It also took an enormous amount of effort when her body hadn’t rebuilt its reserves. Every muscle in her body was trembling, and she was breathing like a bellows; just as she neared the bottom rung, she heard the scrape of a door opening.
“Fucking nipples on ice!”
The hoarse, muted roar would have made her fall off the ladder if it hadn’t been for the telltale noise of the door. Holding tight to the ladder, she peered through the rungs at him, where he was almost completely hidden by the dark shadows at the back of the camp building. The expression made her blink. “I’ve never heard that one before,” she commented faintly. “Innovative.”
Rapidly he strode forward, his expression both disbelieving and furious as he gripped her waist and peeled her off the ladder. He stood her up for a brief second as he switched positions, bending down to hook his left arm under her knees and lift her off the floor, holding her tight against his wet slicker. “You could have broken your damn fool neck!”
“But I didn’t,” she pointed out with impeccable logic, even though she was still gasping for breath. “So I saved both time, and wear and tear on you.” She hooked her left arm around his neck, and felt a
ker-THUNK
kind of thud in her chest as her heart reacted to how natural it felt to be held like this, to feel free to sling her arms around him.
If anything, he looked even more furious. “I can handle getting you up and down the ladder.”
He was just standing there, instead of taking her outside, and
her exertion in getting down the ladder had made the situation more dire. “I wasn’t impugning your manhood,” she said impatiently. “Just handle getting me out to the toilet. Pee now, chew out later.”
Muttering more obscenities under his breath, he strode to the back door. It wasn’t a regular door, but part of the wall itself that had been cut out and hinges installed, and was secured by sliding a two-by-eight into steel brackets. “Hold your hood in place,” he growled. “The wind’s still gusting.”
She grabbed her hood and held it as he turned sideways and maneuvered her through the door. It was like walking under a waterfall. The rain felt like a solid sheet of water, hammering at them. The portable was placed against the back of the building, just a few steps away, but if she hadn’t been wearing a slicker she’d have been drenched in a second. Ducking his head against the onslaught of water, Dare pulled open the toilet door and stood her up inside. “I’ll wait here,” he half-yelled, because the drumming of the rain on the plastic roof of the toilet sounded like, well, actual
drumming
.
She started to tell him not to be silly, to go back inside, but realized he wasn’t going to budge no matter what she said, so the best thing she could do was not waste time. She took care of business as fast as possible, cleaned her hands with the gel hand sanitizer, then opened the door. He had her swooped up into his arms and back inside the cabin before she could get her bearings.
He put her down so he could secure the heavy door and peel out of his dripping slicker. Balancing on one foot, Angie removed her own slicker, and he hung them over a rail to drip dry. She drew in a breath that was rich with the smell of hay, horse, and feed, which reminded her of her own horses. “The bastard,” she blurted. “He stole all four of my horses. I know he won’t take care of them; he can barely ride.”
“Then maybe he’ll get thrown and break his neck,” Dare said with a calm intent that told her he meant the comment literally.
“I hope so,” she muttered, and she was being just as literal as he was.
“We’ll get your horses back. Mine, too, if the nitwit didn’t run himself to death,” he said as he put his hands on her waist. “Alley oop.” Without pausing, he tossed her onto his shoulder. She grunted as the impact drove out her breath, but didn’t waste time complaining. Instead she grabbed him to steady herself as he began the upward climb; she was more than glad to let him carry her, because she was wiped out, almost back to square one. She was exhausted and cold, but at least she wasn’t soaking wet.
He turned his back and gave her some privacy while she pulled off the sweatpants and worked his thermal underwear back up her legs and hips, though to be honest she was already so close to conking out she wouldn’t have cared if he’d looked; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t put them on her the first time. Lying back on the mattress, she almost dozed off while he was rewrapping her ankle. Maybe she did actually go to sleep, because the next thing she knew he was sliding close against her and pulling the sleeping bag over them, enveloping them in a warm cocoon.
She snuggled back against him, oddly content. Feeling him so close to her was deeply comforting, something she desperately needed right now when she felt so off balance. Eventually everything would settle into place and she’d get a grip on things, but that time wasn’t now. For now, being warm and having him there was enough.
There were so many important things to think about, but a thought, an idea, would rise to the surface of her consciousness and then drift away, her mind too tired to hold on to it. She could actually feel sleep coming, feel herself sinking closer and closer to that delicious edge of unconsciousness, until it enveloped her as surely as his arms were wrapped around her.
The next time she woke, Angie had the feeling that several hours had passed, that she had finally, at last, gotten enough sleep to make a difference to her exhausted body. Outwardly nothing had changed; it was still raining, the light was still dim and gray, and they were still nestled under the sleeping bag. Somehow she knew, though, that it was now late afternoon. Dare must have slept, too, because if he’d been awake again and moving around, he hadn’t disturbed her, and she had to think he would have. She wasn’t used to sleeping with anyone, which had contributed to her restlessness, and she thought the same could probably be said about him.
He was still asleep now, his body hard and warm against hers, totally relaxed. His arm was heavy around her, his breath hot against the back of her neck, his chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm. Feeling him there like that made her want to turn into his arms, press her face against his chest, and just inhale the heated scent of his skin; for a moment, she was still just sleepy
enough that she almost did it, almost took that step, then reality slapped her in the face and with a small jerk she stopped.
Which, of course, woke him up. He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, his arm tightening around her in what she would almost call a hug, if they were on hugging terms. The ridiculousness of the situation made her smile. They’d faced a life-or-death situation together, they’d slept cuddled as close to each other as they could get, and they weren’t on hugging terms? She knew one thing for certain: She would never, ever again view him as the enemy. She couldn’t; he wasn’t. He maybe never had been, but circumstance and her own lack of self-confidence had kept her from seeing him as he was. She didn’t think he’d ever be an easy man to get to know, his grumpy state was likely permanent, but at the center of him was a solid streak of steely willpower that kept him going when lesser men would have given up.
“You okay?” he muttered, his rough voice guttural with sleep, but he didn’t seem really interested in the answer because he nestled his cheek against the back of her head and relaxed again, as if he were going back to sleep. A moment later, though, she knew he wasn’t, because the hard-on he’d warned her not to bitch about began pushing against her butt.
She thought about bitching anyway, just to jerk his chain, but sex was another one of those areas where she wasn’t as confident as she’d like to be. In her experience, it was more trouble than it was worth: In exchange for suffering the uncertainty of exposing her emotions, as well as her less-than-perfect body and her less-than-perfect judgment, to a man who might or might not appreciate any of them, she would get to experience a climax brought about by a hand. Climax-by-penis was a fairy tale, as far as she was concerned, so why not just bypass the middle man, so to speak, and take care of her climaxes herself? The process was a lot neater, less complicated, and easy on the emotions.
Not that she was going to have sex with Dare Callahan. She didn’t want to go there and she couldn’t imagine why he would,
either, except as an automatic kind of thing. She felt about as sexy as roadkill, and probably looked not much better. She couldn’t even feel flattered by his hard-on, because it was just a reaction to waking up, and had nothing to do with her, personally. He’d have one even if she wasn’t there.
So her options were that she could lie there and kind of enjoy feeling an erection poking at her even if she wasn’t the cause of it, or she could sort of casually shift away as if she hadn’t even noticed, pretend she was just waking up herself.
“Hey, don’t mind me,” he growled. “I’m just the guy with the hard-on poking at you, not somebody you really need to answer.”
And just like that her good intentions fell away, because nobody else had ever been able to jerk her chain the way Dare Callahan did. “Oh, is
that
what that is?” she cooed. “I thought it was a tube of Chapstick.”
He made a smothered kind of sound that might have been amusement, if he’d been the type of man who laughed. His big hand closed on her shoulder and he gently tugged her onto her back as he shifted to the side and propped himself on his elbow. Before she had an inkling what he might do, he gripped her hand and pressed it to the thick, hard ridge in his jeans. “Chapstick, my ass,” he said. There was a faint curve to his mouth that said he really might have laughed.
Angie froze, her mind going blank with shock at what he’d done, at suddenly finding herself in such uncharted territory she had no idea which way to go, or how she’d even got there. She turned as red as any teenager and jerked her hand away, stammering, “Wh-what’re you doing?” God, had he thought she was
flirting
? She didn’t know how to flirt. She sucked at it, so she never tried.
“Correcting a misconception,” he said, as if her question actually needed an answer. “Two, as a matter of fact.”
If she hadn’t been so at sea, she wouldn’t have responded, wouldn’t have let curiosity get the better of her. “Two?” she
blurted, completely off balance and almost panicked by the lightning speed with which the situation had altered.
“The first one, you can figure out on your own.” He actually gave a real smile, one that crinkled the corners of those vivid blue eyes, and if she’d been standing her knees would have gotten wobbly. Oh, thank God he didn’t smile all that often, she thought fervently, because the effect was lethal. “The second one, I’ll tell you about later.”
“Why not now?”
Damn it!
What was wrong with her? Why didn’t she just leave well enough alone, keep her mouth shut, and let the subject drop? Dare Callahan had just put her hand on his penis and she needed to stop thinking about him, divert him from thinking about it, and in general pretend it had never happened. She waved her hand as if to erase the words. “Never mind. It isn’t important.”
“That’s a matter of opinion, but it can wait.” He yawned and sat up, rotated his neck from side to side, stretched his arms over his head and rolled his shoulders, grimacing as ligaments popped. Getting her here had to have been a terrible effort for him, she thought guiltily. She had thanked him, but there was no way any words could repay him for what he’d done.
“Do you need to make another trip outside?” he asked as he twisted his neck from side to side, which made more popping noises.
“No, I’m good.” She made a helpless gesture. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For nearly crippling you. You sound like Rice Krispies when you move.”
“Snap, crackle, pop? Hell, I sound like that every morning when I get up.”
“I had to have made things worse.”
“The mud was the hardest part. Carrying someone conscious isn’t that tough. Dead weight’s a bitch, though.” He said it with the slightly absentminded manner of someone who was well acquainted
with carrying dead weight, then rolled to his feet with a litheness that belied any sore muscles or stiffness. “I’m starving. You have any preferences for supper? We’re okay for food. I always have some supplies up here, plus I brought more when I came up. We have jerky or power bars if easy’s what you want, or I can heat some water and we’ll have hot soup or stew—”
“Stew,” she said, sitting up as the thought made her mouth water. She was starving, which wasn’t surprising considering how many calories they had both burned during the night, without anything to eat in almost twenty-four hours except the sugar water he’d made for them, and a power bar each. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Tidy up what you can reach,” he replied. “I kind of left the area in a mess this morning.”
She was absurdly gratified that he didn’t dismiss her offer. No, she wasn’t very mobile and couldn’t do much, but she could definitely crawl around the small space and pick up the dirty, soggy clothing that had been scattered helter-skelter. Their muddy boots had been left where they’d fallen, her mud-encrusted rifle and scabbard were propped in a corner, though Dare’s rifle was within easy reach. The cups they’d used that morning were on the floor, as well as the power bar wrappers.
Dare was a military man; for him not to police his area told her more than words could on how exhausted he had been when he’d carried her up the ladder early that morning.
She tidied as much as she could, putting the trash in a plastic trash bag, folding their wet clothing into a neat pile so he could take them down and hang them over the stalls to dry. While she was doing that, Dare moved the camp stove into their small area, set it down, and lit it. She appreciated the notion behind not wasting any heat. She wasn’t cold now, thank goodness, but the cabin was definitely chilly.
“This is an interesting design,” she said, waving her hand to indicate the cabin. “You built it yourself?”
“I designed it. Hired someone else to build it. I was too busy to take care of it myself, plus I hate hammering shit together.” He paused in the act of pouring bottled water into the percolator, and glanced up at her, blue eyes glittering. “Guess that wasn’t the most diplomatic thing to say.”