by Cindy Gerard
With a strength he hadn’t thought was left in him, he sprang to his feet. As an afterthought, he offered her his hand.
She didn’t just ignore it. She made a great show of looking at his outstretched hand, then glaring at him as if to say, “I wouldn’t accept your help if you were the last degenerate on earth.”
She rose to her feet on her own steam. Without a word, she gathered her soaked clothes in her arms and headed up the stone cliff.
Halfway up the slope, she turned back to him. “Hershey, at least, was smart enough to come in out of the rain. If you can muster up a fraction of his intelligence, you can do the same. That is, if you don’t strain something dragging that damn plane to shore.”
While her words were harsh and judgmental, the look in her eyes gave him hope. She may be mad—okay, so she was livid—but she was also concerned about him. Just when he’d thought all was lost. She cared, bless her. She didn’t want to but she did.
Even the glare she leveled at him before she turned and began making her way along the slope didn’t fool him. Katharine Hepburn always gave Spencer Tracy that lookjust before she threw herself into his arms and told the big lug she loved him.
“Everything was so simple yesterday,” Maggie muttered under her breath as she lifted the whistling teakettle off the stove and filled two mugs with boiling water. “I was alone. I was in peace. I was not up at two in the morning with a seventy-pound ball of fur hogging my bed and a two-hundred-twenty-pound drowned rat occupying my shower.”
She tried not to be concerned about Blue while she stood in the kitchen and he stood in the bathroom under a hot shower trying to coax some warmth back into his bones. But he’d been out in the storm a lot longer than she had and she’d felt awful by the time she finally made her way back to the cabin. She’d been cold to the point of brittle, her joints aching, her fingers and toes stinging and her teeth chattering so hard she’d managed to bite her tongue.
A long, hot shower had helped her. So had the fire she’d laid in the little wood stove—as she’d done every night in the event she needed to take the chill off the cabin. She sent a silent prayer of thanks toward whatever power had sent her Abel Greene two months ago. He’d just shown up out of nowhere that day she’d arrived, and in addition to helping her open up the cabin and making some minor repairs to the place, Abel had taken to checking on her at regular intervals and seeing to it that her wood pile was well stocked.
Unlike Blue Hazzard, who had been nothing but a pain, Abel Greene had been a gift. Like Blue, Abel was a big man. Big, uniquely beautiful, and at first meeting imposing. The first time she’d seen him emerge from the woods looking for all the world like an untamed and savage warrior with his long black hair flowing down his back and his silver-eyed wolf dog by his side, she’d almost packed up and headed back to civilization. She’d gotten used to Abel’s unannounced visits since then. And to his silent stoicism.
Abel was an enigma she had given up trying to figure out. That was her gift to him. She didn’t pry. Didn’t prod. She accepted that what he gave her was also satisfying some need of his own. And she recognized the wounded spirit inside him. She recognized it because it was so like her own.
A crash of thunder rattled the windows, making her jump. The storm had not lessened in intensity. If anything, it had gotten worse.
Dressed in dry sweats and heavy socks with a towel wrapped turban style over her hair, she gathered all three oil lamps she’d discovered in the cabin in preparation for the loss of electricity that seemed inevitable.
That done, she settled into the worn sofa with her mug of hot cocoa and a warm blanket, and waited for Blue to join her there. That, too, seemed inevitable. After all, she couldn’t very well refuse him the comfort of a fire—even though a firing squad was more to her liking.
He’d followed her to the cabin a full half hour after she’d left him on the beach. When he’d finally rapped on her back door, his lips had been as blue as his eyes. She didn’t have to ask what had taken him so long. He’d been beaching the Cessna. Putting his precious baby to bed.
She’d shoved a dry towel into his shaking hands, pointed him toward the shower and shut the bathroom door.
Staring thoughtfully into the fire, she turned out the sounds of the storm outside and grudgingly admired him for his devotion—even though she thought he was a fool for risking his neck like that. Wistfully, she wondered what it would be like to have someone care about her as much as Blue cared about his plane. Foolishly, she wondered what it would be like if that someone was Blue.
The bathroom door opened just in time to quell that dangerous thought. With concentrated effort, she schooled her attention and her eyes to remain on the fire.
It was a temporary respite at best. Avoiding him would be impossible. Although the little log cabin in the woods had all the basic amenities of electricity and indoor plumbing, square footage was not its greatest asset. The single bedroom and bathroom were the only rooms with doors. The kitchen-living area made up the bulk of the floor plan, open by design cozy by intent and close by proximity.
The wood stove sat in the corner of the knotty-pine paneled great room, nestled in the mortared lake-rock portion of the walls and sitting on a hearth of the same rock. The furniture—sturdy pine frames with upholstery of hunter’s plaid—was arranged to face both the fire and the picture window and gave a postcard view of the bay by daylight, and an eye-of-the-storm sensation on a night like this.
“Is this for me?”
She looked up at the sound of Blue’s voice to find him standing by the kitchen counter, looking hopefully at the mug of hot chocolate she’d left for him there.
All of her resolve to remain distant melted like the marshmallows floating in her mug when she met his blueeyed smile and the obvious embarrassment he was trying to hide as he stood there in her pink chenille robe.
She couldn’t help it. She smiled. Then she laughed. Giggled, actually. It just slipped out, a little rusty from lack of use, a little surprising in the ease with which it had escaped at the sight of his very huge self in her very small robe.
“You find this funny?” he said, deadpan, when she’d spent herself. “Fine. But I just want you to know that mini has never been my size. And pink has never been my color.”
She sniffed and buried her nose in her mug to quell another chuckle. “Oh, I don’t know. I think you look kind of pretty in pink.”
They shared a grin then. How could she not smile at six feet two inches of testosterone packed into a robe made with estrogen in mind? Where the robe covered Maggie from chin to knee, it strained at the seams to hit him from midthigh to elbow, and wasn’t having much luck at either. That wasn’t even mentioning the bare expanse of muscled chest and, um, other things that threatened to peek out.
“Sorry I couldn’t come up with something better. But until your clothes are dry, it’s the best I could do.”
Holding his cocoa in one hand and the robe closed with the other, he walked in front of her, then settled into the opposite end of the sofa.
“Could be worse,” he said, stalling a shiver and snagging the extra blanket she’d laid out for him. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he raised his arm and sniffed the fabric of the robe that held the scent of the lotion she wore. “I can’t remember when I’ve ever smelled this good.”
They shared another sneak-up-on-you smile and she wondered when they had started coming so freely. Just like she wondered how a man in a woman’s pink robe could look so undeniably sexy.
His hair was still damp from his shower. His only attempt at taming its wild disarray had been a quick finger combing that had somehow managed to arrange it with an artfulness that no stylist’s brush could ever have achieved.
Everywhere the robe didn’t cover—and that encompassed a lot of territory—the firelight gilded the summer bronze tint of his skin, set flickering highlights to the soft curling hair on his chest, defined the strong angles of his face with shadows and substance. Hi
s eyes were so blue, so intense, as they met hers above the rim of his mug.
She looked quickly away, embarrassed that he’d caught her staring, and cataloging, and wondering what it would be like to be made love to by Blue Hazzard.
That thought stopped her cold. Unsettling as it was, even more upsetting was the very real possibility that he could tell exactly what was running through her mind.
She’d been told for years that one of her most valuable assets was her ability to relay a gamut of emotions with nothing more than a look. She’d made her fortune on her face and the openness of the feelings she could express there. And she’d be a fool if she thought Blue hadn’t known what she’d been thinking as she’d watched him.
She waited for him to call her on it, to push the advantage of a storm-drenched night, a warm fire and the vulnerability of a lonely woman. When he didn’t, she couldn’t help but meet his eyes again and question why.
He answered her silent query with a soft, easy smile and a deep sigh before he angled his gaze thoughtfully toward the fire.
“I owe you an apology, Stretch,” he said into a silence broken only by the rush of the wind, the persistent peppering of rain on the windowpanes and the crackle of the cedar fire. “I put you at risk tonight.”
She tucked her feet up under her bottom and arranged the blanket more snugly around her. “I was never at risk. And you didn’t ask me to come after you. I made that decision myself.”
“Yeah,” he said, after a thoughtful silence, his deep voice pensive. “You did, didn’t you. I guess the question is, why?”
She could feel his warm gaze touch her face, puzzled, pleased, liking the conclusions he’d drawn before ever hearing her reply.
“Well it wasn’t like I could sleep or anything,” she said, shooting for a disgruntled demeanor. “Not with your dog shivering under the covers of my bed and you bobbing around like a cork in my bay.”
One corner of his mouth tipped up in a crooked smile. “Hersh does like his creature comforts.”
“And you like to prove you’re still the same reckless show-off you were fifteen years ago.”
She tried to sound disgusted but it didn’t come out that way. It came out sounding wistful instead, crowded with old memories that, if she let herself, she could find both comfortable and amusing.
“Yeah, well, I was in love. A man will do almost anything when he’s in love.”
“You weren’t a man. And you weren’t in love,” she corrected him, and gave in to the recurring urge to smile as she tugged the towel from her hair. “You were an obnoxious pain in the neck locked in hormonal overload. And if I recall, I saved your sorry self once back then, too.”
“Well, at least I let you think you did.”
She angled him a suspicious look, stilling the hand she’d been working through her hair to fluff and dry it. “You mean you really didn’t have a cramp that day I dove into the bay after you?”
He grinned sweetly. Angels should look so innocent.
“You toad,” she sputtered, grudgingly accepting that he’d duped her all those years ago.
“Sorry,” he said, without one speck of remorse. “But a guy had to do what a guy had to do. And it was heaven.” He exhaled on a wistful sigh. “There I was—tucked safely in your arms as you swam me back to shore.” He caught the towel she threw at him, chuckled and let his head fall lazily back against the sofa cushion. “And the mouth-tomouth, well, I almost embarrassed myself over that.”
“You really were a jerk, Hazzard,” she said, but with a fondness in her voice that undercut her exasperation.
He let his head loll to the side, toward her. His gaze sought hers, the intensity in his eyes heightened by firelight and lightning flashes. “And you really were a beauty. Still are.” He paused, genuine regret darkening his eyes again. “But even though I’d still try just about anything to get close to you, I’d never intentionally hurt you. I never meant for you to go out in that tonight.”
“I know,” she said, turning way, uncomfortable with his intentions, certain of his sincerity. “I’m fine. Nothing was hurt, okay?”
He grunted. “Nothing but my image. And maybe my pride.”
“Ah, well. Time has managed to dispel the ’real men don’t eat quiche’ stigma. Maybe we’ll break the pink bathrobe barrier soon, too.”
He smiled crookedly and resumed his study of the fire.
“So, did you get warmed up?”
He took a careful sip of his hot cocoa. “Working on it.”
“And the plane? Is it all right?” she asked rather than let the silence infuse them again with intimate thoughts and impossible options.
“She will be. She took a nasty gouge in the right float before I got her beached, but she’ll ride out the storm okay where she is.”
“Far be it from me to question your priorities, but why is that wreck so important to you?”
His eyes filled with affection and pride. “Remember Hank Townsend?”
She furrowed her brow but shook her head when she couldn’t connect with the name.
“Old Hank was just about the best walleye guide between the Cities and Alaska. He was also one of the nicest old guys and one of the biggest characters I’d ever met. The first time I was ever airborne it was with Hank in that plane. It was that flight that turned me on to flying. And that little plane that gave me my first thrill.”
He paused. A shadow of regret darkened his face. “When I heard that Hank had died a few years back, I made a trip up from the Cities to pay my respects to his kids and ended up buying the plane from them. She and I have been together ever since.”
There was a certain sweetness about him as he told her the story. An innocence of spirit and purity of heart that tugged at feelings deep inside. Feelings she’d thought she’d lost and would be better off without, she told herself grimly, just as the lights went out.
“I’ve been waiting for that,” she said, making to rise from the sofa and light the lamps.
A hand on her shoulder stayed her.
“Stay put,” he said softly. “We don’t need the lamps. The fire glow works for me.”
It was working for her, too—too well. The dancing flames lent a subtle intimacy to a moment that eclipsed even the isolation inherent in the romantic scenario of one woman and one man alone in a cabin in the woods.
Even so, she let him coax her to settle back onto the sofa. “You mentioned the Cities. Were you living there then?” she asked, not, she told herself, because she was interested in his life, but to establish a definitive line between intimacy and necessity. It was a necessity to not court intimacy. It was a necessity to keep the conversation generic.
“I still do.” He slouched lower on the sofa and stretched his long bare feet closer toward the warmth of the fire. “My business is there. Air cargo,” he added in anticipation of her next question.
“Air cargo?”
“Yup. And actually, Minneapolis is basically headquarters now. Hazzard Aire is flying out of a dozen different cities at last count.”
She tilted her head. “So he’s a successful businessman.”
He shrugged. “I’ve been lucky.”
Maggie doubted that luck had much to do with it. Not in today’s competitive business world. “You just happened to be up here on vacation?”
He smiled. “I’ve got competent people working for me so I leave the business in their hands and spend my summers up here.”
Successful and smart, she concluded. Here was a man who was not going to let his life be consumed by corporate stress and an insatiable need to control the pulse of every aspect of his business. She should be so together, she thought ruefully, then reacted to the warmth in his eyes.
“So the lake got in your blood, too,” she said with a speculative tilt of her head.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, settling even lower on the couch and, if possible, stretching out a little longer as he propped his mug on his chest. He looked comfy and content and too, too appe
aling. “This place does that. There are memories here that never quite let go. And some traditions just refuse to die. My dad started bringing me to the lake when I was five years old. I’ve never spent a summer since without making some kind of an appearance. Even if it was only for a long weekend or two in those early days when I was getting the business off the ground—no pun intended.
“You probably won’t believe this,” he added in a voice softened by self-deprecation, “but I never gave up hope that I’d find you up here again.”
He turned his head lazily on the sofa cushion, his gaze seeking hers in the firelight. “I’ve never spent a summer like the one I spent chasing you.”
Maggie thought back to that summer. That wonderful, special time in her life when Max and Esther Snyder had made her feel cared for and cherished and loved. It had been a rarity in her life that had seen her shuffled from one foster home to another, from group home to group home in Chicago’s inner city to a couple of ugly brushes with juvenile detention.
“You know, I’ve looked for you up here every year since then, Stretch.”
His voice broke through her musings. Deep, compelling, so tempting with its knowledge of the feisty, streetwise girl she’d been, so forbidden because of his lack of insight about the apprehensive, distrustful woman she’d become.
“Somehow, I doubt that,” she said, determined to diffuse the recurring threat of intimacy his straightforward admission fostered.
He didn’t dispute her. Not in words. It was his silence, instead, that compelled her to look at him. If it makes you feel better, doubt away, his intense blue eyes and indulgent shrug suggested, but I’m telling it straight.
In her heart, she believed him. Her heart, it seemed, might just be leading her into trouble.
“It wasn’t in the cards for me to come back,” she said, determined to find her way back to safer ground.
“And yet you ended up here now.”