Completely Smitten

by Kristine Grayson

  “Five days?” he asked. “All alone?”

  She nodded.

  “Most hikers who come through here have a companion.”

  “You can’t think about things if you have a companion.”

  “Ah,” he said, taking a sip of wine. “A vision quest?”

  She shook her head. “Just a chance to be alone after a hard year.”

  She didn’t want to tell him about the rotator cuff and the choices she was going to make. After what had happened today, that just might be too much. He probably felt sorry for her already.

  “Boyfriend doesn’t mind?” he asked.

  Normally, that wasn’t a question she liked to answer. Letting strange men know she was unattached often led to unpleasantness. But he wasn’t a strange man. She felt as if she had known him for a long time.

  Still, she took another bite of that excellent garlic bread before she said, “There is no boyfriend.”

  “No boyfriend?” He seemed both shocked and dismayed, as if it were important to him that she have someone in her life.

  “No boyfriend, no husband, no pet iguana. My friends and family know I’m here—” that was a bit of a stretch. One friend knew she had left, but no one else did. She didn’t want to be talked out of this “—but there’s no significant other to keep the home fires burning while I’m away.”

  In fact, there were no home fires either. She had given up her apartment for the summer and placed everything she owned in storage. She had planned that when she thought she’d be in Hawaii, training, and she saw no need to change it.

  She needed a new place, and she hadn’t found it yet.

  “I’d think, then, you’d want to take a trip with someone,” he said.

  She shook her head. “There are just times in your life when you want to be alone, you know?”

  “I do.” He swirled the wine in his glass. Her comment seemed to make him sad.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m intruding on your privacy.”

  He raised his head. “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to.” She leaned over and grabbed the wine bottle off the coffee table, somehow avoiding spilling her tray in the process. Every one of her muscles screamed in agony at the movement, but she ignored them. Muscle pain was something she was used to. “A person doesn’t live this far away from civilization because he likes company.”

  He watched her pour the wine into her glass and made no move to help. She appreciated that. It meant he wasn’t overprotective. She had been a little worried about that after he put the splint on her leg.

  “I don’t live up here,” he said.

  “Oh? This is awfully well apportioned for a rental.” She finished pouring, then offered him the bottle.

  He took it and poured some wine into his glass before putting the bottle back on the table. “I come up here a couple of times a year. I like the isolation on a short-term basis, but living up here would drive me crazy.”

  “Winters,” she said. “Snow, mountains, and no escape.”

  He nodded. “No movies either.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You could get a satellite dish.”

  “I could,” he said, “but I think a DVD player would be more useful.”

  “You have a Blockbuster in this neighborhood?”

  He laughed. “I could bring a year’s supply of DVDs with me, and leave only when I run out.”

  “There’s a measure of a person’s time. He must emerge from his sojourn in the wilderness when he has seen The Matrix fifteen hundred times.”

  He frowned at her. “The Matrix? I was thinking of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “something light and happy to help you through your solitude.”

  He set his tray on the floor, but kept the wine glass. “All right, what do you think I should be stranded with?”

  “All the films of Chaplin,” she said.

  “Are they even on DVD?”

  “They should be.”

  “With director’s commentary.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “They’re silent films. You don’t want to ruin that with narrative. You’ll get written notes in a file you can open on the side.”

  “Touché,” he said.

  She smiled, then picked up her tray. She was going to lean over and set it on the floor, but he was too quick for her. He got up and took it from her.

  He looked in her eyes again. That same deep look he had given her before, as if he saw into her very soul.

  Whatever was there seemed to upset him.

  “You sure,” he asked, his face just inches from hers, “that there’s no one special in your life?”

  His voice was very soft. She could hear the threads of sorrow in it.

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “No one you admire from afar. No great long-lost love?”

  She laughed, feeling a bit uncomfortable. At the same time, it felt right that he should ask these questions. As if he needed to know.

  As if she needed to tell him.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve dated, but there’s never been anyone serious.”

  His gaze went to her lips, and for a brief moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Then he moved back to his chair.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m usually not this serious.”

  “It’s all right.” She plucked her wine glass off the tray beside her. The glass had become a lifeline.

  “No,” he said. “It’s inappropriate. I guess I keep thinking there’s someone out there who had a weird vibe this afternoon and is now worried about you. Silly, huh?”

  She shrugged. “Probably a natural reaction to what we went through today.”

  “Not my natural reaction,” he said. “My reaction to something like this is to joke about it inappropriately.”

  “I don’t believe that.” She swirled her wine just as she had seen him do. The wine had a marvelous red color and a smoothness she wasn’t used too. She had a hunch it was very expensive.

  “Oh, it’s true,” he said. “If there’s an offensive comment to be made, I usually find it.”

  “You haven’t been offensive to me.”

  “I guess you caught me at a bad moment.”

  She sipped the wine. “Or maybe a good moment.”

  “If that were possible.” He leaned back in his chair. “Lenny Bruce fired me. He said my jokes were too tame.”

  “You’re not old enough to write for Lenny Bruce,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows at her. “You know about Lenny Bruce?”

  “I’ve seen his routines.”

  “Not live,” he said. “You’re not old enough.”

  “Or lucky enough,” she said. “He was good.”

  “And funny.”

  “And raunchy.” She grinned. “And he wrote his own material.”

  He grinned in return. “Caught me.”

  “If you’re going to impress me with your raw wit, you have to do better than that.”

  His grin faded. He looked down at his glass. Something she said had changed his mood.

  “Mostly,” he said, “I just offend people. I figure if I can piss them off, they’re not worth my time.”

  “Really?” she asked. “I always thought that if a person was smart enough, he could piss anyone off.”

  He raised his head and gave her a measuring look. “Why? Is that a hobby of yours too?”

  She shook her head. “I’m one of those milquetoast people who works hard at keeping everyone calm.”

  “I don’t think a milquetoast person would have been hiking alone, let alone have enough presence of mind to roll over and catch herself with a knife blade.”

  He had seen that. They hadn’t talked much about her fall. She was still unclear about what exactly had happened.

  “Not that the knife blade worked,” she said.

  “It worked long enough for me to be able to help,” he said and bit his lip.

&nb
sp; She leaned back on the pillows. Something about this entire topic made him nervous and she wasn’t sure what it was. “Was that when you saw me?”

  He nodded. “I heard something odd, then saw you digging that knife in. I’m not even sure I would have known if you were there if you hadn’t done that.”

  She ran her thumb along the glass’s warm side. If he hadn’t known she was there, she would have died on that ledge. Even if she had regained consciousness, she had no idea how she would have climbed back up. She didn’t have mountain climbing tools, and then there was the small matter of the broken ankle.

  “I owe you everything,” she said softly.

  “No,” he said, “you don’t.”

  He sounded almost panicked by her words, as if he didn’t want anyone to be in his debt. Still, she had to ask. “What can I do to repay you?”

  He stood, went to the window, and pulled it open. The cool evening air poured in, making her realize just how stuffy the house had been. Then he came back to his chair and sat on the arm.

  She got that strange sense of duality again, as if he were going to tell the absolute truth and lie to her at the same time.

  “I’m not used to visitors,” he said. “The last person who slept in that guest room was Hemingway.”

  At first she thought he was joking, but he seemed too serious for that.

  “Really?” she asked. “Which one? Muriel?”

  He smiled. The look on his face was fond. “No. Ernest.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You weren’t even born when he died.”

  Darius started, as if he were coming out of a dream. For a moment, his expression was sheer surprise; then he picked up his wine glass. He didn’t drink, though.

  “I didn’t say it was recent,” he said. “He was here in the Twenties. He used this as a hunting shack.”

  “So you bought it from his family?”

  Darius shook his head. “This has been in my family for more than a hundred years.”

  She had no idea the place was that old. There’d clearly been a lot of renovation. “Wow. How did your people find this place?”

  “Accident,” he said. “It was a mining shack. I—um, I think this was squatter country. I don’t think anyone paid for the land.”

  “Well, someone paid for the house.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I did a lot of the renovations.”

  “But no electricity, huh?” She couldn’t comprehend living in a house with no electricity. Camping without it was one thing—she didn’t expect to flick a switch and have lights. But living here without the benefit of power seemed strange to her.

  He slid into the chair. He was now sitting with his back against one arm, and his legs draped over the other. It looked like a teenager’s posture—or an athlete’s.

  “No lines come up this far. There weren’t phones either, until some idiot invented cellular technology. Now you can’t get away from anything.”

  “Sure you can,” she said. “You just have to chose not to bring a phone with you. Besides, they told me cell phones don’t work up here.”

  “They don’t,” he said. “You need a satellite phone. And no, I don’t have one. I’m a bit of a Luddite.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” she said. “I haven’t seen a stove like that outside of a museum.”

  “I have two generators, but I prefer not to use power for things that I can do myself.”

  She nodded. “I guess that’s why I like camping. I feel as if I’m getting back to nature, even though I know I’m not.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Back in those natural days, no one had aluminum pans.”

  “Or lightweight tents.”

  “Or water filters.”

  “Or dehydrated food.”

  “Well, I’m sure they were all sad about that.”

  She smiled. “Is that one of those biting comments I’ve heard so much about?”

  “That wasn’t biting. That didn’t even qualify as sarcastic. If anything, it was mildly amusing.”

  She stretched and leaned back on her pillows. “This is a great place. If I had a haven like this, I’d never leave it.”

  “Don’t you like civilization?”

  “Most of the time it’s all right. But I think it takes away our opportunities to test our limits.”

  He slid around so that he sat properly in the chair. “Actually, I think civilization gives people the opportunity to test their limits. Otherwise, they’d simply be struggling to survive. Life has improved a lot over the last few thousand years.”

  “There wasn’t civilization three thousand years ago?” she asked.

  “Of course there was,” he said. “I just meant—”

  “I know what you meant.” She smiled sleepily. She could banter with him all night, but the day’s events were beginning to take their toll on her. “I just wonder sometimes if we forget why we’re here.”

  He bent over, resting his elbows on his knees and turning the wine glass around in his fingers. “Do you think people should always do what they’re supposed to do?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Too much wine. Now I’m not only serious, but maudlin. You don’t need that tonight. You need to laugh.”

  “Actually,” she said. “I need to go lie down. My brain wants to keep going, but my body has had enough for one day.”

  “Found its limit, huh?” Darius asked with a smile.

  “Oh, I suppose I could push it farther, but I’ve never had the chance to sleep in Hemingway’s bed before.” Then she blushed. She usually didn’t say things like that. What had gotten into her?

  Darius set his wine glass down and stood. “Let me help you.”

  “No.” She sat up all the way and reached for the crutches. “I can’t haul you back to civilization and have you carry me from place to place. Imagine how that would look.”

  He studied her for a long moment, as if he were imagining that. “We’d attract attention.”

  “That we would.” She picked up the crutches, got them into position, and somehow got to her feet. She had no idea how people who weren’t athletic did this. It was hard enough for her.

  Darius hadn’t moved. His gaze met hers, and this time the sadness was gone. She got a sense of deep loneliness and strength.

  He cupped her face. His touch was gentle. He ran his thumb over her lips. She opened them just a little. She wanted him to kiss her. She’d never wanted anyone to kiss her like this before—so much that her entire being felt the longing.

  He leaned toward her, sliding his hand to her shoulder, and bracing her. Then his mouth brushed hers. It felt as if he were going to move away, but she caught his lips. They parted and the kiss deepened. He took a step closer to her, putting one hand on her back to help her keep her balance.

  Then he pulled her against him.

  She almost dropped the crutches. The kiss took something from her, and made her feel as if she’d found something as well. She was no longer just her—she was part of a them, part of something greater than herself.

  She let go of her right crutch and slipped her hand in his golden hair, feeling the softness of his curls. The crutch fell sideways, knocking against his chair before clattering to the floor.

  His hands slid down her back, pressing her against him. His body felt marvelous against hers. For the first time, she was kissing a man who was the right height, who didn’t have to reach up or bend down to kiss her. They fit together.

  And then, suddenly, he let her go.

  She staggered on her one good foot, losing her balance, but before she could fall, he had caught her again.

  “Sorry,” he said, and it felt like he was apologizing for more than knocking her off balance. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  He held her until she was steady and then he reached for the crutch. She wanted to ask him to join her in Hemingway’s bed, but somehow that no longer felt appropriate.

&nb
sp; The mood had changed, and she wasn’t sure why.

  He handed her the crutch, keeping a distance between them.

  “Good night, Ariel,” he said.

  She nodded once. Perhaps it wasn’t as incredible for him as it had been for her. She had never felt a kiss like that. But he was a handsome man, practiced, desirable. Maybe the kiss was nothing special to him.

  She gave him what she hoped was a cheerful smile. “See you in the morning, Dar.”

  He didn’t answer her. But she felt him watch her as she made her slow and painful way down the hall toward Hemingway’s large—and empty—bed.

  * * *

  As soon as he was sure she had made it safely to her room, Darius picked up the wine bottle and took it outside.

  What was wrong with him? He knew better than to mess with someone else’s soul mate. He’d learned that lesson in King Arthur’s Court, when he thought no one would care about a blonde stranger’s fling with Guinevere. Well, Arthur had cared, and he’d mistakenly blamed his good friend Lancelot. And nothing Darius could do when he reverted to his short form and his then-identity as Merlin could change Arthur’s belief.

  So much for Camelot. History hadn’t remembered the blonde stranger, taking Arthur’s version as truth, but Darius did.

  He never made that mistake—at least not in that same way—again.

  Darius sat down on the porch steps, extending his long legs to the pine-covered path. The air was cool and still smelled of warm pitch. In the distance, he could hear the roar of the river, and not to far away, an owl hooted.

  Darius took a swig from the wine bottle. Some of the cabernet dripped down his chin, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.

  He had been honest with her and he had no idea why. He told her his real name—something the magical never did, something not even his best friend Aethelstan (who’d met him 1500 years into the sentence) knew. Darius had told her that he spent time alone here to think about things, and he’d told her about Hemingway.

  In fact, he’d had to cover for himself because he kept blurting so many different things. He’d almost told her about that last, stupid argument he’d had with Lenny Bruce.

  She had to leave first thing, or he wouldn’t be able to lie to her any longer. And he had to lie to her, or at least mislead her, if he was going to act as her matchmaker when he returned to his short form.