Up Close and Dangerous Read online

  “For warmth, yeah, but we survived without a fire for two nights, so we know it isn’t strictly necessary. I was thinking about using the fire to signal our location. We can’t do it now because the wind dissipates the smoke, and I’ll be damned if I’ve found any location that’s completely sheltered, considering how it swirls.”

  Bailey turned and looked in the same direction where he was looking. The day was clear, the air so cold and crisp that details stood out. The massive mountains reared against the sky, white peaks outlined by pure blue. She could see the snow line, and below that rich green, which promised warmer temperatures and at least the possibility of food. “How far down do we have to go?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m hoping the snow line will be far enough down. This is a federal wilderness area, so the forestry service monitors it for fires. Anything that seems to be man-made gets checked out.”

  So they could be rescued in a day or two, depending on how long it took them to get out of the winds. Two days ago, even yesterday, she would have been ecstatic at the possibility, but now…now it was too late. Two days ago she had been heart-whole. Oh, being warm and well-fed would be nice, but what if, once they were no longer bound together by necessity, Cam’s interest in her waned? She didn’t trust emotion anyway, and she certainly didn’t trust it under emergency conditions.

  She was torn, and she hated that. On the one hand, the sooner she could get some separation from him the better. On the other hand, oh dear God, she wanted this to last. She wanted to believe in a happily-ever-after, a love that lasted a lifetime. She knew people who seemed to love each other that long, the way Jim had loved Lena, but a niggling doubt had always kept her from buying into the concept. Maybe Jim had loved Lena, but what if Lena hadn’t loved Jim? Jim had been mega-rich; maybe Lena had looked around but not seen anything better. Bailey didn’t like being that cynical, but she’d seen too much to believe in the fairytale version of love.

  Love was a crapshoot, Bailey thought, and she’d never been a gambler. She had no idea what to do, how to handle this situation. Part of her wanted to just let go and enjoy being with him as long as it lasted; after all, it was unrealistic to expect a lifetime of happiness, and probably impossible to boot. Only an idiot was always happy.

  Was the period of happiness worth the unhappiness that followed a breakup? Most people seemed to think so, because they got on the love train time and time again. After getting tossed off they’d mope around a while, maybe act out and do something stupid, but eventually they were back at that station, ticket in hand, ready to board. She hadn’t thought the momentary gain was worth the pain, so she’d watched the train circle around without her. Now she’d been ambushed and tossed into the baggage car, and no longer seemed to have a choice.

  Cam trailed a finger down her cheek. “You’ve wandered off. You’ve been staring into space for five minutes.”

  Wrenched back to the here and now, her mind was momentarily blank. “Ah…I was thinking about what happens when we go home.” She mentally applauded herself. Good save! That was a very reasonable response, under the circumstances.

  He looked grim. “I can’t tell you. Without evidence of what he did, probably nothing, and we can’t go around making charges without something to back them up or he can sue us for slander.”

  “He’d love that. That would give him a public forum to air all the things he’d said about me, and you can bet Tamzin would back him up.” She felt sick at the thought of a lawsuit that would dredge up every ounce of muck Seth could find or fabricate. She wasn’t afraid of real muck, because people who didn’t take chances seldom got dirty. There were no shady dealings in her past, no affairs with married lovers, no drugs, no police record of any kind.

  None of that would stop Seth, though. He could probably put on the stand fifty people who would swear they’d slept with her, or done drugs with her, or that she’d told them of a sleazy plan to marry a dying man and con him into signing over control of his fortune to her. In fact, probably the only reason he hadn’t done that already was that control of the trust funds hadn’t been in Jim’s will, where it could be challenged. Jim had set up the funds before he died—before they married, in fact—and put her in charge, and her performance had been excellent. Seth would look like a fool challenging that. Moreover, the monthly disbursement was very respectable. Nothing compared to the whole of the trust fund, of course, but very respectable.

  “I think we have to let him know that we know,” Cam said. “And have told our suspicions to a third party, so if anything else suspicious happens to you, the finger will point straight to him. Unless he’s gone crazy on meth or something like that, he’ll understand that there’s nothing he can do.” He leaned over and kissed her, then briefly caught her lower lip between his teeth and gave a gentle tug. “I also suggest you move in with me, so he doesn’t know exactly where to find you. You’d have to be nuts to stay in that house all alone.”

  Her heartbeat skittered with excitement, and her stomach clenched with dread. Bemused both by his proposition and her mixed reaction to it, she said, “There’s a big gap between kissing a few times and moving in together, Justice. Moving makes sense. Moving in with you, not so much.”

  “I think it makes a lot of sense,” he said mildly. “But we’ll talk about it later. Right now we need to get busy or we’ll have to sleep in the open.”

  He dug a pit for the fire while she gathered rocks and wood for both the fire and constructing the shelter. The fallen tree provided most of the wood, because it had been down long enough that the wood was dry on the inside and the branches easily snapped off. They followed the same procedure as before with the battery, and within half an hour small flames were merrily licking at the firewood.

  Because there were two of them working, and because Cam had a much better idea what he was doing than Bailey had had that first day, the shelter quickly came together. The angle of the tree where it lay across the large rock created, at the highest point, a space large enough that they could sit up. Cam had positioned the fire so some of the heat would radiate against the rock, and thus into the shelter. Sheltering the fire from the wind was still a problem, so he stacked limbs in a berm on the other side of the fire, building it higher until the flames stopped dancing so wildly.

  The end of the job saw them both a little sweaty and a lot dirty. The dirt factor made Bailey’s nose wrinkle, but it was the sweat that was dangerous. Cam sat by the fire while she crawled into their new “home,” complete with the pieces of foam she’d insisted they bring along—at least they were almost weightless—to clean up and dry off as best she could.

  When she crawled out, once again bundled in layers and layers of clothing, Cam was carefully placing pinecones around the edges of the fire. “Wow,” she said. “Now the campsite will smell all Christmasy. That’s a touch I hadn’t thought of.”

  “Smart-ass. After the cones are roasted, we can eat the nuts out of them. I wish I’d remembered this yesterday.”

  “Really? Pine nuts? They really come from pinecones?” Funny how she’d always thought pine nuts were just called that for some unknown reason. Crouching beside the fire, she poked at the cones. Who would have thought? She was ecstatic at the thought of food—warm food, at that. Nuts, any kind of nuts, would go a long way toward easing their hunger.

  “They really do. Watch them and don’t let them catch on fire,” Cam instructed as he slid into the shelter. “I’m going to get dried off before this sweat freezes on me.”

  She sat down and held her hands toward the fire. After a moment she realized she was listening intently to the sounds Cam made as he undressed and briskly dried off, imagining him naked even though she knew he wasn’t, any more than she had been. Had he listened to her moving around as she removed individual pieces of clothing, and imagined her naked? Or had he been too busy gathering up the pinecones?

  Abruptly she realized that their cleaning up could almost be construed as a prelude to sex, as