She was still sitting on the rock outcropping, nearly out of sight of the trail, but Matt’s attention tracked straight to her with no effort at all. She sensed his wry amusement as he stopped and eyed her. “Someone send out an S.O.S.?”
She barely bit back her sigh. Dammit, Mallory. Out of all the men in all the land, you had to send this one…
When she didn’t answer, he smiled. He knew damn well she’d called Mallory, and he wanted to hear her admit that she was lost.
But she didn’t feel like it—childish and immature, she knew. The truth was, her reaction to him was just about the furthest thing from childish, and that scared her. She wasn’t ready for the likes of him, for the likes of any man. The very last thing she needed was an entanglement, even if Matt did make her mouth water, even if he did look like he knew exactly how to get her off this mountain.
Or off in general…
And if that wasn’t the most disconcerting thought she’d had in weeks…
Months.
“Mallory called the cavalry,” he said. “Figured I was the best shot you had of getting found before dark.”
Amy squared her shoulders, hoping she looked more capable than she felt. “Mallory shouldn’t have bothered you.”
He smiled. “So you did send out the S.O.S.”
Damn him and his smug smile. “Forget about it,” she said. “I’m fine. Go back to your job doing…” She waved her hand. “Whatever it is that forest rangers do, getting Yogi out of the trash, keeping the squirrels in line, et cetera.”
“Yogi and the squirrels do take up a lot of my time,” he agreed mildly. “But no worries. I can still fit you in.”
His voice always seemed to do something funny to her stomach. And lower. “Lucky me.”
“Yeah.” He took another leisurely sip of his soda. “You might not know this, but on top of keeping Yogi in line and all the squirrel wrangling I do, rescuing fair maidens is also part of my job description.”
“I’m no fair maiden—” She broke off when something screeched directly above her. Reacting instinctively, she flattened herself to the rock, completely ruining her tough-girl image.
“Just the cry of a loon,” her very own forest ranger said. “Echoing across Four Lakes.”
She straightened up just as another animal howled, and barely managed not to flinch. “That,” she said shakily, “was more than a loon.”
“A coyote,” he agreed. “And the bugling of an elk. It’s dusk. Everyone’s on the prowl for dinner. The sound carries over the lakes, making everyone seem like they’re closer than they are.”
“There’s elk around here?”
“Roosevelt Elk,” he said. “And deer, bobcats, and cougars, too.”
Amy shoved her sketch book into her backpack, ready to get the hell off the mountain.
“Whatcha got there?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She didn’t know him well enough to share her drawings, and then there was the fact that he was everything she didn’t trust: easy smile, easy nature, easy ways—no matter how sexy the packaging.
Chapter 2
If God had meant for us to be thin, he wouldn’t have created chocolate.
Matt loved his job. Having come from first the military, then Chicago SWAT, the current shortage of blood and guts and gangbangers in his workweek was a big bonus. But his day as supervisory forest ranger for the North District had started at the ass crack of dawn, when two of his rangers had called in sick, forcing him to give the sunrise rainforest tour—a chore he ranked right up there with having a root canal.
Without drugs.
Talking wasn’t the problem. Matt liked talking just fine, and he loved the mountain. What he didn’t love were the parents who didn’t keep track of their own children, or the divorcees who were looking for a little vacay nookie with a forest ranger, or the hard-core outdoor enthusiasts who knew… everything.
After the morning’s tour, he’d measured the snowmelt and then gone to the Eagle Rock campsites to relocate one royally pissed-off raccoon mama and her four babies from the bathroom showers. From there, he’d climbed up to Sawtooth Lake to check the east and west shorelines for reported erosion, taken steps to get that erosion under control, patrolled all the northern quadrant’s trails for a supposed Bigfoot sighting, handled some dreaded paperwork, and then come back out to rescue a fair, sweet maiden.
Only maybe not so sweet…
She was still sitting on the rock outcropping, her mile-long legs bent, her arms wrapped around them, her dark eyes giving nothing away except her mistrust, and he felt the usual punch of awareness hit him in the solar plexus.
So f**king beautiful. And so full of 100 percent, hands-off-or-die bad attitude.
She wasn’t his usual type. He preferred his women soft, warm, giving, with a nice dash of playful sexiness, so he had no idea what it was about Amy Michaels. But for the past six months, ever since she’d moved to Lucky Harbor, they’d been circling each other.
Or maybe it was just him doing the circling. Amy was doing a whole lot of ignoring, a real feat given that she’d been serving him at the diner just about every night. He could have asked her out, but he knew she wouldn’t go. She turned down everyone who asked her.
So instead Matt had regularly parked himself at Eat Me, fueling himself up on diner food and her company when he could get it. Then he’d go home and fantasize about all the other ways she might keep him company, getting off on more than a few of them.
Today she wore low-riding jeans and a black tank top that hugged her curves, revealing slightly sunburned shoulders and toned arms. Her boots had both laces and zippers. City girl boots, meant to look hot.
They did.
“You going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Uh huh.” She was revealing a whole lot of nothing. Basically, she would admit to being lost over her own dead body.
Usually people were happy to see him, but not this woman. Never this woman, and it was a little baffling. He knew from watching her at the diner, serving everyone from the mayor to raunchy truckers with the same impassive efficiency, that she had a high bullshit meter and a low tolerance for anything that wasn’t delivered straight up. “So Mallory’s what, on crack?” he asked.
“She thinks she’s funny.”
“So… you’re good?”
“Pretty much,” she said.
He nodded agreeably. Fine by him if she didn’t want to break down and admit to being lost. He enjoyed her fierceness, and the inner strength that came with it. But he still couldn’t just walk away.
Or take his eyes off her. Her hair was a deep, rich, shiny brown, sometimes up, sometimes falling softly about her face, as it was today. She wore aviator sunglasses and lip gloss, and that tough-girl expression. She was a walking contradiction.
And a walking wet dream. “You know this trail closes at dusk, right?”
She tipped her head up and eyed the sky. Nearly dusk. Then she met his gaze. “Sure,” she said with a tight smile.
Hmm. Not for the first time, he wondered how it’d be to see her smile with both her eyes and her mouth at the same time.
She retied her boots, those silly boots that didn’t have a lick of common sense to them. He was picturing her in those boots and nothing else when she climbed off the rock and pulled on her cute little leather backpack, which was as impractical as her boots. “What are you doing all the way up here?”
“Just hiking,” she said carefully. She was always careful with her words, careful to keep her thoughts hidden, and she was especially careful to keep herself distanced from him.
But Matt had his own bullshit meter, and it was deadly accurate. She was lying, which stirred his natural curiosity and suspicion—good for the cop in him, dangerous for the man who was no longer interested in romantic relationships. “Hiking out here is big,” he said. “But it can be dangerous.”
She shrugged at this, as if the dangers of the forest were no match for her. It was either cocky, or simply the fact that she’d spent a hell of a lot of time in far more dangerous situations. He suspected the latter, which he didn’t like to think about.
She moved back to the trail, clearly anxious to be rid of him. Not a surprise.
But along with Matt’s BS meter came a honed ability to read people, and he was reading her loud and clear. She was exhausted, on edge, and his least favorite: scared, though she was doing her best to hide that part. Still, her nerves were shining through, and he knew it was because of him.
He wasn’t sure what to do about that. Or her. He wasn’t at all used to explaining himself, but he needed to explain a few things to her. Such as exactly how lost she was. “Amy—”
“Look, I appreciate you coming out. I did lose track of time, but I’ll be going now, so…”
Knowing the value of a good, meaningful silence, Matt waited for her to finish her sentence.
She didn’t.
Instead, she was clearly waiting for him to leave, and he suddenly got it—she wanted to follow him out. Pride sucked, as he knew all too well. “Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll see you at the diner real soon.”
“Right.” She nodded agreeably, the woman who was the singularly most disagreeable woman he’d ever met.
Having much more time than she, he leaned back against a tree, enjoying the flash of annoyance that crossed her face. “Right,” he mirrored. It’d been a hell of a long day, and it was shaping up to be a longer night. He didn’t have enough Dr. Pepper left to get him through it, but he was perfectly willing to try.
Amy sighed with barely concealed annoyance and stalked off down the path.
In the wrong direction.
Funny, Amy thought, how righteous indignation could renew one’s energy level, not to mention make them stupid. And oh, how she hated being stupid. Even worse was being stupid in mixed company. She’d done it before, of course. Too many times to count. She’d thought she’d gotten past it but apparently not.
“Need help?”
With a grimace, she slowly turned to face Matt. Yeah, she needed help, and they both knew it.
He was still leaning against the tree, arms crossed over his chest, the gun on his hip catching the sun. He looked big and tough as hell, his shoulders broad enough to carry all her problems. His hair brushed his collar, a little shaggy, a lot tousled. Sexy. Damn him. He stood there as if he had all the time in the world and not a concern in his head.
And of course he didn’t. He wasn’t lost.
But there was something else, too. There was a sort of… crackling in the air between them, and it wasn’t a bird or insect or frigging elk call either.
It was sexual tension. It’d been a long time, a real long time, since she’d allowed herself to acknowledge such a thing, and it surprised the hell out of her. She knew men, all of them. She’d been there, done that, bought and returned the T-shirt. She knew that beneath a guy’s chosen veneer, whatever that may be—nice guy, funny guy, sexy guy, whatever—lay their true colors, just lying in wait.
But she’d been watching Matt for months now, and he was always… Matt. Amused, tense, tired, it didn’t seem to matter, he remained his cool, calm, even-keeled self. Nothing got to him. She had to admit, that confused her. He confused her. “I’m actually okay,” she said.
He expressed polite doubt with the arch of a single brow. Her pride was a huge regulation-sized football in her throat, and admitting defeat sucked. But there was ego, and there was being an idiot. “Fine,” she said. “Just tell me which way is south.”
He pointed south.
Nodding, she headed that way, only to be caught up short when he snagged her by the backpack and pulled her back against him.
She startled, jerking in his hands before forcing herself to relax. It was Matt, she reminded herself, and the thought was followed by a hot flash that she’d like to blame on the weather, but she knew better.
He turned her ninety degrees. “To get back to the ranger station and your car, you want to go southwest,” he said.
Right. She knew that, and she stalked off in the correct direction.
“Watch out for bears,” Matt called after her.
“Yeah, okay,” she muttered, “and I’ll also keep an eye out for the Tooth Fairy.”
“Three o’clock.”
Amy craned her neck and froze. Oh sweet baby Jesus, there really was a bear at three o’clock. Enjoying the last of the sun, he was big, brown, and shaggy, and big. He lay flat on his back, his huge paws in the air as he stretched, confident that he sat at the top of the food chain. “Holy shit,” she whispered, every Discovery Channel bear mauling she’d ever seen flashing in her mind. She backed up a step, and then another, until she bumped into a brick wall and nearly screamed.
“Just a brown bear,” said the brick wall that was Matt.
“Would you stop sneaking up on me?” she hissed over her shoulder. “I hate to be sneaked up on!”
Matt was kind enough not to point out that she’d bumped into him. Or that she was quaking in her boots. Instead, he set his drink down and very softly “shh’d” her, gently rubbing his big hands up and down her arms. “You’re okay,” he said.
She was okay? How was that possible? The bear was the size of a VW, and he was wriggling on the ground, letting out audible groans of ecstasy as he scratched his back on the fallen pine needles, latent power in his every move. Sort of like the man behind her. “Does he even see us?” she whispered.