His eyes were all over her, assessing her condition. Then his black brows met over his nose and he sniffed. And sniffed again. “Do you smell gas?” Suddenly he began to swear and tore open his seat belt. “Shit! That rock must have torn a hole in the gas tank.” He turned his fierce regard on her. “Unbuckle your seat belt, Red.” When she simply regarded him blankly for a second, he snarled, “Move. We’ve gotta get the hell out of here.”
She moved, and once free of the restraints, reached for the door handle. His voice stopped her.
“No,” he said. “Go out the window. There’s bugger-all way of knowing what kind of damage was done to the doors, and one spark could blow us sky-high.”
She stared at him as she battled her way free of the airbag and pushed back evergreen branches to clear a space for herself in the window opening. “A spark from what?”
“Metal striking metal, darlin’. Just takes one and boom! We’re barbecue.”
“My God.” Catherine paused to stare at him. “You’re just full of cheery tidings, aren’t you? How do you know these things anyway?”
Sam’s teeth flashed with feral whiteness in his tanned face. “Hey, we’re alive, sweet cheeks—it doesn’t get much cheerier than that. And I don’t know how I know. It’s a guy thing, I guess.”
She cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “Absorb it through your penis, do you?”
“Big guy’s been known to do some of my best thinking,” Sam agreed, and gave her leg an appreciative pat as she eased up onto the window ledge. What the big guy was thinking right this moment, however, he acknowledged as he watched her pull herself out, was hardly appropriate to the circumstances.
The thing was, he’d been so busy beating himself up this morning for all the ways he’d screwed up that he’d lost sight of the fact that Catherine was nobody’s pushover. Somehow he’d gotten it into his head that along with everything else, he’d taken unfair advantage of her inexperience. But if Red hadn’t wanted to make love with him, she sure as hell wouldn’t have.
Damn. He fought a dippy smile…and lost.
“Hand me my purse.” Her face appeared at the window. “What are you grinning at? I thought you were worried about becoming the featured item at the barbecue.”
“Gasoline doesn’t just spontaneously combust.” He passed her handbag through the window. “Stand back.” Reaching up, he grasped a heavy overhead branch and hauled himself through in her wake. “We should be fine as long as we don’t create any sparks.”
He ducked beneath the branches and went around to the back of the car to inspect the trunk. Given the abuse it had taken, it looked surprisingly unscathed and should be safe enough to open to retrieve their bags. He inserted the key.
That’s when the shooting began.
“Son of a bitch!” Abandoning the trunk, he grabbed Catherine’s wrist and dragged her behind the tree, using it as a shield between them and the shooter. “Run!”
“Is that Chains?” She dragged against his hold as she kept glancing over her shoulder, trying to see how close the danger was. “Is he coming?”
“No, I think he’s still up top.” He gave her an impatient yank. “Come on, Red, move it. Trust me when I say it’s in our best interests to put a lot of distance between us and the car.”
“But he’s too far away for a hand gun to have an effective range, isn’t he?”
“Yeah…unless he hits a rock up the hill and sets off one of those sparks I was talking about. The tank left a trail of gasoline all the way down to the tree, so we could be that barbecue yet.” He spared a glance over his shoulder as he dragged her deeper into the woods. “You willing to risk that?”
Catherine passed him in a burst of speed. “Huhuh, no sir. I am not.”
21
“DO YOU HAVE the vaguest idea where we are?” Dusk was setting in, and Catherine was nervous as a cat. Her legs sported scratches from ankle to thigh, and both they and her arms were covered in bites. Slapping at yet another mosquito trying to liberate her of more of her blood, she followed closely behind Sam, just narrowly avoiding tramping on his heels. “You ever do any camping as a kid?” she demanded. “I’ve never been camping in my life.” She tilted her head back to look up through the towering evergreens, anxious to see a slice of the sky. “We’re lost, aren’t we? This is way too much great outdoors for my taste.”
Sam stopped and turned, catching her by the shoulders to steady her when she bounced off his chest. Stepping back a pace, he held her at arm’s length and studied her expression. “We’ll stop and make camp for the night,” he said decisively.
“Oh, good idea.” She looked around and saw that they were in a tiny clearing. “How does one do that, exactly? Set up a tent, I suppose, except we don’t have one. Should we forage for berries? But what if they’re poisonous?” She wished she’d shut up. The more she chattered, the more she scared herself. But this vast wilderness was very much outside her range of experience.
Sam stroked a big hand down her hair. “We’re not lost, Red. We have to spend the night here, but we’ll reach a town tomorrow. Collect some firewood. I’ll forage for the berries.”
She desperately didn’t want to let him out of her sight, but she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to prevent all the disgraceful pleas she felt clogging her throat. She was a self-reliant woman, dammit, always had been. She took care of people—she certainly didn’t need anyone to take care of her. Watching until he disappeared into the trees, she took several deep breaths to stem her panic. God. She was practically hyperventilating. This was too pathetic.
But she had a very bad feeling that all this rampant nature was simply teeming with many-legged creatures ready and willing to crawl across her exposed skin.
She wandered the perimeters of the clearing, gingerly picking up fallen branches and inspecting them for wildlife before carrying them back to a growing stockpile in the center of the glade.
When the gunshot abruptly sounded in the not-too-far distance, she nearly wet her pants. Hand clamped over her thundering heart, she slid into the shadows of an evergreen, where she hovered anxiously until she heard Sam’s voice.
“Catherine? Don’t be nervous, darlin’, that was only me catching our dinner. I’ll be there as soon as I dress it out.”
Dress it out? She shook her head. She didn’t even want to know.
An hour later, however, she was feeling more relaxed. Sam kept a small fire burning in the circle of stones he’d collected, and the rabbit he turned on its makeshift spit sent up a heavenly aroma. After repeated assurances that they would reach civilization in the morning, her current worry was of the eight-legged variety.
Darting a nervous look into the darkness over her shoulder, she scooted closer to Sam. “You think there’s a lot of spiders in these woods?”
He kept his attention on the rabbit. “We’re in Colorado, Red. They don’t have spiders here. Kind of like Hawaii and its lack of snakes.”
She sagged against him in relief.
Until she thought about it.
“You are so full of it, McKade.” Giving his knee a smack, she straightened away from him. “I’m arachnophobic, not stupid.”
He turned his head, golden eyes gleaming in the firelight as they met hers. “I don’t know how to break this to you, honey, but being arachnophobic is kind of stupid.”
“Oh please! And I suppose you’re not afraid of anything, logical or illogical.”
“Hell no.” His fist thumped the center of his chest. “Me big strong man.”
She made a rude noise and cast another nervous glance into the darkness.
Sam grinned and slung an arm around her, pulling her close again. He found himself charmed by her vulnerability, as it wasn’t a side of her he’d seen often. And damned if it didn’t generate the craziest surge of protectiveness.
“You don’t believe that, huh? Well, believe this.” He snugged her up under his arm and tilted his head back to look up at the stars hanging low in the sky. Then he pul
led his gaze away to look into her face. “You’re not going to find many spiders at this elevation. And if we do happen to stumble across one, I’ll get rid of it before it can come anywhere near you.”
“But what if it sneaks up on me from behind? From the dark?”
“Catherine, spiders are more afraid of you than you are of them.”
She gave him a look, the one only women seemed to be really good at, and he backpedaled. “Okay, let’s compromise and say they’re nearly as afraid of you as you are of them. Bottom line here is, they’re basically shy creatures. They don’t pounce on people out of the dark. They practice avoidance.”
She emitted another sound of disbelief, but he felt her relax. “Hungry?” he asked. “I think this rabbit’s about done.”
They ate it with their fingers and drank creek water from a beer can he’d found lying on the forest floor. “People can sure be slobs, but in this case it came in handy,” he said when Catherine asked him about it. “I scrubbed it up as best I could, and it’s been lying around long enough that I doubt any germs survived.”
With a full stomach and Sam’s lean bulk warming her right side, Catherine began to feel not quite so desperately out of her element. She couldn’t shake the feeling a spider was going to crawl up her unprotected back at any moment, however, and kept shooting nervous glances over her shoulders.
Sam suddenly reached out to grasp her wrist. “You’re not going to relax as long as your back’s exposed, are you?” he demanded. “Well, c’mere, then.” He pulled her around to sit between his legs. Settling her with her back against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her waist. “So, what grade do you teach, anyway?”
For the first time since he’d dragged her away from the familiarity of the car, she relaxed completely. Warmed by his body heat, she snuggled a little deeper into his loose embrace and stared into the fire. Never could she recall anyone taking pains to make her feel safe this way, especially over something as inconsequential as a phobia. There was something very…nice…about it. Comforting. “Seventh and eighth,” she replied.
“God, pubescent teenagers? No wonder I couldn’t get anything past you. What subject?”
“Language arts, primarily.”
She dug at an itchy welt on her calf while she answered further questions about her work. A while later, they fell silent. As she stared drowsily into the fire, it occurred to her that their entire conversation had been about her. She tilted her head back into his shoulder to catch a glimpse of his profile. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why is it so important to you to buy your friend a lodge?”
He stiffened for a moment, but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shifted on the ground behind her. His warm hands rearranged her infinitesimally to fit the new configuration, and he rested his chin on top of her head. “Gary and I always talked about buying one when we retired from the service,” he said in a noncommittal tone of voice. “It just happens that a lodge on the market now is the same one we used to go to on furloughs.”
“Which makes it pretty special, I imagine.” Her brows furrowed. “So why don’t you ever refer to it as your lodge?”
“What? Sure I do.”
“No. You don’t.” She could tell by the way his arms tightened around her that she’d hit a nerve, but felt compelled to persist all the same. There was something to this—she knew there was. “You always call it Gary’s lodge, as if it has nothing to do with you at all.”
All of Sam’s desires, which for the past three years had been kept neatly buried, welled up inside him. There were things that, given different circumstances, he would have liked to do with his life. And the fact that she’d somehow tapped into what he’d managed to keep hidden even from himself infuriated him. His arms dropped away from her.
“Isn’t it amazing,” he said sardonically, reaching for a stick to feed into the fire, “how you can fuck a woman once and she thinks she knows every last detail about you?”
The words reverberated in his head the instant they left his mouth, and he was appalled. He may have been brought up poor, but his mother had raised him to treat women with respect. He felt Catherine’s immediate withdrawal and tightened his thighs on either side of her hips, wrapping his arms around her once again to hold her in place.
“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “That was uncalled for—I don’t know what came over me.”
“No, you’re perfectly correct,” she replied with cool civility. “You don’t owe me any explanations. We’re barely more than strangers, after all.”
“Bullshit.” His arms drew her tighter against him. “The last thing we are is strangers. You…hit a nerve, is all, and I wanted to hit back.”
“Because?” Her voice was cool, disinterested.
“Because you’re right.” He exhaled sharply and looked past her averted profile into the heart of the fire. “Gary and I always talked about buying a fishing lodge, but it was just a dream—you know? Something that seemed way off in the future.”
“And now here it is, huh?”
“Yeah.” His chest moved against her back. “Something like that.”
She looked up at the stars. “So, what would you rather be doing?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged again. “What I’m doing is fine.”
“Dammit.” She twisted around to glare up at him. “Tell me to mind my own business, if you don’t want to talk about it. But don’t tell me ‘nothing’ and then turn around and use it as an excuse to say something offensive because you’re an unhappy camper. Now, what would you rather to be doing?”
“None of your damn business.”
“Fine.” She faced forward again and sat stiffly between his legs.
“I’d like to be a cop, okay?” Sam swore and freed a hand to rake back his hair. “I really liked being an MP. I liked the structure and the order.” His stomach twisted up in knots at the thought of never again realizing that level of satisfaction, but he took a deep breath, expelled it, and sat a bit straighter. “But you don’t always get what you want. That’s life.”
Her voice was gentle, full of warm interest again, when she asked, “What will you do now?”
“Hell, who knows? See if I can scare up a bounty that’s worth running down before the option on the lodge runs out, I guess. I know what I don’t look forward to.”
She tilted her head back to look at him. “What’s that?”
“Having to break it to Gary from the next phone we find that I loused this up.”
They awoke at dawn, chilled, stiff, and, on Catherine’s part, at least, out of sorts. Disengaging herself from Sam’s arms, she rose to her feet and dusted herself off as best she could. She missed her toothbrush and tormented herself for a moment or two with the thought of hot water and clean clothes. A long shower and a new toothbrush would be her reward when they reached civilization again, which, oh, please, God, would be soon.
She did her utmost to fight the call of nature, intimidated at the idea of entering those woods by herself. Eventually, however, the need grew too imperative to ignore. With a long-suffering sigh, she slipped into the trees.
Sam watched as she disappeared. He, too, felt out of sorts.
What the hell was he doing?
Somehow his relationship with Catherine had veered so far from what was acceptable, it was nothing short of ridiculous, and it was past time to get the damn thing back on track. He’d known her for—what?—all of six days? Hell, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the minute he got the Jimmy Chains/Hector Sanchez situation straightened out, he wouldn’t see her for dust. She’d return to her life and her cozy little house and her upscale job, and that would be that. He’d never see those big green eyes again.
So, this was it, time to quit screwing around. No more sexual advances, and definitely no more spilling his guts to the woman. From now on, he was the ultimate professional. Kicking dirt on the few embers that remained in the fire pit, he ignored the leaden fe
eling in his gut. It might pinch a bit, but it was the right decision and he knew it.
It was a resolution that was blown clean out of his mind when Catherine’s bloodcurdling scream ripped through the forest.
He entered the woods in a running crouch, his gun extended in one hand and braced by the other, sweeping the woods to cover as much territory as possible until he could find the danger. Catherine stood shivering, her arms wrapped around herself and one foot stacked on top of the other, but he saw no sign of Jimmy Chains. Eyes scanning the surrounding trees, he worked his way over to her. “Are you okay? Where is he?”
“There,” she said in a wavery voice, and pointed at the ground. “Right there.”
Puzzled, both his gaze and the barrel of his pistol followed her trembling finger. There was nothing to be seen.
Except a spider.
It took a full minute for the significance of that to sink in. Then his gun hand dropped to his side. “Oh, for God’s sake…that’s why you were screaming the woods down?” Granted it was a decent-sized wolf spider but…“Christ Almighty, Catherine, I thought Chains had gotten his hands on you.”
The finger she pointed at the insect trembled. “Shoot it!”
“It’s a spider, doll. You don’t go around shootin’ spiders.”
She gave him a look of pure incredulous indignation. “You shot a helpless bunny!”
“For Chrissake, Red, that was different. That was dinner.”
“Shoot it!”
“Look,” he said reasonably, “the thing’s sitting right on top of a rock. Bullet hits rock, it ricochets. Then we could all be in a world of hurt.”
“Oh, God, it’s got such fat, hairy legs.” She raised huge eyes to his. “Please, Sam.”
Sam stomped the spider into paste.
She dived into his arms and he hooked an arm around her neck, pressing her cheek against his chest. She clutched his waist, trying her damnedest to meld her trembling body to his. He stared off into the woods over her head.
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