by Seton, Cora
“I think Greg Devon should explain himself. Does he really mean to pick a bride this time?” the third woman demanded.
“Here’s some video that might interest you,” Clem said.
On the episode, the women turned to a video screen. Footage came up of Greg’s encounter with Fulsom, Clem and Renata at the hospital the day after he’d drawn the short straw. Greg wanted to cover his face with his hands, but he forced himself to watch. When onscreen version of himself pointed to Renata and said, “She’s the one. She’s the woman I’m going to marry. She has to stay because she’s going to be my wife!” the group of women shrieked with outrage.
“It’s happening again!” Monica said. “Women are being lured to beg to be considered as wives when there’s obviously no chance they’ll make it on the show. Base Camp is all about denigrating women!”
The show cut away to what seemed to Greg like an hour of footage—just of him and Renata. Where was everyone else?
Pretty soon he saw a pattern. A pattern he knew would infuriate Renata, just as Clem had intended. The footage wasn’t even real. It consisted of short cuts spliced together in ways that created a story line that didn’t exist. Some of the footage had been mixed up to look like all Greg did was order Renata around while she followed him like a docile slave.
Other sequences featured Greg talking, interspersed with close-ups of Renata listening with all her being, as if she was held in thrall by every word Greg said. Clem was trying to make her feel small. Greg hoped it wouldn’t work.
“Renata wasn’t even there for that conversation,” he spluttered a few minutes later. “I was talking to Boone!”
“The camera doesn’t lie,” Clem said.
Renata didn’t say a thing, but her lips were pressed together in a thin, angry line. Clem had taken every opportunity to showcase her cleavage in his shots. The way he was slicing and dicing the footage made her out to be a simpering fool.
Meanwhile, he’d portrayed Greg as if he barely could be bothered to give Renata the time of day. There were so many shots of him walking away and Renata staring after him, Greg lost count. In some of them, Clem had barely attempted to make the backgrounds or the angle of the sun match up from one frame to the next.
“No one’s going to fall for this,” Greg told him. “It looks like a kindergartener edited it.”
“You’re overestimating your audience’s smarts,” Clem retorted.
The bunkhouse fell silent as the episode went on and on. When it was finally over, Boone shut it off. Renata stood up, crossed the room, grabbed her spencer and walked out the door.
“Boo-hoo, Renata. Better toughen up if you want to make it in this busin—”
The door slammed shut before Clem finished his sentence. Greg lunged from his seat, but Boone and Jericho jumped in to stop him.
“Not like that,” Boone muttered. “We’ve got to get him in a way that will end this once and for all.”
For a second Greg thought he meant a more permanent solution than he’d ever even considered, but then he realized Boone was talking about getting Clem off the show.
He followed Boone out of the bunkhouse, Clem’s continued taunts ringing in Greg’s ears.
“We’ve got to get that guy,” he said when they made it outside.
“We will,” Boone promised him. “Avery, could you and Eve get us some damaging footage of Clem? Now that we’ve taken his hidden cameras down, you know he’ll get up to trouble.”
“With or without him knowing?” Eve asked.
“Without, preferably.”
“Just to be clear,” Avery said. “You want us to spy on Clem?”
“That’s right. Get us some dirt on him.”
“O-kay. Will do, boss,” Avery said. She turned to Eve. “Let’s go make a plan.”
Boone waited until they were gone. “Can you hold tight a couple of days? I have a feeling it won’t take long to capture something unflattering.”
“I guess so,” Greg muttered, but if Clem pushed him much harder, he couldn’t predict what he’d do.
By the following afternoon, Renata felt like the tension in the air was palpable. Everyone was cranky, worried about whether they were being filmed in private moments or if they had been in the past. Eve and Avery were doing their best to keep tabs on Clem, who spent his time keeping tabs on her. She thought she’d scream if she didn’t get some time alone soon.
“Gather around, people,” Boone called out, entering the bunkhouse as the afternoon faded to darkness. “I’ve got an announcement.” He waited for everyone to get settled.
“We’re going to DelMonaco’s for dinner. I checked the rules, and there’s nothing that says that we can’t treat ourselves to a meal out.”
“Baloney,” Clem called out. “You’re supposed to grow all your own food.”
“Which we are, and we’re using it for every meal we serve here, but we can still go to a restaurant.”
“Prove it. Call Fulsom.”
Boone did better than that. He set up a video call so Fulsom could see everyone gathered. He explained the situation, and Fulsom nodded. “Sure. Why not? But no more than one meal out per month—and you pay for yourselves. This isn’t in the budget.”
“Will do,” Boone assured him. When he’d cut the call, he told Clem, “See? What’d I tell you? Let’s get going, folks. Clean yourselves up and meet back here in an hour.”
There was a scraping of chairs as everyone stood up.
“What do you think?” Boone asked Greg after making his way over to him. “Will it cheer people up?”
“I think it’s the best idea anyone’s had in ages.”
Renata had to agree.
As they congregated again in the bunkhouse an hour later, everyone seemed more cheerful already, and the conversations buzzing along were far livelier than they’d been in days. The women had changed to their nicest dresses. Then men had put on their good jeans and boots.
They split up into several truckloads, and Renata wasn’t surprised when Greg managed to position himself beside her. As usual, his solid presence was hard to ignore, and she found herself wishing she could lean into him, but there were too many other people around for that.
“Dinner out is exactly what I needed,” Avery remarked as they drew near to town. She was sitting on the other side of Greg.
“I’m ordering a big juicy steak,” Jericho said from the front passenger’s seat.
I’m getting a pizza. Does DelMonaco’s have pizza?” Renata asked.
“What on earth is that?” Boone asked. He’d commandeered the driver’s seat, and no one had fought him for it.
Along with everyone else in the vehicle, Renata craned her neck to see what he was pointing at. Her mouth dropped open as they passed a large billboard attached to the side of a barn that read, “Don’t Date This Man,” next to a huge photograph of Greg’s face.
“What the hell?” Greg asked as Boone swerved over to park the truck on the side of the road. The other two vehicles carrying the members of Base Camp followed suit, and they all trouped back to look at the billboard again.
Don’t Date This Man.
“It’s the backup brides,” Renata groaned. “It has to be.”
“You mean it’s Clem,” Clay said.
Boone swore. “There goes any chance we might have had to find Greg a wife in town. Everyone in Chance Creek will be talking about this.”
“That picture doesn’t even look like me,” Greg said.
“Yes, it does,” Renata told him. It was a good likeness, actually, and she had a hunch a woman or two might just get in touch despite the backup brides’ message.
“Why are they picking on me? I’m not the one who—” Greg spotted the camera crew setting up to film. “Hell. Now the whole world will know about this.”
“Come on, let’s go eat,” Boone said. “Standing around complaining won’t change the fact it’s here.”
They left the film crew to follow when they were ready and
kept going, but it was a somber group who sat down at three large tables at DelMonaco’s.
“Hey, I know you. You’re the guy I’m not supposed to date,” their waitress announced cheerfully when she got to Greg.
“I’m not a bad guy—”
“Yeah, yeah, everyone’s innocent,” she cracked. “You must have done something pretty awful to get a billboard about it.”
Renata couldn’t help feeling sorry for Greg, and to distract him, she regaled him with stories of famous people who’d been brought down to earth publicly over the years.
“Think of it as a badge of honor,” she told him when the waitress came back to take everyone’s drink orders.
“I already have a few of those, thank you very much.”
“Really? You don’t talk much about your time in the service.” Maybe he’d talk now. Renata was ready to listen.
“It’s not my favorite topic. I learned a lot. Saw a lot. Saw some things I wish I could unsee.” He made a face. Renata considered, not for the first time, that all the men around this table had lived lives far more dangerous than most people could imagine. Greg hid the parts of himself that had probably served him well during his time with the Navy SEALs, but once in a while she got a glimpse of the warrior.
“What made you leave the service?” she asked.
“Same as everyone else here, I think. People think guys who serve don’t believe in global warming. They couldn’t be more wrong. We’re on the ground, seeing its effects all over the world. The military takes climate change more seriously than just about anyone else. We have to. It effects everything we do.”
“Everything from how our equipment functions, to what equipment we need, to the dangers we face, the ways we react to them—you name it,” Curtis added. He’d obviously been listening in to their conversation.
“I wanted to find a way to make people more resilient. Look how many people have been displaced by conflicts and climate change already,” Greg said. “We’ve got waves of immigrants we’re struggling to contend with. What happens when Central America heats up another few degrees? People down there are already suffering climate change’s effects. I got to thinking: What if we could stop it, or what if we could make it easier for people to remain in place, even if conditions worsened? What if there were ways for them to mitigate climate change in their own locales?” He grinned suddenly. “Sorry, I’m lecturing.”
“You’re answering my question,” Renata told him. She looked up, caught a glimpse of the crew filming them. They’d arrived in the last few minutes and quickly set up. Hell, she was doing Clem’s job for him, interviewing Greg like this.
“Anyway, I wanted to help.”
“We all do,” Curtis said.
“That makes sense,” Renata said. She thought about the mudslide in Colina Blanca. Knew conditions in many countries were growing more and more difficult as climate change led to unpredictable storm patterns, heat waves and crop failures. Several of the girls she was sponsoring had decided to study environmental science, hoping they could figure out ways to help their people, too.
After dinner, Greg took her aside as everyone pulled on their jackets and got ready to leave. Dinner had mellowed her out, and she thought everyone was in a better mood.
“Can we talk later? Alone?”
“How are we going to manage that?” They moved toward the door, lagging behind the others.
“After Byron is asleep we can slip out through the kitchen door.”
“We can try, I guess.”
Hours later, long past when the crew had left and everyone settled down for the night, Renata was sure their plan would never work, but one by one, Walker, Angus, Avery—and Byron seemed to fall asleep. Greg got up first, moving so quietly she wouldn’t have known he was doing so if her eyes were closed. They’d been open all this time, however, and when she saw his shape against the lighter squares of the bunkhouse windows, she got up, too. They collected their boots, coats, hats and gloves as silently as they could, tiptoed into the kitchen, got into their outer gear and Greg quietly opened the side door.
Outside, a crescent moon lit a clear sky, stars twinkling in the frigid air.
“Now what?” Renata asked in a whisper when he’d shut the door again.
“Now we walk.”
He took her arm and led the way down the snowy track toward Pittance Creek, ducking into his tiny house and reappearing with a substantial backpack. “This is a Base Camp insider’s trick.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“That’s right.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You’re going to love it.”
By the time they reached the banks of Pittance Creek, Renata was shivering. She stood back and watched Greg spread a tarp on the ground and then zipped together two sleeping bags and lay them out on top.
“Climb in. You probably won’t need your coat once you’re in there.”
“I never said I’d get naked with you.” This wasn’t a good idea, although she had to admit slipping into that sleeping bag with Greg sounded pretty wonderful right now. For one thing, it was cold out here, a thousand stars twinkling overhead.
For another, Greg was… Greg. She wanted to be close to him again.
“I didn’t ask you to get naked with me. We’re just going to talk.” He ditched his own coat, slipped out of his boots and climbed into the sleeping bag, still wearing the sweats he slept in. “It’s too cold to spend time out here without being bundled up. In here we’ll keep warm.”
Knowing she was making a mistake, Renata followed suit. She wasn’t nearly innocent enough to think Greg only wanted to talk.
The thing was, she wanted more than talking, too.
Folding her coat and setting it on top of her boots, she crawled in and sighed as she lay on her back and looked up at the stars. Greg put an arm out, and she snuggled into him, resting her head on his bicep.
“There’s the big dipper,” he said unnecessarily.
“I noticed that one.”
Greg pointed out a few more constellations. “There’s Orion’s belt,” he finished.
“I know my constellations. Stop showing off.”
“What else can I do? I’ve got my favorite girl in a sleeping bag. I have to impress her.”
“It’s going to take more than that. Didn’t you bring me here for something specific?”
“Yep. This.” Greg turned her toward him, gathered her close and kissed her, taking his time, exploring her mouth, finally slipping his tongue in between her lips to taste her.
Renata found herself melting into him, meeting him on his terms.
Melting was right. As they clung to each other, the temperature in the sleeping bag was rising fast.
Greg groaned, pulled back and tugged his shirt over his head. He tossed it on top of his other things.
“That’s better. I was overheating.”
She knew what he meant. She was pretty warm, too. What the hell, she thought. You only live once. She pulled her shirt up and over her head, too, tossed it aside and turned back to find Greg watching her, a smile tugging at his mouth.
“Come here,” he growled.
She did so, gasping as her breasts brushed his chest. She wrapped her arms around his neck and savored the feeling of her nipples against his hard muscles. He was warm, and as he circled her in his arms, she knew there was nowhere she’d rather be.
Greg’s kisses slid down her throat, behind her ear and down to the hollow in her neck before he dipped lower, brushed his lips over her breasts and wriggled down to get better access to them.
“Renata, you are stunning.” His voice was husky. All she could do was arch back and let him do what he wanted. Every move he made felt wonderful. She closed her eyes and reveled in it.
Greg took his time exploring all her curves, kissing and caressing her all over. When he tugged her close and reclaimed her mouth, she could feel his hardness, evidence of his desire, and she couldn’t wait for him to slip inside her. She had no doubt he wante
d that, too, and—
Oh, when he did, she could only moan.
Greg filled her perfectly, sliding in and out again so slowly she had to fight to keep herself from forcing him to speed up. She wanted to enjoy every moment of this, and so she let him set the pace, closing her eyes and riding every thrust with unbridled enjoyment.
“We were meant to be together,” he whispered in her ear.
“Mmm” was all she could think to answer. He was right; their bodies fit together perfectly. His touch woke every sense within her. There was no awkwardness with Greg. No pauses or fumbling motions. Just—
“Renata, I want to be with you forever. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
He kept moving inside her, making it hard to think.
“Say yes to me.”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
“But you’re thinking about it?”
She was definitely thinking about it.
“What do I have to do to convince you?” He picked up the pace, and another moan escaped her. If he kept this up, all her defenses would shatter. She’d find herself agreeing to anything he asked, and she couldn’t. Not until—
Renata let herself go, crying out as Greg brought her over the brink. He joined her, gasping out his release along with her, both of them crashing into each other, rushing to a conclusion they could no longer stop.
When it was over, and she’d caught her breath, rolling onto her back and staring up at the stars, Renata chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” Greg asked her, propping himself up on one elbow.
“You have no idea how strange it is to end up here—with you. I’m supposed to be directing this show. Instead, it’s all happening to me.”
“Thank goodness no one’s filming us now.”
“Let’s hope,” she agreed.
“I want to hope,” he told her, brushing a strand of her hair out of her eyes. “Am I a fool to do that?”
“No,” she said. “You’re not a fool. I just don’t know how…”
“I wish you would let me help you solve whatever problem you’re trying to solve by yourself.”
Should she tell him about her promise to her students? Name the sum she still owed? What would Greg do about it? Would he try to pay it off himself?