“Be sure they’re not,” Anne said, leading her down the hill to where four boxes of doughnuts and a pile of foam cups teetered on the hood of a car. “Best you get away from that talk or you and Dylan will never patch things up.”
“Anne,” Casey said, “you’re jumping to conclusions—”
“As is everyone else.” Anne arched a brow at her. “It’s not surprising, you know. Dylan has only brought two women around to meet the family in his whole life, and he ended up marrying them both.”
Casey scraped to a stop on the graveled slope.
“Uh-huh,” Anne continued, as Casey’s jaw grew slack. “That’s right. The boy’s as faithful as a hound dog—or at least he doesn’t brag about his escapades like Bill.” Anne rolled her eyes. “I don’t think Dylan’s ever had an escapade in his life, tell you the truth. He might look like Indiana Jones right now, but you should see him in the classroom—all spit and polish and pressed pants. Want a doughnut?”
Casey shook her head, grappling with an overload of information.
“You should try the Bavarian creams. They’re heavenly, and Lord knows, you could use some fat on you.”
“Anne, please.” Casey rubbed the middle of her forehead. “You’ve got this all wrong. I’m a journalist. I’m doing this for money.”
The pale brows rose high on her forehead, and the blue eyes began to twinkle beneath.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Casey corrected, embarrassment mingling with frustration. “I’m on assignment. I’ll get paid for the story when it’s done.”
Anne paused with a sugared doughnut halfway to her mouth. “And then what will you be doing?”
“Leaving,” she said. “Following the next story. That’s my job.”
Anne took a bite, and shook her head as she chewed it down. “Leave it to Dylan. He always picks the same type.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, it’s just that Dylan’s a sucker for a certain kind of girl, honey. It’s not like the guy isn’t ambitious, he’s just happy where he is. But he’s always picking the kinds of women who’ll never settle in Bridgewater.”
Casey suppressed the urge to say, But you don’t know me at all. Who says I wouldn’t settle in Bridgewater? Or any other fine small town in America? She’d lived that life once, a long time ago. But she kept her mouth closed. She didn’t want to get into that debate. Not here, not now. And not with Dylan’s curious sister.
Casey shaded her eyes and gazed up the slope, where the men were still laughing and joking and shoving Dylan and winking, with Dylan in the middle with his smile at full cock and his shoulders in full swagger.
Embarrassment and frustration gave birth to the first frisson of anger.
“Casey,” Anne said, “what d’you think about high-school football?”
“Hmm?”
“Football, Casey. Do you watch it?”
“Sometimes. Not for years.” Casey shrugged. “I guess I followed it in high school. I was on the track team, and so we followed all sorts of sports.”
“Well, that’s a plus.”
“What?” Casey shook her head. “Why do you ask?”
Anne gave her a mysterious little smile and shrugged a shoulder. “It means there may be hope.”
Casey gave her an exasperated look.
“Well, either way, you might as well know right now,” Anne said, wiping her sugared fingers on a tiny floral napkin. “I’m absolutely, positively not having yet another hideous bridesmaid’s dress made. You’ll have to settle for one or other of the two—teal with white piping, or burgundy velvet.”
Anne’s outrageous remark was interrupted by the chatter of the men, as a group of them wove down the slope to the river’s edge, hefting the birchbark canoe on their shoulders. Dylan directed the men until the canoe splashed into about two feet of murky water. As they straightened, Casey heard some of the remarks that were not meant for her ears: “Small version of the love boat, if you ask me.” “Two oneway tickets to the love lagoon, coming up.” “So, did Danny really break his arm or did you toss him out in favor of Legs, there?”
Casey’s frisson of anger was stewing into a slow smoldering pique. She stepped away from Anne and waved to Dylan. He gave her a rakish smile and waded through the water toward her. There was an arrogant sway to those shoulders of his, bulging out of the ragged white tank-top he wore, untucked, over a pair of shorts.
As he approached, she wrapped her fingers around the bulge of his forearm. “Let’s check the bags, shall we?” she said, mustering a toothy smile. “We have to discuss packing—”
“I’ll pack the canoe—”
“Well, I’ll supervise. After all, I’ll have to know how to do it without the help of your friends and family. And soon.” She led him up the slope, through a clutch of men laughing and joking, all the way around to the back of the Jeep. Only then, out of earshot of the harpies, did she drop his arm, swivel one heel in the gravel and face him.
“All right, MacCabe. Are you enjoying yourself?”
He had the nerve to flash her that hundred-watt grin. “Of course I am. I’ve been waiting for this all year.”
“I’m not talking about the launch. I’m talking about this little stunt you pulled.”
“Stunt?”
“Playing the dumb jock doesn’t flatter you,” she said, forcibly lowering her voice so as not to gain the attention of the curious onlookers just by the hood of the Jeep. “Why didn’t you tell your family I was coming instead of Danny?”
“I did,” he said, dipping his head under the hatchback of the Jeep and searching the mountain of luggage. “I told them just now.”
“Yeah, well, why didn’t you tell them yesterday? While we were in town in range of a dozen pay phones?”
“I had other things on my mind.” He cast her a bright-eyed glance. “Besides,” he added, turning back to the wall of gear in search of something, “I knew they’d find out today.”
“Oh, they found out, all right.” Her gaze drifted toward the hood of the Jeep, where Bill stood with some of the other men, peering at them and grinning. “Is there something wrong with your brother’s eyes?”
Dylan seized a handful of duffel bag and yanked, nudging it out of its wedge amid the gear. “What?”
“Bill’s eyes,” she repeated. “He keeps twitching one at you. Like he has some kind of tick.”
Dylan glanced up over the pile of gear and his smile widened at the sight of his brother.
“It must run in the family,” she said wryly, “because I just saw you twitch back.”
Dylan peered around the edge of the Jeep and hiked the duffel on his shoulder. “Hey, Bill!” he yelled, then heaved the duffel through the air. Bill caught it and skittered back, nearly landing on his rump. “Make yourself useful and take that down to the shore.”
Then Dylan turned to her and took a step so they stood only a hand’s breadth away. He cupped her shoulders in his hands.
She supposed he meant to reassure her. She supposed he was trying to treat her like one of his high-school kids grappling with a personal problem. She supposed this was what he usually did in such a situation—take the kid in hand, hold him or her still, and look him or her straight in the eye.
But the moment she felt the scrape of his callused palms on the sun-warmed flesh of her shoulders, her head shot up. A breeze parted the branches of the tree above the Jeep, sending a bright shaft of sunlight against his hair. A surge of blood rushed to her head, making her momentarily dizzy. She met the intensity of that hot blue gaze. And all the anger she felt for him morphed into something far more fierce, far more immediate, far more hungry.
He felt it, too. He opened his mouth but no words emerged. His fingers flexed over her shoulders. His gaze slipped over her face and lingered, a moment too long, on her lips.
“Listen, Casey—” His chest swelled with a deep breath, and he dug his fingers into her skin. “You’ve got to make allowances for my family. They’re loud, they’re
nosy and they’re lacking in social graces—”
“I don’t know your family at all,” she interrupted. His breath, smelling of strong coffee, brushed her face when he spoke. Her voice sounded husky to her own ears. “I’ve known them for ten minutes. They’ve acted perfectly normally, considering the circumstances. It’s you I want to pummel.”
“Obviously.”
“When you told everyone that I was joining you, you were grinning like a cat that had gotten into the cream.”
“What did you expect?” He gave her thigh-length black bodysuit a leisurely perusal, and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Have you taken a good look in the mirror lately, Casey Michaels?”
She heard her own sucking intake of breath and hated herself for revealing herself so blatantly. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then shook her head. She couldn’t let this happen—she couldn’t let him flummox her like this. “The point,” Casey persisted, “is that your family believes there is a relationship between us.”
“You can’t change the way people think.”
“Yes, you can. You can tell them the truth”
“Oh, yeah, there’s a solution,” he said. “Stand up in front of my friends and family and protest loudly that the relationship between us is purely platonic.”
“That would have been a good start.”
“C’mon. Nobody would have believed us. We’d just be drawing attention to the situation.”
“Oh, and showing up with me at the dock without a word of warning wasn’t drawing attention to the situation?”
“Casey, I’m thirty-nine. You’re of age, What we do as consenting adults is no one else’s business.”
“That’s exactly the problem—you knew damn well what they would think,” she said between her teeth, tilting her head with a jerk toward the men clustered at the hood of the car. “Because of you, your family thinks I’m some sort of loose woman, running off with you into the woods for three weeks of skinny-dipping and wild sex.”
She could have bitten her tongue off for letting those words leave her lips. Oh, if only the sun could melt her into the ground right now, for Dylan’s whole body had tensed and his eyes blazed like all the light of the sky had been harnessed and intensified into some sort of laser beam burning into the part at the top of her head, while she could only stare at the tiny worn hole in his tank top just below the hem of the neckline, reeling from the images she’d conjured up on her own.
Then he loosened his grip on her shoulders, and let his rough hands slide, slowly, across the muscles and curves of her upper arms, around her biceps, to palm the points of her elbows, and run fingers like sparks across the tender insides of her wrists—as a sensualist might run his hands down the oiled flesh of a naked woman.
Then he asked, in a husky rasp of a voice, “You got something against skinny-dipping?”
Bill stuck his head around the edge of the Jeep. “Skinny-dipping? Somebody say skinny-dipping?”
They broke apart to the sound of Bill’s knowing laughter. Dylan said something. Casey didn’t stay around to hear. She mumbled some sort of excuse and blindly seized a duffel bag. She tucked it under her arm, turned her back on Dylan and brushed by Bill to head down the slope, toward the shore.
Out of the heat of Dylan’s touch and into the relative coolness of the blazing August sun.
DYLAN SPEARED THE TENT stake through two washers and into the dirt. Curling his hand around the heavy-headed hammer, he pounded the stake—once, twice—deep into the ground.
He wished there were twelve stakes instead of six. Hell, he wished there was no firewood so he could hike away from this little spit of land he’d chosen for an evening campsite and cut down an oak. He wished he could find something to do other than think about what he’d like to do with Casey in this tent, this night.
A whistling rose in the air. He got to his feet and saw steam spewing from the spout of the kettle on the compact propane stove. Casey stood still beside it, staring at the small tent, oblivious to the rising whine of the dented teapot.
He’d thought the tent was big enough when he’d envisioned him and Danny-boy drinking beer and cruising these rivers. Now, staring at the lightweight nylon job he’d purchased with some of the grant money, he wished he’d bought a circus tent. Then again, even that wouldn’t be big enough to keep him from fantasizing about the feel of Casey under his hands.
He strode to her side, leaned over and shut off the gas for the stove. “We have to ration the propane,” he explained, straightening. “The tanks we’ve got have to last us all the way to Canada.”
“Oh.”
She tore her gaze away from the tent. She avoided his eyes. She leaned over an open pack filled with freeze-dried meals. Dylan let his gaze skim over her long back, the sun-reddened shoulders, the ridging of her spine pressing against the black bodysuit, the heart-shaped curve of her buttocks.
He swiveled his heel into the dirt and gave one last good shake to the frame of the tent to make sure it was sturdy, though he’d checked it a dozen times already.
She cast a question over her shoulder. “Do you want chicken teriyaki or beef stroganoff for dinner?”
“Beef.”
Wordlessly she went about the business of reading the directions and fixing the meal. Their whole day had consisted of such utilitarian conversations. Since the morning with his family, she’d shown, toward him, at least, a brittle coolness that was hiding, he suspected, a simmering anger. From the beginning Dylan had decided to let her stew. He welcomed the distance she forced between them; welcomed it because he was finding it harder and harder to maintain it himself. He shouldn’t have touched her as he had behind the Jeep, he should never let this woman come within an arm’s length. He had already proved that he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He was beginning to wonder how they were going to get through three weeks under such brittle, uncertain conditions.
He strode into the forest to collect wood for a campfire. By the time she’d figured out the simple pour-in-water instructions for the freeze-dried dinners, he’d constructed a worthy blaze to ward off the rising swarm of mosquitos.
He took the aluminum bag steaming with the scent of beef stroganoff and settled down as close to the smoke as he could stand. He started to shovel the food into his mouth. She did the same, perched straight-backed and cross-legged a good distance from him. The fire crackled and popped as it consumed a pine bough woven into the framework of tinder. They ate in silence, watching the flames as the sky turned a darker and darker blue. Soon he’d finished the whole bag of dinner, yet he hadn’t tasted one bite of it.
He wadded the aluminum-lined bag into a ball between his palms. They couldn’t go on like this for the next three weeks. There had to be some compromise between himself and this woman, something between raucous sex and professional friendship. At the very least, he had to let her know who he was, and what he wasn’t.
He was definitely not a man looking for another wife.
“So,” he said, as he tossed the ball toward a sack they would use for their garbage. “How long are you going to be angry at me?”
A noodle slipped off her fork and back into her own sack of dinner. She stiffened. “Ah. So you’re not a complete dolt.”
“It’s been the coldest August day I’ve ever spent.”
“I’ve been waiting for an apology.”
“An apology.” For what? he wondered. For wanting her? For lusting after her? For thinking about doing what any red-blooded American man would do with a woman on a warm August evening under the stars?
“You should have apologized to me miles ago.” Casey waved a fork at him. “That stunt this morning… You set me up, Dylan.”
Ah, yes. Now he remembered. That old cow. “No, Casey, I didn’t set you up. At least, not intentionally.”
“You can’t deny you loved every minute of it.”
He thought of those few sweaty moments behind his Jeep. “Damn right, I did.”
She dropped her
fork into her dinner. “There! You don’t even deny it!”
“I won’t, either.” He mustered a grin, though it felt tight against his teeth. “I’m guilty as charged. It’s not often I’m in a situation like this.”
“Situation like what?”
“Out in the woods,” he said, stretching his legs out, “with a good-looking woman.”
“Stop it.” She said the words swiftly and harshly. Back Off signs were blinking brighter than the flames of the campfire. “Flattery won’t get you out of this one, Dylan. Neither will lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You’ve had two wives and Lord knows how many women before, after and in between, and you’re going to tell me you’re a thirty-nine-year-old virgin?”
He felt his grin stiffen. He stretched back and wove his hands together, putting them under him as a pillow against the boulder that was his backrest. “Mary-Lou Hetton took care of that when I was—.”
“Spare me the dirty details.”
“But I may as well be a virgin,” he said, trying to keep his voice light, though his grin was fading, along with the images he’d wrestled with on the couch for the past two nights in the cabin. “In this family, Bill’s the one who’s always caught with his pants down. I’m the staid one. Bill calls me ‘Dull-as-Dishwater-Dylan.’”
“C’mon, MacCabe—”
“It’s true. That’s why the clan couldn’t believe it when I showed up with you. And that’s why I milked it for all it was worth.”
That was the amazing thing about it. Most women didn’t pin him for what he was, immediately. Casey looked at him as all the others first looked at him. She didn’t see him as the high-school history teacher out on a lark. She knew him only as the adventurer, off for three weeks in the wilderness.
Yeah, and if he looked really hard at it, Dylan knew he’d done all he could to sustain the image. He’d done more wood-chopping in the past few days than he’d ever done. He’d worn all of his working-out-in-the-woods clothes. He hadn’t dipped into that old fur-trapper’s diary he’d checked out from the local library, nor put on his reading glasses or his chinos, or his leather shoes—all the accoutrements of a history-teacher’s uniform. It was hard not to live up to the wrong ideal when a woman as sleek and sexy as Casey Michaels barged into your life.
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