Loving Wild

by Lisa Ann Verge

  He plucked an olive out of the colander in the sink. She busied herself blowing on the bit of purple pasta until it was cool enough to test, telling herself all the while not to ask, not to ask.

  Don’t ask.

  Though why any woman in her right mind would dump a man like this was beyond her comprehension. Of course,. divorce as a concept was totally beyond her comprehension. She’d been brought up to honor marriage as a sacred union. Sacrosanct. A bonding for life. It was the stubborn Catholic in her.

  “Aren’t you in the least bit curious, Casey?”

  Oh, yes. She was curious. The curiosity was eating at her—she was a reporter, after all. But she knew the way the game was played. If she asked him about his wives, then that would be a wide-open invitation for him to ask her the same kinds of questions. “Your personal life is none of my business, Dylan.”

  “That’s not what I asked. I asked if you were curious. As to why my wives dumped me.”

  “Hmm, let me think.” She turned against the counter and pretended to muse, blowing on the pasta between thoughts. “Was it the way you threw them in the lake every time you took them out in the canoe? Or because you forced them to bait hooks with worms?” She waved the wooden spoon in the air. “Or maybe you like to hang from your feet like a bat in the middle of the night. Eat raw meat for breakfast. Chase after young women. Am I getting warm?”

  A slow smile slipped up one corner of his mouth. A dangerous smile. “Not even close.”

  She could think of a thousand other quirks, involving exotic oils and whipped cream and bedsheets, but she didn’t have the wit or the nerve to articulate them. She turned abruptly back to the stove. “Maybe you just have bad judgment.” She slipped the cool rotini between her lips, then bit it to see if it was done. “In any case, I’m not here,” she said, tossing the hard rotini into the sink, “to find out about your personal life, Mr. MacCabe.”

  “Back to that, are we?”

  “What?”

  “‘Mr. MacCabe.’ You say it like you’re pushing me about a mile away.”

  “I’m trying to tell you,” she said, stirring the pot a little too viciously, “that you should be careful what you confess.” She’d used this tactic before, to ward off personal questions. “We’re going to be partners on this journey, but in the end, I’m a reporter, MacCabe. I’ll use whatever I need, whatever you tell me, if it has an impact on the story I’m going to write.”

  “Ah, Casey, promise you’ll paint me as a wild man.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Neither am I. Paint me as a cad, a monster, a defiler of fair maidens. Might spice up my life a bit.” He leaned toward her. “And it’s going to be a long three weeks, with only each other to talk to. Best you know my foibles now.”

  “Foible number one: You can’t keep your own secrets. Foible number two—”

  “My foibles with women,” he corrected, eyeing another black olive. “I tend to get mixed up with the wrong type.”

  She arched a brow at him. There was obviously no stopping the man. “Should I get out my tape recorder, Dylan? Or a book on Freud?”

  “Janet and I met in high school,” he continued, popping another olive into his mouth. ”She was the homecoming queen and was well on her way to managing a restaurant when she dumped me.”

  “Homecoming queen, huh?” She could imagine the type. Blond. Cheerleader. Long legs. She sank her teeth into a piece of green rotini. It tasted strangely bitter.

  “I was a high-school football hero,” he explained, grinning. “Make sure that gets into the article, will you?”

  “I’ll have to check the facts first.”

  “First-string quarterback. Two years in a row. Made the regional finals, my senior year.” He sank an elbow onto the counter and leaned into it. “Wife number two—Renee—worked for a children’s book publisher in the city. She’s back there now.”

  “They sound like terribly dangerous women, MacCabe. Terrible, wicked temptresses.”

  “I can’t help myself,” he said, with an exaggerated sigh. “It’s purely hormonal. I’m attracted to strong women. Real independent types.” He paused on a breath. “Women who wear silky dresses in the woods.”

  She jerked around to meet his gaze. Though a grin lingered upon his lips, there was something in those blue eyes, something sharp and intent and very, very serious.

  A moment passed between them. A moment when Casey realized there was no humor behind that grin, and she found herself staring into the heart of a very solid, very serious man, grappling with very weighty thoughts. An odd moment. So odd, she stood still and blinked, wondering if she was imagining the sudden shift in the conversation, wondering if she was just imagining the silent communication between them. A brief but-unmistakable acknowledgment of a pure sexual attraction. A swift but silent acknowledgment that Dylan wasn’t all that comfortable with the attraction, either.

  She stood, too stunned to speak. A piece of pasta tipped off her spoon and splashed back into the boiling water. For she’d hardly come to terms with her own body’s strange reactions to Dylan—and there Dylan stood, in full and open admission of a physical attraction she was not yet ready to admit to herself.

  Suddenly Dylan laughed. A low, rumbling, dangerous sort of laugh that left the hair on the back of her neck prickling.

  “Don’t worry, Casey. You’re in no danger from me.” His gaze stayed fixed upon hers, bright and blue and in fierce defiance of his own words. “I’ve struck out twice already. After the second strike, I figured what I need is a nice hometown girl, someone with family on her mind, and little else.”

  “You were born a few decades too late,” she said, trying to make her voice light. She turned back to the boiling pot of pasta. “They don’t make women like that anymore.”

  “Have you ever been married, Casey?”

  She stiffened. She’d known it was coming, sooner or later. Once the ice broke, once they started talking about more than business, there was no way she could dam the questions. All she could do was hold him off for as long as possible.

  “I was married. Only once.” She cast a glance over her shoulder, toward the screen door and the smoke billowing from the grill. “Shouldn’t you check on those burgers?”

  BY THE TIME CASEY went out into the backyard with a bowl of warm pasta salad in her hands, she noticed, thankfully, that Dylan had dropped the whole subject of marriage. As they ate peppery, overdone burgers off paper plates, the conversation drifted to trivial things—the relative benefits of steak sauce versus catsup, raw burgers versus medium rare, the latest horror novel by a bestselling author. Casey ate with relish—she hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she sank her teeth into the meat.

  The sun drifted low and cast long shadows across the ground. Dylan lit a series of candles on the table. The lemon scent of citronella billowed around them, chasing back the evening onslaught of mosquitos.

  A silence fell between them. It should have been comfortable. Her belly was full and warm, six ounces of beer coursed through her veins, and a light breeze rustled the trees and brought relief from the day’s heat. But the silence was tense, uncertain; like that between any two strangers thrust together at a party who had run out of things to say. The light from the kitchen poured out into the yard, reminding her that soon they would both be sleeping in close proximity in the small cabin.

  Dylan settled on a lounge chair beside the picnic table. He took a swig from his beer. She could hear his throat working it down.

  “Did I tell you my grandfather built this cabin with his own hands?” he said, his gaze drifting toward the building. “About seventy years ago.”

  “No,” she said, thinking this at least was a neutral enough subject. “It looks good for its age.”

  “It’s been fixed up a few times since,” he admitted. “New windows, new roof. But back in the twenties, it was nothing but a shack Grandpa used to make moonshine here.”

  She blinked at him and laughed. A
nervous, abrupt laugh. Another bombshell. “Dylan…you’re kidding, right?”

  “No, no, it’s true,” he said, grinning as he toyed with his beer. “Did you notice those two big brown bottles on the mantel? Those are his moonshine jugs.”

  She cast him a doubtful eye.

  “It’s true,” he protested, with a slap of his hand across his heart. “When I was kid, every summer instead of playing ‘war’ or ‘cowboys and Indians,’ we played ‘Beat the excise men’ and ‘Get the moonshine to town.’”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, struggling suddenly with the image of a little Dylan and his friends tearing wildly through the woods, laughing. And she felt an odd pang in her chest.

  She took a sharp breath to force it away. “Dylan, did your grandfather have any compunction about telling impressionable kids how he broke the law?”

  “He always said that a bad law is no law at all.” He shrugged with a quick heave of his shoulders. “Anyway, we just figured that Grandpa was so old it was as if he lived back in the Old West, with Jesse James and Billy the Kid, when outlawing was fun.”

  “Your poor mother.” She let her gaze drift to the darkening woods. “She must have hated those games.”

  “Not really. She and everyone else thought Grandpa was harmless. Full of tall tales.”

  She paused, eyeing him over the lip of her bottle as his words hung in the air. She spoke out of pure reporter’s instinct. “But you didn’t think so, did you?”

  “Oh, no. I’m sure everything he told us was true, right down to the last wild detail.”

  “Dylan,” she chided, “you are a romantic.”

  “I’ve had two wives. Of course I’m a romantic.”

  He smiled at her then, a wide, honest grin—the first easy communication they’d had since that tense moment in the kitchen. Casey tried not to grow warm at his glance. She really tried. She let her gaze skitter away and she took a gulp of beer. It washed down her throat as tasteless as water.

  Great. Three weeks in the wilderness with a romantic. She must be losing her mind.

  “Grandpa’s stories were hard for any boy to resist.” Dylan leaned forward in his chair, his gaze following the outline of the woods, growing more murky with the dying day. “I remember one story in particular. Grandpa told us about an Indian he’d met when he was a young man. A Seneca still living in the woods up here.”

  “A Seneca,” she said, arching a brow higher.

  “Yeah, you know. An Iroquois. C’mon, Casey, we’re talking seventy years ago. There was still homesteading going on in Oklahoma.” He waved a hand toward the woods. “And this land, it wasn’t all fenced off as private property or relegated to national park status back then.”

  “Sounds like your MacCabe ancestor has kissed the Blarney stone.”

  “Casey,” he said with mock shock, “you’re not a romantic.”

  She blinked at him. The comment pricked her. She felt, strangely, like wincing. She had been a romantic. Once. A long time ago. She’d given up on happily-ever-afters after her husband had died.

  “Call me a cynic.” She took another swig from her now empty bottle and planted it with decided force upon the scarred wooden picnic table. “Do you have any idea how many wild stories I’ve heard in my travels?”

  “No. I’d like to hear them.”

  “Well, we’ve got three weeks coming.” She swung her legs over the bench, stretched them out, and leaned back against the table. “Did you ever hear about that guy who parachutes off skyscrapers? Well, I’ve interviewed him. I’ve also interviewed a man who lives in Yosemite. I mean, lives in Yosemite. Kills deer and hunts rabbits to eat, sleeps in a cave. I keep telling myself I’m going to write it all down someday. Call it ”Travels across America,‘ or ’The American Character,‘ or something just as highfalutin’. But I never seem to have the time.“ She tilted her head at him. ”Sounds like your grandfather’s story would fit right in with all the other tall tales.”

  “If you do write that book, tell the tale about the Seneca Indian,” he said, settling back in his chair, “who showed my grandpa a canoe route through to Canada.”

  Casey stilled. A chorus of evening bugs brought their song to a sudden swell. A citronella candle sputtered and shot a curl of smoke into the air.

  Well, well, well Dylan had a method to his madness. She stared at him, but he seemed strangely reluctant to meet her eye.

  “Should I get my tape recorder for this, Dylan?”

  He shrugged, then twisted his bottle in his hand, over and over. “I thought you were out of batteries.”

  “I have an adapter,” she replied, nodding to the outlet near the door to the cabin.

  “I’d rather you just sat and listened.” His gaze flickered to her, then back out to the woods. “Just this once.”

  Her fingers itched for a pad of paper and a pen. She leaned toward him, sensing a story. She watched him as he took a deep swig of his beer, then planted the empty bottle on the table. She realized with a jolt that he was finally going to admit to her the secret he’d kept since the afternoon, and that secret didn’t seem to be anything as dangerous as she’d expected.

  She wondered if Dylan would ever stop surprising her. She wondered if she could ever get a handle on the man, pigeonhole him, mark him for a type and then dismiss him as she’d done with so many of the men she’d written about.

  “Grandpa said the Seneca showed him a canoe route into Canada,” he began. He hung on to the empty beer bottle for a while, tracing patterns in the sweat on the glass. “The old Indian told him fur traders used to take it, but they always needed an Indian guide, because the Indians were the only ones who knew the signs.”

  “Signs?”

  “Landmarks. Rock formations. Petroglyphs. All the markers that showed the way.” He released the beer bottle, then folded his hands upon his flat belly and tipped back in the chair. “As a boy I used to play that my friends and I met the Indian, he showed us the route and then saved us from certain peril.”

  “This is too wild, Dylan.”

  “I thought so, too. I’d long since written off the story as just a crazy yam to fill a boy’s imagination. Everybody had. It got to the point where people were saying that Grandpa was finally senile, always insisting he was telling the truth in those bootlegging stories—and now none of his cronies were alive to back him up.” He let the chair drop to the ground. “He’s nearly ninety, you know. Still kicking. But half the time he isn’t really here anymore. Everybody stopped believing him a long time ago.”

  “Except you.”

  She’d murmured the words. She’d not meant to say them aloud, but they lingered between them in the soft silence of the evening.

  “No,” he admitted. “Even I thought he was full of blarney. I thought he should be happy knowing that he was a good storyteller, and stop insisting on everyone believing everything he said. I even told him so, once.”

  Casey suddenly realized that dusk had turned to twilight, and the glow from the kitchen had grown bright and golden, mimicking the flickering golden light of the citronella candles. Darkness had fallen upon them suddenly, and now it seemed to draw them together in silence.

  A strange silence. An intimate silence. Nothing had changed; they still sat with an old scarred wooden table between them, yet the darkness cloaked them in intimacy.

  “Then one day, about two years ago, I was in the middle of some research on early Bridgewater—my hometown—when I came across an article in the newspaper in the late 1920s about how the Adirondack creeks were considered to be one of the thoroughfares for illegal liquor coming down from Canada.”

  Dylan flexed his fingers and tipped farther back in his chair. He leaned his head back into the cup of his entwined fingers.

  Casey watched him, riveted.

  “Then,” Dylan continued, “not long after, I stumbled on Henri’s map—in a totally unrelated bit of research on seventeenth-century Quebec. It was eerie. And I could no longer deny that there were som
e mighty coincidental links here.”

  “Dylan…you didn’t mention any of this in your grant papers, did you?”

  He gave her a lopsided smile. “Fifteen years in the school system has taught me political expedience, if nothing else. Do you think the alliance would have sponsored me if they knew I was following an old moonshiner’s route into Canada?”

  She knew they wouldn’t. It wasn’t academic enough. It didn’t have the smell of old parchment and ancient languages. But it had heart. Real heart. And a realization came to her—at first no more than a niggling thought, but which soon bloomed big and fragrant.

  “This whole thing,” she said, leaning toward him, “this whole trip…you’re doing it to prove your grandfather was telling the truth.”

  Dylan sat in silence, his face limned by the candlelight. His lips tight, his face still.

  “You are, aren’t you?” She sidled up on her knees on the picnic bench. “You’re going to find the water route through to Canada, not just because fur traders did it three hundred years ago, but because your grandfather claims to have done it seventy years ago.”

  He shrugged. He reached for his beer, curled his lips over the mouth and tipped it up, though he’d already finished the dregs. She sat back, incredulous. Her fingers itched for a pen and a pad of paper. She wanted to write this all down. Already, the story was taking shape in her head. Not the main story for American Backroads, but another story she would write about the man—a story about moonshine and the ingenuity of bootleggers; a story about a man in the midst of reliving a childhood adventure, setting forth to redeem an aging grandfather’s honor.

  She stared at him. He seemed strangely uncertain, leaning back in his chair, busying himself with knocking away a moth that had fluttered past him toward the citronella flame.

  She curled a hand around one of the candleholders. The flame inside warmed the thick glass. She peered in to gaze at the yellow wax, then tipped the glass, so the pale yellow liquid poured away from the drowning wick.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this,” she asked, easing the candle back down, “when you were first trying to convince me to join you?”