“Just think of it this way,” he said, tightening the rope with practiced ease. “The mud’s good for mosquito bites.”
She glared at him as she scratched her arm, where a series of welts glowed red along her elbow. She felt her cheeks flush with irritation and anger. She had a sudden image in her head of Wile E. Coyote, eyes red in fury, steam belching from his ears. She only wished she had the phone number for the Acme Company.
Mr. Optimist was beginning to get on her nerves.
Of course, everything was beginning to get on her nerves. First of all, the rain. Not drenching downpours of rain, no. Not enough to convince Mr. Nature Boy to put up the tent and take cover for a while, but spitting mist, instead. A spitting mist that made her normally straight, sleek hair kink and twist like Little Orphan Annie’s. A vague drizzle that seeped under the collar of her T-shirt and made her as itchy as if she had an all-body case of diaper rash.
For two days this haze had fallen on them. Two days of pewter skies and fog. Two nights of sleeping wet without a fire. Two days of living under this Saran Wrap rain poncho feeling like some kind of soggy leftover.
Two days of wondering what had possessed her to agree to take this trip with this infuriating go-go football coach, this disgustingly well-conditioned hunk who could still look heart-stoppingly good, unshaven and soaking wet, after a week of roaming the woods.
“I’m going to climb that rock,” he announced, checking the rope for tautness and eyeing the float of the canoe. “Maybe I can find that Owl’s Head landmark better from up there.”
“According to your inaccurate ancient map,” she said, kicking her muddied foot against a sapling, “we were supposed to be able to see Owl’s Head Rock from the river.”
“Yeah, yeah, but maybe the trees have grown. Maybe there’s a petroglyph we can’t see from below. Maybe the rock formation has eroded. We’re not getting anywhere looking from the river, so we might as well scout out the terrain.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Eagle Scout.” She mocked a salute as she scraped her other muddy shoe against the sapling. They’d spent the whole morning looking for “Owl’s Head Rock,” a supposedly prominent landmark on the route, to no avail. “So,” she said, “we’re lost.”
“Casey, don’t start this again.” His jaw set “We’re not lost.”
“No?”
“No.”
He swept up his pack and hefted it over those brawny shoulders, then swung a rope over one arm. We’d better not be lost, she thought darkly. He might think he was Indiana Jones, but Casey knew she was not—nor would she ever be. Beef jerky and freeze-dried chicken teriyaki was one thing, but she wasn’t going to live on wild onion grass and well-baked acorns and various other disgusting survival foods while he sent smoke signals for help, just because this adventurer felt like playing Davy Crockett. She had her own plans for rescue tucked tight in her backpack, if they did ever find themselves truly lost in the wilderness.
“You’re not one of those guys who refuses directions, I hope,” she said, slapping her hands free of muck. “The kind that will drive in circles with a map on the steering wheel muttering to themselves, instead of admitting that just maybe, just maybe—”
“Six hours ago we entered this stream. The turnoff is dear on the map.”
“Ah, yes, old Henri’s trusty three-hundred-year-old map—”
“If worse came to worst,” he interrupted, “we could backtrack to that point”
“I say, that means we’re lost.”
“No. We’re not lost.”
She stilled. So she’d finally probed a sore spot in the optimist’s armor. His jaw was set, his shoulders stiff. A muscle flexed in that ill-shaven cheek.
Then he looked up and his bright blue gaze swept over her, from dripping hair to dirty toes. “You can stay here while I climb,” he said. “Throw up a tarp. I’ll be back within the hour.”
He turned on his heel and crashed, alone, into the woods.
Casey stood in the dim gray light for a moment, staring at the greenery swaying in the wake of his departure, staring at the darkness of the woods beyond, listening to the crackling of litter, the creaking of tree branches bowing under the weight of rain. She thought of the bull moose they’d passed yesterday, its huge antlers dipping as the animal drank at the riverbank. Then, with one swift move she swung up her own discarded pack.
“Wait!” She crashed through the woods, pushed away ferns and branches, and caught up with him. “Wait, Dylan—”
He came to an abrupt halt as he swung to face her. “What is it?”
Whip-crack sharp. Impatient. His eyes a bright blue in the dimness. And all of a sudden the air was full of lightning.
She took a step back. Damn him. Damn him for looking so good while she felt like a limp noodle. Damn him for looking at her…like that.
Didn’t he think she was angry, too? Didn’t he know she sensed the frustration shimmering between them? Didn’t he know she tossed and turned in her sleeping bag every night, all her senses directed toward him lying on the other side of the tent, as if her body consisted of a hundred thousand magnetic needles, all straining north? She wanted to be rid of him, too, but they were stuck here together and that was what was causing all this friction.
She forced herself to meet his eyes. “I’m coming with you, Dylan.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t have to prove anything to me.”
He straightened. His chest expanded as he took a deep breath. She tore her gaze from the way the damp cotton of his T-shirt clung to his pectorals. He looked beyond her, over her shoulder, away from her face. She saw his struggle in the tightness of his features.
“Listen,” he said finally, in a voice falsely calm, “you’ve been a real trooper, but I can do this better alone.”
She narrowed her eyes. He did that often lately. Called her a “real trooper.” Or urged her to paddle yet another mile, saying, “Come on, girl, you can do it.” He did everything but pat her on the head when she managed a difficult task. She wondered if he would offer her a Girl Scout badge when this was all over.
She supposed it made him comfortable that way—to put them in the role of teacher and student. Instead of what they really were. Instead of what they could not avoid facing, each evening, stuck inside that small tent in the dark, or even now, in the moist intimacy of these woods. They were just one man and one woman, out in the wilds. Alone. With lightning arcing between them.
“No way, MacCabe,” she said, wondering at the quiver in her voice. ‘Tm not waiting back there alone.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of in these woods.”
“No, nothing but a bull moose in rut and a bobcat or two—”
“Casey; there are no—”
“Besides,” she interrupted, in no mood for logic, “you need me.”
The muscle in his cheek flickered again. A light in his eyes flared. She realized there was more than one truth in those words.
He curled his hand over the binoculars hanging from his neck. “I can use these well enough myself.”
“You need my perspective,” she persisted. “that what partnership is all about, right?”
His knuckles whitened on the binoculars. Then, with a grunt, he swiveled a foot in the muck. “Suit yourself, then.”
As soon as he turned away her breath rushed out of her in one long swoosh. She closed her eyes, then shook herself out of light-headedness. He’d already surged too far ahead, and she was determined not to be left behind.
She caught up to him and followed his long-legged stride as best she could. He was making no allowances for her now. Not that he ever had, since that afternoon in the cove. He seemed to take great pleasure in pushing her—and himself—to the edge of endurance. She felt as if she’d spent the last week trying to catch her breath.
She plodded on. Her feet squelched in river silt and water with every step. She was so wet. From the inside of her ears to the insid
e of her toes. From the back of her neck to the base of her spine. She couldn’t help but think of hot baths and heated rooms, she couldn’t help but crave civilization. She wanted to find a laundromat, hurl herself bodily into one of those industrial three-load dryers, close the door and let the thing whirl her until she tumbled out, as dry and soft and fluffy as a big terry-cloth towel.
She also wanted a good meal. A cooked meal. Something that wasn’t powdered or fneeze-dried. She wanted a big glass of orange juice. She wanted dry socks. She wanted to sleep on a mattress. She wanted to sleep with Dylan.
She wanted to sleep with Dylan.
She jerked her backpack tight against her shoulders. Dylan had done it to her again. Thoughts like that always struck her when she was in extremes of physical exertion. Like now. Like at the end of a five-mile jog. It had always been during those mini-marathons that she had seen through her problems most dearly. That was the real problem here, if she admitted it to herself. She wanted to sleep with Dylan MacCabe.
Suddenly, Jillian’s voice rang in her head—so clearly that Casey imagined she could even smell Jillian’s cigarette smoke.
There will come a time, Casey, when you’ll want a man in your bed again. It’s a normal biological response.
Casey tightened her grip on her backpack and wondered how Jillian managed to do that—plant some key phrases in her head and then send her off so that whenever Casey hit an emotionally fragile situation those phrases would sound in her head, like an audiotape on a loop.
She raised her glance to Dylan. He strode purposefully ahead of her. The mist had soaked his shirt and made it cling to his shoulder blades—to the width of those shoulders, to the hollow at the base of his back just above his belt. Something fluttered deep inside her, something that made her knees go weak.
Oh, God, I’m not ready for this.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t ready for any of it. The idea. The wanting. How much longer could she stay celibate in that small tent alone with a powerful, sexy, rain-drenched Dylan MacCabe? Playing fish. Backgammon. Pretending to read by the light of a flashlight, with Dylan’s warmth filling up the tent. She’d long given up telling him her travel stories. She couldn’t stand having him stare at her for so long. They lived in such intimacy…yet they weren’t intimate enough.
She opened her eyes and shrugged the weight of the pack against her shoulders. She tried to concentrate on her breathing. She tried to put herself in the athlete’s mind-set. As if she were on the fifth mile of a six-mile run, and had set her heart on breaking her own personal record. Don’t complain. Work yourself to the bone. Never do less than your very best. Go the extra mile. Work through the pain.
Work through the pain.
She felt the strange bite of tears at the backs of her eyes. She blinked, hard, to make them go away. She’d spent three years working through the pain. She wasn’t ready for this. She simply wasn’t ready for this.
She stubbed her foot against an upraised root. Dylan stopped and glanced back at her. He looked—dripping wet and all—like an advertisement for hiking boots.
“You all right back there?”
Flat and unemotional. No gentleness. No real concern. A droplet fell from above and splashed on the tip of her nose.
She fixed her gaze on the ground so he would not see her tears.
“Yeah, Dylan.” She shoved her thumb under the shoulder of her backpack. “I’m doing just fine.”
AN HOUR LATER DYLAN reached the summit of a granite promontory that jutted out into the curve of the river. From this vantage point, he could see the whole expanse of the wild countryside, the tips of the firs, the rounded humps of bare rock heaving up, here and there, from the forest; the silver thread of the stream they followed, winding amid the wispy fog. He dropped his pack on the rock and climbed a jutting needle of rock to search for the Owl’s Head promontory.
He peered up and down the river. He pulled out his binoculars, and scanned the same territory. He cursed the fog and leaned out perilously far. It had to be here somewhere. It had to be. According to his calculations he should be right on top of it. And before they traveled any farther he had to find it, for all his calculations to the portages depended on pinpointing the location of Owl’s Head Rock.
Finally he climbed back down from the slippery needle of rock, flipped open the laminated map, and sank to his haunches.
It was no use. He’d gone over the calculations again and again. The landmark should be here, and he couldn’t find it anywhere. The frustration was getting to him.
Frustration seemed to be the emotion of the day.
He glanced over to the source of that emotion. Casey leaned against a rock with her eyes closed and her face lifted to the mist. That stubborn kid was wearing herself out. They were behind schedule. He had no choice but to push her—but he was pushing too hard.
Then she swiped a hank of hair off her brow. Her wet T-shirt pulled tight against her breast, showing, through the thin fibers, the dark peak of a tight areola. All his pretense that she was nothing but a kid fluttered away with the rising wind.
She caught his eye. Their gazes locked for a moment. Then, abruptly, she lowered her arm and hiked up a knee to cover her breast.
“So, Lewis,” she said, “have we found the mouth of the Mississippi yet?”
“Not yet” He shook out his dripping laminated map and rolled it up tight. “But we’ve got to be close.”
“So we’re still lost.”
He gave her a look, but all she did was cast him a weary little smile.
‘I’ve thought of something,” she said, running her fingers through her slicked-back hair. ”I’ve been thinking about it all the way up here. I do my best thinking when I’m running, you know.”
He hiked his hands onto his hips, eyeing her, eyeing that weary little smile and feeling more than a little twinge of guilt for pushing her so hard. “So, what is it?”
“I don’t know if you want to hear it,” she said, with an airy wave of her hand, “you being so sure of your directions and all.”
“Casey,…”
“When I look at that map, I see it in a different way than you, Dylan.”
He cocked a brow at her. He would be angry if the idea weren’t so ludicrous. He’d spent years studying this map. He’d spent almost as long searching through sources for further information about the old trading routes. He’d stared at this map so much that he knew it by heart.
“All right, Clark,” he said. “Is this some kind of female-intuition thing? What other way is there to look at this?”
“When that Frenchman made that map,” she said, raising her other knee and tucking them both under her chin, “didn’t you tell me he made it for other Frenchmen, looking to sell furs to the English?”
“Yeah.”
“Then he made the map to sell to men planning to come south, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
He stilled the urge to wince. He knew he sounded testy. Demanding. Not at all like a patient teacher of overactive sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old students. If she’d been sixteen, he could have handled it. But this was a woman sitting in front of him, from her plastered cap of wet hair all the way down to those long, shapely legs. A woman he’d slept next to, in a state of absolute sexual readiness, for a very, very long week.
“We’re going north. Generally speaking,” she added as he opened his mouth to protest “We’re taking the route into Canada, while old Henri designed this map for people coming to the States from Canada.”
He paused, his gaze upon her, trying to concentrate on her words instead of the way her shorts gaped to give him a glimpse of smooth, tanned flesh and the crotch of her white cotton underwear.
“My read of that map says we’re looking for these signs in the wrong direction.” She gestured to the rock Dylan was leaning against, and then looked up at the rock she was leaning against. “Heck, we could be sitting right on top of old Owl’s Head Rock.”
He stood from h
is crouch as her words sank in. He flipped open the curled map. He looked ahead on the map; he looked behind, to ground they’d already passed. He noticed where Henri had put the markings. Then he snapped the map into a roll and backed away from the rock he’d been leaning against. He looked around at the top of the promontory, noticing for the first time the two large jutting needles of rock, one closer to the river, the other set farther back.
Then with a clamber of footsteps he headed down the opposite descent of the promontory. He heard the scrape of her sneakers as she followed. He stopped when they got a few feet down to look back up, at the rock formations. He clambered still lower, through the spindly tough trunks of trees with their roots dug into the rock, and stopped to stare up again. He noticed the two pointed rocks set on an angle at either end of the promontory—rocks that would be concealed from the river coming from the south, but would look very much like owl’s ears, if the trees were smaller, coming from the north.
Dylan stood there staring at the rock formation, with the mist breathing down upon his face, and his own breath coming fast, watching Casey pause just ahead of him and arch her long neck to look up at the rock formation. Then she turned with the most unbearable look of triumph in her dancing brown eyes.
The lady was right. They’d been sitting on Owl’s Head Rock all along. And he’d been too blind to see it—or too preoccupied with a certain sexy brunette to think straight
“So,” she said, planting her fists on her hips and herself right in front of him. “What does Davy Crockett have to say now about female intuition and a fresh perspective?”
There was a lot he could think of saying, standing there staring down at her, at that jutting chin, at those dancing eyes, at the look of triumph she wore on her wet face, despite the rain dripping off her nose, despite the smudge of dirt across her shirt.
Instead, he just shrugged and with a rising grin said, “I told you we weren’t lost.”
She gasped, her mouth gaped open, and with an incredulous laugh she slapped him on the arm. “You!” She slapped him again, on the other arm. “The arrogance of men! I can’t believe—”
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