Loving Wild Read online

  “I’m going to kiss you again, Casey, and this time I’m not stopping…”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Copyright

  “I’m going to kiss you again, Casey, and this time I’m not stopping…”

  Casey met Dylan’s steady gaze. “No,” she said, but all around her came the lapping silence of the northern woods, and the knowledge that she couldn’t get away from him—not for weeks and weeks. “Making love wasn’t on the agenda, MacCabe.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the thing about travel,” he said in frustration. “It’s full of surprises.”

  “Keep your surprises to yourself. This is business.”

  “Casey, we could light up most of Bridgewater with the electricity between us.” He lowered his voice. “You feel it, too.”

  She bristled. “I didn’t come out here looking for a lover.”

  “Neither did I, but now it’s happened.” He paused, and she could hear him breathing. Waiting. “Look at me, Casey.”

  Knowing it was a mistake, she twisted abruptly and looked straight into those intense blue eyes. A shiver passed through her that had nothing to do with cold or fear, and everything to do with passion—a passion she didn’t want to feel. Yet standing before him, she knew it was inevitable.

  They would make love in the wild…and she could no more stop it than she could the raging river beside them.

  Dear Reader,

  Although I have written ten historical romances, Loving Wild is my very first venture into the exciting world of Harlequin Temptation.

  I love writing romance—in fact, I just love writing. Despite what my friends suspect, I didn’t become a writer, and thus sidetrack a promising career as a chemist, so that I would never have to wear panty hose. My motives were much more subversive. You see, in the “real” world, I’m afraid of flying, I hate driving at night and I willingly watch from the safety of a bench while my children hurl through the air on roller coasters.

  But in fiction I boldly fly F-14s, float gloriously in hot air balloons, brashly face down bad guys and—as in Loving Wild—I canoe uncharted white-water rapids with a tall, handsome, lusty man who has more than survival on his mind.

  On top of it all, I get to take you, the reader, on the journey with me. Please—let me know if you like the ride. You can drop me a line at Harlequin Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada, M3B 3K9.

  Wishing you many exciting journeys,

  Lisa Ann Verge

  LOVING WILD

  Lisa Ann verge

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN

  MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  1

  “C’MON, BESSIE, HOLD ON for me.” Casey Michaels patted the dashboard of her three-year-old minivan as it lurched over a rut in the dirt road. “That cabin can’t be far now. I’ll be sure to give this nature boy a good talking-to about the virtues of a telephone…if I ever lay eyes on him.”

  Casey pressed the brake as she approached a fork in the path. The rays of the sun blazed in dappled confusion across the windshield. She opened a crinkled map against the steering wheel and trailed her fingernail over the razor-thin line she’d been following for the past half hour, comparing the map to the maze of dirt roads she’d just navigated.

  She chewed on her lower lip and tried to ignore the niggle of panic in her belly. Her gaze flickered to the dashboard clock. She had been driving for nine hours. Her lower back throbbed from sitting in the lumpy seat. Her leg ached from pressing on the gas. But she needed this assignment too badly to turn back now simply because she was lost in the wilds of the Adirondack Mountains with a dying vehicle.

  “Isn’t it just my luck, to be assigned to find Davy Crockett,” she muttered, massaging the cramp in her right thigh. This was the age of portable fax machines, cellular phones, e-mail and the World Wide Web. Yet this guy had buried himself so deep in the woods that she doubted he could even see smoke signals.

  Which made it all the more likely, she reminded herself, that he would grant her an exclusive on his story.

  She concentrated on the map. Yes, she remembered that turnoff. And that riding trail that crossed the road. She shoved the map aside. Okay. She flexed her fingers around the steering wheel. There was no reason to be even a tiny bit worried. So Bessie was shaking like an old washing machine. Bessie had clocked—Casey checked the odometer—over eighty thousand miles. The trusty minivan could certainly do a few miles more.

  Easing the van down the left fork, she cracked her elbow on the side window when Bessie lurched through a rut As she grimaced with pain, she reminded herself that she’d been in worse positions than this. Like the time Bessie overheated in the Mojave Desert. Then, of course, Casey had had a healthy bank account, and hadn’t cringed at the cost of a tow truck and car repairs. Lately, her bank balance came in the low four digits, and it was sinking fast.

  She might have missed the squat little building a half mile down the road if it hadn’t been for the flash of sun off the Jeep parked in front of it. She lurched Bessie to an unsteady stop and peered through the trees. Yes…that was it It had to be it. The cabin stood far back from the road, sheltered under a canopy of spruce, its weathered logs the same rusty color as the trunks of the trees surrounding it.

  It looked like the kind of place where this guy would live, she thought, as she turned into the graveled driveway and shut off the van with a symphony of coughs and sputters. She dragged her battered leather briefcase onto her lap and fingered through her papers until she found her yellow pad with the notes from yesterday’s conversation with her editor. This was the kind of guy, she mused, perusing her notes, who would spend a year making a birchbark canoe, and a summer paddling blindly into the wilderness.

  Reaching behind her, Casey tugged her boxy linen jacket out from under a pile of books, slipped her arms into its cool lining, and stepped out of the van. She heard the distinct sound of someone chopping wood behind the cabin. Davy Crockett, no doubt. Stocking up on heating fuel for the long winter. She hoped he believed in jumper cables, or she would never get Bessie out of his front yard.

  Shoving her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose, she picked her way around the cabin and told herself that he could be the most unpleasant tobacco-spitting, beerdrinking, unshaven, plaid-shirt-wearing lout but she would stay—gleefully—if it meant he would grant her an interview.

  As she reached the clearing behind the cabin, she stopped short. The remains of a very thick tree lay scattered across the ground. In the midst of the carnage stood a man with a pair of the widest shoulders she’d ever seen. As she watched, the six-foot wonder hefted a flashing ax and hurled it toward a defenseless little log.

  She thought it prudent to wait until the axe had sliced into the wood before speaking.

  “Excuse me…Mr. MacCabe?”

  The man straightened and glanced over his shoulder. He had light, piercing eyes. A Viking’s eyes. To go with the shimmer of blond the sun had bleached in his hair. The piercing gaze raked over her with a thoroughness that left her feeling rumpled and bare.

  “Yeah,” he said, shoving a log out of the way with his foot. “I’m MacCabe. You lost?”

  “No…no. It seems I’ve just found who I’m looking for.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and picked her way across the clearing, trying not
to wince as she eased weight on her cramped leg. “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I didn’t intend to drop by unexpectedly. But you don’t have a phone….”

  “I like surprises better.”

  She stood closer now. She met his eyes. A jarringly bright blue. In a face well-tanned and leathery.

  Under the heat of that gaze, Casey tightened her grip on the strap of her bag. She wrote for a number of sports and adventure magazines, so she knew the “look”: MacCabe was sun-bronzed with health, lean and muscular from outdoor sports, and not shy about wearing biker’s shorts and tank tops to their best advantage. In the three years she’d freelanced, she’d long since grown used to interviewing sweaty, half-dressed, well-built males.

  But most of the men she interviewed were verging on their twenty-fifth birthdays. And most of those took one look at her thirty-two-year-old face and, with the cruelty of youth, called her “ma’am.”

  She would be hearing no “ma’am” from Dylan MacCabe. Despite his muscular good looks, the man standing before her with a curious gleam in his eye was no young adventurer. The beginnings of crow’s feet fanned out from his eyes. His hair, a tousled brown burnished gold by the sun and obviously having outgrown its last cut, showed at the temples a few strands of silver.

  And Dylan MacCabe was more…hardened. Almost grizzled, in a comfortably attractive, bearish sort of way. Probably in his late thirties, if she could gauge age at all.

  Then she realized she was staring. Rudely. And he was watching her stare with a twitch of his lips. She managed an apologetic smile, hoped she wasn’t blushing, and thrust out her hand. “The name’s Casey Michaels.”

  He engulfed her hand in his own—a hand that was warm and big and rough with bits of wood. It held hers in a dangerously easy and comfortable fit. She struggled with. the unexpected feeling of being tugged along by it, though he made no move at all.

  Her heart made a sudden leap in her chest—a strange, fearful little jump. She realized with piercing clarity that she was alone with this giant of a man in a place where only the squirrels would hear her scream. Then, just as quickly, she chided herself for having read too many horror novels.

  “Hello, Casey Michaels.” He drew out the word hello. “Whatever you’re selling, it’s sure that you’re the best thing that has happened to me all day.”

  “Oh?” She quickly snatched her hand away, wondering why she had, a moment after she did it. “You’re not having trouble with the trip, I hope?”

  He raised his brows. “You know about the trip?”

  “It’s the reason why I’m here. I’m a freelance writer, Mr. MacCabe.”

  She rifled in her bag, searching for a business card. Her hair slid down across her face and she took the moment to gather her wits. He didn’t fit the usual description of her subjects. Of course, she was accustomed to dealing with good-looking guys. She’d interviewed some of the most appealing bachelors in the country, much to the envy of her unmarried sisters. Whenever she dropped the name of the latest sports hunk, she had always smiled tolerantly at their melodramatic swoons and wide-eyed giddiness. They claimed she had ice in her veins. But she’d long ago come to terms with the fact that she just wasn’t capable of feeling that way about a man—not anymore.

  A familiar tightness gripped her chest. She took a deep breath and forced it loose. This was not the time to be thinking of the past. She had Bessie to think of, and her own uncertain future.

  “Here it is.” Casey tugged a black business card out of her bag. “I’ve been sent here by American Backrouds.”

  “I know the magazine.” He tugged the card from her hand. She watched the way his hair tumbled over his brow as he eyed the rainbow-foil print. “It always has some guy in neon spandex on the front cover.”

  “That’s it. It’s a monthly. They cover everything from hang gliding to bungee jumping to, most recently, a recreation of the trip over the Oregon Trail.” Was she babbling? She felt strangely as if she were babbling, even though this was her usual pitch. “My editor got your name from the local geographical alliance. She loves what you’re doing. She thinks it would be the kind of journey the subscribers would like to read about.”

  “And you’ve been assigned to write it up.”

  “A full feature article, for the October edition.” She tapped her pen on her yellow pad of paper. “Providing no one else has beaten me to you, of course. We’ll insist on an exclusive.”

  She clicked-the nib of her pen. Her throat tightened as she waited for him to pick up on the opening. Waiting to see if she would have enough cash to repair Bessie’s C. V. joints before they busted. Waiting to see if she would be able to finance her wanderlust lifestyle another week longer, another day longer, another hour longer. Anything to stave off the reality of her financial situation: If she didn’t get a steady stream of well-paying assignments soon, she’d be forced to get a nine-to-five job, to settle somewhere, establish roots again.

  Maybe even go home.

  But Dylan MacCabe remained thoughtfully silent, fingering the edges of the business card. He eyed the gold chain at her neck and the lines of her linen suit. Then his gaze followed her hosed legs all the way down to her sensible tan leather pumps.

  She stood there in the hot August sun while a prickly heat that had nothing to do with the weather crept up her neck. She watched his face from behind the guard of her sunglasses, wondering if she had runs in her pearly stockings. And feeling, all of a sudden, very small, very vulnerable… very feminine.

  Feminine. Intensely aware of her bare throat, the tickle of her hair upon the nape of her neck, the press of her breasts against the silken fibers of her blouse.

  He swiped the hem of his tank top in a fist, then slid the business card between his black shorts and glistening skin. “You’re not local, are you, Casey?”

  “Local? Oh, no.” She fixed her gaze on the sweat gleaming in the hollow of his throat. It seemed a safe enough place to look, since her eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses; safer than at the edge of the business card peeping above his waistband. “I work stories all over,” she explained. “I just finished a piece on a cross-country hike from Hudson Bay to the St. Lawrence River.”

  There, she thought. Professional credentials confirmed. Maybe that was why he was giving her such a once-over. She couldn’t imagine why else. It was true that she did cover what was usually considered a man’s beat. Casey remembered how one of the ladies at her hometown paper used to complain that the editors always farmed her off to the women’s club monthly meeting and the board of education budget stories—and never let her in on the hot local scoops. But Casey freelanced. She chose her own stories, on her own whims. Personally, she had never experienced any sort of discrimination.

  She wasn’t even sure she was experiencing it now. She wasn’t quite sure what she was experiencing.

  “You’ve come all the way down from Canada,” he asked, wiping his face with a fistful of tank top, “just to cover me?”

  “Don’t be flattered, Mr. MacCabe,” she said. “I’ve traveled farther to catch a story.”

  “Still, that’s a long way to come, just to write about a little canoe trip.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.” Casey flipped up her yellow pad again, twisting it to read her scribble though she knew darned well what it said. “A ‘little’ canoe trip through the Adirondack wilderness, tracing old trading routes?”

  “I’m surprised you found me at all.” He dropped the hem of his tank top and scraped his hand over the faded sports logo. “We’ve been here for weeks, without a phone.”

  “You weren’t so hard to find,” she lied, shrugging. “I called the contact number the alliance gave my editor. Your partner’s wife faxed me directions to this cabin.”

  “Directions?” He flashed her a hundred-watt grin. “What, turn at the split oak and veer left at the creek?”

  “Well…they weren’t too good,” she admitted. “But the park ranger gave me a map.” She shrugged and clicked th
e pen again. “I often find myself bumbling down dirt roads. It’s the nature of the job.”

  He eyed her in that strange speculative way again.

  “Reporters can be very resourceful, Mr. MacCabe.”

  “I see that.” He disarmed her with another bright grin. “And call me Dylan. Otherwise I’ll start treating you like one of my high-school students.”

  She managed a tight smile to match his much warmer one. She was beginning to feel like a high-school student. Giddy and strangely jumpy, and all because this six-foot Viking had given her a once-over as invigorating as a Swedish massage.

  “Listen, we’re going to be on this trip for three weeks,” he said, dipping down to heft a log under his arm. “Are you going to hang around until it’s done?”

  She blinked at him. “Does that mean you’re giving me—the magazine—an exclusive?”

  He glanced around the clearing, then looked at her with a comic tilt of his head. “Well, there’s not a heck of a lot of competition waiting here, for the chance to grant me my fifteen minutes of fame.”

  The pressure in her chest eased, and she felt the swift unraveling of muscles coiled too long and too tight. She sucked in a quick, deep breath and felt it rush all the way down to her toes. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.

  She started making swift calculations. A feature article could run up to three thousand words. That could finance a couple of weeks’ frugal travel, minus Bessie’s mechanic’s bills, if she spent a few nights in her van. She might also be able to write a shorter piece about the trip, with a different angle, for a smaller magazine.

  Then she realized she was grinning idiotically at the man who had paused, mid-crouch in his wood gathering, at the sound of her gasp of relief. She thought back on their conversation until she remembered what he had asked her, before he’d unwittingly granted her several more weeks of freedom. Was she going to stay?