Ain’t Misbehaving

Chapter Fourteen

Kay killed the snowmobile engine with a push on the button. Flipping up the mask on her helmet, she sighed, relaxed, and leaned back on her elbows.

Mitch’s snowmobile continued to zoom ahead, then did an abrupt circle, roared back in her direction and stopped abruptly. His machine was as snow-covered as hers was, and with his suit and helmet totally encrusted, he looked something like the abominable snowman. Particularly when he swung one long leg over the side and started stalking toward her.

“We’re never going to get there if you keep doing this,” he scolded, not for the first time.

“I couldn’t help it.” She motioned all around her.

Moscow always received its share of snow in winter, but often enough it was the kind of snow that pelted down…and then melted. This high lake country around the Kootenai River was something else. Kay knew it was a lumbering region in summer, but Mitch’s cottage was accessible only by snowmobile at this time of the year.

She’d never been this far north before. Steep slopes had given the three-hour ride a roller-coaster quality. Over each rise there seemed to be a lake or stream hidden in the mountain folds. The sun had to fight to soar through the growth of old cedars and giant firs, so snow-laden they were drooping. In places, the wind-driven snow completely buried the trees, and they looked like mammoth ghosts, whimsical giant figures about to take off and walk.

Kay motioned again, entranced by the curve of silver stream they’d just passed. A foot-high shelf of snow curled over its banks; the sun had put a glaze of rhinestones on it. The air was so pure and fresh it hurt her lungs, and the sky had that incredibly clear blue of aquamarine. “It looks as if no one’s ever been here before-ever,” she said helplessly.

A lazy slash of a smile lit Mitch’s wind-reddened features as he bent over her and matched extremely cold lips to hers. “I knew you’d like it.” His warm eyes settled on hers for a long moment before he moved behind her and made sure for the dozenth time that her pack was secure on the back of the snowmobile. “This used to be mail-order-bride country, you know.”

“For the lumberjacks?”

“For lumbermen. Miners. Outlaws. Whoever was foolish enough to try to carve a living out of the wild. Old-timers say that anyone living alone here for long ‘got as goofy as a wooden watch.’ No matter what the season, they were cooped up. Eight feet of snow in the winter, and in summer the undergrowth could get so thick in the woods that you couldn’t travel through them.”

“How did they travel, then? Your family started around here way back, didn’t they? How’d they get the timber out, if there weren’t any roads?”

“They used the rivers. And as for simple visits between folk, the Kootenai and Kalispell Indians built some strange-looking sturgeon-nosed crafts. Kootenai canoes, they were called, ideal for traveling the rivers. And you’re not going to get me talking again until I have you nice and warm in front of a fire with a mug of hot coffee in your hands.” He tucked one snowmobile glove under his arm, and felt her cheek with his bare fingers. “You’re freezing,” he informed her.

“Am not.”

“You’re also hungry.”

“Am not.” She grinned.

“And it’s going to be dark in two hours. Did I tell you this area has its share of grizzlies?”

“Don’t give me that. Bears sleep during the winter.”

“Black bears sleep during the winter. But grizzlies…”

Kay righted herself promptly, not that she seriously believed him. Casting one lingering glance at the idyllic scene, she started the snowmobile engine. The vibrating roar filled her ears, and she adjusted her visor.

Leaning forward to keep the snow from rushing onto her mask, straddling the seat, she felt something like a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. A couple of hours before she’d been wary of the snowmobile; by now she was into the spirit of it. The thing liked to race; she’d just let it have its way-and had elicited Mitch’s roaring laughter when she pitched headfirst into a snowbank some time before.

Her fingers and toes were long past freezing and had gone completely numb. As she followed Mitch’s spray of snow in the distance, she thought dismally that she was doing a terrible job at keeping a handle on caution. She’d balked at the idea of spending three days alone with him, for the very reason that she knew darn well they would turn out as terrific as these first few hours.

Her heart couldn’t afford to get in deeper; she was in hock to Mitch, and heavily, already. When he’d tried to give her the star garnet for Christmas, panic had set in. She couldn’t accept a gift like that unless they were…committed. She was committed, but she just couldn’t be that sure of Mitch. She knew what he thought he wanted, but she couldn’t get it out of her head that the special feeling for a first lover would fade, that he’d suddenly be looking for other women and other sexual experiences.

She’d hurt him badly when she refused to take the garnet pendant. They’d been stiff with each other for the first time on the drive up here. Kay didn’t know how to broach the subject of his inexperience, which had clearly been a tender one for Mitch for so long…but then, as civilization had sped behind them, as the landscape changed to wild white mountains and bubbling streams, laughter had so naturally broken through. How do you keep your distance from a man you love more than life?

At his cabin, they’d be alone, and she’d have the chance to talk to him-she’d make the chance.

Wielding an armload of logs, Mitch pushed open the cabin door with his boot. Dropping the wood on the ketch beside the wood stove, he unzipped his snowmobile suit halfway and glanced around in search of Kay.

The log cabin was one big room with a raised potbellied stove in its center. The snow outside was knee-deep, and it curled on the windowsills like whipped cream. Inside, the stove was really popping, and the cedar logs let off their woodsy fragrance, which permeated the cabin.

The cabin was already toasty. Mitch pushed off his boots at the door and started stripping off the snowsuit, his eyes roaming the room restlessly. A twelve-point buck elk’s head hung over the couch; its eyes always stared back if you looked long enough. A double bed took up one corner; Kay had already removed the cover from the feather bed and fluffed it out.

She’d also set a kettle of water on the stove. And checked out the books in the ceiling-high bookcase. He smiled. Every cupboard in the kitchen area was open, obviously recently explored.

He might have thought she’d disappeared altogether if the trapdoor in the far corner hadn’t been open. Rubbing his hands together, he wandered to the opening and crouched down on his haunches.

“I would think you’d have the sense to warm up by the fire,” he called down.

“You’re back,” Kay announced unnecessarily. “Mitch, there’s enough food down here for an entire winter!”

“Of course there is. Anyone crazy enough to come up here in the dead of winter could get stranded.”

“When I saw there was no food upstairs, I got a little concerned,” she admitted. “But I never dreamed-”

“If we kept it upstairs, it would freeze-or spoil, during the long periods no one’s around. The generator obviously isn’t kept on when no one’s here, and you can’t count on it anyway through a long snowstorm.”

“The bathroom’s adorable,” Kay mentioned.

He grinned. “You like that?” The tiny cubicle just off the main room was big enough for a chemical john and that was it. A big claw-foot tub stood next to the pump sink in the kitchen area and could have contained two grown men. A propane heater promised enough hot water to fill the tub, but privacy was another story.

Privacy was not exactly what he had in mind for Kay these few days anyway. The holiday had not prompted much intimacy so far. Actually, none, although there were occasions he could have taken advantage of if the lady had shown the least inclination. Furthermore, Kay had reminded him twice on the way up that she wanted them to get back for a New Year’s Eve party at Stix’s.

An insensitive fool could tell Kay was turning cool. Mitch was not insensitive. Kay was her usual bubbly self, but it was obvious she suddenly wanted to play it light…and it was obvious to him that in some way he’d disappointed her as a lover. Nothing else could be wrong; in every other way they blended like two peas in a pod. And the worst of it was he couldn’t imagine any lover more satisfying than Kay-for him.

He’d felt as touchy as a wounded bear on the drive up. That edginess had only gradually eased on the snowmobile ride; his mood had lifted as Kay’s natural exuberance had broken through her odd quietness of the past few days. Her smiles had made him smile; her daredevil antics on the snowmobile ride had alternately made him roar with laughter and want to turn her over his knee.

“I love it,” Kay announced as her head popped up through the trap door. “Help!”

She handed him foodstuffs, one by one. Coffee, tea, a bottle of wine. Flour. Canned stew, sugar… “We’re having stew for dinner. With homemade biscuits, and I’ll be darned if this doesn’t look like homemade jam. And here are the pickles-”

“Pickles?”

She pushed the trapdoor shut and locked it, then turned to retrieve the food from his arms. “Everyone loves dill pickles,” she informed him. “Furthermore, there’ll be a fruit salad. Not necessarily a fresh fruit salad, but what do you want to bet by the time we get this fixed you’ll be so raving hungry you couldn’t care less?”

The corner of Mitch’s mouth was twitching. “We brought steaks, you know.”

“We’ll have those tomorrow. When I’ve figured out how to cook on the wood stove without destroying everything. You-” Kay pointed a wagging figure in his direction. “Just stay out of my way and let me go.”

He wouldn’t. She should have known better, Kay thought wryly. He started baking potatoes and cooking the steaks before she’d begun the fruit salad; he took the dough for the biscuits out of her hands and set the table before she even found the plates. Arguing with him accomplished nothing beyond having her wineglass refilled and her fanny consolingly patted as he worked around her.

They used the coffee table as their dining room. Seated cross-legged across from each other, Mitch fed her a warm biscuit, dripping with butter and honey, just as if she were incapable of feeding herself. To her total embarrassment, once she’d swallowed the morsel, she yawned.

Mitch chuckled. “Late nights just don’t go with hours in the cold and a little wine, now do they?”

“I’ll wake up,” she promised.

“By the time you get your bath after dinner, you’ll be so sleepy you won’t even appreciate the feather bed.”

“My bath,” Kay echoed vaguely.

“Your bath,” Mitch affirmed.

Kay chewed rapidly on another mouthful of steak, regarding Mitch through feathery lashes. She’d evaded intimacy for days, not from preference but from common sense. You don’t judge the heat of the fire by getting burned up in it. A little distance for Mitch’s sake, and she hoped he’d see they had more than sex together anyway.

She took a sip of wine. “Actually, I don’t need a bath,” she mentioned.

“You’ll love it. Melted snow is so soft that it’s like silk on your skin, and if we drag the tub over by the stove you’ll think you’re in a sauna.”

“Hmm.” There was just a hint of a stubborn cast to Mitch’s chin; she’d never noticed it before. His dark hair had been finger brushed; there was a shadow of stubble on his chin. A red flannel shirt hugged those strong shoulders of his, and in the light of the stove and the kerosene lamps, his features took on dominantly male shadows. Don’t-argue-with-me shadows.

“Is taking a bath a prerequisite to being invited up here again?” she questioned wryly.

“All guests are given a claw-foot baptism the first time they come here,” he explained.

“A Cochran custom.”

“You’ve got it.”

“And have you got another backwoods story for me?” she asked with a chuckle.

As if on cue, she heard the faint piercing howl of a wolf in the distance and started. Mitch, standing up to gather plates, leaned over to plant a kiss on her forehead. “That’s the other reason you’re taking a bath. This is a strange place with scary sounds in the night, and a hot bath will guarantee that you sleep well in spite of yourself.”

“I expect I’ll sleep well regardless,” Kay insisted, which had the same effect as trying to make an arrow pierce through steel.

Snow melted at a very slow rate. Mounds of snow produced very little water. The dishes were long done before the tub was a third filled; she’d lost a trivia game before it was two-thirds filled; and by the time it was full and she was staring at it interestedly with all her clothes on, Mitch seemed to be refilling her glass again-this time with a spiced mulled wine that had the effect of a potent sleeping pill combined with an aphrodisiac.

“You don’t need this sweater,” Mitch remarked.

He was so right. She hadn’t needed the sweater in hours. The wind had picked up outside, but though it whistled around the windows, the inside of the cabin was marvelously warm. Mitch’s hands were marvelously warm as they unbuttoned the shirt beneath her sweater, and then that garment, too, was tossed aside… She stared in amazement; he’d actually managed to hook it on one of the elk’s horn points.

“He was staring at you,” Mitch explained gravely.

Kay giggled. “It wasn’t personal. It’s obvious that he stares at everyone.”

“Not at you. He has no right whatsoever to stare at you. Particularly…”

The bra went, then she felt his hands on the zipper of her pants. Somewhere in the muddled part of her brain, she was saying to hell with it. Mitch’s hands felt good. The look in his eyes warmed her blood, and the moment she slid into the hot water and leaned her head against the side of the porcelain tub, her eyes closed in sheer ecstasy.

She really hadn’t had so much wine; she was simply exhausted, physically and emotionally. The water lapped over her and soothed her weary muscles, and on the far side of the room, Mitch turned down both of the kerosene lamps. Soft shadows exploded in the silence; the crackle of the fire in the stove was mesmerizing, and she only flicked open an eye because for some odd reason the water level suddenly rose.

Mitch stepped in, and when he sank down, the water threatened to overflow. It did splash a little over the sides when he reached out both hands and pulled her to him.

“My hair’s going to get all wet,” she said. Not exactly the most brilliant conversational gambit she’d ever come up with.

“You’re absolutely right. Your hair is going to get all wet,” he agreed.

She caught the hint of a lazy smile before his lips nuzzled down to the hollow in her damp shoulder. She considered worrying about the space in the tub, but truthfully the old thing was huge. She considered worrying about drowning, but that didn’t seem of any particular immediate interest.

He wanted her. Now. Urgency dominated the intimate caresses he lavished on her body; his mouth claimed hers, tilting her head back so that she had the strangest sensation of floating in a dark, warm world of the senses. His skin was so slick, so warm, his chest muscles sleek and slippery against her breasts.

Desire pulled at her, with the lulling promise of a pied piper’s flute; she felt swept along, carried by the power of emotion that vibrated from Mitch. He laid her back, only to slowly propel her legs around his, tucking her around him. As he rained slow, insistent kisses on her face, murmuring to her, she felt the warm, silken thrust of his body inside her.

Her breath locked somewhere in her throat. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his damp shoulder.

“Look at me,” he whispered.

Such black eyes locked with hers. Dots of moisture beaded Mitch’s forehead like crystals. His face had a faint reddish glow, half shadow, half firelight. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he whispered. “Do you have any idea how good you feel around me, little one?”

His thighs tightened around her and she closed her eyes. “Mitch…”

“So slow in water,” he murmured. “I can last in water for a hundred years for you. It’s like the friction of silk, and for you it’s going to go on and on until you can’t stand it…”

“Mitch…”

His lips caught the name, captured it, held it. He would show her. He could think of a thousand creative ways to give her pleasure; she just had to give him time to learn them all. A lifetime. For the moment, he had now, and there was no way she could escape from him before he’d erased the thought of any other lovers from her mind. Experience or no, there couldn’t possibly be anyone who’d ever love her more.

Kay smiled in the darkness, as wide awake as she had been sleepy an hour before. Mitch’s arms were warm around her. The feather bed felt like a cushion of clouds, and a freshly fed stove was sending out noisy little sparks that toasted the dark room.

She’d put on a long flannel nightgown moments before, modeled it for Mitch, and admitted she’d bought it for the trip north because it looked sort of north woodsy. He liked it very much, he assured her…as he stripped it off her.

The wolf howled again in the distance, and she wrapped her arm more tightly around Mitch’s waist. “You’d think it would get tired and go to sleep, wouldn’t you?”

She felt Mitch’s smile rather than saw it. “It’s just a boy wolf calling for his girl. Don’t get uptight.”

“Do I feel uptight?”

“No.” His fingers smoothed back her hair. When he tilted her chin up, she could almost see his eyes sparkling in the darkness. “You definitely don’t feel uptight,” he murmured.

“You can’t expect to come this far north without hearing wolves,” she whispered reasonably. “They provide…atmosphere.”

“And yet you dropped that extra log in front of the door just in case they got in through the bolted door.”

Her palm connected with his rear end, a love pat for his sass, and then lingered. How could a man with such broad shoulders have such a flat little fanny? Men were built very strangely. Her palms slowly rediscovered that strange territory, with sheer sensual pleasure. He felt good. Every inch of him felt good. And he’d just taken her to ecstasy and back again, to peaks she’d never imagined, to delights in intimacy she’d never felt before.

In silence, she stroked his smooth, warm skin, until she felt the whisper of his lips on her forehead, and her hands stilled. The way his fingers combed back her hair, over and over, the way he let the silken strands wind around his fingers, the way his eyes met hers in the darkness…it seemed a moment in time, always hers.

“Mitch?”

“Hmm?”

Her fingers touched his face, tenderly amused at the rapid growth of beard on his chin. “You could have told me,” she said softly. “I only love you all the more for it.”

“Tell you what?”

“That I was your first.”

Tension whipped through his body so fast that he could feel a tight knot forming in his stomach. Until that instant, he’d wanted to believe there hadn’t been anything that shouted inadequate, untried about his performance. “I wasn’t aware that…you knew.”

“I didn’t know, ”she assured him gently. “Not in any physical sense. It was something that I figured out because you’d been ill for so long, and at that particular time in your life-” He was quiet, so quiet and so tense, that Kay felt bewildered. “You’re a beautiful lover,” she whispered, “and I just wanted the chance to share that with you, Mitch. You made me feel all the more special because I was first with you.”

His arm dropped away from her, and he turned over on his back. “Is that what you felt?” he asked. Had she gotten a kick out of being his first? Before she moved on to more experienced lovers?

His tone could have chilled the tropics. A night that couldn’t possibly go wrong seemed to be going very wrong very quickly.

“You’ve been pulling back, Kay. Do you think I haven’t felt it? Your refusal to accept the necklace was only part of that. You’ve been pulling back from the minute I mentioned marriage.”

Something terribly thick seemed to clog her throat. “For your sake,” she said quietly. “I don’t believe marriage is what you want, Mitch.”

He gave her credit for trying to let him down gently. “Or what you want?”

His cold tone pierced her like a knife. “What I want? Mitch, listen. People…feel differently toward the first person they make love with. It’s not always a lasting thing… I mean, a lot of people have to test out other waters and-”

“I hear you,” he said roughly. “But I definitely don’t need to hear anymore. Enough’s enough, Kay. Leave it at that.” Maybe he’d been expecting to hear that, ever since she’d turned cool. Maybe she’d never felt anything lasting for him. He’d been a “first” for her-that was all.

Kay’s lips parted, with a dozen words trying to pour out. Anxiety and distress tore at her heart. “Mitch…”

“There’s nothing more to say, Kay. You’re absolutely right-I just hadn’t thought about it like that before.”

In time, she turned on her side, and a very long time later he finally heard her restless tossing turn into a restless sleep.

He stayed on his back and closed his eyes. He knew that she’d wanted to talk further, but he’d already heard the only thing that mattered. Being his first had been special for her, but she didn’t want him confusing that with something lasting. Now it all made sense; he knew why she’d pulled back the minute he’d mentioned marriage. More talk wasn’t necessary. Kay would only try to be gentle on the letdown.

He didn’t want her gentleness. If he couldn’t have her love, he simply wanted to extricate them both from the relationship as rapidly and painlessly as possible. For her, and for him.

She lay only inches from him. And yet miles distant. In the middle of the night, she kicked off the covers, and he firmly tucked them back around her.

Once he got up to add more wood to the fire.

At dawn, he had their things packed to return home. A fierce ache racked through his bones, like the loneliness of the north wind seeping through his soul. All the physical pains he’d suffered in his life were nothing next to this. He’d fought so hard for life, only to discover that it meant nothing without Kay.