by Lane Parker
She’d made some bad, impulsive decisions.
Like I don’t know what it’s like to make some shitty choices? She’s hurt. Doesn’t matter how she got here. Doesn’t matter whether the rangers call or not.
Right now, she’s bleeding on my bed and out cold.
It didn’t take long for me to decide what I had to do, whether I wanted somebody else in my space—or not.
I took off her shoes, and her jacket. Her arms were a map of scrapes and bruises. I lifted up her shirt and spied some nasty contusions on her torso.
The woman was going to be hurting when she woke up. No doubt about it.
The bigger problem was the major gash to her leg, and the fact that she still hadn’t moved a muscle. The wound was still bleeding through the denim. Her jeans had to come off. Shit.
I need a minute to think about that one.
I moved to the bathroom. I rifled through a dusty cabinet for the first aid kit with the bandages and pulled out what I needed.
I scowled as I paused at the edge of the bed.
Jesus! I was not the kind of man who takes clothes off unconscious women.
But I wasn’t afraid to do it. Hell, if she woke up and screamed at me, at least I’d know she was alive and conscious.
I put how damn beautiful she was out of my mind and stripped off my flannel shirt so I didn’t get it all bloody. I didn’t even look at her as I eased the jeans over her enormous laceration and pulled the denim from her feet.
Well, it’s not totally true that I didn’t look at anything. I did notice something. I looked at her socks.
They were thin and bright and unbearably cute—sky blue with white clouds and rainbows. They looked like socks for a little kid, except that written in the clouds was a message that was completely adult: Up Yours.
I snorted. Terrible socks for hiking, I thought, but I like the message.
I tossed a blanket from the bed over her lap and propped her leg up on a pile of pillows.
I shook my head and grimaced as I surveyed the damage the slide had caused. The leg was a mess, a long cut up the shin, but I was pretty sure I could just Steri-Strip the gash together since it wasn’t terribly deep, and it would heal. Thank fuck. I hadn’t done sutures in a long time, and I’d only tried it on myself. As a wood carver, I occasionally had accidents, so I’d taught myself how to patch up those injuries without making the drive to Aspen to get them stitched.
I felt around the whole injured area. Her leg didn’t appear to be broken, but it must hurt like hell. She flinched and groaned when I started cleaning the wound and then started sealing it up.
“What the fuck is going on?” she mumbled. “Ouch! Dammit! That hurts!”
So much for the female being as sweet as her smile. The angel obviously has fangs.
I wasn’t quite sure why that intrigued me, but it did.
She sat up. The woman was a little unsteady, but I let out a sigh of relief that she seemed fairly coherent. Hell, she could yell at me all she wanted if it meant she was going to be awake and alert.
She rubbed her face with her palms and brushed the shaggy brown bangs from her eyes.
Then, she apparently registered who I was, and that I was holding onto her bare leg.
“Okay…” She put her hands up, palms facing me. “Where are my pants?”
I sighed. You try to be nice to someone, and this is what you get—an immediate reaction that I’m somehow trying to hurt her. I grabbed her jeans in my hand and held them up. “Here. Covered in blood.”
She looked down at her shin with a grimace. “Yeah. I kind of remember that.” She shuddered. In a calmer tone, she asked, “What, uh, happened, exactly?”
“A rockslide,” I said. “Don’t you remember?” I put on a final Steri-Strip, let go of her leg and stood up. I left the blood-soaked jeans beside her on the bed and pulled my flannel shirt back on.
I was going to have to talk to her before I could finish the first aid.
“Yeah, but—” She shook her head. “What, is it like an earthquake or something? Did it knock me out? Why was the whole mountain coming at me?”
I shrugged. “Just happens sometimes. That was the biggest rockslide I’ve seen in… forever. Pretty nasty.” I wondered if there was another route clear so I could take her out of here, a back way to get her to some place safe. “And I don’t know what happened to make you pass out. It could have been the pain, or the rocks hitting your head. You could have a concussion. But it’s a good sign that you’re awake now. We’ll watch for signs of a concussion.”
She rolled her eyes and fell back onto her elbows. It must have hurt, because she groaned again. “Well, I guess I’m just really lucky.”
I knew sarcasm when I heard it, but…
“You are, actually,” I told her flatly. My damn hair kept falling into my face, so I found a hairband in my pocket, yanked it to the back of my head, and secured it.
I used that distraction to process the fact that I was talking to a gorgeous, half-dressed female in my bed, who shouldn’t be there.
Somehow, I guess I’d counted on her being totally hysterical, but she…wasn’t.
She was strange. The woman was annoyingly casual for someone whose life had just been saved.
Didn’t she know what could have happened?
“You could have died,” I stressed. “Why were you even over there? I told you to go down into the valley.”
“I had no idea where I was going! Your directions sucked.” Her eyes flashed. They were deep and warm, like chocolate and caramel swirled together.
Her unusual dark eyes narrowed. “Why were you following me?”
There it was. I could have guessed that she would ask. She might be bad with directions, but she didn’t seem stupid.
She had a sharp mind, and it showed in her eyes as she looked at me warily.
Don’t ask me why I found that dubious expression so damn appealing, because I wasn’t at all certain why it made the gorgeous female even hotter. Maybe I liked a challenge? Maybe I had a thing for surly females?
I hesitated to reply. The thing was, I didn’t want to answer that question. I didn’t want to get any deeper into the bad idea that had turned my brain to mush long enough for me to follow her and rescue her.
I had done it; that’s all there was to it.
Now I had to live with the fucking consequences.
“You asked for help,” I said, knowing I was stretching the truth. All she’d really asked for was…directions. I was the one who had decided she actually needed more, that she needed to be watched.
The displeased scowl on her face would’ve scared a lesser man. I got the feeling it scared plenty of people in her normal life. She was a fierce little thing. No doubt about it. But, fuck me, I kind of liked that about her.
She swung her legs over to sit at the edge of the bed and winced in pain. “No, I specifically didn’t ask you to help me. I didn’t ask you to come with me. And I definitely didn’t ask you to follow me through the woods like a fucking creeper!”
I stifled a chuckle. “A fucking creeper who saved your life.”
“Yeah, about that,” she said. “Why am I here?” She motioned wildly to the cabin around us. “Is this some kind of backwoods horror movie situation? Because you know what—I’ve seen so many slasher films, I think I can get out of this alive.”
This time I did laugh. Hard. Maybe she could save herself. Maybe if I had put on a hockey mask and chased her, she’d have found her way to the ranger station, no problem.
“I’m not going to kill you. Promise.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not dressed only in a pair of panties and at some mountain man’s mercy.”
Mountain man? I was a man, and I lived in the mountains. I guess it fit. I only thought of myself as an artist. Not some eco-warrior, or a prepper waiting on the apocalypse.
How different was I from those men, though? From the outside, I guess it was a distinction without a difference.
Fuck knows what she thinks of this place, though. It’s bare and quiet. The only things I really kept here were some of my smaller sculptures, a bunch of books, a few old blues records for the turntable, and some postcards I couldn’t let go.
Just enough for one person to not go too crazy.
I let out an exasperated breath and finally answered. “You’re here because you were going in circles. You never got all that far from my cabin. It was the closest and only place near the slide.”
Her eyes brightened. “If the road is near here, could you take me back to my cabin? Please,” she requested, adding that polite word at the end as though it were an afterthought.
I knew what that plea had cost her. She had to be pretty freaked out to ask me for anything.
“That could be a problem,” I said stoically.
“Why?”
“Road might be blocked by the rock fall. All roads. Radio hasn’t come in yet, so… I don’t know.” I shrugged.
Her jaw set tight, she glared at me. Like this was all my fault. She spread the blanket, trying to cover her legs.
“Don’t.” I shook my head. “That cut needs bandaging.”
She blinked at me. That spooked deer look was back in her eyes. “Give me the bandages,” she said, reaching her hand out. “I’ll take care of it.”
It made sense; how uneasy she was. I had never been injured and found myself in the middle of nowhere, with a strange person standing over me. Pants or no pants.
But something in me wanted to let her know she was safe.
Something in me needed to let myself know I could be safe while I was around her.
Since what happened with my sister Olivia nine years ago, since I’d left everyone behind, I wasn’t sure I was capable of telling anyone they were safe with me.
Might as well try now. I brought her here, after all.
“Let me.” The command came out with authority because I was a bossy bastard, but in my throat, it felt almost like a plea.
I knelt at the side of the bed again and settled between her legs, then rolled up the sleeves of my flannel shirt.
“Okay,” she said hesitantly. She stared down at me. She looked half-scared, half-aroused.
If she’s half as aroused as I am…
I silently chastised myself. Putting a final bandage on her injury was the last damn thing that should be getting my dick hard. Thinking she might like me touching her was simply wishful thinking on my part.
My large hand wrapped easily around her ankle, and then my palm slid up the undamaged part of her calf.
I set her foot against my thigh, and I could feel her warm skin, even through the sturdy denim material of my jeans. The heat from her body met mine. The old bedsprings squeaked when her hands grabbed onto the mattress. I didn’t know exactly why she felt the need to hang onto something so tightly.
Pain, probably.
There was an urge in me to softly stroke her skin with my rough fingers.
I had a deeper urge to do a lot more. I wanted to lean forward and run my hands farther up her leg. I wanted to find out how sweet her lips really were.
Son of a bitch! It was almost impossible to curb the beast inside me that just needed to touch her.
However, I didn’t do any of the things my body was urging me to do.
Instead, I took a breath and kept my hands steady.
She flinched when I put the clean gauze pad against her cut. “Still hurts?”
She grunted softly. “It’s getting better. I think. Honestly, my entire body feels like I got run over by a truck.”
“You’re bruised up. So it’s no surprise that you hurt everywhere.”
No one wants to admit it when they’re hurt. Even when it’s obvious.
I wrapped her leg in the bandage slowly and pressed the pad tight.
She was quiet; so was I. After all, we were complete strangers. I had no idea what to say to her. I hadn’t exactly had all that many conversations with anybody over the last eight years or so.
Finally, she broke the silence. “What’s your name?” Her voice wavered a little.
I really didn’t want her to know my name. It made things too damn personal. But I was already doing things I would never do. “James.”
“Thank you, James. For rescuing me.”
I grunted in response. Nobody thanked me for anything, so I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I asked, “And just who did I rescue?”
I didn’t want to know her name, either. But I had to know.
She huffed a nervous laugh. “Keeley Norton.”
I looked up at her. Her dark eyes were sparkling, her cheeks flushed pink.
It was doing something to me…
Something I wanted? Oh, hell, yeah. But it wasn’t a good idea.
It was hard for me to take my hand from her leg. But I did. The bandage was all taped up and finished.
“Well, Keeley, this is my cabin. I hope you don’t stay too long,” I grumbled honestly.
“Let’s hope.” She smiled, like I was joking.
Honey, I’m dead serious.
She was giving me that sweet smile again, the one she’d given me before the rockslide.
Her guileless, cheerful demeanor had been like a stab to my gut with a very large knife.
Really, maybe that was the real reason I’d followed her. After all, nobody had been nice to me in a long time.
That same pain twisted into me again, but this time it was a little bit different. Softer, brighter.
I didn’t have enough time to think about how I felt about that, even if I’d wanted to. There was a static buzz and pop from the radio.
“White River Dispatch, FA1VV, foxtrot alpha one victor victor, you still on this channel? Got big problems your way.”
Chapter Four
Keeley
So this wasn’t what I’d expected from hot mountain guy. Actually, I’d never thought I’d see him again. At all.
However, the handsome jerk who had given me bad directions had actually saved my life. Not only that, but he’d cleaned and bandaged my leg.
But the biggest surprise had been when he’d looked at me like he couldn’t decide whether to dump me back outside his cabin or fuck me until we were both completely satisfied.
His eyes were so intense. They were cold blue, like a frozen pond, but they occasionally burned.
And so do I. Every time he gives me that heated stare.
Okay. Most of the time, he made me feel like an unwanted guest, but he had been brave enough to walk right into a potential death trap and carry me out of it.
Maybe he wasn’t such a jerk, after all.
I pulled my legs onto the bed and covered them with the blanket.
He hurried to the radio, which had started to hiss loudly.
“FA1VV, FA1VV, this is ADT2B, alpha delta tango two bravo.” He held the microphone in his wide hand. The one that was just around my ankle. “Just SE of Baxter and there's a rock fall down from the road line.”
“ADT2B, copy that, we heard. You okay?” A woman’s voice, business-like, came through the speaker.
“Kind of.” He glanced back at me. There was almost a smile on his face, which surprised me. I didn’t think he was capable of turning up those sexy lips at all.
James was the brooding type. Gruff. Ornery. Dark and mysterious. Not to typecast him, but he fit the call sheet for that type of guy.
I heard the woman’s stern voice again. “Well, make sure you are, 'cause there's no throughway until we get this mess cleared.”
“None at all?” he grumbled.
“Nope. Backways up near CB are flooded with melt, and I don't think you'd get to those anyway. How many KM from Baxter?”
“'Bout five.”
“Pretty isolated. Sit tight, they're gonna get the fall off the road in about forty-eight.”
He sighed. “Roger that. Thank you.”
I didn’t understand what was said literally, but I got the gist. Even if I hadn’t,
I would have guessed by the way he slammed his hands down on the battered desk, and his back tensed.
“So, uh, bad news?” I asked hesitantly, as though the truth wasn’t pretty damn obvious.
“Road’s blocked.” He didn’t turn around. “No way to get out for two days. At least.”
Two days. I was sure that couldn’t be right. Like I knew anything about it, but… two days?!
“But, um…” I didn’t really know to say it without sounding demanding. So I put on my clearest, take-no-shit voice, the one I use for producers who weren’t great at listening. “You have to get me back to my cabin.”
He turned around then, and I wished he hadn’t. He looked at me, hard. It wasn’t the look from earlier that felt so good.
Not at all.
The man’s expression was grim.
“First of all, I don’t have to do anything.” He shook his head and looked away, clearly frustrated. “Second, I don't know how to tell you any clearer. We're stuck here.”
Stuck. The word bounced around in my head like a pinball. In my world, there was no stuck. There was always a fix.
But considering this wasn’t my world, I had to rely on him. I had to convince him.
“I can't stay here!” I grabbed the blanket and tried to stand, but pain shot up my leg. I fell back onto the bed, grabbing my shin. I was sure I looked like an idiot, but I didn’t care at the moment.
“I don't even know you,” I pleaded. “Look, you totally saved my life. Thank you. I owe you, like, a lot. But I can't fucking stay here!”
His jaw worked while he stared back at me. There were probably a hundred things he could have said to me. Ninety-nine of them probably involved serious insults.
Kudos to him for keeping that on lockdown. I sure can’t.
“Listen to me… I don't like it, either,” he said. “At all. I don't want you here. No offense.” That last part was more than a little sarcastic.
So I rolled my eyes at him and threw it right back. “None taken.”
“But I'm not gonna carry you all the way back to your cabin. If you could even find it.”
