Loving Wild Read online

  The knowledge gave her pause. Three articles out of three weeks. That added up to a lot of car-repair bills.

  “I’ve been working on this for eight months,” he continued, leaning toward her. “Filling out the forms for grants. Gathering the materials to build the canoe. Doing research on the old trading routes in this part of the country. Practicing the paddle strokes in the Bridgewater river in the cold of March—”

  “Mr. Mac—Dylan,” she said, holding out the flattened palms of her hands, as if she could push him farther away. “Listen, I sympathize, but Lewis and Clark had to deal with setbacks, as well.”

  “Lewis and Clark didn’t have to be back at a teaching desk by September seventh”

  “Do it yourself, then. What’s stopping you?”

  “The canoe’s too big for one paddler. It would take twice as long to make the trip, and there’s too much gear for one man to carry across portages easily. Every portage would take twice as long.”

  She patted her own padded shoulders. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “these shoulders look like they can handle a lot of weight.”

  “It’s not brute strength I need, it’s another warm body—another paddle holder. I can carry the bulk of the weight, but there’s still more. Bulk, not weight.”

  This was absurd. She couldn’t believe he was even asking her. She couldn’t believe he would even consider it. She couldn’t believe she had to talk him out of it. She couldn’t believe she was still standing here and not halfway to the highway.

  “Dylan.” she said, mustering as much calm as she could, “how long have you been training?”

  “For this? The better part of a year—”

  “Great. That’s all I need to hear.”

  “Not physically. It doesn’t take a hell of a lot of skill to use a paddle. I’ve been preparing to do it for a year. Research. Paperwork—”

  “You’ll be sleeping out in the wilderness, won’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t like camping. I don’t like mosquitos.”

  “That’s what netting and chemicals are for.”

  “I don’t cook over open fires.”

  “That’s what propane stoves are for—there are fire rules in the park.”

  “I don’t bone fish.”

  “We’ll bring in our own rations. We’re not exactly roughing it, Casey. There are rules about hunting and fishing up there.”

  “You keep talking ‘we’ as if this is a foregone conclusion.”

  “It’s fate.” A grin lurked at the corners of his mouth. “It has to be. It’s just too perfect.”

  She resisted the urge to snort. There wasn’t any such thing as “fate.” Fate implied some sort of orderly sequence of events; fate required that life made some kind of sense. She’d long ago learned that life made no sense at all, that everyone was just stumbling blindly in the dark.

  She was stumbling now. She still reeled from Dylan’s offer. And through the haze of swirling confusion she kept hearing Jillian’s calm voice.

  “Take the risk, Casey. That’s what life is all about. Risks. What are you afraid of?”

  “I will not.”

  She spoke the words more to the voice in her head than to the man before her, but he heard. He pushed away from the Jeep.

  “You’re not going to let this one get away from you, are you, Casey?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you don’t join me, there won’t be a trip, there won’t be a story.”

  And there won’t be pay, she thought ruefully. And poor ol‘ Bessie might sputter out on me.

  “What are you afraid of, Casey? The trip?” He lowered his voice to a rumble. “Or me?”

  She met his gaze. Bright blue, blazing blue, intense blue. He’d asked the question rhetorically, but she took it at face value. As she always had when Jillian had asked it. What was she afraid of? For all her protestations, Casey didn’t particularly hate camping. She and her family had done it several times during her teenage summers, and she’d enjoyed the experience. Though she would always like dean sheets, running water and soft mattresses better, she supposed she could handle camping.

  There was the element of danger. He wouldn’t be doing this if there wasn’t some risk involved in the trip. But she didn’t know what that risk was, couldn’t even imagine it. They hadn’t gotten that far in the interview.

  What are you aftaid of, Casey? The trip? Or me?

  She hazarded him a glance. Dylan MacCabe was a handsome man. Any other thirty-two-year-old woman would give a few teeth to spend three weeks in the wild alone with him. Maybe that was why she was so full of skitters. She hadn’t thought that way about a man for over three long years.

  She didn’t want to think that way about a man, ever again.

  “I’m no trained athlete, Dylan,” she said, her voice whisper-thin. “I’d be a fool to agree to a trip I know nothing about, except that it’s sure to be dangerous.”

  “It’s not that dangerous.”

  “Sure. It’s for wimps, that’s why you’re going.”

  The grin took hold, widened. “I’m not saying it doesn’t have its challenges,” he conceded, “but the challenges are more in finding the right way through the maze of waterways, than in lions, tigers, or bears.” He shuffled in the gravel. Closer to her. “At least come inside and let me show you what we’re going to do.”

  “What you are going to do, you mean.”

  “You’ve come all the way out here. You would have asked me about the details of the trip anyway, right?”

  She narrowed her eyes. He was right, of course. Her day was lost, in any case. If nothing came of this, she would have to find her way out of this wilderness, find a hotel, and spend the night wondering where her next dollar was coming from. And if he did manage to find another partner—other than herself—she would need to know some background about the trip before she wrote the story.

  “Please, Casey,” he said softly. “Just come in and listen.”

  Then he gave her that hundred-watt smile, and she was lost.

  CASEY BLINKED JUST inside the door to the cabin while her eyes became accustomed to the sudden dimness. The interior smelled of coffee and wood ash. It was far roomier than she’d expected, and far more modern. A bank of kitchen appliances lined one wall. A long counter jutted out to split the cabin in two: the back half for the kitchen/dining room, the other for the living room, with barstools along the outer side for casual dining. Worn braided oval rugs cushioned a rocking chair by a wicker magazine rack, and decorated a hearthstone. Over the shelf of cabinets, she glimpsed a cast-iron wood-burning stove near the raw stone fireplace.

  So much for Davy Crockett.

  She closed the door behind her and banged her knuckles on a plaque hanging on the doorknob that said Gone Fishing. She shrugged off her linen jacket and hung it on a peg by the door, next to a splintered old fishing creel. A collection of rods of varied lengths hung across a row of hooks above.

  “Don’t mind them,” Dylan explained, as she eyed the mounted fish gaping at her from all around the room, their measurements and the date neatly etched in the bronzed plaques below. “My father’s a real fishing enthusiast”

  She arched a brow. “I never would have guessed.”

  “Now that he’s retired, he spends most of the season here. Took a lot of arm-twisting, but my mother convinced him to let me and Danny have it for the week, to prepare for the trip.”

  “That was generous of him.” She pulled off her sunglasses and tucked them in her bag, putting some distance between her and this big bear of a man. “My father’s the same way during salmon season.”

  “Is he?”

  “Uh-huh. Flies up to British Columbia every year with his buddies to stand knee-deep in frigid water in hip-high boots. Never understood it, myself.”

  “It’s a battle with the elements. You know. Man against beast. Man against nature.”

  “Man against pneumonia.”

 
His blue eyes twinkled. “Hooking a fish, you get a sense of self-sufficiency that you just can’t get paper-pushing.”

  “Yeah, a real struggle—a two-hundred pound man with hundreds of years of metallurgy and plastics behind him, against a fifteen-pound fish.”

  “C’mon, Casey. You’ve covered daredevils before. You should understand the mentality.”

  “I’ve covered them. I haven’t always made sense of them. I know there’s some kind of adrenaline rush involved with…danger.” She wandered deeper into the cabin. They were straying into dangerous territory again, and she was determined to keep things all business. “I’m simply not genetically equipped,” she explained, shrugging. “It’s a male thing.”

  “Doesn’t have to be.”

  Dylan flipped on a switch. Light flooded from a lamp swinging above the dining-room table. Neat piles of papers and books lay on the battered wide planks. He searched among them, then tugged a laminated photocopy out of a pile.

  “You’ve got all the physical equipment you need for this trip, Casey. Two arms, a young back, and two legs.”

  His gaze flickered to her legs for the hundredth time. She resisted the urge to rub one leg up the other, to check to see if the hose she wore had caught on splinters.

  Instead, she snapped the document out of his hands and concentrated on it. “What’s this?”

  “The map of the trip we’re making.”

  She eyed him for using the “we” again, but his grin only widened. He came around her to stand just at her side. She sensed the heat of him against her shoulder, bare now without her jacket. She wore only a peach-colored silk shell and right now it felt as thin as tissue paper against her skin.

  “This map was originally made in about 1670, probably 1672, by a French-Canadian fur trapper named Henri Duchamp.”

  He reached across to trace one of the lines, and his bare forearm brushed hers. She tightened her grip on the map.

  “By law, old Henry could only sell his furs to the French government—and the Quebec officials took a pretty big bite. So, being a free-market kind of guy, he mapped a way to get his furs to the English and the Dutch at Fort Orange and Albany, who always paid a better price and didn’t ask for a cut.” Dylan traced one of the lines with his finger. His skin gleamed with a full summer’s tan. The hairs on the back of his hand had been bleached fair by the sun. “Of course,” he added, letting his hand drop to his side, “back then, that was treason.”

  “Treason,” she murmured, wishing he would move back about six miles.

  “Yeah, but the fur traders weren’t much for loyalty—not then, anyway. They did what they damn well pleased.”

  “I see.”

  Seven miles would be better. Why was he breathing on her neck like that?

  “This,” she said, rattling the paper, “looks deceptively simple. Where’s the catch?”

  “Ah, the wary reporter.” He tugged the map out of her grip and tossed it on the table. He snapped open another map, a larger one, of northern New York State. “That map is deceptively simple. It corresponds, somehow, to this.”

  Reluctantly, Casey walked to his side and glanced at the new map—a veritable anatomy of blue veins on a green background—a tangled web of rivers and ponds and lakes. A man could lose himself amid that mess for months. So could a man and a woman. Alone in the wilderness, with nothing but the stars for a roof. As intimate as Adam and Eve.

  “So,” she said, sharply, “good old Henry left out a few things on his map.”

  “There’s a question whether he ever made the trip,” Dylan admitted. “Or if he simply drew the map and made a bundle of wampum off selling it before fleeing west to join his Chippewa wife. After that, he disappeared into the wilderness, and from historical record.”

  “So,” she said, leaning her hip into the table, “you’re trying to prove that the trip can be made.”

  “Yes,” he replied, fingering the laminated map. “With no more guidance than old Henry’s scribbling.”

  She eyed him. The light fell upon his chest and left his face in dimness. Yet his eyes were alight.

  “It is,” she conceded, “an interesting academic question.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s no wonder the alliance funded you for it”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So what are you leaving out, MacCabe?”

  He gave her the kind of sheepish look one of his students would probably give him while explaining lost homework. “I guess I’m not going to put anything over on you, am I, Casey Starr, crack reporter?”

  “Not if you hope to get me to join you.”

  “Well, there is a lot more,” he admitted. “There are a hundred details. But nothing more I could tell you would make the journey any more dangerous, or any less exciting. This project really is as simple as it seems.”

  He kept staring at her, an intense, disquieting stare. She crossed her arms, wondering why she was getting goose pimples in the middle of summer. This was crazy. How had he lured her into this cabin? She had no intention of making this trip. She had no intention of camping out in the wilderness with this man.

  Camping out in the wilderness. Finding their way on old historic fur-trading routes. Her, Casey Michaels, who used to get lost riding around her own hometown.

  “White water,” she said, as if she’d just remembered the words. “There’s white water, isn’t there?”

  “If you’ve done part of the Snake River, then there’s nothing up here you can’t handle.”

  Sure there was. A six-foot, bronzed god of a man looking at her, looking through her, looking as if he would block the doorway if she tried to escape.

  “What’s the verdict, Casey?” he asked, leaning over to catch her eye. “I need to know. My success or failure depends on you.”

  She turned away from him. She shouldn’t even be thinking about this. She shouldn’t even be considering this.

  Think sensibly. Three weeks, she thought. Three weeks without hotel bills, food bills, gas bills. Her funds were running dangerously low, and there was no other assignment on her schedule until the second week of September. She would have to scramble to find something to take the place of this one.

  Of course, she had promised to stay with her sister. Her sister, with the cozy Connecticut home, with the loving husband, and the two adorable towheaded daughters… Casey hadn’t seen them in over two years. She had promised that this year she wouldn’t disappoint them. That she would stay at their house for two weeks, living inside someone else’s domestic bliss, and allow herself to be set up for blind dates with Joe the carpenter and Harry the musician, who her sister claimed were perfect for her.

  Two weeks of remembering what might have been, if her own life had not taken an abrupt turn.

  She sensed Dylan’s heated gaze upon her. A familiar sensation rushed through her—the same feeling she’d had when she’d first left her hometown with all her life’s belongings crammed into her minivan and headed out on that wide stretch of Highway 80. It was a mishmash of sensations: a tingle of fear, a gushing surge of adrenaline….

  She took a deep, deep breath.

  “I’m no Girl Scout, Dylan. I might be more of a liability than a partner. But if you are sure you have no other choice,” she said, turning to a blur of a smile and a sharp laugh of triumph, “then I’ll consider—Oh!”

  He seized her by the waist and hefted her clear off the floor. The room spun in a whirl of color and light. She grasped his shoulders for balance. Her hair swung in her face, blinding her, and through its curtain she felt, suddenly, the hard rasp of an ill-shaven cheek against her face.

  Then his lips. Warm and hard. Fitting over her own mouth with a simple sureness that lacked only the click of a lock and key. She held her breath on it. The world went still. He stopped twirling her. Her mind froze. Her heart faltered on a beat. His fingers curled deep into her waist, her body flattened against his chest.

  Oh…my.

  Strong. He was strong. Wi
de shoulders, thick under her hands. He was so big against her—all throbbing, vital man. She felt oddly fragile, lifted as if she weighed no more than a flea. His hair, damp from exertion, smelled of open air and wood fires….

  He broke the kiss and set her down. Her feet jarred against the floor. Her hair swung out of her eyes soon enough for her to see him take a big step back and stare at her, his grin wider than ever and his eyes twinkling with nothing less than raw, unadulterated victory.

  She scraped hair off her mouth, and brushed her cheek with her fingers long after she’d tucked the last tress behind her ear. How long had it been? Certainly a simple kiss had never knocked her senseless like that before. Maybe her sister was right. It had been too long since she’d been with a man.

  “Did you check into a hotel yet, Casey? Or did you come straight here?”

  “Hotel?” She blinked at him as he strode clear across the cabin to the front door. The kiss obviously hadn’t thrown him. “No. No, I came straight here.”

  “Good. Then let’s get your things.” He stretched open the cabin door for her. “You can stay in the bedroom until the launch and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  She threw up her hand. “Hold it, MacCabe—”

  “Casey, you’re going to be sharing a bedroom under the stars with me for three weeks.” He flashed that all-American grin. “Don’t you think we’d best get better acquainted?”

  3

  DYLAN HAD NEVER KNOWN a woman who could wear brown lipstick and get away with it.

  Of course, the lipstick was all but kissed off now. He could still taste its residue in his mouth.

  Sweet and spicy and stick.

  He pressed the door of the cabin full open. Stop it, Dylan. Hell, if he had any sense left in him, he would put all lurid thoughts of Casey Michaels right out of his mind. The lady had BACK OFF written all over her—in bold, bright, big letters. If he had any hope of redeeming himself from that impulsive blunder, he’d best do it now—and quickly.

  “The nearest hotel is fifteen miles away,” he explained, stepping out into the sunshine. “And we’ve got a lot of work to do before the launch. Canoeing, portaging, background, orienting—do you have a bathing suit?”