by Heidi Rice
Her weeping thigh muscles disagreed. ‘What if we’re trespassing?’
‘We’re in a national park.’
‘So what? Everyone in this country has a gun. Some of them even have automatic weapons, ready to shoot down anyone who strays into their path. Especially unsuspecting English people on extreme rambling expeditions,’ she added, thinking of the bumper stickers in the convenience store they’d stopped at on their way to the resort four days ago. And the unpleasant illustration of the large, deadly-looking firearm accompanied by the slogan ‘come and take it’.
‘Most Americans do not own an AK-47,’ Luke said. ‘Round here they probably only own the odd hunting rifle. We’re not in the hood.’
‘Personally I don’t care if I get accidentally shot by a deer hunter or a gang-banger. I’d still be dead. I think we should stay on the bigger track. Just in case.’
Luke counted down his straining temper.
Humour her. You’ve handled NATO generals with secrets to hide and Washington socialites with dementia. You can handle one knackered celebrity chef from Notting Hill.
He attemped to analyse Halle’s pinched expression. It was hard to tell whether she was generally concerned about rogue gun nuts combing the woods or just trying to avoid exerting herself more. But they needed to get out of the sun. The red patch on the bridge of her nose was evidence of that.
Only one way to find out. Go on the offensive.
‘When did you become such a wimp?’
Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘You really don’t want me to answer that when I’m boiling hot, jet-lagged and being eaten alive by mosquitos.’
‘Actually, I really do.’ He was so over the hands-off approach. After three days of giving her space, he felt as if he’d been tap-dancing on eggshells for days. She scuttled out of the kitchen every time he entered it. Spent most of the time in the cabin in her bedroom and had barely spoken to him during any of their bonding exercises so far. Remembering her panic attack on the plane, he decided to up the stakes. ‘You had a lot more guts as a teenager.’
The blood flowed into her cheeks, pinkening the burned patch on her nose even more. He’d seen Halle lose it before. Not heeding those burning cheeks and furious scowl would be the equivalent of pulling the pin on a grenade. He’d once been prepared to do anything to avoid the explosion. Including lying through his teeth about how excited he was to become an accidental dad at nineteen. But he wasn’t that cowardly kid any more. Because he yanked the pin out anyway. ‘I guess having Lizzie made you lose your nerve. But I never noticed that before now.’
The blood surged up to her hairline and her hand whacked across his cheek with a resounding crack. Pain exploded in his face, the force of the blow snapping his head back, and popping the muscles in his neck.
He swore and cupped his cheek to contain the fiery heat, vaguely wondering if she’d given him whiplash.
Who knew a celebrity chef could pack a bigger punch than Mike Tyson?
‘You unbelievable shit.’ The shout ricocheted off the surrounding landscape, echoing like a thunder crack. ‘It wasn’t Lizzie. It was you.’
The sheen of unshed tears added a golden sparkle to her whisky-brown eyes. Tendrils of sweat-damp hair clung to her forehead, the pale skin above the round neck of her T-shirt had gone blotchy with temper and her chest heaved as if she had just run the London Marathon.
Maybe it was a cliché, but she was even more of a stunner when she was mad.
‘I trusted you. I relied on you. And you buggered off and left me when I needed you the most, you bastard.’ Her breath huffed out and he saw her exhaustion, not just from the plane journey, or the hike, or the jet lag.
This was bone-weary emotional exhaustion.
The realisation brought with it the memory of their squalid eighth-floor council flat in Hackney. The unreliable lift that stank of piss and the half-hearted use of cheap disinfectant. The gang of teenage boys who hung around the stairwell and sucked their teeth when he struggled up the stairs with Lizzie’s buggy. The broken fluorescent light in the bathroom he’d never gotten round to fixing. Lizzie squalling as if she’d been scalded at two in the morning, in the cot from the charity shop they’d jammed up against the dresser in the corner of their bedroom.
Remorse flowed through him, radiating out from the stinging pain in his jaw.
He opened his mouth, but the apology died on his tongue. There was nothing he could say to take that exhaustion away. Nothing he could do to make it better now. And nothing he would have done not to escape then, so giving in to the urge to say sorry sixteen years too late would just be so much self-serving bullshit.
So he said nothing and waited for her to say her piece, each word scoring his conscience.
‘I had to pick up and carry on and build something from absolutely nothing, because I had a child who needed me.’ She thrust a thumb into her sternum, punctuating the hot air with the rasping breaths of her outrage. ‘And I learned not to trust every snake oil salesman who came along, because I had to. Don’t talk to me about guts when you didn’t even have the guts to stick around.’
Halle clenched her fingers into a fist to ease the blazing pain in her palm. She wasn’t sure where the sudden burst of emotion had come from. But his smug words had been the trigger. That and the fact she’d been on a knife-edge of spiralling tension for days now.
Something that’s also his fault, because he’s the one who insisted on us sharing a bloody cabin.
She shook her hand trying to ease the sting. Who knew slapping someone in the face made your palm feel as if it had been branded? Maybe she should have taken into account his rock-solid jaw, and that day-old stubble that had the consistency of sandpaper. But for once there had been no forethought. Only reaction. The volcano, which had been bubbling under her breastbone, had erupted, spewing out her emnity towards him like molten lava detonating through a rock fissure.
He manipulated his jaw, as if checking she hadn’t dislocated it. ‘I guess I had that one coming,’ he said. As always, a master of understatement.
The red stain where her hand had connected with his cheek bloomed under the skin.
The lava turned to ash in her mouth, and her knees trembled, the rawness in her throat making it hard to swallow. ‘Ya think?’
She scrubbed her upper arm across her face, brushing away the salty sweat making her eyes sting.
‘I didn’t stick around because I couldn’t,’ he said, his tone soft in the still air. ‘You have no idea how monumentally screwed up I was back then,’ he added. ‘All thanks to stuff in my life that had nothing to do with you.’
She guessed he was talking about his family. The dysfunctional, screwed-up family, full of underwear thieves, whom he had always refused to talk about and had avoided introducing her to. She’d accepted his explanation then—that she wouldn’t understand, that she was better off not knowing them because ‘they’re all arseholes’—but now she wondered. Why had she always let him decide what she was strong enough to know about, what she had the maturity to understand—and all the things she didn’t?
But did she really want to go there? Now, after all these years? The slap had been a simple knee-jerk reaction to his dumb comment—and the frustration of the past few days. Why would she want to open up old wounds that had taken such a long time to heal?
He brushed his thumb across the hollow under her eye and let it linger for a second too long, before digging his hand into the pocket of his hiking shorts.
Once upon a time—maybe even yesterday—she would have apologised for hitting him so hard. Physical violence had never been her style. But he didn’t look as if he was expecting an apology. And if she was being entirely honest, she didn’t really think he deserved one.
He repositioned the backpack on his shoulders. ‘Let’s go find that waterfall. Looks like we could both do with some cooling off.’
‘Only if you’re absolutely sure it’s safe.’
His lips quirked, the grin imposs
ibly sexy. The bastard. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out for Uzi-toting grizzlies.’
Woods in rural England, on the rare occasions when Halle had been called upon to walk through them, were comforting ancient places, scattered with wild flowers, the tree bark musty with moss, the wildlife never much bigger than a bee. Woods in Tennessee weren’t woods at all, but wild untamed forests, both predatory and provocative—with a spectacular and arresting other-worldly beauty she hadn’t expected. And which she hadn’t taken the chance to appreciate until now.
As they ventured off the sun-brightened logging trail, Luke pointed out a sign, looking like a Disneyland prop, which directed them the 3.2 miles to Cherokee Creek Falls, but had the good grace not to gloat.
Despite the sign, Halle remained vigilant for the first ten minutes, scanning the dense forest of firs and oaks and pine trees, in case a black bear should pop out, eager to bite their heads off. Gradually, though, she relaxed and began to marvel at her surroundings.
The delicious quiet—punctuated only by the intermittent sounds of buzzing insects or distant water—beat with the rhythm of her own footfalls and the patient plod of Luke’s hiking boots ahead. Her palm stopped stinging where she’d sandpapered it on Luke’s jawline, and her heartbeat finally tracked back to the familiar thump-thump of her normal pulse rate.
The disconnected feeling lingered, as if she existed in a fog—her body clock out of sync with the time of day—but it became a warm, comforting fog instead of the hot, blistering, bone-melting fog of earlier.
She scanned the trees, only occasionally distracted by the sight of Luke’s tall athletic form striding down the trail ahead of her. The forest’s shadowy depths provided some much-needed shade from the mid-morning sun while holding secret caches of natural wonders, most of which she couldn’t identify with any degree of certainty. The oak and maple trees, the azalea blooms and ferns weren’t hard to name, even the gnarled thorny branches of the odd hawthorn bush, but easily the most prolific and spectacular plant—a branched shrub festooned with lime evergreen leaves and dying clusters of spiky white and pink flowers—was unrecognisable but incongruous in its profusion. Bushes of the stuff appeared in every break in the trees as the trail climbed slowly upwards, framing some awe-inspiring glimpses of the Smoky Mountain range, which spread out in a panorama of rolling peaks and misty dips.
After twenty minutes of patient plodding, the trail opened into a wild meadow, which stood like an oasis of vibrant variant green, edged by an array of showy dark pink blooms on its far side. The rambling bushes reminded Halle rather bizarrely of the gardens of a stately home she’d once visited in Wiltshire.
‘Are those rhododendron bushes?’ she asked, incredulous.
Luke paused to observe the flowering scrubs. ‘Yeah. Catawba rhododendrons. They grow wild all over the Appalachians.’ Obviously, he’d done his homework, unlike her.
‘Do you know what those other plants are, the ones with the white and pink flowers?’ she asked, pointing out the other shrubs she’d been unable to identify.
He patted the damp skin of his neck with his bandana. ‘I’m pretty sure that’s mountain laurel, although I’m no expert. We’ll have to ask Bill when he picks us up.’
‘It smells incredible.’ She drew in a breath of the perfumed air. ‘I really didn’t expect to see so many flowers.’
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Luke tied the bandana round his forehead and Halle’s pulse spiked. Apparently, the Smoky Mountain scenery wasn’t the only arresting sight on offer.
‘Yes, it is.’
Luke’s wide shoulders tilted as he let the backpack slide down to drop at his feet. Tucking his hands into his back pockets, he lifted his chin to absorb the sunshine, the quiet moment of contemplation like a benediction. His sun-burnished skin glowed, stretched tight over the high planes of his cheekbones, and she pictured him as a fallen angel haloed by a nimbus of hallowed light.
She blinked away the romantic thought. Luke Best had never been anyone’s idea of an angel. Fallen or otherwise. But the realisation didn’t stop the saliva drying in her mouth when a trickle of sweat skated down the corded sinews of his neck to disappear in the hollow of his clavicle. Her pulse fluttered as response tingled over her skin.
‘How much further to the falls?’ she asked.
Was he really planning to go for a dip in this waterfall? How did she feel about seeing him with less clothes on?
The flutter turned into a punch as her pulse thudded against her neck.
Don’t be ridiculous. What’s there to be nervous about?
He was just a man. And his body had once been such familiar terrain. She’d known every secret nook and cranny. The slopes of muscle and bone, the ridges of tendon and sinew, the sensitive hollows, the ticklish places, all his erogenous zones. She’d known exactly where and how to touch him, to kiss him and caress him, to make him groan and grunt and sometimes even shout with pleasure.
OK, stop right there.
She shook her head to shake off the sensual fog.
But as he knelt to retrieve the trail map from the backpack and then stood to study it, she took the opportunity to study him. And it occurred to her that the once familiar terrain wasn’t as familiar any more.
His body looked much more substantial now, having been wiry to the point of scrawny when he was a young man.
She noted the generous thicket of sun-bleached hair on his shins and how it thinned out above his knees. His forearms were fuzzy with hair, too, while sweaty darker wisps clung to his chest where his collarbone peeked from the V-neck of his T-shirt.
Apparently, Luke had gained quite a lot of body hair in the past sixteen years, too.
She tucked the thought away, dismissing the pleasantly floaty feeling engulfing her as a by-product of tiredness and the emotional exhaustion from her outburst.
He shoved the map into his pack and swung the bag onto his shoulders. ‘Can’t be much more than a mile.’ He nudged his forehead against the short sleeve of his T-shirt, giving her a glimpse of the dark thicket of hair beneath his armpit. ‘Let’s get moving. I can’t wait to get wet.’
She fell into step behind him, too tired to argue.
But it wasn’t until the burble of water cascading over rocks beckoned through the trees that it occurred to her she hadn’t packed a swimsuit. And if she’d forgotten her swimwear, what were the chances Mr Spontaneous had remembered his?
I don’t care how much I need to cool off, skinny-dipping is out.
Cherokee Creek poured over the shelves of lichen-covered rock, tumbling into a deep pool of mossy water, which looked cool and inviting and just what Luke had been praying for. Because the sweat soaking his shirt wasn’t the only heat he had to worry about.
Halle sat on the shallow pebbled beach in between the rocks, prising off her dusty trainers and peeling off her socks.
‘It looks very inviting.’ She swept her hair back to retie her ponytail.
‘Doesn’t it just,’ he agreed, because she didn’t sound entirely sure.
She’d calmed down since that whiplash-inducing slap. Enough for them to have a conversation about something other than whether or not they were lost. Which was all good. Not so good was the low hum that struck his abdomen every time their eyes met.
Despite her avoidance tactics over the past few days, his awareness of her seemed to be getting more acute. Even after she’d slumped off to bed yesterday halfway through the afternoon, he’d been hard-pressed to concentrate on the notes for his article. His head had been filled to bursting with images of her: shooting him the gimlet eye while they got smarmed to within an inch of their lives in Monroe’s office; chomping down on her breakfast muffin this morning; and, just a few minutes ago, pursing her lips into that little moue of surprise as she was blown away by the wild flowers.
Given that she seemed to be waging quite a battle to even be able to stand the sight of him, not one of those images should have been remotely hot. But somehow that didn’t stop
the heavy weight in his belly lowering to tighten his ball sac as she wiggled her toes.
‘I doubt it’s safe to swim in it, though.’ She tucked her socks into her trainers. ‘I can’t see the bottom. Dipping our feet in should be enough to cool us off.’
‘Suit yourself, but I’m going in.’ Because nothing short of a freezing-cold dunking would cool him off enough. He crouched to unlace his boots—and hoped she couldn’t hear the roughness in his voice. ‘The park authorities don’t much like people swimming, but I reckon it’s fine as long as you’re careful.’
Their gazes connected and he could see his own awareness reflected in the glassy sheen of her eyes.
Dream on, Best, she’s not interested unless you can time-travel back to 1998.
‘You’re mad,’ she said, lowering her big toe into the water. ‘You do know it’s freezing.’
‘Spoken like a true girl.’ He tugged his T-shirt and shorts off, keen to get into the water before the heat swelling in his gut hit critical mass.
From what his now completely one-track mind could recall of the research he’d done into the region, Cherokee Creek flowed down from the snowmelt on the highest peaks of the Blue Ridge in North Carolina—which should ensure the water was sufficiently cold enough to get his wayward dick under control.
He climbed up to the shelf of granite overlooking the pond. Clamping his teeth together, he cupped protective hands over the Eiffel Tower growing in his pants and leaped into the water, yodelling like a Comanche on the warpath.
He hit with a magnificent splash and heard Halle’s yelp of protest, above his own startled hiss, before he plunged under, gulping for breath a split second too late. The cold stung his skin, freezing the heat in his nuts. The shock to his system, though, made getting another stiffy before Christmas unlikely.
Mission accomplished.
Kicking off the rocks at the bottom, he broke the surface spluttering and coughing to expel the ice water he’d inhaled into his lungs.
