“He, who?” Dare interrupted. “Does the asshole have a name?”
“Todd,” she said, then stopped, struck by the fact that Dare had automatically assumed the man she’d married was an asshole. “Todd Vincent. He wasn’t … I mean, he kind of was, but I completely overreacted.”
“Overreacted to what?”
She sighed and resumed her inspection of the ceiling. “He pushed cake in my face. Not a small piece, either, but a huge chunk that was covered in thick icing. It went up my nose, it was in my eyes … and he laughed when he did it.”
Everyone
had laughed, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to elaborate on that detail.
“The bastard,” Dare said blandly.
He was going to make light of it, like everyone else had. He was going to tell her that she’d definitely overreacted. The bad
part was that she knew she’d been unreasonable, and as a result she’d broken up with and ended her marriage to someone who was essentially a good man, someone she’d loved—all because of her wounded ego. But Dare didn’t say anything else, and after a minute she continued.
“We’d discussed it beforehand. I don’t like the cake-in-the-face thing anyway, I don’t think it’s funny, and I especially didn’t want my hair and makeup to be ruined. I asked one thing of him on our wedding day, which was don’t smack me in the face with wedding cake. He agreed. He
promised
. Was that too much to ask?” Angie heard her voice rising and didn’t even attempt to rein in her indignation. “Apparently it was, because instead of sticking with the agreement he shoved that piece of cake in my face and ground it in, and I started crying and yelling at him, and then I ran out. He followed and tried to apologize, but I wouldn’t listen. Dad tried to comfort me, but I asked him to just please get me out of there, so he did. The next day I filed for an annulment.
“Todd tried to talk me out of it. He apologized over and over. All of my friends tried to tell me to settle down, that he didn’t mean anything by it, but I wouldn’t listen, and pushed my lawyer to get the annulment done in record time.” She took a deep breath. “And then I realized what a fool I’d made of myself over something so minor. I’d hurt a good man, humiliated him and myself, thrown away my marriage—”
“Bullshit,” said Dare.
Taken aback, Angie stared at him. “What?”
“He broke his word.”
“Yes, but—”
“That isn’t minor. And you didn’t love him.”
“I did,” she said, but surprised herself with the uncertainty in her tone that even she could hear.
Dare snorted. “No you didn’t. If you’d loved him you’d have explained away his bad judgment, wiped the cake off your face, and gone on with the party. If he’d loved you, he wouldn’t have
broken the agreement in the first place. All in all you’re better off that it ended then, because from where I sit it seems pretty clear that it would’ve ended eventually no matter how hard you tried to make it work. You deserve better.”
“I could have handled it so much better—”
He gave an impatient shake of his head. “You weren’t wrong. You did what you knew was right, so forget it and move on.”
“Thank you, Dr. Phil,” she said sharply, but without anger, because she was too startled by his assessment. Even more startling was that he didn’t think she’d gone off the deep end when, hell, even
she
thought she had. And he’d said that Todd had poor judgment. She was so taken aback that she couldn’t even think about it right now; she’d save that for later. Much later.
A wry smile turned up one corner of his mouth. “I do have my talents. So, what else?”
“What
else
?” Wasn’t that enough? She’d just told him the most embarrassing episode of her life and he wanted more?
“The dream, sweetheart. What else happened in the dream.” He made a rough sound, deep in his throat. “I’ve heard all about your wedding that I care to, and cake wasn’t all you dreamed about. You mentioned mud and the bear.”
Reorienting herself took a minute. She had to mentally pull herself away from her wedding and back to the hellish scene when the storm broke. “Yeah, cake, and mud, and that freakin’ bear.”
“Where was I?”
“Nowhere in
my
dream,” she retorted. Not this time, anyway.
“Too bad.”
“There’s nothing much to tell. Like I said before, I was drowning in the mud, and then it turned into icing. I was caught in it, couldn’t get free, and the bear was coming … enough said about that.”
He heaved himself up, stretched out a long arm to snag two bottles of water from the floor. Twisting one open, he handed it to her, then opened the other for himself. Angie pushed herself to a
sitting position and drank. She hadn’t thought about being thirsty, but the water was unbelievably good. Maybe she’d put too much salt and hot sauce in her bowl of stew.
“What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Close to midnight. We’ve slept about five hours.”
She hoped they weren’t caught up on sleep, because there were some long hours between now and daylight, and she didn’t want to lie awake all that time in the dark with a half-naked Dare right beside her. Sleep was better, less risky.
Tilting her head, she listened to the rain. It didn’t seem to be quite as heavy as before, but it was still steady, and until it stopped and the flash floods had subsided, she and Dare would inevitably be having more of these too-intimate conversations. There was something about being enclosed in this small space, safe and dry, that freed her tongue. On the other hand, she couldn’t really regret any of the personal things she’d told him.
He couldn’t know what it meant to her that he understood what she’d done—and she would never, ever tell him.
She capped the bottle of water and set it aside, then to her surprise was overtaken by a huge, jaw-popping yawn. She covered it with her hand, then blinked at him. “Sorry. You’d think I’d have caught up on my sleep by now.”
“Takes a lot to make up for something like what you went through. I could use another few hours myself.” He capped his own bottle, then reached down to turn off the lantern. Plunged into total darkness, Angie stretched out again and snuggled under the sleeping bag. A warm, muscled arm circled her waist, tugged her back until she nestled snugly against a very hard chest. He nuzzled her hair aside, lightly kissed the back of her neck, and murmured “Sweet dreams” in a voice that already sounded a little drowsy to her.
Her eyes popped open, straining wide against the darkness. After kissing her like that, he expected her to go to sleep? She
could still feel the slightly moist heat of his breath, the barely there pressure of his firm mouth, as intensely as if he’d branded her instead of kissing her.
Abruptly her breasts were aching, and she caught herself pressing her thighs together to contain and relieve the tightening she could feel deep inside. No. Oh, no. She wasn’t going there. No matter how he kissed her she wasn’t going to let her own body sabotage her resolve.
She tried to find some anger she could use to bolster herself, but there simply wasn’t any. Instead, she had to admit that sleeping beside him was sweeter and more seductive than anything she’d ever done.
She was in deep, deep trouble.
It was still raining. Angie pondered that awful fact for a moment, then pushed it away, because there was nothing she could do about it. She sat up, yawned, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and said to Dare, “If you don’t have coffee, I may have to kill you.”
He opened one vivid blue eye, surveyed her in silence for a moment, then muttered, “Hell, I believe you.”
“So?”
“So I guess I’ll get up and make you some coffee.”
“Good deal.” She’d been pretty sure he would have coffee; he had a percolator, didn’t he? But there had been the chance he’d kept the percolator up here only for his clients, and that he was some kind of unnatural creature who drank only water.
He stretched his long body, his arms banging against the partition wall and the sleeping bag sliding to the side. She had to swallow a sudden rush of moisture in her mouth; he looked both disreputable and delicious, with a beard that was about forty-eight hours past being a five o’clock shadow, and sleep-mussed dark hair. Angie deliberately looked away from the play of muscle, instead
focusing on the more mundane, such as the tiresome need to take care of physical matters.
Maybe she could put some weight on her ankle today, which would make the trip outside so much easier. She eased her right foot from under the sleeping bag and surveyed it. Her toes still looked a little swollen, but not much. Very carefully she wiggled them, just to see if she could. That felt okay, so she wiggled them some more. “If my ankle was broken, would wiggling my toes hurt?”
“I don’t know. I’ve broken my arm, three ribs, a collarbone, my nose, and cracked my kneecap, but I’ve never broken an ankle.”
She turned to look at him, frowning. “Are you accident prone?”
“I prefer to think of it as adventurous. I broke my nose when I was eight, trying to jump my bicycle over a ramp.”
“It doesn’t look as if it’s been broken.” And it didn’t. The bridge was perfectly straight.
“Kids heal better than adults. The ribs were broken when a horse kicked me when I was fourteen. The cracked kneecap was a football game. The broken arm and collarbone were a training accident.”
“What happened?”
“It was a climb. The guy above me lost his grip and fell, and took me and another guy with him.”
He could have been killed. If he’d hit his head, or his spine … Angie had to turn her head before he could read the sudden horror in her expression. She felt sick at the possibility, even though it was in the past, much as she felt sick whenever she saw the scar on his throat and realized how easily that piece of shrapnel could have killed him if it had hit his carotid artery. He’d been so close to death so many times, a matter of inches, a split second of time—
She loved him
. Or at least
could
love him. She pressed a hand to her stomach, fighting to control the same nauseating sensation she got on a Ferris wheel, which she didn’t enjoy at all. Her own history had taught her that having feelings for someone didn’t automatically turn everything into wine and roses. There was some sexual attraction going on, Dare had made that plain, but odds were sexual attraction was all that was going on.
“You okay? You look a little green,” he commented as he stuffed his feet into his boots.
“Headache,” she automatically replied, which was true enough because she hadn’t had coffee, or any other caffeine source, in two days. “I need that coffee.” She hoped he wouldn’t mention that she’d been pressing her hand to her stomach, not her head, because she didn’t want to get drawn into a personal conversation. Her instinct was to pull back, to protect herself. Maybe someone more self-confident in relationships would react differently, but she wasn’t that person, never had been. She was confident in her career, in commonsense stuff, but as far as she could see emotions had nothing to do with common sense.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m putting the water on to heat right now,” he drawled, though he was obviously still lacing his boots.
“I can see that.” She decided to make herself useful, so she lit the heater, and checked the water level in the percolator. There were a couple of inches left. “How many cups will you drink?”
“Two or three.”
“Same here. Pass me three bottles of water, and it can be heating while we go downstairs.”
He did better than that; he not only pulled three bottles of water from the case of water sitting on the floor, he rooted around and pulled out a bag of ground coffee. There was even a scoop inside the half-empty bag. She opened the bag and took a deep breath; just breathing in the aroma of the coffee was a pleasure. She was a by-the-numbers kind of coffeemaker, so she began
doing math in her head, mumbling to herself as she did so. “Three bottles at sixteen-point-nine ounces … fifty point seven … add six … divide by five … eleven something … divide by two—”
“What the
hell
are you doing?” he asked incredulously, staring at her with a kind of horrified, I-don’t-believe-it expression.
“Figuring out how many scoops of coffee to use.” Wasn’t it obvious? She frowned at him. She’d specifically mentioned the bottles, so what else would she have been doing?
“Multiplying and dividing?”
“Well, how do you do it?” She crossed her arms, both feeling and sounding defensive.
“I put in the water, and I dump in how much coffee I think I’ll need.”
“How does it taste?”
He blew out a breath. “Sometimes it tastes pretty good,” he said cautiously.
“I get better results than ‘sometimes’ with my method.”
“But you need a fu—a damn calculator to figure it out!”
“Oh, really?” Ostentatiously, she looked around. “I don’t believe I see one, and I was doing just fine.” She couldn’t believe it. He’d just caught himself before he said
fucking
, and substituted
damn
. When was the last time he’d bothered to moderate his language? Huh. She was beginning to have a little fun.
“So what’s this magic formula?” he demanded after a few seconds, when she simply sat there looking at him, her head cocked a little as if she were waiting.
“Figure out how many ounces of water you have and divide by five—”
“Why?”
“Because, for reasons unknown to mankind, coffeemakers figure a cup of coffee is five ounces, rather than eight.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, it’s true. Haven’t you ever measured water into a coffeemaker and noticed it doesn’t match?”
“I don’t pay attention to shit like that. But this isn’t a coffeemaker. It’s a percolator.”
“But the scoops seem to be based on how much coffee you need for five ounces, so it doesn’t matter. Then the type of grind makes a difference—”
“I don’t want to hear it. You’re making this way too complicated.”
“I make good coffee.” She was beginning to feel a little indignant on behalf of her coffeemaking skills.
“So you say. I haven’t seen any proof yet. Finish with this mathematical thing.” He was glaring at her as if she’d told him there was no Santa Claus.