“So he did leave you some money.”
“No, he didn’t.” The relief had faded, and she was getting very sick of this conversation. “I have privileges, such as living in the house, my expenses taken care of, and I’m paid a very nice salary for managing the funds, but I didn’t inherit anything. All of the privileges stop if I remarry, but the salary continues as long as I do the job.”
“Got it. I won’t even ask what you consider a ‘very nice’ salary.”
“That’s good, because it’s none of your business,” she said acerbically.
He snuggled her closer and rested his chin on her shoulder. “I’m curious about something, though. You’ve truly never been in love? Ever?”
The change in subject made her uncomfortable and she shifted restlessly. “Have you?”
“Sure. Several times.”
It was the “several” that made her wince. If it were truly love, wouldn’t it be only once? Real love shouldn’t fade. Real love expanded, made room for children and pets and a host of friends and relatives. It didn’t come with an expiration date, and after that date you moved on to someone else.
“When I was six, I fell madly in love with my first grade teacher. Her name was Miss Samms,” he said reminiscently, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “She was fresh out of college, she had these big blue eyes, and she smelled better than anything I’d ever smelled in my whole life. She was also engaged, to some bastard who wasn’t nearly good enough for her, and I was so jealous I wanted to beat him up.”
“I gather you were smart enough not to try,” Bailey said, relaxing. She couldn’t take a six-year-old’s crush on his teacher seriously.
“Barely. I didn’t want to upset Miss Samms by killing her boyfriend.”
She snickered and he punished her with a pinch. “Don’t laugh. I was as serious as a heart attack. When I grew up, I was going to ask Miss Samms to marry me.”
“So what happened to this grand love?”
“I started second grade. I was older, more mature.”
“Um hmm. Mature.”
“I chose a more appropriate love interest the next time. Her name was Heather, she was in my class, and one day she pulled up her skirt and showed me her panties.”
She barely managed to restrain another snicker. “My goodness. Heather was fast.”
“You have no idea. My heart was broken when I found her showing her panties to some other boy.”
“That’s a big disillusionment. I wonder how you had the strength to go on.”
“Then when I was eleven…Katie. Ah, Katie. She could hit a fastball like you wouldn’t believe. She moved away before I could get up the nerve to make a move on her—but she moved back when I was fourteen. When I was sixteen, Katie wrestled me down and took advantage of me.”
“Oh, I bet! Excuse me, I mean, the nerve of some girls!”
“She was strong,” he said seriously. “I was so scared of her I let her do what she wanted with me for a couple of years.”
She reached back and returned the pinch he’d given her.
“Ouch! Is that any way to treat a man? I’m telling you how I was used and abused, and instead of feeling sorry for me you abuse me some more.”
“Poor pitiful you. I can tell you were traumatized. That’s why you named a certain body part ‘Good Time Charlie.’”
“I considered ‘Go Slow Joe,’ but I had to go with my heart.”
Bailey completely lost control of the giggles that had been building up. “Justice, you’re so full of it the shelter needs shoveling out.”
“You’re laughing at all my trials and tribulations in the romance field? I don’t know if I should tell you the rest.”
“How many more are there?”
“Just one, and this one’s serious. I married her.”
That was serious, and the laughter went out of Bailey. She could tell by the change in his voice that he wasn’t kidding any longer. “What happened?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. I didn’t cheat on her and I don’t think she cheated on me. We got married while I was still in the Academy; her father was an officer, she’d grown up with the military lifestyle so she knew what to expect. Her name was—is—Laura. All the moving from base to base, the separations, she took in stride. What she couldn’t handle, I guess, is civilian life. When I got out of the military, that’s when things went to hell. If we’d had kids I guess we would have stuck it out, but without them, the hard fact is we didn’t love each other enough to keep things together.”
“Thank God you didn’t have kids!” she said fervently, before catching herself. “Sorry. It’s just—well…”
“You’ve been there.”
“Too many times.”
“I guess that’s why you’re afraid to let yourself care about anyone,” he said, and her heart jumped violently in her chest. She knew why she kept people at a distance, but she’d never before revealed so much of herself to anyone. Too late, she saw that his easy humor had undermined her guard and she’d given him an enormous advantage, one that he wouldn’t hesitate to use.
As if to underscore the thought, he gave a low sound of satisfaction, the sound of a predator with its prey in its grasp, and said, “I’ve got you now.”
27
“MEN!” BAILEY MUTTERED AS THEY TRUDGED THROUGH the snow. “Can’t reason with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.”
“I heard that,” Cam said over his shoulder. “Besides, you don’t have a weapon.”
“Maybe I can smother him in his sleep,” she mused to herself. Her voice was muted by the cloth over the lower half of her face, but evidently not muted enough.
“I heard that, too.”
“Then I assume you can hear this: You’re a stubborn, mule-headed, macho idiot, and if you get dizzy and fall you’ll probably break some bones even if the fall doesn’t kill you outright, and I swear I’ll leave you bleeding in the snow!” Her voice rose until she was shouting at him.
“I love you, too.” He was laughing, and she wanted to kick him.
She had seldom been as furious with anyone as she was with him, but then she seldom lost her temper. You had to care about something to get angry, a fact that made her even angrier. She didn’t want to care about him. He’d made what she thought was a dumb-ass decision, and she wanted to mentally shrug and let it go because he was an adult and he could bear the consequences of his dumb-ass decisions. Instead, she was fretting. And worrying about him. And letting her imagination run away with her, picturing all sorts of awful things that could happen to him, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it because he was a stubborn, mule-headed, macho idiot.
He was pulling the rough sled he’d made, loaded down with the things they’d decided they would need along the way, plus one addition he’d made that morning: the battery. Getting it out of the wreckage had taken a herculean effort, one that had left him pale and sweating—a big part of the problem was that the battery was so heavy, over eighty pounds. But he’d tested the battery, it still had juice, and he’d decided that they should take it so that if anything happened to him, she’d still be able to make a fire.
She’d yelled at him that they would have been doing without a fire anyway. He’d said no, they weren’t, that when they got out of the snow and he could find dry wood, he could make a fire using friction, because he’d been a Boy Scout and knew how.
“Fine,” she said. “Then you can teach me, and we won’t need to drag a hundred-pound battery around! You have a concussion. You lost a lot of blood. You shouldn’t be exerting yourself this much!”
“It doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds,” he’d retorted, completely ignoring the rest of her comment—as well as the fact that the battery came damn close to weighing that much.
So he’d wrestled the thing onto the sled, and the weight had made the wooden runners dig into the snow. Seeing that she couldn’t dissuade him from taking the battery, she’d grabbed the traces and started pulling the sled herse
lf, only to have him firmly move her out of the way and take over the job of sled dog.
“You can carry the backpack,” he’d said maddeningly, referring to his roll-aboard suitcase that he’d rigged with straps.
She was so angry she’d considered hitting him with a snowball, but she was afraid of what damage any chance blow to the head, no matter how slight, might do to him. She also didn’t want to get his clothes wet, not when she’d gone to so much effort to keep him as warm as possible. Smothering him in his sleep, though…that was a possibility.
The terrain was horrifyingly rugged, and unseen hazards lay under the snow. Sometimes the slope was so steep she had to hold the sled from behind to keep it from sliding past him and dragging him down the mountain. Sometimes there simply was no going down at all without ropes and mountain climbing equipment, so they had to trudge up and around until they discovered a less treacherous descent. After walking for what he said was three hours, she doubted they had managed to descend more than perhaps a hundred feet, but they had zigzagged for miles. And she was still angry.
The snowshoes were clumsy and required that she lift her knees with each step, as if she were marching in a band. Her muscles were burning from the effort. Maybe she didn’t lift her foot high enough, but the tip of her right snowshoe suddenly caught on something buried in the snow and catapulted her forward.
She managed to get her hands out to break her fall, going down on her right knee and then sort of rolling to a sitting position. Her hands and knee stung, but sharp pains shot through her right ankle. Muttering curses under her breath, she held her shin and gently rotated the ankle to see if she’d sustained any structural damage.
“Are you hurt?” Cam went to one knee beside her, his gray eyes worried above the strip of red flannel that covered his own nose and mouth.
“A sprain, but I think I can walk it off,” she said. Flexing the ankle hurt, but after the initial throb the pain seemed to lessen. She tried to get up, but was hampered by the snowshoes that remained securely tied to her feet. If the right one had come off when she fell, her ankle probably wouldn’t have suffered at all. “Help me up.”
Catching her hands, he tugged her to a standing position and held her while she gingerly put her weight on her foot. The first step was fairly painful, but the second one was less so. “I’m good,” she said, releasing his hands. “No serious damage.”
“You can ride on the sled if it’s bothering you,” he said, frowning as he studied her gait as intently as if she were a Thoroughbred.
Bailey stopped in her tracks, thunderstruck by what he’d just said. Did the man have no sense? “Are you crazy?” she yelped. “You can’t pull me all the way down this mountain.”
He glanced up, the expression in his eyes cool and determined. “I not only could, I’ll do whatever I have to do to get you home.”
For some reason, that simple statement rattled her. She shook her head. “You shouldn’t feel that way. It isn’t your fault we crashed. If anything, it’s mine.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Seth,” she said simply. “He made me angry, I threatened to decrease the amount he gets every month, and he retaliated. It’s my fault, all of it. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care what you said, that doesn’t justify him trying to kill two people.”
“I’m not justifying his actions. I’m saying I triggered them. So you have no reason to feel responsible—”
He tugged his face mask down. “I don’t feel responsible for the crash.”
“—or for me,” she finished doggedly.
“Things aren’t that simple. Sometimes blame has nothing to do with responsibility. When you treasure something, you want to take care of it.”
Treasure. The word arrowed through her, pinned her to the wall. He shouldn’t be saying things like that. Men didn’t say things like that, it was against their natures. “You can’t treasure me,” she said, automatically withdrawing from him, mentally if not physically. “You don’t know me.”
“Well, now, there we disagree. Do the math.”
The last sentence left her completely at sea. “What math? Are we talking about math?”
“We are now. Let’s take a break, and I’ll explain it to you.”
He tied the sled harness to a tree so it wouldn’t start sliding down the mountain, then they sat side by side on a rock, one that had absorbed a little heat from the bright sunlight. Bailey had on so many clothes she couldn’t really feel the heat, but at least a chill wasn’t seeping through the layers. She pulled her own face mask down and closed her eyes for a minute, pretending the sun was warm on her face.
They drank some water, then each had a bite of the remaining trail mix bar. They’d halved one of the bars that morning, and they’d agreed to slowly eat the other one during the course of the day, figuring their energy would flag more on the first day. As they went down in altitude and oxygen became more plentiful, theoretically they’d have more energy—theoretically. She hoped they were right, because so far everything had been a real struggle.
He said, “This is the fourth day, right?”
“Right.
“Counting from eight o’clock on the first day, which was when we took off, it’s now been seventy-six hours.”
She nodded. The first day, the day of the crash, didn’t count as a full twenty-four hours. Counting from the time they’d taken off, the first twenty-four hours had ended at eight a.m. on the second day. “I’m with you so far.”
“How long does the average date last? Four hours, maybe?”
“Four or five.”
“Okay, let’s say five hours. Seventy-six divided by five is the equivalent of…fifteen dates. If you divide it by four, we’re on our nineteenth date. Split the difference; we’re on our seventeenth date.”
“All right,” she said, amused by the inventiveness of his theory, whatever it was. “Seventeen dates, huh? We’re practically going steady.”
“Going steady, my ass. We’re on the verge of moving in together.”
She gave him a quick look to see if he was joking, but he was watching her with a steady determination that rocked her down to her boots. He was serious: he wanted more than she’d ever given anyone. He wanted more than sex. He wanted a commitment—and there was nothing in the world that terrified her more.
But he…he said he treasured her. Bailey couldn’t remember anyone ever, in her entire life, putting her welfare ahead of his, but that was what Cam was telling her.
“I can’t—” she began, intending to give him some excuse, whatever she could think of, as a reason for not becoming involved.
“You can,” he interrupted. “You’re going to. We’ll take things slow, ease you into the concept. I understand you’re dealing with childhood baggage, and that’s the kind that’s hard to unpack. But sooner or later you’ll trust me, and accept that someone cares about you.”
She wanted to tell him that wasn’t a problem. People had cared about her before. Logan cared about her. Jim had been fond of her. She had friends…well, she’d had some friendly acquaintances before she married Jim, but they’d distanced themselves from her so she supposed they hadn’t been real friends. Even her parents had cared about her, about all their children, though ultimately not as much as they cared about themselves.
She wanted to tell him all that. The words formed in her brain, but refused to form on her tongue. She would be lying. Trust was a problem. Her defense against people not caring about her was that she wouldn’t care first. In the don’t-care category, she was already ahead of everyone she met.
Except him. She couldn’t get away from him. She couldn’t forget about him, couldn’t not care about him.
And…he said he treasured her.
She looked into those sharp gray eyes, and felt the ground fall from beneath her. She was lost, utterly without defense against him. She burst into tears. “Oh, no,” she sobbed, mortified. “I can’t
cry.”
“You could have fooled me.” He put his arms around her and held her close, rocking back and forth a little in comfort. “I think you’re doing a great job.”
He was overlooking the obvious. She pulled away and tried her best to suck it up, before she got into real trouble. “No, really. I’ll h-have ice on my face.”
“Betcha I could melt it,” he said, a slow smile curving his lips.
Damn him, she was in such trouble.
28
TO GIVE THEMSELVES ENOUGH TIME TO CONSTRUCT A sturdy shelter, they stopped for the day at three o’clock. They were still high in the mountains, at the mercy of icy winds, below-freezing temperatures, and possibly more snow, though the skies above were clear at the moment. Weather systems could arrive fast, and it wasn’t as if they had access to the Weather Channel to keep an eye on conditions. Another factor for stopping then was that they came across a large tree that had fallen across some boulders; the tree provided a ready-made central support, which saved a lot of work. If they continued on for another hour or so, they might not find anything as suitable.
Bailey was exhausted, but to her relief the altitude sickness hadn’t returned. Tomorrow, she thought, they could walk a little longer, a little farther—maybe. They were almost out of food, and when the last candy bar was gone, their energy would fast decline. They had to descend far enough to begin finding berries, nuts, edible leaves—anything—or their situation would rapidly worsen.
“I guess the first thing we do is build a fire,” she said, looking forward to the warmth and psychological lift.
“Tonight, anyway,” he said absently, looking out over the mountainous expanse. “After tonight, I’d rather save the juice for when we’re farther down, out of all this wind.”
She closed one eye, looking askance at him. That seemed like reverse logic to her. “Don’t we need a fire more now?”