by Susan Sey
But while taking his ladykiller cousin out of commission would be vastly satisfying on a personal level, Rush also knew it wouldn’t help his cause with Goose at all if she discovered him and Einar trading punches to determine ownership of her hand. It would only be a distraction, a side fight, and she was busy enough already battling her way from no to yes. Rush didn’t need to give her even one reason to suspect he didn’t trust her judgment enough to pick the right answer, let alone the right guy.
But he was still landing extremely gratifying mental punches on Einar’s smug, lantern jaw when Goose breezed through the door.
“Hey, Rush,” she said, hanging her coat on the hook next to his. She lifted her face to the air, closed her eyes and drew in a breath. A beatific smile spread over her sharp face and she said, “Ah, coffee. You’re a prince among men. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Not lately.”
“Then I’ll do it.” She came into the kitchen and patted his arm with that brisk, platonic touch she used so effectively. It was deliberately impersonal—a not-too-subtle reminder of last night’s “no thanks”—but it sent a surge of awareness skittering over his entire body anyway. “You’re a prince among men,” she said, and reached past him into the cupboard for a coffee cup.
“You might not think so after the next few days.”
“Why’s that?” she asked, her eyes dancing over the rim of her cup.
“Weather’s coming.”
She glanced out the window, where fingers of trailing mist slid through the trees, and melting snow dripped slowly from the roof. “Aw. It’s going to get cold again?”
“Yeah.” Rush cleared his throat. “It may snow and blow a little, too.”
She frowned at him. “Okay, so translating from Rush into Human, that’s roughly, what? Negative sixty, winds up to eighty knots, and twelve, fourteen feet of snow?”
“Roughly,” he agreed.
“So what does that mean?”
“It means we’re eating anything that can’t be stuck in a snowbank until the power comes back on, and recharging all our batteries and cell phones before it goes out. We should bring in enough firewood for the weekend at least, and if you’re interested in one last hot shower, you might want to do it sooner rather than later. That precious hair dryer of yours will be collecting dust by tomorrow morning.”
He took in her stricken expression and decided to drop the final bomb. Better to deal with it all at once. “We’ll lose Internet access first, so if there’s any pressing e-mailing you need to do, you should get on it.”
She set down her coffee cup and stared at him. “You don’t have, like, a backup generator or anything?”
“Nope. People come to Mishkwa for a pristine, wilderness experience.” He stretched his lips in what he hoped was a comforting smile. “We aim to please.”
She reached a concerned hand up to the smooth fall of her hair. “How long does the power outage usually last?”
“Twenty-four, forty-eight hours after the storm, sometimes,” he said. She sighed with relief, and honesty compelled him to add, “It can be up to a week, though.”
She actually paled. “So we’re going to be stuck together in this little cabin, without electricity, showers or—my God—the Internet, for an unspecified amount of time that could possibly be measured in weeks?”
Rush’s stomach sank a little at the prospect stated so baldly. He hoped to God his good intentions didn’t go out with the power, or he’d be busting out every move Einar thought he had, up to and including the old let’s-conserve-body-heat line.
He paused. That was a good one, actually, because it was so true. Fucking like minks kept folks nice and toasty.
He snatched back his wayward thoughts before they generated an image of Goose wearing nothing but all that golden skin of hers and a whole bunch of firelight. This was her battle, he told himself sternly. No fair planting land mines. He’d thrown down the gauntlet last night—he wanted her to come to him of her own free will, with yes on her lips and in her heart. What good was yes if he stole it from her?
The fucking-like-minks thing came to mind again and he shoved it resolutely away.
“I’ll just get started on that firewood,” he said, and hustled toward the door. He snatched his jacket off the hook and shoved himself into it. Or tried to anyway. It took his preoccupied brain a few baffled beats to register that his sleeve was extraordinarily tight. And short.
And purple.
“That’s my jacket,” Goose said mildly from the kitchen.
“I see that.” He tried to peel it off, but it was stuck like a burr on a golden retriever.
“You’re welcome to it, but I don’t think it fits very well.”
He glared at her and gave up yanking on the cuff in exchange for just whipping his arm around. Violence and velocity often succeeded where reason and patience failed, and this was no exception to that handy rule. The jacket sailed across the room and landed on the sagging couch.
Goose snorted out one of those half-swallowed belly laughs of hers. As usual, it transformed her face from interesting to incandescent, and everything inside him went abruptly still.
Mine.
“Is that a ‘no thanks’?” she asked, grinning.
Rush didn’t answer. He knew if he opened his mouth, no wasn’t the word that would come out. He stomped out into the damp yard to wrestle with the woodpile, her unabashed laughter chasing him out the door.
Chapter 19
THREE HOURS later the sky dropped onto the island, exactly as Rush had predicted. Snow rose and fell in strange, howling twists outside the frosted windows, driving the evergreens to moan and rock and weep. Icy air leaked into the Ranger Station straight through the walls, or so it seemed to Goose. It reached deep into the core of her and leached away something vital and warm.
“Good Lord,” she said, rubbing her arms and moving closer to the stove. Unease perched lightly in her belly. “Was that thunder?”
“Yeah.” Rush opened the stove door to feed the fire and Goose all but crawled up his back in an effort to get at the heat. She spread her hands in the blast of hot air.
“You can have snow and thunder at the same time?”
“Sure.” He threw her a glance over his shoulder, blinked at how near she was. “Chilly?”
“Aren’t you?” She looked out the window—the part that wasn’t yet buried in snow anyway—and shuddered.
“You might want to put on a sweater or something,” he said. “I don’t think this old stove will pump out much more heat. It’s pretty much running at capacity. Plus we’ll want to be relatively conservative with the wood. We don’t know how long this little squall will last yet.”
“Little squall?” The wind battered the door like a wild beast that had scented its prey. “You call this little?”
“Sure.” He fed the fire a log and closed the stove door. “We’ve still got power, don’t we? Until the power goes out, it’s hardly—”
The lights flickered, dimmed, then died.
“—a storm.” Rush sighed. “Okay, now it’s a storm.”
“Wonderful.”
“Come on. Help me light the lamps. Then we can get set up in here for the night.”
He groped through the storm-induced twilight and came up with her arm. His hand was so warm and solid and reassuring that she leaned into him. She was so damn cold. After a single startled moment, he gave her arm a brisk scrub, a quick up-and-down with his hand. The sort fathers give chilly daughters. If she hadn’t been so freaked out at finding the passionate battle raging inside herself suddenly reflected in the out-of-doors, she might’ve been offended. Or at least amused.
As it was she simply leaned closer.
“Wait, get what set up in here?” she asked as he led her into the kitchen, where he’d arranged a series of antique hurricane lamps earlier. He handed her a disposable lighter and she lifted the glass globes and began filling the cabin with an oily yellow light.
“O
ur beds.”
Goose fumbled the lighter.
“Excuse me?”
“Power’s out,” he said, slipping a glass globe over the wick she’d finally managed to light. “Which means the fans that move hot air through the cabin are also out. Unless you’re looking forward to waking up tomorrow morning with icicles on your eyebrows, we’re bunking down in here for the night.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll close off the doors to the bedrooms, too. Minimize the space the stove needs to heat. I filled a few five-gallon buckets before the water pump went out. We can use a few for drinking and cooking; the other we can use to flush the toilet. We can back that up with melted snow, push comes to shove.”
Goose stared blindly at a tiny flame licking at a cold, oily wick. What, she wondered, was more terrifying? The prospect of manually flushing a toilet? Or the prospect of spending a night—two nights? three?—sleeping close enough to Rush to take advantage of the heat from his body?
The memory of his kiss, hot and avid, blazed through her and she sighed.
At least she wouldn’t be cold.
BY BEDTIME—or what the clock said should have been bedtime, as it had been dark for hours—Rush was only too happy to get outside. The screaming wind sliced cleaner than his old combat knife, but what was cutting at him inside that warm little cabin—the smell of her, the sound of her, the quick skate of those dark, liquid eyes that wouldn’t quite meet his—was worse. He was almost grateful for the wind that snatched and shoved at him as he trotted out back for another armload of logs, freezing one eye and both nostrils shut within seconds. It cleared his mind and reset his body quicker than a cold shower, and wasn’t quite as obvious, which was a nice bonus.
He banged back into the cabin and lost any headway he’d made against lust the instant he saw her.
He didn’t know why it should surprise him that she’d dragged the cot mattresses from their respective rooms and arranged them in front of the stove. That she’d taken the care to lay out his sleeping bag and place his pillow at the head. That she’d brought out her own and done the same. He’d live in eternal regret that she’d laid them out carefully head to toe rather than zipping them together, but he couldn’t say it surprised him.
No, what surprised him was that while he’d been out doing the manly thing, wrestling what they needed from nature to survive the storm, she’d taken the traditional female role and built their nest. He didn’t know many women—many people in general, actually—who’d just do what needed doing without squawking about who did which job and what getting stuck with a certain job declared other people believed about them. Goose was about the most competent cop he’d ever run across—and he’d run across plenty in his former life—but she didn’t balk at making beds. Didn’t balk at tending somebody else in a small, mundane way.
She sat cross-legged in the middle of her sleeping bag, the earflap hat Ben Barnes had hooked her up with plastering her hair to her cheeks so hard the ends were starting to bend outward and upward a little. Cute.
Or it should have been cute. But lust uncurled slow and warm in his belly at the sight of her there, her huge eyes nearly purple in the lantern light, her lip gloss worn off hours ago, the polished veneer cracking good and solid as the real woman underneath gazed at him with concern and trepidation.
“Rush,” she said. “We have to talk.”
He dumped his armload of logs into the wood box next to the stove. “That sounds ominous.”
She didn’t smile. “It’s not good.”
“Does it have anything to do with the fact that I’ve been making this mental list of Ways to While Away a Stormy Night with Goose, and talk doesn’t feature in the top ten?”
She did smile at that. “Not exactly, no.” Her smile died and she met his eyes. “But by the time I’m done talking, you’ll probably be making a different list. Top Ten Ways to Get This Woman off My Island, Pronto.”
He pulled off his hat and gloves and tossed them onto the floor beside the stove to dry. “Doubt it.”
She twisted her fingers together in her lap and slid her eyes away from his. “You shouldn’t.”
He stripped out of his jacket, hung it on the peg by the door. “Should I brace myself?”
“Will you sit down, please?”
And that was a big fat yes if he’d ever heard one. He came to the couch, sat facing her. She didn’t stand up, or even join him on the couch. Anxiety stirred in his stomach. A woman like Goose would have mastered all the unspoken ways to use body language to assert authority, and the fact that she stayed on the floor below him spoke to her intense desire to keep him off the defensive. His heart pinched.
Either she was about to rock his world with some really, really bad news—maybe she was into Einar after all?—or she was making one more last-ditch effort to play the tired old we-can’t-be-together-because-I’m-after-your-family card.
Not that he could blame her for trying Door Number Two one last time. Hauling all your shit into the bright light of day for an unforgiving inventory was no picnic. Rush knew this firsthand, and he sympathized. But was she really so desperate to avoid it that she’d encourage him to crucify her on the cross of his family loyalty instead?
Only one way to find out.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m ready. Hit me.”
GOOSE SWALLOWED hard and gazed up at Rush. He sat leaning forward on the couch, elbows on knees, his long, tough fingers linked loosely between them. He gazed at her with a steady patience that put a sharp strain on the controls under which she generally locked her more dangerous appetites. She damned Lila for even putting the idea in her head that sex would set her free. She damned him for suggesting the same thing.
Because ever since he’d walked away from her in the moonlight, she couldn’t even look at him without remembering the feel of his mouth on hers. Without reliving the way his big hands raced hot and demanding on her skin.
Without considering his quiet assertion that she was some kind of fraud. That her dedication to stamping out her worst impulses was born of cowardice rather than altruism.
And she certainly couldn’t look at him now, sitting right there on the couch above her. Not when it was so completely clear that he’d consider it his pleasure—no, his honor—to help her toss some of that emotional baggage overboard. That he’d be more than happy to reacquaint her with her body and everything it knew how to want. And maybe even introduce her to a few things she had never even thought to want.
She drew in a deep breath and snatched at the shreds of her self-control. If she was going to take him up on that offer—and that was a huge if she was still deeply conflicted about—she wouldn’t do it while lost in lust. If she said yes, she would say it from a place of cool, reasoned decision. It was one thing to embrace your more carnal nature. It was another thing entirely to turn off your brain and let your body—markedly unreliable in certain situations—call the shots.
So if she was going to get through this night without taking a bite—just one little bite—out of that gorgeously solid shoulder of his, Rush was going to have to help. Which meant she was going to have to remind him why spending their evening doing anything more than talking was a really, really bad idea.
It was time to come clean. At least partially.
“So I’ve been thinking,” she said. “About this situation of ours.”
“Which situation?” he asked. “The counterfeiting? The black magic? Or the fact that I kissed you last night, and somewhere between ‘oh my God’ and ‘no thanks,’ you kissed me back?”
Heat spiraled out of her core, settled heavy between her legs, in her breasts. Okay, this wasn’t a good start. “Um, the first one. And the second.” Though God knew she’d been thinking about the third, too.
He made a vaguely disapproving noise, like he could sense the basic cowardice that kept option number three off the agenda. But all he said was, “You have a suspect?”
“Yes, but I need your help before I can move f
orward.” Her hands wanted to fidget, so she clasped them neatly in her lap. “And please, I need you to understand that I wish like hell I didn’t have to ask you this.”
He leaned forward, his eyes warming with . . . sympathy? “Goose. You’re doing your job, and you’re doing it with honor. I appreciate that, and I’ll do whatever I can to make this easier on all of us.”
She blew out a breath. “Say that again in five minutes,” she muttered.
He cocked a brow. “You think I won’t?”
“Why would you?”
He reached out and tugged on a lock of hair her hat couldn’t contain. Hair that was already starting—God help her—to wig out. “Yarrow’s a very troubled young girl, Goose. You think I can’t appreciate that what you’re doing will ultimately benefit her?”
Her heart stopped for three solid seconds, then thudded back to life. Jesus, she hadn’t planned to go quite as far as the Yarrow situation tonight. She stared at him in openmouthed shock. “You know about Yarrow?”
“It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots you’ve been drawing me, Goose. You think she’s the one making herself at home at the Stone Altar, don’t you?”
She frowned at him. “Why would I think that?”
He stared at her this time. “Because of what you said the other day. About her needing to reject love?”
She closed her eyes. “Oh God. Lila. Black magic would be a big slap at Lila. An ugly one, too. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“But you’d clearly thought of something.” She opened her eyes to find him giving her a sharp appraisal. “What was it?”
She shook her head. “No, let’s follow yours through for a minute. What about your theory that the two are connected—the altar and the smuggling? How on earth would Yarrow be connected to importing supernotes?”
“I made a few phone calls after our conversation in Hornby Harbor the other day. It’s Yarrow’s story to tell, and I won’t get into all of it, but I will say that part of the reason her parents moved her up here was to separate her from a bad influence. Some college dope dealer. Apparently he was in pretty deep with a Minneapolis-based gang.”
