind.
“How do we prove I didn’t do it if we’re all the way out here?”
Gag
e didn’t know exactly how to respond. He’d promised Felicity the Wyatts wouldn’t take over and leave her in the dark, but the nice thing about leaving people in the dark was they couldn’t take actions that might undermine what you were doing until it was too late.
Still, a promise was a promise.
“This is just step one.”
“Step one?”
“When they come to arrest you, the story will be you went backcountry camping to get your head on straight. By the time they send a team out to find you—if they even do, they might wait—you’ll be gone.”
“Gone where?”
“That’s step two. Let’s focus on getting through step one.”
“Gone where, Gage?”
He sighed. There was no way getting around it. “Back to the scene of the crime.”
Chapter Six
It was a very strange thing to set up camp with Gage. As a ranger Felicity had done this with all sorts of people—friends, coworkers, strangers.
But never a Wyatt.
Which shouldn’t be different or feel weird. The Wyatt brothers were her friends. She’d shared meals and life with them.
Trying to convince herself this was all normal came to a screeching halt when they had everything unpacked. “Wait. There’s only one tent.”
She looked at Gage, a vague panic beginning to beat in the center of her chest. He merely raised an eyebrow, the sunset haloing him in a fiery red that made the panic drum harder.
“Safest if we’re in the same tent,” he said after a while.
She wasn’t sure how to describe the sound that escaped her—something strangled and squeaky all at the same time.
“Problem?”
“No. No. No. Of course there’s no problem.” There was a catastrophic, cataclysmic event happening inside of her, but no problem.
“Afraid I’m going to try something?”
She tried a laugh, which came out more like a bird screech. “I like Brady,” she blurted, as if that had anything to do with anything.
“I’m very well aware.”
“And you like...” She thought of the women she’d seen Gage with. Rare. He never brought girlfriends home.
Still, every once in a while for a birthday or something, the Wyatt boys and Knight girls would get together in town. Go to a bar or something. Gage’s dates were always... “You like breasts.”
He choked out a laugh. “Yeah. Crazy that way. Hate to break it to you, you have those.”
She looked down, even though of course she knew she had breasts. Not ever on full display or anything, but yes, she had them. They were there. And why was she looking at them while her face turned what had to be as red as the sunset?
Had Gage noticed her breasts? Why did that make her feel anything other than horrified?
“If it bothers you, I can sleep outside.”
“It doesn’t bother me.” She was pretty sure she’d have the same ridiculous reaction to sharing a tent with Brady. Sharing a tent was intimate and she didn’t have an intimate relationship with...
Anyone.
But there was one tent up, and perfectly rational reasons for them both sleeping in it. It would be fine, regardless of the jangling nerves bouncing around inside of her. She’d survived those for almost her whole life, even learned to overcome them for the most part.
She was struggling today because people thought she was a murderer. Someone was trying to make it look like she was a murderer. It was messing with her brain in many different ways, not just one.
“Hungry? I can cook up some dinner,” Gage said, acting as though this was normal and fine and not at all scary and weird.
“I hope you know you can’t have a campfire. Backpacking stove only. We can’t go breaking every park rule just because we’re in trouble.”
Gage didn’t respond. His mouth quirked, his eyebrow raised, and he pulled a backpacking stove out of his pack.
Brady never did that arched eyebrow thing. Brady’s lip never quirked in that sardonic way at her. And his eyes never went quite that shade of brown, as if there was a hidden intensity under all that...
What on earth was wrong with her?
She was camping with Gage to avoid being arrested for a murder she darn well didn’t commit.
“Park rules are important,” she insisted, though he hadn’t argued. “People try to get away with all sorts of things that hurt the cultural and ecological integrity of the land and threaten the safety of the park.”
“Believe it or not, I’m well versed in what people will try to get away with.”
“I suppose you think your laws are more important than mine?”
He cocked his head as he set up the stove and measured out water into a pot. “Why do you assume that?”
“Because...” She trailed off because she didn’t have a good answer. Gage had never given any indication he thought his job was more important than hers. Nor had any of the other significant people in her life. Certainly she’d had a few park visitors who liked to sneer at how not important she was to them, but—
“Sit. Eat. Stop...that.”
She blinked at him, startled by him interrupting her thoughts. “Stop what?”
“Whatever it is you’re doing standing there with your mind whirling so hard I can hear it.”
“You cannot hear my brain.”
“Near enough. If you’re going to occupy yourself, might as well focus on the problem at hand, not how much more you’d rather spend a night in a tent with Brady than me.”
“That isn’t what...” But she couldn’t explain in a way that made any sense.
She acquiesced and sat, then took the tin bowl he offered her. She was hungry. Tired, too. And though she knew he couldn’t hear her brain moving, it felt like it was galloping around at rapid pace, and she wasn’t sure why.
She’d sleep under the same canvas roof as Gage Wyatt. So what?
So someone wanted to frame her for murder—she had a big group of people willing to help her prove she hadn’t actually done it. She had Gage to make sure she didn’t spend a night in jail.
They ate in silence, watching the sun go down. It might have been peaceful, but she didn’t feel any kind of peace. Just anxiety and something else. Something edgier and sharper than the sheer manic ping-ponging of anxiety.
“He doesn’t get you, Felicity,” Gage said quietly, staring intently at the bowl in his lap as the last whispers of light faded away. “I’m not saying that to be cruel. I just think you could find a lot better focus for your... It’s not going anywhere.”
It took her a minute to realize he was talking about Brady, and then another minute before full realization hit.
She couldn’t find the words to argue.
“He can’t ever...” Gage swore under his breath. “Brady is too noble to ever see you as anything other than Duke’s foster daughter.”
It should hurt. She should be outraged and embarrassed and feel horrible. Intellectually, she told herself that. But there was no crushing pain of a heart breaking. No heated moral outrage that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
She was under no illusion Brady looked at her and saw the real her. She’d never asked herself why she liked him anyway, why she convinced herself he might someday.
It wasn’t comfortable that Gage had been the one to point out having a crush on Brady didn’t make much sense. Her face was on fire, and she couldn’t find a way to defuse her embarrassment.
She didn’t think Gage’s words were cruel. In fact, she knew he was trying to be kind. Trying to show her it was never happening.
She was in the middle of the stark Badlands with his twin brother of all people telling her things she already knew.
Because she did know. She told herself she didn’t. She told herself she was holding out hope for Brady to come aroun
d, but she was aware of the truth.
Brady was safe. In more ways than one. Safe because he wasn’t edgy or volatile. Because he was exactly what Gage said. Too noble to ever consider one of Duke Knight’s daughters in a romantic way.
She didn’t want Brady in reality. She liked the idea of him. Liked pining after him. She could tell herself she had normal feelings for a guy and never actually have to deal with it. Know she’d never ever have to deal with him reciprocating.
The truth was Brady was never going to break his code of honor and see her as different—and she’d known that.
She’d liked him because she’d known that.
“Maybe I don’t need him to get me,” she managed to say, when what she really meant was, Maybe I don’t want anyone to know me.
Gage shrugged. “None of my business,” he muttered.
Which was more than true. Totally and utterly true.
She couldn’t for the life of her understand why he’d brought it up.
* * *
GAGE DID NOT sleep well. The tent was small, and it smelled like a woman. He’d never camped with a woman before.
Never will again.
Maybe if you were all wrapped up in the woman it would be nice enough, but with a platonic friend you had some more than companionable feelings for it was too crowded, too all-encompassing. Who’d want to be right on top of anyone like this?
He looked at Felicity, who was fast asleep only a few feet away from him.
She was too pale—he could tell that even in the odd cast the faint light made against the blue nylon of the tent. Her freckles were more pronounced than usual, and though she slept deeply and quietly there were shadows under her eyes.
He felt a stab of guilt, a twist of worry that he’d done something rash without fully considering the consequences. He’d put her through too much just so she didn’t have to spend a few nights in jail.
Jail. Whether it was a holding cell or the facility Ace was at, she’d look worse in there. She was an outdoorsy person. Better to be hiking through the rigorous Badlands backcountry than locked in a cell, that he knew for sure.