Call Me Wild

by Robin Kaye

  “Fisher? You’re looking really pale? Are you okay?”

  “What?” Jessica stared at him, her big brown eyes filled with concern. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Could have fooled me. Do you want to tell me what just happened?”

  Shit on a stick. He couldn’t very well say he realized he might be in love with her. She didn’t believe in it. And wasn’t that just the berries?

  A ringing from his satellite phone broke the silence. He dug it out of the front pocket of his backpack. “Fisher Kincaid.”

  “Hey, you okay?”

  His gaze returned to Jessica. “It’s Hunter.” He turned toward the river, almost happy that Hunter’s spidey sense was still working. “Yeah, I’m great. How are you and Toni doing?”

  “Fine. Are you sure you’re cool? I got this weird feeling—”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “Can’t talk?”

  “Not now.” Maybe not ever. Not about this at least. “It’s all good.”

  “Okay, so something is wrong, but you can’t talk about it. Nothing life-threatening though, right?”

  “Right.” It could prove to be painful, but not life-threatening. “I’ll call you when I get back to town.”

  “Make sure you do. And don’t forget you have class Thursday night.”

  “Like I’d ever forget that.” He ended the call and took a deep breath. He was so screwed. Leave it to him to fall for a woman who didn’t believe in love. How the hell can you prove the existence of romantic love? And how the hell was he supposed to know when he’d never been in it before?

  ***

  Jessie pulled on the hip boots Fisher packed for her. They were Karma’s, so they fit okay, even though they had rubber boots attached. The fabric was a pretty brown, gray, and green camo-ish paisley pattern and came up to her upper thighs, a few inches lower than her crotch. Karma’s feet were smaller than her size nines, so the boots were tight, but not horrible.

  Fisher stayed clear on the other side of the beach doing his own thing and ignoring her existence. He’d been Mr. Attentive all day, but ever since he’d stopped short on the path—as if he’d hit some kind of invisible wall, almost knocking her over—it was as if she didn’t exist.

  From the corner of her eye she saw him tugging on his waders and cursing under his breath. Cursing was out of character for him. She might not know him well, but the only time she’d ever heard him curse, even under his breath, had been the first time they’d made love. But then it was more a curse of awe than frustration. Because really, what did he have to be frustrated about? They’d both been having the time of their lives, or so she’d thought. This string of muttered curses was wrought with frustration, whether it was about his waders or whatever happened earlier, she hadn’t a clue.

  No matter how much he denied it, something had happened. Maybe it was the call from his brother that upset him, but she didn’t think so. He’d looked as if he’d had a mental train wreck well before his phone rang. His color still wasn’t good. Maybe he poisoned himself, but she’d eaten the same thing he’d fixed for lunch, and she felt fine.

  She grabbed her pole and stepped into the river. She didn’t need Fisher to tell her what to do. He’d already put a fly on her rod, so the rest was up to her. She could ignore people with the best of them. It wasn’t her first choice, but if he was going to ignore her, she wasn’t the type to run around asking what the heck was wrong. She didn’t need his attention. “And he thought women were hard to understand. At least we don’t lock ourselves in our virtual man cave,” she muttered as she stripped the line and cast.

  When the fly flew downstream on the river, she pulled it off the surface of the water, determined to tune him out and just enjoy the late summer sun bouncing off the quick flowing river. It really was breathtaking out here. She whipped the line behind her and forward a few times, picking up momentum before letting out line and catching distance. It felt good to be fishing, even if she had to ignore the man stomping around onshore behind her.

  She heard Fisher stripping line downstream. So, he was going to keep his distance. That was just fine with her. She didn’t want to know what was going on in that mind of his anyway. It was none of her business. She didn’t have relationships for just this reason. She had never been interested in dealing with messy emotional crap—especially not someone else’s.

  The only thing she was interested in getting from Fisher Kincaid was sex and only on a temporary basis. If it turned out to be way more temporary than she’d planned, she’d be fine. She’d never had a problem going without before. Although she had a funny feeling going without wouldn’t be quite that easy now that she knew what she’d been missing. Okay, so she’d like a lot more time rolling around with Fisher, but that probably had more to do with her PMSing than with him.

  She pulled her rod back to cast again, but her timing was way off—story of her life. Not only that, but she bent her wrist—what Fisher called breaking it in fly-fishing terms—lost her distance, and the line splashed a few feet in front of her. She looked over her shoulder and found Fisher staring off into space. Good, at least he’d missed her less than stellar performance.

  Jessie ventured farther upstream—if he wanted to sulk, or whatever he was doing, she wasn’t going to stop him. Tossing a glance over her shoulder, she realized she’d walked well beyond the beach. She turned to walk deeper into the river to keep from snagging her line on the bushes growing close to the shore. Reeling in some line, she talked herself through the cast before trying again. She didn’t want to be caught screwing up. Just to be safe, she took another few steps. The riverbed beneath her feet disappeared, and the next thing she knew she was in over her head. Her waders filled with ice water as she kicked to get to the surface. She tried to kick her waders off, but the boots were too tight, and she was moving downstream fast. She bumped into a rock—a boulder. Pain radiated through her shoulder, and she turned so she could at least see where she was going, while she tried desperately to keep afloat as her waders dragged her down.

  Fisher screamed her name just before she went under.

  ***

  Fisher did his best to wrap his head around the whole idea of falling in love with Jessica. Maybe it was just the great sex messing with his mind. But then, he pictured the way she looked the day he’d met her. He’d been immediately attracted to her in a big way. It wasn’t as if he’d never been attracted to a woman. He had, but his attraction to Jessica grabbed him by the balls and made him do crazy things like run with her—maybe it wasn’t love at all. Maybe he just had a latent death wish. Whatever it was had him worrying about what she ate. It made him want to know who had hurt her so badly she believed love didn’t exist, and how he could go about fixing it. Damn, he had it bad. No wonder love was a four-letter word.

  He stared downriver, hoping some answers would somehow magically appear. He didn’t so much as look Jessica’s way, because if he did, he might just blurt out his feelings, and that was the last thing she wanted to hear. He needed time to come up with a plan and make damn sure what he was feeling was love. Shit. Pretty soon he’d not only be knitting, but he’d be reading Cosmo too.

  He heard a splash and then Jessica’s scream. He pulled off his waders as she floated by. “Feet first! Jessica, point your feet downstream. Stay on your back.” Fisher jumped in after her. How could he have been so stupid? He’d been so caught up the whole love issue, he’d neglected to tell her about the shelf, and she must have walked right off it.

  He swam for her, and her head went under. With the fading light, she blended into the river, and he lost her.

  He spotted her again just as she hit a boulder. It looked like she tried to grab the next one, but the river was getting rougher and pulled her down. Just a few more yards, he skirted the boulder she’d clung to, reached for her, and missed. Fuck.

  Things were going to get dicier if he didn’t get to her soon. Thank God, they were almost to the eddy. If he could get her to th
e eddy, they’d be okay. If not… That wasn’t worth thinking about.

  He kicked hard, ignoring the cold, and grabbed her arm, pulling her to him, holding her head above the water long enough for her to catch her breath. “Come on, Jess… Swim right, hard. Kick.”

  The boulder in front of the eddy was coming at them fast. Fisher spun them around, holding her close, protecting her body, taking the hit. He thought his back would take the brunt of the impact, but his head snapped back, and pain shot through him. He saw stars. He let the water pull them around the boulder into the safety of the eddy, letting them float in the whirlpool the large boulder he hit had created. The last thing he saw was Jessica’s terrified, fuzzy face, before his world went black.

  ***

  Jessie held onto Fisher as he sank. He was out cold. She held his head above water, thanking God she had her lifeguard certification and floated in what seemed like a whirlpool. At least the river had stopped dragging her down. She needed to get him on that big rock and out of the cold. For all she knew, he could be in shock.

  She held onto Fisher and slipped beneath the water, testing its depth. When she hit bottom, she sprang up, pushing Fisher onto the rock. Damn, he weighed a ton. He was still hanging half off, but for now, he was stable. He was also unconscious and bleeding from the back of the head.

  Shaking from cold and fear, she climbed onto the boulder, which was as large as a king-sized bed, but not nearly as comfortable. She grabbed Fisher under his arms and dragged him further up, trying to get as much of his body out of the water as possible, and then rolled him over. He was breathing, thank God. For a minute there, she wondered if she’d killed him.

  She had to get him to shore, to his car, and then to a hospital. She just wished she knew how to go about doing that—supergirl she was not. They were only about three or four yards from shore. If she could get him out of the whirlpool, she should be able to swim for it.

  Jessie pulled off the water-filled waders—not an easy thing to do with an unconscious man bleeding beside her—rolled them up, and threw them to shore.

  Blood pooled beneath Fisher’s head. She knew head wounds bled a lot, and the water in his hair made it look worse than it was—at least that’s what she told herself. She took off the vest and T-shirt, wrung the T-shirt out, and wrapped it around his head. He was going to need stitches. “Fisher? Come on. You gotta wake up. I don’t think I can get you to shore on my own.”

  The water had felt like ice, and even now that she was out of it, with the warmth of the rock seeping through her wet sweats, she shook uncontrollably. “Fisher, please wake up. Please.”

  She didn’t know what to do. Should she leave him and try to get help? God, he could die out here. She heard herself whimper, something she’d never heard before, and fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck, her eyes were leaking again.

  “Damn you, Fisher. If you die on me, I swear I’m gonna kill you!”

  She covered her eyes and cried. God this sucked so bad.

  “I’m not dead yet.”

  Chapter 12

  “Stay awake, Fisher.” God, every time he closed his eyes, Jessie wondered if he was dead. She gave him another nudge, but she was afraid to take her hands off the wheel for too long as the Land Cruiser bounced up and down the steep mountain road.

  She glanced at the directions to the hospital she’d hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper. Karma said it was a forty-five-minute drive during the day—once you hit the main road. But with night falling and the fact that she was driving a strange car down dark and windy, sorry-excuse-for-a-mountain-road, who knew how long it would take. But then, Karma had also said Jessie should take Fisher to the hospital if she thought it was necessary—as if Karma didn’t.

  Fisher had passed out for cripes sake. Sure, it had been for less than a minute, but so what? And he was bleeding. Okay, so the bleeding had stopped, or it seemed to after Jessie had washed the area and wrapped some gauze around his head. Still, she wouldn’t be able to rest until Fisher got a clean bill of health.

  She reached over to nudge him again.

  “I’m up. Will you stop hitting me?”

  “Don’t go to sleep. You have to stay awake.” She wasn’t sure why, but she got the impression it wasn’t a good thing for a person with a head injury to sleep.

  “How could I possibly sleep after you stole my keys and insisted on driving my baby?”

  Getting the keys wasn’t hard to do, which just made her even more nervous. It was very clear to her that Fisher had an unhealthy relationship with the piece of crap he called a car. Lord only knew why, the damn thing had more ailments than a hypochondriac with a new copy of the Physician’s Desk Reference. “I’m a great driver.”

  “Yeah, tell that to someone who didn’t have to push your car off the road it never should have been on in the first place.”

  “God, are you going to bring that up again?”

  She shot him a dirty look. Leave it to Fisher to still look hot with a bandage wrapped around his noggin, when she looked like something the cat threw up.

  “I’d probably have a lot more to say if I could remember what the hell happened.”

  “I told you. You hit your head on a rock in the river, and I somehow pulled you onto that huge boulder close to your special place.”

  “Yeah, that’s the part I don’t understand. I wasn’t planning to take a dip, and if I had, I sure as hell would not have gone that far downstream. It gets really gnarly down there.”

  Tell me about it. She sneaked a glance at him. At least she had his attention now, not that she’d wanted it before—back on the beach, before she’d fallen in.

  Okay, so she had wanted him to turn back into Mr. I-can’t-stop-undressing-you-with-my-eyes. She wouldn’t lie to herself—not for long anyway. And she wouldn’t lie to him… Hell, if he got pissed at her for causing his brain injury, at the very least, the anger might keep him awake long enough for her to get him to a hospital.

  “I guess I went out into the river too far. I took a step, and it was as if the bottom dropped out. The next thing I knew, I was flying down the river, and you were screaming at me. You grabbed me, but then you hit your head, and we ended up in a weird whirlpool. You fainted—”

  “I didn’t faint. I was knocked out.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Women faint with shock, if they have low blood pressure, for all sorts of reasons. When a man takes a blow to the head, he gets knocked out. There’s a huge difference. Fainting is… prissy. I’m not prissy.” He brought his hand up to the softball-sized lump on the back of his head. “It figures. I was rescuing you again.”

  She rolled her eyes. He didn’t see it, which was just as well. “First of all, you need to retract the word again. That implies you’ve rescued me before, which you haven’t. Secondly, I dragged you out of the river after you fainted. I ended up being the one doing the rescuing.”

  “You’re going to have to show me proof, since I don’t remember.”

  “Yeah, isn’t that convenient?” She was sure the bloodstain was still on top of the boulder, but just the thought of it had bile rising in her throat. “Do you remember walking back to the cabin?”

  “No, I remember waking up on the couch, wondering why my clothes were wet, and I had a headache like you read about.”

  That was a relief. “Isn’t it interesting that you’d forget that I dragged you out of the river and through the woods? God, it sounds like a bad Christmas song.” And felt like a nightmare. “You walked, like a guy on a three-day drinking binge. You said you were dizzy.” She’d been scared to death his brain would swell, and he’d drop dead just like the bad guy in the last romance she’d read. She may have rambled on a bit about how the bad guy hit his head, and then a few hours later, he stood and fell flat on his face—dead as a doornail.

  No, it wouldn’t hurt her feelings if Fisher never remembered that, or the way her eyes sprang a leak when she’d thought he could die. God, just thinking about it mad
e her eyes threaten to leak again.

  “Do you even know where we’re going?”

  “Yes, I called Karma as soon as I retrieved your backpack. She gave me directions to the hospital.”

  A half hour later, Jessie pulled up next to the emergency entrance of the hospital and roused Fisher, something she’d been doing through the entire drive. Her arms were stiff either from dragging him from the river or just gripping the wheel like a lifeline.

  “You’re not supposed to park here.”

  “What the hell are they going to do? Give me a ticket?”

  He pointed to the other side of the porte cochere. “You can park over there.”

  “By the sign that says Physician Parking? But I’m not a physician.”

  “What are they going to do, give you a ticket?”

  At least he had his smirk back—that one with the winking dimple. She put the truck in neutral and put on the brake. “Let me get you inside before I park it, okay?”

  “I’m fine. It’s not that far. I can walk.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re hardheaded?”

  “I guess that’s a good thing, considering.”

  Jessie parked in the doctors’ lot, risking a ticket, tossed his backpack and her purse over her shoulder, and hurried around to meet him as he stepped out of the truck.

  Fisher smashed up against her. She wasn’t sure if it was because he’d lost his balance, or because he wanted her smashed against him.

  She hoped for the latter, but was prepared to hold him up if need be.

  “Now you smell like clear, cool river water and woods.” He pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed her—just a sweet kiss that gave her a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. His lips were so warm and alive, so unlike the way he’d felt a few hours ago. What a relief. He looked right into her eyes. His pupils were still the same size, which was good. “Thanks for rescuing me.”