Loving Wild

by Lisa Ann Verge

  Now she heard the crackle of his footsteps coming along a narrow path by the riverbank. She jumped up to greet him.

  “‘Bout time you got back,” she said. “Another few minutes, and I’d have eaten both of these myself.”

  Dylan looked up. He had a strange expression on his face. She took two steps toward him. “Dylan? What’s wrong?”

  He held out his hand. “Come, I want to show you something.”

  “The fish—”

  “Take them off the fire and cover them. This will only take a minute.” He glanced toward her pack. “And bring your camera, too.”

  She hardly had time to cover the pan, prop it on a level rock and dig out her camera before he’d headed back down the path. Her stomach growled, but she didn’t complain. Something was up—and so was her curiosity.

  He paused a quarter mile along the riverbank, where the greenery broke to show a triangular stretch of muddied shore. He waited for her to catch up.

  “Look.” He gestured to a vine-covered shape slanting at a strange angle near a tree. He picked away one of the vines to show a gleam of pottery. “Does this look familiar to you?”

  She poked around the vines. It was a jug of some sort, half beige, half brown, with a small finger-grip near the narrow mouth. The jug had been braced, upside down, upon a sturdy piece of wood, now twisted with vines.

  When she said nothing, Dylan reached in and shoved away some clinging vines. There, on the creamy face of the pottery, were the markings of a distinct crest. “Dylan, that’s…” She glanced up at him. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “My grandfather’s marking.” A strange, boyish smile crossed his face. He jerked his chin toward the path beyond the riverbank. “This must be the end of that portage we couldn’t find before. This must be the marker for people coming from Canada.” He shook his head. “This is one of my grandfather’s jugs. He used it to mark the portage.”

  She held his gaze as the import of his words sank in. He’d found it. He’d found the path. They knew where they were now; they could follow the map for the rest of the way into Canada.

  She should feel incredible relief, but that wasn’t what filled her heart. For she knew that better than finding their way, was that Dylan had found proof—solid, undeniable proof—that his grandfather had been telling the truth.

  “Well, Dylan,” she said, letting a grin spread wide across her face. “Congratulations. You’ve just proved your grandfather was a bootlegger.”

  “I’ll be damned, Casey,” he said, shaking his head. “I had hoped I might find this. But I didn’t really believe I would.”

  Her first reaction, standing there smiling into Dylan’s suddenly pensive face, was that this would make excellent copy. With her journalist’s eye she could see the photo already, perhaps gracing the cover of American Backroads. She’d already started writing the copy in her head, focusing on the human-interest aspect.

  But her more immediate, more overwhelming reaction was to hold Dylan in her arms. Shake him, until he let those tears of joy flow instead of suppressing them like a man.

  Then she moved into his arms. He slipped his hands across her back and pressed his nose into her hair. She felt him swelling, under all those bulging muscles. A swell of pride. A swell of unexpressed emotion.

  He disengaged himself a few moments later. She let him go. It was too much emotion—too deep, too strong. He flashed her a wide smile and struck a swaggering pose by the jug.

  “Well,” he said, “start shooting, Casey. The MacCabe clan isn’t going to believe this unless I have hard photographic evidence.”

  BY THE TIME THEY returned to the campsite the fish was dry and lukewarm, but Casey ate it as if it had been served to her on china at a fine restaurant. They’d found some ripe blackberries as well, and now she crusted the fruit over the last of the melba toast and savored its tart sweetness.

  Dylan sat hunkered over the map, a baseball cap shading his eyes from the midday sun.

  “We’re farther up than I thought we were,” he said. “It won’t be long now.”

  “That’s good,” she mumbled around a mouthful of berries and cracker. “We were due today or tomorrow, so maybe they won’t send out the National Guard if we’re home soon.” She paused as a thought came to her. “How soon?”

  “Three days. Maybe two.”

  She paused in her chewing. “Is that all, Dylan?”

  She held the cracker in her fingers. Her gaze drifted across the glittering gurgle of the river. The campfire smoke curled blue into the canopy of leaves above. A fish jumped, snatching a dragonfly from the surface of the water. A cardinal swooped through the trees on the other side of the river, a flash of red in the deep green shadows.

  She took a bite and chewed, slowly. Two or three more days of camping. She should be ecstatic. In two or three days she could stop taking baths in river water. She could actually use a real toilet. She could drink a whole gallon of freshly squeezed orange juice. She could sink her teeth into an apple.

  Two or three more nights in the quiet of the woods, alone with this man. Two or three more nights of lovemaking.

  Dylan’s face was shielded by the bill of the baseball cap. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She wasn’t even sure what she was thinking—or feeling.

  She leaned over and peered at the map. “Is that where we are?” She pointed at a red X on the map, and Dylan nodded. “But look at the distance we have to cover.” She traced the twist of the trail over the border. “That can’t possibly be two or three days—it’s too far.”

  “We’ll be covering it really quickly.”

  “Oh yeah?” She sank back on her haunches and popped the last of the cracker into her mouth. “Do I look like a marathon runner?”

  “Yes.” He glanced up at her from under the bill of the baseball cap and gave her legs a long, hot look-over. “But we’d be covering it quickly nonetheless.”

  “Dylan…”

  “Casey, remember before we started this journey, when I mentioned something about white water…?”

  10

  “CASEY, WATCH RIGHT!”

  Casey braced her feet on the ribs of the canoe just as the river dropped. She twisted the paddle with a jerk. The bow of the canoe crashed into the foam. A boulder shot by them, pounded by the current. The cold spray blinded her. She sputtered and shook her hair out of her face. On white water, Dylan had told her, she couldn’t be blind for a second.

  “Casey, watch left. Left!”

  She fought with the current for control of her paddle. She flexed her fingers over the smooth wood and yanked. The canoe jerked, swerved, skidded sideways on the river and shot spray over the gunwale. Through the mist she caught a glimpse of the corpse of a fallen tree jutting into the stream, just as they skimmed by it

  Dylan knelt in the bow, bobbing like a skier lurching from mogul to mogul. His paddle lay flat across the canoe, his hands braced on it and the gunwales, his thighs taut and spread as he leaned forward, surveying the misty trail for eddies and haystacks and all the other colorfully-named sources of danger in white water. Spray soaked him, darkened his hair, sent rivulets careening down his thighs.

  This was the picture she wanted for American Backroads. This picture, of him and her, working together on this wild, raging river, breathing the same air, thinking the same thoughts, working like one creature. She kept her eyes on the back of his head, straining to hear his commands above the roar of the water. They’d only ridden these ragged streams for two days, but they’d covered twice the distance as when they’d been canoeing against the current. And they’d found a wild rhythm together. To go with the one they shared every spare moment they could find.

  She flexed her hands over the paddle. There was a strange exhilaration in riding this white water. She and Dylan had eaten away a lot of the baggage over the past weeks, so the lightened canoe rode buoyantly on the waves. Maybe the weeks of experience helped, too, for now as she made her paddle act as a rudder, she f
elt like she really controlled the canoe far more than during all those days of plodding upstream. Even though the current roared against the birchbark beneath her feet. Even though the white water battered the sides. Even though jagged rocks threatened just under the surface of the river, tracing paths in the dried black pitch that streaked the canoe.

  “Left, Casey! Watch left!”

  She plunged the paddle deeper, twisted the shaft, felt the canoe lurch to her command. Spray bit into her thighs and iced her feet. The canoe heaved, rose in the river, then touched back down into the foam.

  “Curve coming up!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Easy, girl. Take it loose.”

  Dylan plunged his paddle into the spray, breaking the hurl of their trajectory as much as he could. Casey glimpsed the curl of the river ahead, walled on one side by sheer granite. Dylan shouted instructions. With care they edged out of the central trough into a deep-water eddy.

  He paddled them into the shadows, into the lee of a boulder. The canoe twisted in the weak whirlpool. From this vantage point, they could see the drop in the river ahead of them, and the rise of mist in the trees.

  He gestured down river, toward the billow of the mist. “We’d better take a look at that before we run it.”

  “Why? You told me none of these rapids would be worse than Class II.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t expect the water level to be so low. That could change things.”

  “C’mon, Dylan,” she teased, “where’s your sense of adventure?”

  Dylan cast her a white-toothed grin. “Is this the woman whose face turned ashen when I mentioned white water?”

  “Hey, I was thinking of the Snake River, not this little creek.”

  “So, think you can take more?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, slicking her hair off her face. She knew she was grinning wildly—as wildly as he was. She knew, too, that he was loving this as much as she was.

  That thought should have scared her. She’d not been this close to a man since Charlie. She’d not been this close to anybody since Charlie’s death. She’d not wanted to know the intricate messages that a man could give a woman, by the slightest tilt of his head, by the intensity of his gaze, by the way he leaned forward.

  Yet here they were, as close as a man and a woman could get, alone in the wilds, racing headlong toward civilization. And she felt happy. Happy.

  She told herself to stop analyzing it and just enjoy.

  He made no move to turn the bow back into the current. He was simply staring at her. “Did anyone tell you you look good when you’re wet?”

  “Yes,” she said, as a frisson skittered down her spine. “You.”

  “Sure you don’t want to take a nice long walk along the river before we run these rapids…?”

  For a response, Casey plunged her paddle into the water and headed toward the shore.

  There they found a patch of soft moss bathed in golden sunlight. There, Casey peeled off her wet clothes in the open air, while Dylan did the same. There, she let him wrap his muscled arms around her body and pull her to the ground…. There, in the bright August sunshine, he dipped his head between her legs and did wondrous things with his lips and teeth and tongue until she was blinded by much more than the sunshine.

  Much later, both of them laughing and sated, Casey shrugged into one of Dylan’s dry Tshirts and her damp shorts and strapped on a light backpack. They headed down the riverbank to scout the terrain. Dylan interlaced his fingers with hers as they walked; their hands joined felt like the most natural thing in the world.

  A way down the riverbank they stumbled upon a small clearing. The cold charcoal remains of a bonfire blackened the center of it, and brown and green beer bottles littered the ground.

  Dylan shook his head and started collecting the debris.

  Casey joined him. “Guess they never heard of ‘Take only pictures, leave only footprints.”’

  “Probably a bunch of teenagers partying.”

  “Hmm.”

  “We can’t be far from civilization now.”

  Not far from civilization now. Casey tipped a beer bottle to drain the rainwater out of it, then turned away so Dylan couldn’t see her face. They’d talked about being close to the end of their voyage, but this was the first time she’d been faced with physical evidence.

  They had so little time. So little time.

  For, surely, their relationship wouldn’t last beyond this trip. How could it? What else could she do but climb back into Bessie and set off for her sister’s place and another assignment? The only plan she had beyond that was to give Jillian a call and tell her the whole wonderful story…and let her know that she wouldn’t be calling anymore—at least not for therapy. Then, Casey supposed, she would set off down the road again with a mended spirit.

  Odd. That the world seemed so alien. Three weeks in the woods and suddenly she felt like she’d shed another life.

  She cast Dylan a sidelong glance. She wondered what he would do at the end of this voyage. Would he touch her cheek and say goodbye and not look back? Or would he ask her to stay?

  For all their intimacy, they’d never talked about it. The truth was that she didn’t even know how he felt about her. She didn’t know if he considered her just another woman in his life, or if he was expecting something more once they finished their project here together. They never talked about it.

  She told herself it didn’t matter. Whatever happened between them, she would be forever grateful to Dylan for chipping her out of the ice block she’d been living in, for teaching her how to trust again.

  Suddenly he was standing beside her, taking an upended bottle from her hand. “I think that’s the last of them, Casey. We’ll pack them in along with all the other garbage.”

  “You’re such a good Boy Scout.”

  He didn’t move away. She glanced up into his eyes. Hooded eyes..Wary. Careful. “You know, Casey…I think we can do this.”

  She looked at him blankly, not quite sure what he was saying.

  “This part of the river,” he added, in answer to her unspoken question. “I think we can run it.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s not going to be easy,” he continued. He lifted his shoulders in a strange little shrug. “A trip like this is never easy. And the hardest part always seems to be at the end.”

  He was standing close, very close. She smelled the river on him, saw the flecks of stubble on his cheek, remembered with vivid, knee-melting intensity the feel of his beard scraping her inner thigh.

  “I know what I’m talking about,” he explained. “I’ve made a lot of these trips. Too many. And for all the wrong reasons. But the end is the tricky part.”

  She wondered what he was jabbering about, and wished he wouldn’t stand so very close. “Well, if you think we can do it…”

  “I’d like to try.” He slipped his hand into hers. “There’re going to be a few rough patches. We’ll have to take a couple of quick turns, maybe back up a bit before we can go forward. But if you really want to do this,” he said, leaning close to her, “then I’m game.”

  She felt his breath upon her face. He was looking deeply into her eyes. And she suddenly realized he was talking about more than the river rapids.

  Though she stood on solid ground, she felt, suddenly, as if she’d shifted into the river, as if the current had swept her legs out from under her and pushed her into places unknown, uncharted worlds; into cold water that was quite over her head—and she with no paddle.

  She held tightly to his hand and pressed her face against his. She breathed in the scent of him, woodsy and clean. He moved his face against hers, sought her lips and found them.

  It was a sweet kiss. Soft and loving. She stepped closer, pressed her body against his, for this she understood: the wanting, the yearning, the passion. But Dylan ran his hands up her arms and gripped her shoulders and eased her head down into the nook between his jaw and his shoulder.

  He held her. Just held her. S
he heard his heart thumping slowly and evenly in his chest.

  “Well, Casey,” he murmured. “What do you think? Are we going to run this river or not?”

  She closed her eyes and listened to his heart. She let the warmth of him seep into her skin. She let herself feel the strength of his arms around her, the breadth of his strong shoulders. Then she took a deep breath.

  “All right,” she whispered on the exhale. “Let’s give it a try.”

  CASEY KNEW SHE WAS in trouble at the first drop of the river.

  These rapids weren’t like the others. These rapids raged. They seized the canoe and hurled it downstream and all but mocked her efforts at control. Dylan barked out commands and she struggled to hold the paddle still, but the canoe seemed to skim across the water like a car on ice, catching pavement now and again but soon spinning wildly across the surface.

  They lurched past boulders at blinding speed; careened against the current, then slipped nose-frst into it again. Twice she was lifted completely off her seat by the heave of the vessel, twice more her bottom slapped back onto the splintered board. She felt the jerk of the first impact, heard the screech of rock through the belly of the vessel, and.saw the bubble of water surge through the finger-long rent in the canoe, but had no time to stanch it or even to head toward shore, for the current gripped the boat and shot it recklessly down the central trough and she had her hands full just trying to fight for control.

  A thought fluttered through her mind—We’ve got a rip. It’ll take a full day to fix it.

  “Right.”

  Dylan’s voice rang out in.the vapor curling around them.

  “Right,” he repeated. “Right!”

  She yanked with all her weight and the canoe bucked, then swerved, and another nest of debris flew by them.

  “Left, Casey—”

  She surged the other way, twisted the paddle, felt a splinter sink deep into her palm.

  “Pull it, pull it, Casey—”

  Dylan plunged his paddle into the river, sending up a fountain of spray. The canoe heeled, sidled, slowed, edged off the trough of the current. Casey felt the water cover her shoes, inch up her ankles.