Frankenstein had reached the bank while she was attending to her ablutions. He took off his cap, set it, Muffy, and the gear down on the bank, and turned back to lend her a hand. At least, she thought that was why he was turning back, and she splashed forward to meet him. Her dislike of him softened still more, blunted by his concern for her.
He stopped some two feet away, bent double, and thrust his head beneath the surface of the water.
Summer was so startled by the unexpectedness of his action that she lost her footing. The sole of her too big sneaker slid on a mossy rock, and for a moment she teetered wildly. Then, with a startled cry and an enormous splash, she went down.
Her mouth was still open when the water closed over her head. The suddenness of it, the shock of finding herself totally submerged in icy water, caused her to panic. She choked, flailing like a chicken on the chopping block.
A hand caught the front of her T-shirt and dragged her upward. Her head broke the surface of the water, and she coughed and gagged and spat as she tried to fill her waterlogged lungs with air. Soaked to the skin, she was hauled to her feet and steadied with a warm hand on each elbow. Glancing up, she saw Frankenstein’s grinning, dripping face.
He deliberately held her at arm’s length so that she would not get his clothes wet.
„If you laugh, I’ll kill you. I swear I will,“ she said through gritted teeth and a curtain of sopping hair.
He laughed.
Summer thought about kicking him. With her luck her foot would fly out from under her and she would end up taking another dunking.
She thought about punching him, but she figured he’d dodge. Shed probably end up in the drink again that way, too.
Either way, he’d laugh even more.
She turned and stomped toward shore. Her water-filled shoes felt like they weighed about a hundred pounds each.
Squelching up onto the bank, dripping and shivering, Summer wrapped her arms around herself. She must have been quite a sight, because Muffy took one look at the apparition arising from the stream and started backing away.
Behind her, she thought she heard a snicker.
Over her shoulder, she threw Frankenstein a glare that should have toasted his toes.
Was she ever mad! Mad at him, mad at herself, mad at the world! If Heaven had planned the whole sorry last twenty-four hours as some kind of cosmic entertainment, well, she would like to kick Heaven right in the teeth!
She was also freezing her buns off.
„Here,“ Frankenstein said, sounding faintly choked as he pried one set of her frozen fingers from her arm and thrust the quilt into it. „Go get out of those wet clothes before you catch pneumonia. I’ll start a fire.“
Casting him a venomous glance, Summer, clutching the quilt, retired behind a large boulder with what dignity she could muster.
When she emerged sometime later, swaddled in the quilt like a papoose, her wrung-out clothes held stiffly before her, her wrung-out hair twisted in a soggy coil down her back, she was relieved to discover that he was paying her not the least attention. His back was to her as he worked to blow life into a flickering flame that licked halfheartedly at a pile of twigs. Muffy was stretched out like a small fur rug at his side.
Summer hung her clothes from branches, careful to snag them securely so that they would not fall during the night. She turned her enormous shoes upside down to dry atop a rock. By the time she had finished, Frankenstein had the fire going and was threading hot dogs onto a stick.
Food. Nothing less than that would have enticed her to approach the fire – and him.
She was very conscious of being naked beneath the quilt.
„Here,“ he said as she approached, and handed her another stick that skewered four marshmallows. Regarding him warily, Summer sank cross-legged to the ground. The quilt unexpectedly parted in front, baring an embarrassing expanse of pale inner thigh. Shooting a quick look at Frankenstein – thank God he appeared to be staring into the flames, oblivious – she hitched the soft cotton closer around her body. Modesty restored, she too focused on the fire and concentrated on roasting her share of dinner to a turn.
He ignored her. She ignored him.
The wind, still warm from the day, blew softly across the clearing. Flames danced around the small pile of sticks as it passed. Overhead, stars twinkled, ringed in by a fringe of towering pines.
Frankenstein was about a yard away, and, like her, he sat cross-legged on the hard-packed earth. Try as she would to pretend he was not there, he loomed large in her peripheral vision.
His wet hair glistened seal-black in the firelight. The right side of his face, the side that was nearer her, was not as badly damaged as the left. There was still some bruising, but most of the swelling seemed to have receded. It was possible to discern that he had high, rather flat cheekbones; a straight, high-bridged nose; thin lips; and an obstinate chin. The natural color of his skin was slightly sallow, she thought. As an adolescent he must have suffered with acne, because his cheek bore faint traces of scars.
Not
a handsome man, she decided smugly. And remembered that disinterested kiss.
He glanced at her. Ringed by twin shiners, his eyes were as black as his hair. They were guarded eyes, dangerous eyes. The eyes of a man who was not afraid to die – or kill.
One glance from those eyes should have made her shiver in her shoes. Which, she discovered to her surprise, it did. Only not from fear.
She glanced away hurriedly, so that he would not think she was looking at him. When her gaze stole back to him, he was once again staring into the fire.
Summer found herself admiring the breadth of his shoulders, bared by the orange Nike shirt and gleaming in the firelight, and the rippling muscles in his arms. Beneath the tight cutoffs, his thighs and calves were well muscled, too, and well furred as well. The deep neck of his shirt revealed that his wide chest was liberally endowed with swirls of silky black hair.
He wasn’t handsome, but he was masculine. Intensely, powerfully masculine. The sheer force of that masculinity was sexier than mere handsomeness on its own could ever be.
As she came to that conclusion, Summer found herself meeting his gaze. For a second, no longer, their eyes locked and held. Then, as casually as if nothing momentous had occurred, Frankenstein shifted his attention back to the hot dogs he was roasting over the fire.
Summer, on the other hand, felt like she had just been struck by lightning.
How was it possible to be cold, scared, and starving – and yet at the same time wildly attracted to the man who had caused all three?
When he didn’t even seem to realize that she was a woman?
By the time the marshmallows were done, Summer felt as grumpy as he had acted all day. She was also so ravenous that she couldn’t even wait for the marshmallows to cool. Instead she pulled one from the stick while it was still bubbling hot, and popped it into her mouth.
And prompdy burned her tongue.
„Oh! Ah!“ she gasped, and gulped desperately at the beer Frankenstein obligingly passed her. With her tongue cooked to a crisp and the cloying sweetness of the marsh-mallow acting as a barrier, the beer was not half bad.
„I thought you hated beer,“ he observed when at last she lowered the can.
„I do.“ Her tongue still tingled. She waggled it experimentally.
„No beer parties in college?“ He carefully pulled a hot dog from the stick.
„No.“ Summer shrugged. „No college.“ With rapt interest she watched as he balanced the stick by the fire, split a bun and tenderly placed a hot dog therein.
„None at all?“ He took a huge bite.
„Nope. Hey, how about me?“ Indignantly she reached for the stick he had put down, which still held three hot dogs. He was obliging enough to trade the package of buns for a marshmallow.
„How come?“ He ate the marshmallow whole.
„How come what?“ Summer took her first bite of hot dog. It tasted wonderful, fantastic, divine. If she’d been writing for a
Mobil Travel Guide,
she would have awarded it five stars.
„How come no college?“
„I went to New York to model instead. As a teenager I took classes at a modeling school in Murfreesboro – they cost an arm and a leg, let me tell you – and modeled part time. After high school graduation, the school set up some interviews for me with some agencies in New York. One took me on, and the rest, as they say, is history. I always thought there’d be plenty of time later for college. I was wrong.“ She took another bite out of her hot dog: ambrosia.
„So how long did you stay in New York?“
Muffy was approaching him flat on her belly, her tongue lolling, her tail wagging abjectly. She gave a delicate little yap, and Frankenstein scowled at her. Then, to Summer’s surprise, he broke off a third of his hot dog and handed it to her.
„I modeled till I was two months shy of twenty-five. Not high fashion stuff like I had hoped – lingerie, for catalogues, mostly, and some hand work. Lingerie wasn’t as big then as it is now, and hands weren’t big at all. I made a decent living, went to a lot of really neat parties, and enjoyed myself in general. Then all at once there were other girls, younger girls, who were in demand. Just as suddenly as that“ – she snapped her fingers – „it was over. I was too old. So I came home.“
Snapping her fingers had been a mistake. Muffy did her crawling-rug imitation in Summer’s direction. Summer fed her part of a marshmallow.
„How long ago was that?“
„Eleven years.“
„So you’re thirty-six.“
„Sounds awful, doesn’t it?“ Summer took another bite of hot dog and tried to pretend she didn’t care. She did. Getting older was not something she had been prepared for. No longer being young and reasonably gorgeous had required a lot of adjustment. Getting up in the morning and counting the crow’s feet around her eyes, having to use her mascara wand and then a rinse to color the gray hairs that increasingly appeared among the brown, was not something she had ever expected would happen to her. But of course it had.
She was glad getting over it was all behind her, which it was.
Except when a man, especially one who interested her as much as Frankenstein was beginning to, seemed to feel that she possessed not one iota of sex appeal. Then getting older stung all over again.
22
„Thirty-six sounds pretty good to me. I’m thirty-nine.“
„Men are different. Given the chance, I bet you’d date twenty-year-olds.“ Disgust laced Summer’s voice.
„Nope. I like my women old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway.“
Summer snorted. „Ha-ha.“
He grinned and pulled another marshmallow from the stick.
„So what happened after you came home? By home you do mean Murfreesboro, I take it.“
Summer nodded. „I was born in Murfreesboro, and when New York stopped happening I came home to Murfreesboro. Don’t you know that, however far they may wander, Tennesseeans always come home?“
„I think I may have heard that somewhere.“ Frankenstein bit into his second hot dog with as much evident enjoyment as he had attacked the first. „You came home to your family? Parents, brothers, sisters?“
„Mom, Dad, older sister Sandra, younger sister Shelly. I was the one in the middle. The headstrong one who never would listen. Dad used to say I always had to learn things the hard way. He wanted to send me to college; I took the money and went to New York instead. My sisters, on the other hand, chose college. Sandra’s a medical technologist out in California now, happily married for fifteen years, with four gorgeous children. Shelly lives in Knoxville. She’s a lawyer, happily married for nine years, with three gorgeous children. Then there’s me: a divorced, childless janitor.“
Summer laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. Her sisters had sensibly chosen to follow the paths their parents had mapped out for them; Summer, on the other hand, had defied all advice to reach for a star – and in the process gotten her fingers badly burned.
„At least you had the courage to try.“ This comment, coming from Frankenstein, from whom she would have expected some kind of joke at her expense, startled Summer. After a moment spent twisting the notion this way and that, she looked at him with real gratitude. Never had she thought of her choice in quite that way, and to do so eased a hard little knot of regret that had been festering for a long time inside her.
Before she could comment, he continued: „So what did you do, a New York lawn-jer-ee model, back home in Murfreesboro? “
Summer smiled a little. „I got married, what else? To the police chief’s handsome doctor son. Despite the little hitch of his being Jewish, my parents were thrilled. Despite the little hitch of my being Baptist,
his
parents were thrilled. I was even thrilled – for a while. It wore off.“
„What happened?“ He sounded surprisingly sympathetic.
Summer bit into her hot dog. „He married the lingerie model, not me. When he found out that my natural weight was some twenty pounds heavier than it was when he married me and my hair didn’t curl unless I put curlers in it and my lips weren’t naturally red without lipstick, he freaked.“