“It probably won’t matter, anyway. My guys didn’t bring swimming gear,” Julian said, taking a sip of the rich cocoa and leaning back against a duffel bag. “We were hardly expecting an outdoor spa.”
Kate choked on a laugh as the guys ripped off their clothes and jumped into the water, their naked parts hairy and dangling and flashing under the moonlight.
“Seems they’re an inventive lot.”
“You’re turning this whole thing into a joke,” Julian muttered, shaking his head. He slipped his jacket from his shoulders as he did it, tossing the item into Kate’s lap. “If you’re going to sit out here, you should at least cover up your arms. The mosquitoes are out in full force.”
It was just a lightweight thing, and he was going to take it off anyway, but the grateful smile she gave him made it seem like he’d laid a treasure chest at her feet. He’d never be able to figure this woman out. If he tried to talk to her sensibly, she bristled like an alley cat. If he crashed her date or laid out pornography in front of her lady friends, she pulled out her wits and smacked them right on the table. Only a coat offered solely to prevent West Nile Virus turned her into an actual human being.
And even then she snapped right back into battle mode. She crossed her arms, now swimming in black cotton, and nodded at the camp.
“It wasn’t my idea,” she said. “Anne brought the hot tub. She’s a friend of mine from the JARRS group—a very supportive and outdoor-savvy friend, I’ll have you know. And her brother works at REI, so there’s plenty more where that came from. But in my defense, I only told her to bring camping gear. I certainly didn’t say a thing about all the luxury amenities.”
All the luxury amenities? Julian suddenly wished he’d taken better stock of the women’s supplies as they’d unpacked. They’d last a lot longer than he thought if there were chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne over there.
He ran a quick but appraising eye over their side before laughing out loud. Outdoor-savvy, huh? Clouds of mosquitoes gathered around the lamps they’d left lit near the entrance of the tent, where the nylon hung gaping and open. Apparently, the lure of the hot tub overrode common sense.
“It’s all fun and games until you realize how many bugs are crawling inside that open door of your tent.”
Kate looked back between Julian and the tent, her lips thin and white with the sudden pressure of being wrong. She shoved her mug in his direction and stormed across the field. It was better than a movie, watching her rummage through her things until she came across a can of insect repellent so big it might have taken down an entire ecosystem.
He had to struggle to keep seated while she covered the tent and all its surroundings with the killer spray before zipping up the doorway, undergoing a minute investigation of the ground and all its crawling contents before she was satisfied the job had been done properly. A quick word to the raucous hot tub party, and she stalked back across the field.
“See? That wasn’t so hard.” There was a slight sneer in her voice—meant, Julian knew, to put him in his place. It was unnecessary. He was exactly where he wanted to be right now.
“You’re right—you have a real skill with insecticides.” He waited until she was comfortably settled on the ground before adding, “Though you might as well have taken a bottle of lighter fluid and doused it over your sleeping bags. That stuff’s pretty flammable, and the wind picks up over the bluffs at night. You really aren’t good at this outdoor lifestyle, are you?”
The look Kate sent his way was almost too good to be true. There was no way to capture the narrowed eyes, the furious blush, the slight part of her lips—no, that wasn’t true. There was one very good way of capturing those lips, and it involved his hand on the back of her neck, tilting her head up so he could explore all the softness of lips parted in passionate indignation.
But, no. She was just a girl, and one who had only recently placed those lips up to an expensive glass of wine in a toast with his enemy. One whose motives in coming over with hot chocolate and a skirt couldn’t be designed to help him in any way.
So he laughed instead. Loud and long and fully deserved.
“Try not to burn down the whole park, will you? Then neither one of us will have anywhere to host our events.”
The entire contents of a mug of hot chocolate splashed over his shirt, marshmallows clinging like wayward polka dots to his chest. The beverage had cooled considerably, so the intended effect—dramatic and decisive—fell short of its goal. Which only made Julian laugh that much more.
“And you are not invited to our hot tub to clean up,” Kate muttered, turning on her heel and stomping away.
For a moment, he thought the words meant she’d be joining the party across the way, where he could see Jada settling comfortably in Peterson’s lap and Nick, who he was pretty sure was underage, kicking back his fourth or fifth beer. To his relief, she bypassed the laughter and headed right into her tent for the night.
But not, of course, before carefully extinguishing every light within ten feet of her liberally debugged comfort zone.
Chapter Ten
A Lady’s Complexion
Kate slept fitfully. She’d never camped in her entire life—the closest her family had ever been to roughing it was when she was a kid and they stayed at a hotel with only three stars attached to its name.
First of all, it was cold. Even though Anne had brought her a sleeping bag she swore was designed for sub-freezing temperatures, the bare tent floor beneath Kate’s body seeped like ice up into her bones, and she felt like a ninety-year-old woman with no body fat. So of course she’d been forced to wrap herself up in Julian’s light athletic jacket in order to stay even remotely warm, and his smell, the crisp scent of Irish Spring soap and fresh-cut wood, invaded her dreams, weaving in and out of her consciousness like a ghostly hand. Sometimes the hand wrapped right around her heart, clenching tight before releasing with an oddly-timed thud. Other times, it curled up heavily in the full weight of her breasts and right between her legs, throbbing with restless intensity.
And then her portable alarm clock started ringing at five thirty, before the sun had even had a chance to do more than twitch a few feeble signs of life over the field.
“Turn that thing off, Kate,” groaned Anne, her arm fumbling for the snooze button.
Kate opened a pair of very groggy eyes and tried to stretch, but her body was so stiff she might as well have been frozen to the dirt. Her head pounded from where she’d been hit the day before, and her mouth felt like it had been scrubbed with steel wool.
“Oh my God. People do this for fun?”
She couldn’t see very much, either. The tent let in only a few rays of diffusive light, but from what she could tell, everything seemed to have shifted in the night, their sleeping bags and equipment collecting in the middle of the tent as though they, like their owners, needed to huddle for warmth. One owner, though, was nowhere to be found.
“Where’s Jada?” Kate croaked.
“Good morning, my lovelies!” Jada poked her head into the tent and beamed at them. She looked freshly washed and scrubbed, her hair pulled back in an immaculate ponytail and nary a line across her face. Kate promptly threw a dirty sock at her.
“There better be coffee out there.”
Anne sat up and stretched. “And food. I forgot how hungry I get when I’m camping. It’s all this fresh air.”
“There’s coffee and pancakes and eggs,” Jada promised. “But there are also five very large, beautiful men. So don’t you dare come out until you’ve done something with that hair. And yes, Kate, I’m talking to you.”
Kate pulled a face. In college, she’d had to put locks on her bedroom door to prevent Jada’s sunrise bliss from getting in the way of her rest. The woman had some sort of early morning disease that rendered her completely gorgeous and irritating before nine a.m., Pacific Standard Time.
“You made breakfast?”
“Don’t be stupid. I went to McDonald’s. No
w get up—I’m serious. They’re getting ready to throw trees.”
Anne scrambled into action, shooting Kate a single apologetic glance before pulling her own perfectly cute and curly hair back into a ponytail.
“Sorry, Kate. I’ve always wanted to see this. And if I’m going to be sleeping on the ground with you for the next few weeks, I’m taking my kicks where I can get them.”
Kate pulled the blankets back up over her head. This wasn’t going to work. Two more weeks of late night hot tub sessions and early morning wake-up calls? She still had to get home, feed Gretna, shower, get dressed and go to work. Her lunch hour would be spent finalizing things with the florist, and she had to leave early for an appointment with a vintage milliner at two—the woman did amazing things with a feather and was planning on setting up a booth at the Fauxhall Gardens.
And then she had to return here to sleep on the ground again, with all the bugs and the medicinal scent of apparently useless insect repellent spray, and only Julian’s casual, handsome mockery to comfort her.
“I might end up burning this whole place down on purpose,” she muttered into the blankets.
“What’s burning?” Jada stood above her, a brush and a washcloth in her hand. “Kate, did you touch those plants Anne told you to avoid? No—don’t tell me. I don’t want to know what you were rolling around in last night. Just get up. I’m making you presentable.”
Kate emerged from the tent about five minutes later, feeling a little bit more human thanks to a thorough face scrubbing with icy cold water and Jada’s cruel hand forcing her hair into two thick braids that hit her shoulder blades. That woman should have been a matron in a German boarding school.
But the moment she saw the men standing on the far end of the field, Kate decided she didn’t regret the touch of primping. Anne wordlessly handed her a coffee in a to-go cup.
“They’re amazing, Kate. Where did you find them, again?”
“Right here,” she murmured.
The men were lined up in a row, clad in shirts and shorts despite the crisp morning air. All of their attention was on McClellan, who balanced a huge, six-foot tree trunk in his two hands. He squatted low to the ground, and Kate could see all those muscles that had seemed stacked on top of one another the day before being unfolded and put to good use. He braced the log against the side of his neck, which seemed an awful lot like a splinter hazard, and with a mighty, ancient roar, pulled up to a standing position, using the squat and his arms to propel the log up and out, forcing it to sail through the air. The vertical lift caused the log to flip top to bottom in a full rotation before hitting the ground with a heavy thud, and the weight of it reverberated in Kate’s feet, even from several hundred feet away.
The cheers of the four other men indicated the throw was, indeed, as impressive as it seemed.
Kate and Anne were shocked into an awed silence, but Jada gave a longing sigh.
“You’ve got to wonder what else a man with that kind of strength can do.”
“In my experience, the really strong ones don’t have the kind of stamina you’d expect,” Anne said, her voice perfectly grave.
Jada nodded knowingly. “That makes sense. It seems such a pity, though.”
Kate looked back and forth between the two women, neither one of them paying her the least bit of attention. It seemed she was in a magical place where the world set into motion before the sun came up, trees flew through the air, and meek, mild Anne revealed a sexual past that rivaled Jada’s. What on earth could be next?
“Maybe you can tell us, Kate. Is stamina an issue?”
That could be next, apparently.
Kate’s skin grew hot and prickly, and she found she couldn’t meet either Jada’s or Anne’s suddenly interested gaze.
“I don’t know, thank you very much.”
“Kate, we saw you head over to the enemy camp only to come back wearing his clothes. We were in a hot tub. Not blind.”
Jada turned to Anne. “She never kisses and tell,” she explained, like a teacher to a particularly undereducated child. “Which is a damn shame. When you’ve got a man like that holding the bar, I imagine there isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t wonder how he measures up.”
“So how high is his bar?” Anne giggled, getting into the spirit of it and using her hands to hazard a few ludicrous suggestions.
“Did he adopt the old straddle technique?” Jada asked, naming an old track-and-field high jump method. “Oh, no—don’t tell me! He was a Fosbury Flop!”
“I’m not having this discussion with you two right now. It wasn’t at all what you’re imagining. Sometimes, you know, it’s about more than…”
“The size of the bar?”
Anne and Jada had apparently become the best of hilarious friends overnight, full of promises to torture and antagonize Kate. Life was getting rosier by the second.
“So, are you going to sleep over in Julian’s tent tonight?” Jada asked, waggling her eyebrows.
“Very funny,” Kate replied, making a face. Jada wasn’t happy until everyone was having sex. “I don’t intend to sleep with the enemy. Even I know that’s a one-way ticket to a bottle of poison and a dagger to the heart.”
“You mean a sgian dubh,” Anne said.
“A what?”
“It’s the pretty little knife they tuck into their socks to slit throats and cut open boxes and stuff. Michael showed me his. That’s what you’d have to use to end your miserable, Romeo-less life.”
Jada nudged Kate with a laugh. “See? Even Anne’s getting a look at the Scottish equipment.”
“The sporrans are pretty interesting too,” Anne added. “Those little pouches that hang from the waist of the kilt?”
Kate knew what she was talking about. She thought they looked like tiny leather shields, crafted to protect their vital man bits from a wayward blow.
“Some of them are leather, but Michael and a few others use more traditional animal fur. Badgers, I think. They use their sweet little taxidermied heads as the flap to the pouch.” Anne frowned a little. She was one of those very good vegetarians—the ones that didn’t even eat eggs or marshmallows.
“Oooh, did Michael show you his pelt, Anne?” Jada laughed. “Looks like I’m the last one to get to ride a Scotsman.”
“I wish you’d ride them on out of here,” Kate muttered. She gazed out toward the parking lot, where the line of cars sagged uniformly under the weight of camping supplies meant to last both sides for weeks. “If we don’t do something soon, this is going to end in a stalemate. And then we’re done for. Forcible removal weighs very, very heavily in their favor.”
Jada patted her on the head. “It’s really important you get this, isn’t it?”
Kate spread her arms helplessly. “Of course it is! What else would all this be about?”
Jada didn’t respond right away. Instead, she pursed her lips thoughtfully, looking her over with more interest than Kate cared for. “What else?” Jada finally echoed before snapping her attention back to the field.
“I’m going to work,” Kate announced with a resigned sigh. “I’ll be back around three. Which one of you is staying here today?”
Anne spoke up. “I am. For a while at least. I might have one of the other JARRS ladies come by for a few hours so I can shower. You’d be surprised how many volunteered. They’re all on board with this, you know. The spot is perfect.”
“So you don’t think I should give in?”
All three of them turned to look across the field, where Michael was preparing to take a turn with the caber. Julian had said it wasn’t an event he himself participated in but that Michael was one of the best in the country.
“Give in?” Anne gave a gusty sigh and watched as Michael jumped up and down, stretching his arms and legs to prepare them for the throw. Well aware that the women were up and watching, he even took his shirt off, his muscles dancing in an oddly burlesque parody.
“No way, Kate. No freaking way.”
Kate expected to be greeted by a sea of faces when she got back to the camp early that afternoon. Disappointment niggled at her stomach when it turned out no one was there. She really wanted a friendly face.
Work had been particularly grueling that morning since they were reshelving the nonfiction section, and her entire body had screamed in protest each time she lifted anything heavier than a mass market paperback. It seemed her muscles were unable to distinguish between sleeping on the ground and running a marathon, and she’d been looking forward to a little commiseration from her fellow campers.
“Hello?” she called, peeking inside the tent.
There wasn’t anything to indicate a hasty retreat or sneak enemy attack, so Kate relaxed. The unspoken rules—that someone must remain on site at all times—didn’t count if campers from both sides were missing.
“Is anybody here?” she tried again, looking around and shielding her eyes from the bright afternoon sun. A few shouts of laughter from the other side of the park rang out. Kate couldn’t see over there unless she went around the parking lot or through Julian’s secret wooded path, but she noticed the box containing the volleyball net was missing. They’d probably set it up in the sandy patch over there—she remembered them having a serious discussion last night regarding the merits of women in small shorts and shirtless men jumping around together in the dirt.
“It’s too bad we can’t play a game to determine the winner,” she muttered, picking up the empty box and tossing it with the rest of the supplies. “It’d be a great way to get all this over with.” Except she doubted there was a game on the planet Julian couldn’t win, unless it was something like chess or Scrabble. She was excellent at Scrabble.
The campers had been smart enough not to leave a fire burning in either the pit or the hot tub warmer when they left to go play, but the water in the tub was still pretty inviting. Kate trailed her fingers in the water, sending a pattern of ripples from one end to the other. It would be like a hot bath. Relaxing. Soothing. Not the least bit private, but there were some sacrifices to be made in the great outdoors, after all.
Love is a Battlefield: Games of Love, Book 1 Page 15