Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap

by Julie Anne Long

  She squeaked and reflexively seized handfuls of his hair and yanked back hard, like a rodeo queen ten seconds away from clinching the championship.

  He gave a muffled squawk of pain, pivoted abruptly, staggered in a semicircle like a dreidel losing steam, barreled at a forward run toward the beanbag chair, shouted, “Look out!” and dumped her into it.

  She bounced once and lay still.

  It seemed unduly silent after that.

  It was safe to say it was a stunned sort of silence.

  She slowly, slowly turned her eyes up to his.

  They stared at each other in something like mortified, almost impressed, slightly accusatory amazement. As if neither one of them had realized such thorough mutual indignity was even possible as adults.

  His face was scarlet, either with exertion or pain or mortification—and his hair was standing up in little peaks all over like whitecaps whipped up on a bay.

  She was pretty sure she was the same color. Judging from her temperature.

  “Maybe we should have gotten a ladder,” she offered. Subdued.

  “Maybe,” he said shortly.

  More silence. He was still staring at her with an expression that suggested he thought she might be as possessed as the possum up there in the attic.

  She cleared her throat. “Thank you. And . . . I’m sorry.”

  Her parents had always taught her those were the go-to words when a situation was untenable.

  He could take them however he wished.

  He just shook his head to and fro, to and fro, slowly and wonderingly. Then rotated his neck experimentally.

  She didn’t hear any grinding noises.

  She was desperately glad she hadn’t broken him.

  And then he frowned faintly. “Wait. You’re sorry about going up in the attic or about . . .”

  “I’m sorry about needing to be rescued,” she said firmly. “I’m very sorry I inconvenienced you. I’m . . . sorry I squeezed your neck and pulled your hair.”

  Why did their conversations always devolve into something that sounded like an exchange between two kids on the playground?

  “It’s very soft,” she added. Lamely. “Your hair.”

  His expression teetered somewhere between hilarity and censure.

  “I think your cheek says ‘Skechers,’” she said, quietly, when he didn’t seem inclined to speak.

  He swiped at his cheek absently. He missed the “S” completely. She didn’t say anything. He’d get around to noticing it eventually. If she was a guy who looked like him she’d be looking in the mirror all the time.

  “I’m a little stiff from working on the wallpaper. Otherwise my balance would have been a little better.”

  “Yeah?” he said abstractedly.

  She nodded silently. Like a shy three-year-old.

  “Hey, where’s your guard dog?” he asked.

  “Chick Pea,” Avalon called. Then louder, “CHICK PEA!”

  A few seconds later, they heard the click-click-click of tiny nails progressing sedately through the hall. Chick Pea trotted merrily into the room, smiling a doggie smile and went straight to Avalon, the very picture of blissful obliviousness.

  She bent down to scratch her head. “I think she might be a little deaf.”

  She glanced up at Mac. Judging from his silence and his expression, he was expending significant internal effort to refrain from saying something. “I told you so.” Or something in that vein.

  She kept her face down. The silence elongated.

  “Simon Le Bon. John Bonham. Janis Joplin. Sarah Vaughan. Robert Plant. Bob Marley. Baba O’Riley.”

  She levered her head slowly up in amazement.

  He’d recited these names almost defiantly. It sounded like he was reading a list of war dead.

  “What . . .” She wondered if she’d damaged her hearing or her brain in the stair crash.

  “Those are the names of my goats.”

  She stared at him. A flush painted her to her hairline.

  “Say them in a goat voice in your head,” he urged.

  Simon Le Baaaan, John Baaaanham, Janis Jaaaaaplin, Sarah Vaaaaughan, Raaabert Plant, Baaaaab Marley . . . Baaa Baaa O’Riley.

  Wow, that was hilarious. And touching. Vivid and so . . . so him.

  Shame made her face go even hotter. She’d accused him of not caring about anything. It was a fairly terrible thing to say to anyone. It had been calculated to hurt him, to jar him into some sort of truth or revelation.

  It had worked, though. If she were being scrupulously honest with herself, she wasn’t entirely sorry.

  “They’re very good names,” she said, quietly.

  His eyes widened again. For a moment there his face was luminous with some complicated emotion.

  “My chickens have names, too.”

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  He went quiet again.

  “Avalon . . . why did you go up in the attic?” he asked finally. The tone wasn’t entirely gentle.

  She didn’t think she could pull off “because you told me not to.” The mood of the moment somehow didn’t support glibness.

  She just looked up at him wordlessly, and widened her eyes in rueful apology.

  He just shook his head, slowly. “Avalon . . . I just . . .” He sighed. As if he was about to deliver a truth he was weary of repeating. “All I want is for you to be safe.”

  And she realized that it was, in fact, true.

  Inherent in Mac was a quality of caring that informed his actions.

  Even if the words coming out of his mouth implied something else altogether.

  She folded her hands together in her lap and looked down at them. Chastened and subdued and suddenly rather confused.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment or two. Chick Pea panted quietly next to her.

  Finally she lifted her eyes to his.

  The corner of his mouth dented a little.

  “Hey,” he said suddenly, softly. “You’ve brought a cobweb down with you.”

  He bent a little in front of her. She could see in his eyes as though they were crystal balls. What she saw was a rapt girl, frozen as if he were a wizard casting a spell.

  His hand reached out slowly toward her hair and he delicately freed the strand.

  He handed it to her as if it were forensic evidence, or a strand of rare silk.

  She watched herself, as if from above, take that damned cobweb like he was handing her his letterman jacket.

  Their fingertips brushed when the transfer was made. And just that little brush turned her thoughts to white noise. Ssssssss. Like lightning had taken out the cable.

  He had had his hands on her ankles and pretty close to the seat of all desire, there, at the crook of her legs.

  But somehow it was this tender intimacy that undid her.

  She could all but feel herself unravel, as if she herself were made of something as fine as cobwebs.

  She couldn’t look up at him because she was afraid he’d see the pulse thumping in her throat.

  In that moment, a moment that lasted forever and just a few seconds, everything she considered herself to be, all of her achievements to date, finally, figuratively, softly collapsed like a house of cards. Inside crouched the teenage girl she once was: lustful and confused and madly, recklessly in love, heartbroken and not good enough for him.

  She realized in a blinding flash that her entire life to date, from GradYouAte to overeducated Corbin, might very well be an I-told-you-so born of that long-ago moment: Mac had blown her off course.

  She looked up at him and prayed that nothing of what she’d just realized was in her face.

  She discovered that his face was still. He seemed a little tense about the mouth.

  He finally straightened and drew in a long sharp breath.

  “Well, then. Guess I can chalk this little episode up to be careful what you wish for.”

  He said this mostly to himself. And with that ironic, cryptic little statement, he t
urned around and headed down the stairs.

  But she didn’t hear that fourth step groan.

  He must know that he needed to skip it.

  Mac had in fact gotten into the house by shoving a window in the living room open wide enough to squeeze through. It hadn’t been easy, though. That particular window frame was going to need scraping and sanding and repainting, if she was serious about getting the place ship-shape before she sold it. He wondered if Avalon intended to attempt to undertake that particularly nasty job all on her own. It was nothing but methodical, relentless grunt work, all dust and splinters.

  But then, scraping layers off things was never painless.

  It was every bit as beautiful as he remembered.

  “Hey, Cat,” he said to The Cat, who appeared and fell into a long-legged stride alongside him, as if they were a couple of rogue detectives out on a case.

  But he was, in fact, feeling a little subdued.

  He just . . . found it less and less easy to leave her every time he was in her presence. Even when he couldn’t get away fast enough.

  Even though every encounter seemed to flay a fine layer from him.

  He knew how that kind of work could be a very effective form of purging and self-flagellation. But he could tell she was already stiff from it. She wasn’t a common farmer like he was, used to laboring away.

  He smiled crookedly at himself. He liked being who he was.

  Didn’t he?

  But there had to be some other reason she was here all by herself, going at that huge house.

  When he got home, he followed a hunch and whipped open his laptop and navigated to SilliPutty, scrolling through items.

  There was a little jab in the area of his heart when he saw it.

  Sources tell us that Corbin Bergson is flailing at the helm of GradYouAte in the wake of CEO Avalon Harwood’s sudden mysterious leave of absence. Could the abrupt departure of a certain intern be related?

  Mac leaned back against the chair and blew out a breath.

  Well, well, well.

  He was both grateful and irritated on Avalon’s behalf that someone on her staff was loose-lipped or bribable. The notion that she might be hurting, and not just thanks to wallpaper scraping, bothered him a lot, though.

  He mulled.

  He knew what he really wanted to do right now. And wasn’t he a guy who got what he wanted?

  And yet he couldn’t remember his pulse going like this the last time he went after something he wanted.

  Maybe the stakes just hadn’t been high enough before.

  Chapter 14

  Avalon answered the doorbell a half hour later to find Mac standing there, still wearing what he’d been wearing when he’d maneuvered her out of the attic.

  “Do you have a bathing suit?” he said without preamble. “Oh, hello, Chick Pea. Down, girl. Whoa, easy there.”

  Chick Pea was sitting sedately next to Avalon, smiling politely up at him, eyes agleam with bonhomie, fluffy tail switching a little.

  “Why do I need a bathing suit? Do you know something about the plumbing that I don’t?”

  “I know approximately a million things about this house that you don’t. But no, that’s not why.”

  “You need to borrow one? Because yours is in the wash?”

  “I usually go without one when I go swimming around here, since there’s no one around to care,” he said affably.

  Dear God. What was he trying to do to her? Her knees went buttery.

  He cleared his throat. “Listen, didn’t you say you were a little stiff from scraping wallpaper?”

  “I did say that.”

  “There’s an old natural hot springs about a fifteen-minute hike or so from here. Gets dark fast out there and we’ll want to be back before then. We’ve got about an hour and a half, maybe two, before sunset. You in?”

  Delight pierced so abruptly it stole her breath.

  It immediately warred with wariness. Getting half-naked with the very hot man who had broken her heart wasn’t quite equivalent to sticking her big toe up the faucet, but no one would have called it a wise decision.

  But then, no one was holding her to a particular standard of wisdom but herself.

  And maybe she just needed to prove to herself that he no longer had the power to shape her life, even if he once had.

  Finally, pure curiosity tipped the vote. She wanted to see the damn springs.

  “Give me five minutes.”

  The sunset was going to be a pretty good one. A few of the fluffy oblong clouds overhead were already limned in golden light, and with luck they’d go gold or tangerine or aubergine.

  While in San Francisco, she’d desperately missed the surprise and variations of sunsets and sunrises. The light of the computer and phone screens and the neon lights over the takeout places never really varied.

  She ducked to her knees, which was none too easy, given how stiff her muscles were, and touched a finger to the water. And watched the ripples waver out. River water warmed by the earth and cycled out again. Ceaselessly fresh. She could see her reflection in it; she could see Mac behind her smiling. Behind him was a tall cluster of old boulders.

  “It’s about three and a half feet at its deepest. You going in?”

  It was the first thing he’d said in about fifteen minutes. He’d clearly been so full of thoughts on the fifteen or so minute walk that he couldn’t say any of them. Or maybe he was even nervous. Maybe they both were.

  The bathing suit her mom had stuffed into her gym bag was olive green and fashioned of fabric that was probably considered space-age at the time; it featured dramatic darts in the boob area and a flouncy little skirt. If her own willpower collapsed on her, this suit might very well keep Mac Coltrane at arm’s length, should he make the proverbial move. Her mom must have kept it out of nostalgic reasons; Avalon thought she recognized it from a few old family photos. It fit like a charm, though. She did have her mom’s curves.

  She shucked her sweatshirt and kicked off her thongs, then hesitated for a moment before setting about peeling off the jeans.

  Which gripped onto the exotic fabric of her bathing suit the way her feet gripped the adhesive ducks in the bathtub in the bathroom she and Eden had shared growing up. It was a wonder there wasn’t a little suctiony pop when she finally got them loose.

  Mac watched this whole little dance in rapt, entertained silence.

  She was fit even if her own abs weren’t quite drum-tight. She was comfortably certain his silence was a tribute to the fact that she was well worth looking at, suit or no suit.

  “Wow, that’s some bathing suit, Avalon. Speaking of tightropes and things you might wear to walk on them.”

  His voice was a little bit lulled, though. A man a little bit drugged by his own hormones.

  “It’s an heirloom,” she said mildly. “Passed down through my family for generations.”

  He gave a short laugh.

  She touched a toe into the hot springs. And the rest of her body sort of reflexively oozed in after it as if she were literally melting.

  “Ohhhhhhh . . .” It felt like the best thing that had ever happened to her.

  “Good, huh?”

  “Holy Mother,” she sighed. She closed her eyes for a few seconds. She opened her eyes.

  He was still standing near the largest stone, motionless, watching with satisfaction, as if her enjoyment was something he’d personally accomplished.

  “So is your plan that you are going to guard me like I’m Cleopatra and you’re a centurion? You look like you should be holding a spear.”

  “Aren’t you mixing up your cultures and centuries?”

  “Probably,” she murmured.

  “Do you mind if I get in there with you? Hot tubs are pretty seventies and you know what they got up to in the seventies.”

  “Macramé. Heavy metal. Muscle cars.”

  “Orgies,” he contributed.

  She stared at him. The word was very conjuring of writhing bodies
, always fairly sexy, but in her mind’s eye all the men had seventies mustaches very similar to her dad’s, and that, as far as she was concerned, wasn’t sexy.

  “Don’t you need a crowd for that sort of thing?” She was way too relaxed to bat that innuendo back or to protest. Maybe that was his plan. She didn’t care about that, either.

  “I don’t know. You’re the one who goes to, what was that, bondage farmers’ markets and all that stuff. But I can make a few calls.”

  She gave a somnolent snort. “It was a fair. The Folsom Street Fair. A decadent celebration of . . . a lot of things, let’s just say. Not a farmers’ market. To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I feel about as sexy as a carrot floating in soup. A really happy carrot.”

  It was a warning of sorts that if his plan was to seduce her, he had his work cut out for him.

  And it was also a relief: the less sexy she felt, the less inclined she was to attempt to climb him like a tree. Because standing backlit by the sunset right now, no one had ever looked more tempting.

  He yanked his boots off and peeled off his shirt. Maybe it was the fact that the world went slo-mo that made him resemble a sculptor unveiling a statue. She watched through slitted eyes. The casual undressing held an unexpected walloping intimacy, and her stomach muscles braced as her senses took the impact. There was no way he didn’t know the power of his own nearly bare self, because Mac was the sort who thought of all the angles.

  He was brownish everywhere from the sun apart from a hint of paleness at his hipbones. An ordinary pair of red swimming trunks clung lovingly there. The rest of him looked like it had been turned on a lathe or cut by whatever tool they use to facet diamonds. She saw a scar across the lower part of his thigh. That was new.

  And then all of that vanished under the water, and only his smooth brown shoulders remained above, like two enticing tropical islands.

  She might actually be in dangerous territory here. She was literally in the soup!

  All she could do was smile drowsily. The warm water resumed doing its business of soaking all the tension out; maybe it wouldn’t let any new tension back in.