For this wasn’t her, standing waist-deep in lake water with the shadows of the trees shivering over them…. This wasn’t her, arching her neck and offering her mouth to Dylan MacCabe, leaning ever so slightly forward, into him, so that her wet breasts brushed his damp chest. No, no, this wasn’t Casey Michaels. She didn’t know this woman standing in her place, losing herself in the quiver of Dylan’s kiss. This woman was uninhibited, this woman felt sexy and sure and full of yearning. This woman was giving herself to him, without a second thought.
Then, suddenly, Dylan lifted his head. And Casey stood swaying, blinking up at him. Her lips throbbed, felt puffy and swollen.
He scanned her face with those intense blue eyes. Searching for something. She noticed a small scar that cut across the bristle on the tip of his chin. Gold tipped each of his lashes.
The shock ebbed away. She’d just kissed Dylan MacCabe. Freely. Willingly. And with feeling.
He let his hand slide out of her hair.
“I’m not saying I’m sorry, Casey.”
She stared at him. Words wouldn’t form in her throat. She didn’t know what to say, anyway. All she knew was that with one kiss, Dylan had turned her into a woman she didn’t know. A responsive woman. A vulnerable woman. Dylan had made her want something she’d convinced herself she would never have again.
“I’ve wanted to do that since the first time I kissed you in the cabin.” His hands lay still at his sides, but he stood as coiled and tense as a spring. “I’m going to do it again, Casey, and this time I’m not stopping—”
“No.”
She stumbled back in the water, away from him, sending up a surge of spray. She stilled just as swiftly as she’d moved, surprised at her own reaction.
She looked away from him, away from those fierce confused eyes. She needed to figure out what was going on in her head that had allowed her to fall so easily into Dylan’s arms. She needed time to think. She needed to get away from him.
All around her was the lapping silence of the northern woods, and the knowledge that she couldn’t get away from him—not for weeks.
Panic gripped her. Turning away from Dylan’s strong, sure presence, she took a deep breath—a deep, cleansing breath—and tried to get a hold of herself.
She heard him breathing. She heard him waiting. Her tongue felt heavy and unresponsive in her mouth. “That wasn’t on the agenda, MacCabe.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing about travel,” he said, his voice filled with frustration. “It’s full of surprises.”
“Keep your surprises to yourself. And let’s keep this all business.”
She heard the water, felt the ripples of his movement, and jerked away before he could touch her.
“Casey, we could light up most of Bridgewater with the electricity between us.” He lowered his voice. “You feel it, too.”
She bristled. He’d breached her defenses, and it made her angry that he would use that knowledge against her. “I didn’t come out here looking for a lover.”
“Neither did I.” The water gurgled as he shuffled where he stood. “I didn’t plan this. But now it’s happened.”
“Nothing has happened,” she retorted, hating the hoarseness of her voice. “Nothing of significance.”
“Oh, yeah? Then why won’t you look at me?”
She looked at him. She didn’t want to. But she twisted abruptly and looked straight into those intense blue eyes with Jillian’s words ringing in her ears:“Face what you fear, Casey. It’s the only way you’ll conquer it.” A shiver shuddered through her as she met Dylan’s bright eyes, a quiver that shook her right down to her toes. A tremor that had nothing to do with cold or fear or dread—and everything to do with passion.
She didn’t want this. She’d never wanted it. Yet standing here before him, she had a fierce sense of inevitability.
She remembered the dress she’d worn that first night, that little slip of silk. And the bright pink bikini she’d chosen to wear this morning. And the way she’d stretched yesterday as she’d risen from brushing her teeth, knowing Dylan’s eyes were upon her. She remembered, too, the discreet little purchase she’d made at the drugstore the day before the launch.
Slie’d willed this upon herself. Not consciously, no. But she couldn’t stand here and deny that she’d wanted to kiss him from that very first day. And more. Her body did, at least Her body still craved much, much more. She’d been too cowardly to admit it to herself.
She’d forgotten what it was like to be so close to another human being; she’d forgotten the joy of flesh upon flesh, of lips upon lips. She’d forgotten what it felt like to have blood rushing through her veins—not from running a track, but from doing something no more physical than rubbing cheeks with a man.
She knew then that, sooner or later, she was going to become Dylan MacCabe’s lover.
The thought shocked her to the bone. She couldn’t She couldn’t make herself that vulnerable again. Not here, not yet, not now—not ever.
“Look, Dylan,” she said, speaking as calmly as she could—more to herself than to him. “We hardly know each other. Yet we’ve spent every moment together for a week.”
“Is that what it is, Casey? Just the moment?”
“Yes,” she said emphatically. “You’re single, I’m single, the sun is bright, the water warm. Let’s just write this whole thing off to the situation and move on, okay?”
A muscle flexed in his cheek. He looked at her—a long, long look that held her when she would have glanced away.
“That ain’t going to be easy, Casey. Not anymore.”
“ARE YOU EVER GOING to give me my own copy of that map, or are you going to pore over it all by yourself for the whole trip?”
Dylan eyed Casey sitting pertly at the stern, then swiftly drew his attention back to the laminated map he’d balanced on one knee. He didn’t need another look at her to know her hair had dried soft and shiny in the breeze, a result of that intense shampooing session they’d shared in the cove.
“There are two streams that lead into this part of the lake,” he said, trying to keep his voice conversational “I’m trying to figure out which of the two is the right one to take.”
“If I had my own map, I could help.”
“Can you say ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo’?”
“Just as well as you, I suppose.”
“Here, then. This will be yours.” He snapped the map back to her, and avoided her arched eyebrow. He dug another copy out of the waterproof map cylinder snug under his seat. “I’ve marked where we are. You see we’re entering the streams now. The map only indicates one outlet at this end of the lake, but we’ve found two.”
“What’s this strange mark a couple of miles up the stream?”
“A marker. A rock carving. Probably petroglyphs.”
“Petroglyphs? You mean…prehistoric carvings of some sort?”
“Indian carvings, more likely. But yeah, that’s right”
“But you told me this map was written three hundred years ago.”
“Yeah?”
“But any rock carvings that existed then could be faded. Covered by bushes, by trees, or just worn away. How are we to be sure the rock carvings are still there?”
“We aren’t.” He grinned back at her, though his heart held no humor. “That’s the beauty of this trip, Casey. It’s full of surprises.”
He was rewarded with the sight of her flush. He turned away swiftly. He had to stop staring. He’d stared enough in the past few days to imprint the sight of her on his mind as surely as petroglyphs in the granite rock of the Adirondacks. He couldn’t seem to stop looking at her, even if it was as simple as watching her bend over a river as she brushed her teeth. He’d found infinite fascination in the way her hair slipped over her shoulders…in the curve of her lean back…
She was driving him crazy. He was a grown man, but she had him feeling like a randy teenager. His nights were filled with fantasies of rolling that few feet of distance betw
een them, and peeling that slim-fitting tank top she always wore to bed right off her body, so he could see without impediment the peaks of her breasts, see whether her nipples were pale and tender and pink, or as luminescent as her eyes. Then, covering one with his mouth to taste her—
Stop! She was skinny, he told himself. He could see the ribbing of her spine whenever she bent over. She was small-breasted, lean-hipped. He liked his women with curves and heft—more to grab on to, no fear of bruising anything in the heat of the moment
The moments were getting hot enough around here.
He’d been spending far too much time thinking about her, and him, and it. He should be concentrating on the map balanced on his knee, or the choices spread out before him—the wide inlet on his right, and the smaller inlet farther down the banks on his left—both equally viable alternatives. He should be thinking about the journey, concentrating on all he remembered of what his aging grandfather had said about this trip in his more lucid moments. He shouldn’t be thinking about the feel of Casey’s shampoo-slick hair in his palms, or the brush of her breasts against his chest.
“Seems to me,” she said, as she absently stroked the paddle to keep the canoe still, “that the petroglyph—or whatever it is—should be two to six miles or so upstream, right?”
He snapped the laminate flat, though he knew the map by heart. “I calculate four miles.”
“Well, let’s pick a path and go looking for it.”
“If we’re wrong, it means backtracking. Double the mileage, half the time.”
“Well, from what I can see, there’s no way of knowing which is the right way by this map.”
“That’s right.”
“Then I say ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo.’ Right fork.”
Dylan shoved the map between his feet. “Right fork it is.”
He dug his paddle deep, shoved it hard, then lifted his face to the breeze. He directed the nose of the canoe up the wide inlet, into the unknown.
He tried to sweat away the thoughts. He paddled strenuously. In the river, the current flowed against them. Not too strong, not yet, though he imagined the narrower the stream became, the more swift the current, and the harder they would have to work to travel any distance. True to form, as the stream suddenly constricted, the current seized the belly of the canoe. He paddled deeper. He sensed her struggling to keep pace, but he didn’t stop. He wanted his muscles to hurt tonight. He wanted to go to bed in that tent and sleep. He wanted to concentrate on pain, instead of pleasure denied.
Not for the first time, he wondered what the story was between her and her husband. He wondered what the hell the bastard had done to make her so reticent, to make her so dosed, so distant; so fiercely determined to resist the rush of electricity humming between them.
The attraction was mutual. That much he knew, now. For a moment back at the cove, she’d been yielding and open, and the current had flowed strong through them both.
He hadn’t wanted this to happen. He wasn’t looking for a woman—he’d had two too many—and least of all, for a woman who would, at the end of this journey, climb back in her van in search of another assignment. Leaving him here picking up the pieces while the members of the clan MacCabe shook their heads and muttered among themselves, “At least he didn’t marry this one, before she dumped him.”
But he was a man, after all. And she was all woman. And the weather was hot and humid and the water was cool and clear. He didn’t know how much longer he could play the gentleman, while the bees buzzed in his ears and the birds chirped in the trees.
“Dylan?”
He tightened his grip on his paddle. Her voice was soft, and it grazed against his senses. “You want a break?” he asked.
“No…but isn’t it getting dark?”
He blinked at the world around him. The pines rose straight on either side of the river, and only a funnel of sky peeked between the dark green tips. He’d been so lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed the change in the weather. The wet wind winnowed through the trees. The black bellies of clouds billowed in the sky above.
He muttered, “A storm’s coming.”
Fast and furious, judging by the roiling of the sky. He glanced around, but there was no place to land. Underbrush billowed from the steep banks and dipped the tips of greenery in the water. He caught sight of a mallard in the shelter formed by the brush, already hiding from the coming rain.
He added, “We’ve got to find a place to pitch the tent”
She must have heard an urgency in his voice, for she paddled with renewed strength. They rounded a curve in the river and he caught sight of a small spit of rocky shore just as the first thick raindrops splattered the surface of the water.
By the time they’d pitched the tent on the uneven ground and covered the canoe with a tarp, rainwater had soaked them to the skin. He stumbled into the tent with the last of the supplies and swiped the water out of his eyes. Casey sat on the nylon floor, rubbing a towel briskly through her hair.
At the sound of supplies dropping, she peeked out from under the towel. Rainwater pattered on the tarp above his head. The coolness of a puddle gathered around his feet
Casey’s body steamed from exertion. Her T-shirt clung to her body, revealing every line of the hot-pink bikini, shaped the curve of her thigh, draped off the line of her shoulder. The tent smelled of her—and of the faint floral fragrance of the shampoo they’d shared that afternoon.
He realized that it couldn’t be five o’clock yet—hours and hours before he would have the urge to sleep.
He turned his back to her and unzipped one of the packs. He rifled around for his own towel, then wrestled off his T-shirt. He used his towel as a screen as he shimmied off his bathing suit.
He heard, behind him, a rustle of clothing, and realized she, too, was peeling off her wet clothes.
It would be so easy. Just to turn around. To see the curve of that back uninterrupted by the strap of a bathing suit To see the tight mounds of her bottom, no longer hugged by cotton. To see the perkiness of her breasts, free of the tautness of a bathing suit, unobscured by the white cotton of an old T-shirt. His palms itched to feel her naked flesh, or her clean sleek hair….
He closed his eyes, thinking, Death, gloom, pestilence. Anything to soften the decided rise of the towel draped around his waist This afternoon she’d made it as clear as glass that she didn’t want his kiss, his touch, or his lovemaking. Famine. War. Losing in the fourth quarter on a third down. He struggled into a pair of loose, dry shorts though his legs still dripped with water.
When he was sure she’d settled down, he glanced at her over his shoulder. She wore an oversize T-shirt with the logo of a famous rock band. She was sucking on an end of her hair. She looked about sixteen.
Yeah, that’s it, MacCabe. She’s too young for you.
Of course, he felt about twenty right now. With just about as much control over his body.
She glanced at him from over the edge of a paperback she’d been reading since the first day. Obviously, she wasn’t making much progress.
She let the book drop to her lap. “Know any good ghost stories, Dylan?”
He met those big, amber eyes, and saw in them a mutual acknowledgement that it was going to be a long and difficult night. Saw more, too; more than he wanted to see. A vulnerability. A silent plea.
“Nope,” he said, in a voice that was more growl than anything. “Haven’t done the Boy Scout thing in years.”
He plunked down and rifled through the packs piled between them, looking for something to eat that wasn’t a granola bar, peanut butter and crackers, or dried aprimts. A beer would be nice. Or a bone to nosh on, to grind out his frustrations.
He suddenly had a new take on the expression “cabin fever.”
Jolting herself upright, she said, “I have an idea.”
She leaned over the packs. Her T-shirt gaped. His gaze fell to the line of her throat, and lower, to the white curve of a breast.
He cracked h
is elbow on a rock jutting under the nylon as he forced himself back down. He sank his teeth into a hunk of salami and worked his jaw to chew it.
“I’ve got it.” She settled back, cross-legged, and gave him a tentative smile. “I assume you play cards, MacCabe.”
“Wednesday nights,” he said, talking around the salami. “My night out with the boys.”
“Good.” She snapped out the cards and nimbly shuffled them. “So, what’ll it be? Gin rummy? Five-card stud, joker’s wild?”
He tore off another hunk of salami. “How ‘bout strip poker?”
He couldn’t bite back the words. He didn’t want to. After this afternoon, he couldn’t pretend that he didn’t want to flatten her against the floor of the tent and let nature take its wild and heated course.
The cards shuffled to a stop in her palm. She narrowed a look at him, frowning. “High hopes, huh?”
He shrugged. “A man’s got to try.”
“Well, why don’t we start with something a little less…risky. Like‘Go fish.”’
He grunted and stared at the red backs of the cards she dealt his way.
It was going to be a hell of a long night
7
CASEY STEPPED OUT OF the canoe and splashed into the shallows. She sank ankle-deep into the silty riverbed.
“Great. Just great,” she groaned. She lunged toward the bank. Her heel slipped against a rock and sank deeper. She sucked her back foot out of the mud. The fine silt seeped in under the edges of her sagging socks. By the time she splashed to the dry riverbank her legs were black from the mid-calf down and grit seeped between her toes.
Dylan, tying the towrope to a branch overhanging the bank, cast her a vaguely amused glance. “Missed the rocks, eh?”
“No, Dylan,” she snarled. “I actually wanted to be exfoliated from the knees down.”
“That works better with your sneakers off.”
“No kidding.”
She cast him a black look. His boots were squeaky-clean. Of course he didn’t sink into the mud. Of course not. Mr. Sensible Nature Man probably mapped out the route before he stepped out of the canoe.
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