“Are you thirsty?”
She gaped at him. “Thirsty?” And then she let out a wild little laugh. “In this?” She stuck out a hand toward the water streaming down the lone window.
“Are you?”
And she frowned again. “Well, yes. Now that you mention it, I suppose I am.”
He rose. “I’ll see if I can find some clean containers in the barn. We can catch some of the rainwater, so we won’t get dehydrated.”
She blinked up at him. “Yes. That makes sense. I’ll help.” She started to rise.
He took her shoulders again and gently pushed her back down. “Get out of your boots and shoes—and wrap this around your feet.” He held out another blanket.
She took it, her gaze colliding with his. Holding. “What about you?”
“Let me see about setting out containers for water. Then I’ll grab a few blankets and try and warm up a little, too.”
* * *
Half an hour later, he had his boots and socks off. They’d pushed four hay bales together and spread a blanket over them. Side by side, wrapped in more blankets, they passed a bucket of water back and forth.
When they’d both drunk their fill, there was still plenty left in the bucket. He set it on the floor, where Buster promptly stuck his nose in it and started lapping. “You don’t happen to have a nice T-bone handy, do you, Willa?”
She chuckled. There wasn’t a lot of humor in the sound, but he took heart that at least she wasn’t staring blindly into space anymore. “Plenty on the hoof right outside that door.” She pointed her thumb over her shoulder at the door that led into the barn.
He scooted back to the wall for something to lean against. “Not that hungry yet.”
“I didn’t think so.” She scooted back, too, settling alongside him, and then spent a moment readjusting the blanket she’d wrapped around her feet. “There.” She leaned back and let out a long breath. “I believe I am actually beginning to thaw out.”
“That was the plan.” Outside, the rain kept falling. The sky remained that same dim gray it had been all day. “Got any idea what time it is?”
“I don’t know. Six, maybe? Seven?” She sounded...softer. A little sleepy. That was good. Rest wouldn’t hurt either of them. “Won’t be dark for hours yet....”
He was feeling kind of drowsy, too, now that he wasn’t chilled to the bone anymore and most of the adrenaline rush from the various near-death events of the day had faded a little. He let his eyelids droop shut.
But then she spoke again. “It’s really very strange, Collin, being here with you like this.”
He grunted. “This whole day has been pretty strange.”
“Yes, it has. And scary. And awful. But, well, that’s not what I meant.”
He knew exactly what she meant. And why was it women always had to dig up stuff that was better left alone? He kept nice and quiet and hoped she wasn’t going there.
But she was. “Maybe this is a good chance to clear the air a little between us.”
“The air is plenty clear from where I’m sitting.”
“Well, Collin, for me, it’s just not.”
“Willa, I—”
“No. Wait. I would like a chance to say what’s on my mind.”
He didn’t let out a groan of protest, but he wanted to.
And she kept right on. “It was very...humiliating for me, that night at the Ace in the Hole.” The Ace was on Sawmill Street. It was the only bar in town. People went there to forget their troubles and usually only ended up creating a whole new set of them. “It was my first time there, did you know? My twenty-first birthday.” She sounded all sad and wistful.
He’d known. “I think you mentioned that at the time, yeah.”
“Derek had just dumped me for a Delta Gamma.” Straight-arrow Derek Andrews was her high school sweetheart. They’d graduated the same year and headed off to the University of Idaho together. “Collin, did you hear me?”
“Every word,” he muttered.
“Did you know it was over between me and Derek?”
“Well, Willa, I kinda had a feeling something might have gone wrong with your love life, yeah.”
“You led me on,” she accused. “You know that you did.” He’d seen her coming a mile away. Good-girl Willa Christensen, out to find a bad boy just for the night. “And then you...” Her voice got all wobbly. “You turned me down flat.”
“Come on, Willa. It wasn’t a good idea. You know that as well as I do.”
“Then why did you dance with me all those times? Why did you flirt with me and buy me two beers? You acted like you were interested. More than interested. And then, when I tried to kiss you, you laughed at me. You said I wasn’t your type. You said I should go home and behave myself.”
He’d had some crazy idea at the time that he was doing her a favor, keeping her from doing something she wouldn’t be happy about later. But with Willa, no good deed of his ever went unpunished. And was she going to start crying? He hated it when a woman started crying.
She sniffled in her blankets, a small, lost little sound. “I still can’t believe I did that—made a pass at you. I mean, you never liked me and I never cared much for you and we both know that.” That wasn’t true—not on his part anyway. Far from it. But he wasn’t in the mood to dispute the point at the moment. He only wanted her not to start crying—and he thought maybe he was getting his wish when she squirmed in her blankets and grumbled, “Everyone knows how you are. You’ll sleep with anyone—except me, apparently.”
Mad. Now she was getting mad. As far as he was concerned, mad was good. Mad was great. Anything but weepy worked for him.
She huffed, “I just don’t know what got into me that night.”
He couldn’t resist. “Well, Willa, we both know it wasn’t me.”
She made another huffing sound. “Oh, you think you’re so funny. And you’re not. You’re very annoying and you always have been.”
“Always?” he taunted.
“Always,” she humphed.
He scoffed at her. “How would you know a thing about me the last four years? Since that night at the Ace, all I see is the backside of you. I come in a room—and you turn tail and run.”
“And why shouldn’t I? You are a complete tool and you never cared about anything or anyone in your whole life but yourself.”
“Which is girl talk for ‘You didn’t sleep with me,’” he said in his slowest, laziest, most insolent tone.
“You are not the least bit clever, you know that?”
“You don’t think so, huh?”
“No, I do not. And it just so happens that I’m glad we never hooked up that night. You’re the last person in the world I should ever be sleeping with.”
He tried not to grin. “No argument there. Because I’m not having sex with you no matter how hard you beg me.”
“Oh, please. I mean just, simply, please.” She sat up straight then. Dragging her blankets along with her, she scooted to the edge of the hay bales, as far from him as she could get without swinging her bare feet to the floor. Once there, she snapped, “You do not have worry. I want nothing to do with you.”
He freed a hand from his blankets and made a show of wiping his brow—even though she wasn’t looking at him. “Whew.”
“In case you didn’t know, it just so happens that I have a fiancé, thank you very much.”
“A fiancé?” That was news to Collin. The information bothered him. A lot—and that it bothered him bugged him to no end.
“Yes,” she said. “Well. Sort of.”
“Willa, get real. You do or you don’t.”
“His name is Dane Everhart and he’s an assistant coach at the University of Colorado. We met at UI. We’ve been dating on and off for three years. Dane l
oves me and knows I’m the one for him and wants only to marry me and, er, give me the world.”
“Hold on just a minute. Answer the question. You’re saying you’re engaged?”
She fiddled with her blankets and refused to turn around and look at him. “Well, no. Not exactly. But I could be. I promised to give Dane an answer by the end of the summer.”
He stared at the back of her head. Her hair was a tangle of wild, muddy curls from her dip in the floodwaters. It should have looked like crap. But it didn’t. It looked like she’d been having crazy good sex with someone—and then fallen asleep all loose and soft and satisfied.
And why the hell was he thinking about sex right now? Was he losing his mind? Probably. A few hours trapped in a barn with Willa Christensen could do that to a man, could drive him clean out of his head.
He sat up, too, then, and sneered, “You’re in love with this guy, and you’re not going to see him until September?”
“So? What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, I mean, if you’re in love with him, how can you stand to be apart from him? How can he stand to be away from you?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Are you in love with him, Willa?”
She squared her slim shoulders. “I just told you that you wouldn’t understand.”
“That’s right. I wouldn’t. If I loved a woman, I’d want her with me. Where I could touch her and be with her and hold her all night long.”
Willa gasped. She tried to hide the small, sharp sound, but he heard it. “Oh, please. As if you know anything about being in love, Collin Traub.”
“I said if I was in love.”
“Well. Humph. As it happens, Dane has gone to Australia until the end of the month. He gets only a short summer break before practice begins again. And do you know how he’s spending his limited free time? I will tell you how he’s spending it. At a special sports camp. He’s helping Australian children learn about American football. Because he’s a good man, a man who cares about other people. That’s how he is. That’s who he is...”
There was more. Lots more.
Collin let her heated words wash over him. The point, as far as he saw it, was that she hadn’t answered the main question. She hadn’t come out and said, “Yes. I’m in love with Dane Everhart.”
He felt absurdly satisfied with what she hadn’t said. She could rant all night about the wonderfulness of this Dane character while talking trash about him. At least she was acting like the Willa he’d always known. At least she was full of fire and vinegar and not shaking with cold, shock and fear anymore.
Collin smiled to himself, settled back against the wall and closed his eyes.
Chapter Three
Willa felt Collin’s presence behind her acutely.
But she didn’t turn to him. She sat on the edge of the pushed-together hay bales and stared resolutely out the tack room’s one window as waves of never-ending rain flowed down the glass.
She finished what she had to say about Dane. “It just so happens that Dane would have liked to have taken me with him. But he was going to be very busy with the Australian children and I had things I could be doing here at home. We have summer school at Rust Creek Falls Elementary, in case you didn’t know and I...” Her voice trailed off.
Collin hadn’t said a word for a couple of minutes, maybe more. Had he fallen asleep, for heaven’s sake?
She wouldn’t put it past him. He was such an exasperating, impossible man. Always had been. And no doubt always would be.
So why am I starting to feel ashamed of myself?
Willa’s cheeks were flaming. She tucked her chin down into the scratchy saddle blanket he’d wrapped around her. At least he couldn’t see her embarrassment at her own behavior—not as long as she didn’t turn and face him.
Which she was not going to do right now, thank you very much.
Stretched out on the floor by the hay bales, Buster huffed out a long sigh. Willa bent down and scratched him on the head. His tail bounced happily against the rough plank floor.
She gathered her blankets close again. All right, she probably shouldn’t have gone off on Collin like that. No matter how humiliating her history with the guy, he’d been there when she desperately needed him. He’d saved her life a few hours ago, at no small risk to himself.
Plus, well, she hadn’t really been honest while she was getting all up in his face just now, had she? She hadn’t bothered to mention that she had serious reservations about her and Dane. Dane was the greatest guy in the world and he did want to marry her, very much. But Rust Creek Falls was her home and he wasn’t about to give up his wonderful career at CU. And more important than geography, Dane somehow didn’t quite feel like her guy.
Whatever her guy should feel like. She wasn’t sure. She just had a certain intuition that Dane wasn’t it.
And worse than her doubts about her future with an ideal man like Dane, well, there was that longtime thing she’d had for Collin—oh, not anymore. Of course not. That night at the Ace in the Hole had put an end to her ridiculous schoolgirl crush on the town bad boy. But before that night she used to fantasize about him now and then.
Or maybe even more often than now and then.
She used to wonder what it would be like if bad-boy Collin were to kiss her. Or do more than kiss her...
Not that it mattered now. None of her past silliness over Collin mattered to anyone. It had been a fantasy, that was all. Her fantasy. He’d never been the least interested in her. He’d made that painfully clear on the night he led her on and then laughed in her face.
And really, after all that had happened today, her four-year grudge against him for not having sex with her was beginning to seem nothing short of petty. She really needed to let the past go. She needed to be...a bigger person than she’d been so far about this. She needed to be a better person.
And she needed to start doing that now.
Willa cleared her throat. “Um. Collin?”
He shifted a little, back there against the wall. “What now, Willa?” His voice was scratchy and deep. Lazy. What was it about him? He just always made her think of wrinkled sheets and forbidden passion.
In a purely impersonal, objective way, of course.
“I, um, well...”
“Come on. Spit it out.”
She made herself say it. “I’m sorry, okay?” She hauled her blanket-wrapped legs back up on the hay bales and wiggled around until she was facing him again. He lay sprawled under his blankets, his head propped against the wall, his eyes shut, his eyelashes black as coal, thicker than any girl’s, his full mouth lax and lazy, just like his voice had been, the shadow of a beard on his cheeks. A curl of that impossibly thick black hair of his hung over his forehead. She clutched her blankets tighter to keep from reaching out and smoothing it back. “I shouldn’t have jumped all over you like that. I shouldn’t have called you a tool. That was...small-minded and mean-spirited of me, especially after all you’ve done for me today.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. And he didn’t open his eyes. Again, she wondered if he’d dropped off to sleep and she had to resist the urge to reach out and shake him. But then those bad-boy lips curved upward in a slow smile. “So you don’t think I’m a tool, then?”
“Um. No. No, of course not. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I am.”
“And you think maybe you could stop racing off like your hair’s on fire every time you see me coming?”
A fresh wave of embarrassment had her cheeks flaming all over again. But what did it matter? He couldn’t see her blush. His eyes were shut. Also, she truly wanted to make amends. “Ahem. Yes. Fair enough. I will do that. I will stop avoiding you.”
“Well, all right then. I accept your apology.” He patted the empty space bes
ide him. “Stretch out. Try and get some sleep. I’m thinking we’re going to be busy when the rain stops and the water goes down.”
His words brought reality crashing back down on her. She hung her head. “Oh, Collin. It seems like it’s never going to stop. I know my brother’s house is already underwater. And what if it just keeps rising, what if we—?”
“Shh.” He reached out and clasped her arm through the thick wool of the blanket. His grip was strong. Sure. It made her so very glad that he was here with her, that she wasn’t huddled in the family barn all alone, waiting out the endless storm. “Don’t go there.” His voice was calm and firm. “There’s no point.”
She lifted her head. His eyes were open now, steady on hers. Shamelessly, she pleaded, “Tell me that we’re going to be okay, that Rust Creek Falls will be okay, that we’ll make it through this, come back better and stronger than ever.”
He didn’t even hesitate. He told her what she needed to hear. “We will. Just watch. Now come here. Come on...” He lifted the blanket that covered him.
She didn’t think twice. She went down into the shelter of his offered arm, resting her head on his shoulder. He was so warm and big and solid. He smelled of mud and man, which at that moment she found wonderfully reassuring. He fiddled with the blankets, smoothing them over both of them.
Willa smiled to herself. All those crazy teenage dreams she’d had about him. And here she was, damp and dirty, bruised and scratched up, lying practically on top of him, grateful beyond measure to share a pile of saddle blankets with him. The world seemed to have gone crazy in the space of a day. But right now, in Collin’s arms, she felt safe.
Protected.
She closed her eyes. “I didn’t realize until now how tired I am....”
He touched her hair, gently. Lightly. “Rest, then.”
She started to answer him, but then she found she didn’t have the energy to make a sound. Sleep closed over her. She surrendered to it with a grateful sigh.
* * *
When she woke, the light was different.
Sun. It was sun slanting in the window—and the window faced east. That meant it had to be morning, didn’t it?
Marooned with the Maverick Page 3