by Sandra Brown
“How the hell should I know?” He tore through the cabin, uprighting everything he laid his hands on in his frantic search for the flare gun. “Where is that...here!” Brandishing the gun, he raced outside, leaped over the porch, and scanned the sky. In stocking feet, Rusty hobbled after him.
“Do you see it?”
“Shut up!” He cocked his head to one side while he listened carefully. The unmistakable hum of the engine reached them at the same time. They turned simultaneously and were met with a dismal sight.
It was an airplane, all right. Obviously a search plane, because it was flying low. But it was flying in the opposite direction. Firing the flares now would serve no purpose except to waste them. Two pairs of eyes remained on the diminishing speck until it grew too small to see and the whine of the engine could no longer be heard. It left a deafening silence in its wake. As the noise had died, so had their chances for a probable rescue.
Cooper came around slowly. His eyes looked cold and colorless and so laden with murderous intent that Rusty took a step backward.
“Just what the hell were you doing asleep?”
Rusty preferred him shouting. Ranting and raving she knew how to deal with and respond to. This soft, hissing, sinister-as-a-serpent voice terrified her. “I...I finished the wash,” she said hastily. The words tripped over themselves. “I was exhausted. I had to lift—”
It suddenly occurred to her that she owed him no stuttering apologies. From the beginning, he’d assumed charge of the flare gun. It hadn’t been out of his possession since they’d left the wrecked aircraft.
Belligerently, she placed her hands on her hips. “How dare you blame this on me! Why did you go off without the flare gun?”
“Because I was mad as hell this morning when I left. I forgot it.”
“So it’s your fault the flare wasn’t fired, not mine!”
“It was your fault that I was so damn mad when I left.”
“If you can’t control your short temper, how can you expect me to?”
His eyes turned dark. “Even if I’d had the gun and fired it, they could have missed it. But they damn sure could have seen smoke from our chimney. But, no. You needed a beauty rest. So you went to sleep and let the fire burn out.”
“Why haven’t you built a signal fire, a big one, one a potential rescuer couldn’t miss?”
“I didn’t think I’d need one. Not with a chimney. Of course I didn’t count on you taking afternoon naps.”
She faltered, then said defensively, “Chimney smoke wouldn’t have attracted their attention anyway. That’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“This far off the beaten track it is. They would have at least circled around to investigate.”
Rusty groped for another valid alibi. “The wind is too strong for a column of smoke to form. Even if the fire had been going, they wouldn’t have spotted our smoke.”
“There was a chance.”
“Not as good a chance as seeing a flare, if you had had the gun with you.”
It would have been prudent not to point out his dereliction of duty at that particular moment. His lower lip disappeared beneath his mustache and he took a menacing step forward. “I could easily murder you for letting that plane go by.”
She tossed her head back. “Why don’t you? I’d rather you do that than keep harping about my shortcomings.”
“But you provide me with such a wealth of material. You’ve got so many shortcomings that if we were stranded here for years I would never get around to harping on all of them.”
Her cheeks grew pink with indignation. “I admit it! I’m not qualified to live in a rustic cabin in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t a lifestyle I chose for myself.”
His chin jutted out. “You can’t even cook.”
“I’ve never wanted to or needed to. I’m a career woman,” she said with fierce pride.
“Well, a helluva lot of good your career is doing me now.”
“Me, me, me,” Rusty shouted. “You’ve thought only of yourself through this whole ordeal.”
“Ha! I should be so lucky. Instead I’ve had you to think about. You’ve been nothing but an albatross.”
“It was not my fault that my leg got hurt.”
“And I suppose you’re going to say it wasn’t your fault that those two men went dotty over you.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No?” he sneered nastily. “Well, you haven’t stopped putting out signals that you’d like to have me in your pants.”
Later, Rusty couldn’t believe she’d actually done it. She’d never guessed that she had a latent violent streak. Even as a child, she’d always given in to other children to avoid a confrontation. By nature she was a pacifist. She’d never been physically aggressive.
But at Cooper’s intentionally hurtful words, she launched herself at him, fingers curled into claws aimed for his smirking face. She never reached him. She came down hard on her injured leg. It buckled beneath her. Screaming with pain, she fell to the frozen ground.
Cooper was beside her instantly. He picked her up. She fought him so strenuously that he restrained her in an armlock. “Stop that or I’ll knock you unconscious.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?” she asked, breathless from her efforts.
“Damn right. And I’d enjoy it.”
Her struggles subsided, more out of weakness and pain than capitulation. He carried her indoors and set her down in the chair near the fire. Casting her a reproachful look, he knelt on the cold hearth and painstakingly coaxed the fire back to life.
“Does your leg still hurt?”
She shook her head no. It hurt like hell, but she’d have her tongue cut out before admitting it. She wasn’t going to speak to him, not after what he’d said, which was patently untrue. Her refusal to speak was childish, but she clung to her resolution not to, even as he separated her torn pants leg, rolled down her sock, and examined the zigzagging incision on her shin.
“Stay off it for the rest of the day. Use your crutches if you move around.” He patted her clothes into place, then stood up. “I’m going back to get the fish. I dropped them in my pell-mell rush to the cabin. I hope a bear hasn’t already made them his dinner.” At the door he turned back. “And I’ll cook them if it’s all the same to you. They look like good fish and you’d probably ruin them.”
He slammed the door behind him.
They were good fish. Delicious, in fact. He’d cooked them in a skillet until they were falling-off-the-bones tender, crusty on the outside and flaky on the inside. Rusty regretted passing up the second one, but she wasn’t about to devour it ravenously, as she had done the first. Cooper added insult to injury by eating it when she refused it. She wished he would choke on a bone and die. Instead, he complacently licked his fingers, smacking noisily, and patted his stomach.
“I’m stuffed.”
Oh, boy, did she have some excellent comebacks for that leading line. But she maintained her stony silence.
“Clean up this mess,” he said curtly, leaving the dirty table and stove to her.
She did as she was told. But not without making a terrible racket that echoed off the rafters. When she had finished, she threw herself down on her bed and gazed at the ceiling overhead. She didn’t know if she were more hurt or angry. But whichever, Cooper Landry had coaxed more emotion from her than any other man ever had. Those emotions had run the gamut from gratitude to disgust.
He was the meanest, most spiteful human being she’d ever had the misfortune to meet, and she hated him with a passion that appalled her.
True, she had begged him to get into bed with her last night. But for comfort, not sex! She hadn’t asked for it; she hadn’t wanted it. It had just happened. He was bound to realize that. His puffed-up, colossal ego just kept him from admitting it.
Well, one thing was for certain: from now on she was going to be as modest as a nun. He’d see the skin of her face, possibly her neck, surely her hands, but that was it. It wasn’t
going to be easy. Not living together in this—
Her thoughts came to an abrupt halt as she spied something overhead that provided the solution to her problem. There were hooks over her bed, exactly like the ones Cooper had used to drape the curtain in front of the bathtub.
Filled with sudden inspiration, she left the bed quickly and retrieved an extra blanket from the shelf against the wall. Completely ignoring Cooper, who she knew was watching her covertly, she dragged a chair across the floor and placed it beneath one of the hooks.
Standing on the chair, she had to stretch her calf muscles—more than they’d ever been stretched in aerobics class—in order to reach the hook, but eventually she managed it. Moving the chair directly beneath another hook, she repeated the procedure. When she was done, she was left with a curtain of sorts around her bed, which would give her privacy.
She shot her cabin mate a smug glance before she ducked behind the blanket and let it fall into place behind her. There! Let him accuse her of asking for “it.”
She shuddered at the memory of the crude thing he’d said to her. Add uncouth to all his other disagreeable traits. She undressed and slid into bed. Because of her nap, she couldn’t fall asleep right away. Even after she heard Cooper go to bed and his steady breathing indicated that he was fast asleep, she lay there awake, watching the myriad flickering patterns the fire cast on the ceiling.
When the wolves began to howl, she rolled to her side, covered her head with the blanket, and tried not to listen. She clamped her finger between her teeth and bit down hard to keep from crying, to keep from feeling lost and alone, and to keep herself from begging Cooper to hold her while she slept.
Chapter Eight
Cooper sat as perfectly still as a hunter in a deer stand. Motionless, feet planted far apart, elbows propped on widespread knees, fingers cupped around his chin. Above them, his eyes stared at her unblinkingly.
That was the first sight Rusty saw when she woke up the following morning. She registered surprise, but managed to keep from jumping out of her skin. Immediately she noticed that the screen she had so ingeniously devised and hung around her bed the night before had been torn down. The blanket was lying at the foot of her bed.
She levered herself up on one elbow and irritably pushed her hair out of her eyes. “What are you doing?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“It snowed several inches last night.”
She studied his expressionless face for a moment, then said with a great deal of pique, “If you’re wanting to build a snowman, I’m not in the mood.”
His eyes didn’t waver, although she could tell that he was willfully restraining himself when he was sorely tempted to strangle her.
“The snowfall is important,” he said calmly. “Once winter gets here our chances of being rescued are greatly reduced.”
“I understand that,” she replied in a serious tone befitting his observation. “What I don’t understand is why it has such grave implications at this very minute.”
“Because before we spend another day together, we’ve got to get some things straight, lay down some ground rules. If we’re going to be marooned up here together all winter—which looks like a very real possibility—then we must reach an understanding on several points.”
She sat up but kept the blanket raised to her chin. “Such as?”
“Such as no more pouting spells.” His brows were drawn together in a straight, stern line of admonition. “I won’t put up with that kind of brattiness from you.”
“Oh, you won’t?” she asked sweetly.
“No, I won’t. You’re not a child. Don’t act like one.”
“It’s all right for you to insult me, but I’m supposed to turn the other cheek, is that it?”
For the first time, he looked away, apparently chagrined. “I probably shouldn’t have said what I did yesterday.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. I don’t know what evil thoughts you’ve cultivated in your dirty little mind, but don’t blame me for them.”
He gnawed on the corner of his mustache. “I was mad as hell at you.”
“Why?”
“Mainly because I...I don’t like you very much. But I still want to sleep with you. And by ‘sleep’ I don’t mean just sleep.” If he had slapped her, she couldn’t have been more astounded. Her lips parted with a sudden intake of breath, but he didn’t give her a chance to say anything.
“Now isn’t the time to beat around the bush or to mince words, right?”
“Right,” she repeated hoarsely.
“I hope you can appreciate my honesty.”
“I can.”
“Okay, concede this point. We’re physically attracted to each other. Bluntly stated, we want to get off together. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a fact.” Rusty’s gaze dropped to her lap. He waited until his patience gave out. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Say something for God’s sake.”
“I’ll concede both points.”
He let out a long breath. “All right then, knowing that, and knowing that it’s unreasonable to do anything about it, and knowing, too, that it’s going to be a helluva long winter, we’ve got some things to iron out. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“First, we’ll stop the mudslinging.” Her russet eyes treated him to a frosty stare. Grudgingly he added, “I’ll admit to being guilty of that more than you. Let’s just promise not to be verbally abusive to each other from here on.”
“I promise.”
He nodded. “The weather will be our enemy. A fearsome one. It will require all our attention and energy. We can’t afford the luxury of fighting each other. Our survival depends on living together. Our sanity depends on doing it peaceably.”
“I’m listening.”
He paused to collect his thoughts. “As I see it, our roles should be traditional.”
“You Tarzan, me Jane.”
“Sort of. I’ll provide the food. You’ll cook it.”
“As you’ve so untactfully pointed out, I’m not a very good cook.”
“You’ll get better.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t get defensive if I offer you advice.”
“Then don’t make snide remarks about my lack of talent. I’m good at other things.”
His eyes lowered to her lips. “I can’t argue that.” After a long, silent moment, he roused himself. “I don’t expect you to wait on me hand and foot.”
“I don’t expect that from you, either. I want to pull my weight.”
“I’ll help you keep the cabin and our clothes clean.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll teach you to shoot more accurately so you can protect yourself when I’m gone.”
“Gone?” she asked faintly, feeling that the rug had just been pulled out from under her.
He shrugged. “If the game gives out, if the stream freezes over, I might have to go in search of food.”
She would face with fear and dread the times she might have to stay in the cabin alone, perhaps for days. Even a vulgar and insulting Cooper was better than no Cooper at all.
“And this is the most important point.” He waited until he had her full attention, until her dazed eyes had refocused on him. “I’m the boss,” he said, tapping his chest. “Don’t let’s kid ourselves. This is a life-or-death situation. You might know all there is to know about residential real estate and California chic and the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But up here, all that knowledge isn’t worth a damn. On your turf you can do whatever the hell you please and I say, more power to you, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ and all that. But up here, you obey me.”
She was stung by his implication that her field of expertise wasn’t much use outside Beverly Hills. “As I recall, I haven’t tried to usurp your position as the macho provider.”
“Just see that you don’t. In the wilderness there’s no such thing
as equality between the sexes.”
He stood up and happened to catch sight of the blanket lying on the foot of the bed. “One more thing: No more silly screens. The cabin is too small and we’re living too close together to play coy games like that. We’ve seen each other naked. We’ve touched each other naked. There’re no more secrets. Besides,” he said, raking his eyes over her, “if I wanted you bad enough, no damn blanket would keep me from you. And if rape was what I had in mind, I would have done it a long time ago.”
Their eyes locked and held. Finally, he turned his back. “It’s time you got up. I’ve already started the coffee.”
That morning the oatmeal was considerably better than it had been the day before. At least it didn’t stick to the palate like a day-old peanut-butter sandwich. It had been frugally seasoned with salt and sugar. Cooper ate every bite of his, but didn’t offer her a compliment.
She didn’t take umbrage as she once would have done. His failure to criticize was tantamount to a compliment. They had only promised not to be verbally abusive; they hadn’t promised to shower each other with flattery.
He went outside after breakfast and by the time he came in for a lunch of biscuits and canned soup, he had made himself a pair of snowshoes out of bent greenwood and woven dead vines. He strapped them to his boots and clumped around the cabin, modeling them for her. “These will make it a lot easier to navigate the ravine between here and the river.”
He spent the afternoon away from the cabin. She straightened it, but the housekeeping didn’t take more than half an hour. That left her with nothing to do but fret until she saw him through the window at dusk, making awkward progress toward the cabin in the homemade snowshoes.
She rushed out on the porch to greet him with a cup of hot coffee and a tentative smile, feeling slightly foolish for being so pleased to see him return safe and sound.
Unstrapping the snowshoes and propping them against the cabin’s outside wall, he looked at her strangely and took the proffered coffee. “Thanks.” He stared at her through the cloud of rising steam as he took a sip.
She noticed, as he held the cup to his lips, that they were chapped and that his hands were raw and red despite the shearling gloves he always wore when he was outdoors. She wanted to commiserate, but decided against it. His lecture that morning discouraged anything except mutual tolerance.