Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2)

by Tamara Morgan

  “So.” She rubbed her hands and nodded toward the table. If Scott had his way, they’d stand here with full pistons firing all night, which, though tempting, wouldn’t be as much fun for Max and Ace. “Are we ready to deal? What’s the buy-in tonight?”

  Ace launched himself over the back of an armchair and settled in. Despite the grey hair, he was a surprisingly agile man. They all were. That was what happened when the majority of your free time was devoted to tramping out in the snow to retrieve missing persons. You became nimble and muscular and impervious to the cold.

  Had she mentioned how much she loved these guys?

  “If it’s all the same to you, we thought we’d play for pennies tonight instead of quarters.” Max looked slightly apologetic. “Five dollar buy-in? Ten cent maximum?”

  “Sure thing.” She rummaged in her purse and pulled out her wallet, extracting a five from among the bills. She looked up just in time to catch Scott glowering at the wad of money. Oh, Lord. What now? “Is something wrong?”

  “You probably hate playing for pennies,” he said.

  “Um. No. I like playing, period.”

  “But five dollars is such an insignificant amount of money. Way below your usual standards.”

  “Oh, for the love of all that is good and holy—it’s poker night. Ace isn’t wearing pants. I think we’ve long since passed anyone’s usual standards.”

  “I have shorts on,” Ace protested. They both ignored him.

  “Pizza, beer, wads of cash to lose…” Scott trailed off suggestively. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to buy my friends off.”

  “Your friends?”

  He spread his arms wide, a gesture of masculinity and arrogance she wanted to high-kick into oblivion. “I’ve known these guys for over a decade. How long have you been a part of our Search and Rescue team? Ten months? Eleven? What are you even doing here, Carrie?”

  Max and Ace sucked in a collective breath at the direct confrontation, and she felt the sharp pang of it herself, of cupid’s arrow gone awry, but she didn’t let it slow her down. To show him how much his words hurt would only give him power over her, and she was determined not to do that.

  Because it was inevitable, this tide of their relationship, a force she’d been stupid to think she could hold back in the first place. Never mind that she’d come out tonight with the best of intentions, hoping to find a way to move forward without losing her place in their SAR group. No matter that she’d rehearsed twenty pleasant speeches ahead of time, determined to keep the peace. She and Scott could be anywhere, at any time, in any situation, and it always came down to this.

  The two of them standing opposite one another. High noon. Guns drawn.

  Carrie fired first. “You mean, what am I doing here with the friends you’re so close to, you didn’t even know Max had a daughter, let alone one he was struggling to get custody over?”

  Scott staggered but didn’t fall. “Of course I knew he has a daughter—I’m not a monster. I just don’t feel a compulsory need to meddle in the personal business of everyone in my life.”

  “You don’t feel a compulsory need to do anything related to human beings. Dogs, on the other hand—”

  “Stop right there. You better not bring my dogs into this.”

  “Why not? You bring them into everything else.” She debated for only a second before finishing her statement with a flourish. “Including the bedroom.”

  This time, Ace and Max didn’t breathe collectively so much as suck all the air from the room. It was difficult to tell if their reaction was the result of shock or laughter, but she assumed the latter.

  Laughter, unfortunately, was the last thing on Scott’s mind. He lowered his arms and was looming in front of her in a matter of seconds. If it had been difficult to be in the same room with him before, what with all his brooding jean-shirt manliness mocking her, it was damn near impossible when he was so close she could feel the heat emanating off him. Like his dogs, he seemed to operate at a basal body temperature of just over a hundred degrees, rendering him an ideal comfort in cold weather like this. He made a girl want to strip down to nothing and dive into the snow with him. He made this girl want to command him to sit and beg and roll over until they were both nothing but a furious, panting mess.

  It was just like she said. High noon. Guns drawn and cocked and ready to get off.

  “One time,” he said, his voice dangerous. “One time, I let a dog in the room with us, and you know it was because Queenie was having issues with her crate.”

  “It was twice, and she barked at us both times.”

  “No. She barked at you both times. And that was only because of the howling sound you make when you—”

  She clapped a hand over his mouth. There were strict rules in place about when and where it was appropriate to touch an ex on the lips, and this was probably breaking all of them, but there was no other way to shut this man up.

  Well—that wasn’t strictly true. She knew of one other highly effective way to shut him up, but if the firm press of her palm against his lips was unsafe, she didn’t want to think about what that other method would do to her resolve.

  “Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” she warned.

  She felt his mouth curve into a smile, that rare manifestation of joy she’d once considered her favorite sight in the whole world. This man’s grin was both an invitation and a promise, and she didn’t have to see it to understand the implication. You know you want me, Carrie. It’ll be so good, Carrie.

  Nope. No way. Never again. You could lead a woman to temptation but you couldn’t make her drink.

  She lifted her hand away. “And don’t you dare smile at me either. This is my poker night. I started it, I planned it, and I intend to keep coming for as long as I want. If you don’t like it, you can go home and bark all alone with Queenie.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “For me to roll over and go home, letting you take everything?”

  Oddly enough, she wouldn’t. She hadn’t come here with the intention of taking over his friendship with these men. She just wanted him to share. One Wednesday night ritual might not seem like much to Scott, who had a job and friends and roots in this city, but he had no idea how bleak things looked over on her side.

  Considering she’d lost her job and the man she loved within the span of a month, it seemed fair to say it was pretty freaking bleak.

  Prudence warned her to take a different tack before the entire night dissolved and neither one of them got custody of poker night. Keep it light. Keep it simple. Keep it fun. It was the only way to avoid going back to her apartment alone.

  Tilting her head and angling for a coy tone, she managed to roll all three mandates into one. “You’re just afraid I’m going to play better than you and win all your money again, aren’t you?”

  “You don’t play better than me—you just turn things unlucky when you touch them. And you’re always touching everything.”

  “Some men find that a point in my favor.”

  “Some men obviously haven’t spent very much time in your company.”

  They stood at an impasse for what felt like hours, eyes locked, stances squared, hearts pounding in sync. It was a tactic Scott liked to use when he was feeling superior—this alpha-dog approach to staring others into submission—but she’d be damned if she’d play along this time.

  She crossed her arms and settled in for the long haul. She could wait. She literally had nowhere else in the world to be.

  Scott must have sensed her resolution because he gave a resigned sigh. “Fine. I’ll play. But we’re not doing any of your stupid wild card or Hi/Lo crap. I hate girly poker.”

  “Okay.” She relinquished her upper hand with a smile. “You win.”

  He looked confused. “I do?”

  “Absolutely. We’ll play macho poker and I won’t touch anything until you specifically ask me to—playing cards and body parts included. Happy now?”r />
  Scott’s eyes flashed a warning, but not even he could find something to argue about in complete capitulation. He’d try, but he wouldn’t succeed.

  “Ecstatic,” he said dryly.

  Chapter Two

  “Max, would you please grab these and give them to Scott?” Carrie nudged the red cards across the table with the nub of a pencil. “I’d like two.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Even though Scott had been determined not to be the first to give in, he couldn’t take much more of this. “You can hand them directly to me. I give you permission to touch your own cards.”

  “Do you?” She beamed at him, her smile as sincere as if he’d just lavished her with flowery compliments. “That’s nice. We’ll be able to play so much faster now.”

  He tossed her the top two cards from the deck, groaning when her eyes lit up and her smile only increased in wattage. Carrie had the worst poker face in the world—every heart and diamond reflected in her oversized brown eyes—which made it difficult to infuse the game with any real challenge. With that woman, you always knew in advance if you were going to win or lose.

  Scott lost. Every time.

  “Well?” she prodded. “Are you just going to sit there, or are we playing stud?”

  He clamped his jaw down so hard he almost bit off his own tongue. Carrie might be enacting some kind of saintly, put-upon ex-girlfriend routine over there, but he knew when he was being goaded. Playing stud was something they’d both rather enjoyed in the past.

  “Dealer takes three,” he said, and drew his own cards. Goddammit. A two, a jack, and a five. The worst possible hand he could have pulled. As Ace slapped his cards down and Max liberally swore, Scott realized she’d managed to come out ahead yet again.

  “Full house!” she chirped merrily, and leaned in to pull the stack of coins her way. “Mama’s buying herself a new pair of shoes.”

  As she was seated directly across the table, her enthusiasm provided a generous glimpse of her breasts straining against her low-cut white sweater. He’d have bet every penny in front of him—a small pile that was dwindling by the second—that she’d worn it on purpose.

  It was the Carrie Morlock way of doing things. Distract and awe. Cause major accidents. Somehow manage to avoid the fallout afterward.

  That must be one of the benefits of being the most beautiful woman in the world. Statuesque and perfectly proportioned, everything about Carrie’s body was designed to beg—and receive—forgiveness. The endless curves of her hips and breasts, long legs that were as strong as they were well-formed, a softly purring voice she could tease as easily into a taunt as she could a proposition…it was difficult to imagine any more erotic combination of features. To make matters worse, what nature had gifted her with in sex appeal, it immediately contradicted with deceptively sweet features. In addition to her puppy-dog eyes, she had long dark hair and a heart-shaped face that should have turned her into America’s sweetheart.

  Unfortunately, Scott knew all too well that she had a bite that was ten times worse than her bark. And the woman could bark. Almost as well as she howled.

  “I’m sorry. Is Mama buying some shoes not macho enough for our agreement?” She cocked her head to the side and studied him with a calm air. Even though he knew—just knew—she was pulling out all the stops to get a reaction out of him, he couldn’t seem to keep his lips from pulling downward. “How’s this instead? Daddy’s heading out to buy wine and women.”

  “No,” he grumbled. “That’s not macho either.”

  “Sports cars and aged whisky?”

  He glared.

  “Fine, fine. I’ll buy soccer balls and jock straps. Sheesh.”

  “Really? Those are the most masculine items in your imagination?”

  She smiled sweetly. “Well, if I based my idea of masculine off what’s in your house, I’d have to go with organic wheatgrass and ladies’ shaving gel.”

  He didn’t have to look at Ace and Max to know they were enjoying this, their suppressed laughter doing a good job of shaking the poker table. Not that he could blame them for it. He’d have been enjoying this situation if it was any other man Carrie had gotten her hooks into.

  But it wasn’t. It was him. He’d been the one to fall under her spell—and he was the one paying for it now.

  “That shaving gel was for you,” he said through his teeth.

  “Liar. You said it works better than the man stuff, because it has the extra aloe that makes your skin so soft. And it does, too. Remember that time you asked me to shave your—”

  “If you value what’s left of your life, you’ll stop right there.”

  She just smiled harder. He supposed this was retribution for his foul mood before, but he didn’t know what else he was supposed to do in this situation. Normal women understood what it meant to break up. The man got to keep his friends. The woman got to keep that one really comfortable sweatshirt he’d never be able to replace. That was how things worked.

  “What?” she said, dripping with faux innocence. “You’re the one who likes a clean shave.”

  Across the table, Max chortled. Scott opened his mouth to tell his friend where he could stick his own hairy balls, but the table started shaking again. This time, however, it wasn’t because of his friends’ amusement. That was the familiar shake of a Search and Rescue pager going off.

  It was a vibration everyone in the room knew well, a kind of alarm system that worked as a call to action. The moment disaster struck—a missing person, an accident in the mountains, a winter snowstorm that trapped moms in minivans—the pagers went off, and anyone who was free to help out came in. It shouldn’t have been a moment for anything more than temporary alarm, the four of them banding together to head out into the cold to lend a hand.

  Except his was the only pager going off.

  “What the—?” He glanced down at his hip, surprised to find nothing more than a phone number flashing on the screen. Usually, there was a code, a series of three numbers that designated what and where and why, but this was just a local phone number. “Did you guys run out of batteries out or something?”

  Ace pulled his pager out and shook it. “Mine’s still good.”

  “Mine too,” Max confirmed with a glance.

  Carrie didn’t need to say anything. She changed the batteries on her pager every week like clockwork. God forbid a call go off and she not be there to answer it. She lived for the high drama and adrenaline of other peoples’ misfortunes.

  “I’m sure it’s a glitch.” Scott attempted a nonchalant shrug, but a feeling of fear began churning in his gut and spreading outward. This was no glitch. Glitch implied an element of chance, which was something that had been missing from his life since the day Carrie walked into it. “It’s a local number, so somebody probably dialed wrong.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Five-oh-nine, four-four-six…” As Scott registered the digits, his voice died away. “Oh, shit. It’s Newman’s home phone.”

  As the head of their SAR unit and a man he considered one of his closest friends, Newman was never an ideal source of bad news—and this late in the day, getting a personal page was even worse. Alarmed, Scott’s gaze drew to Carrie’s. Months of having her constantly by his side had rendered him unable to handle his problems without turning to her for support, and he knew he’d find her sympathy waiting for him.

  He wasn’t disappointed. Her delicately arched brows came together in a wrinkle in the center of her forehead, her lips parted to showcase her sympathy. He had to physically stop himself from reaching for her, remind himself that so far from falling into her girlfriend-like concern, he needed to do everything he could to stop it.

  “Oh, calm the fuck down,” he said irritably. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  He knew it was a horrible thing to say. Every time something cruel moved over his lips in her direction, he could taste the bitterness of it on his tongue, poisoning him from the inside out. But he couldn’t come up with an
y other way to force the necessary distance between them. If he showed her a glimmer of kindness—or, God forbid, regret—he was done for. She’d be back in his life and in his arms before he knew what happened, and he wasn’t sure he had the strength to end things with her again.

  It almost broke him the first time.

  Thankfully, she took the bait. “Excuse me? You calm the fuck down.”

  “I am calm. I’m so calm you could tell time with my heartbeat.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m so calm you can’t even tell I have a heartbeat.”

  “Oh, please,” he said. “I’ve known that since the day I first met you. A heartbeat would require you to have a heart first.”

  “Me?” Carrie sprang to her feet, sending poker chips flying. The bottom of her sweater snagged on the cheap tabletop poker cover, tugging it hard enough that the upper lip of her bra flashed over the top. It was white and lacy, as usual. Probably with some fancy French label that made it ridiculously easy to ruin thousands of dollars’ worth of lingerie with his teeth. If she ever decided to present him with a bill for damages incurred in the bedroom, he’d have to declare bankruptcy. “You think I’m heartless? Talk about the kettle and the pot getting into a racist argument. There’s enough love inside you to fill a teaspoon. Maybe.”

  “That’s not my fault. I never claimed to love you.”

  One would think that coming up with the cruelest possible insult would finally pierce through Carrie’s iron-thick armor and cause her to back off, give a man a moment’s reprieve so he could finally breathe again.

  One would be wrong.

  Ignoring the fact that the deep vee of her sweater was now practically around the bottom of her breast, she pulled away from the table and moved into his face. She was always doing that—getting up close and personal, forcing him to look at her, talk to her, acknowledge how much a part of his life she’d become after just eight months of being together. He’d been with his last girlfriend for two years and felt nothing more than a twinge of disappointment when she announced she was leaving him.