Rogue's Revenge

by Gail MacMillan

  “Until dusk. Then we’ll sneak back up over the ledge and find a safe place for the night. Your sleeping bag is in your pack, as well as a frying pan and a pot. We’ll manage.”

  “An empty frying pan and an empty pot,” she breathed, the full extent of their predicament washing over her. “Miles from civilization with our canoe, food, and ninety percent of our camping gear gone.”

  “Not to panic. Remember you’re with the Lord of the Woods. He and his woman always survive. They have to. Otherwise there’d be no more movies.” In the darkness he slipped an arm about her sagging shoulders and planted a kiss on her taut lips. “Relax and enjoy the ambience. Quite a different aroma from those mayflowers but still just as natural.”

  “Very amusing. You said someone was deliberately shooting at us, but who? Why?”

  “I’m not sure who, but I do know why. To coerce us into selling the Chance to National Realty.”

  “National Realty? I find that hard to believe. They’re legitimate realtors with branches right across Canada.”

  “Are you saying big business isn’t capable of using underhanded methods? I know you’re a member of their rank and file, but still you can’t believe that crock.”

  “No, but I…”

  “And exactly what do we know about this James Wilcox who’s supposedly their agent?”

  “Well, about the man, nothing, actually. What makes you say ‘supposedly’?”

  “The fact that he’s yet to produce any ID that identifies him as one of their full-time employees. And the fact that these so-called sasquatch sightings became much more frequent once he began trying to buy the Chance. My opinion is that he’s a freelancer working on a commission basis.”

  For a few minutes they sat in silence. Then Allison spoke.

  “Heath, Candace Breckenridge alluded to a scare she got when she was up here last fall. Did she see the sasquatch?”

  “Is that what she said?” A sneer colored his words.

  “Well, she gave some story about almost being caught with you by her husband, but since you’ve told me there was never anything between you…”

  “There never was.” He let out an exasperated sigh. “But it looked as if there was, when her husband found her with me in my bedroom.”

  “In your bedroom? And you’re telling me your relationship with her was purely platonic? Ouch!” She’d tried to jump to her feet and banged her head…again.

  “Take it easy. Let me explain. Jack and the other guides took the guests downriver on a picnic. Mom went along to serve lunch. I thought I was alone in the Lodge area. I didn’t know the Breckenridges had had a fight and stayed behind. I hadn’t had a day off in weeks, so I decided to take a shower, go into town, and convince Jesse to have lunch with me.”

  “Ah, ha! So you and Dr. Henderson are…were…”

  “Friends. Don’t jump up again. I had just gone into my bedroom to dress when Candace burst into the cottage screaming something about seeing a big hairy ape down near the boathouse. Claimed it was a sasquatch. Before I could stop her, she threw herself at me, and toppled me backwards onto the bed. She knocked the towel from my hips and when her husband, drawn by her screams, arrived, you can guess what he thought he was seeing.”

  “You mean Robert Breckenridge saw you lying on your bed buff naked with his wife sprawled over you and he didn’t try to kill you?” Allison gasped. “Wow! If my father had caught you with my mother like that, your hide would currently be nailed to the boathouse door.”

  “I don’t intend ever to be in that position with his wife.” Heath’s voice was teasing, sensuous. “But with his daughter…I have a healthy imagination and high hopes.”

  “Dream on.” But she smiled in the darkness. Then she sucked in her breath as a thought stuck her. “Heath, you don’t suppose that’s Robert Breckenridge out there shooting at us?”

  “Hardly. He was one of the poorest woodsmen I’ve ever encountered. He loved to fish, but his guide even had to bait his hook. I doubt he’d know how to fire a rifle.”

  “Was that the first reported sasquatch sighting?”

  “First one I’d ever heard of.”

  “Poor Candace.” Allison was thoughtful. “Dad claims her husband’s only passion is Triam Industries. As long as he and Candace stay married and he remains in control of the company, he couldn’t care less what his wife does.”

  “I felt sorry for her.” Heath exhaled a weary sigh. “He managed to ignore her completely even up here on vacation. As a result, I included her in the canoe trips I was guiding while he went off fishing with Jack. She became quite adept at camping and told me she’d been a champion skeet shooter in her teens, even suggested Jack put in a facility for it. Can you imagine Jack installing a shooting gallery? He was so anti-guns there isn’t a single one on the place, sasquatch or no sasquatch.”

  “And she fell in love with you,” Allison finished.

  “I wouldn’t describe her interest in me as love.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yeah, oh, dear. At the time, I would have denied that fact. After all, the woman is almost old enough to be my mother. But then, just before she and her husband were to leave to return to Toronto, she came to see me down at the boathouse. She said that if I could convince Jack to sell the Chance, she’d buy it—at a generous price, mind you—and put me in full charge. I thought she was talking a lot of nonsense. Now I’m beginning to believe she meant every word.”

  “Another CEO under her control,” Allison muttered. “Or, more accurately, a bought-and-paid-for lover in their own secluded love nest.”

  “I guess.” He moved in the darkness, and Allison sensed the discomfort the honesty of their discussion was causing him.

  “Of course, Gramps refused.”

  “Right. But within days the mythical sasquatch first sighted by Candace began to put in regular appearances to the wives and children of our guests. After that, business began to fall off.”

  “Surely you don’t think Candace is impersonating that thing?”

  “She was safely back in Toronto. But with her kind of money, people can be hired to do just about anything. The question is who.”

  “And can we manage to elude him until we get back to civilization? Why is it taking us so long to travel by water from the Chance to Adams’ Landing? By road it’s an hour’s drive.”

  “The North Passage horseshoes between those two points,” he said. “It loops far back into the wilderness, winding and twisting for miles. The road runs as the crow flies.”

  “What point on this horseshoe do you think we’ve reached?”

  “We’ve come over the top and are about one third of the way down the other side…one good solid day’s walk from the Landing. Nowhere near a difficult hike if we didn’t have to worry about whoever is out there trying to make trophies of us.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “This is cozy.” Allison snuggled against Heath’s shoulder. “No one could possibly find us under all these branches.”

  She looked up at the huge spruce towering above them, its wide lower limbs spreading out to form a thick, arched canopy over them before bending gracefully down to touch their tips to the ground and conceal the couple.

  “They will if you don’t keep your voice down.” He quieted her with a kiss that left a warm feeling of invitation coursing through her.

  “Remarkable.” Allison snuggled closer and sighed.

  “Not nearly as remarkable as I am,” he muttered against her hair, “spending the night sharing a sleeping bag with you and remaining celibate.”

  “You promised Mom, remember?”

  She put a finger lightly to his lips and smiled in the darkness, admiring his integrity and hating it all at the same time. “As for anyone finding us, I don’t see how that’s humanly possible. After we left that bear den, we traveled miles away from the river, backtracking and circling and jumping across brooks before we ended up back on its banks again.”

  “You forget…whoe
ver is on our case is obviously an experienced woodsman. We can’t be too careful.”

  “Okay, okay.” She adjusted herself against him again and lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Heath, tell me about you…about your life before you came to live with my grandfather. You know everything about me, and I know so little about you.”

  “Not much to tell. My grandmother was a war bride. She’d run away from home to marry a Canadian soldier, and her parents apparently had nothing to do with her after that. She came to this country with my grandfather after the war. Shortly after they arrived in Canada and settled in Halifax, my mother was born. Not long after that, my grandparents were killed in a boating accident.”

  “Heath, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to know them.” Regret seeped into his voice. “My mother was sent to live with an uncle and his wife. They already had six children and weren’t anxious for another, but they took her in since she had no other place to go. She grew up feeling unloved and unwanted. When, at seventeen, she met my father, she married him within a couple of months. I think she’d finally found all the love that had been missing from her life. At least, that’s what I gathered listening to her talk about my father.”

  He paused and Allison stroked his cheek. “Go on.”

  “He was a high steel worker…bridges, high-rises, that sort of thing. I was born ten months after they were married. Two days after their first anniversary, my dad slipped and fell from where he was working on the bridge over Halifax Harbor. He died instantly. My mother, with little education, no family to help her, and next to no money, was left alone to raise me.”

  “Oh, Heath…”

  “I never knew my father, so I never missed him.” He cleared his throat. “But it was hard for my mother. She took any job she could get—waitress, cook, dishwasher. We must have moved a dozen times before I was twelve, each time to a cheaper and poorer apartment in a rougher section of the city. Things just seemed to get harder and harder…for both of us. The whole thing came to a boil when I stole that car and racked it up.”

  He paused, and Allison sensed the emotions roiling inside him.

  “Heath, that girl…that Jennifer…what she did, it would have driven anyone a little crazy,” she said softly.

  “Hardly a valid reason for what I did. At least, that’s what Jack said. A couple of months after I was sentenced, my mother saw an ad in a maritime daily newspaper. Someone with a wilderness lodge in New Brunswick was looking for a cook/housekeeper. She decided to apply, hoping she’d get the job but worried sick she would have to leave me incarcerated in Halifax. She saw only one way to do it. She applied telling Jack the truth about her circumstances. When she had no answer in over a week, she decided he wasn’t interested. Imagine her surprise when he showed up at our apartment one June afternoon and asked her how soon she and her son could be ready to go with him back to New Brunswick. Seems he’d already spent a couple of days at the Justice Department getting me placed in his custody so I could leave the province with them.”

  “Gramps was one amazing man.”

  “I wasn’t much of a joy to either of them after I came to live here. I tried to run away a couple of times. The first time Jack caught me and brought me back, he was reasoning and understanding; the second time he threatened the bejeebers out of me, which was exactly what I needed.”

  “And so you reformed.”

  “Started to. Then you and your mother arrived. I think I might have managed to stay away from you, but you had that big, obvious crush on me…”

  “Now just a minute, Mr. Macho…”

  “Do you deny it?”

  Silence. Then, reluctantly, “No. But still…”

  “You reminded me of Jennifer—pretty, and rich, and stuck-up.”

  “I wasn’t…stuck up.”

  “Sure, you were. You got everything you wanted. And that summer you wanted romance with a bad boy.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “True, isn’t it?”

  “I guess, but it embarrasses me to hear it.”

  “Okay, moving on. We had that incident, and you went away. Jack must have suspected something, because after you left he called me down to the boathouse, lifted me off my feet by the front of my jacket, and told me that if he ever found out any part of me had touched his granddaughter, he’d amputate it.”

  “ Gramps wouldn’t hurt anything—”

  “Anything that didn’t threaten his granddaughter. From his expression that day I wasn’t about to risk another encounter with you. But I didn’t have to worry. You never came back.”

  The soft sounds of the wilderness filled the following wordless moments. An owl hooted, a coyote howled, frogs chirped.

  “Heath?”

  “Hmmm?” He nuzzled her hair.

  “Were you sorry…that I didn’t come back?”

  “Sorry and relieved. I wanted to see you again, to make things right between us, but relieved that I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything that could lead to bodily mutilation.”

  She felt the soft chuckle in his chest and smiled into the darkness.

  “In that case, so am I. I really like you…intact.”

  “Don’t tease. We have to get some sleep.”

  He settled against her. She tried to relax and follow suit. It wasn’t easy. Lying beneath that huge spruce, its spicy fragrance adding to the sensuousness of the star-sparkled night in the arms of this earthy man, was almost more than she could bear. Heath’s long muscular body wrapped about hers made her heart race, her senses catapult. She longed to run her hands up under his shirt, to feel those hard ripples of flesh with her fingers, to kiss his lips, his neck, the hollow at his shoulder.

  His regular breathing told her he slept. She drew a deep breath, forced down the quiver threatening to rush through her body, and struggled for sleep. Fifteen miles with five thousand two hundred and eighty feet in each. Or was it one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards? How many feet…yards…?

  She awoke to sunlight winking into her eyes between the branches. She blinked, struggled up on one elbow, and realized she was alone in the sleeping bag.

  “Heath?” Panic seized her. “Heath?”

  “Not so loud. We don’t want to let the wrong people know where we are. Come out and have some eggs.”

  She crawled on hands and knees from their sleeping shelter and saw him near the riverbank. The thin trickle of smoke from a small fire drifted off across the river on a lazy breeze.

  “Eggs?” She struggled to her feet, stiff from a night on hard ground. “Where did you get eggs?”

  “Partridge. Big nest on the ground over there. I counted fourteen.”

  “You robbed some poor bird’s nest?” Allison rubbed her eyes and looked down at the panful of scrambled eggs bubbling on the fire.

  “No choice.” He hunkered down and stirred them with a stick. “We need nourishment. She won’t mind…much. Partridge often have up to three hatches a year.”

  “And you had matches?” She pointed to the fire.

  “I’d be a pretty poor woodsman if I didn’t have some in a waterproof container on me. Sit. These are almost ready.”

  “What about the smoke? Aren’t you afraid someone might see it?”

  “It’s drifting off across the river, away from anyone on this side who might be on our trail. It’ll dissipate fast over water. Ditto for any faint scent of cooking. At any rate, we have to risk it. We need nourishment, it’s too early in the season for nuts and berries, and I’m not feral enough to eat raw eggs.”

  “And what’s for lunch? Some poor, dead animal?” She tried to be critical of what he’d done but realized he’d had little choice. She also realized she was ravenous.

  “Let me surprise you.” He took the frying pan from the fire, using the sleeve of his shirt pulled over his hand as protection from the heat.

  He dropped the pan between them and handed her a piece of bark he’d fashioned into a crude spoon.

 
; “Eat,” he said and picked up a similar utensil.

  She did and found she was even hungrier than she’d thought.

  “Tea?” he asked when they’d cleaned the pan, eating scoop for scoop.

  “Don’t tease.”

  “I’m not. Raspberry leaves boiled make a strong, nourishing brew. Here, try it.”

  He picked up the pot from where it had been cooling beside the fire and handed it to her.

  Gingerly she raised it to her lips and took a sip of the bitter, bracing brew. She coughed, then took another drink.

  “It won’t replace Starbucks,” she said, handing it to him, “but it does have a get-going kick.”

  “That’s what we need right now.” Heath took a long drink, handed the pot back to her, and stood. “You’re staring. Egg on my face or what?”

  “No, just a good healthy stubble. A further crack in your heroic mystique. A jungle movie hero, for instance, never sports a stubble, no matter how long he’s in the bush with his loincloth as his only luggage.”

  “Sorry my whiskers have shattered the last of your fantasies. Let’s get packing. It might not be healthy to stay too long in one place in daylight.”

  “I have to wash my face.” Allison got to her feet and headed down to the bank of the river.

  She squatted by the river, splashed icy water over her face, pulled out her shirttail to dry it, and suddenly chuckled. Was she the same woman who only a few days earlier had thought ruining her designer suit a major disaster? Now here she was in bush gear she seemed to have been wearing forever, her hair such a tangle she could barely finger comb it, washing her face in a wilderness river, using her shirttail for a towel. She wondered what Paul Bradley would think of her and then laughed out loud because she didn’t care.

  “Come on, Allie. Let’s get going.” Brought out of her daydreams by his call, she started back to where he was waiting, fire extinguished, packsack on his back. She had never felt so alive, so ready for whatever adventure would challenge them.

  The terrain they traveled that morning varied. Sometimes their way was along a low riverbank close to a smoothly flowing stretch of water. At others, they climbed over rocks high above rapids and gorges where the river swirled and roiled like a thing possessed.