With a stiff shake of his head, her fiancé nixed the idea. “No, we’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?” she pressed, because, well, they were in the middle of freaking nowhere backcountry, and it seemed like a good idea to let someone know the only compass they ever used was the one located in Jordan’s BMW’s dashboard.
“Relax, Georgie,” Jordan muttered. “They’re sending us out in one direction. We’ll turn around after we identify the shit and come back. How hard can that be?”
“Team high-intensity scat training, are you ready?” Buck called.
She and Jordan looked up to find all eyes on them.
Jordan puffed up like a peacock. “Yeah, we’re ready.”
“Turn around and on my count, head south, southwest,” Syd said, checking her map.
“Are we running?” Georgie whispered.
“Yes, this is no meandering walk,” Jordan replied as that muscle ticked in his jaw again. It might as well be his asshattery indicator.
“Three, two, one, go!” Syd cried.
Jordan shot into the forest like…whatever the hell sprints in the woods. A cougar? A mountain lion? Were those the same animal? Gah! Her trifecta shrugged as she glanced past a cluster of aspens, already starting their fall transition from green to gold. It was quite lovely, and she would have remarked on it if her fiancé hadn’t bolted into the evergreens like a bat out of hell. She sucked in a breath and caught a glimpse of his gray hoodie as he scaled a large rock.
“Wait!” she cried.
Her backpack clunked from side to side as she held the clipboard and struggled to keep Jordan in sight.
“How are you going to find scat at that speed? And by the way, I’ve got the damn clipboard!” she yelled.
“I want to break from the group and get away from camp. I’m guessing the animals steer clear of it, so, keeping that in mind, the best scat is probably farther away,” he called from over his shoulder.
Dammit! That actually made sense.
Ignoring the sour churn of her belly and her burning sleep-deprived eyes, she mustered all the strength she had because she had more than an inkling she was going to need it.
“Hurry, Georgiana! Run!” Jordan called.
Georgie clutched the clipboard and willed her legs to move faster.
“I am running!” she answered.
For the better part of the last three hours, they’d scoured the backcountry with their eyes locked on the ground in search of animal poop.
She caught her breath and slowed down.
Okay, calling it a run might be pushing it.
“Georgie, come on! I think I see something over by that tree,” Jordan shouted.
Her fiancé’s fecal matter focus had been unrelenting.
They’d found what they’d hoped was squirrel scat, jackrabbit scat, and marmot scat. She didn’t even know what an actual marmot looked like, but she identified its damn poop. They had to find one more specimen of animal scat, and then they could return to camp.
She drew in a sharp breath and kicked it up into high gear, which was pretty much old lady walker speed by this point.
“I’m coming! Slow down!”
“We cannot slow down! You need to speed up!” he answered.
Heat rushed to her cheeks. “This is me speeding up!”
She was tired and hungry. All those muscles that had remained tensed and twisted last night during the Jordan Marks snore-fest begged for a respite from this shit show.
This literal shit show.
What she needed was a hot bubble bath. She could picture it now. Warm water. Bubbles, tickling her skin as she propped her feet on the side of the tub and reread her well-loved copy of Pride and Prejudice. She could sink into the scented water and listen as Jordan cooked dinner or played with Mr. Tuesday.
How she missed those days.
Those days?
OMG! Those days were two days ago! Two days ago, life had been perfect.
“Georgie, look out!” Jordan called.
“What?” she yelled back, but the smell answered.
She stared down at her shoe, smack-dab in the center of a giant pile of poop.
Jordan rushed over and took the clipboard from her. “Before you smashed the scat, did you get a look at it?”
She pressed her hand to her mouth, trying not to gag. She didn’t know which was worse. Pineapple or poop?
“If I saw it, I wouldn’t have stepped in it!” she snapped.
“Don’t move! Let me try and get a better look,” he directed with a stern expression.
“You want me to keep my foot in this pile of crap?” she shot back.
He met her gaze. “Yes, it’s a competition, Georgiana, and we’re not going to lose.”
She scoffed but quickly closed her mouth and pinched her nostrils. It was damn hard to maintain being pissed off while standing in a pile of random animal shit.
Jordan, unaware of her discontent, crouched down next to her crap-encrusted sneaker. “It could be mule deer or elk scat,” Jordan mused, staring at the pictures of poop on the clipboard. “Mule deer scat looks a little lighter in color, so I’m going to go with elk.”
“Great! I’m onboard with elk. Can I move?” she asked.
Jordan gestured for her to stay put. “Wait a second. It could be mule deer. The shape of the piece of scat you missed is a little bit smaller. Or this might just be scat from a small elk. What do you think?”
“I think I’m standing in a pile of shit, Jordan! Actual feces! And you don’t want me to move,” she yelled.
“Calm down and stop being a drama queen, Georgiana. This isn’t a wilderness beauty pageant,” he replied, studying the clipboard.
Oh, hell no!
“What did you say?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“You’ve been kind of a diva today, babe,” he answered, still staring at the damn shit.
“Diva? I’m a diva because I don’t want to stand in animal fecal matter?” she tossed back.
Jordan looked up and met her gaze as a boisterous bout of yips and yeehaws rang out. They glanced over to see Brice with Camille on his back, laughing and cheering as they charged toward camp, dodging rocks and tree stumps like Mr. and Mrs. Outdoor Adventure.
“Just fucking great,” Jordan mumbled.
“Can I please get my foot out of this pile of shit! Let’s go with elk scat. I don’t care!” she said, crossing her arms.
Jordan shook his head. “If you could be a little less beauty queen and a little more girl scout, we could have beat the Plunger Princess and her pest control prince.”
She stared at the Emperor of Asshattery, who had garnered another title.
“You know what, Mr. King of Crap? I think I’ve earned a little luxury. I barely slept last night. I’ve been busting my ass, trying to keep up with you and scan this godforsaken wilderness for animal droppings. If anyone on this planet could use a fresh tube of vegan cookie dough and a pedicure, it’s me!”
“We could put that on a sash! Little Miss I Could Use a Pedicure! Wouldn’t your mom be proud?” Jordan muttered.
“Get up!” she growled, like a marmot, if they growled.
Dammit, she had no idea what sound a marmot made.
He glanced away from the clipboard. “Why?”
“Because if you don’t get out of my way, my crap-covered foot is going to land square in the middle of your smug, scat-obsessed face.”
“Don’t be such a—” Jordan started, but the demon that lived in every woman pushed past her limit took over.
Her trifecta gasped. They knew that shit, scat, crap, or whatever you want to call it, was about to get real.
Hovering on the brink of losing her scat-despising mind, she leaned over and positioned her lips a breath away from Jordan’s ear. “If you say diva or beauty queen one more time, Jordan Marks, Emperor of Asshattery and Reigning Sovereign of Scat, I’m taking the shit shovel, digging a hole, then tossing your perfect ten asshat ass inside.”
/> 8
Jordan
“Remember, folks, no peeking! Do not look at your other half’s answers,” Buck cautioned as he walked the perimeter of the gathering area, observing the seated couples.
Jordan stared at the questionnaire in front of him, erased his answer, then chanced a look at Georgie. She didn’t even glance up as she scribbled on the form as if she’d made it her life’s work to mistreat pencils.
To say the last two days had been an unmitigated disaster was unfair to unmitigated disasters. A total and complete catastrophic shit show was more like it.
Yesterday, they’d lost the scat race, coming in dead last.
Instead of spending the night in the honeymoon yurt with real pillows and running water, they’d suffered through another night in tent hell. Well, truth be told, except for a sore back and aching neck, he hadn’t suffered as much as Georgie.
After waking this morning, he’d found her already up. Sitting cross-legged on the other side of the tent, he watched as his fiancée finished off the last of the cookie dough, then licked the casing like a vulture intent on devouring the carcass of its dead prey.
And that wasn’t the only odd thing about her.
At some point during the night, she’d taken her hair out of its bun. It hung around her shoulders in a wild chestnut mane. He sure as hell wasn’t going to mention anything about it because he had no room to criticize her.
Yes, he’d been an asshat.
Yes, he’d fallen back on his worst coping mechanisms and regained his title of Emperor of Asshattery. Georgie’s new moniker, the Sovereign of Scat, wasn’t far off the mark either.
He’d taken the scat competition too far. He’d gone full-on Marks Perfect Ten Mindset.
But it wasn’t like he didn’t have a reason.
A switch had flipped inside him when he saw Camille Pruitt and stood there helplessly as she called him Straws. All his defenses had gone up. In the blink of an eye, he was that scrawny kid again, hiding in the school bathroom, waiting for the jerks and jocks to clear out. His childhood companions of shame and humiliation hit him again like a one-two punch.
And the whole embarrassing HIIT training versus scat training debacle didn’t help either.
When the Plunger Princess and her rodent royalty fiancé, along with the rest of the boot campers, laughed at him, every insecurity multiplied, every frayed nerve bristled, and each hurt feeling from his past bubbled to the surface. And who was there to bear the brunt of it?
Georgie.
Still, he’d expected her to acclimate better to the task at hand. During the Battle of the Blogs, she’d taken charge. Even when she’d momentarily lost her mind by entering a wet T-shirt contest, she’d won the damn thing.
Why’d she go all beauty queen diva on him?
What was different now?
He stared down at the questionnaire with the words Engaged Couples’ Compatibility Assessment splashed across the top and found his answer.
Was he wrong to have proposed so soon?
Georgie was it. She was the one for him. He knew this in his heart and in his soul, but had he jumped the gun?
“Are you almost done?” Georgie asked, observing him with dark circles under her eyes.
He jotted down one last answer. “Yeah, babe, I am.”
She tossed her mass of tangled hair behind her shoulder with a deft flick of her hand, took his form, then strode over to deliver the papers to Syd and Buck.
Did she think she was in a pageant? Is this what Georgiana Jensen morphed into on zero sleep?
He looked around at the other couples in their moisture-wicking shirts and khaki all-weather hiking shorts. It was like being trapped in an L.L. Bean nightmare. He and Georgie, thinking they were headed to a fitness bridal boot camp, had opted to pack workout clothing. It wasn’t a bad call. He could easily hike and trek around the backcountry in track pants and a hoodie, while Georgie rocked yoga capris and sweatshirts. But they stood out—and not in a good way.
They garnered attention in the same way he had when he stood out as a gangly kid in middle school and high school, and likely, the way Georgie had stood out when she was competing on the beauty pageant circuit.
Freaks.
He hadn’t been this person in years, and neither had she.
They were adored on social media. People made damn Pinterest boards devoted to them. The online world watched them fall in love.
What would they think now?
He glanced around the group while Buck and Syd stood in the center of the gathering spot, shuffling the papers and speaking in hushed tones.
Georgie returned and tapped his arm. “It looks like the judges are going to address us,” she whispered with her shoulders back and chin raised as if she were preparing for the pageant spotlight.
He tried to muster a placating expression. She did not look like she was firing on all cylinders, and neither was he, but at least he’d gotten some rest over the past couple of nights. He needed to make sure she slept tonight. It wasn’t like he was trying to keep her up, but the minute his head hit the poorly padded tent floor, he was out like a light. It wasn’t the physical exertion that zapped his energy. He could run a marathon in his sleep. It was his nerves—this hyper-anxious state of trying to be the best that drained him by sundown.
Luckily, they only had one more night of boot camp. Then, they could get back to normal—whatever the hell that was. But it had to be better than this.
They’d cooked their can of beef stew, ate the sodium infused brown lump of food and made it through a morning couples’ hike, without another scat hide-and-seek competition, thank God. Then, they’d completed a hands-on activity where Buck and Syd taught them how to craft a bow drill to make a fire in the wilderness.
He’d completed the task on his own. He was pretty sure Georgie had been sleeping with her eyes open in some state of half-awake lucid dreaming while the boot camp leaders led the lesson. And it was pretty cool, in a caveman sort of way, to make fire without matches or flipping the switch on a gas fireplace like they did at home.
He’d followed along with the group, constructing a primitive bow using a piece of wood the length of his arm and securing a cord to each end. Next, they made a fireboard—just a flat piece of wood with a little shallow circular indentation at the end. When it was time to construct the drill piece they’d wrap around the bow’s cord to move back and forth in the fireboard’s little hole to make the actual fire, Buck had handed each couple a large knife to sharpen the end of the wood.
There was no way he was about to allow pageant zombie Georgie to handle sharp objects, so he’d whittled the end of the six-inch sturdy branch into a point. Buck then gave each pair a flat stone with a shallow circle carved into the top, similar to the fireboard’s slight hole. This socket stone, as Syd called it, was used to hold the blunt end of the drill piece in place while the sharp end fit into the fireboard’s hole. Set up and ready to go, he’d bowed away like a violinist who’d pounded fifty Red Bulls, creating friction by moving the sharpened tip of the drill rapidly in the fireboard’s opening.
It took a hell of a lot of effort, but he’d done it and made fire.
Take that, Boy Scouts!
Georgie leaned in. “I have a feeling this is the question and answer portion of the competition.”
He nodded. She was probably right. They had just filled out a pretty bizarre questionnaire, and they hadn’t done any touchy-feely couples’ activities yet. Maybe this was the Dr. Phil connect with your partner portion of the bridal boot camp.
A wave of confidence washed over him—a welcome feeling. They could do touchy-feely.
He and Georgie were open books—or open blogs. They laid it all out on the line every day. They could do a couples’ compatibility exercise in their sleep. And with Georgie’s state of mind, that was a good thing.
“All right, couples,” Syd said, addressing the group. “Let’s have the gentlemen sit on one side of the circle and the ladie
s on the other.”
Jordan watched as the men migrated to the other side.
“Are you going to be okay here on your own?” he asked, getting up.
Georgie glanced around with a high-wattage smile. “Of course! I’ll be with the other contestants.”
“Georgie? Babe? Do you know where we are?” he asked, two-seconds away from snapping his fingers in front of her face to get her to come back from whatever alternate universe her insomnia-riddled mind had entered.
She shook her head, then let out a weary sigh, looking a little more like herself. “Yes, I know where we are. I meant to say boot camp participants,” she corrected, her tone more annoyed than spaced out, which under the circumstances, he’d take.
He glanced over as Brice Casey kissed Camille Pruitt on the cheek.
“I’m going to miss my plunger princess,” the man cooed.
“Not as much as I’m going to miss my Pooh Bear, Bricey,” Camille gushed.
Jordan couldn’t look away. How could these idiots be so happy?
He stroked Georgie’s cheek. “See you in a bit, babe,” he tried.
She frowned. “You’re going to be sitting across from me, Jordan. You’ll see me the entire time.”
And bam! She’d returned from beauty pageant purgatory and was back to being pissed off at him, which he deserved.
He headed toward the other side when Mr. Rodent Royalty himself, waved him over.
“Dude, there’s a spot here,” Brice said, scooting over on the log bench.
For fuck’s sake! Was he going to have to sit next to Brice Casey? The douche who couldn’t even remember Georgie’s name and had brought Camille Pruitt and all her Straws baggage to his bridal boot camp?
So far, they’d been able to steer clear of the couple.
But not today.
He glanced around and found no other place to sit, then planted himself on the end of the bench next to the smiling prince of pest control.
Holy hell! Thanks a lot, wilderness gods!
He looked across the circle to see Camille Pruitt perched next to Georgie.
Own the Eights Gets Married Page 12
