Uh-oh.
“Where their bosses don’t even try to hide their belief that excellence is a thing best pursued on a golf course by aging frat boys.”
“Aging? Aging?”
“I’m taking your philosophy as a spit in the eye to all things I hold dear.”
Retreat, retreat. “Laura, I’m making conversation in the middle of the woods because you’re scared and I’m trying to take your mind off bears, okay? Don’t go hysterical on me.”
“I’ve worked hard, I’ve sacrificed, I’ve postponed lots of things I wanted out of life so that I could devote one hundred percent of myself to Harris Associates. And I can’t believe you think all that is nothing—nothing—compared to looking good enough to get laid regularly.”
Bears or no bears, that was going too far. “Laura,” he warned.
“I’ll find my own way back home,” she said, trying to shove him aside on the path.
“Fine,” he said, but as she tried to pass him on the trail, he kept getting tangled up in her hair and her backpack and just her in general. As they started to move, he felt his foot hit something on the trail, and suddenly his face was in grass and dirt, and Laura was falling, too, landing with an “oomph” somewhere near him. His first thought, after “So that’s the ground,” was to wonder if Laura was okay.
He stuck his hand out, connecting with denim. Her leg. She smacked his hand. “I’m not trying to cop a feel, Laura. I’m making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” she said finally. “Fine.”
It was his fault they’d fallen. He never should have let her get the best of him like that. There were very few things in life worth losing your temper about, and defending your ego shouldn’t be one of them. “Look, I want you to know that everyone knows how hard you work and everyone appreciates it. And look where it’s gotten you. A great place in the industry.”
“I don’t know,” she said, but she sounded tired. “You’ve done all right for a guy who doesn’t seem to have gotten a business degree for any other reason than to pick up the right kinds of women.”
Ouch.
4
KYLE WAS A MAN of the nineties, with all the complications and adventures that being such a man entailed. Still, he couldn’t remember the last time he had woken up with a wild-eyed gorgeous woman sitting on top of him, her hand plastered across his mouth.
“Be quiet,” Laura whispered.
“What are you doing?” he said, but it came out, “Mwa, mwa, mwa mwa?”
With her free hand, she reached up and stuck an escaped lock of hair behind her ear. “I think we’re in trouble,” she said.
He definitely was. It was taking his brain a few seconds to process the whys and wherefores of what he was doing flat down in a bed of pine needles anyway, his clothes soaked with cold dew, but his body had all the information it needed to react. He took one short second to call himself an idiot for what he was about to do—shove her off.
Before he could get his hands up, though, she shifted her weight, and he froze, a charge volting throughout his body. He met her eyes, which were at first shocked, as he’d feared, then embarrassed, as he’d expected, and then…knowing.
And sly.
And a whole bunch of other adjectives he’d never associated with the real Laura Everett, but which seemed lifted straight from his fantasies about her.
She smiled, a slow, deep smile, and he thought he had never seen a woman so beautiful, her hair backlit by the morning light filtering through the canopy, her face kissed with pink from the sun yesterday. He reached over to take her hand off his mouth, then, without thinking, pushed his palm against hers, watching their hands twine together. When he looked back at her, he knew the erotic challenge in his eyes mirrored hers. She leaned over, the movement sending an exquisite pain through him, and he put his free hand around her neck, pulling her face down to his.
There had been one brief second in the glade yesterday when he’d thought they were about to kiss. There was no reason now to regret that they hadn’t, since now he’d had the pleasure of waiting for this one. His tongue traced her full lips, and his hand slid from her soft ponytail down her back. He broke off the kiss to move his lips to her neck, and she sighed.
“Did you hear something?” bellowed a rough voice.
What the hell? Laura quickly got off Kyle, and motioned for him to be quiet. The thought of homicidal maniacs tramping through the woods ought to have had a dampening effect on his desire, but instead of finding out who was out there, he wanted to hold Laura for one more kiss.
He touched her arm, but she pointed to a thicket of kudzu forming a tent between several large trees. As the men’s shouting came closer, Kyle took Laura’s hand and they forced their way through the vines into the hideaway.
After they had stumbled off the path the night before, they had agreed that continuing seemed like an invitation to broken bones, and that they should sit near the edge of the trail until they could see. He’d sat there listening to Laura fidget and squirm, worrying about what awful thing was going to crawl over her, wondering if she’d throw herself on him if something did, and hoping that something would. He couldn’t believe he’d ever slept, but obviously he had.
Had Laura? She didn’t look tired. In the darkness of the greenery, he could still see that her eyes were bright, and she had an unfamiliar expression on her face. The necklace he had made for her was brown and dried, but she didn’t seem to notice she was still wearing it. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say she was having fun. But this was Laura, a woman who was never swayed from her work by any of the indulgences that were offered to them when they traveled—gourmet coffee, muffins with organic blueberries, or reservations scored at a city’s trendiest restaurant. So why, in the midst of danger and very possibly backwoods war, did she look so damn happy?
Whish! Pop!
Kyle squeezed Laura’s hand to reassure her, then peeked out through a small clearance in the vines. For one brief, hideous second, he thought the red stuff dripping from a nearby tree was blood. Then he realized some of it was green. Unless Mr. Spock or one of his compatriots had just been obliterated here, this wasn’t a homicide.
“It’s a paintball game,” he whispered to Laura.
“You said there’d be paintball,” she whispered, her breath a warm breeze against his ear.
He had said that, hadn’t he? He was about to give himself a mental high five for his incredible trend-spotting skills when Laura whispered, “How five years ago.”
“Really,” he agreed.
“Markers ready,” yelled someone from across the trail. Kyle peeked through again to see men garbed in protective padding and goggles walking around on the other side of the woods.
“Should we go out?” Laura whispered.
Kyle shook his head no. And say what? Hey guys. We were just, uh, hanging out here because we mistook you for the Hatfields and McCoys. Now that we see you’re just nerds with costumes and pellets of food coloring, how ya doin’?
And who exactly were the nerds here? The ones who had eaten dinner, then spent the night in real beds with real sheets or the ones who had split a candy bar and slept on the ground?
Then again, he was willing to bet the ones who’d slept in real beds hadn’t had a wake-up call nearly as exciting as his.
“I think this is a wild-goose chase,” said a higher-voiced man. “The blue team went up the trail.”
“I heard something,” said the man with the deeper pitch.
“Who else would be out here?” his friend asked. “The two lovebirds who escaped last night?”
He hoped his face wasn’t as red as Laura’s was turning. Embarrassment became alarm, though, when he heard the first man say, “They’re not lovebirds. You don’t know Harris Associates’ favorite pair of pit bulls? That guy stole an account from me in Macon last year, when he was working for Delusk. They’re probably on their way to Bellamy Island to get Herb Harris the hell out of hot water.”
Laura removed her hand from his and pinched him on the leg, a sign that the Laura who had been willing to make out in the woods had been replaced by Laura the ever responsible Harris Associates employee. He wondered if those two Lauras were ever the same person.
“What kind of hot water?” the other guy asked, but his question was followed by a crash from somewhere down the trail. “There’s the blue team,” he said.
“You go on,” said the original bellower. “I’ve got to take care of some business.”
Kyle heard his friend traipse away, then heard what he assumed to be the paintball weapon hitting the ground. Why was he putting his paintball gun down?
Oh, that kind of business.
He was out of the kudzu before the guy could reach his zipper. “Wait, wait,” he said.
The ruddy-faced man gaped at Kyle. Although Kyle didn’t remember him from past business dealings, he did recognize him as someone who had taken an unhealthy amount of pleasure in the hat incident yesterday. A second later, he was reaching for his weapon, but Laura’s sneakered foot came down on it first, and she picked it up. “It’s us,” she told the man. “The pit bulls.”
Kyle decided that if they were ever going to trade endearments, that was not going to be one he chose for her. She looked mighty irritated. She was really cute when she was mad. He wondered if he’d get slapped if he said so.
The guy’s hands had gone back to his sides, but he stared at Kyle, looking angry. “Make her give me my weapon back.”
“I can’t do a thing with her,” Kyle said. He suspected that truer words had never been spoken.
“After you tell us why we have to go to Bellamy Island and help Harris,” Laura said.
“Can’t do it,” the guy said.
“Then I guess you just go back covered in paint,” Laura said. “How far away does he get to be before I can shoot him safely?”
“Give me that,” Kyle said, grabbing it out of her hands. “Seriously,” he told the man. “I heard you say I stole an account from you. I’ll give you a lead on one in Forsyth in exchange for your information.”
“I would have started bargaining smaller,” Laura said.
“You lack compassion,” the man said to Laura.
“That’s why I have the gun,” Kyle told him. “Come on.”
“Okay.” The guy shifted his weight from one leg to another and dug a small hole in the carpet of pine needles with his shoe. “New Horizon’s in trouble. They want Herb Harris to buy them at what you guys think they’re valued at. If they were being honest, they wouldn’t be able to give the company away.”
Kyle looked at Laura, who was visibly troubled. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Does everybody know this?”
“No,” the guy said. “I’ve been dating a woman who worked there. Her paycheck bounced, and Walt and Bill gave her some bogus cover story. She heard them on the phone the next week, saying they were going to use your company to pull them out of the hole. But things have been bad there for a while. They expanded too fast, let their reputation get ahead of what they could do.”
Kyle imagined that Laura’s eyes were on him when the guy said that, but he didn’t want to prove himself right by looking her way. He thanked the guy and reminded him to call him for the lead at the first of next week.
“Hope you’ve still got a job,” the guy said, taking his weapon from Kyle. “Rand was really unhappy about your disappearing act, and he was going to call your boss right before he went out with another group this morning. I bet Herb Harris is really steamed.”
Laura broke into something between a power walk and a jog, heading down the trail. Kyle started running, too, the chirps and cheeps of the waking forest around him drowned out briefly by the sound of his stomach rumbling.
He caught up with her. “No way we can eat breakfast before we find Rand, is there?”
“Kyle, this is serious,” Laura said. She was still half walking, half jogging as she spoke. “If this deal is bad, Harris is going to look like an idiot.”
“And there’s only going to be room for one of us again,” Kyle said.
She stopped and stared at him, her eyes wide. Looking at her, he saw that she still had a bit of twig at her forehead. He reached to brush it away and she flinched slightly. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said.
She didn’t have to add the unfinished part of that statement: Obviously, you did.
“Listen,” he said. “Let’s not worry about that until we talk to Harris. Maybe the guy’s right and he’s so ticked at us that we don’t have jobs anyway.”
The look on her face was a disturbingly familiar one, one she wore at the office whenever she thought he was getting away with something. “You always know how to make a woman feel better,” she said, turning down the trail again.
They didn’t speak again as they followed the path to a stand-alone office near the main lodge. Inside, the smell of coffee wafted through the small lobby, and although Kyle didn’t drink the stuff, he watched Laura practically start to tremble at the aroma.
“Would you mind if I had a cup of coffee?” she asked the receptionist, identified by the nameplate on the desk as Andrea.
“Help yourself,” the woman said. “But, who are you?”
Laura had started to drift away toward the hallway, but Kyle grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “You can have coffee in a few minutes.”
“I need it now,” she grumbled.
“Andrea,” he said, “We’re the missing campers.”
“Oh, I’m not Andrea,” she said.
At the same time, Laura said, “She’s not Andrea.”
He turned to Laura, who was wistfully looking down the hall. “How do you know?” he asked her.
“There’s a picture of Andrea in the brochure,” she said. “‘Our smiling receptionist, Andrea.”’
He hated it that she knew things he didn’t, just because she paid attention to details, and that she could spout those details even when she claimed to be brain-fogged from lack of caffeine.
“I’m Stacy,” the woman said. “Andrea’s off. But I did hear that you two had taken off. Rand was going to call your boss, but he didn’t have a chance before his accident.”
“We didn’t leave,” Kyle said. “We got lost.” So Rand hadn’t called. Their jobs were safe.
“What accident?” Laura asked, and again, Kyle felt like a dolt for not asking himself. She’d been a very equal participant in that kiss this morning—why wasn’t it slowing her thinking down the way it was slowing his?
“He lost his center of calm and fell off a log during a training exercise. He’s sort of unconscious.”
“How terrible,” Laura said. “We feel so responsible.”
“I don’t feel responsible,” Kyle said. “He’s the one who didn’t pack a flashlight.”
“I need some coffee to deal with this guilt.”
Kyle took her arm again and this time left his hand there, conscious of the warmth of her skin next to his, trying to focus on what he had to do to get them out of there and Harris out of his bad deal.
“I’m very sorry to hear about Rand,” he said. Normally if he were talking to an attractive woman, he would turn on the charm. In some weird way, though, he felt that it would be disloyal to Laura to do so. “But we left our keys and wallets with him. Do you think we could get our stuff from you?”
She started shaking her head even before he had finished speaking. “All your stuff is locked in a couple of lockers. He put your suitcases there this morning, right before, you know, the calm thing.”
“But someone else has the combination,” Laura said. She hadn’t phrased it as a question, but Kyle was afraid he already knew the answer.
Stacy shook her head again. “No,” she said. “He’s the only person with it.”
They were all silent for a moment.
“I can get someone to weld the lock off—” Stacy started.
“Do that,” Kyle said.
“But I would have
to wait for my boss to approve the charges, and he isn’t due back until later this afternoon.”
“What are we supposed to do? Besides pray for Rand to regain consciousness?” Kyle asked.
“I can have a driver take you back to Atlanta,” Stacy said.
“Coffee,” Laura said, pulling away from Kyle and walking down the hall. Once he would have assumed that he worked better when Laura wasn’t around; now he felt unfocused without her, as he tried to decide what to do.
“Listen, I need to use your phone,” he said. He tried Harris’s cell phone and got his voice mail. Damn. He knew from a past visit to Bellamy, a semiexclusive island near Georgia’s Golden Isles chain, that there was only one good hotel there. A call to the hotel revealed that Harris and his two colleagues were already playing golf.
Where was Laura? Just as he looked around for her, she came down the hallway carrying an extra-large Serene Dynamics travel mug and a plastic bag full of cookies. Inside that bag he could see another bag that held the necklace he’d made. She had washed her face and smoothed her hair, and he could see a bit of water on her shirt where once there had been a tiny chocolate stain. Even in yesterday’s clothes, she looked wonderful.
“Did everything get worked out?” she asked, handing him a cookie. “I hope you don’t mind,” she told Stacy. “We haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
Kyle didn’t wait for Stacy to answer. “They’re all playing golf together,” he told Laura, stuffing the cookie in his mouth and swallowing it before he spoke again. “That means he thinks things are going well.”
She bit her lip, then turned to Stacy and said, “Why don’t you order us that car to Atlanta?”
Kyle couldn’t believe it. “But that’s not—”
“Then we’ll borrow someone else’s car and we’ll go see him.”
“That’s a waste of—”
The look she gave him was stern. “I really don’t see what choice we have,” she said. “Stacy, we’d really appreciate it. We’ll be waiting outside.”
“Outside?” Kyle asked her, but she was already out the door. She had started down a side trail near the lodge, and he followed her, still talking. “If you wanted to be outside, couldn’t we have just sat on the porch? You should buy a treadmill when you get home. Exercise is clearly your thing.” She hadn’t said anything, and he now noticed that she had led him to a gravel lot below the lodge. A small white sign hanging from a post identified it as Staff Parking. “A parking lot? I could have found a more scenic route.”
Bringing Up Baby New Year & Frisky Business Page 21