by Cathie Linz
Eyeing her closely, he said, “You’re not thinking you’re in any way to blame for that kid’s death, are you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“I know you.”
“Not as well as you think,” she retorted.
“Maybe not,” he allowed. “But well enough to know that you’re the kind of woman who’d grieve for any loss of life, let alone someone who had been one of your students. Michael always grumbled about how you’d put in extra hours, use your own money to get supplies, take the time to make the kids feel important.”
“They are important. Children are our hope for the future. In answer to your question, I know that, strictly speaking, I wasn’t responsible for Duane’s death.” Emotionally speaking was another thing; she refused to confess her secret guilt, the secret fear that if she’d done something differently, if she hadn’t stayed late that day at school, Duane Washington might still be alive today. That was a reality she was still trying to cope with. The police had told her that if she hadn’t reported Duane, someone else would have. Her mugging hadn’t been his first criminal offense. “I just wish I could have done something to have prevented it.” That much was definitely true. “But you know how I am. Tough. I’ll be back in the teaching harness again before too long.” She said the words automatically, wanting to reassure him, wanting to make sure that he stopped worrying about her. “I just need a break for now. Time to relax, enjoy the peacefulness of the mountains, maybe do some sketching.”
“I didn’t know you sketched.”
“I didn’t know I sketched,” she stated wryly. “I’ve never been able to before. Maybe I just lacked the inspiration. Goodness knows, there’s enough beauty around here to inspire anyone.”
“You’ve got that right,” he agreed, but he looked at her as he said it.
Gaylynn nervously shoved her hair away from her face. She wasn’t herself at the moment. She felt totally emotionally exposed. That’s why she’d clung to him like plastic wrap. “I guess you could say that I’m not the fearless one in the family anymore,” she acknowledged with ragged ruefulness, before ending in a whisper, “I’m not sure who I am anymore.”
Hunter knew who she was, and it was up to him to show her that she was a very special woman. He didn’t tell her so, knowing she wouldn’t believe the words. He could see the vulnerability she was trying so desperately to hide, the underlying raw fear. No, mere words wouldn’t cut it. He had to show her how exceptional she was.
In fact, he was still discovering just how exceptional—the kiss they’d just shared had shaken him, but good! No longer could he dismiss his coming to her emotional rescue simply because she was Michael’s sister. The feel of her pliant mouth beneath his had wiped that fallacy clear off the map. His feelings for her were much more than just platonic. They were direct, intense and passionate. Attraction, chemistry, sex, lust—whatever label he put on it, friendship had nothing to do with it.
But Hunter also knew that Gaylynn had spent all of her life in a big city, or traveling to exotic and exciting locations around the world. None of those adjectives fit a quiet out-of-the-way place like Lonesome Gap. Sure, Gaylynn was hurting right now, but she’d get over that. He’d make sure of it. And when she did, when she was back to her old don’t-mess-with-me self, she’d go back to her life in Chicago. That was a given.
Besides, he didn’t exactly have a great track record where women were concerned. His own marriage bad broken up because of the demands of his job and because of the isolation of living out in the boonies. In the intervening time since then, he’d made it a point to keep his relationships with the opposite sex on a superficial level. But there was nothing superficial about Gaylynn.
The bottom line was that Hunter had to help Gaylynn get her life back. And to do that, he needed to coax her down off the mountain.
It took Hunter two weeks to get his plans together. During that time he tried coaxing, bullying and teasing Gaylynn off the mountain.
It didn’t work. She patted his cheek and sent him on his way, told him she was perfectly happy. And she way looking better than she had when she’d first arrived. But that spark wasn’t back yet.
Never one to back away from a challenge, Hunter had no intention of giving up. With that thought in mind, he tried out plan B. Actually, he was probably on plan M or N by now, but who was counting?
She answered his knock on her front door faster than he expected. She was wearing jeans and a lace-trimmed sweater in a pale peach. The sweater’s short sleeves showed off the light tan she’d gotten since coming to the mountains. The screen door added a blurred edge to her appearance, giving her a softly romantic look. In that instant, his heart leapt, as if he was seeing her for the very first time and his body was recognizing hers as its intended mate.
His intense man-to-woman reaction caught him by surprise and merely confirmed his earlier realization that his feelings for Gaylynn were not merely platonic. They weren’t merely anything. They were powerful and vibrant, unexpected and unknown.
“Something wrong?” she asked him with a frown. “You look like you’ve been poleaxed.”
“Picking up some of our mountain speech, are you?”
She wished she could imitate his sexy drawl, but there was no way. The Southern accent wasn’t too thick; it was just right, complementing the natural flow of his voice.
“What can I do for you?” she asked him.
The image of her lying naked in his arms suddenly filled his head like a two-story screen at a drive-in movie. In living Technicolor.
“Hunter.?” she prompted him.
“Uh, it’s a beautiful day today.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “You stopped by just to tell me that?”
“I’ve stopped by for our date.”
She frowned in confusion.
“You didn’t forget what day today is, did you?” he asked.
“Of course not. It’s, uh.”
He could see her trying to remember.
Closing her eyes and wrinkling her nose for a second of concentration, she snapped her fingers and said, “It’s April first!”
“April Fools’ Day.”
“Great. Does that mean I’m going to have to check to see if you’ve somehow short-sheeted my bed?”
“What?” The image of her and bed together was enough to momentarily short-circuit his thought processes as that two-story-high mental image of her filled the screen of his brain once again.
“You and Michael and Dylan used to play the worst tricks on me,” she was saying. “Don’t you mamember? Putting food coloring on cotton balls and sticking them in the faucet filter fittings of the sink so the water came out all blue? My mom nearly had a heart attack when she saw my face.”
The force of his attraction to Gaylynn was enough to give him a heart attack! All she’d done was smile in reminiscence and his blood pressure nearly shot through the roof. Stuffing his hands in his jeans pockets, he locked back on his heels, reminding himself that his mission was to get Gaylynn out of her shell, not out of her clothing and into his bed.
“Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat and started again. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to come with me for a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway today?”
“You’ve asked me that every day off you’ve had since I’ve been here and my answer is the same. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Okay. Then come on.” He took her hand and gently tugged her outside.
“Wait a second,” she protested. “I said I didn’t want to go on a drive with you.”
“I know. I heard you. We’re not going on a drive. We’re going on a walk.”
“A walk? Where?” she inquired wryly as he hustled her up a narrow path. “Clear up to West Virginia?”
“Gee, and you used to be such a trusting soul.”
“Yeah, and I got rewarded by you and Michaelstranding me up in that tree house for an entire day.”
“It was only an hour. It just felt like an
entire day.”
It took Gaylynn a moment to realize that she could have said she’d been a trusting soul until she’d gotten attacked, but that hadn’t been the first thing that had come to her mind, thank heavens.
Yes, she’d definitely done the right thing coming to the mountains the way she had. With the sun shining down on her bare head and the sound of bird song filling the air, it was one of those magical moments when it felt good just to be alive.
“So where are we going?” she asked him.
“I told you. For a walk. There are some things I want to show you.”
He kept her hand in his, twining his strong fingers through bers. His touch didn’t inspire a bolt of awareness. Instead, it created a magical warmth that spiraled along her arm to her very heart. Unable to resist, she tightened her hold and was rewarded for her boldness by him grinning at her over his shoulder before squeezing her hand in return.
The footpath through the woods followed the incline of a ravine, along a tiny creek, and was so narrow at first that they had to proceed in single file, with their clasped hands providing the physical bridge.
Blooming redbud and dogwood trees created a splash of pink and white against the spring greens.
“They say that in these mountains in spring, there must be as many words for green as the Inuit have for snow,” Hunter said.
“I believe it,” she murmured.
Lacking their full foliage, the trees filtered rather than blocked out the sunlight, allowing wildflowers to flourish. The forest bed was filled with them. And not just one or two single flowers, but entire beds carpeting the ground. Anemone, bellflower and violets were the only ones she recognized. There were many others she didn’t. “What a lovely flower,” she said, pointing to one in particular. “You wouldn’t happen to know what it’s called, would you?” she asked Hunter.
Turning to look at her over his shoulder, he glanced at the flower before grinning wickedly. “It’s called trillium erectum.”
Gaylynn almost choked. “Very funny! If you didn’t know you could just have said so, instead of making something up.”
“I’m telling you, it’s a trillium erectum.”
“Right. And I suppose that one next to it is trillium orgasm? Never mind—” Using her free hand, she put her hand over his mouth. She could feel his smile branded into the heart of her palm. “Don’t tell me.
Trillium erectum,” she muttered with a shake of her head.
The teasing swirl of his tongue darting into her palm reminded her that she still had her hand over his mouth. She yanked it away.
“Anything else you want to know?” Hunter asked with a look of devilish innocence.
“I should have known better than to ask you anything on April Fools’ Day,” she stated.
“I’m not kidding you about the name of that flower.
Look it up in any wildflower book.”
“Since when have you been an expert on wildflowers?”
“Since I found out there was one with a name like that,” he replied with a slow smile and that lazy drawl of his. “Makes a big impression on the ladies.”
“Now I see why mothers warned their daughters about men who led them down the garden path,” Gaylynn noted wryly.
“You want to turn back?” His look was a challenge she wasn’t about to resist.
“No way. Lead on.”
They hiked on for about twenty minutes before Gaylynn called a halt. “Time out!” she gasped.
“Just two more feet and you’ll get a view that’ll make everything worth your while,” he promised her.
“Two more inches and I’m taking a rest stop,” she declared.
“Never holler whoa in a mud hole,” he told her.
“Which means what?”
“When things are getting rough, that’s not the time to stop and give in. It’s the time to keep moving on, pushing forward.”
“I would push forward, but there’s a man the size of a mountain in front of me,” she noted, placing the palm of her free hand in the small of his back and giving him a gentle shove. “You’re blocking my view.”
Truth was, he was the view—she’d spent the past twenty minutes watching his lanky stride with decidedly feminine approval. He had the long, surefooted walk of a born woodsman.
The view two feet away, when they reached it, was indeed worth the walk. So was the view of Hunter’s denim-clad backside, she silently noted with a grin.
Seeing it, Hunter said, “Ah, you like, huh?”
“I like very much,” she agreed sassily before turning to study the scenery laid’out before her.
The sky was an intense blue, bluer than she’d ever seen it in Chicago. Laid out before her were row after row of shadowy blue mountains, the color unique to this area and unlike anything she’d seen elsewhere in her world travels. It was a sea of flowing curves, with every ridge separated from its sisters by deep and narrow ravines. There was only mountain and forest for as far as the eye could see.
“I’ve often found that a little height makes a sight of difference in the way a body sees things,” Hunter told her in a soft mountain drawl.
“You’ve got that right,” she agreed, her voice touched with awe at the mind-boggling vista. There was something mystical about the way the mountain ridges blurred one into the other—the closest being the darkest, and the farthest the lightest, with infinite shades in between. She counted eight different layers fading off into the distance.
She didn’t realize she’d counted aloud until Hunter said, “The Cherokee have a story about how these mountains were created. They say that at one time the earth was wet and soft and very flat when Great Buzzard flew over the land. He’d been sent on a scouting mission and had flown a long way when he reached this area. By then he’d grown weary and his wings struck the mud. That’s how the valleys were formed. On each upbeat of his wings, a mountain was raised.”
“Since then, these mountains have seen a lot of sorrow,” she murmured. “Especially for the Cherokee.
They lived here for a thousand years until Andrew Jackson became president and decided they were in the way. Gold had been discovered nearby, so he had thousands of Cherokee herded up at gunpoint and then forced them to march on the Trail of Tears all the way to Oklahoma.”
“Some Cherokee did manage to stay here and survive,” Hunter said. “My great-grandmother was twothirds Cherokee from the Qualla Reservation just south of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.”
“I didn’t know you had Cherokee blood.”
“I’m told I have my great-grandmother’s nose,” he told her with a grin. “Ended up getting me in several fights over the years. Of course, my Irish heritage no doubt also contributed to my being labeled a hothead in school. That was one of the politer terms used.”
“Irish, huh? So that’s where you get your gift of blarney from?”
“My mother’s maiden name is O’Brien,” he acknowledged. “Her favorite thing about Chicago was the fact that they knew how to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day by dying the Chicago River green.”
“They still do,” Gaylynn said. “They use vegetable dye, similar to you dying our tap water blue on April Fools’ Day.”
“Well, I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve this April Fools’ Day,” he told her, undoing both sleeves of his denim shirt to show her his arms.
“Yes, well.” She blinked away the all-too-tempting image of those strong arms holding her. “Umm, we’d better be heading back down.”
But she hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when she had to stop. “Ow!”
“What’s wrong?” Hunter immediately asked in concern, taking her by the elbow and helping her over to sit on a fallen log a few steps away.
“I’ve just got a rock or something in my shoe,” she noted in disgust while undoing the laces on her left athletic shoe.
Relieved that nothing serious was wrong, Hunter sat beside her on the fallen log. He watched as she propped her ankle on her opposite
knee and tugged off her shoe. They were in the forest once again, surrounded by greenery, the panoramic mountain view now hidden.
A sudden piercing shrieking nearby startled Gaylynn, who was somewhat precariously perched on the log to begin with. She flinched and almost ended up on her fanny in the ferns. Instead, she somehow ended up in Hunter’s arms, pressed against him. His arm around her waist safely anchored her to his chest.
“What was that?” she asked breathlessly.
“A jay.”
“Oh.” Feeling foolish, Gaylynn went to pull away. She only made it far enough to look into his eyes and then she was hooked.
Five
Hunter’s hands cupped her arms as he lowered his head for a kiss that started out light and infinitely gentle before slowly progressing at a delightful pace, the rhythm accelerating into a warm cadence. Where theirfirst kiss two weeks before had been like being struck by lightning, this one was like being immersed in a warm sensual pool. There was no sense of rushing, but his restraint only served to increase her craving for him even more.
When she nibbled at his bottom lip, he growled his approval and their kiss blossomed into an equal exchange of parted lips, sleek tongues and husky murmurs. Using the tip of his tongue, he stroked the roof of her mouth, the feathery caress making her shiver with excitement as she moved even closer.
Hunter did the same, tugging her into his arms. Her breasts were pressed against his chest. He used one arm to clamp her to his side, which left the other free to cup her cheek. The warm slide of his fingers into her hair created a rush of desire within her. While kissing her, he stroked his thumb against her jaw line. Every new touch was a potent discovery of just how powerful his effect was on her.
The need grew and with it so did the intimacy of both their kiss and their embrace. She put her arms around his back and met each thrust of his tongue with moist approval. Moments later she was lying halfway across his lap, her pelvis in intimate electric contact with his.