Cait smiled wryly. Or rather, Josh and no sex.
The last rays of afternoon touched the ridgeline, and a shelter humped into view. Cait drew a relieved breath. At least he wouldn’t pressure her tonight.
She lengthened her stride, eager to shed her pack and her own thoughts for a while in the company of other hikers.
But as she approached the three-sided shelter, her steps slowed. Instead of the dozen or more bodies she expected, there were only three sprawled on the wooden platform: a really big guy, a really small guy, and a tall, seated figure in the shadows.
“What are you waiting for?” Josh asked behind her. “An invitation?”
Cait hesitated. Violent crime was rare along the trail. But something held her back, like her father’s hand or her mother’s voice. She’d read stories…
Josh bumped past her. “Come on. It’s getting dark.”
Dark and cold.
At least this shelter boasted a fire pit. You couldn’t build a fire just anywhere along the trail. If she wanted to get truly warm tonight…Anyway, Josh was with her. His determination to couple up annoyed her, but it would also protect her.
Reluctantly, she followed him under the metal roof. A circle of lamplight pooled on the rough timbers.
The little man looked up from his…whittling? Pale curls of wood decorated the floor by his boots. A knife flashed in his hand. “Welcome. I’m Goodfellow.”
The big guy, with a head like a bullet and a build like a bear, grunted. “Ursus.”
Josh let his pack thump to the floor. “Diogenes,” he introduced himself. He jerked his thumb toward Cait. “Wildcat.”
Cait flushed. She understood the tradition of trail names, the impulse that drove the pilgrims and dropouts to shake off their old identities and choose new ones. But she thought Josh’s chosen name—Diogenes, the philosopher, the cynic—was pretentious, and she hated the name he had bestowed on her. She was five-seven, for God’s sake, with her father’s lanky build and her mother’s brown eyes. Hardly a wildcat. Every time Josh used the name, she felt less like some sleek native of these mountains and more like his sex kitten. Maybe that’s what he had in mind.
“Just Cait,” she corrected hastily. “Caitlin.”
Josh glowered.
The little man grinned, revealing small, pointed teeth. Cait blinked. “Diogenes, eh? And is it one honest man you’re seeking by lantern light?”
Josh puffed his chest, pleased by the recognition. Cait kneeled to unstrap the cookstove from her pack.
“Aren’t all travelers on the trail seeking something?” Josh asked grandly.
“Or running away,” the third man put in quietly from his corner.
His voice, deep and unaccented, flowed over Cait like warm water. Flustered by her reaction, she yanked harder at the strap.
Josh frowned. “Who are you?”
“Rhys.”
Not a trail name, she thought, tugging. The strap yielded as the third man, this Rhys guy, unfolded from his corner and strolled forward into the light so that she saw him, really saw him, for the first time.
Her jaw dropped. Well. Wow. He was…handsome was too weak a word, and beautiful sounded too pretty. But he was beautiful, with a face that could have been painted by Da Vinci, all bold lines and secrets, and a body like a Greek statue. His eyes were the color of old gold coins, his hair was long, dark, and shiny, and his clothes—black jeans, black jacket—were fitted and clean.
Cait was suddenly conscious of her straggling blond braid, her clunky boots, her sweat-drenched layers of clothing.
“You’re not a thru-hiker, are you?” Josh asked.
In the closed society of the trail, thru-hikers, hikers attempting to complete the two-thousand-mile trek from Georgia to Maine between spring and first snowfall, were its scruffy aristocracy.
But Tall, Dark, and Clean-Shaven didn’t seem abashed by Josh’s attempt to put him in his place. If anything, he looked amused. “No.”
“Where are you from?”
Like freshmen during new student week or strangers in a bar, hikers followed predictable conversational patterns: What’s your major? What’s your sign? Come here often? But under Josh’s question, Cait heard an unfamiliar note of challenge.
Rhys smiled faintly. “Around.”
Josh scowled.
Cait straightened. No way was she standing here while they pissed on trees or pawed the ground or did whatever men did to mark their territory. “I’m getting water.”
Rhys turned his beautiful, golden eyes on her, and her insides contracted. She opened her mouth to breathe. “There’s a stream,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
Cait felt an instant’s qualm. Forget beautiful. She didn’t go off into the woods with strangers. She looked at Josh, expecting him to say something like, Let me get it or I’ll come, too. But all he said was, “Good. I want some tea.”
Well, at least he’d be within shouting range.
She grabbed the canteens and marched—stomped, really, her mother always told her to watch her temper—into the woods. Rhys didn’t stomp. He glided through the trees like Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans. Cait slowed, setting her feet with care among the rocks and leaves.
She heard water before she saw it, like the gurgle in the pipes when somebody showered upstairs, muffled but close.
Rhys eased through a break in the bushes, still doing the Native American guide thing, and squatted beside a fallen log. Between slick rocks, a narrow stream pushed its way through tree roots and over stones rippling with moss.
He extended his hand. “Give me your canteen.”
Cait tugged the strap over her head. “I’ve got it. Thanks.”
He drew back so she could squeeze in beside him. Wedged above the rushing water, she barely had space to kneel, and precious little room to maneuver. Her hip pressed his thigh. Her shoulder brushed his arm. The scents of earth and water, green and growing, sharp and secret, rose and enveloped her.
Her head swam.
She looked up, struggling for breath. Rhys watched her, his pupils large and dark in his odd gold eyes.
Tearing her gaze away, Cait plunged the canteen into the stream. The cold shock cleared her head. She filled both canteens before adding purification tablets to the water.
“You don’t need to do that here,” Rhys said.
She screwed the caps back on. “Better safe than sorry, my parents always say.”
“Do you always do what your parents tell you?”
She winced, his words chafing like the boots against her blisters. Not his fault he’d touched a sensitive spot, she told herself. Or theirs. Her parents loved her. And she loved them. It was only recently she’d found that love a little…restricting.
“Pretty much,” she admitted. “Until now.”
He raised his eyebrows. With his dark hair falling into his face, he looked like every mistake her mother had ever warned her about, every bad boy her father had ever chased away from their door. “Until…now?”
“This trip,” she explained. “They didn’t want me to come. They thought it was dangerous.”
“They were right,” he said.
Cait’s throat constricted. But she wasn’t letting herself get played by some stranger on the trail, even if he did look like a Greek god.
She stood, slinging the water bottles across her body. “I can handle myself.”
His eyes gleamed. “Lucky for you.”
She searched for a snappy comeback and found her mind blank. She had to fall back on dignified silence, which wasn’t nearly as satisfying.
Rhys smiled a cool, exasperating smile and practically sauntered back to the shelter.
Well, damn.
Cait followed.
While Josh scanned the news and notes scribbled in the shelter’s log book, she coaxed water to a boil and prepared their nightly meal of ramen noodles. Nobody else cooked anything—maybe they had eaten already?—but the bearlike guy scrounged branches from the surroundin
g woods, and Rhys kindled the fire.
The little man stood, shaking his wood shavings into the flames.
“Oh,” Cait exclaimed, delighted. “You carved a flute.”
He made a queer half-bow and offered it to her. She ran her fingers in disbelief over the smooth, delicate instrument. She had watched him ply his knife for the past half hour, but the piece he held appeared as fine and finished as wood turned on a lathe.
“Can you actually play that thing?” Josh demanded.
Goodfellow regarded Josh with beady black eyes like a bird’s. “Maybe. And will you be paying the piper, then?”
“The price isn’t his to pay,” Rhys said from his corner.
Goodfellow cocked his head. “More’s the pity.”
Cait refused to be sucked in by the undercurrents swirling through the shelter. “It’s lovely,” she said, handing the pipe back to Goodfellow.
He tucked it away in his jacket—a shaggy leather jacket, with the fur turned to the inside. She stared. And was that a feather in his hair?
“Are you…Is it Cherokee?” she asked.
He chuckled. “Could be, could be. The old ways are still alive in these hills. The Cherokee knew that.”
“But can you play it?” Josh repeated.
Goodfellow’s eyes brightened with firelight or malice. “I can play, boy-o. But you might not like my tune.”
“I’d love to hear you play,” Cait said.
Honestly, what was the matter with Josh? They had to spend the night with these people. Couldn’t he at least try to get along?
Josh shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m turning in.”
He retreated to his sleeping bag to unlace his boots, leaving her alone with the other three men in the circle by the fire.
Two weeks until Hot Springs, Cait reminded herself. She could put up with anything for two weeks.
“Goodnight,” she called.
Let him cool off. She intended to warm up by the fire. Dragging her own sleeping bag over to protect her butt from the cold ground, she sat and hugged her knees.
Goodfellow blew on his fingers and then, softly, on his pipe. The flute made a sleepy, contented sound, like bird-[ ]song at twilight. He grinned at her, his eyes alight and wicked. Cait smiled back, charmed. Uneasy.
He played, a breathy, droning, soothing song, never wavering more than six notes up or down the scale, the tune rising and falling as naturally as the wind or the flames of the fire.
Cait blinked. Smoke wreathed Goodfellow’s head and twined around the flute. On the other side of the stone circle, red light slid greedily over Rhys’s long body. The fire danced in his eyes. The music swirled, lulling, drugging. It filled her lungs. It caught her thoughts and spun them up and out like sparks against the night sky.
Her breathing slowed. She was warm. Very warm. She should take off her jacket.
The flute’s tempo quickened with a throb like a drumbeat that gradually took over the rhythm of her heart. In the fire, images flickered, joined, and combined. Her limbs felt heavy. Her feet were restless. Her blood ran hot.
She wanted to leap and sway like the dancing flames, like the lovely, naked figures in the fire. She stood, combing her curly hair loose from its braid with her fingers. Out of the blaze a dancer rose to partner her, tall, long-legged, lean-hipped, moving with the heat and energy of the fire. Dazzled, she could not see his face. She could not stop her feet or resist the rhythm that crackled and flowed around him. It trapped her, twirled her as the pipe called, faster, wilder.
Caught in the music, lost in sensation, they twined and writhed together. He was so warm, his dancer’s body hard and fluid. Heat radiated from him, from his skin and his golden eyes. Familiar eyes, she thought. Rhys.
She glowed. She burned. Shaking back her hair, she swayed around him, rubbed against him. Warmth infused her cheeks and flooded her veins. She was melting inside, trembling and molten, quivering on the brink of…
Her thoughts stumbled.
Trembling on the point of…
What the hell was she doing?
Cait opened her eyes. She stood alone in front of the fire wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The shifting flames mocked the sudden, shocked stillness inside her. Her arms were bare and cold, her feet leaden in her hiking boots.
All three strangers stared at her: Rhys with dark intensity, Goodfellow almost with pity, and the man called Ursus with a look that made her shudder.
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. What was she doing? What had she done?
Mortified, shaken, she stooped and groped blindly for her jacket. Her face burned. Her body throbbed.
Rhys swept up her jacket and offered it to her.
“Thank you.” She thrust her arms into the sleeves. She couldn’t look at him, at any of them. Her breasts still felt heavy. Sensitized. Her knees trembled.
“Are you all right?” His voice was politely impersonal.
She shivered. Was she? What had just happened? Her mother’s cautions about date rape crowded the back of her mind. She wondered, with a flash of horror, if she’d been drugged. But all she had eaten was the food she had prepared and some dried fruit from her backpack.
Cait straightened her shoulders. Maybe the wooziness she felt was only an effect of the fire, the result of smoke inhalation and fatigue.
“Fine,” she said. But as she turned from the fire, she stumbled as if she’d been drinking.
“Let me help you.”
“No!” she said sharply. Too sharply. Her reaction wasn’t his fault. But she was still aroused and unbelievably uncomfortable. If he touched her now…
She couldn’t think of that. She didn’t want to think about it.
“I’m good, thanks,” she said.
Goodfellow chuckled. “Good won’t always protect you.”
“Protection enough,” Rhys said. “This time.”
Cait ignored them. She wobbled toward the shelter, dragging her sleeping bag with her. Keeping her back to the group by the fire, she struggled with the zipper before crawling inside. Josh never stirred, the rat bastard.
What had happened? She had never been much of a party girl. Her parents’ love and watchfulness had seen to that, although Cait considered their worries mostly misplaced. But she’d been spectacularly drunk once or twice in college and had put her roommates to bed more times than she could remember.
This was worse.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she pretended to sleep. Her mind still burned with the after-images of the fire, and her body was restless. Her thoughts raced and scrabbled like the mice foraging for food in the corners of the shelter. Her dreams, when they came, were suffused with tongues of flame and twists of smoke and lots of red, glowing, naked skin. Despite her fatigue, Cait slept fitfully and woke sweating.
The ground was cold and hard and the sky the color of iron when she peeled her eyelids open. Josh snored beside her. She held very still, as if she could somehow hold the day at bay. She didn’t want to see the amusement in Goodfellow’s eyes or the menace in Ursus’s. She didn’t want to face Rhys—who had featured in her seething, fevered dreams—at all.
But when she finally, reluctantly, turned her head, the other travelers were gone.
CHAPTER 2
The tatters of Cait’s dream clung like cobwebs through the morning, leaving her uneasy and out of sorts. Tea hadn’t helped. Hiking didn’t help. The sky pressed down, heavy and cold. The rocks rose up, hard and inhospitable. And Josh was in a mood again.
“Josh.” Cait raised her voice. “Hey, Josh.”
Since breaking camp, they had tramped four hours without once stopping or seeing another soul. She was glad they hadn’t caught up with the others, with Goodfellow and Ursus and Rhys. But…
“I need a break,” she said.
Josh didn’t turn around. “We can’t stop. I want to reach the next shelter before it snows.”
Cait squinted through the bare trees at the gray sky. Had the weather discouraged all traffic on the tr
ail? “Snow? In May?”
“May first. We’re in the mountains, Wildcat. Elevation four thousand feet. It could definitely snow.”
She ignored his patronizing attitude. “I still need a break. A potty break,” she added before he could argue.
“Well, hurry up,” Josh said.
Like she wanted to hang bare-assed over a six-inch hole in the ground one second longer than she had to.
She eased her pack from her shoulders, setting the frame on the ground, and grabbed her roll of toilet paper and the shovel.
The tall pines close to the trail offered little privacy. Cait walked farther than she wanted to before she found a sheltered spot behind a big boulder.
She was zipping her jeans when she heard an approaching rustle like a large animal or another hiker. Hastily, she buckled her belt and reached for the shovel.
“Josh?”
Silence.
She peered through the screening bushes at the bare, brown slope. Nothing. A crow cawed and launched noisily from a tree.
“Is anyone there?” she called, feeling foolish.
No answer.
Which was a good thing, she told herself staunchly. Picking her way through the coarse, matted undergrowth, she rounded the rock, and came face to face with a bear.
Cait shrieked.
Not a bear. A man with a bear’s bulk and menace, a bear’s shaggy coat and heavy jaw. Her heart pounded as she recognized the dark beard and gleaming eyes of the big hiker, Ursus.
“Sorry. You startled me,” Cait said.
Ursus’s little eyes fastened on her face. He didn’t say anything at all.
An hour ago she had hoped she would never see Rhys again. Now she wished he would show up. “Are your, um, friends with you?”
Ursus shifted from side to side without speaking. She was now officially, totally, creeped out.
“Well.” She edged to her right, but she didn’t quite have room to pass between the rock and the tree. “Josh is waiting for me. I’ll see you on the trail.”
The big man didn’t budge.
“Josh?” She raised her voice. “Josh!”
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