“The real thing. With stalagmites and stalactites and everything. He says it’s a good way to spend an afternoon.”
Lillian was even more grateful for her hiking boots as they walked the mile or so back to the cave entrance. They neither met nor passed anyone as they traveled, yet several others waited at the small visitor’s center when they walked through the door.
They were obviously tourists. Locals wouldn’t be nearly as excited by the display of cave photos that lined the center’s walls, nor would they be wearing the plethora of video and still cameras around their necks.
For the first time since Wes said the word “caves,” Lillian felt a little quiver of curiosity. All these people wouldn’t show just to get out of the rain. They had cars. She could see them in the parking lot, with license plates from Indiana, and Tennessee, and states beyond.
Their guide turned out to be a pert-nosed college student whose perkiness made Lillian want to smack her. Bubbling over with enthusiasm, their guide warned them all to stay with her, not to touch the limestone formations inside the cave and to please refrain from attempting explorations off the main path. That said, she set off at a brisk pace down the path without looking back, apparently assuming that anyone who couldn’t keep up didn’t deserve to see the caves. Wes kept up fine as the guide led the way but it was all Lillian could do to manage not to be left behind. As it was, she fell further and further back, until she and some seventy-year-old with a breathing problem were left alone at the back of the pack. Determined not to be shown up by some old lady, Lillian picked up her pace.
It wasn’t easy, thanks to the mud caked on her boots and the length of time it had been since she’d hiked anywhere, let alone uphill on a gravel trail. She had no trouble seeing Wes’s back, though, as he walked next to Her Perkiness, laughing and talking as if Lillian didn’t even exist.
Her mood darkened when her boot came untied. Of course, she didn’t know it was undone until she tripped over the lace and crashed into prickly bushes. She was saved from rolling on down the hill by the surprising agility of her walking partner. The woman might not be able to hear well, but she sure could move.
“Lil, honey, you okay?” Wes knelt down beside her, his hands gentle as he checked to see if she had any damage besides a few scratches and her injured pride.
“I’m just fine.” She shoved his hands away and pushed herself to her feet. “Sorry my yelling interrupted your good time.”
She hated the lopsided grin that spread across his face at that. He was just so full of himself sometimes. Turning away, she thanked the woman who’d broken her fall by grabbing her arm and then brushed past Wes as the group started moving again.
And to think that she’d slept with that arrogant slob last night. What was he doing now? Flirting with the first good-looking woman he came across. Now she remembered the reason she never acted on her attraction to bad boys. They always turned out to be bad news.
Tied up with her thoughts, she nearly bumped into the balding man ahead of her when the group suddenly stopped in front of a set of heavy iron gates. She was a little too far away to hear the guide closely, but she did catch something about “always 50 degrees in the caves” and “bats.”
She shuddered.
“What’s wrong? Goose walk across your grave?” Wes was beside her again, acting as if not two minutes ago, he hadn’t been hip to hip with the college chick. Lillian started walking, determined to ignore him. It wasn’t going to be easy, considering that he grabbed her hand as they went down the steps into the cave and apparently had no intention of letting go. A wave of chilly air greeted them as they followed the steps into the cave and she shivered, suddenly cold in her too tiny shorts and barely-there shirt.
Wes slung an arm around her shoulders. “That help?”
“…and you’ll see where centuries of limestone dripping on the cave wall has…”
Lillian zoned out as their guide droned on. Everyone else seemed to be completely fascinated, which was fine for them. She was only here because she wasn’t about to spend all day and all night stuck in that tiny tent with Wes, and she still hadn’t figured out a way to make all her electronic gizmos work where there was no electricity and no phone lines.
Tucking her hand into the pocket of her jeans, she felt the comforting outline of her smart phone. Knowing it was there gave her hope she’d escape from the hell of this campground someday. She’d kept it turned on, even though not one message had gotten through since they’d set up camp, as a connection with the real world.
“Come on, Lil. She wants to show us some formations.”
“Wow, some formations. There’s nothing more exciting than that.”
“Oh, I think we know better, don’t we?” Wes leaned close, his breath warm on her chilled skin. “You couldn’t have forgotten last night already.”
He held her back as the others rounded a small curve up ahead, leaning down to kiss her, as if to be sure she knew what he meant. Even as her mind screamed at her to start walking and ignore him, her body arched toward him, and her head tipped back as he bent toward her. When his lips met hers, warm and soft, she clung to him, rising to her tiptoes. He felt so good, smelled like smoke, rain and something unique. Wes. That now-familiar tingling began again as her mouth opened intimately under his. All too soon, though, he gently broke the kiss and stepped away.
“We’d better catch up with the others.” He brushed back her hair where it had fallen across her eyes. “We were supposed to stay together, remember?”
“Uh, huh.” Those little syllables were all she could manage. She had no idea how he did it, but one kiss from him completely robbed her of all reason. She knew she’d been mad at him, but for the life of her, now she couldn’t remember why.
Her hand firmly encased in his, they began to follow the trail around the curve. The faint sound of voices floated back to them. Wes stepped up the pace, forcing Lillian to do the same. The voices got louder as they reached a fork in the trail, and Wes stopped. He listened intently, standing at the head of one trail and then the other, yet he wasn’t sure which way they’d gone. Lillian’s expectant gaze rested on him so he took a breath and took a chance.
“To the left.”
Lillian obeyed without question. They couldn’t have been more than ten feet down the trail when they ran into the bats. The soft scratch of wings against the cave’s stone walls stopped Wes where he stood. Lillian stopped with him, wondering what the noise was.
Until the first bat flew past them, its wings brushing Lillian’s hair.
She shrieked and started to flail, her arms smacking into Wes, the cave walls and the river of bats rushing past her. Panic rolled in and sent her spinning as she flailed. Her boot caught the edge of an outcropped rock and with a final yowl, she collapsed onto the hard surface beneath her, a crumpled heap at Wes’s feet.
****
“Babe?” Wes reached for her in the darkness. His heart pounded a staccato beat against his chest wall, and his mind unveiled, in bold, vibrant color, all the possible scenarios they might find when someone with a flashlight finally showed.
Lillian in a catatonic state induced by the horrors of this cave. Lillian in a coma after being bitten by one of those no-doubt rabid bats. Lillian silently bleeding to death from smashing her head against a rock. Fumbling his way down beside her, he’d finally figured out which was her front and which was her back, with some half-formed plan in mind to just pick her up and carry her back the way they’d come, when a shrill breeeeep filled the tunnel. Wes jerked to his feet, banging his head against the cave wall behind him. He let loose with a string of expletives cut short by Lillian’s sudden, “Shut up, will you? It’s just my phone.”
“Your phone works in here?”
“Duh, no.” Lillian reached into her pocket as she stood, managing to elbow Wes in the stomach as she pulled out the device with its lighted screen. “Something happened when I landed on it. Like the alarm or I called myself or something.”
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Maneuvering himself behind her, he put his arms around her waist and half-pushed her ahead of him toward the junction they’d just left. Inside his head, he was still cursing, because Lillian had the beeping pager in her hand, clinging to it as if it held the secret to eternal life.
It seemed an eternity before they reached the fork again. Wes heaved a sigh of relief when he heard the voice of the guide from the other trail.
“Stay where you are!” she shouted. “I’m coming back for you.”
Wes clamped Lillian tight against him. There was no way he was letting her do anything stupid now. Thanks to her screams, the guide had missed them. If she hadn’t, they’d have been in a lot more trouble than Lillian realized, since this was the last tour of the day for this cave.
A beam of light cut through the darkness and the guide’s worried voice said, “Are you two all right? I don’t know how I could have let you go the wrong way.”
Wes lost the opportunity for any reply he might have made, like telling the truth about why they’d gotten separated from the group, when Lillian’s pager started shrieking again. She punched the button and grabbed the guide’s hand, shining the light onto the tiny screen.
“Ma’am, you’ll have plenty of time to call once we’re back at the surface.”
The guide reached out, maybe to take the phone or to offer a comforting hand. Lillian ducked away, dancing backward.
“It’s mine and you can’t have it.” The fierceness in her voice matched her squared shoulders. “That’s my only link to the real world and you can’t have it. I won’t let you.”
She kept stepping backward as she spoke, her eyes darting from the guide to Wes, as if daring them to challenge her. Wes heard the guide’s intake of breath at the same time as Lillian, and he grabbed for her, yanking on her arm just as she began to flail. The guide’s flashlight illuminated the space behind Lillian, where a chasm stretched four feet wide.
Panicking as she felt the emptiness behind her, Lillian thrust her arms toward Wes, shouting his name, the phone dropping from her hand and spinning into the space below.
It had begun to shrill again.
“No!” Lillian turned in time to see it fall, the flashlight’s beam illuminating it until it finally bounced to a stop, eight feet down. “I have to have it back. I need that!”
Wes grabbed her shirt, the guide the back of her shorts, and they pulled Lillian to the safety of the trail before she could act on the impulse to follow the pager. Yanking Lillian tightly against him, Wes said “Move,” and kept her plastered to his side as they joined the others.
Lillian’s tiny sobs were punctuated by the occasional hiccup as they finished the tour at the back of the group, the guide continually checking to make sure they were still there. Wes didn’t blame her for not trusting them; hell, he’d have done the same thing in her shoes. It was a pretty bad blemish on the old personnel record if you lost two tourists in a cave full of bats and holes.
The second half of their tour went a lot faster than the first part, and Wes could have sworn he heard their guide sigh with relief when he and Lillian walked off the last step and back onto the trail leading to the visitor’s center. Lillian had finally stopped crying, but the tracks of her tears stood out against the griminess of her cave-dirtied face.
“Thank you for the tour,” she said to the guide, ever mindful of her manners, no matter how horrible the experience. “It was something I’ll always remember.”
She didn’t say another word as they left the gravel trail for the dirt path that took them to the campground. The rain had finally stopped, but the mud had multiplied. Yet Lillian didn’t offer one word of complaint, not even when she stepped into a hidden puddle and muddy water squished over the top of her boot.
Their campsite was just as they left it, although the tent roof sagged under the weight of the water that accumulated on it. Wes went inside and pushed up on the fabric, letting the water run off the back and away from where they walked. He came back out to find Lillian sitting on the wet bench of the picnic table, staring down at her feet, her arms hanging limply at her side.
He’d never seen anyone so pathetic.
“Babe, it’s going to be all right.”
“Nothing’s ever going to be all right again.” She looked up at him, her eyes shiny with still more tears. “I hate camping, I lost my phone, you think I’m a wuss and that guide has a lot better boobs than me.”
Wes laughed, a reaction to everything that had been inflicted upon him during the last three days, and a release for all the tension he didn’t know he’d been holding inside.
“It’s going to be okay, Lil.” He brushed the cave dust off her cheeks with his finger. “You’re getting better at this outdoors stuff all the time, I think you’re very smart and very brave and, if you want to know the truth, I’m pretty sure the guide chick’s rack isn’t real. I’d put my money on implants any time.”
Finally, Lillian smiled. She snuggled up against him, sighed and said, “I’ll give you one thing, Wes Hatfield. You sure do know how to sweet talk the ladies.”
With hopeful eyes, she looked up into his and said, “Almost as good as you cook.”
Wes laughed again and pulled the food box over. If Lil was hungry, he was pretty sure she’d be fine.
Chapter Nine
The weather report stuck up on the ranger’s bulletin board had been right. The sky was clearing, the sun struggled to dry the soaked ground and it turned out to be far more pleasant than Wes could have hoped for.
And so was Lillian.
As he watched her squatted down where their campsite met the woods, poking at something with a stick, he tried to decide whether she was just a nice girl out of her element, given to mood swings or suffered from multiple personalities. He only saw flashes of the dragon lady now, and she hadn’t pulled her high and mighty act on him since they’d been back from their disastrous cave trip. He’d expected her to rant and rave until darkness fell about her lost phone and her waning expectations of ever seeing Frank Lovejoy again, let alone presenting her powerhouse marketing plan.
It hadn’t happened yet, for which he was grateful. He prided himself on being a realist, and so he was aware that only his baffling and compelling attraction to Lillian had kept him from strangling her with his bare hands once or twice. That and the fact that she’d made it pretty obvious that she suffered from her own fantasies about eliminating him as her tent mate in ingenious and torturous ways. Although he was pretty sure she was more bravado than butcher, he’d still taken the precaution of hiding the two knives that had been in their camping supplies. Sometime before they left, she was going to start thinking about that damned phone again. When she did, she’d start blaming him for its loss because, after all, he was the one who’d suggested going to the caves.
And because he’d learned right off the bat that she liked blaming things on him. Smoky fires. Crummy food. Last night’s thunderstorm. The way they couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other.
He sighed. Out here, with his life reduced to its most elemental levels, it had somehow become more complicated than ever. It was a fluke, one foolish moment of trusting good old Bobby, that had turned his life upside-down. Until Lillian had walked into his life, he could see his future stretching before him, calm, uneventful and satisfying in its simplicity.
Now he couldn’t imagine, moment to moment, what was coming up next.
“Hey, Wes, come here.” Lillian was standing now, hands on her hips, still staring at whatever it was that had caught her attention.
His feet sank into the spongy ground as he walked over to her, hoping she hadn’t been torturing some small animal while he blithely looked the other way.
“Can we eat that?”
His gaze followed her pointing finger down to the ground, where a flat, brown blob poked through a blanket of old leaves. Like she had done before him, he squatted down, peered at it and then poked it with the stick she’d discarded.
“What the hell is it?”
“I think it’s a mushroom.” She frowned. “Maybe. I don’t know for sure, though. I’m used to seeing mushrooms either in a glass jar or served on the side at my favorite restaurant. But it looks like a mushroom, doesn’t it?”
“Kinda.” Wes poked it again.
“Whatcha guys looking at?” They both jumped at the high-pitched voice behind them.
Mindy squatted down beside them and stared at the brown blob. Squinting, she bent down to study it better before saying, “I bet if you ate that, it would kill you.” Her hands went to her throat and she rolled her eyes. “You’d start to choke, and your eyes would bug out, and you’d foam at the mouth, and the ambulance would come and take you away but you’d die anyway.”
Wes and Lillian exchanged glances. That sounded like typical kid talk, something based on some movie she’d seen, but they stood up and backed away from the brown thing anyway. Sad as it was, Mindy’s knowledge of the great outdoors far exceeded theirs. If she wouldn’t eat it, they weren’t about to, either.
As they walked back to their picnic table, Mindy went with them, chattering away a mile a minute.
“Wow, it’s really wet here.” She stepped carefully in her well-worn tennis shoes. “I bet you guys thought you were going to die last night. My dad knew it was going to storm so he wouldn’t let me sleep in our tent and I’m glad because it would have been really scary.”
She stopped for breath before plunging ahead. “Me and Dad and Mom were talking about you guys and your tent, and Mom said she bet you didn’t have a clue about what to do, and you ought to come eat supper with us.”
She stopped abruptly, catching the grown-ups off guard.
When they didn’t answer immediately, she shrugged. “Well, you’re going to, right? I’ll tell Mom.”
She hopped on her bike and started pedaling away, calling back over her shoulder, “It’s lot 64. Mom said six o’clock.”
Shaking his head, Wes shot Lillian an amused glance. “If nothing else, it’s nice to know that we’re fodder for the gossip mill, isn’t it?”
Unforgettable Heroes Boxed Set Page 46