A sharp elbow jabbed him hard in the stomach and before he could trap the offending arm a swift foot stamped down painfully on his shin. It took every bit of his self-control not to snap back the woman’s head and wring her blasted neck.
He grunted as he pressed his knee into the back of hers and felt her dropping to the ground. He went with her and pressed her body against the forest floor. A muffled squeal met his ears as he tried to subdue the struggling woman. He didn’t want her to shout to the rest of the group to alert them. He breathed in deeply as he sat up across her back and pressed her face gently into the leaves. It took him a second to realize that the scent in his nostrils was already ingrained in his mind. Blonde hair fell from a coloured band at the back of her head and it dropped in familiar waves about her neck.
“Lucy!” His shocked whisper stopped her struggling far more quickly than he could physically subdue her frenzied thrashing. He lifted up from her body and turned her over between his knees.
“Joe! Shit! You scared the life out of me!” She struggled to sit up, spitting leaves and dirt as Joe spun from her body.
“Jesus Lucy! You have some kind of elbow on you. That bloody hurt.” Joe rubbed his flat stomach and un-tucked his t-shirt. He tugged it downwards, desperately trying to disguise the throbbing that had begun in his groin the moment he had realized who he was sitting on.
Lucy rubbed her elbow and tried to look at it.
“Hurt me probably more than you. What the hell do you think you’re doing sneaking up on me like that? I was only following your instructions and trailing you.” She let go of her arm and sat breathing heavily on the overgrown path. She rubbed a hand across her face to remove some of the dirt.
Joe pulled a big white handkerchief from his pocket and passed it to Lucy. She took it and wiped her face all over before shaking it out and then handing it back to him.
“Sorry.” Joe squatted down beside her. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just didn’t want you to give the game away. The way they are jabbering on they could be walking for miles before they have any idea that no one is with them. It makes for a great exercise for them to have to work together to find the way back out of here.” He looked at where Lucy had her hand pressed to her forehead. He noticed her wince and he reached forwards to remove her hand. There was a faint red mark on her forehead. “Shit! I’ve hurt you!” He grabbed his handkerchief again and poured some water from a bottle at his waist. He pressed the cool cloth gently against the graze as his eyes raked her face for other injuries he may have caused.
Lucy sat still for a moment and then shuffled back from him. His masculine scent mixed with his spicy aftershave was too much for her. It took all she had not to throw herself into his muscled arms.
“I’m fine Joe. It’s nothing.” She pushed his hand away from her face and tried to catch her hair back up in the band, then she began slapping at her shirt as she tried to remove the filth of the forest floor
Joe looked down at her as she brushed the dead leaves from her front. It took him a few moments to realize that they were now totally alone in the forest. The sound of the group had long since passed but he knew that David would be keeping up with them.
“Lucy, I am so sorry. I wouldn’t have hurt you for the world.” His tone was agonized as he glanced at the slight graze on her forehead. It burned his gut to think that he had caused her harm.
She looked up at him and smiled.
“You didn’t hurt me Joe. It’s just a graze. I should have realized that it was you. It was my own fault.”
His heart was pounding in his chest partly due to anger at himself for hurting her but mostly because he could still feel the heat from where she had been trapped beneath his body. Joe shook his head.
“No, it’s my job to know who is on my tail. I’m just rusty. It’s never happened before here.”
Lucy looked up at him quizzically.
“What do you mean? Hasn’t anyone seen you sneak off like that? It wasn’t like you were hiding or anything. The others were just distracted, that’s all.”
Joe nodded in agreement.
“But that’s the point. Up until now everyone has been distracted. You are the first to ever see me leave the group in nearly five years.”
Lucy smiled up at him.
“Don’t be daft. Someone must have seen you before now. I saw David disappear too. He was on the other side of the path. It was just easier for me to follow you.”
Joe’s eyes clouded for a moment as he realized what she was saying. She wasn’t following him deliberately. She was just following the nearest person to her. His heart sagged in his chest and he moved back from her, trying to give them both some space.
There was a rustle behind them and suddenly David appeared from behind the bushes. He lifted his chin at Lucy, his eyes shining with admiration.
“Well done love. You are the first to manage that feat.” He looked over at Joe and nodded. “I’ll head them off for a bit and give you twenty minutes to get down to the river. I’ll meet you there with the rest of the group.” He gave Lucy one last smile and melded back into the bushes.
Joe stuck his hand out to Lucy who grabbed it and hauled herself from the ground. She dusted off the remainder of the clinging leaves and looked up at Joe again.
“Ready?” She asked as he stared down at her.
He cleared his throat noisily.
“As ready as I’ll ever be. Are you sure you are okay with that bump on the head?” He still sounded worried.
She gave him a quick smile and his heart leapt in his chest as he saw her dimples peek out once again.
“It’ll take more than a measly bump on the head to take me down. Come on, let’s get down to the river before the others. We can give them all a big surprise.” She smiled widely and stood back as Joe took one last glance at her and then stepped onto the path in front of them.
Jessica Dennison drew in a shocked breath and turned to her boss.
“Can you believe how he just spoke to us? That man is an idiot. He has no idea who we are. I want to leave immediately.” She stood with her hands on her hips and glared up at Freeman.
Carter Freeman stared down at the woman in front of him.
“I think we should let it go Jessica. These are just teething problems. Everything will be sorted out by the end of the day. If it comes to it, I can always complain to his boss. He might look tough but it’s always the money that talks.” He looked over his shoulder and suddenly stopped speaking when he saw David smiling widely at him.
“You can give it a try if you like mate…go on then, I’m waiting. What complaint would you like to make?” David grinned now as Freeman squirmed in his shoes.
He had completely forgotten that David was the joint owner of the chateau and project. Freeman gritted his teeth and said nothing while the woman at his side made odd squeaking sounds in the back of her throat. It took him a moment or two to realize that she was grinding her teeth in fury. He looked at his secretary who although wasn’t grinning quite like a Cheshire cat, had a definite smirk on her face.
“Do you want to share how you came to be here with these men and not with the group? I thought the whole point of the exercise was that we stick together.” He sounded more than a little annoyed.
Joe stepped forwards.
“I asked you to follow me. Miss Collins was just following my instructions a little better than the rest of you. Now if half of the group would like to go with David, the others can come with me and we’ll all meet back here to change activities in two hours.” He walked through the middle of the group indicating who each person should go with. He kept Freeman and Jessica in his own group and made sure Lucy was in David’s. He didn’t want her mixed up in anything these two were going to muck up. He even felt a bit sorry for the rest of the group and vowed to swap them around after these two tasks were performed.
Chapter Seven
The sweat ran down Lucy’s back but there was no way she was going to give
up. They had made the pine logs into a high wall using nothing but the wood itself combined with plenty of initiative and determination. It had taken them a good twenty minutes to actually work out how you could even do it, but one of the staff had suddenly remembered seeing an episode of Little House on the Prairie where they had made a log cabin. They used the same principals and soon had a three sided structure that presented one face as a wall of wood.
David had been somewhat impressed. On most other occasions he had to give massive hints and even had to tell the groups on occasions. This lot had at least some modicum of intelligence and more importantly, were willing to give someone else’s idea a try. It wasn’t how he would have done it himself because if they were meant to be using it as a wall to keep an enemy out, it had some big flaws, but on the whole it worked. There were groans from the crowd when he advised them that the wall, while sturdy enough, now had nice easy footholds for an enemy to use to climb over it.
“We want to keep the other team off our backs for another hour. They could climb over this in minutes. We need to make the wall solid and a lot higher. This way we have used a lot of the wood as supports. We need to be more efficient.”
It was Lucy who pointed out that there were four lengths of wood considerably longer than the others.
“Well, if we had something to dig with we could use the longer pieces as braces and slot the other bits between. We would need to dig it down a long way though for it to have enough strength though.”
David gave her a huge smile.
“Well done Miss Collins. And you’re right about the depth of the holes needed, but don’t forget, this is an ancient forest floor. The ground has been built up over centuries with fallen leaves. It’s dead soft and dead easy to dig so the next question is, what are we going to use to dig with?”
There was a short silence and then a faint voice piped up at the back of the group.
“There’s plenty of smaller branches lying about. If we could bend and split a couple so they are pointed we can use them to break the soil and lift it out with some sheets of that bark. We could all work on a digging point at the same time if we measure it all out carefully. That would save time and keep us all occupied. It’s not as though we could work with many more than two on each hole anyway.”
David grinned again.
“Well done! Come on, let’s get this wall built. We’ll keep your boss at bay for another hour!”
There was laughter in the air as they all suddenly walked to the edges of the path looking for suitable branches to split and bark to use as shovels. It wasn’t long before they were breaking the soil and digging into the soft earth.
Half an hour later they were slotting the logs between their poles and in minutes, with a few careful placement of some rope pulleys they had built a twelve foot high wall of solid wood. It was sturdy enough too but someone had found some young willow branches down by the river and for extra strength, instead of using the rope that they decided as a group might come in handy for another project, they bound the supporting poles together at the top with the sinewy branches.
David stood back to admire their work and found Lucy at his side.
“Just in time I think.” She cocked her ear at the wall of wood. There were distinct groans coming from along the path the other side.
David gathered the group and held his finger over his mouth to indicate that they needed to be quiet. He gathered them together and pointed over his shoulder along the path. They all quickly made their way to the next activity and left the sounds of annoyed people behind them.
Joe was sick to death of his group. Well, sick to death of two people in it. The last exercise had been a near waste of time. It was a fairly simple task, a test of the group’s ability to work together but Freeman and Jessica Dennison had taken over completely. And then they hadn’t been willing to share any of the responsibility when it had all gone wrong. They had assumed that getting the group through the spiders web of ropes that Joe had knotted together and stung across the forest path, would be a simple activity, but as each gap was to only be used once it was a little more difficult than they had expected.
After struggling with the weakest people attempting to lift some of the heaviest, they soon found themselves in more problems when they realized that they hadn’t left a gap at the bottom of the web big enough for the last person. Freeman had taken over, instructing his team with bad advice as to who should go through the web where. They had managed it at last, only to find the there was no gap big enough for Freeman to crawl through and the next one large enough for him was right at the top with no way for him to reach it.
Freeman snorted in disgust as he realized that he was trapped on the wrong side of the web. Joe had started them on the task again, asking others for their opinions, encouraging them to find a better system but this time Miss Dennison had taken over. She sent Freeman through first to help with the lifting on his side, which wasn’t such a bad idea, but then she left herself and another female stuck because neither of them were tall enough to get through the gap at the top without a good leg up and they discovered too late that neither of them were strong enough to support the other single handed.
The team had eventually made it through when Joe put a quiet but thoughtful man in charge. Within minutes the whole team was on the other side of the web easily, with minimum fuss, but Freeman and Dennison had glared furiously at the man who almost quaked under their combined gaze.
They made their way back along the forest path towards the river but groans went up as they saw the twelve foot high wooden wall now blocking their way. The wild rhododendrons hemmed them in at both sides leaving them with no other route to follow unless they went back up the trail and through the spider’s web again.
Joe admired the workmanship involved and as he tested the wall’s strength. It was very sturdy and he wondered who had come up with the idea of lashing the poles together with willow. It made the whole thing very strong.
Fortunately his group had learned a thing or two in the last activity and they had more of an idea of how to get the group over the barricade. Sensibly they sat Freeman on the top of the wall after two of the strongest men gave him a leg up. Freeman could then help with pulling up some of the less agile and weaker ladies. He could also reach down to the last man left on the wrong side of the barrier, the tallest and fittest guy, to give him a hand up when he took a running jump at the wall.
Joe congratulated them all on a good job and then wished he hadn’t as Freeman took all the credit for being the only helpful member of the team as he had been on top of the wall. He had entirely forgotten all of the lifters and carriers who had pushed, pulled and cajoled their team mates over and then helped them down at the other side.
They arrived at the river just in time to see David’s team swinging over the water on the ropes they had saved from the wall building exercise. Loud whoops accompanied the general camaraderie and Joe’s team looked on with envy.
Freeman immediately went to the riverbank and stood with his hands on his hips. He turned to face Joe.
“And this is meant to teach my team what exactly? I’m not paying sixty grand for this lot to just muck about playing Tarzan.” His tone was acidic.
Joe held his gaze and answered.
“David is showing them how to rely on their own strength as well as on that of others. That wall must have taken some building to get done in the short space of time. Now they are letting off some steam. Looks to me as though they are having a good time while they are doing it, so it was a good idea to keep hold of the rope pulleys.” He smiled and his heart soared as he saw Lucy fly through the air, her hair streaming out like a golden cascade behind her as she screamed her way across to the other side of the river.
Jessica came up beside her boss.
“That’s not hard. Anyone can hang onto a rope and let themselves go.” She smirked up at Freeman who stared at Joe in turn.
“So is that what we are doing next? Swingi
ng about on ropes?”
Joe frowned at the man in front of him and then decided to play along.
“Yes, actually it is. And you can go first.” He turned to David who was watching the exchange from the other side of the river along with two of his group. The rope was situated on a narrow bend in the river and David looked on expectantly as Freeman grabbed hold of the rope. He stood and waited to catch the man as he came over, but freeman motioned him and the others away with his hand. The two men holding the other end of the rope looked at David for a second but he just shrugged and waved them back.
“Mr. Freeman clearly thinks he knows what he’s doing.”
“This will be a doddle.” Freeman raised his arms and settled them high on the rope, then he took a running jump and suddenly leapt from the edge of the bank.
But he hadn’t considered why David and two of the other team had been waiting at the river bank. The rope jerked through their hands as he launched himself and the overhead branch plunged down once his weight was hanging from below it. Joe had to grin at the horrified look on Freeman’s face as he realized that he was now below the bank on the other side. There was nothing he could do. The men were no longer holding the rope as a counter weight and he had leapt so violently that he spun out of control. His back hit the bank hard and he let go of the rope.
The water was only waist high but he wasn’t in a good position and he sat down in the water which promptly closed over the top of his head. He came up spluttering just as Joe slithered down the bank and waded across to him to help him up.
Forever Scarred (Scarred Series Book 3) Page 8