by Terry Spear
She should appreciate that he was driving for a good part of the journey then.
“Rough night?” he asked, smiling, even though his shoulder ached all over again. The non-drowsy medicine only managed to blur the rough edges of the pain a bit.
“I’m used to sleeping against an ultra-soft mattress instead of a rock-hard body.”
“They say a firmer mattress is a lot better for your back.”
She didn’t open her eyes, but smiled a little.
“I expected you to try and get away from me sometime during the night. I wasn’t exactly expecting the cat maneuver in the bathroom.” He admired her tenacity.
“I did leave you in the middle of the night. Four times. Didn’t you notice?”
“You must have been tired.”
“Clearly, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I’d be on my way, alone, and you’d be talking over your business with the sheriff and his deputies, doing a hell of a lot of explaining about what you were doing in my house last night.”
“What did you say to Dan to clue him in that you were in trouble?”
She opened her eyes, a glint of panic in them.
He knew she’d tried to give the sheriff some hints. Any sane person in her shoes would have done the same, given the opportunity.
“If I had, he would have had half the town surrounding the house to free me and take you in.”
“He didn’t get your hint—too subtle,” Leyton persisted. “Or maybe his visit with Dottie was uppermost on his mind. A woman can sure rattle a man like that.”
She tilted her chin up a bit. “Like with you?”
“It would take a hell of a special woman to distract me from being concerned something might be amiss. So what did you say to try and clue him in?”
“Nothing. Are you always this suspicious?”
“Yes. You’re too cagy to have let the opportunity go without trying something.”
She sighed. “If you truly aren’t undercover, you must have been a cop before as much as you are mistrustful of people.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, then finally said, “For one, I hoped when I told him Sheba had disturbed my nap, Dan would have realized she would have only done so if she was upset about something. Like someone had broken into the clinic. Second, I never would have gone back to the house to eat dinner and messed up the place after I had cleaned everything and was ready to go. And third, I would immediately have left for the cabin from the clinic, even if Sheba had disturbed my sleep. I told Dan just what happened, minus any mention of you, because what else could I say without making you all growly again? But I figured at least one or a combination of the things might have clued him in.”
Leyton smiled. “Dan must have the hots for Dottie.”
“Well, it doesn’t mean he won’t talk to Dottie about it, and she’ll start thinking about it and know that’s odd. Or if Ricky, the nineteen-year-old boy who saw the lights on in the kitchen, told his boss, Deputy Sheriff Hal Haverton, when he returned to the ranch, Hal might get suspicious. So the whole posse could be on your tail in a massive cougar manhunt in a matter of hours.”
“I’ll be on the lookout for it. You said you were visiting with friends at the cabin. When we arrive there, you’ll say I’m your new boyfriend.”
“And Chase?”
“He never was your boyfriend, or I should say husband. Not when he didn’t come home last night.”
She let out her breath with exasperation.
The first obstacle he figured they’d meet were bathroom breaks, though he was planning for them to go in the woods. And being that it was only a six-hour drive, they shouldn’t have to stop that often. That would alleviate problems with worrying if she’d leave messages that she was a hostage. Still, he was reminded that she couldn’t very well turn him in to a regular police force.
Food, no problem. They’d just stop at fast food places along the way. Gas, same deal. No bathroom breaks at gas stations, though he did consider if they had a family restroom, he’d just make her go with him in there. He could just see a clerk eyeing them with suspicion, and he’d show off his injury and tell the clerk he needed her to hold it for him.
He smiled at the image that gave him. He still couldn’t believe that she’d washed him, and he’d been ready to return the favor. His body reacted again to feeling her hands on his arousal, which proved she could be more professionally minded them him at times. But hell, when she was washing him…
He shook his head to clear the thought.
They’d started so early, they’d driven five hours before they came to a town where he could grab some clothes. She’d actually slept the whole way, and so except for stopping to get gas once and taking the keys with him while he made a quick pit stop in the woods, she hadn’t needed anything. But it was ten, and he was getting hungry.
He pulled into the parking lot of a men’s clothing store, relieved he’d finally found one. This was going to be awkward, but it couldn’t be helped. He hiked up the sweatshirt sleeves, and said, “Ready to go shopping? Since you’re paying, though once I can, I’ll reimburse you, I’ll make sure I stick to a strict limit.”
She uncurled herself from her jaguar throw like a big sleepy cat, yawned, stretched her arms, and smiled. “Should be interesting.”
“We passed a lot of small grocery stores, a Dollar General store, and a department store, but I figured smaller was better.”
She waited for him to get her door, but this time he offered her his hand, and she took it. “Where in the world are we?”
He pulled her out of the car, locked the door, and motioned to the town. “About an hour from your rental, I suspect.”
“Geeze, Leyton, where in the world have we ended up? I’ve never seen this place before.” She shook her head. “Let me see my phone.”
He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her while he watched her Google their location. “Ahh, Leyton, you’ve taken us two hours out of our way.”
“What? No way.” He took the phone from her, and scowled. “Hell. Must have been the GPS.”
“Or the driver.”
“Or the navigator. If you hadn’t slept the whole time, you could have made sure I didn’t go the wrong route.”
“Blame me for your mistake, why don’t you?”
He smiled.
They headed inside. The clerk said, “Welcome to the Rogers Mountaineer Adventures,” then noticed the way Leyton was dressed and glanced at Kate to see what state of dress she was in.
Luckily, the store had just opened and no one else was shopping there yet.
“Robbed, clothes stolen,” Leyton said. “Nothing like wearing your girlfriend’s sweats to feel like a real man.” He draped his arm over Kate’s shoulder and led her to the jeans stacked on a shelf. She rolled her eyes at him.
“How are you going to manage this?” Kate asked, her voice hushed.
“What, trying on clothes? No need to. The sizes should be close to what I need and certainly better than what I’m wearing now.”
He soon had everything he needed while Kate paid for it. Then they headed out to the car.
“How are you going to get dressed?”
He swore she was attempting to hide a smile. “Hell, Kate, give me a break.”
“I don’t know. You look so hot in your girlfriend’s sweats, I’d hate to see you change into the he-man clothes.”
“I’ll let you have them back as a souvenir of the brief time we spent together,” he said, winking at her.
“Get into the passenger seat. Or the back seat. I’ll drive and actually get us to our destination. You go ahead and change.”
He did then, trusting her to get them to where they were going. He had finished dressing in the brown T-shirt and camo pants, looking down as he was tying his hiking boots, then decided to rest his eyes. He wasn’t sure how long he was out when Kate screamed.
Leyton looked up just in time to see them sailing off the narrow road into the spruce trees and heading
down into the ravine, snapping trees in their path, bending others. The collision forced the air bags to inflate and deflate, the trek downward rattling every bone in his body. Right before they crashed at the bottom.
4
“Kate, are you all right?” Leyton asked, gently taking hold of her arm and squeezing lightly. “Kate?”
“What…what the hell happened?” she asked, staring at the forest in front of them, the windshield glass shattered, the air bags silky white cloth draped over the top of the dashboard and her steering wheel. Bits of glass covered everything. Dappled sun filtered through the spruce, reflecting off the tiny pieces of glass, making them shimmer like diamonds. The car was tilted downward as if they were stuck in a roller coaster frozen in time on the way down, but not going any further.
Through the trees, a glimpse of a rocky shoreline and a creek beyond could be seen, but she still couldn’t fathom what was going on. The last she remembered, she was driving on the road.
“You took an interesting detour,” Leyton said, unbuckling his seatbelt, stretching, checking himself over. “Are you okay?”
She couldn’t move. She…she wasn’t injured, she just couldn’t think.
“Okay, listen, Kate,” he said, sounding worried about her, his hand on her arm, gently holding it as if he was trying to give her comfort. “You left the road. We’re at the bottom of a ravine. There’s no way to get your vehicle out of here. It’s totaled. We need to assess the damage—not to the vehicle. Just to ourselves and figure a way to get out of here. Where were we when you left the road?”
“A black mother bear and her two cubs were on the road,” she finally recalled. Sure, experts always said not to swerve to avoid hitting an animal in the road, but a mother bear and her cubs? The thought left her chilled to the core. She hadn’t even had time to slow down, apply her brakes, nothing. And if she’d hit the bears, her car still would have been totaled, and she could have ended up down here anyway.
“Okay, good reason to leave the road.”
She frowned at him. “Quit trying to cheer me up. Or placate me. Or whatever it is you’re trying to do. I just totaled my car, got us stuck down God-knows-where, and—“
Tears filled her eyes. Damn it. She was not an emotional kind of person. She couldn’t be when she had to take care of others who were badly injured and…emotional wrecks.
“Okay.” He pulled out her cell phone and tried to get reception. “No bars.” He let out his breath. “Do you know approximately where we are? Surely someone will come this way, see the broken trees, and realize a car left the road there.”
“I took a detour to try and make up all the time you lost.” She chewed on her lip. “Damn it.”
He sighed. “Both of us are cougars so we have that advantage. As long as we haven’t suffered any broken bones and need to have them splinted, or we haven’t had any internal injuries, we should be fine. You have food and water with us, well-prepared for your stay. You have a tent for part of your camping experience. A sleeping bag.”
She looked at him. “For one,” she said. It really was for two because her nurses had gotten it in the hopes she’d be dating a guy who loved to camp like she did. So for now she’d just used it as an oversized bag for herself. But she didn’t want him thinking he could sleep with her in it.
“For two. When I stopped for gas while you were sleeping, I was checking over the supplies. Which will work well for the two of us. It’ll get cold at night and I imagine we’re going to have a long hike out of here. If we have to, we can hunt as cougars for fish in the creek. But we won’t abandon our…your gear. We need to get to someplace where we can call for help.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “You’re going to talk to the police?”
“I’m going to get you help. Either I’m going to help you get to the cabin you were staying at—“
“I’ll be a couple of days late and they’ll most likely give my cabin away,” she said, feeling defeated.
“I’m sorry, Kate. I swear if I can, I’ll make it up to you. Do you need help with your seatbelt?”
“How can you be so calm and collected? Jeesh.”
He smiled. “You screamed enough at the top of the ridge for the both of us.”
“The cub ran out into the road. Momma bear ran out after him with the other cub following. I nearly had a heart attack.” She couldn’t shake loose of feeling so out of it. She knew she was in mild shock. She was glad he seemed fine, but it annoyed her too that she couldn’t feel the same way. Probably because she’d been driving, it was her car, and the end of her vacation.
She realized then she was shaking. The adrenaline rush, shock.
“Tell me your name and your address,” Leyton suddenly said.
“What?”
“Just tell me.”
“Give me a break.”
“Damn it, you’re going into shock. And you’re the doctor. Not that most of our kind aren’t first-aid trained, and in the job I’m in, I’ve taken additional training, but I know shock in a victim when I see it.”
“Kate. Ellen. Parker. M.D.”
“Address?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I got my name right, didn’t I?”
“Address?”
“Three-eleven Wildwood Lane, Yuma Town.”
He waited for the rest.
“Colorado! I know where I live.”
“Good. I’m going to help you out of your seatbelt.” He unbuckled the belt and pulled it gently off her, though he groaned when he did it.
She felt bad that he was still in pain, and she was certain the accident hadn’t helped matters at all. “I’ll share my sleeping bag with you.”
“Thanks, Kate. I swear I will make this up to you.”
She leaned back against the seat, her body still shaking. He took the jaguar blanket and wrapped it around her.
“I’m going to get out and look around a bit.”
“If you see the mother bear and her cubs, return here pronto, okay?” She could imagine him getting himself killed.
“Yeah, will do.” He pulled a piece of hair away from her eye and kissed her forehead. “I’ll be right back. Just wanted to check and see if we might be able to climb out of here. If we can get to the road, we might be able to hail someone.”
She hadn’t seen anyone coming or going on the road the entire time she’d been driving on it, which didn’t really bode well for the situation they were in now. “Okay.”
She closed her eyes.
“Stay awake, Kate. I’ll be gone only for a little while.”
After he climbed out of the tilted car, he shut the door and glanced back at her through the shattered windshield.
She frowned at him. “Go.”
She realized that this was the first opportunity she’d had to escape him. Right. Not that she couldn’t make it up the steep incline as a cougar, but then what? She would be shot when she went into town to ask for help. Which reminded her of how Leyton had been shot and sought to get bandages from her clinic. He’d been naked just like she’d be if she had to visit a town as a human after shifting.
She steeled her back, groaned a little in pain, feeling the muscle strain, or whiplash as it was known, in her back and shoulders from being thrown forward so violently, and then back. She tried to open her car door, but hers was stuck, jammed because of a bent frame or maybe a stump or something that prevented it from opening. She just sat there, wanting in the worst way to get out of the car and check out their surroundings too.
Even turning her head made her back and shoulders ache. God, what a nightmare. She could sure use some of the backache medicine she had in her bag, if she could reach it. But climbing over the console seemed an insurmountable task.
She heard movement in the brush behind the car and hoped Leyton had some good news. Like there was a staircase a short distance away and they could climb it up to the road.
She tried to turn to see his expression, but the pain shrieked through her back. Ther
e wasn’t a thing she could do about it either, except put ice on it and take the backache medicine. She waited until he got to the window and turned her head carefully. Peering at her through her door window was one of the black fuzzy bear cubs, his long wicked nails propped on her door.
Her heart practically seized. Momma bear would be here any second. And the windshield was smashed to smithereens.
5
Leyton didn’t want to be gone long, anxious about Kate’s condition. He was really concerned about her, worried she might have suffered some internal injury, knew it was bad news, and that’s why she hadn’t tried to leave the car. He was afraid she hadn’t wanted to worry him. He’d made a pass a mile down the creek, the terrain up the hill too steep to climb. As cougars, they could make it. But as humans without climbing gear, it was going to be difficult to make it up there unless they risked their necks. It was about a half a mile up the steep terrain to the road, he guessed, so not a short trek either.
He headed back to the car, figuring his next job was getting Kate out of it, and checking her over. He needed to give her something to drink, pain medication, if she needed it, and then he’d head back the other way, walk about a mile and see if he could discover anything that way. He wanted to see if he could find a way out of here while it was still light out, just in case there was an easy way to make it up to the road.
His stomach rumbled¸ reminding him they’d missed breakfast and it was about lunchtime. So he’d fix them something to eat too, set up a camp, and figure out the direction they needed to go. He wondered just how far they had to go on this road. Would it follow the creek? They could get water and purify it to save on their supplies and follow the creek to wherever the campsite was. They’d have to backpack it out. He wasn’t sure he could carry a backpack with his shoulder injured so. It would heal faster than a human’s, but it was still going to take a week or so. He would have to make a Native American styled travois to carry their gear and pull behind him across the rocky beach. Even if Kate wasn’t injured, she wouldn’t be able to carry all that weight. He imagined when she got to her destination, she would have just set up at a campsite, her car right there, a tent pad ready for her. And then her cabin, same thing, parking spot right there and she wouldn’t have far to lug all her stuff.
