He smiled. “You’re fine.”
“I keep telling you that.”
“Come on.” Rising to his feet, he pulled her to hers.
At the movement, pain shot up her tailbone, but she controlled her wince and let him help her back up the hill.
“I’ve seen just about everything there is to see out here,” he said at the top. “But I’ve never seen anyone fall down that ravine before.”
“So glad to give you a first.”
“You should have woken me up.”
For a pee escort? Hell no. They were at their campsite now, and he gave her a little nudge toward the tent. She crawled inside and back into the sleeping bag, pulling it over her head, hoping to pretend that she was at home, in a warm bed. But at home, she never had worries about bears and mountain lions, and for all she knew also the big bad wolf. She certainly never shivered like this at home either.
When had it gotten so cold?
Her butt suddenly vibrated, scaring her for a second until she realized it was the cell phone in her back pocket. With some maneuvering, she pulled it out and read the text from Mallory.
Good girl lesson #2: When your BFF sends you a gorgeous guy, you call her and thank her. That’s good manners. Good girl lesson #3: Stop scowling. You’ll scare away the aforementioned gorgeous guy.
Amy was definitely scowling and didn’t plan to stop anytime soon. She considered hitting reply and telling Mallory exactly what she thought of the good girl lessons so far, but just then the sleeping bag was yanked off her head, and it wasn’t the big, bad wolf. Actually, if she squinted, there were some similarities.
“Your arm,” Matt said, on his knees, head ducked low to accommodate the tent ceiling. He had a first-aid kit and had pulled out an ACE bandage, which he used to wrap her wrist. Then he slapped an ice pack against his thigh to activate it and set her wrapped wrist on it. He pulled out a second ice pack and eyed her.
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“You going to let me look at it?” he asked.
Her free hand slid to her own behind. “How did you know?”
“Wild guess,” he said dryly. “Let me see it.”
“Over my dead body.”
He let out a breath and dropped his chin to his chest for a moment. Either he was praying for patience or trying not to laugh. When he had himself together, he moved with his usual calm efficiency and unzipped her sleeping bag, yanking it from her before she could so much as squeak.
Which she did.
He ignored that and held her down effortlessly with one hand on her waist and one on her thigh. “Be still,” he said.
Be still? Was he kidding? “Listen, I’m going to be still with my foot up your ass—”
“You’re bleeding.”
“What?” She immediately stopped struggling and tried to see what he was seeing. “I am not. Where?”
“Your leg.”
He was right, there was blood coming through her jeans on her thigh. She stared at it a little woozily. She hated blood, especially her own. “Um…”
Matt was rifling through the first aid kit again. “Lose your pants. We need to clean that up.”
Well if that didn’t make her un-woozy right-quick. She laughed at him, making him lift his gaze from the box. “Oh, hell, no,” she said.
The only light in the tent came from his flashlight, so she couldn’t see his exact expression, but she had no trouble sensing his surprise. Probably when he said “lose your pants” to women they generally tore themselves out of their clothes, in a hurry to get na**d for him. “Over my dead body.”
She sensed more than saw his smile. “I administer a lot of basic first aid,” he said in that calm, reasonable tone that made her want to do something to rile him up.
Too bad she’d given up riling men a good long time ago. “Just give me a Band-Aid.”
“We need to clean the cut.” His voice was all reasonable friendliness, but laced with unmistakable steel. Authority. And yet… and this made no sense… it was also somehow the sexiest voice she’d ever heard. She didn’t often let herself get curious about the people in her life, but this time she couldn’t seem to help herself. “After all you’ve done,” she said, “How the hell did you end up out here in the boonies saving the stupid chick?”
He laughed softly, the sound warming her a little bit. “Always did love the outdoors,” he said. “I was twelve when I first spent a night outside.”
“You ran away when you were twelve?”
“No.” He slid her a look that said he found it interesting that her mind had taken her there. Interesting, and disturbing. “My older brother took me camping,” he said. “He warned me not to go anywhere without him, not even to take a leak.” He laughed a little at the memory. “I thought, well f**k that.”
The smile in his voice was contagious, and she felt herself relax a little. “What happened?” she asked.
“Woke up in the middle of the night and had to take a leak. I was way too cool to need an escort…” He paused meaningfully, and she grimaced.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“So I stumbled out of the tent and went looking for a tree. Walked straight into a wall of bushes and got all cut up. Nearly wet myself before I got free.” He laughed again and shook his head. “My brother reamed me a new one when I got back. Man, he was pissed off that I was hurt. I told him to chill, that everything was fine. And the next morning, everything was still fine. But by that afternoon, I had a hundred-and-three temperature. My mom stripped me down to put me in a cool bath and found a nasty gash on my arm that had gotten infected.”
His voice was magic, Amy thought, listening to him in the dark. Low and a little gruff. Listening to him was like listening to a really great book on tape. No regrets about his past, and then there was his obvious affection for both his brother and his mom… both things she had no experience with.
“I also had poison oak,” he said. “Everywhere.”
She gasped. “Oh, God.” Gentle interlude over, she sat up so fast she bashed her head on his chin. “Do you think I have—”
“No.” He pressed her back down, rubbing his chin with his spare hand. “But you do have a cut that could get infected if we don’t clean it out.”
“By morning?”
“By midnight.”
She stared up at him, looking for a single sign that he was being a perv about this. Because if he was, then he was also a dead perv. But there kneeling at her side, he looked at her evenly, steady as a rock.
This was also totally out of her realm of experience as well, a guy wanting in her pants for non-sexual reasons.
Maybe the scratch was already infected, and she’d lost her mind. This was the only explanation she could accept for the teeny tiny smidgeon of disappointment. In which case, dropping trou was the least of her problems. So she blew out a sigh and unzipped her jeans. For a moment she panicked, unable to remember which underwear she’d put on that morning. She didn’t know whether she hoped for laundry day granny panties, or something sexy. Laundry day granny panties… No, wait. Something sexy. No! Good Lord, she was losing it.
Shimmying the skinny jeans down to her knees wasn’t easy or attractive, and Amy was also incredibly aware of Matt’s big, solid presence at her side. And yep, he was right—there was a big gash on her thigh, curving around to the back. It was burning now, but she hardly noticed over the relief to find that she wasn’t wearing granny panties. She was in the thin baby-blue, cheeky-cut panties that she’d gotten in a sale pack of three. Which is where the bad news came in, because they were a lot like wearing nothing. Worse, they said “booty-licious” across the butt, but luckily he couldn’t see that.
There was a beat of complete silence.
And then another.
And then yet another.
Finally, she looked up. Matt was still as stone, his hands on his own thighs, eyes dilated nearly black.
“Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“Working on it.” His voice sounded unusually tight.
“I thought you said you did this a lot.”
“Yeah. I do. But apparently not with anyone I’m wildly attracted to.”
This caused certain reactions in her body that were best not experienced in mixed company. “It’s just panties,” she finally whispered.
“And they’re really great panties,” Matt agreed. “But it’s not the panties, Amy. It’s you.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that, or even how to feel. She should feel weird; she knew this. Instead she felt…
Attractive. Sexy.
It’d been so long since she’d thought of herself in this way that it took her by surprise. So did the yearning running through her.
They were silent for another long minute. Then she heard Matt blow out a very long breath. In the next beat, he was cleaning her wound with a clean pad and antiseptic, which hurt like hell. She distracted herself by watching his long and callused fingers work on her. They felt decadent on her skin, like a long-denied treat. And it was long denied, being touched, being cared for.
Too long.
“Turn over,” Matt said.
She hesitated, everything in her balking at his quiet command—just as at the same time, she was completely turned on by it.
“Amy.”
She turned over. There was another long beat of silence as Matt took in the rear view, and she risked a glance over her shoulder. His face was more angles than curves, his silky hair brushing the collar of his shirt. He was so broad in the shoulders he blocked out any light the moon might have given them. This left only the meager glow from the flashlight, but she wasn’t afraid of the dark.
Or him.
She was safe with him. She knew that. But at the same time, she was about as unsafe as she could get.
She knew that, too.
By the time he finished bandaging her up and she pulled her pants back up, they were both breathing a little unsteadily. He handed her the ice pack for her tailbone. She put it in place, and there was a long silence.
“You’re still shivering,” he said, and lay down beside her. “Come here, Tough Girl.” He pulled her in close. The sleeping bag, still unzipped, was between them. He didn’t try to get into it with her, simply wrapped her up in his warm arms and held her until she stopped shivering.
“Better?” he whispered against her hair.
He was rock solid against her, the muscles in his arms banded tight. Yeah, she was better. “Much, thank you.”
He started to pull away but she slid her arms out of the sleeping bag and around his neck, pressing her face into his throat. It was a move that startled them both. It was also a really dumb thing to do. Normally she had so much more sense than this, but he was turning her on with every little thing he did. She didn’t understand it but she understood this—holding onto him had nothing to do with being cold.
“Amy.” He stroked a hand down her back. “You’re safe, you know that, right?”
Safe from bears and coyotes and creepy crawlies, maybe. But she wasn’t safe. Not from the yearning flowing through her and not from feeling things she didn’t want to feel. Feeling things like this left her open to being hurt. “We’re not the only ones out here,” she said. “Right before you found me on the trail, someone was in the bushes, watching me. I saw just a face.”
“There are a few people out here on this mountain tonight,” he said, and rubbed his jaw to hers.
“But that’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
Again he stroked a hand down her back. “When I first took this job, it’d been a while since I’d gone camping. And then as it turned out, on my first night out here, I was stalked.”
She tipped her head back and tried to see his face. “By…?”
“Every horror flick I’d ever seen.”
She found herself smiling. “Was the big, bad forest ranger scared?”
“I started a fire,” he said instead of answering, and the typical guy avoidance of admitting fear made her smile in the dark. “But even after I had a roaring fire, I still felt watched.”
“What did you do?”
His hand was still gliding up and down her back, absently soothing, not-so-absently arousing her further. “I got up and searched the perimeter,” he said. “Often. I finally fell asleep holding my gun, and at first light was startled awake by a curious teenage bear.”
“Oh my God,” she said on a horrified laugh. “What happened?”
Amusement came into his voice. “I shot the shit out of a tree and scared the hell out of us both. I fell backward off the log I’d fallen asleep on, and the bear did the same. Then we both scrambled to our feet, and he went running off to his mama. If my mama had been anywhere within two thousand miles, I’d have gone running off to her just the same as the bear.”
She burst out laughing.
“What,” he said, smiling at her, “you don’t think I have a mama?”
“I think you wouldn’t go running off to anyone if you were scared. You’d stand firm and fight.”
He shrugged. “I’ve had my moments.”
“So your mom…?”
“Lives in Chicago with my dad, tending to the three grandkids my brother’s given them. We talk every week, and they ask me when I’m going to give them a few as well.”
“When are you?”
He shook his head. “Not anytime soon.”