Dragging around a full-grown man had not been her expected choice of exercise.
Leaning down, hovering over the man’s face, she shouted, “It’s time to wake up!”
Chapter Two
Nothing. No response. Not even an eyelid flickered.
What if he never woke up? It wasn’t as if she had any IVs lying around to hook into him. He’d have to eat if he was going to survive. She didn’t know much about head wounds, other than they could kill a person or make them wacko when they did regain consciousness. For all she knew he could be some sort of axe murderer. Memory loss. Amnesia. What if this guy didn’t even know who he was?
Ugh. She had to stop with the imagination.
“Hey! Flyboy!” She patted his cheek again, forcing herself not to actually slap him. She wasn’t the panicking type, but caring for an unconscious guy wasn’t part of her vacation plans.
“Fine,” she muttered as she spread the tarp on the ground next to the man’s still form. Pushing him up on his side, she pulled the tarp under him then laid him back down. Stepping over him, she grabbed his collar and belt loop, and toppled him facedown onto the tarp. Then, for good measure, pressing her shoulder against his side, she shoved at his big body until he was on his back in the center of the tarp. Half reclined against him, sucking cool, damp air into her lungs, she flopped her head back onto his chest.
Ho-boy, was he ever solid. Her heart gave a little flutter at the thought, and she had to laugh at herself. This was ludicrous. He might have an incredible body, but she still had to get him into the cabin.
The tarp was six foot by six foot, and this guy’s feet hung off the end. Damn, they grew them big in Alaska. The pilot who’d dropped her off had been six and half feet tall and built like a redwood.
With more pushing and shoving, she got him diagonal so that he was fully on the thick plastic canvas. By then she was breathing hard and her legs felt like rubber.
Fifty feet to the steps. That’s all.
How in heaven’s name was she going to get him up the stairs? She’d have to worry about that when she got there. Grabbing fistfuls of the tarp, moving backwards, using a lot of the colorful language she’d learned while on a Merchant Marine ship a few years back, she dragged the tarp over the rocky ground.
Halfway there, she stopped to shake the painful cramps out of her fingers and glare down at the inert man. “You couldn’t have been some short, skinny guy could you? Maybe a woman? A little itty-bitty woman?”
She swiped at the damply clinging hair on her cheeks and blew out a frustrated breath. As soon as the stinging ache subsided in her hands, she grabbed the tarp again. “You know...” she huffed as she struggled to drag him closer to the cabin, “if you die on me after this... I swear I’ll never forgive you.”
The heel of her boot caught on a protruding tree root and she landed with a thump on her butt. Her ass was going to be black and blue, but at least she’d made it to the cabin. She crawled over to the bottom step, her lungs straining for breath as she laid her head on her arms. Being so out of shape sucked. She hated the weakness. She hated...the tears gathering in her eyes.
“Stop it, Hammond. One step at a time. The past has nothing to do with this moment.”
The drizzle had slowly turned into a light rain while she’d worried over the man, and she needed to get him inside, out of his wet clothes, and do the same for herself.
“Hey! You in there?” she shouted, lightly slapping his cheek again, hoping something would wake him up.
Peaceful as could be, lying there with the rain dripping on him. If it hadn’t been raining, she would’ve left him outside. But no, he picked the first rainy day in a week to take a nice little flight.
Isabella gathered her strength and stood. Idly glancing around for inspiration, she rolled her shoulders, trying to dispel the tightness in them, but saw nothing that might help her get him up the six steps to the porch. “All right, big guy. I have a feeling your backside’s going to be sore. Don’t blame me.” She’d have to drag him up the steps. There was nothing else to do.
Bending over behind him, she grabbed hold of the shoulders of his shirt and shoved him into a semi-sitting position. Wrapping her arms under his, she laced her fingers together over his chest. Once again she noticed his muscles. Through the wet clothes, his body was warm to the touch, which, she figured, was probably a good sign he wasn’t going into shock. Unless he was developing a fever. Fever could kill.
Shit. Shut the hell up. He’s going to be fine. Just knocked out.
In a coma.
No! Knocked out. Bump on the head. If she had any ammonia she could have tested her theory, but she didn’t have any. And the small first aid kit inside didn’t have any smelling salts. It didn’t have much of anything. God, how stupid I was to come here.
One excruciating step at a time, she pulled him up the stairs. The back of his jeans had an annoying habit of catching on the wood. Her back strained, her fingers ached where they were laced together, and her legs shook. “Come on. Come on,” she grunted as she jerked his big body toward the top. Finally reaching the porch, she dragged him back far enough so he sprawled out flat, his big feet dangling off the first step.
She plopped down beside him, leaned against the wall of the cabin, and tried to catch her breath. Her arms and thighs quivered from overexertion. “You better not be some crazed lunatic. I’d hate to have to shoot you after going through all this trouble trying to save your life.”
She watched his chest rise and fall in steady, regular breaths. Laying a finger against his throat, she felt his pulse. Much stronger now, but when she lifted his hand off his chest and dropped it, it plopped limp on the wooden-slat floor. Nice hands, she thought idly as she placed it back to his chest, letting her finger trail down over his. Long, lean fingers. Wide, square palm. Clean nails, short and blunt. Just a sprinkling of dark hair on the back and knuckles.
“I’m losing it. Admiring an unconscious guy’s hands. Maybe it’s a good thing you showed up, because I think I’m going a bit nuts. Mosquitoes and horseflies don’t carry on much of a conversation. But then again...” She laughed a bit hysterically. “…neither do you.”
She pushed up and reached for his thin black leather belt. “All right, outta those clothes, big guy.”
A knife and a cell phone sheath were at his right side. The knife was a standard folding Buck. Three-and-a-half-inch blade. She opened it. Nicely honed, lethally sharp. Well used. The scratched and worn handle had seen better days. The lake had obviously destroyed the cell phone. She shook it, and water sloshed around inside. Not that it would have done them much good way out here, anyway.
Setting aside the knife and phone, she unbuckled the belt and then opened the button and zipper of his jeans. “Hope you don’t mind. I don’t normally go around undressing unconscious men.” She snorted at her attempt at humor. “Been a hell of a long time since I undressed a conscious one, for that matter.”
She decided to get him closer to the couch before she took his pants off. The last thing she needed was to have to pull splinters out of this guy’s butt because she’d dragged him across the wooden floor.
She shoved open the door to the cabin, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him inside, staggering under his weight and sheer exhaustion. The adrenaline of earlier had ebbed to nothing. The fire in the barrel stove had gone out, and she wondered just how long it’d been since she’d been sitting on the porch, minding her own businesses, before Studly here fell out of the sky.
He did kind of look like a stud. Alaskan stud, anyway, not some magazine model. The whiskers, the muscles, the wild, untamed hair and square jaw. She wasn’t sure about the earring, though. She hadn’t really imagined any wild mountain men wearing quarter-carat diamond studs. She found it...amusing. When she burst out laughing again, she worried her grip on sanity was beginning to slip.
She laid him down next to the aged and worn olive green sofa. The only other furnishings in the twelve-by-four
teen-foot cabin were a small, scarred wooden table, two rickety chairs, and the ancient, creosote-encrusted barrel stove made from an old fifty-five gallon oil drum. There was a minuscule kitchen with a two-burner propane stove, and a tiny pantry area at the back end of the cabin. Over the kitchen a small loft made up the sleeping area, which held two queen-sized mattresses side by side.
Isabella reached for Studly’s pants again and wondered why her stomach fluttered in something close to anticipation. She’d seen plenty of naked men, having lived almost exclusively with men for the past ten years. Her uncle and whatever guides they’d needed to get to wherever they’d needed to go, to get the stories that Cameron Jones had been known to write, were almost always men. Some of them rather good looking. None of them with even an ounce of appeal that this half-dead guy had.
“Jeez, you’d think you were the first man I’d laid eyes on in the past ten years.” She yanked down his jeans and underwear in one motion. Oh, he was a man all right. A very well formed one, she thought, admiring him as a shiver of pure feminine awareness slithered down her spine, warming her from the inside out. She tried not to let her gaze wander where it shouldn’t but couldn’t seem to help herself. Michelangelo’s David had nothing on this wild Alaskan.
She extricated him from his pants then pushed him up again and tugged off the flannel shirt and then the T-shirt. Soft, dark brown hair covered his chest, swirled around his pecs, and then thinned out as it traveled down his taut stomach, around his navel then widened out again, making a soft, curly padding upon which his sex rested.
Oh, my. She wouldn’t mind waking up next to this guy every morning.
A slight pink discoloration marred his right side from shoulder to waist. A burn scar, though not a deep one, first or second-degree maybe. No puckering, just discoloration. Fairly recent, in her estimation, maybe even still a bit tender. She frowned, wondering how a guy could get burned over that much of his body.
Expelling a heavy sigh, Isabella climbed the short ladder to the loft to pull down the spare sleeping bag, the one she’d brought in case it got really cold. Her friend back in San Francisco who’d given her the name of the outfit that owned this cabin had told her that August weather could be unpredictable. Sometimes hot and sunny. Sometimes rainy and cold. Sometimes beautiful and mild. So far, it had been the latter, until the rain had started last night.
She loved the rain, though. And the mingled scents of wet spruce needles and moss were so sweet it made her want to bottle it and take it everywhere she went. Maybe she’d settle here. Not here per se, but in Alaska. Fairbanks seemed like a nice little city. Not too many people, but not exactly a town either. They had a Home Depot, Walmart, and a multi-plex movie theater. Or there was Anchorage. It was much larger, a city by anyone’s standard, and she’d probably have better luck getting a job there.
A job. What kind of job could she get? What did an ex... She didn’t even know how to title the job she’d held for her uncle. Assistant? Yeah, she had been that. His assistant. His secretary, accountant, pack mule, photographer, co-author, his...right hand and right leg. There weren’t many people for whom she’d work that hard. In fact, she couldn’t think of one. Moreover, she’d be damned if she ever set foot in another jungle ever.
Isabella realized she was still standing on the ladder, clutching the sleeping bag to her chest. Pulling herself back to the present and her silent companion, she spread the sleeping bag open over the sofa cushions and back. With more grunting and groaning, tugging and pulling, she heaved the man onto the sofa. Thank goodness the green monstrosity sat so low to the floor or she’d never have managed. Her strength was giving out at an alarming rate, the muscles in her arms and shoulders burning, and her legs had turned the consistency of wet noodles.
His right arm flopped down, palm up, on the edge of the couch.
Her breath caught in her throat. A cold shiver spiked through her. Ice cold. And it had nothing to do with the chilly cabin or the wet clothing that clung to her body.
Tattooed on the inside of his forearm was a skull with a viper slithering through the empty eye sockets. The words “silent” and “deadly” were over and under the design. It was a Special Forces insignia. The men who’d eventually rescued her and the other captives from that Central American hell had all sported the same ink. The highly lethal Viper Team.
“Pull yourself together, Hammond,” she whispered. Coincidence. Pure, simple coincidence. There must be thousands of men in the Special Forces.
She shivered again.
Gently, she lifted his arm and laid it over his chest then pulled the soft, quilted inside of the bag over him. “That should do it.” Brushing his thick hair off his forehead, she examined the knot above his right eye. It had grown to the size of a lemon and turned a disgusting shade of blackish-purple. If—when—he woke up, he was going to be in some serious pain.
After changing into dry clothing, Isabella set about hanging all the wet clothes on the line running kitty-corner over the barrel stove. When she lifted the man’s pants, a wallet plopped to the floor from the back pocket. Good. Maybe she’d be able to find out his name. After hanging up the clothes, she sat at the table and opened the well-worn, water-saturated black leather.
“Brandon Eugene Wilks,” Isabella said as she looked at the Michigan driver’s license with a Detroit address. He was thirty-nine years old, six-foot-three inches tall, and two hundred fifteen pounds. She doubted that. She’d guess he was about one-eighty. Brown hair, brown eyes, and an organ donor.
She pulled the rest of the items out of the wallet. He had eighty-nine dollars in cash, a Visa card, a punch card that entitled him to a free six-inch sub sandwich, a coffee card from Le Café for a free Grande Latté, a pilot’s license, a health insurance card—a lot of good that’s doing him now—a small stack of business cards from various businesses around both Fairbanks and the Detroit area, and two pictures. One picture was of a family. A big blond man, a small, dark woman, and a pretty baby. The other picture was of an older woman. Both had been laminated as if prepared for today’s swim.
She went back to the sofa and stared at him. Maybe this was her way of paying back those that had rescued her when she desperately needed help. Maybe this was a test to see if she’d deserved to be saved from death by the elite Viper Team.
~*~*~
Three strikes, you’re out.
A bullet, an explosion, a plane crash. Was he out? Was he dead?
Brandon groaned.
Nope. Can’t be dead. Too much pain.
His head had been split in two, he was sure. It throbbed, ached. He tried reaching up to touch his forehead, but the searing pain that shot through his left shoulder stopped him, and he groaned again.
“Shh, Brandon. You’re all right. Try not to move too much.”
Soft, feminine voice. Gentle. Soothing. Slightly husky. Almost silky. He tried to relax. Maybe he was still in the hospital. Maybe these past two months had been a dream.
“I’ve got some aspirin for you. I hope you don’t have an allergy to it or anything. I don’t have any other pain killers here.”
A soft, warm cocoon surrounded his body. The scent of wood smoke and woman closed around him, teased him. Gentle, cool fingers touched his cheek. He turned his face just a bit to press against that wonderful hand. It seemed to lessen a bit of the pinpoint flaming pain scorching his skull.
“Brandon.” His name had never sounded sexier. He smiled. “If you can sit up just a bit, I’ll help you with the pills. I’m sure you need something for the pain.”
That enticing little hand smoothed over his cheek, down his neck to his chest. Another hand, equally cool and gentle as the first, slipped under his bare shoulders. With a slight pressure, she tried lifting him.
He forced his eyes open.
The room was lit by the soft glow of a Coleman lantern hanging on the wall. The woman with the cool hands had the eyes of an angel and the hair...of a madwoman. A wild riot of dark curls surrounded her trem
endously feminine, extraordinarily beautiful face.
“Your driver’s license was right, they’re brown,” the woman said softly with a gentle smile that made her look even more angelic. “Nice to have you back among the living.”
“Where...” He cleared his throat, which caused an explosion within his skull. Squeezing his eyes shut, he fought the dizzying pain. “Where am I?”
“In a cabin on Ice Worm Lake, about two hundred miles northwest of Fairbanks. You crashed your plane in my front yard.”
Brandon groaned again as memories started to surface. He’d been thinking about going back to work tomorrow. Something hit the windshield, busting it. A bird. A flock of geese, that was what it was. He’d tried to find the nearest lake to set down on, but it was too close, and he’d been going too fast when he hit the water.
“I think you’re going to be all right now that you’re awake. Your shoulder’s going to hurt for a couple days, and you have a nice bump on your forehead.”
“Who are you?” he croaked. Her hands were still on him. One under his shoulders, the other on his chest. She felt nice, soft, comfortable. She smelled like heaven—sweet and slightly musky.
“Isabella Hammond.”
“You live here?” Through a pain-induced haze, he desperately tried to focus his eyes on her.
She shook her head at him. “No, I’m on vacation.”
“Who else is here?”
“Just us. You and me.”
Brandon shut his eyes again. An angel on holiday. Didn’t know they allowed that kind of thing in Heaven.
“Can you sit up? I have aspirin and some water for you.”
Brandon let her help him up. He had no choice; he was as weak as a newborn. Again. He’d just barely regained his strength after that long, agonizing month in the Burn Center.
Alaskan Nights Page 2