by Seton, Cora
“Can you hand me that screwdriver? I’m going to take this down.”
Renata blinked before getting a hold of herself and fetching the screwdriver. She didn’t meet Greg’s eyes as she handed it up, sure he knew exactly where her thoughts had drifted.
“If there’s one, there’s more. We have to find the rest of them.” Greg tossed the camera down when he’d uninstalled it and came down the ladder again to get one of the ones they’d just bought.
“Clem will notice if his cameras are gone.”
“Screw him.” Greg was good and mad, and Renata didn’t blame him.
No one liked being spied on.
“That’s one of our cameras installed, five to go,” he said a few minutes later. He looked around. “You know what? We’re going to need a lot more of these things.”
“Greg? There you are. We’ve got a problem,” Boone said when he met them coming back to the bunkhouse an hour later. They’d found three more cameras and set up the rest of the ones they’d bought near the wind turbines, the root cellar and a couple of the solar panels, but Greg knew they had a lot more work to do. He was sure if they looked they’d find more cameras around, and the ones they’d installed barely covered any of the things Clem might decide to sabotage. It would be far too easy for whoever was causing trouble at Base Camp to simply evade them.
Greg sighed. “What now?”
“There’s a problem with your backup brides.”
“What backup brides?”
“You know I always line up backup brides,” Boone said.
“What about them?” Renata asked.
“I put out an ad the day you drew the short straw,” Boone said to Greg. “I went to check if there were any responses this morning, but there weren’t.”
“Good.” Greg was relieved. He didn’t want Renata thinking he was even entertaining the idea of marrying someone else.
“Not good,” Boone told him. “You need a fallback plan. No offense, Renata.”
“None taken. I agree with you. What do you think happened?” She was back in director mode. And speaking of directors, here came Clem.
“What’s going on?” he demanded as a crew hurriedly set up to film.
“No one’s answering Greg’s backup bride ad,” Renata explained, as if his impending marriage had nothing to do with her. Greg’s frustration mounted. His body was still uncomfortably aware of her closeness. How could she turn off what had happened between them so easily?
“Maybe no one’s interested in marrying him,” Clem said.
“It’s not Greg,” Boone said. “It’s that article you posted on the website. The one titled Backup Brides Unite. See? I didn’t know it was there until this morning. I haven’t been paying attention like I should.” He showed them his phone. Greg leaned in to try to make it out, but the screen was too damn small to see it very well.
“I’ll read it later on my own phone.”
“Who told you to write an article?” Renata demanded.
“No one,” Clem said. “I interviewed a bunch of the women who’ve answered backup bride ads and talked to Boone in the past. They’re pissed that none of them ever make it on the show. They think it’s a scam, and I think they’re right. It’s an article that needed to be written.”
“Well, you’ve screwed up everything,” Boone told him. “Now the women are forming a boycott, and no one’s going to cross the proverbial picket line to marry Greg.”
Renata laughed. “Sorry,” she said when Boone—and Clem—glared at her. “You’ve got to admit it’s funny. A backup bride boycott.”
“Really funny,” Greg told her. “You realize this means you’ll have to marry me?”
For an instant, Renata pictured doing just that. Pledging her hand—and life—to the man standing beside her. The man who was half-relieved and half-pissed that his potential backup brides were boycotting him.
She smiled again. She couldn’t help it. The Base Camp website was fantastic for riling up the fans—and the cast.
Her smile faded. She was part of the cast now. Who knew what Clem would post about her given the chance?
She vowed right there and then she’d never look at it again.
Instead a vision of married life with Greg flitted into her mind. Living in a tiny house. Waking up beside him—instead of across the bunkhouse floor, like she had this morning.
It had taken ages to fall asleep these past few nights. She’d listened to Angus snoring. Listened for any sign that Greg was awake, too.
What if she’d crept out of her sleeping bag, slipped into the kitchen—
And he’d come to join her?
What if they’d slipped away and spent a whole night together, not just a furtive quickie in a truck but a long, leisurely session of lovemaking that would go on and on—
Suddenly uncomfortable, Renata tried to focus on the conversation—
Then realized no conversation was happening. All three men were looking at her—
As if they’d read her mind.
Renata swallowed hard. “I’m not marrying anyone,” she insisted weakly.
“Then you’d better find Greg a wife,” Boone said, “because I don’t know what to do. I tried some other dating forums, and the women are on there as well, warning everyone else away from him. It’s a real problem.”
“If you can’t get it done, how do you expect me to?” She didn’t want to find Greg a wife. She wanted to be his wife. Maybe she needed to start shaking down more of the inhabitants of Base Camp for money.
“However you can. I’ve got to get going.” He moved to the entrance to pull on his outer gear. He was actually angry, Renata realized. Boone had put a lot into making this community a success, and they were standing on ground his wife, Riley, had once thought she’d inherit from her family. No wonder he was mad.
“Yeah, Renata,” Clem echoed. “Find Greg a wife.”
“You’d better not find me a wife,” Greg warned her. “I won’t marry her if you do.”
“You’ll do what you’re told,” she said primly.
“Like hell.” Greg looped a hand around her waist. “I told you. I already know who I want to marry.” His kiss was fast and hot, and the pressure of it left her clinging to him.
The bunkhouse door burst open. “Boone, Greg. Pasture.” Jericho was gone as quickly as he’d come.
“What does that mean?” Renata asked.
“Something’s up with the bison.” Boone was halfway to the door. Greg steadied her, bent down to snatch a kiss. Renata lifted her chin to meet it before she remembered she needed to stop doing that.
“Be back as soon as I can,” Greg said.
“Someone cut the wires deliberately,” Boone announced when Greg caught up with him, Walker, Avery and Jericho in the pasture. Walker and Avery were working to repair the fence, with Jericho’s help. Boone came to meet Greg.
“Did we lose any bison?”
“No,” Walker said shortly from where he was kneeling to unspool some wire.
“It must have just happened,” Jericho added.
“We need cameras out here, too. Speaking of which,” Greg added, “when Renata and I went to install ours, we found someone else had gotten there ahead of us.” He explained what they’d found. As he did so, Renata approached. She’d stopped to pull on her spencer and boots, her old-fashioned gown hampering her progress through the snow.
“Cameras?” Avery repeated sharply.
“We found six of them altogether in various places, so far. Renata and I will drive into town when we can and pick up some more. We’re taking down the other ones and putting up our own. We think we can catch whoever is slipping in and doing damage.”
“Where exactly were these cameras?” Avery asked.
Greg tried to be patient as he explained again. He couldn’t blame Avery for not liking being spied on, but he was a little surprised at the extent of her anger. After all, they were all on a reality television show.
“We need to be p
atrolling more,” Boone said.
“There aren’t enough of us.” All of the men had been working on way too little sleep for months. They needed a break. Not that he was managing to get much sleep anyway these days, thanks to Renata’s presence just feet away in the bunkhouse every night.
“Did you know about this?” Walker asked Renata.
“No,” she said unequivocally. “Like I told Greg, we considered using cameras like these at the beginning of the show. At the time, Boone was pushing for almost no filming at all. We compromised on camera crews with handheld video cameras capturing what they can.”
“Whose are they, then?” Jericho demanded.
“They have to be Clem’s,” Boone said.
Renata nodded. “That’s my assumption. He’s breaking rules left and right.”
“Here he is,” Jericho muttered.
Greg swung around to see Clem and a small crew making their way through the snowy pasture toward them. Boone went to meet the man, and Greg fell in behind him. “You put surveillance cameras up—without telling us?”
Greg thought Clem would deny it, but the other man must have realized it was useless. “So what? I’ve got every right to film every angle of what goes on here. That’s the deal.”
Renata swore as a new thought occurred to her. “I bet he’s got them inside, too,” she said to Greg. “We’d better sweep this whole place.”
“Inside?” Jericho strode forward to confront Clem. “You put cameras in our houses?” His voice rose.
“No,” Clem said, but Greg didn’t believe him.
By the looks of it, neither did Boone, and after the fence had been repaired, he gathered everyone together in the bunkhouse to announce what they had learned. The result was pandemonium.
“There’d better not be a camera inside of my house,” Clay threatened Clem.
“You’ve got that right,” Curtis added.
As voices rose into an angry clamor, Greg muttered to Boone, “Better get this under control before there’s a lynching.”
“All right, everyone, sit down! Let’s talk this over,” Boone bellowed. With a lot of grumbling, they did. “We’re going to work in pairs, combing every surface twice. We didn’t sign up for this, obviously.”
“This is ridiculous,” Clem said from the back of the room. “I’m the director, and if I want cameras—”
“Pair up. One SEAL, one citizen,” Boone went on, ignoring him. “Start with your houses. Examine every inch—inside and out. Then we’ll split up to sweep the outbuildings.”
It was a major undertaking, hampered wherever possible by Clem, who protested it every step of the way. He kept his phone clapped to his ear, trying to get through to Fulsom, who didn’t seem to want to answer.
“I’m supposed to make this show interesting,” he bellowed finally. He’d stomped a circle in the snow outside the bunkhouse door. “Why the hell can’t any of you understand that?”
“He’s losing it,” Renata said dryly as she and Greg headed toward one of the unfinished tiny houses. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been inside your place.”
“I’ll be glad to show it to you.” The building crew had hurried to frame in all the houses they’d need and get them weather-tight before the snow fell last fall. Now they were finishing the interiors in the order in which the men married. Since he was to wed next, they’d been concentrating on his. He checked in when he could, but it had been several days.
He opened the door and ushered in Renata, and when she sighed with appreciation for the sunny, beautiful interior, he smiled. “Clay, Curtis and Harris do good work, don’t they?”
“These houses are one of my favorite things about Base Camp.”
“Let me show you around.” He guided her through the light-filled front living space with its floor-to-ceiling windows, to the kitchen and eating area. Upstairs was a loft that would hold a queen-size mattress. Every inch of space had been utilized for cupboards, shelves and storage spaces.
“They always feel so big for being so little,” she said.
“I know what you mean. I was skeptical at first, but when I checked out Boone’s house at the beginning of the show, I was hooked.” Greg had shut the door when they entered. They were alone. He moved to kiss her.
“Don’t you think we should check for cameras first?” Renata asked him.
“To hell with it. Let them watch if they want to.”
Greg was kissing her, and she wasn’t stopping him, and she really ought to stop him because she still hadn’t figured out a way to pay off the twenty-nine months’ worth of payments still outstanding to Mayra and Gabriela.
Trouble was, Renata couldn’t seem to remember why that was important.
If she did marry Greg, she’d live in this wonderful house, with this sexy, wonderful man…
Greg pulled back. “I guess you’re right; let’s make sure we’re really alone before this gets out of hand.”
They got to work, and to Renata’s surprise, they didn’t find any cameras in the little house’s interior. They checked thoroughly, Greg looking in places she’d never have thought of.
Renata stored the information away for later. Who knew where her career might take her, after all?
Outside was a different story. They found not one but four different cameras there, two on either side of the house. Greg examined them.
“Why four? I can see installing one on either side, but why did Clem double up?” Each side had hosted a large camera and a much smaller, much cheaper one.
“Maybe he didn’t.” Renata pointed out that there were two different kinds. One set were larger and more expensive-looking. The other two were smaller, similar to the cheap ones she and Greg had bought earlier.
“You think someone else besides Clem is spying on us? Who?”
She didn’t answer that. Wouldn’t until she got Avery alone and asked her a few questions. She’d caught Avery sneaking around more than once in the past, but until recently she’d been here to film the action, not shape the story.
Greg’s expression darkened, and his brows drew together. “You know something.” It wasn’t a question.
“It’s more of a guess.”
“You’ve got a lot of secrets,” he said when she didn’t elaborate.
“Believe me, I wish I didn’t.”
Chapter Eleven
‡
All in all, they found twenty-four large cameras and eighteen small ones. When they’d finished the sweep, everyone trooped up to the manor and started all over again, making sure Clem and all the camera crews stayed with them and didn’t reinstall cameras back in the buildings they’d just swept.
It was a discouraged, disgruntled group that arrived at the bunkhouse for dinner that night.
Greg knew Boone had registered a protest with Fulsom, who’d promised to bar Clem from putting up new cameras, but when dinner was over, and Boone announced it was time to watch the week’s episode, the atmosphere was mutinous. Clem was sulking. The camera crew seemed chastened, especially when Renata came near them.
“We didn’t know anything about extra cameras,” Greg heard William saying to her, but she just waved him off.
After the usual introduction, the episode began with a group of women Greg didn’t recognize, seated around a table in a nondescript office.
A narrator’s voice—Clem’s voice—introduced them. “All of you sitting at this table have applied to be backup brides, am I right?”
“More than that,” one woman said. “We were all informed by Boone Rudman that we’d passed the first clearance and our information would be given to the men in question.”
“I think Boone was lying. I was told my information would be given to Clay. As far as I can tell from the show, Clay never even looked at any of our profiles,” a frowning brunette said.
“That’s right,” a blonde to her left echoed. “I was told the same thing—my information would be passed to Clay. Why did I go through all that effort if he was going to marr
y Nora the whole time?”
“So you felt taken advantage of,” Clem said. “As if you’d been used and discarded like an old condom.”
The blonde blanched. “That’s not quite—”
“How about you?” Clem asked a different woman. “Which Navy SEAL screwed you over?”
“Jericho. He never got in contact with me,” she said. “I thought that was rude. I put myself out there applying to meet him and got nothing in return.”
“Exactly,” a fierce-looking woman to her right said. “I thought there’d be a chance to meet Jericho. Talk to him. No one even called me back to tell me it wasn’t going to happen.”
“So the show preyed on your gullibility,” Clem said. “You really thought you stood a chance.” He turned to the camera and made a face, showing just how unlikely he thought that was.
“It’s like, did those men just take one look at our photos and refuse to even meet us?” a redhead asked from in back.
Clem turned on her. “Don’t you think appearances are important?”
“Maybe,” the woman retorted. “But I’m more than just tits and an ass.”
The interview went down from there when Clem introduced three new women.
“You’re here to talk about Greg Devon, am I right?” Clem asked them.
“That’s right. I’m Monica Halton,” a pleasant-looking brunette stated. “I saw the ad, and I went online to Base Camp’s website and saw how the other backup brides had been treated, and I thought it was wrong for them to keep getting women’s hopes up when the men never picked one.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Clem pointed out. “Samantha Smith married Harris Wentworth.”
“After she was led to believe she’d be marrying Clay Pickett—and after Curtis Lloyd, the next man she was matched with, refused to even pick her up from the airport!” another woman interrupted. “I think the whole thing is meant to humiliate women. I was going to apply to be a backup bride, too, but I changed my mind when I saw what was really going on.”
