by Dana Marton
“Mmm,” he said around her nipple before he switched to the other one.
A long, terrible growl echoed through the woods. The next second, Jess was plastered to him like a spider monkey, her breasts mushed into his cheeks.
“Can’t breathe.”
She let up a little.
“Not that I’m complaining.” Since her soft breasts still rested against his face.
“What was that?” She kept clinging to him.
“Wild cat? Bear?” he said, very much distracted.
“Sasquatch?”
“Probably not.”
“I wish our clothes were dry.”
“I wish I had a gun.” A secondary wish, really. Mostly he just wished he was inside her. Especially when she shifted. “That’s not a gun. Just to clarify.”
“How can you joke in a situation like this?”
“Believe me—I’d rather do other things than joke.”
“You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes right now.” She was peering over his head, into the woods.
“You can’t see it, but you gave me a raging hard-on.”
“One-track mind.”
“It’s a good track.”
For several seconds, they could hear no other sound but the fire’s crackling, and beyond that, the rushing river. “Do you think it’s gone? Why aren’t you worried?”
“We have no food. No smells to draw a bear here. And wild animals will rarely walk toward a fire. Except for rhinos. Rhinos will try to stomp out a fire, did you know that? They call them the firemen of the bush in Africa. It came up once in a book I wrote.”
“I don’t think it’s a rhinoceros.” She shifted back to look at him, which shifted her entire body.
Oh God, yes, right there.
“Jess?” He gently rocked against her, the slightest possible movement.
She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, her eyes heating. But she said, “I can’t focus on sex right now.”
Was that a mix of disappointment and desire in her voice?
“How about I take your mind off the distractions?” He rocked against her again.
“I’ll still be leaving in another week or two.”
At least she didn’t sound as happy about that as before, which Derek took as encouragement.
“I know.” He nuzzled her breasts before looking up at her face. “But here’s the thing. We’re going to figure this out. What I can’t do is let you walk out of my life again. This is about more than sex. You know that, right? If you want me to prove it, I’ll stop right now.”
She watched him for a distressingly long time before saying, “Don’t stop.”
She rubbed her wet heat on his hardness, and the moan that escaped her said she was on the edge already. The air caught in his chest. Fire exploded through his body. He’d meant to take it slow. Not that he was complaining. Ever again. About anything.
He must have had a startled expression on his face, because she smiled. “I have the moves and reflexes of a stuntwoman.”
“I’ll have to start training again to keep up.” He gripped her hip and ground himself against her, gratified when pure mad lust replaced her easy smile.
She looped her arms around his neck and began moving over the hard, throbbing length of him. Were they too close to the fire? He felt ready to burst into flames.
“I don’t think I ever stopped being in love with you,” he told her.
She stopped and searched his expression. “I didn’t think you were in love with me in the first place.”
“I was too stupid to know. I didn’t figure it out until I was in the navy. Out of everything at home, I missed you the most.”
She closed her eyes.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I didn’t allow myself to think about you.”
“But now you know you always loved me?”
“Is it enough if I know that I’m falling for you right now?”
“I’ll take what I can get.” He took her lips.
What they were doing went miles beyond just sex. He hadn’t known until this moment what he’d been looking for when he’d returned home. He knew now. He’d been looking for Jess. And she was here, in his arms.
And he still didn’t have a freaking condom!
He’d bought two boxes after the last time: one for his bedroom, one for his car. Neither of them was doing him any good right now. Jess had no idea how close she was to seeing a grown man cry.
He brought her to completion with his fingers, and when her sweet body contracted around him, he lost it and surrendered to his own pleasure, making a sticky mess of her thighs.
Long seconds passed before he gathered himself enough to clean her off with a handful of fallen leaves. They were replete, breathing hard, and grinning like idiots when a loud noise came from the woods: branches breaking, rocks rolling underfoot.
“Sasquatch!” She leaped up and dragged on his damp shirt.
Derek grabbed the thickest branch at hand and stepped between her and any possible coming danger.
Zak stomped out of the woods. “Jesus, man!”
“Sorry.” Derek dropped the branch and cupped his privates to cover them.
Jess stepped in front of him. He dragged his pants on behind her back while she explained how they’d fallen into the river.
When she finished, she asked Zak, “So that was you calling out in the woods earlier?”
Derek came around her. “We thought it might be a bear.”
“Oh, no.” A dreamy smile spread on Zak’s face. “That was Bertie. One of the friendlier squatch. Hasn’t shown himself to me yet, but we’ve been talking for a while now.”
He turned toward the woods and let out a sound so grating it could strip the bark from the trees. A sound very much like the one they’d heard earlier.
So it was Zak, Derek thought, shooting Jess a smug look but politely saying nothing. He’d just had the best sex of his life. He could afford to be magnanimous.
Except, a second or two later, Bertie answered back.
“Holy goose bumps shitcrackers,” Jess whispered, nearly climbing onto Derek’s back.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Tuesday
“WOULD YOU MIND radioing the police?” Jess asked Zak, pretending that she wasn’t freaking out completely.
She was ready to get out of the woods and away from the wildlife—squatch or otherwise. She needed a big step back and a moment alone to gather herself.
Zak rubbed his finger over the radio clipped to his belt. If he’d been happy to find them, he didn’t look it now. The flickering light of the flames illuminated his reluctance. “They’ll come in a motorboat.”
“The sooner the better.”
“They’ll scare Bertie away.”
How was that a bad thing?
But before she could ask anything as insensitive as that and offend Zak forever, Derek cleared his throat next to her.
Zak looked at him. Whatever expression Derek wore must have been convincing, because Zak said, “Right.”
He grabbed his radio, called in that he’d found Jess and Derek, and gave coordinates while Jess’s cheeks burned. She was wearing Derek’s shirt and little else. Derek was wearing only his pants. Zak so had to know what they’d been doing.
“You must know these woods pretty well,” Derek was telling him.
Zak’s chest puffed out. “We mapped out a few hundred acres in grids. When we find footprints or fur, or the remains of a kill, it’s important for our work to record location. The river is one of our main orientation points. Also, our highest priority. The sasquatch have to come to the river to drink. So we know this area the best.”
Jess sincerely hoped that Bertie or his cousins wouldn’t come to the river to drink just now. But, at the same time, she was also super grateful that Zak was focusing on the squatch and not on Derek and her.
While they waited, Derek put on his boots, and then h
e built up the fire so they’d be more easily seen from the water.
Zak tried his sasquatch calls again, but received no response. The longer he tried, the more his shoulders deflated. “Too much movement in the woods tonight, with all of us out. The squatch will probably lay low for a couple of days.”
While Derek walked down to the edge of the water to wait, Zak talked to Jess about all their finds and sightings and near misses. She didn’t hear half of it. Her mind was a mess. Chuck was gone. She could not even begin to process that. Principal Crane was the masked man. Just . . . What the hell? She’d pushed him off the cliff. Dead. Dead. Dead. Then her gaze would catch on Derek by the water, and all they’d shared in the past hour would flood back into her brain again, washing out every other thought.
I don’t think I ever stopped being in love with you, Derek had told her. That sentence, more than anything else, kept ping-ponging around inside her skull.
How was she supposed to leave now? How on earth was she going to get on a plane and fly away?
Derek was . . . He took care of everyone without expecting anything in return. He was willing to defend her with his life. They had a shared past, which she’d finally come to understand wasn’t a bad thing. He knew her in a way that nobody else was ever going to know her. She was in love with him. Hell of a time to realize that, tonight of all nights, shivering on the riverbank.
Twenty minutes passed before they heard the motor’s chugging, then another five before the boat pulled up to take them, Sheriff Rollins at the helm. He leaned heavily, as if nothing but the act of steering was holding him up.
“That can’t be safe,” Derek muttered under his breath.
“I’m willing to take my chances,” Jess answered. She wasn’t staying in the woods.
“Everybody all right?” The sheriff panned them with an industrial-strength spotlight mounted in the front of the boat.
Jess shaded her eyes with her hand. “You found Kaylee?”
At the same time Derek said, “Kaylee OK?”
“At the hospital for a quick checkup. Which is where you’re going next. So hop on in.”
Derek carried her in his arms so she wouldn’t have to get wet again, and so the rocks wouldn’t cut up her bare feet. Then he went back and kicked apart their fire, kicked dirt over the burning branches.
As Derek jumped into the boat, knowing just where to land and barely rocking it, the sheriff called past him. “Zak?”
“I’m staying.” Zak backed toward the woods. “Have my ATV a couple of miles up the trail.”
“You sure, son? You can come back to get it tomorrow in daylight.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t want to be back here on another search and rescue if you get lost.”
“The day I get lost in the woods is the day I hang up my Versquatcher hat.”
“All right.” The sheriff shook his head. “You have a radio. Call if you get yourself into trouble.” Then, with one last disapproving glance at Zak, he turned the boat around to go upriver, muttering about the overconfidence of young fools.
Jess sat with Derek’s arms around her. She watched Zak until she could no longer see him. He probably wanted to try communicating with Bertie again.
She shivered.
“Anything you want to tell me about the dead body at the bottom of the cliffs?” The sheriff squinted at them. With the spotlight on the water, he probably couldn’t see much.
“Crane attacked Jess on the top of Short Stack,” Derek said. “They went over. He fell on the rocks. She fell in the river. I jumped after her.”
When the sheriff said nothing, Jess asked, “Did you recover the body?”
“It’s secured. We’re waiting for daylight for recovery. Nothing we can do will save him now. No sense risking personnel on those rocks.”
They fell silent for a minute or two, only the sound of the outboard motor filling the night.
The sheriff kept frowning. Then he finally said, “Never figured him for one of them perverts. Used to hunt together. Neither of us likes venison, so we used to give the deer we shot to the homeless shelter. Then they got some new rules, wouldn’t take ’em no more.” He shook his head. “I stopped hunting, too old for it anyway. Crane kept going. Don’t know what he did with the venison after that.”
Fed it to the crows, Jess thought, and shivered. He’d fed those crows like pets. That was why the birds followed him around.
Derek tightened his arms around her middle. She lay her head on his shoulder and let his warmth surround her.
Sheriff Rollins took them to the bridge, where they were transferred into a waiting ambulance. The EMTs cleaned cuts and scrapes and put on bandages, two young guys in blue overalls, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. Since Jess had been shot, they had her lying on the gurney, while Derek sat on the bench.
The sheriff promised to come by the house in the morning; then he closed the door before either of them could say anything. When the ambulance started up a second later, Derek took Jess’s hand.
She stared at the white ceiling. Principal Crane. Kaylee. The water. Then Derek . . . Too many thoughts circled in her head. She couldn’t line them up. “I can’t think straight.”
“Hypothermia does that,” the younger of the two EMTs told her. “I can get you another blanket.”
Heat seeped into her from Derek’s hand. “No. Thank you. This is OK.”
She spent the trip in a daze, her mind rerunning the events of the night as if she were watching back movie-shoot footage. She’d stop the recording, think, Holy shit, then rewind again.
She didn’t fully snap back into the here and now until they ran into Kaylee in the ER. The EMTs stopped with her for a second to update the intake person who hurried over to receive them.
“I’ve already been discharged,” Kaylee said. “Six stitches.” She showed off the bandage on her forehead. “I didn’t cry. I was tough. Abuelito was tough through heart surgery, right? We’re the tough kind.” She fought hard not to let her face crumple.
Jess couldn’t have been prouder of the girl or more impressed. After being kidnapped and threatened with death, Kaylee still had the presence of mind to think about her grandfather, and the fortitude to hold strong. She was going to grow up to be an exceptional woman. And Jess wanted to be there to see that.
Zelda hurried up, her face pale, her eyes red-rimmed, and put an arm around the girl while her gaze searched Jess. “Are you all right?”
“Barely a scratch,” Jess said. “They’re only bringing me in as a precaution. How did you get here?”
“Pam drove me.”
As if on cue, Pam popped up on the other side of the gurney. “You’re doing this to hook up with a hot doctor.” She tried to turn her worried expression into a teasing one, but didn’t entirely succeed. “Admit it.”
“There’ll be no hooking up.” Derek grumbled and took Jess’s hand.
Pam shot Jess a look that said, I knew it! Then, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me before. Then, You’ll pay.
Before Jess could think of what to say, the EMTs wheeled her through the swinging doors. Derek went with her. Everybody else had to stay back.
Jess was checked out and patched up in less than twenty minutes, then discharged. The retelling of the night, when they went up to Rose’s room to let her know everyone was all right, took longer than the doctor’s exam.
Jess’s mother did not handle the news well that her gentleman friend was a serial killer. Jess had to assure her at least a dozen times that she didn’t blame her. “Come on, Mom. Nobody had seen that coming.”
Pam drove them all home, still grappling with all that had happened. “So Crane was going to kill you, then go back for Kaylee? You think he died as soon as he hit the rocks? I hope the dickless bastard hung on for a while and suffered. God, I don’t even want to think what would have happened if Derek didn’t find you.”
“Jess and Kaylee had everything under control,” Derek said. H
e sat in the back of the car on one side of Kaylee, Jess on the other. Zelda sat in the front with Pam.
“You think Abuelito is proud of me?” Kaylee asked, her voice thick with grief.
Jess hugged her. “You bet.”
Derek ruffled Kaylee’s hair. “Everybody is proud of you. You ever decide to join the navy and become the first female Navy SEAL, I’ll be your reference.”
Kaylee’s lips stretched into a wobbly smile. “If Abuelito is watching, I want to show him that I can take care of myself.”
“You can,” Zelda said from the front. “But you also have a family to take care of you. So you don’t have to do it all by yourself.”
The family weren’t the only ones pulling together either. The whole community was pulling for Kaylee and Zelda too. At home, seven casseroles and at least as many plates of cookies and a coconut cake waited on the kitchen table, with notes of condolences from people and offers of help.
Jess stared at the bounty as she drew in a long breath. Her eyes burned. For years, she’d thought of Taylorville only as the place that couldn’t keep her safe. But this too was Taylorville—the people who came together in times of trouble. Her neighbors’ kind gestures felt like a warm, fuzzy blanket enveloping her. Home, she thought, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, she felt the word.
“Should I warm up something?” Pam offered.
“Too tired to eat,” Zelda said, and the rest of them nodded in agreement.
Jess gave Pam a hug. “Thank you for being such a good friend.”
Instead of dinner, they all took quick showers—Jess careful of her bandages—so they could go to bed.
“I think you should get my room,” she told Kaylee as she came out of the bathroom and passed the girl who was waiting to go in. “Permanently.”
“I can’t take your room.”
“Of course you can. You can’t live at your place all alone. You belong here now. Like Zelda said. You’re family.”
“It’s not that.” Kaylee shuddered. “It’s the posters. Good grief.”
For the first time in the past two days, Jess smiled. “Smart-ass.”
