by Meg Maguire
Ty went on for a while, riffing, explaining creosote fires and expounding on some of the features of the landscape, but Kate wasn’t listening. She watched him in the viewfinder, trying to square the man she was recording with the one she’d made love to. He was good…. He could do this by himself. He could do this in his sleep, if he ever got any. He could certainly do this with someone else….
“Kate?” Ty on the tiny screen prompted.
“Sorry, what?”
“I’m all out of half-cocked nonsense to blather at you.”
“Oh, right.” She shut the camera off.
“That boring, eh? Well, the one thing you don’t do for me is narration, so I guess that’s to your credit.”
“I don’t feel like talking, Ty. I’m really tired.”
“Okay.” He looked up at the sky for a moment. “Do you feel like singing? You want to do ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ with me? You can be Meat Loaf.”
“No, Ty.”
“Just trying to cheer you up,” he said, catching her obvious irritation.
“I’m fine.”
“You look sad.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not used to you looking that way.”
“Will you let me keep my job? All of it?”
“Not the filming bits.”
“Then get used to me looking sad.”
Ty turned her by the arm so they were facing and halted. “I don’t mean to flog a dead horse, but I can’t help but think you care more about this than…than anything.”
“Exactly.”
“Sorry, Kate, but that’s not okay.” He suddenly looked and sounded very impassioned. “I’m not worth sacrificing everything for. You can’t do this, and get hurt or killed because of me.”
“Ty—”
“And don’t try and tell me it’s your choice, like that’s what this is about. This is about me having to live with it, if anything ever happened to you. This is self-preservation, trust me.”
“How noble of you.”
He shook his head, frustrated, but released her so they could continue the hike. “I never claimed to be some selfsacrificing saint.”
“No, more like suicidal.” She turned the thought over in her head and came up thoroughly annoyed. “You have a hell of a nerve, you know. Getting all protective of me, when I can’t even get you to buckle your seat belt or look both ways before you cross the street. I’ve spent three seasons sitting by and respecting your, frankly idiotic, way of doing things. At first I thought, well, maybe it’s good TV. Ty sets himself up for some calculated danger so he can show the audience how to get out of a jam, hey, good for the show. But that’s not it, is it?”
“Kate—”
“Now I nearly get hurt in a perfectly accidental crash, and suddenly the risk is too great. That’s so amazingly hypocritical I could just…I could scream at you. What is it with you? Why are like this? Is it some adrenaline addiction thing, or do you actually want to die young?”
“I don’t want to die,” he said quietly.
“Oh no? Well, act like it.”
He kept his eyes on the ground ahead of him, pace steady, lips pursed in a tight line.
“Why then, Ty?”
“I just…” He sighed, clearly angry. “I just have to be sure that I’m supposed to still be here.”
It was Kate’s turn to sigh. “What do you mean, still be here?”
He glanced up and held her eyes for a second before turning back to the slushy trail. “Something happened, when I was little. This awful thing…”
“What?”
“Somebody died. It should have been me, but it wasn’t.”
She stopped in her tracks. “What do you mean? Who died?”
Ty stopped, too. “My little sister.”
“You had a sister? You never told me.”
“You never told me you had a fiancé,” he countered.
“What happened to her?” Kate asked, dread gurgling in her middle. She stared at his face, his expression one she’d never seen before…sad and cold and grim. “Ty?”
Ty starting walking again. “I was seven and she was six, and we were playing on a dock at my uncle’s place on the ocean. She dared me to jump off and I was scared, because it seemed really high up. She got fed up with me…she was always like that. Always busting everybody’s balls, even that young. Anyway, she jumped first, and she got carried off by a riptide and drowned. Jesus. She was only six.”
Kate bit her lip, studying his face. The iciness was gone now, leaving only sadness. “Ty…you couldn’t have saved her. Not from a riptide. You’d both have probably drowned if you’d tried.”
“No. But if I hadn’t been scared in the first place…”
“Then you’d have died.”
He nodded faintly, looking at the ground in front of him. “Anyway. That’s why I won’t do an episode on the open ocean—I can’t stand knowing that huge empty space swallowed up my sister. And that’s why I hate hearing my first name, because I had to listen to her calling out for me to help her, while I just stood there, frozen.” He blinked for a moment, looking annoyed. “That’s why my parents are how they are, because they blame themselves.”
Kate couldn’t think of anything to say.
“And I’m sorry,” he added, “because I know how much you hate for people to be so bloody trite.”
His steps got quicker and Kate had to work to keep up. She wasn’t sure of how to address him so she focused on her feet, on the trail, on the information he’d shared. It wasn’t trite; it just explained him. Everything. Perfectly. About how he’d ended up the way he was, so obsessed with acting brave, to make up for the shame he must have felt for so long. What he lost sleep over every night. Why the idea of Kate getting hurt would upset him so much.
She cleared her throat. “I’m sure that wasn’t your fault, Ty.”
“And I’m sure you don’t know the first thing about it.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Let’s do some more filming.”
When she hesitated he took the camera from her, swapping back the axe. She fell mute as he recorded some firstperson footage, disturbed by the off-camera change in him. If there was one thing Ty was not, it was angry. He’d been in the middle of more fights than any man she’d ever met, but he was always jumping in, prying people apart. Ty didn’t do angry. He barely did irritated. He only ever raised his voice in celebration. Kate had seen him accosted by snakes, by natural disasters, by lies and insults from the entertainment press, but he’d never batted an eye before the sled accident. She watched him addressing the mic, the picture of confidence and self-possession. She’d never noticed it before, but he was one hell of a good actor.
10
A GOOD HALF-HOUR FARTHER along the trail, the sky still looked unsuitable for shooting off flares or assembling a signal fire. Ty glanced to where Kate was keeping his trudging pace without complaint. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that they might reach the safety crew’s camp before the sky cleared. That suited him just fine—he wouldn’t mind maintaining his current rescue-free track record. They were safe now, which was the main thing. The temperature was hovering around freezing but the wind had calmed. Ty’s toes had stopped prickling and gone numb a couple of miles back, but frostbite didn’t seem to be a major threat.
“How are your feet?” he asked Kate, breaking a long silence.
She looked down at them. “Still tingly. I’m wiggling my toes.”
“Good.”
“We should be at the fork soon,” she said, sounding nervous. “I mean, we’d have noticed if we hit it already.”
“I hope the rescue crew’s all right.”
“Unless their cabin caught on fire, too, I’m sure they are. Toasty warm and well fed.”
Ty let himself imagine such a thing for a moment. Electric heat. A working kitchen. A modern bloody bathroom. Food.
Kate laughed, a small huff of breath. “Who knows, maybe they got laid, too.”
Ty winced. What had happened betw
een them went so far beyond getting laid. He had half a mind to—
“Hey, look.” Kate pointed ahead to where the trail split in two, both routes looking for all intents and purposes identical.
He felt his whole body tense, that old paralysis, his violent allergic reaction to decision making. “And you don’t remember which way the team would have gone?”
She shook her head. “I only got the map yesterday morning from Grenier. I was busy breaking up dogfights.”
“Well, what do you reckon? Left or right?”
“It’s your show.”
“And you’re the brains behind it.” Ty didn’t think he could stand being in charge of picking for the both of them. If he chose wrong and something else went awry he doubted he’d be able to stomach the guilt.
“Why don’t we decide the Dom Tyler way?” Kate asked. “Do you have a coin?”
His chest loosened. “No…but we could flip your glove, maybe.” Her gloves were black on the palm sides, striped on the backs.
She slipped one off. “You be left. I’ll be right. You call it.” She flung the glove up into the air.
“Stripes.”
It landed black side up.
“I win,” she said with a small smile, a little taste of how they used to be. How they’d been for two and a half years, until this stupid, illfated trip. “Right it is,” Kate said, tugging her glove back on.
Ty felt a wash of sweet relief, not only from her warming tone but also from having the universe put firmly back in charge. Accept all dares, let chance sort out the rest—the philosophy he lived by. Whenever possible, he let the flip of a coin or the toss of a dart make his decisions. Left or right, north or south, life or death… In the case of the latter, chance always chose life. Ty couldn’t imagine why. That karma seemed so bent on knocking now, ready to collect on Ty’s debt while Kate was here with him…well, that just stood to reason. After two-plus decades of gambling with fate, he should have caught on that his own life wasn’t a big enough ante.
They started down their blameproof route of more unending white snow, and black forest. How odd that it’d probably be a balmy seventy-plus when they disembarked at LAX the next day, or whenever they managed to make it back to the “real world.”
“Do you want some string cheese? Or nuts?” Kate had her calm blue eyes aimed at him, a ceasefire inherent in her tight smile.
“Nah. Let’s let that orange be my one-and-only transgression.”
“As you wish. Hold up a second.”
Ty stood still while Kate dug a crinkling bag out of the pack strapped to his back. He propped the camera on his shoulder when she finished fussing and got her in focus.
“How are you enjoying the overnight, Kate Somersby?”
“The crappy motor lodges are looking like the Ritz, after last night,” she told the lens, popping cashews in her mouth. “And I can’t wait to brush my teeth and change my frigging underwear.”
“Somersby…I never noticed before, but that’s a pretty posh name you’ve got. For a girl who keeps insisting she’s from the wrong side of the tracks.”
Ty filmed her shrug. “The Somersbys of Dorchester, Massachusetts.”
She cocked her eyebrow. “I changed my name, okay, Ty?”
“Oh yeah? What was it before?”
“Sullivan.”
“Ah. But you’ve always been a Kate?”
She nodded.
“What’s wrong with Kate Sullivan?”
“I don’t know…it’s just so…Boston. I wanted to get as far away from my roots as I could.”
“Like a reinvention?”
“I guess.”
“I’d like to meet the old Kate, Kate.”
Another shrug. “Like I said, Ty, people don’t change. You’re looking at her right now, minus the trashy accent and the tacky lip liner.”
“I’d like to hear your accent. You’ve heard mine.”
“No way.”
“How does it go? It’s all ‘cah pahking,’ right?”
“Thet’s roight, mate,” she said, imitating Ty’s Australian pronunciation.
“Ooh, not too shabby.” Ty smiled at her for the first time in quite a while. He lowered the camera so she could see. “I missed you, Katie.”
She looked away.
“And I still want to kiss you. Will you let me?”
KATE SHRUGGED, CONSIDERING Ty’s request. She was wary of what another kiss would do to her, but she was also dead tired and didn’t think Ty stood much chance of rousing anything in her aside from a bit of limp, apathetic receptivity. And secretly, underneath the exhaustion and irritation, she did want to kiss him. He’d shared something intensely personal with her earlier on this hike, and she wanted to underscore that intimacy, before it went away for good.
“Yeah, fine,” she said.
Ty smiled deeper, fixing his eyes on hers. He dropped the pack from his shoulders and balanced the camera on it. “Put the axe down? It’s a bit unnerving.”
Kate complied, smirking to herself but feeling suddenly nervous. “I’m going to taste like cashews.”
“I’ll have to own up to that to the viewers, I suppose,” Ty said as he closed in, voice already turning hushed from The Shift. He pulled his gloves off and shoved them into his pocket. He ran his hands up her arms, her shoulders, her scarf-clad neck, just as he had so many times before. Their eyes flickered together, faces close. She could feel his energy, her body beginning to vibrate at that familiar frequency.
Ty’s eyes closed as he brought his mouth to hers, grazing skin against skin, cautious. Kate’s lips were tender from everything that had gone on in the past eighteen hours. Their noses touched as his fingertips alighted on her jaw. Parting her lips to welcome his, she felt all the exhaustion and angst and doubt leaving her, melting away, until all that was left was the two of them and their point of contact. Ty deepened the kiss, his hot tongue sliding against hers, sending the blush from her cheeks flashing down her body, to her breasts and belly, and then down between her legs. Damn, that boy could kiss. She angled her head to invite his explorations. She moved her hands to his jacket, unzipping it and wrapping her arms around him inside. She felt his arousal before long, his cock pressing against her navel, insistent. Scenes from the previous night flashed through her mind—Ty’s body, big and strong and demanding, his face as he approached climax, those eyes burning into hers.
They kissed for a minute, maybe ten, maybe an hour. When Ty pulled away, Kate could have sworn the previously monochrome woods were on fire, everything impossibly bright and saturated in the wake of their embrace.
“We should keep moving,” Ty said, voice husky. He licked his flushed lips, his eyes still locked on hers.
“I suppose so.” Kate reluctantly released him.
His gaze zigzagged over her face and there was something wild in his expression. Something beyond The Shift, even. She caught him glancing over her shoulder as he put his hands on her upper arms, walking her clumsily backward until her back pressed against a tree trunk, just like the day before.
“Ty,” she murmured, unsure herself if it was protest or encouragement.
He crossed his mouth over hers again, hungry. Ravenous. Small, desperate noises drifted from his throat, thrilling Kate deep inside. The conflict disappeared along with the vulnerability, and all that was left was the two of them. Two people who’d sheltered together under strange and exotic circumstances, as well as mundane ones. Sequestered in complete geographic isolation, and also in the midst of bustling industry parties, all the time each wanting this but unwilling to ask for it. Never in her life had Kate craved a man the way she had Ty, and never in her dreams had she imagined how utterly satisfying the reality of him would be. She might be losing this when they got back to the city, but she wouldn’t let this moment pass her by. A hundred blizzards couldn’t dampen the fire between them.
Kate sensed Ty’s self-control dissolving as his lips crossed her cheek to her ear, then her jaw. Impatient hands tu
gged down the zipper of her coat. His touch roamed over her, surveying her with rough caresses as she cradled his head in her gloved hands. His mouth teased the skin uncovered by her scarf. The breath caught in her lungs as his hands found the waistband of her hiking pants, and she felt her body’s demand breaching the dam that held her back, liquid heat collecting between her thighs.
She uttered his name, the tiny syllable nearly choking her.
“God, Kate.” She felt his lips moving as he spoke, just as his fingers slipped inside her panties, the coldness of his skin making her own heat seem that much more fiery by comparison. “Spread your legs for me,” he whispered, and she widened her stance to give him the access he demanded.
His slippery touch felt like one she’d known for years, belonging to a lover more dear and familiar than any she’d ever come close to actually having. He rubbed her clit with the pads of two fingers. He hooked them, dipping inside her with a harsh moan and reminding her of another part of him…reminding her of something she ached for a thousand times more desperately than she’d craved food or warmth just minutes earlier. Behind his head her hands stripped off their gloves and dropped them to the ground.
As her nails scraped his scalp, Ty intensified his touch. Kate wanted more. She flirted briefly with the hard contours hidden behind his sweater. Her hands went in search of his belt. The sound of that very buckle hitting the ground who-knew-how-many times during their immodest professional relationship had never failed to thrill her. Now, fumbling then feeling it release in her own hands, she whimpered from the overwhelming longing it triggered. Her fingers quaked as she unbuttoned his jeans. As the zipper slid down over the stiff ridge of his arousal, Ty panted at her throat, his strong body pinning her to the tree by her shoulder. Any discomfort she felt only fueled the pleasure.
