Authors: Sara Petersen
***
Mac railed at himself all the way down to the creek, despising the intrusive feelings he was doing a poor job of fighting. Before Jo had come to the ranch, he was calm and minded his own affairs, and now he was stumbling over branches in the dark to protect her from Leif.
That’s bull
! His own inner voice harassed him. You’re going because you’re jealous. That thought stopped Mac’s heart cold, the truth of it ringing in his ears like a bomb blast. In the dense fog of aftershock, brilliant flashes of Jo poured into his mind. Jo at the campfire, her wavy hair rippling down her back. Jo with Sam, playing tag in between the garden rows. Jo laughing at herself this morning, her blue eyes full of brightness. Shaking the images from his mind, he refused them deeper access.
Reaching the bank of the creek, Mac scanned through the darkness, up and down each side trying to make out the figures of Jo and Leif. Not seeing either one riled him, and he picked his way further up the bank, carefully stepping over downed limbs.
“Jo?” Leif’s voice called out a few feet ahead.
Following the sound, Mac spotted Leif’s outline in the dark. “Nope,” he answered flatly. Reaching Leif, Mac watched him stand up and button his pants. “Where is Jo?” he ground out angrily.
“She’s up the creek. Where did you think she was?” Leif spurted back at him, disliking Mac’s tone and stance. Leif knew Mac would get the wrong idea. He’d actually counted on it and figured he’d come hunting them. Now he was going to send Mac up the creek to wait for Jo, and he was going to go back to the campfire, a perfectly executed operation. Leif pulled on his boots and started back, calling over his shoulder, “She’s fifty yards that way.” He raised his arm, pointing to the left without slowing down.
Mac stood where he was for several minutes, at war with himself and cursing Leif. He’d been maneuvered, and he knew it. Realizing he couldn’t just go back to camp and leave Jo out there alone, he started up the creek in the direction Leif had pointed, feeling tense. He’d been battling natural impulses for weeks now, and he fervently hoped that when he found Jo, it wouldn’t be in a state that would make his struggle harder. His pulse throbbed, remembering the first time he’d caught her unawares. Then, it was just an unknown woman in a wet dress, trespassing on his property. Now, the memory had a name. It was Jo in the wet clinging dress.
Mac was grateful for the clear night and bright moon helping to guide his steps up the creek bank to Jo. The creek was narrow but still deep enough in spots to allow for wading. About twenty feet in front of him, next to one of these deep holes, he spied Jo’s silhouette in the darkness.
The crunch of gravel alerted her that someone was approaching. Turning her head in that direction, she called, “Leif? Is that you?”
Mac’s deep voice answered negatively, “No. It’s Mac.”
“Oh,” she sounded, deflated, which irked Mac.
Was she hoping for Leif
? he wondered.
Assuming from her casual manner that she was already dunked and dressed, he continued his steps toward her, coming to stand only a few feet away. “I met Leif down the creek a few minutes ago. He’s on his way back to camp,” Mac explained.
Jo had grown more comfortable around Mac in the last few weeks, but suddenly she felt shy and inexplicably edgy, alone in the darkness with him. Unable to see his face or read his eyes was discomfiting.
“Did you come to take a swim?” she inquired, standing on one leg and bending down to pull up her boot. As she did so, a rock slipped from under her foot, and she tripped to the side.
Stepping closer, Mac caught her and let her lean on him for balance. “No. I just came as a precaution…against predators.” Mac’s white teeth flashed in the darkness.
“Ha,” Jo snickered, clasping his arm tightly, “the only danger out here is Leif.”
Mac agreed with her, “Yep, that’s the one I was thinkin’ of.”
Finishing with her boots, Jo stood up, releasing his arm. “I can handle Leif,” she said confidently, thinking it ironic that out of both brothers, the only one that presented a legitimate threat to her was the one standing next to her right now.
Mac stepped closer to Jo, their silhouettes melding into the other’s in the blackness. Leaning down, so close that Jo could feel his breath on her face, he whispered huskily, “What about me? Can you handle me, Jo?”
Mac’s words rippled lightly across her face; his masculine smell seeped achingly into her being. Jo’s heart beat loudly in her chest. Mac’s face was so near that she could almost feel the rough whiskers of his face and the heat from his skin. Jo had no doubt in her mind that she absolutely could not “handle” Mac.
It would be as about as easy as handling a grizzly bear.
His size and severity alone made him a formidable opponent, but when he stared at her with his smoldering eyes and uttered low propositions into her ears, her mutinous will waved its white flag.
Independent from her mind, her hands slowly ascended between them, longing to feel the scrape of his jaw against her fingertips and trace the face obscured from her sight.
Mac felt the intent of her hands before any actual contact was made; his breath held, waiting expectantly. At the last second, Jo’s hands curled into tight fists, and she pulled them into her chest. Her face, which had been turned upward to him, slanted harshly to the ground. She was seconds away from touching him, fractions away from reaching for him when she remembered that Mac was acting, that his rakish innuendos weren’t real, and that he was toying with her.
Breathlessly, she confessed, “No. I’m no match for you.”
The admission from her lips was deeply satisfying to Mac, and he smiled in the darkness, pleasure coursing through him.
“Are you smiling?” Jo demanded. “If I’d known you were going to gloat, I wouldn’t have told the truth,” she berated, backing up a step and put distance between them.
“I can’t help it,” Mac admitted. “I like when a woman says she’s helpless against me.” Mac’s egotistical comment goaded Jo further.
“What an indecent thing to admit!” she scolded, as she began tromping through the trees on her way back to camp, with Mac following closely behind her. This conversation was affecting her, and though she denied it, Mac’s statement wasn’t far off the mark. Oftentimes, she did feel completely helpless against him, and it terrified her. This game Mac was playing, the act he was putting on, was becoming too real for Jo, and she wanted it stopped.
“You know the joke is up, right?” she asked, stepping over a log.
Holding her elbow to help her, he murmured lowly, “What joke?”
Jo halted and spun around to face him. “This!” she exclaimed, pointing to herself and Mac.
Taken aback by her sudden mood shift, Mac asked, “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the innuendos, the pushing me up against fences, and this! This flirting!” she threw at him.
Like hackles spiking along a dog’s back, Jo’s tone and manner aroused defensiveness in Mac. “You don’t seem to mind one bit when it’s coming from Leif’s corner,” he charged bitingly.
“It’s not the same with Leif. I know he’s only teasing and that he’s not doing it to mock me,” Jo hurtled back at him.
Throwing his hands out to the side, exasperated and angry for coming to the creek and getting tangled up in this mess, Mac asked derisively, “I’m
mocking
you?”
“I know the truth about Sam,” Jo interrupted him.
Mac exhaled quietly through his open mouth, wondering what one had to do with the other. A moment ago he was enjoying himself, trifling with Jo, and now she was snapping in his face. He clenched his fists at his side, keeping silent.
“I know that you adopted him and that you didn’t…well, you know…” Jo stuttered and blushed, grasping for the proper words. Mac’s icy stare pinned her. “I mean, Mattie told me about Sam,” she flustered.
Mac stood perfectly still before her, peering at her darkly while working to unravel her jumbled sentences.
“I thought that,” she paused again, searching for the right words. “Well, that you were a… well… a… ”
“A what?” Mac demanded impatiently.
“A playboy,” Jo winced, regretting her choice of words immediately. Reddening, she stammered, “I realized pretty quickly that you were a good father, no matter how Sam came to be in the world, but I still thought you were disreputable. And, well, after you propositioned me and acted…”She paused again, despising herself for the mess she was making of this conversation. “You acted like you were looking for some easy fun, so I assumed I was right.” If there had been a hole, Jo would have gladly jumped into it. “I know now…that you aren’t that way, and I shouldn’t have been so judgmental.” Excruciating minutes passed for Jo while she waited for Mac to say something or accept her apology.
In his anger, Mac didn’t hear the apology. The only thing he heard was that Jo was opposed to his advances.
Softly, beseechingly, her voice floated to him, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me go on believing the worst about you?”
The rippling water and black stillness hovered around them while Jo waited for an answer. Turning his back on her, Mac took a step toward the camp, but Jo’s hand reached out to him, lightly resting on his arm and detaining him with as much force as a butterfly.
“Please?” she said. Her plea tore at him.
Resigned, he faced her, intense and looming. “I didn’t correct you because he’s mine. He is my son. Anything prior to that doesn’t matter…because that’s what he is now. When we had that conversation, you were only a ranch hand, a temporary person in our lives. Imagine, over the course of Sam’s life, how many temporary people will pass through it. It’s not information they would need to know. I didn’t hide it from you. It was none of your concern,” Mac answered tightly.
Jo could tell he wanted her to leave it alone, but she wanted answers. She needed to know if his flirtations were genuine or if he was just toying with her.
“I understand why you wouldn’t mention that he was adopted from the beginning, but when you realized what I thought about you, that I thought you’d fathered him out of wedlock, “—Jo gulped—“why not say something then? Why not defend yourself?” The words reverberated off Mac’s back and crumbled unanswered to the dirt. Keeping up her assault, she continued, “You’re not the philanderer I judged you to be…nor are you attracted to me…so you don’t need to keep punishing me with these pretenses and these innuendos. It’s confusing and…” Jo stopped as she searched for the right word. Finding no help for it, she stated flatly, “hurtful.”
Mac’s icy eyes flicked sharply at her accusation like a whip crackling through the air. He wanted to laugh at her naivete but knew the result would be another charge of brutality laid at his feet. Sure, his initial come on had been the result of anger, but his attraction to Jo was no pretense.
Coming to the creek tonight was a roaring mistake
, he chided himself.
Mac was like a wounded animal being coaxed from his cave. Jo moved too swiftly toward him, became too comfortable in his territory, and like any injured animal, he snarled and struck at her.
“Why would I waste my time correcting a snooty, unwanted, temporary ranch hand?” The caustic barb stung Jo. “Your opinion of me…wasn’t something I was concerned about. You were eager to think the worst. I just gave you what you wanted.”
The truthfulness of his acerbic words wrapped crushingly around Jo’s heart. Wanting it all unraveled at once with no more questions left flitting around her mind, she pushed further, “So, I was right then? Every remark, every heated look, was only you playing the part? It was a way to punish me for thinking badly of you?” she probed, the forbidden fears breaking her heart as she spoke them aloud.
The high-pitched chirp of crickets, the wind humming through the trees, and the rustling leaves were the only answers to Jo’s questions. Unable to speak, she nodded her head in the dark, accepting his silence as an admission, pained because it was as she’d expected and also what she’d feared.
Mac wanted to say more, to force the deadly arrow shot from him back into its quiver, but he stubbornly remained silent. In the last few years, he’d taken pride in his callousness, worn it like a cozy blanket, but he felt no sense of triumph in the blow he’d just delivered to Jo. He’d done exactly as she’d accused; he’d intentionally hurt her.
With words echoing like a sorrowful bugle call over a battlefield, Jo whispered quietly, “We should get back.”
Mac indecisively stood where he was, anxious to escape the mangled carnage but reluctant to leave it in its awful state. Releasing pent-up breath, he exhaled heavily then turned hotly away.
Clouds had drifted across the sky, and the moon was now hiding in their cover, denying the night its revealing light as Jo followed Mac’s tall shadow through the brush, over trees, and up a small bank without speaking, her mind and heart bound up inside her. She’d suspected that he didn’t care what she thought of him, and that this home she’d found was only temporary, so why did the words, just because they were spoken out loud, wound so deeply? Unwanted. The word stung Jo. Internally, she harshly scolded herself for letting her guard down, for daring to hope the attraction she felt for Mac could be returned.
When Mac and Jo were in the open again with no trees to shelter or hide them and the campfire within sight, he slowed his pace, waiting for Jo to move in beside him instead of trailing behind.