by Elle Aycart
“Yes.”
“Good.” He cupped her neck and kissed her—first playing softly with her lips, then going deep and hard, tongue and teeth included. She was too dazzled to think, let alone talk, when he broke the kiss. He put his arm around her shoulders and gently drew her forward.
Obviously, the guy didn’t have any issues with public displays of affection. The rest of the town might not be so used to it, though, because they all seemed to be looking at them very intently.
Alec reached the ice and grabbed her hand. “Be careful. Your shoes don’t have cleats.”
They passed by several people, all of them greeting Alec until they reached a small group of guys. Two were fishing in one hole, while Marc was fishing alone.
Shit, she didn’t have his stuff. Again.
Alec lifted his chin at his crew. “Marc you know. This is Cage, aka the Butcher, and Wolf. Guys, this is Megan.”
“Aka the boss,” interjected Marc, looking amused.
“Hi,” she said, raising her hand and getting nods in return. “Sorry, I forgot your clothes again.”
“No, you didn’t,” Alec said, taking a plastic bag from the backpack and handing it to Marc. “Here.”
Bonehead had taken his friend’s clothes from her cabin?
“Thanks, but I wasn’t in a hurry.” Marc smiled at her.
“I was,” Alec replied, his tone sharp. He was staring at Marc rather intimidatingly, but the latter just laughed.
Alec took her hand again and walked several more steps. Then he stopped and let all the gear down. “This is a good spot. Let’s make a hole.”
“With the corkscrew?”
He grinned. “Ice drill, boss.”
Right.
He started drilling. At the beginning it seemed to be heavy going, but as the drill disappeared deeper into the ice, it seemed to go more smoothly. After several minutes of work, he stopped. “Do you want to give it a go?”
She was surprised. Very surprised. Everybody always treated her like a porcelain doll, except for Alec. She nodded enthusiastically. The work was hard, but Alec helped, and she was totally thrilled when they broke through and the deep hole filled with water. “Yay!” she screamed, high-fiving him.
“Let’s get rolling.”
They sat on the chairs. Alec prepared the rods and handed her the can of bait. “You cool taking care of this? You used to have no problem with it.”
Uh-oh. “I’ll try.” She opened the container. Yep, worms. She wasn’t going to get far with gloves on. She stripped one off.
“Fuck you,” she heard both Cage and Wolf curse. Marc was laughing and pulling a huge fish from the ice.
“Who’s my bitch?” Marc said, while they showed him the finger.
“Marc is unbeatable at this,” Alec observed. “That’s why no one wants to sit with him. It’s a guarantee you won’t catch squat.”
“He’s a fish whisperer?”
Alec laughed. “Nope. He has the yummiest baits in the world.” At her puzzled stare, he continued. “Remember how I told you he doesn’t slaughter his cows? He farms a different source of proteins.” Megan grimaced, fearing she knew what was coming next. “Yeah, you’ve probably guessed it. Bugs. Big, fat, juicy bugs. Beetles, mealworms, grasshoppers. No fish on earth can resist them.”
“Get out of here. So the protein bars…”
“Made of pure insect protein. They’re extremely popular. He sells a shit ton of the protein base overseas, to the Nordic countries especially. They make those protein bars.”
“They’ve probably had their taste buds destroyed by that rotten fish they eat. Lutefisk. Fermented herring.” She’d read somewhere that a freshly opened can of fermented herring was one of the most putrid smells in the world. She didn’t dare to speculate about the taste.
“My bugs are pretty tasty,” Marc interjected. “Deep fried, they’re the bomb.”
To her surprise, Alec nodded. “Beetles taste like lobster.”
“Oh my God, you’ve ruined lobster for me forever.”
Marc and Alec laughed. Cage and Wolf too.
Fishing rods baited, Megan leaned forward and lowered her line. Alec balanced another rod on some sort of stand, then put his chair behind her and bracketed her with his long legs. “You aren’t going to fish?” she asked, turning her head.
He kissed her nose. “You were the ace at fishing. I’m afraid I can’t compete. Either way there’s an extra rod there, so if it tweaks, let’s pull it out.”
“Okay, but it’s been ages since I went fishing, and I’ve never been ice fishing. Don’t expect miracles.”
“Same principles apply,” he said, resting his chin on her shoulder. “Didn’t you say your brother taught you to fish and that you guys went fishing a lot? The way you talked about him, you seemed very close.”
“We were, but we had a falling out. I was in remission. I thought I might actually have a healthy life in front of me, so I meddled. I didn’t want him to waste his time in a marriage with a manipulative bitch, and I enlightened him. Big mistake.” Life was too precious to waste, right? Wrong. “We haven’t been on speaking terms since. That was two years ago.”
“Sorry.”
So was she, but Logan had been an ass too, so she guessed they were even. She shrugged and smiled at Alec. “One question: why are we all dressed up as if we’re waiting for the signal to impregnate something?”
He laughed. “We’re blending with our surroundings, boss. It’s a training exercise. You never know when you’ll be attacked.”
“Right. I hope it’s not the Soviets again, because that train is long gone.” She reached into a pocket and took out her cell and earbuds. It had been almost twenty years, but she gave him one earbud out of habit and kept the other.
“K-pop again?” he asked with a grimace.
“Random play if you insist, killjoy.”
As the music started, she put the phone back into her pocket and grabbed the rod. Her bare finger got caught on the reel, and she felt the skin tear. “Shit.”
“Let me see.” Alec grabbed her hand and inspected the bleeding finger. “Just a small cut. It’ll stop bleeding in a second.” He put her finger in his mouth and sucked it. “There, all better.”
She couldn’t avoid giggling. “Man, what kind of prepper are you? That’s the best you can do?”
He pretended to think about it. “I could tell the others we need medical assistance, and they’ll go all out for you. They don’t mind operating on the fly. If they can’t stick an intravenous drip in the usual places because you’re wearing too many clothes, they’ll plug one in your forehead. There’s a pretty big vein about here, right in the center.”
Wow. No middle ground. Either they kissed it to make it better or they operated on you. Hadn’t they heard of Band-Aids?
At that moment she realized Marc and the other two guys were looking at them.
“Have you ever seen Alec talk so much?” Marc asked. Cage and Wolf shook their heads. “Or smile, for that matter.”
“Fuck off,” Alec muttered.
Her rods tweaked several times, but they got nothing. They sat there in silence for a long while, listening to music. She felt protected and cherished with Alec at her back, hugging her and keeping her warm. She hadn’t felt this content and at peace in ages.
Then Megan heard someone screaming. She turned to her left in time to see a guy jumping naked into a big hole in the ice. “Is he crazy?”
“No question. It’s ice swimming. Crazy Nordic people.”
“Crazy preppers, you mean?”
Alec shook his head. “Nope. I think it has more to do with being Nordic. Plenty of that around here.”
She watched as the guy came out, his whole body red as a frigging tomato and steaming, and leisurely walked back to the shore, towel in hand.
“The idea is to get into a sauna afterward, but they have yet to get permission to build one near the lake.”
“I would so like to do that,” sh
e said longingly.
“You’re too skinny.”
That rubbed her the wrong way. “You mean too sick, don’t you?”
He hugged her. “No, boss. I mean too skinny. Believe me, it took three days for me to find my balls after I tried it.”
She bet it had. Still, it wasn’t like her to give in so easily. “You know, Romans used to dip in freezing cold water as a way to jumpstart their metabolisms and boost their immune systems. It’s worth a try.”
“Yeah, well, they used to drink out of lead pipes too.”
That she couldn’t refute.
Saved by the bell—her rod gave a massive twitch. “We got something.”
“Pull it up slowly but firmly,” he instructed, keeping his hands over hers. Sure enough, a fish rose steadily out of the hole—not a humongous one, but decent enough. “You got it, boss.”
She was so happy, it probably looked like she’d won the lottery. She leaped out of her chair, high-fiving him with both hands. He was smiling at her—pleased, with something else in his gaze that she couldn’t recognize. Something sweet.
“You are good at this,” Alec said as he put the catch in the bucket and Megan prepared new bait. “Sure you’ve never been ice fishing?”
She settled back into her chair, shaking her head. “For the last ten years I haven’t been allowed to do anything that could pose the least bit of risk to my health. Every holiday—that is, if I wasn’t in the middle of a crisis or some procedure—my family took me somewhere warm. I was allowed to sit and watch, never participate in anything fun.” God forbid she should get sick. “At first, my parents were too afraid to let me go anywhere without them, but soon enough my circle of friends shrank from all my school friends to just the people I met in the hospital, where I spent most of my time anyway. Their health was as precarious as mine and it was damn difficult to coordinate everyone’s schedules there—you know, between medical procedures, crises, deaths, and whatnot.” She tilted her head back. “How come you never ask me about the cancer?”
Alec shrugged, serious now. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, not really.”
“That’s what I figured, boss. Cancer is like war, I guess. You only talk about it when absolutely necessary.”
Fair enough.
They were silent for a while, listening to the music, when finally her favorite BTS song came on. Excited, she glanced back at him, and he rolled his eyes. As the chorus approached, she put up three fingers, then two, then one, hoping Alec would join in. No luck. He covered her mouth, muffling her very heartfelt “Fii-yerrr!”
“Traitor,” she said, pulling his hand down.
Alec laughed, gorgeous lines appearing around his mouth and eyes. Jeez, he should laugh more often; he looked spectacular when he did. “Screaming ‘fire’ around this crowd is a very dangerous thing, boss. We’ll get bulldozed.”
Oops. She hadn’t thought about that.
The rod jerked again, but as she went to reel in her catch, a loud siren spooked her so badly that she dropped the rod and it disappeared instantly down the hole. She stared after it in shock.
“Don’t worry about it,” Alec said, standing up and giving her back the earbud.
“What—” She looked around, perplexed. Everyone was gathering their stuff at the speed of light and running to the shore.
“Pick up the bucket,” he ordered, almost done with packing their gear. He grabbed her hand. “Run!”
But she didn’t have proper boots and staggered at the first step.
“Right, no cleats. I forgot.” He moved the backpack to his front. Turning away from her, he bent one knee to the ice. He looked at her from over his shoulder, a grin on his face. “Hop on, boss. It’s not the drunken K-drama piggyback ride that you and Jess hoped for, and I’m no flower boy—but it’s a piggyback ride nonetheless.”
She had no clue what was going on, but she wasn’t scared with Alec by her side. Quite the opposite. The butterflies in her stomach were fluttering so much, she felt light-headed.
Laughing, she jumped on him. Bucket swinging in one hand, she held on tight to Alec with the other. He had the chairs under his right arm and her knee over his left.
Then they were off, running for shore along with the rest of the crazed sperm. She’d seen more K-dramas than she could count, but she’d never seen a piggyback like this. When they reached solid ground, Alec put her down. “Strip,” he ordered, unzipping his onesie. “Take off the camo. We need to reverse it.”
After a fast glance, she realized the others were stripping too. “Why?” she asked, obeying.
“We’re going to hide in the woods. We need the other pattern to blend in.”
Man, this—whatever this was—was nuts. She wrestled fruitlessly with the cloth until Alec yanked on something and, God only knew how, got the onesie reversed. Dressed again in the new camo pattern, this time with the hood on, they linked hands and headed for the trees. “Let’s find a spot to hide,” Alec whispered, sounding inexplicably cheerful.
“What is going on?” she whispered back.
Alec pulled her into crouch in some brush. “Emergency drill,” he replied, tucking away some strands of hair stuck to her face.
This had to be immortalized. She took her cell from her pocket, held it as far off as her arm allowed, and took a selfie of them both, flash flaring.
Alec put his hands over his face, his shoulders jerking with muffled laughter.
Another siren sounded and a woman’s voice spoke through a megaphone. “All clear. The drill is over.”
As they walked toward the sound, Megan realized the woman was Shayna from the tea stand. “Four minutes and forty-six seconds from the alert till the last one of you was camouflaged in the trees. Room for improvement, people. Especially you two,” she said sternly to Megan and Alec. “Too much talk. Stealth is silent. Plus she’s not wearing proper footwear. Worst of all, you used a flash, giving away your position. You might as well wear a neon suit. Alec, you know the rules. For Pete’s sake, you wrote most of them. You brought her in; you’re responsible for her.”
Alec was going to say something, but Megan jumped in. “Sorry. I’m new at this. Can you cut us some slack? I’ll do better next time.”
Shayna gave a curt nod.
“Better how?” an amused Alec asked as soon as Shayna moved on.
“I promise to turn my flash off next time.” Megan paused thoughtfully. “Although I might scream ‘fire’ at the top of my lungs just for the heck of it.”
“Fuck me. You didn’t post that pic anywhere, did you?”
She shook her head vigorously.
Alec smiled and threw his arm over her shoulders. “Good. We may live to see another day.”
Alec had been to plenty of cookouts, but he’d never had so much fun before. After the drill they’d started preparing pits for grilling, and now they were ready. During all that Megan had been beaming, her eyes sparkling as they had when she was thirteen and couldn’t wait to explore the world, not a single worry in her mind.
At the moment she was enthralled by the smaller fish speared on branches stuck in the ground around one of the fires. The bigger fish lay flat on a more traditional grill, but that didn’t seem to interest her.
“Two?” Monroe, their local car scavenging guru, asked. After Alec assented, Monroe de-impaled two small fish and placed one each on paper plates, offering them up. “Here you go. No forks.”
Like a kid with a new toy, smiling from ear to ear, Megan all but sprinted to their chairs. “Come on, Bonehead. Let’s dig in.”
“I’ll get us something to drink.”
When he came back, Megan was attempting to debone the fish, alternately blowing on it and on her reddened fingers.
“I’m going to change your nickname from ‘boss’ to ‘city girl’,” he said, shaking his head.
“Don’t you dare. I like boss. It makes me feel… in charge,” she stated, smiling impishly.
“Right, boss. Give
me your plate.” He didn’t mind eating the skin and the head. Even bones had been a gourmet treat when he was deployed in some hellhole, starving, but he figured she wouldn’t appreciate all that, so he worked carefully until he had a clean fillet. Taking a piece in his fingers, he offered it to her.
She grabbed it enthusiastically and yelped, juggling the fish from hand to hand and howling, “Hot! Hot! Hot!” until she found the presence of mind to dump it on her plate. “Crap. How did you touch that little sucker? It’s frigging hot.”
He rolled his eyes. “You have baby hands.”
“Baby hands my butt. I’ve got neuropathy from the chemo. My fingertips are practically numb.”
He grabbed her index finger and bit the pad.
“Ouch.”
“You see? Baby hands,” he repeated. “Here.” He blew on another morsel and held it to her lips. She didn’t hesitate and took it, her sweet lips and tongue brushing his fingertips. Oh, man. He’d never heard the fingertips were an erogenous part, but damn if they weren’t, because he was feeling fucking hot and his pants were suddenly strangling his growing erection.
Megan was oblivious, though, panting and using her hands to fan her open mouth, half laughing. “Hot! But delicious,” she said, then licked her lips and took a chug of beer.
Shit, that only made matters worse. His mind flashed to the night before, which didn’t help in the least.
Okay, asshole, keep it in check.
He heard an “ouch.” Megan had tried to feed herself. Impatient little thing. Trying to ignore his recalcitrant cock, he carefully fed her another bite, then himself. Then Megan again.
A flake fell on her chest. When he reached to pick it up, she hastily moved away.
“Sorry, I was just—”
“My bad,” she said, furiously blushing and brushing the fish off her chest. “Too clumsy.”
Uh-huh. Her reaction had nothing to do with clumsiness, but he kept his mouth shut.
She looked around. “I didn’t realize so many people would come to this barbecue!” she said, her tone unnaturally perky. “This is a proper party.”
If that was how she wanted to play it, he would let her. “Yep. The ones who don’t fish bring other stuff. Drinks, bread,” he said, motioning to a laden table.