Running Wild

by Susan Andersen

  He swore under his breath, raked his fingers through his hair, then efficiently disposed of the condom, found his shorts and pulled them on. It was sweltering in the tent and he wiped his forearm across his forehead, then brought his wrist down to look at his watch. And said coolly, “You want to break camp then and get a few more hours farther downriver?”

  His sudden shift in conversation might have been jarring if that panic thing hadn’t started up all over again. Even as she struggled to get her racing heart under control, however, she gave him a terse nod. “Yes. I think it’s probably a good idea to get going while I still have the nerve to get back in the boat.”

  He cursed again and moved in on her, his hand reaching out to brush back a hank of hair that had escaped her braid. “I didn’t even think about that. You gonna be okay?”

  “I hope so.” Almost immediately she sucked in a deep breath and gave a decisive nod. “No. I will be fine. You can be sure, though, that I’ll put my life jacket on the minute I step into the boat.”

  He gave her head a knuckle rub and she blinked in surprise. She was having a tough time keeping up here, what with him trying to argue her to a standstill one moment, then getting all chummy playful with her the next.

  “You know what, Magdalene?” he said. “You’re a damn good sport. And I have a feeling you’re a helluva lot tougher than you think you are, too.” Then he became briskly efficient. “Why don’t you take our packs down to the boat while I roll up the mat and bag and break down the tent.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they shoved off the beach. For the first half hour, Mags sat stiffly vigilant, but little by little, as the water remained calm and nothing more exciting happened than spotting an occasional group of little squirrel monkeys swinging through the increasingly dense trees lining either side of the river, her tense posture relaxed. She lifted her tote onto her lap and hauled out the items that hadn’t fully dried during her earlier attempt, spreading them across the empty seat between her and Finn.

  I have a feeling you’re a helluva lot tougher than you think. His words kept running through her mind even as she tried her best to ignore them.

  She wished she were tougher than she thought. Physically, she’d been known to display an occasional moment of bravery. Or foolhardiness. It all depended on who you talked to. As far as emotional toughness went, however, Finn had pretty much hit the nail on the head. When she ventured out to clubs and bars, she was the life of the party and it made her all warm and fuzzy when people thought she was fun and wanted to hang out with her.

  But while she was a master at fooling herself on occasion, trying to do so in the long run simply wasn’t sustainable. She knew she had mama and daddy and what a shrink would undoubtedly call abandonment issues. She also knew it was past time she let them go. Unfortunately the latter was easier said than done. And when the only two real friends she’d made during her boarding-school days disappeared from her life, she’d taken it as a sign. God knew it was less painful to simply avoid deep, genuine connections in the first place. Because, show people your real self and odds were they were gonna walk away.

  Okay, Heather had died in a car accident, so Mags could hardly cry abandonment over that one. That sure hadn’t made it hurt any less, though. As for Sarina—

  The three of them, she, Sarina and Heather, had been the Three Musketeers—or Teeretts, as Heather had dubbed them—since practically the first day at Mags’s final boarding school, the one in which she’d decided to apply herself instead of willfully screwing up and getting herself kicked out yet again. She and Sarina had clung together after Heather’s death, but when Mags dropped out of college, Sarina had just blown her off.

  It had been like a kick in the stomach, but apparently she’d no longer fit in her former friend’s plans. Sarina had always been ambitious, constantly seeking people to meet, social ladders to climb. And that apparently meant friends with connections, or at the very least, college degrees.

  An-n-nd—this is getting me nowhere.

  She’d been doing her best to ignore Finn by keeping an eagle eye on the water. Her spirits lifted when she saw hundreds of brilliantly colored butterflies gathered on a tiny sandbank.

  Soon after that, however, the water lost its clearness and grew cloudier until eventually it became downright muddy-looking. Here and there tiny villages comprised of a handful of open-sided huts cropped up. Straddling the shore and the edge of the river, they were built atop slender poles and looked as if they’d been constructed from mud and straw.

  Really? her inner critic demanded. This is what it’s come to? Deciding what a handful of rickety huts I’ll never see again are made of?

  She sighed. Considering how often she’d sneaked peeks at Finn even as she’d tried to keep her attention directed elsewhere, there was no getting around the facts. Her best in the ignoring department sucked.

  He’d shaved the night before last, but the stubble on his hard jaw had grown almost thick enough to qualify as the beginning of a beard, or the precursor to one, anyhow. His mouth, framed by all that dark scruff, looked sexy, dammit. It was thoroughly sensual...and she could honestly say that wasn’t a word normally found in her vocabulary. She looked back out at the water before he could catch her gawking.

  A few minutes later, however, she glanced at him again down the length of the boat. Only this time, in an attempt to avoid looking at his face, she studied his hands.

  That turned out to be even worse than thinking about his mouth, because like a needle stuck on an old-fashioned, scratched-up vinyl record and endlessly playing the same few words over and over again, memories and remembered sensations of those hands on her kept repeating themselves in her mind.

  She clutched her head. “Errrrgh!”

  Pulling his watchful attention away from the river, Finn pinned her in that direct, dark-eyed gaze of his. “Taking up growling, darlin’?”

  She grimaced. “I hope not—at least it’s a new-to-me skill. I guess I was thinking out loud.”

  “Quite despondently, too. What’s bothering you?”

  She shrugged. But his willingness to demand answers or start discussions on subjects she’d avoid like an Ebola outbreak made her revisit him saying that maybe he hoped to be the exception to her penchant for avoidance. He had put what he’d like right out there as if it didn’t take courage, even though he’d basically said he’d like her to let him in. And the ease with which he’d owned up to it made her ashamed of her own cowardice.

  So maybe she owed him a truth in return. She took some deep breaths, then raised her head to look straight at him for more than the fleeting seconds she’d been directing his way since she’d settled down enough to look at anything other than her white-knuckle grip on her seat. She licked her suddenly dry lips.

  And confessed, “I didn’t require more foreplay.” She waved a hand. “Earlier, you know?” she clarified, in case he didn’t have a clue what she was babbling about—even though it hadn’t been that long ago. “Your foreplay was the exact right amount.”

  * * *

  JESUS, SHE WAS killing him here. Finn had been doing his damnedest not to look at Mags too often since leaving the beach. Not only did he think she needed the space, but every time he got her in his sights, he also promptly pictured her all naked and hot in his arms, which in turn made him relive the expression on her face and the little sounds she’d made when she’d come for him. And God knew he didn’t need that.

  Even with her in his direct line of sight, he’d done a damn fine job of keeping his eyes off her by concentrating on the river—which, after this morning’s mess, was probably a better use of his focus anyway. Plus, after having had the river virtually to themselves, boat traffic was beginning to appear. Way more than he would’ve guessed.

  Despite the increased need for vigilance, however, he hadn’t been able to prevent his mind from going around and around what he might have done to make the sex better than nice for Mags. It was hard to deny he’d been long on slam-b
am-thank-you-ma’am and short on foreplay. Having her tell him that she’d been satisfied with the little he’d managed took a huge load off his mind, and his smile was spontaneous. Happy. “Yeah?”

  “Definitely. I was so hot to reach the finish line that any more would have been overkill.”

  “Then why the hell did you call it nice?”

  “Because it was! And I said really nice.” She scrubbed her hands over her face before dropping them back in her lap. Then she fixed those big baby blues on him. “Look, I’m not used to critiquing sexual performance. No one’s ever asked me to do that before.” She gave him a stricken look. “Oh, God. Maybe because my own stunk and I was just too oblivious to realize.”

  “Trust me, you’re far from lousy,” he assured her, then added slyly, “It was really nice.”

  She flashed him the sweet beam of delight he thought of as her “Magdalene” smile.

  “Oh, good. That’s a relief,” she said and he realized nice honestly was praise in her mind. She peered at him through thick, pale eyelashes that had been washed almost clean of their usual mascara in her tearing tumble through the rapids. “I’m sorry if I messed up the postgame quarterbacking. I know now that it’s all wrong to call it nice. Even if I don’t quite understand why.”

  Then she blinked and hurt flashed across her face. “Oh.” Her open Magdalene expression shut down and she looked at him with the cool gaze that had Mags’s ask-me-if-I-give-a-damn cynicism written all over it. “I guess that wasn’t a compliment, was it?”

  “I was teasing you, darlin’.” Which he’d take a wild stab here and surmise no one had bothered to do much of in her life. “If you’d been any better you’d have had to bury my cold, played-out corpse back on that beach.”

  And just like that, her open smile exploded back on the scene, all wide and genuine and clearly pleased. “Sweet.”

  He shook his head, a half smile tugging at his mouth. “Not from the corpse’s perspective.”

  Her delighted laugh was loud, raucous.

  The afternoon definitely started looking up after that. They talked about the increasing boat traffic and Mags pointed out some of the more stunning birds—which, given the wide variety of vibrant plumage within the species, was saying something. The sun had begun its downward arc toward the horizon and he was trying to remember what they still had left in the way of food when they motored around a bend in the river and he saw a small town up ahead. “Whoa. Lookit that, Mags! Civilization.”

  “What?” She whipped around in her seat to stare at the small town that grew closer by the minute. After she’d looked her fill, she swiveled back to give him another big smile. “Food! And a shower. And maybe even a real bed to sleep in.” She sighed. “I dream about thick, comfy mattresses and here we are with a sporting chance at actually sleeping on one. I still have half my take from yesterday’s fiesta gig.”

  “A real bed sounds like Nirvana to me, too.” Give him an evening with her in one of those babies and he’d lay odds he could do some of his best work ever.

  But, clearing his throat, he shoved the image springing full-blown in his mind into a deep dark closet. “And a nice cold beer.”

  Her smile grew bigger yet. “Make mine a margarita. Alongside a big bowl of chips and salsa.”

  As if on cue, his stomach growled and Mags laughed.

  Hearing the sounds of a cantina as they pulled up to the rickety pier that thrust out into the river, they exchanged grins as he maneuvered their boat between one similar to theirs and a long orange dugout canoe with a blue open shelter on one end. Mags climbed out and squatted to secure their boat to a couple of crude bent-nail cleats.

  He hauled out their belongings as she finished up and extended a hand to pull her to her feet. “You want to find a place to wash up first or to eat?”

  “Ooh, God. Both sound equally wonderful. You choose.”

  “I vote for a cleanup, then—if we’re quick. ’Cause I’m pretty sure that beer’s got my name on it at the cantina.”

  “Deal.”

  From what he could see, the town’s business section was comprised of this long block of single and two-storied buildings painted in colors that looked as if they’d once been vibrantly hued but had faded over the years to grubby pastels. They headed for the only hotel, passing by a second cantina on their way.

  Finn found himself salivating at the scents that floated out of it and Mags moaned low in her throat.

  “I want to eat there,” she said.

  The sign on the hotel they walked toward read merely Hotel, so it was probably a safe bet it was the only one in town. When they entered its tiny lobby they found the small counter that served as check-in desk unoccupied. But it had an old-fashioned bell atop it and Finn slapped it a few times.

  A man came out through the door behind the counter, tugging a napkin out of his collar. He greeted them in Spanish and Finn let Mags step forward. What followed was a rapid exchange in which he understood maybe one word in ten. The upshot, however, was that Mags ultimately began rooting through her big purse, no doubt for yesterday’s leftover earnings.

  He put a hand on her arm. “I’ve got this,” he murmured and pulled out his wallet. “How much?”

  She told him and he paid the clerk. The man passed him two keys with different room numbers.

  He promptly pushed one back and said, “Uno habitación. Uno.” But stomach sinking, he turned to look at Mags.

  She shrugged. “I requested two rooms.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “UNREQUEST IT.” The flat demand in Finn’s voice and hard look in his eyes made Mags’s heart thunder in her chest.

  But damn his eyes if she’d let it show. “No.” Sticking out her chin, she returned hard look for hard look. “I need breathing room.” Okay, and maybe she was running away rather than having to face how this afternoon’s sex had affected her. But if that were the case, so be it. She really did need some space that wasn’t filled to the rafters with Finn’s testosterone.

  “Then ask for a room with two beds and we’ll hang a blanket between them,” he said in a way that let her know she’d have a fight on her hands if she didn’t follow his demands pronto. “Did you even look at the numbers on these keys?” He held them out for her to see that one was on this floor while the other was upstairs. “If Joaquin or his hired muscle show up here, you have some plan in place for contacting me?”

  Feeling naive and stupid, she shook her head in silent admission that she did not. Then she sighed...and acknowledged what was truly on her mind. “I get the feeling you’re expecting more sex.”

  His dark eyes did the impossible and darkened yet more. “I won’t lie, darlin’, I’ve been thinking about just that.” He slicked his hands over his hair from his temples to his nape, where they locked at the base of his skull, one palm stacked atop the back of his other. His bent arms squeezed the sides of his face, his elbows pointed her way as he locked her in the bull’s-eye of an intense gaze. “But I’m a big boy,” he said unequivocally. “I take no for an answer.”

  She blew out another sigh. “Maybe I’m worried about my own poor impulse control.”

  “Oh, baby—” his grin was wide, white and wicked “—you don’t wanna be telling me that. Because unless you have a gun to both defend yourself and bring me running, we are sharing a room.” An odd expression crossed his face as he took her arm and walked her away from the desk clerk. “I forgot all about Joaquin’s gun in the bottom of my pack. I’ll give it to you if you really want to be alone and can get two rooms on the same floor.”

  Revulsion surged quick and hot and her hands jerked up, palms out, fingers spread in an age-old, if involuntary, don’t-even-go-there reaction. “I’ve never touched a gun in my life and I don’t plan to begin tonight. I believe I already mentioned, the last time you offered it to me, it’s a better bet I’d shoot myself or have it taken away and used against me than be a threat to anyone else.”

  “Then one room it is.” He jerked
his head at the clerk, who gazed longingly toward the door behind which his dinner was no doubt growing cold. “Tell him.”

  “Finn—”

  “Those are your options. The gun. Or me.”

  She swore under her breath. “Fine.” She walked over to redo their arrangements.

  “And keep the one on the main floor in case we have to bail like we did at Senora Guerrero’s,” Finn called softly from behind her.

  She rejoined him a few moments later, shoving the refunded money at Finn as she reached him. “The only room with two beds available is upstairs,” she said, handing him the key.

  “Dammit, I said—”

  Something in her expression must have given him pause, because he cut himself off midrant or demand or whatever it had been about to be. But just in case he was merely marshaling his arguments, she used his own words against him. “That’s your only option,” she said evenly. “Deal with it.”

  He grunted but let it go, and they headed up the stairs to the second floor, walking in silence until they reached their room. He unlocked the door and opened it, then stepped back with a gesture that invited her to enter first. They’d barely cleared the door when he stabbed a forefinger toward the small attached bath.

  “Be quick, will ya? I don’t know about you, but I could eat a live cow with my bare hands.”

  “Your mouth would probably work better,” she said, “but you got it.” Tote slung over her shoulder, she walked straight into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

  The shower was small, its water the color of weak tea and its pressure feeble. Yet it felt like a little piece of heaven right here on earth. She would have loved to linger, but she, too, was hungry and she had no desire to fight with Finn all night and ruin what promised to be a mammoth treat. She’d gotten her way with the two beds and he hadn’t beaten to death her failure to notice the different floors the rooms occupied when he’d seen the original keys.