Follow A Wild Heart (romance,)

by Hutchinson, Bobby

  "Morning. Liz, pour them some coffee, and that toast is fresh, if you want some," she offered, smiling up at Karena.

  Karena had lectured herself sternly all during the drive in this morning. She'd be natural and easy with Logan's sister this time. No more awkward silences, no more hurrying through the visit in a self-conscious fit of nerves.

  She was about to accept the offer of coffee and toast when Logan said hurriedly, "Sorry, sis, we'll pass on the offer. Kari and I are driving down to St. Paul, and we ought to get going. I'll just go out to the barn and say hello to Cliff, and we'll be on our way."

  "Wait for me. I'm coming with you. I want to show you the new calf," Liz shrieked as he practically flew out the kitchen door, and Betsy stared after them.

  "Well, what's got into him? Sit for a minute at least," she entreated, waving at a chair. "I was hoping we'd get some time to visit. Last time, it seems to me I was on the phone most of the time you were here."

  She hoisted Nicole up over her shoulder for a burp, and both women grinned at the loud sound the baby made.

  "She's getting so big," Karena remarked, unable to resist reaching over and touching the baby's soft neck with her forefinger.

  "She's done eating. Here, you can hold her for a minute if you like," Betsy offered, handing the baby over.

  "Isn't she afraid of strangers?" Karena asked, glorying in the feel and smell of the tiny girl in her arms who studied her seriously from huge violet eyes.

  "Poor kid is handed around so much she doesn't know the difference," Betsy said lightly. "I wish sometimes I had more time to spend with her, but when you're working as well—"

  "I used to feel that way when Danny was little," Karena agreed. "I still do feel guilty at times."

  "Me, too," Betsy said fervently.

  The conversation for the next ten minutes flowed so freely, Karena was amazed to find herself loath to relinquish the baby and leave when Logan reappeared and practically dragged her out the door. It had actually been fun, talking with Betsy.

  It was more fun, though, driving along on a crisp, autumn morning alone in the car with Logan. He drew Karena over close beside him, and the sensual awareness so evident between them grew more acute as the miles passed.

  Logan's apartment was in a new housing complex, and each tenant owned his unit. Logan parked in the underground garage and steered Karena toward the elevators, while giving her a tour.

  "Here's the weight room," he announced, "and that's a steam and sauna area. This is the swimming pool, and this is an entertainment complex any resident can use for parties."

  All she noticed was that none of the rooms he showed her had windows. Everything was carpeted and anonymous music drifted through hidden speakers. Logan used a key on each door he opened, and Karena was reminded of prison cells. There were only one or two people in each of the areas, and Logan didn't seem to know any of them.

  She felt hemmed in and short of breath, as if the air were stale, before they even stepped off the elevator at Logan's floor.

  "Here we are," he said a trifle nervously, unlocking the door. She'd become awfully quiet, although she had been nodding and smiling politely.

  Damn, he wanted her to like his home. He wanted her to feel relaxed and comfortable. He wanted to share this part of himself with her, just as she'd shared her home and her life with him.

  He turned on the thermostat and scooped a mountain of mail off the hall rug.

  He wanted to whisk her straight in and make crazy love to her for the rest of the day on his king-size bed. It seemed an eternity since he'd last had her alone in a warm place, with no kids around, no moose looking over his shoulder, no mosquitoes and no danger of interruption. The intimacy of the car ride had made his body ache with wanting her.

  But she'd think that sex was the only reason he'd brought her here if he carried her into the bedroom like a caveman.

  "This is the kitchen." Brilliant deduction, Baxter.

  "Here's the living room. You can see a section of the park and the trees if you step out here on the balcony." He'd driven her over two hundred miles to look at a view of the park? Fascinating, professor.

  "I use this room as a study." So what else do you call a room with a computer, printer and a desk?

  "Here's the bedroom." He swallowed hard, casually tossing her overnight bag on the blue-patterned bedspread, dropping his jacket carelessly on a chair, and trying to subdue a vivid mental picture of her Nordic fairness sprawled on the blue spread.

  "The bathroom is just off there. Would you like a drink, maybe some wine?"

  She was advancing slowly and hesitantly, but purposefully, across the deep pile of the navy rug, and he watched as she took off her jacket and put it beside his on the chair.

  Then she was close enough to reach out and slip his glasses carefully off and lay them on the dresser, and after only a moment's hesitation, she began to undo the buttons on his shirt, still with that slight uncertainty in her manner, as if she wasn't quite sure she had the right.

  "That long drive made me awfully sleepy," she whispered with a slight bashful catch in her voice. "Maybe we ought to have a little nap, Logan?"

  His arms closed like bands of iron around her and the strangeness of having her here, where he'd spent long nights fantasizing about her, gave way to the breathtaking reality of holding her in his arms and telling her with his lips and his body just exactly how welcome she was to everything he possessed.

  Everything.

  And afterward, it was easier for her to relate this strange, cave-dweller type of existence in a place that he said belonged to him, but which he shared with utter strangers, where a smidgen of tree was an event, with the Logan she'd thought she knew.

  In some primitive fashion, she had needed to make love with him before anything else. She had needed to reestablish the feeling that he was truly her lover, here in foreign territory.

  "Show me how your microwave works, and your dishwasher," she demanded when they finally made it as far as the kitchen hours later.

  "Never mind the gadgets, woman, just look at this refrigerator. There's nothing here but instant coffee, and why my cleaning woman would put it in the fridge is beyond me. We have to go out and either buy groceries or find a restaurant before I starve to death. I'm a seriously weakened man, and I need sustenance."

  "Do you really have a cleaning woman?"

  "Only once a month."

  She'd never met another human soul who actually had a cleaning woman. But neither did she know anyone who had a combination convection-microwave oven and a dishwasher.

  Feeling like a space traveler, she wandered curiously around the apartment. The tub had a Jacuzzi, and Logan promised he'd show her how it worked, after they'd had something to eat.

  Refusing to be hurried, she admired the rustic-looking fireplace in the living room, thinking here at least was something they had in common. Logan ruined that whole illusion by telling her the authentic looking Jogs were fake, and demonstrated that the realistic fire was flamed by gas.

  No firewood to cut, no ashes to clean up. No wonder Logan constantly forgot to put wood on the fires at the cabin. This way was lots easier, though, Karena decided.

  She inspected his bookshelves. Here, at least, there were a few names she recognized: Jack London, Robert Service, James Michener. But there were dozens she'd never heard of, treatises on psychology, forestry, agriculture, even two scholarly volumes on human sexuality.

  Logan brought her jacket, shoved her into it, and nearly dragged her out the door. The other couple in the elevator never said a word all the way down, and Karena avoided eye contact.

  Logan had given a lot of thought during the previous week as to where to take her in St. Paul, what to do that Saturday night that she'd enjoy.

  From one of his students at Itasca Logan had learned that the university gallery was having a showing of the work of a renowned Canadian wildlife artist and that the exhibit contained several studies of moose.

&nbs
p; But first they had dinner at a restaurant he liked, and when they came back to the apartment they somehow ended up having a bath together so he could illustrate how the Jacuzzi operated.

  Then they ended up in bed again, right after the bath, so there wasn't a lot of time to waste getting ready to go to the gallery showing.

  Logan swiftly donned a pair of gray pleated trousers and a pale-blue shirt, with a wool tweed sport coat over the top, and instantly became a stranger to Karena.

  "Have we met?" she inquired, not altogether jokingly.

  "Not only have we met, madam, but you are the only person besides myself who knows that beneath this dapper exterior are bright red jockey shorts," he teased.

  Karena put on the dress she'd brought along, wondering anxiously if Abigail had guessed right about it.

  "What clothes are you taking?" she'd demanded.

  Karena shrugged. "Jeans, maybe a skirt and blouse, I don't know. I only own three dresses, and one of them is too hot for this weather."

  Abby had insisted on an exact description of all three, deciding that a brown paisley shirtdress sounded the most like something she labeled "multipurpose."

  "And leave it unbuttoned three down at the top and two at the bottom," she insisted.

  Now, Karena dutifully put it on, then used her usual dress-up dabs of mascara and lipstick. She gave her short curls a vigorous brushing, fastened her one pair of gold earrings in her ears, and they left in a hurry.

  Everything in the city seemed to demand that one hurried, she mused. Logan drove impatiently through the maze of traffic, parked in a lot near the gallery, and then rushed her along the street.

  "In there?" She hesitated outside the building, studying a small chattering group of sophisticated-looking people who were just going in. One of the women wore an ankle length coat in brilliant purple, and the other had a jersey scarf wound around her head in dramatic turban fashion. Women and men were wearing clothing that made her feel ridiculously conservative and out of date. She suddenly started feeling apprehensive again.

  But once inside, she felt a little better, because there seemed to be all types of people present, wearing a wide variety of outfits. And as soon as she began to study the paintings, she no longer was aware of anything as mundane as clothing.

  She'd seen reproductions of the artist's work in magazines, but nothing prepared her for the glory of the paintings themselves. She was transported back to the woodlands she loved by the canvases, and their very familiarity made them wonderful to her. Here were the animals and the outdoors through the eyes of a visionary, a man who had to have known and loved the scenes he portrayed so vividly. She wandered from one canvas to the next, mesmerized.

  "Logan Baxter, how nice to see you. Is Bernice around?"

  She heard Logan respond, and she turned from a painting of elk to see a tall man and an elegant woman in an emerald satin pantsuit smiling quizzically at her.

  "Karena," Logan said, drawing her close to his side and putting an arm around her shoulders, "I'd like you to meet friends of mine, John and Edith Kelsey. John teaches at the college."

  Nodding and doing her best to smile at Edith Kelsey, Karena knew how a wren must feel when confronted by a peacock.

  "How do you do?"

  John extended a hand, and then Edith did as well. Edith had shimmering rings on several fingers, and her nails were long and carefully tended. Bangles that exactly matched her outfit rattled on her wrists. Karena was painfully aware of her own slightly chapped hands, her plain brown dress and neutral hose. Edith's stockings above her high strappy sandals were shimmering silver.

  The old, all-too-familiar sensations of being out of place and wrongly dressed threatened to overcome Karena, but she resisted. Logan's sheltering arm gave her a small measure of confidence and security, and the men were talking, so there was no need to search desperately for conversation with Edith.

  "You're finished up at Itasca, aren't you, Logan? How'd it go?"

  Logan summarized the field session, making the couple laugh with his droll descriptions of poison ivy and overturned canoes, and then Edith said, "Didn't you get my note, Logan? Jack Jameson is finally out of the hospital, and tomorrow I'm having a little get-together to welcome him home. I sent you an invitation. Why don't you and—" she hesitated for an instant, as if she weren't certain of the name "—Karena come? About eleven tomorrow morning. It's brunch."

  Logan started to politely refuse, but Edith insisted stridently, and her husband added briskly, "Of course they're coming. Jack will have a million questions for him, as well."

  "Karena?" Logan hesitated and looked questioningly at her, and she knew by the expression on his face that he'd like to go. With a horrible sinking sensation she said as positively as she could, "That's fine with me, Logan."

  The arrangements were completed, Edith and John smiled warmly and moved away, and Karena tried to recapture the magic of the gallery, but all she could think of was the ordeal she would be facing at eleven the next morning.

  Dear heaven, the last thing she wanted to do was visit these people Logan worked with and meet even more strangers. She wasn't equipped for meeting people; she'd never learned the rules everyone else seemed to intuitively understand. And yet, how could she refuse? While visiting her, Logan had been confronted with Otis, Gabe, even Ole Svenson, and he'd never complained once.

  She'd just have to get through the best she could. In the meantime, there was still tonight.

  Edith and John Kelsey's house was in a smart new suburb of St. Paul, not too far from Logan's apartment.

  Logan pulled up nearby and parked. Karena had been sitting close beside him in the car, and he knew by her silence and the way her hands twisted on her lap how nervous she felt. He gave her a warm hug and a lingering kiss before he opened the car door.

  "You're absolutely gorgeous, and I'm going to have to beat my colleagues off with a stick."

  She wore the same shirtwaist she'd worn the previous night, and she hoped Abby was right about it's multipurpose appearance. It had been either that or a pair of white jeans.

  Her hands felt cold and her stomach cramped as John and Edith met them in the doorway with a warm greeting. Laughter and loud voices sounded from the room behind them, and Logan took her icy hand in his warm grip and drew her into the crowd.

  "Sally, Joe, I'd like you to meet Karena. Joe teaches math..."

  Every single woman present was wearing either well tailored slacks, form fitting jeans or pants of some sort.

  "Logan, you old reprobate. How's it going? Get the lady a tequila sunrise, it's John's specialty, and come over and say hello to Joanna. How was Itasca?"

  Everyone, with the single exception of Karena, knew everyone else intimately. She was introduced to one person after another, and not one name registered.

  All the women gave Logan a kiss, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, and they all, men and women together, gave her a curious look disguised behind a smile. Logan was drawn into a group of men surrounding another man who wore a cast on his leg.

  "Jack Jameson, those notes you supplied are the worst I've ever seen. Now try and explain—"

  Logan was gone.

  "You're not with the college, Karena?" one of the women—she thought it was Joanna—asked politely. Joanna wore navy leather pants and a white sweater, big silver hoop earrings and lots of eyeliner.

  "No, I live in the woods north of Bemidji."

  "And what do you do?"

  "I work for a logging company. I'm a log scaler."

  Blankness. Then, "How interesting. And how did you meet Logan?"

  "We met at the fair in Bemidji."

  "Oh, I see. How... quaint."

  Karena could tell right away Joanna figured she'd probably been running some concession, maybe cotton candy or hot dogs. Well, let her think that. It was easier than trying to explain logrolling and ax throwing anyway, and Joanna was easing away, her eyes darting around looking for someone else to talk with.
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  Edith appeared at her elbow. "Karena, dear, you must have some food." She drew Karena over to the laden table in the adjoining dining room, piling sausage rolls and tiny biscuits and pieces of fruit on a plate and handing it to her peremptorily.

  "You're not at the college?"

  "No, I'm from Northome. I'm a log scaler."

  "How, uh, fascinating. You must tell me more about it. My goodness, there's Gladys. Gladys, have you met Karena? Gladys, whatever happened to the vote at the faculty women's club last Tuesday? I had to leave early, and…"

  Nervous perspiration was trickling down between Karena's breasts. She took the plate, a napkin, a fork, and the glass she'd been holding and looked around desperately for an inconspicuous place to sit down. Logan was still involved in fast-paced, laughter-punctuated conversation in the other room, and everyone else seemed gathered in groups of two or three, laughing and talking together in loud, excited tones.

  She chose the stairwell finally, because it seemed the only unobtrusive, unoccupied place. Her stomach was knotted, and eating didn't hold any appeal at all. Maybe if she had a chance to just sit quietly and think positive thoughts, as Abby would undoubtedly tell her to do, she'd be able to manage until it was time to leave.

  But within three minutes, an auburn haired woman wearing a shiny cinnamon colored jumpsuit with a dramatic brown leather belt caught sight of her hiding place, smiled and said, "Mind if I join you? I'm Adelle Lindstrom; we were introduced earlier," and sat down gracefully on the step below Karena.

  Karena managed a weak smile and a murmur of agreement when Adelle commented on the food, and then there was silence for several minutes while Karena pretended to eat, and Adelle actually did, with gusto.

  Adelle soon set the plate down on the step beside her with a rueful air, and said, "I'd better stop while I still fit in this rig."

  "It's very attractive," Karena said, remembering the simple little jumpsuit she'd bought before that first picnic with Logan.

  "We were flying to Burma last spring—Andy's working on his doctorate—and my wardrobe consultant insisted this was the thing to take, it packs like a rag. The color's good, I'm autumn, you know, and then I found the belt at that little leather shop in the plaza."