by Linda Howard
He could have been killed. If he’d hit his head, or his spine … Angie had to turn her head before he could read the sudden horror in her expression. She felt sick at the possibility, even though it was in the past, much as she felt sick whenever she saw the scar on his throat and realized how easily that piece of shrapnel could have killed him if it had hit his carotid artery. He’d been so close to death so many times, a matter of inches, a split second of time—
She loved him. Or at least could love him. She pressed a hand to her stomach, fighting to control the same nauseating sensation she got on a Ferris wheel, which she didn’t enjoy at all. Her own history had taught her that having feelings for someone didn’t automatically turn everything into wine and roses. There was some sexual attraction going on, Dare had made that plain, but odds were sexual attraction was all that was going on.
“You okay? You look a little green,” he commented as he stuffed his feet into his boots.
“Headache,” she automatically replied, which was true enough because she hadn’t had coffee, or any other caffeine source, in two days. “I need that coffee.” She hoped he wouldn’t mention that she’d been pressing her hand to her stomach, not her head, because she didn’t want to get drawn into a personal conversation. Her instinct was to pull back, to protect herself. Maybe someone more self-confident in relationships would react differently, but she wasn’t that person, never had been. She was confident in her career, in commonsense stuff, but as far as she could see emotions had nothing to do with common sense.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m putting the water on to heat right now,” he drawled, though he was obviously still lacing his boots.
“I can see that.” She decided to make herself useful, so she lit the heater, and checked the water level in the percolator. There were a couple of inches left. “How many cups will you drink?”
“Two or three.”
“Same here. Pass me three bottles of water, and it can be heating while we go downstairs.”
He did better than that; he not only pulled three bottles of water from the case of water sitting on the floor, he rooted around and pulled out a bag of ground coffee. There was even a scoop inside the half-empty bag. She opened the bag and took a deep breath; just breathing in the aroma of the coffee was a pleasure. She was a by-the-numbers kind of coffeemaker, so she began doing math in her head, mumbling to herself as she did so. “Three bottles at sixteen-point-nine ounces … fifty point seven … add six … divide by five … eleven something … divide by two—”
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked incredulously, staring at her with a kind of horrified, I-don’t-believe-it expression.
“Figuring out how many scoops of coffee to use.” Wasn’t it obvious? She frowned at him. She’d specifically mentioned the bottles, so what else would she have been doing?
“Multiplying and dividing?”
“Well, how do you do it?” She crossed her arms, both feeling and sounding defensive.
“I put in the water, and I dump in how much coffee I think I’ll need.”
“How does it taste?”
He blew out a breath. “Sometimes it tastes pretty good,” he said cautiously.
“I get better results than ‘sometimes’ with my method.”
“But you need a fu—a damn calculator to figure it out!”
“Oh, really?” Ostentatiously, she looked around. “I don’t believe I see one, and I was doing just fine.” She couldn’t believe it. He’d just caught himself before he said fucking, and substituted damn. When was the last time he’d bothered to moderate his language? Huh. She was beginning to have a little fun.
“So what’s this magic formula?” he demanded after a few seconds, when she simply sat there looking at him, her head cocked a little as if she were waiting.
“Figure out how many ounces of water you have and divide by five—”
“Why?”
“Because, for reasons unknown to mankind, coffeemakers figure a cup of coffee is five ounces, rather than eight.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, it’s true. Haven’t you ever measured water into a coffeemaker and noticed it doesn’t match?”
“I don’t pay attention to shit like that. But this isn’t a coffeemaker. It’s a percolator.”
“But the scoops seem to be based on how much coffee you need for five ounces, so it doesn’t matter. Then the type of grind makes a difference—”
“I don’t want to hear it. You’re making this way too complicated.”
“I make good coffee.” She was beginning to feel a little indignant on behalf of her coffeemaking skills.
“So you say. I haven’t seen any proof yet. Finish with this mathematical thing.” He was glaring at her as if she’d told him there was no Santa Claus.
“If the grind is coarse, then you need to use a little bit more; if it’s fine, a little less. This looks like a medium grind, but the scoop looks big, so I’m estimating two cups for each scoop of coffee. Therefore, after I divide the ounces of water by five, I divide that answer by two, and that gives me how many scoops of coffee I need.”
Still looking like a thundercloud, he pointed at the percolator. “All right, get the coffee going. This had better be good.”
“Or what?” she taunted. “You’ll strip me of my coffee privileges, and risk death by dismemberment?”
“Just make the damn coffee!”
“Do you like it strong, weak, or medium?”
His jaw clenched. “Go for medium.”
“All right.” As she measured the coffee into the basket in the percolator, she couldn’t help prodding the beast just a little. “Do your clients like your coffee?”
His jaw got even tighter. “One of them usually takes over making it, after the first day,” he finally admitted.
“My clients like my coffee,” she said smugly. She added another half-scoop, because she figured he’d like it a little stronger than she did, and a half-scoop seemed like a nice compromise. Turning on the camp stove, she set the percolator on the fire. By the time they finished their trips to the outside, the coffee should be ready.
With that in mind, she gingerly flexed her foot; the ache wasn’t too bad. “I think I can put some weight on my foot today, if you’ll help me up.”
“And I think you’re rushing things,” he said, but he got to his feet and held both his hands out to her. She gripped them, and he effortlessly pulled her upright, releasing her hands to put both arms around her and support her weight.
That wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind … and he still didn’t have a shirt on. She tried to ignore being cradled against that naked chest, and the strong arms that were wrapped around her, concentrating instead on gaining her balance as she stood on her left foot. Cautiously she put her right foot on the ground, held her breath, and transferred a little of her weight to her injured ankle. It hurt. It ached. But it wasn’t the shooting agony it had been when she’d first hurt it, and it didn’t buckle under the stress.
“Let me see if I can take a step.”
His deep voice rumbled against her temple. “I’ve got you. Go ahead.”
And he did have her. She couldn’t have put all her weight on her feet even if she’d wanted to. She eased more pressure onto her foot and took one short, hobbling step. “Ouch. Wow.” She took a deep breath of relief. “It’s definitely better than it was, so I guess that means it’s a sprain and not a break.”
“That’s enough. If you try to do too much, you’ll make it worse. C’mon, let’s go down and get this over with.”
“Getting it over with” meant, of course, that she once again made the trip down the ladder while draped over his shoulder, as that was the fastest method. But it also meant that he had to put on his shirt, so all in all she considered that a good trade-off. She didn’t know how much longer she could have borne looking at all that muscle.
Instead she was looking at something else.
“Staring at your butt is getting ol
d,” she mumbled, clinging like a limpet so she didn’t fall down an entire story and land on her head.
“Aw now, be nice,” he admonished as he easily moved down the ladder with no more effort than if she’d been a child. “I wouldn’t say that about your butt.”
“You haven’t spent hours staring at my butt, or you might be singing a different song.”
Having reached the bottom, he patted her on the butt in question, then boosted her off his shoulder and stood her upright, holding her close to him and looking down so that they were practically nose to nose. “You’d be wrong about that; I’ve stared at your ass every time I got the chance.”
Thump thump! Her heartbeat went into drum-pounding mode again. What was she supposed to say to that? Was he just flirting because he wanted sex, saying whatever he thought would work, or was he serious? Wide-eyed, feeling as if she were a deer in the headlights, she stared into that intent blue gaze and tried to decide if she should blow it off as a joke or if he was serious. How could he possibly be serious?
With all the animosity that had been between them, and the fact that he was buying her out and she’d be leaving soon to set up her business in a less-competitive area, he had to be thinking about nothing more than having sex. Men could do that, compartmentalize things so that their emotions were in one storage area, their sex drives in another, and never the twain shall meet. She didn’t want anything to happen here that could foul up her thinking when they got out of this situation and things were back to normal.
He was waiting for her reaction, and from his alert, narrow-eyed expression she got the idea he was halfway expecting her to take a swing at him. Her arms wanted to move, all right, but for some reason they wanted to fling themselves around his neck; she couldn’t have that, no body parts moving independently of her will, so she firmed her lips and said, “Then stop it. No more looking at my butt.”
He made a derisive sound. “Make me. I happen to think your ass is one of the seven wonders, so no way am I going to deprive myself of the view.”
She began shaking her head in denial, waving her hands back and forth in front of him as if she could erase his words, backing a couple of awkward, hobbling steps away from him as she did. “No, no, no. Not going there. Just get all of that out of your head, because it isn’t going to happen.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” he warned, the corners of his eyes crinkling as if he wanted to smile at her protests.
There had to be something she could say to make him back up, and suddenly she knew just what it was. “I’m very grateful to you,” she said, throwing the words at him like a weapon. “I’ll agree to selling my place to you without any problem. You don’t have to use sex to get your way.”
He straightened as if he’d been kicked by a mule, his dark brows snapping together over his nose and his eyes narrowing even more, blue fire sparking. “Damn it, don’t try to make this about any fucking piece of property!”
“What else am I supposed to think?” she asked with what she thought was a very reasonable tone. “All of a sudden you’re acting as if I’m God’s gift to men, when we both know better. Either you’re looking for easy sex, or you think you can use sex to get your way. Neither of those look like a good deal to me.”
Tight-lipped, he grabbed her slicker off the post and tossed it to her. “Let’s get this over with,” he snapped.
As she pulled on the slicker she wondered if she’d done a smart thing, pissing off the man who would be carrying her up a tall ladder, but she couldn’t have let him continue saying suggestive things that completely threw her off balance. What if he was only teasing and she’d taken him seriously? She’d have humiliated herself beyond recovery. She had kind of gotten over the embarrassment of how she’d acted at her wedding—kind of; she still felt uncomfortable at the very thought of seeing people who had been there that day, and she’d come up with every excuse in the book for not keeping in touch with the friends she’d had in Billings for that very reason. But taking Dare seriously, and then discovering he’d just been joking about finding her attractive, would be more than she could bear.
He carried her outside and she shut herself in the plastic cubicle, hurrying so he could take his turn. By the time they were back inside and had shed their wet slickers, she could hear the coffee perking. Without a word he took her back up the ladder, and Angie promised herself right then that, no matter how long it took or how much it hurt, she’d negotiate the way on her own the next time, even if she had to hop on one foot. There were things to hold on to for balance.
He all but dumped her onto the mattress as he rasped, “How do you like your coffee?”
She thought about snapping that she’d fix her own coffee, but reined in her temper. If she let herself get pulled into a red-hot back-and-forth with him, God only knew what she’d end up saying, and they’d end up doing. Her goal was to keep everything under control. “One sugar. Thank you.” She sounded so prim she wanted to slap herself.
He prepared their cups of coffee, putting one packet of sugar into hers and a whole lot more than that into his. She started to comment, but deemed silence more prudent. She wouldn’t even ask him if the coffee tasted good to him, because that would be like prodding an ill-tempered tiger. Taking the cup when he held it out to her, she scooted back against the wall, stretched her legs out, and sipped.
Despite everything, the hot coffee felt and tasted like heaven. She took another couple of sips, then leaned her head back against the wall, closed her eyes, and felt her headache begin to disappear as if it were going down a drain. Maybe it wasn’t really going away that fast, but her head definitely felt better.
She felt him settle into place beside her, heard him sip. Grudgingly he muttered, “It’s good.”
“Thank you.”
My, weren’t they polite?
Okay, the best way to go on was to just … go on. Something occurred to her and she asked, “By the way, you’ve never said … why were you here? Were you doing some scouting for a late hunting party you have coming in?”
“No, I came up to do some fishing, and to get away from paperwork. You were a few hours ahead of me.”
She opened her eyes and turned her head, still resting against the wall, to look at him. “Lucky coincidence, for me. If you hadn’t been, who knows if I’d still be alive right now. What were you doing out in the storm, anyway, at that hour?”
“Looking for your camp.” Wrapping his hands around the warm cup, he drank some more, then adjusted his shoulders to a more comfortable position. “The storm woke me up, and then I heard the shots. I knew they were pistol shots, and I couldn’t think of any good reason why you or anyone else would be shooting a pistol at that time of night. If a bear or cougar had come into your camp and was attacking, you’d have used your rifle. The pistol shots meant people trouble,” he said flatly.
“Yeah,” she agreed, and sighed. “They did.”
“So I saddled up that crab-hopping young son of a bitch and set out in the worst storm I’ve seen up here since I was a kid. I’d lost the trail and was doubling back when I heard you. You know the rest.”
“But how did you know where my camp was? I mean, you might be able to tell the general direction the shots came from, but—”
“Harlan told me which camp.”
“Harlan?”
“He was worried.”
Angie digested that in silence. Harlan’s concern was probably because she was a woman and her two clients were men, something she couldn’t completely discount because she was always careful, herself, in that regard.
“So he knew you were coming up here and—” She stopped, confused. And, what? Keep an eye on her? This cabin was several miles from her campsite, so if it hadn’t been for those shots in the middle of the night, there was no way Dare could have known that anything was going wrong at her camp. If Chad had waited until the next day, and shot Davis and her with the rifle, there was nothing that would have alarmed Dare because rifle shots
were to be expected during a hunt.
He drank some more coffee, his eyelids lowered as if he were thinking. Then he said, “No, not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I wasn’t coming up here. Harlan was worried and asked me to keep an eye on you, just in case. I decided to do some fishing while I was here.”
She almost dropped her cup, she was so flabbergasted. She stared at him, trying to sort through all the implications that were rushing through her brain. “So you … I …”
“Yeah. It wasn’t coincidence I was up here.”
He’d come up here, taken what could have been an entire week out of his time, to do a favor for Harlan? She could see him doing Harlan any number of favors, but considering the hostility in her own relationship with Dare, she couldn’t think of why he’d do that particular one.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re here,” she said, “but for the life of me I can’t imagine why you agreed to do that.”
“I’ve told you,” he returned, eyeing her over the rim of the cup. “I’ve been watching your ass for two years now. By the way, this really is some damn fine coffee.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Alarm bells once again began ringing in the back of her head. Her reaction was instantaneous. “Oh, no,” she warned. “I told you, I’m not going there.”
“Yeah? Why not?”
From his tone of voice he might as well have been asking her why she didn’t want pizza for supper. That definitely punched her buttons, making her feel as if he were looking for nothing more than a sexual tissue, to be used and discarded. She scowled at him. “I have a better question: Why? I’m not into recreational sex, period, and it isn’t as if we’re dating.”
He cocked one knee up and rested his forearm on it, coffee cup in hand, giving her a long, considering look. “We could have been. Damn it, I asked you out twice. So now let me ask you a question: Are you attracted to me, or not? I’ve made it as plain as I can that I’m attracted to you, so now tell me straight out how you feel.”