by Dani April
“Are you going to come with me?” he asked her.
She put her face in her hands then looked back up at him. “I don’t want to.”
He came back to her and put his arms on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I’m not giving you a choice.”
She shrugged. “All right,” she said and gave up. “I’ve already come this far. I might as well go the rest of the way. But do you have a jacket or something else for me to put on? It really is chilly out tonight.”
He lifted his arms over his head and removed his T-shirt. He handed it to her. “This should keep you warm,” he said.
She swallowed hard. He stood so close to her. Suddenly he had made her feel like a spoiled child. All of a sudden she didn’t feel very smart. She wasn’t for sure if it was because she had put up a fuss over Luke’s actions, or if it was because she had agreed to come with him. Whichever it was she knew she didn’t feel very bright in this situation.
“What about you?” she asked him. “Won’t you be cold?”
He gave her a crooked smile. “The temperature’s in the sixties, Arielle. It takes a lot more than this to make me cold.”
She put on his T-shirt. It was way too big for her and fell to her knees. The moment she had it over her head, she could smell Luke in the fabric of the material. His smell was raw and earthy. It was a smell she liked. She rubbed some sleep from her eyes and decided to get with the spirit of things.
“So we’re going for a midnight horseback ride?” she asked Luke, as she approached her horse.
Luke jumped up into the saddle of his horse and looked down at her. He gave her a laugh and motioned for her to mount up next to him. “We are going for a ride unless you keep acting like a little bitch,” he told her, and gave her a wink.
Arielle put a hand over her mouth to try and hide her smile. It had been a while since she had ridden, but knew it would all come back to her. She put her foot in the stirrup and hiked her leg over her mount.
“Okay, I promise not to be a bitch anymore,” she told him. “But only if you promise not to act like a psycho werewolf.”
He put his Stetson on and gave her a tip of the hat. Mounted on top of his horse with the cowboy hat on, his boots and tight jeans, and no shirt, bathed in moonlight, he really was a sight for sore eyes. The wicked part of Arielle wanted to eat him up right there inside the stable.
“I might be a psycho, but I’m no werewolf,” he told her. “I’m a shape-shifter. Follow me.” He gave his horse a pat and trotted out of the stable. Arielle got her horse to move and left the building right behind him.
They took the prairie range at a brisk pace. The night was lit by the moon, and it was easy to see. Luke was sure and knew exactly where he led them. When they got to the end of the prairie land, they entered a canyon that ran between two small mountains. Again Luke knew right where he went and the dark was no problem for him. Arielle wondered if he could see in the dark through his shifter eyes. At the end of the canyon Luke found a trail, and this led them into a dense forest.
Arielle was not cold anymore. The horseback ride exhilarated her. The night became warm and pleasant, and she enjoyed Luke’s shirt over her body. She also enjoyed his shirtless form on the back of his horse. He led them, and she got to watch him from behind as they rode.
He didn’t speak, and there was no need for speech. She didn’t say any more either. She knew it was wise to just keep quiet and enjoy the beauty of the mountains at night. Few people had a chance to get this close to nature. Arielle felt lucky. This midnight ride made an impression on her, and she doubted she would ever forget it. Someday when she was an old woman, she would look back on this night and smile to think that it was she who rode across the land on this horse in the moonlight.
Arielle lost track of the time, but knew they had ridden for hours. Time didn’t matter to her any longer. She wanted to see where Luke led her.
They had climbed the back of a steep hill and attained its summit when Luke finally brought them to a halt. He dismounted and helped Arielle down from her horse.
“We’re not going back to the ranch, are we?” Arielle asked him. “I didn’t bring anything with me,” she complained to him.
“I packed a couple of bags. Everything we need is in them.”
“But I don’t have any clothes to wear.”
“Then don’t wear any clothes. It’s just you and me up here. No one’s going to see us. After I shift I don’t wear any clothes either.”
“No, thanks. I’ll leave my clothes on.”
He took her hand and led her forward. “We’re going to stop and rest now, but there’s something I wanted you to see first.”
The sun had just risen behind them. From their position on the top of the rise they got a good view. The morning birds in the forest around them had started to sing. The moon had gone down, but now everything was bathed in the first rays of the new sun. Around them the forest was still and peaceful.
“I like this,” he told her in a quiet voice.
“Yeah, I like it, too,” she admitted.
“Are you glad you came with me?”
“I’m not for sure yet.” However she had to admit to herself that this was a good time, but she didn’t think she would tell him just yet.
She knew Luke had taken her out here for a long trip. They wouldn’t be back at the ranch anytime soon. She processed the information through her brain and realized she was okay with that. But Luke had no doubt brought her out here to have a heart-to-heart about the two of them as mates. She wasn’t so sure if that was all right. It would just be the two of them now, and he wouldn’t make this easy for her. She had already had sex with both of his brothers, and nothing would be easy with a guy as cute as Luke Wildback.
Chapter Twelve
“This isn’t very much for breakfast,” Arielle said as Luke handed her a single breakfast bar.
“It’s nutritious.”
“When I was in college I used to go camping with my friends in the summer. We would catch fish for breakfast. Is there a creek nearby?”
“About a mile from the bottom of this hill is a pond. There aren’t any fish in there, but the stream that feeds it is full of them.”
Arielle stuck her breakfast bar in her mouth and got up from her seated position on the ground. “All right, I’m going fishing then.”
“Let me finish setting up camp, and I’ll come with you.”
She sat back down. She leaned her back against a fallen log. She had to keep her knees folded in the air because she wore shorts and the bugs on the ground had a good time with her bare skin. Luke made camp for them. He had announced that this clearing at the top of the hill was where they would stay. Arielle watched him. His butt was cute when he moved.
“You need some help with that?” she called to him.
“I brought two tents. If you want to set yours up, we can get to the fish faster.”
She climbed back up off the ground and dusted herself off. Somehow she felt like a naughty schoolgirl. She and Luke had run away together. She had done a lot of crazy things over the past two weeks, but this adventure probably took first place. However, she realized a sense of freedom had taken root in her. There was no TV out here, no Internet, and no phones. Most importantly no people. Luke had been right when he said they could run around naked if they wanted. Not that she planned to take him up on the offer. Still the isolation and the wide open of the forest provided an adrenaline rush that was probably better than drugs.
Luke told her the other tent was in one of the bags they had brought up with the horses. He had unburdened the horses of them, and they were now on the ground next to where the horses were tethered. She brought the tent out of the bag and took it across the clearing to where Luke set up the first one.
She began to remove the tent from the cellophane it was wrapped in. It weighed less than five pounds, but when she began to expand it there was a lot more of it than what first appeared. Some of it flopped down onto the
ground, and it confused her as to which end she should work on first. She felt useless and stupid as she stood there ineffectively and fumbled around. God, get a grip, girl, she told herself. After all, she could perform an eye operation on a cat. The setup of this taffeta tent should be a snap.
Luke had already set his up and moved around the camp ground to gather loose wood, probably for a campfire later on. He gave her a puzzled look at her predicament. “I thought you watched me set mine up.”
No. I just watched your ass, she wanted to shout back at him. “I did watch you, but I’m all thumbs today. Sorry,” she said to him instead.
“Here, let me.” He threw aside the wood and came over to help her. She was grateful to surrender the job to him, but stayed at his side and watched what he did. However with all that had happened, her mind was working on too many other burners right now to take notes on proper tent preparation. She would leave that challenge for another time.
She arched an eyebrow at Luke when she realized what was out of place with this campsite of theirs. Two tents? He didn’t intend for them to sleep together. The outside of each tent package noted they were two-person tents. She wondered what went on inside that complicated shifter head of his. Last night he had been bold enough to kidnap her, and this morning he set up individual sleeping compartments for them, spaced away from one another at an appropriate interval. She wondered who she was up here camping with, a cowboy abductor, or Mr. Manners.
She thought about a word with him on the two tents and the reason for it since they were supposed to be mates, or at least that was the idea the men had for the future. Then she decided not to push her luck and leave things well enough alone.
She checked her watch. It was after eight in the morning. She had called Bethany each morning while she had been a guest at the Wildback ranch. She should have called her ten minutes ago. Now that her sister was pregnant, she seemed to worry about everything. Arielle didn’t want to be the cause of one more worry.
“Do you have a phone on you?” she asked Luke. “I need to give my sister a call. And as you know I left so quickly last night I forgot to bring mine with me.”
Luke kneeled before her on the ground. He hammered the stake of the tent in with his fist. He looked up at her with a crooked grin. “I don’t own a phone.”
Arielle just shrugged. Somehow it didn’t surprise her. Luke wasn’t exactly in the twenty-first century yet. “Fantastic,” she said sarcastically and leaned against a tree to watch him finish the setup.
“If you miss calling your sister for a day or two, will she really be that worried about you?”
“You don’t know my sister.”
He looked back up at her, sweat rolling off his brow, a curious look on his face. “I wonder if she’s like you.”
“She’s my sister so I guess we’re a little alike.”
“I don’t think you’d go all crazy with worry over something stupid.”
“I might. You don’t really know me, Luke.”
“No. I don’t think you would. I think you go with the flow.”
She laughed. “What gives you that idea?”
“When I abducted you for sex last night a normal woman would have started screaming and probably wouldn’t have come with me unless I tied her up and threw her over the back of my horse. But you came willingly.”
“Is that why you brought me up here? Sex?”
Another crooked smile. This one bigger than the last. “Sure is, Dr. Banks.”
She realized this should have scared her, but it didn’t. When it came to the Wildback brothers, she didn’t think anything scared her anymore. Maybe he was right about her and how she had learned to simply go with things and take them for what they were. She was pretty certain she had not always been like this. She had probably been more like Bethany before. But with the Wildback brothers one had to learn to adapt.
“Do Jason and Kyle know we’re up here?”
“They sure don’t.” He paused to give her another dangerous smile.
“Won’t they be mad when they find out?”
“They’ll probably want to kill me.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
He secured the last stake and stood up. His naked chest was covered in sweat. “I don’t care about that,” he told her, and she could tell he really meant it, too.
He walked up to her. She pushed herself off the tree she leaned against. He stood close to her. Close enough for her to smell the sweat on his body and see the fine blonde hairs that grew beneath his navel and led down into the concealment of his jeans.
She put her arms around herself and looked across at the two tents in the clearing. “Good job,” she told him. “Want to go fishing now?”
“I do, but first sit back down over here.” He grabbed her hand and took her back over to the fallen tree. Just a slight push from his huge muscled body and she was back down on her butt on top of the log. “Your legs are real pretty,” he told her. The wicked and oh so dangerous smile had never left his face.
“Thank you,” she responded to his compliment.
“Too pretty to get bug bites all over them, which is exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t put on some of this.” He came back to her with a tube of bug repellent and knelt in front of her. He squeezed out a large dab onto his palm. “This is strong stuff, but it’ll keep the bugs off you for forty-eight hours.”
He pulled out her right leg and started at her calf. When the ointment touched her skin, it was ice-cold and made her wince. She tensed up for a moment until she got used to the feel of the cold liquid and his palm rubbing her skin.
When he ran his fingers behind her knee, she wanted to laugh. She was ticklish there. She gave him a smile. “That feels good.”
“It’s not supposed to feel good. It’s just supposed to keep the bugs off you.”
She cleared her throat. “That’s what I meant. It feels good to have the bugs off my skin.”
He looked up from her leg and had never looked more dangerous. She blushed and wiped some hair back out off of her face. He returned to her right foot and sat it across his leg as he removed her sneaker.
“My feet, too?” she asked him.
“This will stop the ants from getting in your shoes.”
He gave her a foot rub, and it felt good. The cold liquid had now become a luxury as he spread it along her skin. She wished she had a back rest on the fallen tree she sat atop of so she could lean back and enjoy, but unfortunately she had to keep herself propped upright with her hands. It didn’t matter. He still gave a glorious foot massage. By the time he moved to take off her left sneaker, she felt relaxed.
“Do you always give a foot rub on the first date?” she asked him playfully.
“I don’t date,” he told her as a matter of fact.
“What do you do, then?”
“I fuck women.”
“Well, what do you call this camping trip you’ve taken me on? I know you said we’re going to have sex, but I mean we could have done that at home. How do you classify this trip?”
He kept her foot in his hands and made her muscles roll under his touch, and he thought about her question. It was a while before he answered. By the time he did answer, he had started to work his way back up her leg again.
“I don’t know what to call this,” he finally told her. “I’ve never had a mate before, so I just don’t know how to act or what to do. Bringing you out here was the only thing I could think of. I wanted to be alone with you.”
“Well, we couldn’t get much more alone than this.”
“That’s why I brought us here.”
She wanted to talk to him about what his idea of a mate really was. That would be important to the decisions she made in the very near future. However, he had moved up her leg with the delicious, cold bug repellent and had moved onto her thighs. Suddenly she realized the shorts she had worn were just too damn short. She had trouble concentrating with his hands so close to her sex. But fortunat
ely he moved on quickly.
“Take off my shirt,” he told her. He had finished with her feet and legs and sat down beside her on the log.
“You want your shirt back?” she knew she asked this a bit wistfully since he looked so good without it.
“The bug repellent is sticky if it gets on your clothes,” he told her.
“It’s gotten warm out. I don’t really need it anymore,” she said, and lifted her arms above her head and removed his shirt.
He was quick to lift up her bare arms and start rubbing bug repellent on them. Once more he took his time, and the cool liquid as applied by his fingers to her skin felt like magic. Then he rubbed her shoulders and lifted the straps of her halter to get the skin beneath. She raised her chin for him, and he got her neck. When he moved to the back of her neck, he moved her hair out of the way. The cold liquid made her squirm each time it was applied to a new area of her body. The touch of his fingers made her shift uncomfortably on the log.
“That should take care of you for a couple of days,” he said as he finished up.
“So you want us to spend two days out here camping?”
“I’m not for sure yet. As long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes for what, Luke?”
“For you and I to get to know each other.”
She sighed. “Okay. I’m game to go along with you. But what happens if we get to know each other and then decide we don’t like each other?”
He shrugged. “It’s a possibility. I’ve known a lot of people I haven’t liked before.” He put his shirt back on. She felt disappointed when he did this. Then he held out his hand to her. “Ready to go fishing?”
“Lead the way, sir,” she told him after he helped her up from the log. He went back to the duffle bags and brought out two monofilament lines with tiny hooks on the end. He also took a box of what must have been bait. Then he took her by the hand, and they started off.