“Oh,” she said, on a shuddering sigh.
Any minute now she would start to be embarrassed at losing her self-control in front of him. And then she would be angry with herself, but of course she’d take it out on him because, hey, he was there. He braced himself.
She ran a hand through her hair, matted from being mashed up against his uniform shirt, which was itself looking rather the worse for wear. “Were you looking for me?”
He tried to get past the fact that she was still leaning against him, firm and resilient and vital, every inch of her alive, if a little more subdued than he was used to. Had he been looking for her? It was hard to remember. He waited for her to pull free and say something nasty, something designed to push him away, anything, and the sooner the better.
She laid her cheek against his chest and closed her eyes.
It was a trap. It had to be a trap. She was resting her full weight against him. He could feel her breasts, her thighs, oh my god, she was putting her arms around his waist. He worried about her knees and what she might decide to do with one of them.
She rubbed her check against his chest and gave a long, deep sigh.
Mutt, who had for some strange reason of her own not monopolized Jim’s attention from the first moment of his appearance, gave the two of them a long, impenetrable look and vanished from the clearing.
The hell with it. Jim picked up Kate in one smooth, easy motion and walked over to sit down beneath a spruce tree with spreading branches overhead and fifty years’ worth of needles piled beneath. He settled her in his lap and her head naturally found a place on his shoulder. He thought carefully about what to do with his hands, until one curved just as naturally around her waist and she relaxed into it with another long, deep sigh. The other he rested on her hip, the curve of which fit into his palm like it had been designed specifically for that purpose.
Time passed. The sun shone. A soft breeze teased the fat buds on the branches of the trees. Birds sang and cawed and called. A porcupine rattled out of the woods, looked them over, and rattled back in again. Jim thought he heard a moose stripping bark from a willow tree. There was a distant crashing of brush like a bear might be passing through, and he gave some thought to pulling his weapon, but it might have woken Kate and the danger wasn’t clear and present enough to justify anything that drastic.
He’d never seen her sleeping before, not close up. Oh, she’d fallen asleep after they had made love last summer in Bering, but she’d been making love to someone else and he hadn’t been able to get out of that bunk fast enough. Then there had been the encounter on the floor of Ruthe Bauman’s cabin last January that had not involved any drowsiness at any moment on anyone’s part. He watched her face and made a discovery. She frowned a little in her sleep, did Kate, as if even then there were jobs to be done, problems to be solved, disputes to be settled.
Her golden skin was smooth and unblemished. Her brows were as black as her hair and as straight. Closed, her eyes looked less Asian than they did when she was awake. A strand of hair lay across a high, flat cheek and the wide, full mouth that was unsmiling but relaxed. That hair, that thick cap of pure black that had once hung to her waist in a fat braid. He’d had fantasies about that braid, which had disappeared a year and a half ago during a guided big game hunt when a bunch of homicidal computer executives-geeks with guns; he still had a hard time with the concept-had opened up on each other instead of the moose and Kate had been caught in the crossfire.
Now he had fantasies about the cap.
What was it about this woman, this one woman, when his life had been filled, one might even say littered, with so many others?
She was smart, and he liked smart in a woman. When she forgot it was him in the room with her, she had a robust sense of humor. He didn’t have a lot of empirical evidence, given the brevity and angst of their only two encounters, but he was fairly certain they were sexually compatible.
Fairly certain, hell. He knew beyond all shadow of doubt that he and Kate together would produce a fire that would make the burning down of Kate’s cabin look tame by comparison.
Still. It wasn’t like there hadn’t been other women just as smart and just as fun and just as hot. Plenty of them.
He tried to remember the name or the face of just one.
She shifted in his arms, burrowing closer without opening her eyes. Any minute now she was going to wake up and remember whose lap she was in, and he could kiss his nuts good-bye.
He leaned his head back against the tree, gathered her in as close as he dared, and let himself drift.
He must have drifted all the way off to sleep because when he opened his eyes, she was kicking at the ruin that had been her cabin. The needles didn’t feel as soft as they had when he had first sat down, and no doubt there was more pine sap leeching onto his uniform shirt with every passing second. He got to his feet and dusted off the seat of his jeans. His hat had fallen off at some point, and he picked it up and whacked it against his leg before pulling it on, tugging the bill as low down over his eyes as he could and still see.
She must have heard him, but she didn’t turn when he came up behind her. “I didn’t say it before, Kate, but I’m sorry as hell about this. I know the place has been in your family since before you were born. I can’t imagine how much seeing it like this must hurt.”
It was the decent thing to say and he stopped himself before he could offer her house room. For one thing, he didn’t have a house yet, and for another, just because she no longer had a home herself didn’t mean she’d be moving in with him of all people.
Still. She had trusted him enough to let him hold her while she slept.
“I found the shotgun,” she said, nodding at a blackened length of metal. The wooden stock was barely recognizable as such.
He winced. “Ouch. What’s a new one run these days?”
“A good one? Starts about eight hundred, I’d guess. Lucky I had the rifle with me.”
“Lucky,” he agreed.
She picked her way to the water pump and tried to work the handle but it wouldn’t budge. She tried again, a third time. “Damn it,” she said, her voice tight. She’d have to plug this well and drill another. Would she even be able to rebuild on the same site?
“Did Bobby tell you about Hazen’s RV? We called him, got a convoy set up for tomorrow. George did a flyover of the road in and he says it looks good. They should be here tomorrow night, the next morning at the latest.”
“Yeah, he told me.”
“It sleeps two.” She looked at him and he said hastily, “Room enough for you and Johnny both, I mean. I’ve seen it, it’s a big sucker.”
She made an effort. “I take it you’ve been on one of Hazen’s on-the-road-again parties to the Russian River?”
He shook his head. “Been invited. But something always came up.”
She nodded. “You said you just missed me at Auntie Vi’s.”
When he looked blank she added, “When you first came down the trail. Were you looking for me?”
“Oh. Yeah. Right.” He pulled off his cap and put it on again, screwing it down around his ears. “Bobby came looking for me this morning.”
“Oh?” She had turned back to look at the cabin’s remains.
“He tells me you’re still working the case.”
“Oh?”
Something in that single, disinterested syllable reminded him why he’d been angry. “I fired you, Kate.”
“Ummm.”
“I made your services available to the industry, as they say in the oil patch.”
“Uh-huh.”
He could feel the slow burn coming on, except that with Kate it was never slow, it was more like spontaneous combustion. This from a man who had not only a personal inclination but a professional obligation not to lose his cool.
He’d lost his temper with her yesterday morning. Full out, balls to the wall. It helped knowing that his rage was fueled mostly by fear, but not much.