by Lisa Plumley
No. Better not to dwell on Riley’s kindness, Jayne told herself firmly. She was supposed to be resisting him.
She yawned. Peered into the reddish light caused by the sun struggling to penetrate their tent’s nylon walls. “What time is it?”
“Just after sunrise. The guides say we have to get an early start if we want to make it to the halfway point between the Hideaway Lodge and the canyon lodge by this afternoon.”
Ugh. A pre-dawn wakeup call had almost been tolerable yesterday, when the excitement of beginning their trip had livened things up a little. But two days of crawling out of bed before the sun had reached a reasonable skyscraper-height was pushing it.
Jayne flopped onto her sleeping bag again. “I’ll catch up.”
“Come on, sleepyhead.” Kelly tugged at her arm. “I hear the guys are making breakfast.”
Mmmm. Breakfast. Pancakes, waffles, omelets…even cornflakes. Okay, so getting up might not be so bad. She was starving. And yesterday’s hike must have offered up plenty of those fat-burning benefits Riley had promised, so she had some room to splurge. Picturing a nice morning meal al fresco, Jayne pushed upward.
“‘Atta girl,” Kelly said.
Jayne rubbed the sleep from her eyes, straightened her abundance of layered outdoors wear, and then whipped her hair into a ponytail at the top of her head. She stuffed her stockinged feet into her unlaced ATSes. Trailed by Kelly, she crawled from the tent and shuffled into the chilly campsite.
“‘Morning, ladies.” Red-haired Mack smiled and waved from his position crouched beside three compact camp stoves. He had an oven mitt on his waving hand. “Breakfast will be ready in a jiffy.”
He was so sweet, Jayne thought. And—even though he wasn’t her hazel-eyed, dark-haired, constantly teasing type—so darn cute, too. She turned to say so to Kelly, and saw that Kelly apparently already agreed. Wearing an eager expression, she approached Mack with hesitant steps. “Need any help?”
The guide’s smile broadened. His gaze softened when he looked at Kelly, and Mack gestured for her to sit beside him. “Sure! I could use some company. Why don’t you join me?”
Jayne lingered a moment. Kelly sat beside Mack. They looked companionable, snatches of their conversation drifting on the non-pancake-scented breeze.
Where were those pancakes, anyway?
Wanting to be ready for them, and assured that Kelly was in dependable hands, Jayne headed into the bushes. A few minutes later, she’d performed her most basic morning duties. Muscles gradually unkinking, she trudged sleepily back to the campsite. She wished she had a nice triple latte. A nice chocolate chip scone. A nice roof and walls and central heating, and a nice old-fashioned bathtub and—
“Good morning,” Riley said, interrupting her thoughts. He strolled across the clearing with a handful of plastic bowls and spoons, looking bright-eyed and happy. “Sleep well?”
“Like the dead, thanks to you.” Her smile was split with another yawn. She stretched, feeling the pull of post-hiking soreness all over her body. “Those stars were just what I needed.”
He nodded, his gaze lifting from its appreciative perusal of her stretch. “There’s nothing like being out in the great outdoors for a good night’s sleep. I can hardly manage it in the city these days. It seems twice as noisy to me now.”
Jayne thought of the typical sounds she awakened to. Traffic, auto alarms, her neighbor’s TV, a car stereo booming rap music on the street below. She had to admit, bird calls were much nicer. While doing her duty amid the twitter of wild birds this morning, she’d felt almost like a Disney cartoon heroine. The ones who set bluebirds chirping and bunnies hopping and all manner of cute woodland creatures following them. Tra-la-la-la-la.
“Nature has its appeal.” Jayne wrinkled her nose. “I guess.”
Riley smiled, as though delighted by her opinion. Why that should be, she didn’t know. Obviously, he’d never intended to share “the great outdoors” with her. This joint expedition had been an accident.
She wondered if he’d ever taken a girlfriend on one of his adventure photography expeditions. Probably, he’d taken someone tomboyish. Someone capable, like him. Someone eager to test her mettle against squirrels, sand, slimy fish, and civilization deprivation.
Someone, Jayne thought morosely, like the person her father and brothers must have hoped she’d become.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Riley told her, “because we’ll be in the thick of it today.”
At her blank look, he elaborated. “Nature, that is. We’ll be climbing more this morning, doing some fishing, making our way up into the canyon. By this time tomorrow, we’ll be two-thirds of the way to the canyon lodge.”
“Does it have a bathtub?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes.” He looked at her—leisurely, as though mentally stripping away her multiple layers of clothing and sliding her naked body into said bathtub. “It does.”
Nirvana. She could hardly wait. She said as much, only to see Riley’s interested expression grow even more…interested. She couldn’t resist adding, “How big is it? Big enough for two?”
His gaze rose from her midsection, lingered for the merest instant where her breasts were shrouded in Polarfleece, and stopped on her face. She tried not to show how his attention made her tingle, even as he cocked an eyebrow.
“Is that an invitation?”
Damn. She should have known better than to flirt with him. She halfway meant what she said, but he…didn’t. “It’s an innocent inquiry. I have a bottle of Bathing Beauty Bubbles, two wild berry bath bombs, a tin of honey body balm, and a whole assortment of herbal bath beads, all going to waste in my pack.”
Thoughtfully, Riley stepped nearer, close enough for her to catch the mingled scents of fresh air and…soap?…clinging to his skin. Soap, in the wilderness. How had he managed that, when she couldn’t hunt down a bath to save her life?
She angled her chin for a closer view, and realized the slightly antiseptic fragrance she’d detected was really shaving cream. There was an overlooked scrap of it still visible just beneath the rugged edge of his jaw. For some reason, that tiny sign that Riley did, indeed, sometimes miss a detail reassured her.
Maybe that meant he wouldn’t realize she was succumbing to his love ‘em and leave ‘em appeal, all over again.
Jayne stifled a tender urge to thumb that shaving cream away. Instead, she stood steady as he spoke. She had to be strong. Ignore his nearness, and its effect on her. Especially since Riley was probably coming closer just to deliver another lecture on packing in only essential items.
He hesitated, as though reluctant to spoil their early-morning repartee with serious adventure travel business. Or maybe as though trying to fathom why one woman needed the equivalent of a bath-and-body shop in her backpack. Then, Riley lowered his head intimately.
“What, exactly,” he asked, “does a person do with honey body balm?”
The husky note of intrigue in his voice made her shiver. Rub it all over me, she thought instantly, crazily. Rub it all over you. Rub it all over each other, until we’re sweet and soft and hard and needful…
Boy, would she never learn?
“I guess that’s for me to know and you to find out,” Jayne said saucily.
Maybe her teasing would divert his attention long enough for her to escape with her pride intact. She did thumb the shaving cream from his jaw, with a hopefully-lighthearted gesture. Then she straightened her fleece and trouped to her tent to finish getting ready for her day…this time, leaving Riley staring after her.
Holding a packet of pre-moistened body towelettes, Riley strode through the campsite. He passed Lance and Mack and Bruce, each of them diligently working either to prepare the morning’s meal or to teach one of Jayne’s guidance groupies how to operate her camp stove. He shook his head at Bruce’s continued (and obvious) flirtation with Mitzi, as the guide tried to talk her into skinny dipping in a nearby creek.
“Are you nuts?” Mitzi asked
. “It’s forty-five degrees out. I’m a woman, not a Popsicle.”
Bruce chuckled. “A Popsicle, huh? Well, then…”
Riley didn’t want to hear whatever ribald rejoinder his buddy would come up with. He quickened his pace. He approached Jayne’s tent at the far edge of the campsite, thinking about his plans to give her the on-the-trail towelettes as a bath time substitute. The disposable towelettes wouldn’t be as enjoyable as, say, honey body butter, but Riley figured they’d satisfy Jayne’s bath junkie mania better than nothing.
He neared the tent. Suddenly, Alexis’s voice came from inside the domed red nylon. He stopped with the greeting he’d been about to call out still on his lips.
Maybe Jayne was talking with Alexis, he thought. Telling his niece all the things Riley and Jayne had discussed yesterday—about how boys could be trustworthy and fun and non-heartbreaking. Maybe she was helping Alexis already. Not wanting to disturb them, he turned and prepared to move quietly away. What he heard next, though, stopped him.
“So you never—ouch—even knew your mom?” Alexis asked, her voice drifting through the tent’s mesh skylight. “That’s, like, totally sad. Ouch!”
“I knew her,” Jayne said. “Just not for very long. She died when I was three. So it was sad losing her…but not as sad as you think. I recovered. I still had my dad and my brothers.” There was a pause. “Please hold still. I don’t want to poke you with the tweezers.”
Ahh, Riley realized. Another primp session. Probably, Jayne was using that girly beauty talk to get closer to Alexis. Very smart of her. His respect for her touchy-feely methods rose another grudging notch.
“Anyway, my childhood is beside the point,” Jayne went on as he listened. “All I did was ask if you wanted to let your mother teach you how to tweeze your eyebrows. I know I would’ve liked that.”
Alexis snorted. “My mom thinks racking up a big AT&T bill qualifies as mother-daughter bonding. She wouldn’t be interested. Besides, she—ouch—gets her eyebrows waxed at the salon.”
Jayne murmured something in reply. Riley decided again to leave them be. Their conversation had veered from the interesting subject of Jayne’s girlhood to feminine masochism, and he didn’t know how much of that he could take. If they started talking about bikini waxes, he might have to run.
Then Alexis said, “It costs my mom a huge amount of money every month to go to that salon, too. My dad used to totally have temper tantrums when he saw the bills.”
Riley nodded reluctantly, eyebrows raised. Knowing his older brother, he could believe it.
“Sometimes,” his niece went on with a sigh, “I don’t think looking good is worth it.”
“Oh, but it is!” Jayne disagreed. Her silhouette wasn’t visible through the nylon tent wall, but she had to be nodding. “Good grooming is important. After all, makeup, tweezers, and the judicious use of hairstyling products are all that separate us from men. Also, cute shoes. Hold still!”
“Yeow!” Alexis sniffled. “Is it supposed to hurt like this? I feel like my forehead is on fire.”
“We can wait a minute, if you want. But yes, beauty hurts sometimes.” A pause. “Especially when nobody notices it.”
“When nobody notices it?”
An awkward moment passed, as though Jayne regretted having made the comment. Then, off-handedly, “Right. Or when nobody appreciates the effort that goes into it.”
“I’ll bet everyone notices you.”
Silence. Jayne had to be shaking her head. The realization stilled him. How anyone could fail to notice—and appreciate—her was beyond him.
“That’s whack,” Alexis said.
Riley grinned, recognizing Lance’s lingo. It seemed Alexis didn’t think Lance was quite as much of a “jerk” as she claimed.
“Everyone must notice you!” his niece continued indignantly. “You look like a model or something. I can’t believe—”
“Not everyone values looking good,” Jayne said gently.
“Like who?”
“Well…like my family, for instance.” Jayne’s voice had quieted. A muffled ouch from Alexis told him Jayne still worked the tweezers. “My dad and my brothers. I always thought—oh, never mind. You don’t want to hear this.”
Riley did. Intensely interested, he lowered to a hunk of rock behind the tent Jayne and Alexis occupied.
“Sure, I do!” his niece said. “Come on, spill.”
“Well…”
Jayne’s hesitant voice betrayed pain she was reluctant to speak of. It made him ache to comfort her. To tell her he thought she was beautiful, inside and out. To erase whatever indifference her family had hurt her with. But he couldn’t. Not now. Not until he knew the whole story.
He’d met her gruff father and three brothers while in San Francisco—for brunch, a Giants game, and an ill-advised just-us-men trip to Hooters (there was nothing more awkward, Riley had discovered, than watching your current fling’s father ogle a busty waitress). But his interactions with Jayne’s family had been brief, relatively impersonal, or both. He didn’t really know much about them…or about Jayne’s relationship with them.
He’d left before things had gotten that far.
Now, he listened.
“I grew up in a house full of men,” Jayne said. “The toilet seat was always raised, ‘the game’ was always on TV, and the closest anybody ever came to being affectionate was high-fiving each other after a touchdown. My dad wasn’t cold—don’t get me wrong—he was just…clueless. He had no idea how to raise a girl. Especially one like me.”
“One like you?”
A wistful sigh. “One who begged for a baby blue bedroom. One who worshipped every cartoon princess, who outfitted Barbie from head to toe, who considered slumber parties a weekend necessity. I’m afraid I was always a girly-girl. In my family I couldn’t have been more of a square peg in a round hole.”
“They should have thought you were unique, then,” Alexis insisted. “Extra special.”
Riley recognized Gwen’s philosophy in that statement, and felt proud of Alexis. His grandmother had her old-fashioned moments, but she knew what was important. Apparently, she’d passed that knowledge on to her great-granddaughter, too.
“Extra special?” Jayne repeated. There was amusement in her voice…amusement covering something else, something like longstanding hurt. “That’s what I’d always hoped, I guess. It didn’t quite turn out that way. But by the time I discovered that, it was too late. I was hooked on beauty products. Hot for hairspray. Bananas for bath accessories. I couldn’t quit.”
At her attempt to lighten the conversation, to turn it away from her disappointing past to the moment at hand, Riley felt a wave of tenderness. Jayne might have been hurt. Had been hurt. But she wasn’t bitter, and she didn’t blame anyone for that hurt. Instead, she bravely moved on, being the only kind of woman she knew how to be.
“Well, I’m glad you couldn’t quit,” Alexis said, evidently wise enough to realize when a sad moment needed glossing over. “So is my baby unibrow. And so are all your workshop women. They’re looking better every day.” There was a shuffle against the tent floor. “Prrriimp!” she mimicked.
They both laughed.
“The only thing more important than looking good and feeling good is having good friends,” Jayne said. “Remember that, okay? Because being alone—being lonely—is just about the worst thing there is.”
A solemn silence fell. Riley imagined Alexis nodding, her brows puffy but well-groomed. He imagined Jayne giving his niece an affectionate hug, the two women bonded forever in familial misery and tweezer trauma. More than likely, Alexis shared Jayne’s dread of being alone, having experienced it more than a thirteen-year-old ought to have since her parents’ divorce.
“I’ll bet you’re hardly ever alone,” Alexis said after another murmured ouch. “You have tons of friends.”
“I’m alone sometimes,” Jayne confided. “It’s hard.”
She’d been alone after her bozo ex-boyfrien
d bailed, Riley thought. Alone, and hurting. Silently, he cursed the jerk who’d left Jayne lonely. His determination to make up for that loser’s shortcomings grew twice as strong.
Then a terrible thought occurred to him, blotting out the rest of Jayne and Alexis’s conversation. Had Riley left Jayne alone and hurting, too?
He’d always believed theirs had been a casual affair, steamy and sexy and filled with good times. He’d always believed she’d viewed their relationship the same way he had—temporary and enjoyable. What if, Riley wondered for the first time, she hadn’t? What if Jayne had wanted more?
Shaken by the question, he stood. His fingers trembled on the packet of towelettes. After one last glance toward Jayne’s tent, Riley made himself start moving. He could deliver the towelettes to her any time. Right now, he felt an overpowering urge to do something else. Anything else.
Anything that didn’t involve staying still. Wondering. Or feeling the confusion that coursed through him like river water past a kayak’s smooth hull.
What if Jayne had wanted more?
He needed to move, that was all. His only mistake had been staying and eavesdropping on something that was none of his business in the first place. Determinedly, Riley tossed the towelettes into his tent as he passed and then just kept going. There were plans to be made, equipment checks to be performed. The sooner he got this group to the canyon lodge—where rendezvous Jeeps were scheduled to return everyone to the main Hideaway Lodge—the sooner this trip would be over with.
The sooner he could head on to Antigua, and return to the life he understood.
Chapter Thirteen
The wilderness was out to get her.
So was this trip.
Jayne came to those conclusions naturally enough, after a morning filled with one calamity after another. First, there’d been no pancakes. Or waffles. Or even corn flakes. Instead, for breakfast there’d been gluey reconstituted oatmeal, coffee made with treated water, and dried apple slices. Not even pretending she was eating muesli at an exclusive Swiss spa had been enough to convince Jayne the stuff was palatable. And this, after having earned a real, honest-to-God splurge with all that hiking? It was some kind of cruel outdoorsy joke. Her thighs might have appreciated it, but she did not.
