But she wasn’t going to think about that. That was a stupid, stupid pastime. Fantasizing about McClain under the circumstances was likely to get her into more trouble than she was in already. And if there was one thing she didn’t need it was more trouble.
Their makeshift bed was toasty warm. It was the warmest she had felt for a day and a half. Clara stretched her legs
luxuriously, no longer alarmed by the hard feel of McClain’s legs next to hers or the soft abrasion of his hairs against her own silky smoothness. Lying on her side, tucked against his ribcage as if she belonged there, felt like the most natural position in the world. Despite the cabin and the forest and Rostov and the police and everything else she felt ridiculously safe. And happy.
Her eyes were closing and she sighed once with warm contentment. Then she was asleep.
XIII
The air she was breathing was cold, so cold that she burrowed against the warmth beside her like a rabbit seeking its nest. Her nose was flattened against a soft, furry pillow. Heat and a peculiar pungent scent were all around her, enfolding her. Her arms were clutching a warm, tensile object; her legs splayed across twin tree trunks cloaked in a rough velvet. …
Her eyes opened to encounter a broad expanse of hairy chest. Her nose was buried in it. Its fragrance was in her nostrils; its warmth pillowed her head. Her arms, she discovered, were wrapped around a powerful neck. Her legs were sprawled over sinewy legs. McClain! She was lying right on top of him.
“Good morning, angel.” The husky drawl sounded like nothing she had ever heard come out of his mouth before. Raising her eyes from their mortified contemplation of his chest, she encountered warm, gleaming slits of green and blushed to her little toes. Hurriedly she tried to slide her hands down from his neck. Those sexy lips smiled a little.
His hands caught her wrists and held them against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” Clara muttered, embarrassed, as she tried to roll off him. He prevented her with an agile movement of his leg. Her legs slipped down until they were on either side of one of his. His hair-roughened thigh lifted slightly until it was pressed against the juncture of her legs. Clara remembered with a sense of shock that she was not wearing any underwear. Her body was completely bare beneath his sweatshirt, and the sweatshirt had ridden up somewhere around her hips. His thigh pressed against naked skin. Clara flushed as she felt the heat and pressure of it, and squirmed in an effort to escape without making him aware of how very intimate the posture was. Squirming was a mistake. She felt a jolt of electricity that sent pleasurable tremors coursing down the insides of her thighs.
“I’m not,” he murmured, tugging on her hands. Helplessly, knowing she would regret this but unable to resist the marvelous quivering that was radiating out from the place where his thigh, so warm and hard, pressed against her, she subsided against his chest, her fingers curling convulsively in the nest of hair. His thigh between her legs pressed her upwards until her mouth was level with his neck. Then he bent his head and kissed her.
His kiss was every bit as devastating as she remembered. Clara closed her eyes and was lost. When he stroked her lips with his tongue she parted them helplessly. She remembered too well the abortive fire he had engendered before.
He tasted faintly musky. His tongue was hot, soft, barely demanding at first as it explored her mouth. She touched it with her own tongue, stroked it, caressed his lips as he had hers: his skin tasted of salt. Then her tongue was in his
mouth as his tongue was in hers, and she was wrapping her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him, catching fire.
She clung to him, kissing him as devouringly as he kissed her, hardly noticing as his hands slid beneath the oversized sweatshirt to caress first the silky skin of her back, and then her shoulders, and finally her bottom. When a large warm hand closed on each separate cheek, she jumped a little, her mouth striving for an instant to separate from his. But his hands held her, squeezing, easing her back down onto that pleasure giving thigh, and she allowed herself to settle back, to be pleasured. The exquisite feelings that were radiating through her flesh were not to be denied.
“Gently, baby.”
Until he whispered the words she hadn’t realized how she was straining against him, instinctively searching for the ultimate pleasure. Before she could assimilate the knowledge he was turning with her, holding her to him as he eased her onto her back, lifting the sweatshirt clear of her breasts at the same time. An icy finger of air creeping beneath the blanket as he turned gave her another moment’s awareness. But then he was pulling the blanket over both their heads, settling her down in their cozy world of blanket covered raft, protected from the cold by the sausage like sides. And he was looking at her breasts. Clara felt her breath catch at the look in his eyes as he studied her.
“You’ve got great tits, baby,” he murmured. The words, which she would have found offensive from anyone else at any other time, excited her almost unbearably. Her hands came up to clutch at his shoulders. She pulled him down to her, quivering as she guided his mouth to her nipple. …
Oh, the pleasure of it! The exquisite wonder of his hot
wet mouth moving over the tip of her breast, drawing in the distended nipple, suckling it like a babe. She felt a shaft of excitement shoot down between her thighs, where his thigh had taken up residence once again. As he kissed and suckled and nibbled she arched her back, pressing her breasts against him with wanton abandon, clutching his head with both hands in his hair as she rubbed herself against that marvelous thigh. …
Then one of his hands was sliding down from its play with her breasts, stroking her stomach, a finger burrowing playfully into her navel before moving lower, hovering just above the soft triangle of hair that ached for his touch.
When still he hesitated her hips lifted in instinctive supplication, inviting his touch in a wordless gesture that was as old as woman. Still his fingers continued to trace tantalizing circles just above and around the sides, tickling her thighs, darting playfully close and then retreating.
“Please, Jack!” The words were gasped against his neck. She thought she would die, just die, if he didn’t touch her there, now. She felt his teeth close on her nipple with a force that would have hurt if she had not been so far gone in pleasure, felt his hand clutch her other breast in a grip that was bruising in its power. Then that craved-for hand was homing in between her thighs, finding the tiny bud that quivered desperately beneath his caress, then sliding lower and inside. …
“God, you’re hot,” she thought she heard him mutter as she gasped and shuddered and sighed at what he was doing to her. Then his hand was withdrawing, and she was whimpering protests, her hands leaving his head to tug
beggingly at that deserting hand. But instead of yielding to her entreaties, the hand she was clutching led her to his body, where she encountered first the hard skin of his abdomen and then the elastic waistband of his briefs. Her knuckles brushed the hard bulge below it and her knees turned to cream cheese.
“Now you touch me,” he murmured, and she did, her hands greedy for him, caressing the muscle-ridged abdomen, tugging at the curling tufts of hair, then suddenly starving for the feel of him and yanking down the briefs with fingers that were unsteady until he was in her hands, huge and hot and pulsing, and he was groaning and sighing with her hungry caresses.
Both his thighs were between hers now as he loomed over her, supporting his weight with his knees and one hand. His other hand was caressing her breasts. His eyes were a hot, smoldering emerald as he watched her play with him, watched her face as she took in the size and heat of him, watched her body as it lay spread open beneath him, ready for his taking. And yet still he held himself from her, not giving her what she craved. Clara felt that she would go insane if he didn’t come into her soon. She lifted her hips to encourage him. He bent and kissed her swiftly on the lips, but that wasn’t what her body wanted. She pulled on him, trying to guide him to the burning center of her, but still he resisted. She whimpered enticingly, trying to maneuver him on top of her with squirming movements of her own, trying to seduce him with a tiny line of biting kisses traced up the muscular arm nearest her lips, but to no avail. He was hard and hot and pulsing in her hands, and she was going crazy beneath him, but he still would not give her what she wanted.
“Love me, lack,” she whispered at last, ashamed at having to beg but wanting him desperately, needing him so enormously that her shame was a tiny thing compared to it. But still he wouldn’t come inside her. Instead he caught each knee in his hand, lifting them over his shoulders so that her feet rested halfway down his back. Her hips were in the air and her body was spread open for him to see, or smell, or kiss … She didn’t know whether to die of delight or horror.
“Jack, no!” Horror won out.
“Yes,” he corrected softly. Then he kissed her, his mouth and tongue wet and scalding hot against her. And her world exploded into a million brightly colored starbursts of delight.
When at last he lifted his head she was gasping, quivering from head to toe, tingling in places she hadn’t even known existed. He put her down and she lay supine beneath him, her head thrown back, body pulsing with random tremors, feeling as though she had died and gone to some place far more marvelous than heaven.
Then it started up again.
He slid inside her, enormous and as hot as a poker just off the fire, tilling her to capacity and then some, not even giving her time to come down off the high she was floating on before he was thrusting, caressing, taking, giving, making her feel more and more and more until she was crying her ecstasy into his mouth, tasting herself on his lips and knowing that it was the most erotic sensation she had ever experienced, gouging his back with her nails and moaning his name, “Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack,
Jack!”
until at last he took pity on her and found his own release, groaning his pleasure into
her throat as he ground himself into her shaking body.
Afterwards, she lay there for long moments, eyes closed, body limp except for the random tremors that still racked it. She had never felt so utterly replete, so totally a woman. His woman. Jack McClain’s.
Slowly her eyes opened. He was still on top of her, sprawled deadweight across her, his sweat dripping onto her body, his breathing stertorous in her ear. Slowly what she had just said to herself replayed in her mind: His woman. Jack McClain’s. Just who the hell
was
Jack McClain? She didn’t know, not with any certainty. She doubted if anybody did. He was a stranger, a dangerous stranger from a shadowy world she wanted no part of. How could she have been such a fool?
“Get off me,” she said, pushing at his shoulder with both arms. She might as well have pushed at Mount Rushmore. He didn’t budge.
“I said get
off
me!” This time her voice was loud, and her push meant business. He lifted himself up on one elbow so that he could see her face. The rest of his body still skewered hers to the rubber bottom of the raft and the hard floor beneath.
“Are you
deaf? I said get off me!”
She was shrieking now. His eyes narrowed and he obligingly rolled off her. She immediately leaped to her feet, pulling the blanket with her to shield her body from his eyes. The icy cold air in the room acted like a douche of equally cold water. Self-disgust at what she had done rose like bile in her throat. She felt physically nauseated. For a moment she feared she might be sick.
“What’s your problem, anyway?” His voice was a low-timbered growl. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of
the raft, as naked as the day he was born and not one whit bothered by it. Clara thought of the things he had done to her and felt nausea churn again. How could she have behaved like that, with McClain of all people? Like a sailor, a spy probably had a woman in every port. James Bond made it with all the ladies in his movies. McClain was clearly bent on carrying on the lofty tradition. At her expense.
“You make me sick,” she said clearly, wrapping the blanket around her like a sarong as she backed toward where her clothes hung before the cold stove.
“God in heaven!” He sounded thoroughly fed up, and as she watched with a kind of fascinated fury he stood up with magnificent unconcern for his nakedness and glared at her. “I didn’t make you sick. You
are
sick. Crazy sick! What in God’s name are you getting so bent out of shape about? It was only sex, after all.”
“Only sex!” Her voice failed her. She’d known it, just known it. She’d made an utter ass out of herself only to be marked down as number 6,849 on his bedpost. He probably had experiences like that all the time. Horny women throwing themselves at him—
“Yeah. Sex. You know, something normal men and women enjoy doing together sometimes. Like when a man wakes up with a hard-on and a naked woman draped all over him and takes care of it? Sex!”
“You
bastard.”
In her fury she could barely talk. That she should live to he so humiliated—and she had brought it on herself, through her own lack of control.
“I’d rather be a bastard than a repressed, sex-starved old maid,” he said through clenched teeth. Then, brushing past her, he yanked his jeans off the line, scooped up his
shoes and stalked outside, still buck naked and sublimely unashamed.
Clara stared furiously after that magnificent bare backside and then, as the door banged behind him, threw the blanket in his wake in a paroxysm of frustrated rage.
XIV
Yowl!
Clara scowled at Puff fiercely. He was stalking back and forth across the limited space in the middle of the raft for all the world like an expectant father. They had been on the river for some forty-five minutes; Puff had howled at least twice a minute. That made some ninety yowls in under an hour.
“Can’t you shut that damn furball up?”
Yowl!
Clara’s glare transferred from Puff to McClain and intensified along the way. These were the first words he had spoken to her since stalking out of the cabin. Her first inclination was not to even bother to reply to what was clearly a rhetorical question—after forty-eight hours of Puff’s company he must know that shutting Puff up was next to impossible—but the temptation to say something nasty was irresistible.
“I could throw him in.”
Yowl!
The look he threw at her over his shoulder was deadly.
“Let me.”
“Or you could use that gun in your belt for something besides looking macho. There are squirrels and rabbits and things like that in the woods, you know. If you were any good with it, you could shoot us something to eat. He’s hungry. And so am I.”
Yowl!
He turned his attention back to the river. The morning was sunny and clear, but the wind was cold and his shoulders were hunched under the poncho which she had returned to him since her own clothes were dry. Unless he was much more warm-blooded than she, he was already freezing. And the occasional spray of water that blew up around the raft was no help.
Yowl!
“I don’t like shooting helpless animals.”
Clara thought for a moment that she hadn’t heard that correctly. “What?”
He cast another of those malevolent looks back over his shoulder. “I said I don’t like shooting helpless animals!”
Clara hooted. “You, the big secret agent men, don’t like shooting animals? Ha, ha! You go around shooting people, don’t you? Isn’t that what spies do? How can you shoot a person and not a squirrel when we’re starving? You don’t even like animals!”
Yowl!
“I do like animals—except for huge furballs with claws like razors and a howl that could be heard on the back forty. And for your information, I would much rather shoot a man in the line of duty than a squirrel to fill your gut. The few men I have had occasion to shoot deserved it; a helpless squirrel does not.”
Yowl!
“So sensitive!” she marveled mockingly.
He half turned to give her the full force of an inimical glare. “If you don’t shut up I’m going to throw you
and
the furball overboard. I’ve had about as much of both of you as I’m going to take.”
Yowl!
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah!”
“Try it, big man.” Clara’s hands tightened on her oar. If he made a move in her direction she would do her best to brain him. She hated him so much this morning that her nerve endings vibrated with it. She hated him so much that she could taste it in her mouth. She hated him so much that if he were lying dead at her feet she would laugh and step over his bleeding corpse. She hated him so much—
Yowl!
“Oh, shut up!” Clara said to Puff with all the loathing she had not succeeded in expressing to McClain. McClain laughed jeeringly and turned back to steer the raft. Puff looked at her reproachfully, then stopped his restless pacing long enough to put his front paws on the side and look over into the rushing brown water.
Yoowwlll!
“If we get lucky, maybe he’ll fall overboard on his own,” McClain muttered as Puff resumed his pacing. Clara glared at McClain’s back. If anyone was going to fall overboard, she fervently hoped it would be him. How she would laugh! The very thought dragged a grim smile to her lips.
Two hours later, the day had warmed slightly while the river had swiftened. They were speeding along now; McClain’s oar was required only to push them off any objects that happened to get in the way. Puff had finally stopped yowling.
He was huddled in the very center of the raft, hunched on all fours as though ready to take action at any moment, tail twitching furiously, gold eyes angry slits. The bottom of the raft was awash in about half an inch of icy water. Like Clara, Puff had evidently given up the hope of finding any escape from the freezing wetness. He just crouched there looking evil tempered, while she sat cross-legged behind him feeling more evil tempered than he looked. Exchanging a glare with him, Clara felt a momentary spurt of sympathy. Poor cat, he hadn’t asked to get caught up in this mess any more than she had. It was all the fault of that insensitive, boorish Neanderthal in the bow.
McClain was frowning as he scanned the banks on either side of the river, Clara watched him sourly. The man was by no stretch of the imagination handsome: his nose looked like it had been run over by a Mack truck, his chin stuck out like Jay Leno’s and the rest of his face was nothing to write home about. His hair was cut so short his ears stuck out, and his neck was as thick as a gorilla’s. His only good points were a pair of beautiful green eyes and an admittedly gorgeous body. Which were more than offset by his nasty disposition. He was undoubtedly the most hateful man she had ever met in her life. She
despised
him.
“We’d better pull for shore.”
“Why?” Something about the too casual way he said it caught her attention.
“I think there may be a dam ahead.”
Clara still didn’t understand. He must have caught a glimpse of her puzzled look, because he added impatiently, “You know, with a waterfall?”
A waterfall! Clara’s eyes widened and she picked up her oar, ready to do her utmost to help McClain pull for shore. Of course that was why the current had speeded up so.
Debris swirled by them at an ever increasing pace, all headed toward the falls. Visions of the enormous roaring drop-off of Niagara Falls, the only waterfall she had ever seen firsthand, danced in her head. They would never survive something like that!
The bank on their side of the river, the west side, was a low, sloping rock wall topped by tall pines that crowded right to the rock’s edge. Getting a purchase on that rock wall might be tricky, but then Clara saw where McClain was aiming for. A fallen tree lay top down in the river some twenty feet ahead. Its roots had torn out of the bank to form a web of interconnecting branches. If they could maneuver the raft toward that, it would no doubt catch them and they could climb out along the pine. She hoped.
They were heading straight for the fallen tree when Clara just happened to lift her eyes slightly beyond it. For an instant she could hardly believe what she was seeing. She blinked once, then twice, then let out a yelp.
“McClain, look, stop, go back!”
He looked sharply around at her, then followed her horrified gaze to the small group of armed sheriff’s deputies standing under the trees not more than a few hundred feet ahead. A pack of yapping hounds milled at their feet.
The word McClain uttered then was the filthiest one Clara had ever heard. It expressed her sentiments exactly.
“Paddle!” he bit out next, suiting his actions to the words. Clara needed no second bidding. She paddled for her life, imitating McClain’s actions as the raft changed directions and headed for the swift current at the center of the river. There was a sharp popping noise, another curse from McClain, and Clara chanced a look at the deputies, who were almost directly across from them now. Three had rifles lifted to their shoulders; a fourth was lowering his.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
“Duck!” ordered McClain, paddling like crazy. A cacophony of pops sounded over her head as Clara threw herself on the floor of the raft, huddling on her knees, arms covering her head. Puff happened to be where she had landed, and she hugged him beneath her, expecting any instant to feel a bullet ripping into her shrinking flesh.
Of course, if a bullet hit the raft they would sink. Clara’s head lifted as she thought of that. She got just a glimpse of McClain hunched over the bow, paddling for all he was worth, his bowed back scant inches from her face. Then another series of pops sounded and she covered up her head again.
“You can come up for air. We’re out of range, I think.”
His less than comforting words sounded breathless. Clara lifted her head cautiously to see McClain frowning back over his shoulder at her.
“You’re not hit, are you?” He sounded almost concerned.
“No. I don’t think so.” She eased herself cautiously back into a semi-kneeling position, looking around as she did so. The raft was rushing along, now caught up in the ever quickening current. The deputies were a barely discernible group of stick figures in the distance.
“What about the furball?”
Puff was crouched in the center of the raft, training those furious golden eyes on McClain, moaning for all he was worth. McClain’s mouth twitched.
“He’s
all right,” he said, answering his own question as he turned back to guide the raft.
“What about you?” Clara was so shaken that the words were scarcely more than a whisper. She had to repeat them before he heard.
“Me? Not a scratch.” But she noticed he sounded worried,
and that his face was grim as he stared down the river. Of course, he must be thinking about the falls. But surely they still had time to get ashore, maybe on the other side. …
“What’s that?” An ominous rumble was just barely audible. As the raft rushed onward, the sound increased in volume until in a matter of just a few minutes it was a full throated roar.
“The falls!” McClain yelled over his shoulder, paddling feverishly for shore without making any noticeable headway against the swooshing water. As Clara absorbed that bad news the raft shot around a bend in the river. What she saw next made her stiffen and grab hold of the sides of the raft with both hands.
Walls of stark rock towered on either side of the river, forming a canyon through which the water rushed. Spray shot up along the rock walls with a hissing sound as the water, its force telescoped, picked up speed and power. Getting off the river would be impossible now, Clara saw. They would have to stay the course, whatever that might be.
“Climb onto the rim and hook your leg over!”
“What?” They were shouting to be heard over the roar, and Clara was not even sure that McClain heard. He was already straddling the rolled side like a rodeo rider mounting a bucking bronco. Clara goggled at him. He had to be joking! As the raft tipped precariously with the shift in his weight, he leaned inward. Clara grabbed the sides again. Puff moaned, his eyes slits of desperation as they scanned the trees far above for succor.
“Hook your leg under like this!” McClain demonstrated how the leg that was still inside the raft was clamped under the rolled side. Clara watched him with growing horror. She couldn’t do that. There was no way—
“Do you want to drown?” he bellowed. The roar was getting louder; the current growing swifter. Spumes of icy spray showered the raft, which was bumping along like an airplane in heavy turbulence. They were sluicing through the water at breakneck speed. Puff was moaning in terror, eyes closed, ears flattened, fur beaded by spray as he crouched in the center of the raft. Could cats swim? Could anybody swim in this torrent?
“We’re going to drown whether I do it or not!” she wailed. Courage had never been her strong suit, and faced with imminent horrible death she thought she would likely keel over of a heart attack before the water ever got her. Her heart was pumping so hard against the wall of her chest that a heart attack seemed a foregone conclusion.
“Get on the rim!” This time the order was given in a roar to rival the waterfall’s. “Over there!”
He gestured with the oar to a spot roughly opposite to where he was stationed. His clothes were soaked already, his black hair glistening like a seal’s. Water ran down his face in streams. His teeth chattered. But the look in his eyes was chillingly familiar a brilliant green glitter that made him seem vibrantly alive.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, you lunatic?” Clara screeched at him bitterly. Then, realizing she had no choice, she scooted on her bottom to the place he indicated and gingerly lifted one leg over the rim. Immediately the leg dangling in the water protested the icy wetness. But as Clara maneuvered herself upright she forgot all about bodily discomfort. She forgot all about everything as she stared in terror at what was ahead.
The river rushed onward in gushing streams of brown water, each with a current so strong that it was separately visible, leaping and intertwining as if braided by a giant
hand before disappearing some two hundred feet away. Just disappearing, with a tremendous roar, beneath a cloud of foggy spray.
“Oh, my God!” she moaned, lying down along the rim and gripping it with both hands in response to McClain’s shouted direction. The raft was bucking like a bronco now; its every movement seemed designed to throw her off into the water that boiled like an icy cauldron all about. She clung grimly to the rubber, hardly feeling the cold, so wet she couldn’t get any wetter. Her hair streamed over her eyes, practically blinding her. She could just make out Puff’s crouched figure in the middle of the raft, ears flat against his head as he stared wildly all around.
“Puff!” she cried. “McClain, what about Puff? He’ll drown!”
McClain stared at her from his perch on the opposite side of the crazily spinning raft, then shifted his attention to the soggy, shivering, moaning animal in the center.
“Goddamn it to hell!” she thought she heard him mutter. Then, in the most heroic action Clara had ever seen, he reached out an arm to catch Puff by the collar, dragging him close until he could scoop him up and hold him clamped between his chest and the rubber side.
Clara screamed as the raft bucked wildly over a sea of hissing white froth before shooting straight out into space. For just an instant they hung suspended, a bright orange pellet against an eternity of baby blue sky, then her eyes shut tightly and her stomach jumped into her throat as they plunged down.
Clara clung to the raft with every ounce of her strength, her nails digging into the rubber, her knees gripping it so hard that she could feel them meet even with the air-filled roll between them. The jolt of the landing took them under;
then the raft righted itself, surfacing with a shake like a dog shedding water, only to go under again and then up in the turbulent maelstrom below the dam. Under and up, under and up they went until she lost all sense of where she was and what was happening. All she knew was that she had to hang on despite the river’s attempts to tear her free and the icy, numbing water that, with a malevolent will of its own, was trying to drown her.