“Hey, you two, get a room!”
At the unexpected sound of Kayla’s voice, Jo nearly cried out.
Oh, God, no!
She twisted loose from Nick’s arms, flushing even warmer, if that was possible.
“If we can’t endure ten days without the comfort of a man’s attention,” Kayla said, flinging Jo’s words back at her, “we’ve got an addiction problem.”
She stood halfway out on the bridge, haughty and accusatory. Worse, Jo couldn’t muster enough indignation to fight back—she felt like a sneaking, two-faced hypocrite.
“We’ve got a spying problem, too,” Jo finally managed to retort. Nick’s searing kiss had left her heart pounding like fists on a drum, her throat so constricted she could barely find her voice. And Kayla must have noticed it.
“Spying schmying.” Kayla rubbed it in spitefully. “I think this proves which one of us is man-hungry.”
Kayla’s green gaze shifted to Nick. “She plays hard to get, and you fall for it. But how long did it take your ‘nice girl’ to rub up against you like a cat? Just remember, Nick—she’s pulled her lah-de-dah act on plenty of guys before you. I’d be very, very careful to practice safe sex with her.”
On that spiteful and triumphant note, Kayla spun gracefully around and flounced off.
“Look,” Nick began awkwardly, “I didn’t know she was here—”
“Please just leave me alone,” Jo cut him off coldly. Anger and mortification—along with a good dose of self-loathing—all warred within her.
“Please, I—”
“Why did you have to do that?” she again cut him off.
“You didn’t seem to mind until Kayla piped up.”
“Wrong! You…you caught me off guard, is all. I would’ve stopped you after I—after—”
“After you cooled down a little? You sure got plenty warm all of a sudden.”
“I meant to say after I caught my breath!” Jo insisted, pushing him aside and hurrying onto the bridge.
“Yeah, hot and breathless, that describes you, all right,” Nick teased even as she escaped in mortified anger. “That’s exactly how I’m going to remember you, sweetheart.”
Despite her immediate relief after fleeing from Nick Kramer, Jo quickly realized she was a woman without sanctuary. The moment she returned to camp, she felt Kayla’s smug eyes tracking her everywhere like video security.
It still hadn’t quite registered with Jo; not only had she responded eagerly to Nick’s advance, she had proved Kayla right. Or so it certainly appeared. But Jo still fooled herself that she was the victim of circumstances and false impressions.
He did cut me off in midbreath, she assured herself. My response was confused, delayed, my body didn’t have my mind’s permission. He caught me completely by surprise.
“Randy” is just another word for young and healthy, she thought.
Hazel’s voice cut into her unpleasant thoughts. “Good morning, sourpuss. What’s the matter?”
“Morning, Hazel,” Jo replied tersely. She was busy filling the smaller water jug used for cooking. “I’m doing just fine.”
Hazel gave that reply a skeptical snort.
“Kayla’s up and dressed,” Hazel remarked with exaggerated innocence as she put coffee water on to boil. “And looking smug as the cat that tortured the canary before he ate it. Don’t tell me you two’ve locked horns already this morning with the birds barely awake.”
“Kayla? I didn’t notice,” Jo replied.
Dottie, still brushing her thick white hair, emerged from the cabin, her nose sampling the air.
“Where’s the coffee?” she demanded. “There’s no life possible without caffeine.”
“Oh, Jo’s got us all behind schedule,” Hazel teased. “A certain Hotshot has got her all discombobulated.”
Anger spiked Jo’s pulse.
“You don’t help any,” she said, exasperated. “I’ve got a strong hunch you’re playing Cupid again, Hazel.”
Hazel winked at Dottie.
“Plead guilty,” the cattle baroness replied, “and you avoid the jury.”
“Yes,” Jo fumed, “but what about that tangled web we weave, et cetera?”
Her accusing gaze happened to land on Dottie.
“Don’t look at me,” Dottie protested in her acquired Texas twang. “I’ve got no dog in this fight. As for Cupid, how comes he’s always naked, anyhow?”
Despite her anger and embarrassment, Jo couldn’t help laughing at both sly old gals and their shenanigans. They’re just girls, too, Jo realized, still plotting schoolgirl pranks and playing “guess who’s got a boyfriend.”
Jo’s mood lightened even though the tension between her and Kayla persisted throughout another busy day in the wilderness.
Hazel made it all fun, but Jo’s mind kept drifting back to that searing kiss. Just the momentary thought of it was enough to set her pulse exploding in her ears, drowning out Hazel.
“Now remember,” Hazel wrapped up her remarks that evening, “tomorrow night we’re all going to drive two miles away from camp, then break up into teams. Each of the younger gals has to guide the way back to camp using the night sky and the reference points I’ve already pointed out. Got it?”
“Got it,” Bonnie and Kayla said.
But Jo didn’t answer with the rest. She found herself transported as sleepiness gradually weighed on her eyelids and the day’s exertions left a pleasant ache in muscles she hardly ever used. Now and then, however, she returned to the present and saw Kayla staring at her, resentful and smugly superior.
Don’t worry, Jo fumed silently. From now on I mean it, Nick Kramer is all yours. So put away your voodoo spells.
But his words echoed in her unwilled memory, exciting and forbidden, a promise of much more to come: Because this is always going to get in the way.
Eight
“Don’t forget,” Dottie shouted over the steady brawling of the nearby rapids, “you never fight the current. Just let it shoot you up the middle. If you get confused, disoriented, turned around or even tossed into the river, do not panic. Always let the current take you. It follows the path of least resistance.”
“Do not panic,” Bonnie repeated, trying to sound lighthearted but betrayed by her nervousness. “After all, the rocks only hurt if you actually hit them.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fraidy-cat,” Hazel teased, floating alongside them in the other raft. “You’re all strong swimmers, and besides, you’re wearing life vests.”
Jo felt nervous anticipation crowding other thoughts from her mind, thoughts that mostly tended toward Nick Kramer and his smoldering, no pun intended, good looks. The kiss on the bridge had played out over and over in her dreams last night, and despite the high-altitude chill after dark, she was forced to throw off the top blanket.
You need challenges like this, she assured herself as the roar of the approaching rapids really began to drown out other sounds.
Nothing focused the mind like fear.
“Oh, how this aching body misses the feel of a black knit dress,” Kayla wailed beside her, barely audible above the river racket.
At least it wasn’t another snide comment about Nick, Jo thought gratefully. So far their mutual dependence had pushed all hostilites onto a back burner.
“Ride ’em, cowgirls!” Hazel shouted in front of them as the first raft suddenly dipped, then shot out of the water when the frothing rapids gained a purchase. “Up the middle, ladies!” she reminded them, and then Jo lost sight of the lead raft as their own craft suddenly plunged into a curtain of misting, roaring foam.
“I wanna go home!” Bonnie wailed just before the rapids drowned out all conversation.
But it turned out they could indeed trust the current. It kept them safely in the middle, and they only needed to occasionally fend off a boulder that came too close, pushing against it with their paddles.
In mere moments, their distressed cries turned into shouts of pure, astonished fun as this crazy, bob
bing thrill ride picked up dizzying speed and made all of them feel like little kids riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair.
All too soon, however, the ride was over, and they floated quietly in the wide pool, all four talking at once and insisting on running the course again.
“Told you,” Hazel gloated as the women trekked back upriver, carrying the light rafts between them by rope handles. “See how much fun you miss by acting like city sissies?”
In the adrenaline rush, Nick Kramer was finally pushed from Jo’s thoughts, but when they arrived back at camp late that afternoon and Hazel made a mysterious disappearance, Jo couldn’t help but feel uneasy. It didn’t do not to watch that matriarchal matchmaker. Hazel was usually up to no good, and Jo was convinced she was now the target of the woman’s schemes.
Hazel had learned, when the smoke jumpers stopped by for supper two days earlier, that tonight they would be off duty. And she had made plans then to ensure that Jo would “bump into” Nick Kramer later tonight, during the star-navigating exercise.
First, however, she had a certain motherly duty to attend to. After all, if she was going to cross Jo’s path with Nick’s, she needed to peer a little closer into Nick’s heart. Hazel trusted her first impressions, and instinct told her Nick was a “keeper.”
Nonetheless, Jo had recently sailed through rough romantic waters, and Hazel had no desire to plunge her vulnerable friend into a whirlpool of additional heartache.
She waited until late that afternoon, when the girls were helping with supper and the smoke jumpers were likely to be awake after their previous night’s labors. Then Hazel slipped quietly away to visit the men’s camp, which was located about two hundred yards below the cabins on Bridger’s Summit.
“Getcher britches on, boys!” she called out as she approached their circle of one-man tents. “Female approaching camp!”
In fact, a few of the firefighters were barely dressed, and Hazel discreetly ogled some sloping pecs as her eye quickly rushed over the camp, looking for Nick. She spotted him immediately, shaving in front of a metal mirror that had been nailed to a tree.
“Hazel,” he greeted her cheerfully, scraping some bristle off one side of his strong-jutting jaw. “Excuse us if we’re not ready for company. What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
“I’m just curious about something,” she replied, glancing around to make sure none of the lounging men was close enough to overhear.
“Oh, yeah? What?”
“What’s your honest opinion of Jo?”
“Jo?” he repeated.
“We’ve established her name,” Hazel said. “Now tell me what you think of her.”
Nick’s eyes cut from the mirror to Hazel’s face, then back to the mirror. He angled the razor up under his nose and said cautiously, “Who wants to know?”
“I’m the one asking, aren’t I? Just spit it out, big boy. I won’t share it with her.”
“Well…she’s damn good-looking,” he essayed, obviously holding back. “Great face, great body.”
“All right, for a man that’s a typical start. But let’s get past the cattle auction. What else do you think of her?”
“Not so quick,” he resisted. “What’s she think of me?”
“Not too much, evidently.”
Hazel’s bluntness was deliberate, and just as she’d hoped, her candor triggered his own.
“Well, since you insist on knowing, the feeling is mutual,” Nick retorted, his voice revealing resentment. “She’s the pouty-princess type, thinks her pedestal is mighty high. Likes to stamp her foot and lay down all the rules, push a guy around for the power rush. I’ve had it up to here with women who deliver ultimatums.”
He almost said more, Hazel could tell, but he suddenly shut up.
Still, sunlight is the best disinfectant, thought a jubilant Hazel, and his brief comments just now threw open casements of illumination. Just like Jo, he’d obviously been hurt in love, and also like her, he was confusing the person who hurt him with all members of the opposite sex. A common mistake, but also a tragic one.
Both these kids, Hazel marveled, are proud and sensitive, and ironically, have much more in common than they suspected. They were both also emotionally defensive, and neither was the enemy the other suspected.
However, she also realized they couldn’t simply be told these things. The heart was no friend of logic. They’d have to learn it the tough way in the school of romantic hard knocks.
“Nick, have you heard the expression ‘A burned baby fears the fire’?”
His eyes met Hazel’s again.
“Sure I have. But don’t forget,” he joked, “I’m trained to see how close I can get to the fire without being burned.”
“Nobody yet has fireproofed himself against romantic burns.”
“Tell me about it,” he admitted. Then he added, “So was Jo burned quite recently? I wondered.”
Hazel nodded without going into the details. “And it’s not just that. I’ve known Jo for a long time now. She’s had to work harder than most girls to be taken as her own person. Sometimes our parents cast a long shadow over us without meaning to.”
For a moment, as he patted shaving cream off his face with a towel, Nick frowned. “Sometimes they cast no shadow at all, and that’s worse.”
“I take your meaning.” Hazel nodded again. “But Jo’s got a problem with the former Miss Montana. A tall, gregarious, very leggy Miss Montana,” she clarified. “One who modeled professionally and is still quite a celebrity in our little town. Ranks right up there with our only rodeo champ, AJ Clayburn.”
Nick mulled this awhile, then nodded.
“Maybe,” Hazel hinted, “if you two could get a little time to yourselves, you might work some of these knots.”
Nick saw the canny gleam in her Prussian-blue eyes, and a little conspiratorial smile twitched at his lips.
“Might be we could,” he agreed. “But she sure hasn’t made me feel welcome to come visiting.”
“So what? A faint heart never won a fair lady, buckaroo. Where d’you plan on being tonight, say, around eight o’clock? Maybe…someplace a little more private than this?”
Nick did a good job of playing along.
“Sometimes, on nights off like this, I like to go over to Wendigo Lake just to get some time alone. You know where it is?”
Hazel nodded, realizing the place would be perfect for her matchmaking efforts. Rustic and romantic, encircled by spruce and pine, Wendigo Lake was within sight of Bridger’s Summit—she could easily excuse herself at that point, knowing Jo could not possibly get lost from there.
“Moon’s in the full phase now,” Nick added. “Light enough I can do a little fishing off that old dock on the south shore. You know the one I mean, don’t you?”
“Why don’t you stroll over that way this evening?” Hazel suggested casually. “Maybe some company will show up. Maybe not. At this point, no guarantees.”
“All right, I will. If nobody shows up, fine, I’ll get in some fishing. Bass bite in moonlight.”
But despite all her encouragement, Hazel felt compelled to add a clear caveat before she returned to camp.
“Don’t get me wrong, Nick. Jo is much tougher than she thinks she is, and I’ve always trusted her judgment. She’s fully capable of making her own decisions. But as her friend, who’s more or less responsible for her up here, I’d hate to see some guy hurt her by sailing under false colors. She’s had too much of that already.”
“I read you loud and clear, Hazel. Don’t worry. I’m not the feed-’em-a-line-of-bull type.”
“That’s my hunch about you, too,” the cattle queen pronounced.
But as she returned to her own camp, she had to admit it: the fate of this potential romance was just too hard to call.
Even if Nick was not the bad sort at all, she could not entirely discount his hint about an unhappy childhood. For reasons beyond his control he might not have it together emotionally—lots of guys in
rugged, macho jobs were too emotionally bottled up inside, one reason they sought jobs that were conducive to the loner and his need to avoid too much society. She’d seen it in many of the cowboys she’d hired over the years.
Jo needed a man, sure, but one who was mature and responsible. There were plenty of men with strong backs and weak characters.
For Jo’s sake, and for the sake of Mystery Valley’s future, Hazel would take the gamble.
Nine
Supper was cooking by the time Hazel returned to the cabins, and the girls were busy playing doubles badminton.
Jo, however, had missed several easy shots, forcing her partner, Bonnie, to take most of the swings at the shuttlecock.
“Jeez oh Pete, Lofton!” Bonnie scolded her good-naturedly. “I’ve seen better form toppling a windmill! Building castles in our mind, are we?”
“Castles? A honeymoon suite, more likely,” Kayla suggested. “Or maybe just a double sleeping bag that smells of wood smoke and the last girl’s cheap perfume.”
“Cool it, mighty mouth,” Stella admonished. “You’d know something about cheap perfume, since you’ve got our camp smelling like Eau de Biker.”
Ignoring the fracas, Jo gave the shuttlecock a mighty swat, spiking it, and Kayla had to leap aside, almost tripping over her own feet.
“Sweetheart,” Kayla said coolly, “you might want to put your glasses on. I know Miss Montana can’t wear glasses, but then again, you’re not Miss Montana, are you?”
Jo had been eating Kayla’s snide comments, off and on, all day long. This time, however, the “Texas tart” had gone too far.
She threw down her racket and placed her fists on her hips, ready to unload on Kayla.
Stella quickly intervened. “Oh, who are you trying to kid, Kayla? You’re ragging on Jo because Nick Kramer obviously prefers her over you.”
By this time their voices had risen high enough to engage the attention of the other women.
Plain Jane & The Hotshot Page 6
