At Last

Chapter 4

A day without chocolate is like a day without sunshine.

Breathless, heart pounding, Amy lay flat on her back in the pitch dark. Shit. Okay, so that was the last time she ever tiptoed into the woods by herself to find a nice, big tree to pee behind. Her downfall had been the walk back to camp. It’d been so dark, and her flashlight had given enough light for exactly nothing.

And she’d slipped on something and slid.

Down.

And down.

She’d lost her flashlight on the descent, and now she couldn’t see much except the vague black outline of the canopy of trees far above her. Or at least she hoped those were trees. Claustrophobic from the all-encompassing blackness, and more than a little worried about creepy crawlies, she sat up and winced. Her left wrist was on fire. So was her butt. Great, she’d broken her butt. She could see the headline on Facebook now-Amy Michaels cracks her crack during a potty break on the mountain.

The worst part was that this was all her own fault. She was street smart and had been cocky enough to believe she could handle herself. Her mistake, because she should have known better-bad things could happen anywhere. They’d always happened to her, from back as far as when her grandma had died. Back then, a twelve-year-old Amy had gone to live with her mother for the first time, and oh how she’d hated that. Her mother had hated it, too, and Amy had grossly misbehaved, acting out in grief and teenage hatred. She’d sought attention, bad attention, in the form of inappropriate sex, using it as a way to manipulate boys. Then the game had been turned on her, and she hadn’t liked it much. It’d taken her far too long to realize she was destroying herself, but eventually she’d given up dangerous sex. Hell, she’d pretty much given up men, no matter how gorgeous and sexy they were.

It’d been so long she felt like a virgin. At least an emotional virgin.

And now she was going to die as one.

A beam of light shined down on her from above. Not God. Not a fairy godmother. Just Matt, calling her name, concern clear in his voice.

“Down here,” she said. Where all the stupid girls end up on their broken butts. “I’m coming.”

“Don’t move.”

“But-”

“I mean it, Amy. Not a muscle.”

“Well jeez, if you mean it…”

No response to that. Seemed the laid-back forest ranger wasn’t feeling so laid-back right now.

He got to her quickly and without falling, she noted with more than a little bitterness. And unlike her, he could apparently see in the dark. Crouched before her, he was nothing but a big, built shadow holding her down when she’d have gotten to her feet. “Stay,” he said, voice firm.

“Stay?” she repeated with a disbelieving laugh. “What am I, a dog?”

“Where are you hurt?”

“Nowhere.”

He flicked the light over her, eyes narrowing in on the wrist she was hugging to herself. “Hold this,” he said, and put the light in her good hand so he could probe at her other wrist.

She hissed in a breath, and he slid his gaze to hers. “Can you move your fingers?”

She showed him just how much her middle finger could move.

“Nice,” he said. “So nature call, huh?”

She didn’t answer, distracting herself by shining the light around them to make sure they weren’t being circled by bears or mountain lions. What she did see stole her breath more than Matt’s gentle maneuvering of her wrist.

They were at the base of a meadow. “Sierra Meadows?”

“Yeah, although this is the back way in.” Matt glanced up at her face. “Why?”

“No reason.”

“Why do you try to bullshit a bullshitter? You were looking for Sierra Meadows?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not a very well-known place,” Matt said. “Hard to get to-well, unless you fall into it.”

“Ha ha.” She wondered how hard it’d be to find this place again on her own.

“So why Sierra Meadows?”

“I read about the wall of diamond rocks. I wanted to see them.”

“They’re a couple of hundred yards across a very soggy meadow from here. But worth seeing-in the light of day.” He took the flashlight back. “I don’t think your wrist is broken but you’ve got a good sprain going. What else hurts?”

“Nothing.”

He obviously didn’t buy this since he gave her a rather impressive eye roll and began running a hand down her limbs with quick, impassive efficiency.

“Hey!” She pushed his hand away. “I already had my annual.”

Finished with her arms, legs, and ribs, he merely tilted her head back and looked into her eyes. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“One,” she said. “But as I already showed you, it’s much more effective when it’s the middle finger.”

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 naked 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 fuck 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.”

“Why?” she asked, fascinated in a way she couldn’t explain even to herself. “Kids not for you?”

He shrugged. “My ex seemed to think I don’t do love, at least not the kind of love a family requires. Said I wasn’t good with people.”

“You were married?” She was surprised, though she shouldn’t have been. Matthew Bowers was a catch.

“For about twenty minutes,” he said. “Just after I got out of the military.”

“When you were a cop,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Is that why she thought you weren’t family material?” she asked. “Because of your job?”

“Partly. And partly because I failed her. But mostly because she was pissed off at me.”

Amy wanted to ask how he’d failed, but that felt too intimate, especially given that she was lying in his arms with his ice pack on her ass. But his ex’s words didn’t make sense. He wasn’t the sort of guy to fail a stranger, much less someone he cared about. What he’d done for her today proved that. His job might have brought him here to check on her, but it hadn’t been his job or responsibility to stay the night with her and keep her safe.

And yet he’d stuck.

She’d had people in her life who had been responsible for her and hadn’t stuck. “Matt?”

His wordless response vibrated through his chest to hers, and he turned his head so that his face was in her hair, inhaling as he rubbed her back.

“I think you’re pretty good with people,” she said softly.

She could feel him smile against her. “Thanks,” he murmured. “Now tell me about you.”

“Nothing as interesting as you.”

“Try me,” he said.

That was the last thing she intended to do. “Well, I don’t have an ex-husband…”

“How about a mom? Dad? Siblings?”

“A mom. We’re not close.” An understatement, of course. Her mom had gotten pregnant as a teen and hadn’t been mom material. “I was raised by my grandma, but she’s gone now. She died when I was twelve.”

“Any other family?”

No one she wanted to talk about. “No.”

He tightened his arms around her, a small, protective, even slightly possessive gesture. It should have made her claustrophobic.

It didn’t.

They fell quiet after that, and Amy wouldn’t have imagined it possible since she was snuggled up against a very solid, very sexy man, but she actually fell asleep.

She woke up what must have been hours later, as dawn crept in, poking at the backs of her eyelids. For a moment, she stayed utterly still, struck by several things. One, she was no longer cold. In fact, she was quite warm, and the reason for that was because she’d wrapped herself like a pretzel around her heat source.

Matt.

She cracked open an eye and found him watching her from his own heavy-lidded gaze. He was looking pretty amused at the both of them. “Hey,” he said, and to go along with that bedroom gaze he also had a raspy early morning voice. Both were extremely distracting. He wasn’t looking like a forest ranger right now. He was looking sleepy, rumpled, and sexy as hell.

“Are you taking this anywhere?” he asked.

Not exactly a morning person, it took her brain a moment to process what he meant. And then she realized that by “this,” he was referring to the fact that her hand had drifted disturbingly low on his abs. If she moved her fingers even a fraction of an inch south… “Sorry!” Face hot, she pulled back and closed her eyes. “This is all Mallory’s fault.”

“Actually,” he said, looking down at his obvious erection. “It’s not.”

“No, I mean-” She broke off at his low, teasing laugh and felt her face flame again. “She sent you out here because she thinks something’s going on with us.”

“Is there something going on with us?”

She didn’t want to touch that with a ten-foot pole. Or an eight-inch one. “It has nothing to do with us. It’s payback for how I set her up with Ty at the auction a few weeks back.”

“What if it’s not?”

She met his warm gaze. “Not what?”

“Payback,” he said.

Their legs were entwined. At some point in the night, the sleeping bag had fallen away so that there was no barrier between them. He was warm and hard.

Everywhere.

She felt herself soften as the heat of arousal built within her. Worse, her fingers itched with the need to touch him.

“Amy.” Matt’s voice was pure sin, not a warning so much as a statement, and her hands reacted without permission, migrating to his chest.

“Mm,” rumbled from his chest as he slid a hand into her hair, tilting her head up to his. He searched her gaze. “You’re all the way awake, right?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just making sure,” he said, then rolled her beneath him.