He finally resigned himself to it and let her lead him to a fire ring where Cooper was sitting between two very pretty Starlets, looking like a Greek god. He did, however, manage to lose Ariel when he at last managed to push her off on one of the camera guys that was ogling her, and stepped away, retreating to his cabin before she could discover he was missing.
It had to be a first, Michael thought as he crawled into a sleeping bag. A campsite full of beautiful women, and he could not have been less interested. He’d had enough of beautiful women to last a lifetime. For the first time in his adult memory, he really was just tired of having women hang around for the sake of hanging around. He wanted something more meaningful. He still wanted Leah.
HE and Eli were the first ones up the next morning, along with the caterers they’d hired, standing around in the chill of the morning, sipping coffee while most everyone else slept.
“This is going to be a long day,” Michael said. “Never thought I’d be herding a bunch of women down white water.”
Eli laughed a little and gave Michael a friendly clap on the back. “Cheer up. This might just be the ride of your life.”
Two hours later, as Michael looked around at twenty women stuffed into life preservers, he began to believe Eli was right. They were chattering like they always did, everyone talking at once, but miraculously hearing each other. Cooper and one of the four river guides were trying to talk, and while the women appeared to be listening, they were moving and whispering and looking around to see what each other was wearing. At least that was the way it seemed to the guys.
Michael swore not one of them understood what they were supposed to do if they fell in the water. He was certain none of them understood their left from their right. And as he exchanged a look with one worried river guide, he tried to smile. “Hey,” he said, “we taught them how to wage war. They’ll be all right.”
The guide did not look convinced.
When it came time to split the women up into four groups—each of the T.A. guys taking a raft—Cooper made them all count one through four, then assigned the ones to a raft, then the twos, and so on. It turned out that Leah was assigned to Michael’s raft—go figure—and he got a withering look for it, as if he had somehow managed to conspire with Cooper to get Leah to count off as a three. He held up his hands as she went marching by. “It was pure dumb luck.”
“More like the luck of . . .” She frowned, trying to think of a comeback. “Whatever,” she said with a toss of her head and followed their river guide, looking like a giant orange marshmallow in her life jacket.
The women climbed into the rafts with a lot of laughing and splashing, which was, Jack opined, the result of having too many cameras around. The four rafts—plus a fifth one holding a camera crew—were set. The guides and the T.A. guys pushed off, then scrambled onto the rafts. When Michael was seated, he glanced to his left and smiled a little. Once again, the guy gods were messing with him, because Michael was sitting next to Jill and directly behind Leah, who sat with her back ramrod straight, and oh goody, there was Ariel, too, sitting up front and grinning like a goon at him from the front of the boat. “This is so much fun!” she shouted at him.
How in God’s name had this happened? So much for Guy Universe smiling down on him. This was karma all right—the bad variety.
Leah blasted an icy glare over her shoulder.
Michael smirked at her back until he felt someone staring at him and turned to his left. Jill was smiling, one brow cocked high above the other. “Trouble?” she asked sweetly.
“Eyes front,” he said sternly, and she laughed and inadvertently dropped her oar in the water.
The ride of his life? More like the ride from hell.
The water was smooth where they put in, the day beautiful, and it wasn’t long before the two front rafts—with Cooper and Jack leading the charge—began to splash and make various attempts to ram each other. And, as undoubtedly every river guide in the country knows, once the seed of hijinks is planted in the minds of novices, everyone is in on the act. In Michael’s raft, Ariel was the first to fling water, and the game was on. The women were all screeching and laughing . . . all of them but Leah, whose paddle was dragging in the water.
He tapped her paddle with his. Leah jerked around. “Your paddle,” he said. “Stay in the rhythm.” That seemed to wake her up, and she grabbed her paddle and began to row, clashing with Ariel’s oar in front of her. “Hey!” she shouted at Leah.
“Sorry,” Leah said, and shot another glare at Michael over her shoulder for good measure.
They reached the first small rapid run, and they could see the first couple of rafts bobbing through, their shrieks of laughter echoing up the canyon walls. One paddle went flying out of the second boat, and a cameraman tried to stand to capture the mayhem just as their boat began to go through. He almost tumbled in, but some quick-thinking companion pulled him down.