chapter Eleven
“This is cozy.” Allison snuggled against Heath’s shoulder. “No one could possibly find us under all these branches.”
She looked up at the huge spruce towering above them, its wide lower limbs spreading out to form a thick, arched canopy over them before bending gracefully down to touch their tips to the ground and conceal the couple.
“They will if you don’t keep your voice down.” He quieted her with a kiss that left a warm feeling of invitation coursing through her.
“Remarkable.” Allison snuggled closer and sighed.
“Not nearly as remarkable as I am,” he muttered against her hair, “spending the night sharing a sleeping bag with you and remaining celibate.”
“You promised Mom, remember?”
She put a finger lightly to his lips and smiled in the darkness, admiring his integrity and hating it all at the same time. “As for anyone finding us, I don’t see how that’s humanly possible. After we left that bear den, we traveled miles away from the river, backtracking and circling and jumping across brooks before we ended up back on its banks again.”
“You forget…whoever is on our case is obviously an experienced woodsman. We can’t be too careful.”
“Okay, okay.” She adjusted herself against him again and lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Heath, tell me about you…about your life before you came to live with my grandfather. You know everything about me, and I know so little about you.”
“Not much to tell. My grandmother was a war bride. She’d run away from home to marry a Canadian soldier, and her parents apparently had nothing to do with her after that. She came to this country with my grandfather after the war. Shortly after they arrived in Canada and settled in Halifax, my mother was born. Not long after that, my grandparents were killed in a boating accident.”
“Heath, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to know them.” Regret seeped into his voice. “My mother was sent to live with an uncle and his wife. They already had six children and weren’t anxious for another, but they took her in since she had no other place to go. She grew up feeling unloved and unwanted. When, at seventeen, she met my father, she married him within a couple of months. I think she’d finally found all the love that had been missing from her life. At least, that’s what I gathered listening to her talk about my father.”
He paused and Allison stroked his cheek. “Go on.”
“He was a high steel worker…bridges, high-rises, that sort of thing. I was born ten months after they were married. Two days after their first anniversary, my dad slipped and fell from where he was working on the bridge over Halifax Harbor. He died instantly. My mother, with little education, no family to help her, and next to no money, was left alone to raise me.”
“Oh, Heath…”
“I never knew my father, so I never missed him.” He cleared his throat. “But it was hard for my mother. She took any job she could get—waitress, cook, dishwasher. We must have moved a dozen times before I was twelve, each time to a cheaper and poorer apartment in a rougher section of the city. Things just seemed to get harder and harder…for both of us. The whole thing came to a boil when I stole that car and racked it up.”
He paused, and Allison sensed the emotions roiling inside him.
“Heath, that girl…that Jennifer…what she did, it would have driven anyone a little crazy,” she said softly.
“Hardly a valid reason for what I did. At least, that’s what Jack said. A couple of months after I was sentenced, my mother saw an ad in a maritime daily newspaper. Someone with a wilderness lodge in New Brunswick was looking for a cook/housekeeper. She decided to apply, hoping she’d get the job but worried sick she would have to leave me incarcerated in Halifax. She saw only one way to do it. She applied telling Jack the truth about her circumstances. When she had no answer in over a week, she decided he wasn’t interested. Imagine her surprise when he showed up at our apartment one June afternoon and asked her how soon she and her son could be ready to go with him back to New Brunswick. Seems he’d already spent a couple of days at the Justice Department getting me placed in his custody so I could leave the province with them.”
“Gramps was one amazing man.”
“I wasn’t much of a joy to either of them after I came to live here. I tried to run away a couple of times. The first time Jack caught me and brought me back, he was reasoning and understanding; the second time he threatened the bejeebers out of me, which was exactly what I needed.”
“And so you reformed.”
“Started to. Then you and your mother arrived. I think I might have managed to stay away from you, but you had that big, obvious crush on me…”
“Now just a minute, Mr. Macho…”
“Do you deny it?”
Silence. Then, reluctantly, “No. But still…”
“You reminded me of Jennifer—pretty, and rich, and stuck-up.”
“I wasn’t…stuck up.”
“Sure, you were. You got everything you wanted. And that summer you wanted romance with a bad boy.”
“Oh, God.”
“True, isn’t it?”
“I guess, but it embarrasses me to hear it.”
“Okay, moving on. We had that incident, and you went away. Jack must have suspected something, because after you left he called me down to the boathouse, lifted me off my feet by the front of my jacket, and told me that if he ever found out any part of me had touched his granddaughter, he’d amputate it.”
“ Gramps wouldn’t hurt anything—”
“Anything that didn’t threaten his granddaughter. From his expression that day I wasn’t about to risk another encounter with you. But I didn’t have to worry. You never came back.”
The soft sounds of the wilderness filled the following wordless moments. An owl hooted, a coyote howled, frogs chirped.
“Heath?”
“Hmmm?” He nuzzled her hair.
“Were you sorry…that I didn’t come back?”
“Sorry and relieved. I wanted to see you again, to make things right between us, but relieved that I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything that could lead to bodily mutilation.”
She felt the soft chuckle in his chest and smiled into the darkness.
“In that case, so am I. I really like you…intact.”
“Don’t tease. We have to get some sleep.”
He settled against her. She tried to relax and follow suit. It wasn’t easy. Lying beneath that huge spruce, its spicy fragrance adding to the sensuousness of the star-sparkled night in the arms of this earthy man, was almost more than she could bear. Heath’s long muscular body wrapped about hers made her heart race, her senses catapult. She longed to run her hands up under his shirt, to feel those hard ripples of flesh with her fingers, to kiss his lips, his neck, the hollow at his shoulder.
His regular breathing told her he slept. She drew a deep breath, forced down the quiver threatening to rush through her body, and struggled for sleep. Fifteen miles with five thousand two hundred and eighty feet in each. Or was it one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards? How many feet…yards…?
She awoke to sunlight winking into her eyes between the branches. She blinked, struggled up on one elbow, and realized she was alone in the sleeping bag.
“Heath?” Panic seized her. “Heath?”
“Not so loud. We don’t want to let the wrong people know where we are. Come out and have some eggs.”
She crawled on hands and knees from their sleeping shelter and saw him near the riverbank. The thin trickle of smoke from a small fire drifted off across the river on a lazy breeze.
“Eggs?” She struggled to her feet, stiff from a night on hard ground. “Where did you get eggs?”
“Partridge. Big nest on the ground over there. I counted fourteen.”
“You robbed some poor bird’s nest?” Allison rubbed her eyes and looked down at the panful of scrambled eggs bubbling on the fire.
“No choice.” He hunkered down and stirred them with a stick. “We need nourishment. She won’t mind…much. Partridge often have up to three hatches a year.”
“And you had matches?” She pointed to the fire.
“I’d be a pretty poor woodsman if I didn’t have some in a waterproof container on me. Sit. These are almost ready.”
“What about the smoke? Aren’t you afraid someone might see it?”
“It’s drifting off across the river, away from anyone on this side who might be on our trail. It’ll dissipate fast over water. Ditto for any faint scent of cooking. At any rate, we have to risk it. We need nourishment, it’s too early in the season for nuts and berries, and I’m not feral enough to eat raw eggs.”
“And what’s for lunch? Some poor, dead animal?” She tried to be critical of what he’d done but realized he’d had little choice. She also realized she was ravenous.
“Let me surprise you.” He took the frying pan from the fire, using the sleeve of his shirt pulled over his hand as protection from the heat.
He dropped the pan between them and handed her a piece of bark he’d fashioned into a crude spoon.
“Eat,” he said and picked up a similar utensil.
She did and found she was even hungrier than she’d thought.
“Tea?” he asked when they’d cleaned the pan, eating scoop for scoop.
“Don’t tease.”
“I’m not. Raspberry leaves boiled make a strong, nourishing brew. Here, try it.”
He picked up the pot from where it had been cooling beside the fire and handed it to her.
Gingerly she raised it to her lips and took a sip of the bitter, bracing brew. She coughed, then took another drink.
“It won’t replace Starbucks,” she said, handing it to him, “but it does have a get-going kick.”
“That’s what we need right now.” Heath took a long drink, handed the pot back to her, and stood. “You’re staring. Egg on my face or what?”
“No, just a good healthy stubble. A further crack in your heroic mystique. A jungle movie hero, for instance, never sports a stubble, no matter how long he’s in the bush with his loincloth as his only luggage.”
“Sorry my whiskers have shattered the last of your fantasies. Let’s get packing. It might not be healthy to stay too long in one place in daylight.”
“I have to wash my face.” Allison got to her feet and headed down to the bank of the river.
She squatted by the river, splashed icy water over her face, pulled out her shirttail to dry it, and suddenly chuckled. Was she the same woman who only a few days earlier had thought ruining her designer suit a major disaster? Now here she was in bush gear she seemed to have been wearing forever, her hair such a tangle she could barely finger comb it, washing her face in a wilderness river, using her shirttail for a towel. She wondered what Paul Bradley would think of her and then laughed out loud because she didn’t care.
“Come on, Allie. Let’s get going.” Brought out of her daydreams by his call, she started back to where he was waiting, fire extinguished, packsack on his back. She had never felt so alive, so ready for whatever adventure would challenge them.
The terrain they traveled that morning varied. Sometimes their way was along a low riverbank close to a smoothly flowing stretch of water. At others, they climbed over rocks high above rapids and gorges where the river swirled and roiled like a thing possessed.
When they paused to rest at noon, it was in a gently sloping meadow that ended in a cluster of alders at the water’s edge. The bright sun and clear skies of early morning had vanished behind a low cloud cover, and a fog had begun to roll in. Together they gathered dry branches, and Heath lighted a small fire on the river’s edge.
“Sit here and rest.” He stood and turned to her. “I’ll find lunch.”
“I can’t wait to see what you come up with this time. I’m so hungry almost anything you deem edible will be accepted.”
He narrowed his eyes, pulled his knife from its scabbard, and ran his finger along its blade.
“Heath, no! Not some animal!”
“Hand me the cooking pot, there. I’m off to harvest nuts and berries.”
“It’s too early in the season.” She caught the teasing in his tone and knelt to open the packsack. “Although I said I could eat almost anything, I’m not fond of twigs and roots.”
“Noted. Avoid roots and twigs.”
He took the pot and headed off into the fog toward the alders along the river. Allison adjusted the pack into a headrest, lay down, and stretched out to wait. Weary after an arduous morning, she dozed. For how long, she couldn’t be sure. But she was certain that when she awoke it was with a feeling of being watched.
“Heath?” She jerked to a sitting position. The fog had thickened. She could see no more than a few feet in any direction. “Heath, is that you?” Her words sounded hollow and eerie.
There was no answer, but something moved a few yards away in the veil of whiteness.
“Heath?”
The answer was a grunt. A huge, hulking, hairy creature materialized out of the mist. It shambled toward her, hirsute hands extended toward her throat.
“Heath!” Allison stumbled to her feet, grabbed the packsack and started at a dead run in the direction in which he’d gone.
When she slammed into the hard wall of his chest, he caught her in his arms.
“Allie, what…?”
“Sasquatch! Back there!”
“Wait here.” He moved her aside, pulled his knife, and headed into the mist.
She stood trembling. Silence returned to the mist. Its surreal ambience and the memory of the monster that had threatened her made her stomach churn. Time moved like a slug. Finally she decided she couldn’t wait passively any longer. What if the creature had attacked Heath, overpowered him? Maybe at that very minute, the hairy giant was throttling the life out of him. She had to find some way to help. An inspiration took hold. She remembered the fire Heath had lighted on the riverbank near where she’d fallen asleep. Animals are afraid of fire. If I get back to the fire, I can help Heath…
Keeping the river to her left, she started back downstream. When she finally found the fire site, she was so relieved she barely noticed the pot of greens bubbling over the flames. Grabbing a stick, she thrust it into the coals and waited. If that thing came back, all she had to do was pull out her torch and, hopefully, he’d flee in fear. Hopefully.
Hugging her bent knees, she hunkered down beside the fire and waited and hoped and prayed. What was taking Heath so long? Since no sounds of a struggle rent the silence, she could only assume he hadn’t accosted the creature. But then maybe the thing had gotten behind him, struck him down without a sound. Maybe Heath was lying somewhere out there in the fog—wounded, dying, dead! Oh, dear God, let him be all right.
“Lunch ready?” Grinning, he stepped out of the mist. Relief flooded through her with strength-sapping force. She tried to get to her feet but stumbled and fell, unable to make her knees support her.
“Allie!” He squatted in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
“What was it?” She collapsed against his shoulder.
“Some guy in a Halloween costume.” He kissed her mist-dampened hair. “Ran like a rabbit before I could get a good look at him. We’re okay for now, but I think we’d better eat up and get moving.”
“You don’t believe what I saw was a sasquatch?” She stared up at him.
“No, not a sasquatch. Someone sent to scare us, maybe do us actual physical harm if that scare doesn’t work.” His tone lightened as he pulled her to her feet with him. “Come on. I’ve cooked up one of nature’s truly exotic dishes, available fresh for only two weeks of the year. I came back while you were sleeping and started them boiling. I went back to look for more but couldn’t find any. I was returning when Hairy Harry decided to give you nightmares.”
He swung about on his haunches and used a stick to lift the pot from its place above the flames. With a triumphant grin, he set the steaming dish in front of her.
“What is it?” She looked into the bubbling greenery. “Spinach?”
“Fiddleheads.” He drained off the water. “Immature ferns. They look like the head of a fiddle, thus the name. Try some.”
He handed her a pronged twig and grinned.
“You’re really quite adept at making unique utensils,” she said. “Maybe guests at the Lodge might enjoy them…the crowning touch of their wilderness experience.”
“Maybe.” He reached out and ran his knuckles lightly down her cheek. The expression in his eyes upped her heartbeat to way past the speed limit.
“You know, Heath Oakes, I’m getting a tad fond of you.” The admittance was soft, almost shy.
“Just fond?” He drew her into his arms. The next moment he was kissing her, kissing her until her feet left the ground, until all she was conscious of was him, his mouth, his body. “Just fond?” He raised his head to look down into her eyes with his amazing ones that narrowed when he was intense.
“Maybe more than fond.” He kissed her again, his tongue tasting, probing, and when he looked at her again, she could only breathe, “Oh, yes, definitely more than fond.”
“If I hadn’t promised your mother…” His words tickled her ear as his hands slid down her back.
“Heath.” His name was a breathed permission, a sensuous request.
“No, no, no.” He threw up his hands and backed off. “Hell, no. I’m a fool, but I do keep my word.”
“You pick the damnedest moments to get all trustworthy and righteous.” Frustrated, she jerked away from him.
“Sorry. But I never promised anything once we’re out of this mess and back on equal footing. I don’t think Myra, who married a cowboy, will expect her daughter to keep her own maverick waiting too long.”
“Great, good, wonderful. Let’s get going.”
****
It was nearing dusk when they reached Adams Landing and headed up across the field toward the tombstone looming out of the fog.
“We made it…” Allison began. A deafening roar and a rifle bullet ricocheting off her grandparents’ headstone cut her short.
The next instant she was flat on the ground behind it. Heath’s body pinned her to the earth. Damn it, déjà vous!
“Don’t move!” he hissed.
As if I could. His body giving her no alternative, Allison lay still and felt his heart pounding against her back.
“Stay close to the headstone.” Barely audible, his words fell into her ear.
“Heath…”
“Stay!”
He eased away from her, catlike, into the fog. Alone, with her heart trying to hammer its way out of her chest, Allison lay with her fingers clutching the base of her grandparents’ tombstone and prayed.
Time became a dragging, wretched thing, its passing an excruciating endurance test. Then a voice made Allison start so violently she felt her shoulders snap.
“Get up!”
She turned and looked up to find the long barrel of a rifle pointed at her head. The woman holding it was Candace Breckenridge, dressed in camouflage bush gear.
“Candace!” She stumbled to her feet. “What…?”
“You spoiled brat!” she snarled, and Allison felt her blood turn to ice water as she saw the insane rage in the woman’s face. “You think your grandfather left you a lover in his will, don’t you? That you own Heath Oakes just like you own this land? Well, think again, honey. A sexy little body like yours might be okay on a camping trip, but it takes money to keep the fire burning three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Heath Oakes knows that. He also knows that while your daddy might be rich, that doesn’t necessarily mean you are. But he damn well knows I am! He might exude all the trappings of a gorgeous savage, but remember where he came from and what he still is under all that earthy charm.”
“You can’t buy people!” From somewhere Allison found the courage to snap back.
“That’s what you think. Heath has a taste for money and is willing to do whatever it takes to get it. He got rid of old Jack and seduced that doctor into signing the death certificate, no questions asked. He’ll convince her to do the same with you after the unfortunate accident you’re about to have. Once we’re rid of you, Heath and I will turn your grandfather’s Chance into a sure thing…and have our own private love nest.”
“That will never happen.” I have to keep her talking until Heath gets back. It’s my only chance.
“Sorry to disappoint you, sweetie, but it will. That fool Jim Wilcox may have failed in doing what I paid him to do, but I won’t! Heath Oakes is still a kid from the slums, out to grab the golden ring at the first opportunity. Within a week, both he and this place will be all mine, and you’ll be a distant memory.”
The woman raised the rifle to her shoulder, eased back on the trigger, and aimed at the younger woman’s chest.
Allison looked into the face of death.