Striking Edge

by Kelsey Browning

  “Amazon Queen?”

  “Sorry. Lauren.”

  “Oh, you mean The Bitcher.”

  This time, Joss didn’t bother to cover her mouth. She just let the laughter roll out, and it felt as if her body and soul had undergone an emotional spring cleaning. “That…” She couldn’t stop her chuckles. “That is perfect.”

  “The women in my family don’t always like it when I do that either. Label people by their function or personality trait. But to me, that makes more sense than names.”

  Fascinating. Shep had an entire system of logic and thinking that made him unique. Special. It was a gift, but Joss realized probably not everyone would agree. “Have you given anyone else on the show one of these handy-dandy labels?”

  Shep grunted, but a tiny smirk lifted one side of his mouth. She wanted to bite it. So naturally, she took a step to the side and tried to breathe through the surprising spear of lust.

  “Moody is The Bombastic Bullshitter. Bradley is The Bleeding Heart. I don’t have anything for the camera guys. They don’t say much.”

  “And me?” she asked quietly, even though she was fairly certain she didn’t want the answer.

  Shep ducked his head and tied the loose ends of his pack straps into knots. Untied. Tied again. Cleared his throat. Fiddled with the straps.

  “Whatever it is, I won’t get mad.”

  “It’s… um… The Pretty Prima Donna.”

  She plastered on a smile even though she hated everything about his name tag for her. She had been a prima donna and that was why her band was dead. How could a man who’d known her for less than a day see that so clearly?

  “You were right,” she blurted out. “I did kill them. My band. I put them on that helicopter.”

  “I should not have said that. Just because some magazines blamed you doesn’t mean it is true. I know that.”

  Joss swallowed and took a shaky breath. “Instead of getting in that helicopter with them, I took a limo that day. I told myself it was because of my fear of falling. But the truth was I rented that helicopter because I wanted privacy to discuss my solo career with a new record label. And although the helicopter company itself was reputable, it came out later that this particular pilot was inexperienced. The Santa Anas were pretty strong that day and…”

  “And you put all the blame on yourself.”

  “Maybe I should have checked references. I shouldn’t have tried to shut my band out.”

  Shep lifted his arms, let them hover midair for a few seconds, and then dropped them. “We… ah, should probably wake up The Bitch… uh… Lauren.” Shep stood, which only reminded Joss how wide his chest was. At first glance, it was the kind of chest a woman could rest her head on and allow to absorb some of her pain. But not her. Because he obviously had nothing to say to her confession of guilt.

  What did you expect?

  “Yes,” Joss forced herself to say, “she does seem the type that might sleep the day away.”

  “What about you?”

  “When we’re… I’m… touring”—just thinking the word and what it meant now made her want to coil into a ball of self-protection—“it’s normal for me to sleep until noon. My body rhythm changes in order for me to get enough rest. But when I’m home, I’m usually up by seven.” She gestured to Lauren’s shelter, which still looked in good shape, unlike Joss’s shotgun shack. “Why don’t I try to wake her?”

  Relief was so apparent on Shep’s face that Joss reached to pat him on the arm, but she remembered that he didn’t care to be touched and dropped her hand.

  So she strolled over to Lauren’s shelter, and just for kicks, shook the cedar branches above it. “Rise and shine, sunshine!” she sang out with totally false cheer. “The day just isn’t the same without you. Get up, sleeping beauty!”

  Lauren’s answer was a cross between a groan and a curse, so Joss rustled the tree again and knocked the toe of her hiking shoe against the support branches. “Oh my goodness, Moody is out here cooking bacon and eggs!”

  Lauren moved so fast, diving out of the brushy shelter and scanning the camp wildly, that Joss rolled her lips in to keep from laughing.

  Really? Laughing after what she’d just told Shep? How was that even a possibility?

  The truth stunned Joss.

  This… this was actually good for her. She’d only thought of Do or Die as a way to improve her public image, but instead, it was changing her image of herself. She wanted to win, yes. But playing and laughing and enjoying it along the way were just as important.

  “Where? Where is he?” Lauren’s words tumbled one over the other as she pushed her wild hair from her face, revealing a cheek creased with leaf marks. Her eyes slitted, she sniffed the air. “Where’s the food? Have you already eaten?”

  Okay, maybe this wasn’t funny. They were all hungry, which could easily turn into hangry. “Lauren, listen. I’m sor—”

  “Because we better all get what we deserve.”

  Was that the way the world worked, that people ultimately got what they deserved? If so, Joss deserved nothing.

  8

  When The Bitcher lunged out of her cedar shelter like a lion leaping on a gazelle, Shep went on alert. At his side, Puck did the same. The woman was obviously not a morning person, so something must’ve happened to motivate her to abandon her bed so quickly.

  Shep shifted his attention to Joss’s face. Her lips were pinched tight. Was she about to cry?

  “Where is he?” The Bitcher called out. “Where is Moody and the damn bacon?” She lifted her face, reminding Shep once again of a starving predator, and took a deep sniff. “I don’t smell frying pork!”

  “What’s this about bacon?” The Bleeding Heart asked.

  The Bitcher pointed at Joss. “She said Moody was cooking us a big breakfast.”

  “Unless he snuck off into the woods and is whipping up pancakes somewhere else, I don’t know how,” The Bleeding Heart told her. “I woke up at five, and Moody hasn’t been around.”

  “Five in the morning? That’s uncivilized.”

  “No,” he said mildly to The Bitcher, “that’s sleeping on the hard ground.”

  “You think I didn’t suffer?” She turned an I-smell-a-nearby-latrine sneer at her own well-constructed—if Shep did say so himself—shelter. “I slept like a homeless person.” She climbed to her feet and brushed off her clothes, now dotted with cedar sap and wrinkled like towels left too long in the dryer.

  Shep hated when that happened. The few times he forgot about his laundry and it came out a mess, he had to start all over again. Rewash them, promptly put them in the dryer, and then watch them tumble until the buzzer went off.

  The Bitcher rounded on Joss and loomed over her, making the difference in their heights very apparent. “Were you lying to me?”

  “I wasn’t lying exactly,” Joss said. “I was motivating you.”

  “You deceitful bitch.” The taller woman lunged, getting herself a nice handful of Joss’s turquoise hair. As hard as she pulled, Shep was surprised she didn’t yank Joss off her feet. “I’m going to teach you a lesson you won’t forg—”

  To Shep’s everlasting surprise, Puck dashed toward the two women and bared his teeth at The Bitcher. The pitch of his growl was something Shep had never heard and it lifted the hair on his arms. It meant he needed to put an end to all of this. Now.

  He strode toward the women and gave Puck a “Don’t!” command. His dog let his lips drop, but he didn’t back down, just continued to give The Bitcher the canine equivalent of the stink-eye. “Puck, heel!”

  Rather than turn a circle against Shep’s left side as he usually did, Puck walked backward two steps and kept his attention centered on The Bitcher.

  She put both hands to her throat in a gesture even Shep could tell was the work of a drama queen. “Did that mangy mutt just threaten me?”

  “He was afraid you were hurting Joss.” And by the number of loose blue strands clutched between the woman’s fingers, she’d su
cceeded.

  “It would’ve been justified,” The Bitcher huffed. “That… that was mean.”

  The Bleeding Heart laughed, a snicker that quickly turned into a hearty guffaw. “What is this—middle school? Lauren, you diva, you would’ve played the same trick if you’d thought of it.”

  Letting go of her drama queen persona, she dropped her hands from her throat and wiggled her fingers, letting Joss’s dislocated hair float to the ground.

  “Are you hurt?” Shep asked Joss. First, she fell before they even started the trip, then she ripped off skin coming down that tree, and now she’d been snatched bald. If they stayed out here much longer, he’d have to drag this woman back on a litter.

  “Stings a little,” she said with a grin. “But it was kinda worth it.”

  The Bitcher swung their way and bared her teeth. But when the fur on Puck’s ruff rose, she shut down her aggressive expression and turned to Shep. “Please tell me there is some breakfast.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. But I’m not in charge of food around here. That’s up to Moody.”

  Her expression soured again. “Then that bastard needs to get his ass up.” She stomped toward Moody’s tent and when it dawned on her that Greg and his counterpart had filmed the entire catfight, The Bitcher shot the two men a double-barreled bird.

  “A charmer, she is not,” The Bleeding Heart commented.

  “But a communicator, she is,” Joss lobbed back.

  The Bitcher unzipped Moody’s tent and stormed inside. “You little fucker, I’m hungry and you…” The tent shook and dipped like two wild boars were mating inside it. Shep squinted his eyes, trying to blur the mental image of Moody and the woman as humping javelinas.

  The Bitcher shoved her way outside and put her hands on her hips. “He’s not here. And by the looks of it, he didn’t sleep here. His sleeping bag hasn’t even been unrolled.”

  “Damn,” The Bleeding Heart said. “To think I could’ve had a little cushion.”

  “Where is he?” Shep asked the camera operators.

  “No idea,” Greg answered. “He doesn’t really tell us much other than when he knows there’s some good footage coming up. We’re supposed to be ready for anything at any time.”

  It was possible Moody had meandered off to answer the call of nature, but Shep had been up for over an hour himself. That would mean the man was taking the dump of a lifetime.

  “Do you think he got lost?” Joss asked him.

  “Or maybe a bear ate him,” The Bleeding Heart said hopefully.

  Shep contemplated for a few seconds. “Moody is a jackass, but he does know a little about the backcountry. I doubt he’s lost. Besides, he had a compass. As for the bear, there would probably be some evidence, and since there’s no blood—”

  Joss grabbed his arm, and the firm pressure felt good. Felt so good, it made Shep want more. Did she want more?

  “Bradley was kidding,” she said.

  “Oh. Yeah. Right.” Her touch wasn’t about him. She was concerned for Moody. He pulled away and said to the group, “All of you stay here. I’ll go look for him.” Then he lowered his voice for Joss’s ears only. “I have more energy bars in my pack. You’re the only one I trust to get them and portion them out fairly. One per person.”

  “If it would shut Lauren up, I’d stuff them all in her mouth.”

  “As my dad says, that would be cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  “He sounds like a wise person.”

  “He made me the man I am today.”

  “Then he’s a helluva guy.” She smiled up at him. “Now go find Moody so we can get this show back on the road.”

  “We won’t be on a road. We will—”

  “I know. Be hiking the trail.”

  Shep took to the woods with Puck trotting along beside him. As they spiraled out from the campsite, he thought about Joss Wynter. With the way she sang on stage and her band’s music, he’d expected her to be shrill. Sharp. Maybe even savage.

  But she wasn’t. Tough, yes. Especially for a person her size. Then again, maybe when you were that small, you had to develop a certain toughness. Kind of like him when it came to interacting with people who had the capacity for emotion that he seemed to lack. In order to make it in the world, he had to use what he had—his intelligence—to navigate social situations.

  It didn’t always work for him, but he’d gotten better at it over the years. As a kid, he’d felt like a turtle being constantly ripped out of its shell and left naked in the middle of a highway.

  Joss was being tough now because she wanted to win Do or Die. She was playing the game, but he didn’t know if her heart was really in it. That could be because she believed she didn’t deserve to, or because he wasn’t reading her right. Her revelation about the accident that had killed her band had shaken him. Made his brain pinball inside his head.

  Sure, he’d read one article about the event, but he should have known better than to believe it.

  The problem was that Joss did believe it.

  The other thing consuming his mind was how Joss had touched him several times, and he hadn’t felt like moving away. He shunned touch from most people except his parents and siblings. And yet, he liked the feel of Joss’s hand on him.

  But was it possible he was reading things—sexual things—into her touch?

  After he’d gone through puberty, a girl touching him had done one of two things—hurt him or made him horny. Either had felt uncontrollably painful. So he shied away from casual skin-to-skin contact. A hug from a family member, he could handle, but they knew him. Knew his thresholds and when to back off.

  His dad and brothers had spent a lot of time trying to teach him the difference. But human flirtation and mating rituals held a complexity that Shep could never completely crack. It was one of the reasons he’d been so happy to marry Amber when he was twenty.

  In the beginning, things had been good between them. When Shep was interested in something, he often took that interest to the edge of obsession. Amber had enjoyed being his obsession.

  But once they were married, she hadn’t understood why his intense focus on her shifted to something else. At that time, it had been rock formations. Another, it had been native plants.

  He’d believed he’d secured companionship that would reassure his family and allow him a relatively independent life. Companionship, Amber had explained to him, was not the same as love.

  Their marriage had failed. He had failed.

  Something he would never do again because he now understood that he did not understand women. Accepted that he wasn’t capable of loving a woman the way she wanted to be loved.

  He needed to stop thinking about this. About Joss and what she wanted from him, if anything. Right now, the most important thing was to find Moody and get this group farther up the mountain.

  To his everlasting frustration, he made six circles of camp, increasing the radius each time, but Moody didn’t seem to be within shouting distance. Shep patted Puck on the side. “I think he’s screwing with us, Puck.”

  Puck looked up, and his eyebrows seesawed, making his long eyebrow whiskers wave.

  “And if we don’t get back to camp soon, there might be some kind of war. For all we know, we’ll discover that the three contestants have tied up the camera guys and are fighting to the death over a handful of energy bars.”

  But when he and Puck cleared the tree line back into camp, the camera operators were busy filming the progress of a snake as it wound its way toward the woods. The younger guy said, “I saw one of these last night when I was in the woods taking a leak. I bet it’s a pit viper. Probably the most poisonous snake in all of North America.”

  “It’s a rat snake,” Shep told him. “There are only three venomous snakes native to North Carolina. Well, five if you count the types of rattlesnakes separat—”

  “There are snakes out here?” The Bitcher screeched.

  “Jesus, Lauren, didn’t you buy a guide book or any
thing?” The Bleeding Heart drawled, doing a pretty damn good job of sounding like a Carolina good ol’ boy. Jay-sus.

  “I guess Moody didn’t show up while I was out looking for him?” Shep asked the group at large.

  “No sign of him,” Joss confirmed.

  Well, hell.

  Shep squatted down to unzip his pack and withdraw the sat—satellite—phone he’d insisted Dan provide him for this trip.

  The Bitcher was at his side faster than Barry Allen could race around Central City. “You have a phone! Does it work? I need to make some calls and—”

  “No.”

  “Yes. I can see quite clearly that you have a phone. Now hand it over, cutie, and I’ll pay you for it later.” She winked, which meant she either had something in her eye or there was some subtext he wasn’t getting.

  “No, I mean this phone is for emergency contact only.” And although Moody’s disappearance wasn’t officially an emergency, it felt like one to Shep. He didn’t want to be out here with all these people by himself. Moody was a jackass, but he was the one ultimately calling the shots.

  Shep walked away from The Bitcher and dialed in the number for Prime Climb. It rang half a dozen times before someone picked up. “Prime Climb Tours, Celia speaking.”

  “I need to talk with Dan Cargill.”

  “Can I ask who’s calling?”

  “Harris Sheppard Kingston.”

  “Oh, Shep, you should’ve just said so,” Celia said. “But Dan’s not here right now. You’ll have to call him on his mobile.”

  “Thanks.” Shep hung up and dialed Dan’s number.

  “’lo?”

  “We can’t find Moody.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  Who else was hiking through the backcountry with a guy named Moody? “Shep Kingston.”

  “Oh, yeah. Moody. Now what’s up?”

  “Moody disappeared sometime between last night and this morning. Everyone else is accounted for,” Shep said. “But when we checked his tent this morning, it looked like Moody hadn’t slept in it.”