The class, dismissed, headed toward the open door with the collective grace of a charging bull. For a minute, Mitch’s face was lost in the shuffle. Maybe she had only imagined he was there? She hadn’t heard from him since the previous Saturday and hadn’t expected to; they hadn’t even exchanged last names.
But when the kids cleared out, he was definitely there, leaning against the doorway, an old brown leather jacket slung over one shoulder and a brown-corded leg shoved forward as he waited for her. She felt a flush climbing her cheeks as she hurriedly retrieved her books and papers.
“I’ve gone through more trouble than you know to find you, Kay Lucretia Sanders.” His voice boomed out in the empty room.
She grabbed her coat with a sudden smile. “I can understand how you might have learned my last name, and even how you tracked me to this school. But not how you uncovered Lucretia. That middle name’s been buried for years.” Her eyes flashed impish glints. “You must be a very determined man,” she said solemnly. “Either that, or unbelievably nosy. Did you enjoy the lesson?”
“I wanted to come in and sit on the kid in the back row, but I controlled myself.”
She chuckled, switching out the light as they left the room. “Jeff will come around one of these days. Compassion and patience work a great deal better than stem reprimands, at least for my subject.”
“Maybe, but sitting on him would have been a great deal more satisfying.”
She chuckled, sliding him a sideways glance as they headed for the back door of the school. The kids in the hall-particularly the girls-were giving him plenty of eye attention. He didn’t seem aware of it. As he held open the glass door, his expression was inscrutable.
“I had in mind spiriting you away,” he said casually.
“Did you?”
“You undoubtedly have something planned for later, since it’s a Friday night. But I was thinking that maybe for an hour or two…”
“Sounds fine,” she said gently. A gentle voice seemed to be called for. She could see Mitch was uncomfortable. The word shy flitted through her head, as it had once before, yet it seemed so impossible. Neither his looks nor his manner nor anything else about him gave him any reason to suffer from shyness. “I haven’t been kidnapped in a long time,” she remarked.
“Then there’s something wrong with the men in this town.”
And with the women, she thought, if this delectable man was actually at loose ends on a Friday night. Outside, they were instantly assaulted by a burst of wind. Clouds were bunching together in low, swirling masses, blocking a sun that had already started its downward descent.
“Your car?” he asked suddenly.
She shook her head. “I almost always walk.” Since Moscow was built on hills, walking made for excellent exercise, at least until the snows hit. “Where are we going, anyway?”
He cleared his throat. “Tell you in a minute.” As soon as he figured it out himself. He’d spent the entire week just finding her, this lady who seemed to have entered his soul like sunlight. He’d simply wanted to see her one more time, see if she was as real as he’d remembered, only somehow he’d never gotten around to worrying about what to do with her then. And maybe he’d expected to find her talking to a class about reproductive functions in some academic way, not happily chattering about sexual intimacy in front of a roomful of teenagers.
Damn it, he’d faced death-more than once. He’d shaken hands with courage, and he had no doubts about himself whatsoever in terms of strength of character or fortitude…but he hadn’t figured on a lovesick attraction for a woman who spoke about sex as if it were toothpaste. Normal, average stuff. For her.
Sliding into the seat beside him, Kay tossed her books in the back of the car as Mitch started the engine. She resisted an urge to brush back that single shock of white hair that had fallen over his forehead. He was so quiet! She had the feeling Mitch took life far too seriously-maybe he had had to.
At the first stop sign, he tossed a sudden, lazy smile her way. “How do you feel about climbing fire towers?” he asked gravely.
Normally, just the word climb was enough to set off a phobic reaction in Kay. But she took another look at Mitch. His eyes, settled on hers, were like polished stones still warm from the sun, and she found herself catching her breath. “That sounds like an occasion for a bottle of wine,” she responded, just as gravely.
“You can put me down anytime, you know. Really. What’s a pair of shoes? And the ground isn’t that damp.”
Kay glanced back; she wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with her skirt hiking up around her waist as Mitch carried her piggyback. Still, there was no one around to sneak a peek at her blue-and-white polka-dot underpants.
It was one of those Robert Frost woods. Lovely, dark and deep. Also nearly impenetrable. Regardless, it smelled marvelous, like clean winter wind and pungent bark and rich, dark earth. A few leaves still clung to the trees, just enough so the wind could whistle through them in exotic, ghostlike murmurs.
She was having a wonderful time. When they’d first stepped out of the car, Mitch had looked first at the thick brush tangling the forest floor, and then at her attractive leather shoes. “Would you believe this has changed more than a little since I was a kid?” he’d said wryly. “Could we start over? Pretend I never came up with the idea of walking to the tower. I’ll take you out for a drink, and if you have time we’ll go out to dinner.”
That struck Kay as a terrible idea. Every instinct told her that being surrounded by people would do nothing to loosen up Mitch. So she’d convinced him that they just had to climb that fire tower of his today. In the process, he’d tried to maintain that quiet reserve of his, but how long could a man stay formal while carrying a woman on his back? And as she’d suspected from the beginning, he had an irrepressible sense of humor.
“You’re getting heavy,” Mitch complained.
“You’re not even breathing hard,” she pointed out.
“Give me a chance. We’re not even near a mattress.”
She blinked, staring in delighted surprise at his dark, wavy hair. That remark was definitely risqué. He was really warming up. And she was determined to get some full-blooded laughter out of him if it killed her.
Her arms were curled loosely around his neck. A bottle of wine and some plastic cups in a brown bag were snuggled between his back and her chest, inside Mitch’s jacket. His forearms had a firm grip on her thighs, and she had the delightful sensation of being carried off like pirate’s booty into the middle of absolutely nowhere. Piggyback wasn’t a romantic position, but it was certainly suggestive, though her fanny was taking most of the cold wind. If she’d worn a full skirt today, she could have pulled off a somewhat more modest posture, but heck, a little end justified the means.
“Where’d the white streak in your hair come from?” she asked conversationally. Her finger stroked that half-inch-wide streak of crisp hair; she’d been wanting to touch it from the first minute she’d seen it. “Genetic thing in your family?”
“No, I earned it carrying two-ton women around in my youth.”
He was the stingiest man with a secret she’d ever met. “Do I have to tell you one more time that I could have walked?”
“And had your feet soaked and your shoes wrecked from the brush. Down.”
She slid, rather unglamorously, down his back to the ground and was given a second and a half to restore her skirt to propriety before he turned around.
“I should have peeked at what my hands were holding all this time,” he remarked.
“After all your grousing, you should be so lucky. Why-” But she could see why they’d stopped. It only looked like the middle of nowhere. Half hidden in dead vines was a metal ladder leading up to the planked floor of the fire tower. In the dusky woods, it hadn’t been immediately visible. She studied the lower steps first, and then her eyes slowly trailed up, and up again.