One Stubborn Texan

Chapter Five

Sydney shut her mouth. Four miles? Why was she panicking? She could do four miles. In New York terms, that was forty blocks. She walked that far some days. And on the treadmill, she ran as many as five or six miles. Piece of cake.

Anyway, she had a feeling Russ enjoyed forcing her out of her comfort zone. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d startled her.

Sydney opened her door, looked down at the red mud, grimaced and jumped down. Her feet sank into the soft earth and she was grateful for the hiking boots. Her suede, high-heeled shoes would have been instantly ruined.

It felt good to stretch her legs after the cramped confines of the truck. It was actually a pretty big truck, but it had felt cramped, given the two overwhelming presences she’d been forced to share it with. Just the thought of that beast lurking in the back made her break out in goose bumps. As for Russ-well, his presence was threatening in an altogether different way. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel like hiding from him; in fact, she’d had no trouble confiding highly personal information, especially strange for her given that she was usually slow to trust strangers.

She closed the door to the truck and stretched her arms up over her head, taking in a deep breath of country air. Lord, what she wouldn’t give to have this quality of air where she lived.

A sharp bark startled her and she whirled around. The dog was still safely confined in the back of the Bronco.

“He just wants to get out and explore,” Russ said from behind the truck. He opened the rear door.

Sydney shuddered and stepped to the other side of the road, where she wouldn’t have to look at the beast. While Nero explored, Russ turned his attention to hauling out a couple of backpacks.

“What do we need those for?”

“It’s always a good idea to be prepared when hiking into the wilderness.”

“Please don’t tell me the dog is going to hike with us.”

Russ sighed. “No, he’ll stay in the truck.”

Thank goodness for small favors. Sydney might actually enjoy a nature hike, but not if she had to worry about a dog putting his muddy paws all over her or slobbering on her clothes. Besides, dogs were genetically wolves. In the wild like this, wouldn’t it be easy for one to revert? And Nero was big, maybe bigger than a chow.

“He might like to come with us,” Russ continued, “but I don’t take him hiking anymore. Last time I did, he took off after a rabbit and didn’t come home for two days. When he finally showed up he was more dead than alive.”

The dog kept his nose to the ground, checking everything out, then came to the exact spot where Sydney had stood and sniffed the ground madly. Nero then followed her trail around the Bronco and stopped right in front of her, giving a sharp bark. Sydney cringed. The beast was hunting her. Why couldn’t Russ see that?

“Nero!” Russ called, and the dog went to his master’s voice. Russ loaded him back into the cargo area. He opened all the windows a few inches, then locked the dog inside.

With Nero taken care of, Russ shouldered his backpack with economical movements, then nodded toward Sydney’s. Determined to rise to whatever challenge he placed before her, she shrugged into the pack, then let Russ adjust the straps, aware of his strong, capable hands, brown from the sun even in winter. When he readjusted the collar of her blouse, his fingers brushed against bare skin and she shivered.

“Cold?”

“A little,” she fibbed. Actually, she was warm, verging on hot, thinking about the feel of those hands against her skin. Just move a little to the left…

The pack adjusted to his satisfaction, he stared at her an uncomfortably long time, as if sizing her up-or maybe guessing her lascivious thoughts. She hoped not. “Is it too heavy?” he finally asked.

She took a few steps, getting used to the weight. “I can handle it.”

Russ raised an appreciative eyebrow, but said nothing.

Sydney, who’d never hiked in the country or gone camping her whole life-and who’d never had a desire to do so-was actually looking forward to the hike now. She wanted to show him she wasn’t some pampered princess. Even if she didn’t like walking on dirt.

Russ led the way down the steep bank to the edge of the creek bed, offering a hand to help Sydney. She shook her head, then wished she hadn’t been so proud when she slid partway down on her butt. Thankfully, he didn’t see her lapse in grace. But her skirt was probably ruined.

They walked alongside the creek for a while, then crossed to the other side on a natural bridge formed by a tree trunk. This time, she didn’t hesitate to take the hand Russ offered. No way was she going to fall in a cold creek, even if it looked to be only a few inches deep.

The climb out of the creek bed was easier and from there they took a rough footpath through some scrubby trees. The path wasn’t difficult, and Sydney was able to fully enjoy her surroundings.

The scenery was breathtaking, with sheer limestone cliffs, pockets of heavy woods and open areas of barren rock. For most New Yorkers, her included, Texas evoked images of deserts. Cactus. Ranches and oil wells. She’d been to Austin a number of times to visit Aunt Carol, but she’d seldom ventured beyond the city limits before this trip. She never would have guessed she would encounter this kind of scenery.

The sounds of the wind in the trees, the chatter of birds, the crunch of dead leaves under her feet-they were all foreign yet intriguingly familiar to her. Surely she’d soon tire of a steady diet of this Daniel Boone stuff, but one afternoon wouldn’t hurt her.

They passed a waterfall that emptied into a deep, mysterious-looking pool and Sydney thought about how refreshing it would be to swim here on a hot summer day.

She wondered if Russ ever swam here. And if so, did he skinny-dip? Her face heated at the mental image taking shape and she shook her head to banish it before she became so distracted she smacked into a tree trunk.

As they topped a grassy rise and entered a meadow, Russ dropped back to walk next to her. “Tired?”

“No. I’m used to walking. At home, sometimes it’s faster than braving the traffic. Disappointed?”

He grinned. “You must really want to see those papers.”

She did. And yet she wasn’t all that optimistic about what she would find. Russ said he hadn’t gone through the boxes. For all anyone knew, they could be filled with old newspapers or recipes.

What was the real reason she’d been so eager to accompany Russ to his cabin? And why hadn’t she asked him more than a few superficial questions?

She knew the answer, she just hated to admit it. Russ had already told her his mother’s name was not Winifred. Didn’t that take him out of the running as the Oberlin heir? She should have returned to San Antonio and resumed her search. She had a few more Russell Kleins to go through.

But she wasn’t done with this Russell, not yet. She wasn’t done fantasizing about him. She hadn’t gotten her fill of his muscular body, his clear blue eyes and the way his mouth creased at the corners when he smiled, which wasn’t often enough. She hadn’t seen enough of the way he moved, so much a part of this wild environment, yet achingly human and all man.

They walked on in silence for a while. They’d been hiking for almost forty-five minutes when Sydney detected a sound, something new, something distinct from the pleasant din of the woods. She looked up into the trees and saw nothing out of the ordinary. She looked from side to side, still seeing nothing. Finally she glanced over her shoulder.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. The dog was loping along the trail behind her, panting happily.

“Russ? Excuse me, Russ?” she called out.

Russ stopped and turned. “Problem?” Then he spotted his dog. “Nero, what are you doing here?”

“Can your dog open car doors?” Sydney stood still as the dog sniffed her boots.

“He must have squeezed through one of the open windows.”

“If he gets those muddy paws on my skirt, I’m sending you the cleaning bill.”

“The skirt’s already ruined,” he pointed out. “I’ll buy you a new one.”

Darn it, he’d noticed her clumsy fall after all.

Russ pulled a piece of rope from his backpack. He tied one end of the rope to Nero’s collar and yanked him away from Sydney. “What’s gotten into you, boy?” To Sydney he said, “I guess we have no choice but to take him with us. I hope I don’t end up carrying him back.”

Sydney pictured Russ hiking back to the car with the big dog on his shoulders. He probably wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Clearly, he was ridiculously fond of the beast.

Yet another reason she should keep her distance. As if she needed more reasons.

Russ slowed his pace slightly, remembering he had a greenhorn with him. Sydney, however, showed no signs of fatigue. She wasn’t even breathing hard, though her face was pleasantly flushed from the mild exertions

But the trail got rougher from that point on. They were hiking more or less parallel to Deer Creek, which had cut a small canyon in the limestone as it wound down the hill. They made several more crossings, sometimes using log bridges, sometimes hopping from rock to rock.

They paused at a particularly difficult spot, where the trail narrowed and climbed almost straight up for several yards. Russ pushed Nero up ahead of him, then doubled back to give Sydney a hand. As she scrambled up, a branch knocked her hat askew.

When she reached the ledge where he was standing, he straightened her hat. And there was that lone curl, dammit, dangling against her cheek.

If anything her face turned a darker shade of pink. Suddenly all he could think about was how it would feel to kiss her, to crush those full, soft lips with his and kiss her until common sense was nothing but a dim memory.

And then he did it.

She responded like a flower to the sun, open, soft, pliant. Her arms went around his neck, her fingers twining in his hair as his mouth plundered hers. He pulled her slender, lithe body against his, feeling the heat of her, smelling the essence of her, the incredible texture of her lips.

He wanted to feel more of her hair. He plunged his hands into the thick, black mass, knocking her hat off.

She made a noise in her throat that could have been excitement, or it could have been the beginnings of an objection. Whatever, it brought him to his senses. When he ended the kiss, her reaction was immediate. She pulled away from him as if he were a hot branding iron.

“I didn’t mean-”

“That wasn’t supposed-”

They both started speaking, broke off, then laughed nervously. Russ took a couple of steps back, almost falling over a rock. He needed to get out of touching range.

“I didn’t plan that,” he finally said. “It was that damn curl that fell over your cheek. It drove me temporarily insane.”

She shoved her hair behind her ears self-consciously, then retrieved her hat. It wasn’t altogether useless, he realized. At least it had a small brim that shaded her face from the sun. She repositioned her pack on her shoulders and set her gaze on the trail ahead. Russ realized the subject of the kiss was closed.

“The cabin’s not much farther.”

During the next ten minutes, Russ kept an anxious eye out over his shoulder, but Sydney seemed to be doing fine. Still, he was relieved when they made the final creek crossing. Another hundred yards and they reached a clearing with a cabin in the center.

“Oh, wow,” Sydney said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was impressed or appalled.

He remembered his own thoughts the first time he’d seen it. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, made of rough-hewn logs with a stone chimney and two porches that ran the length of the whole cabin, front and back.

But no one had been up here in a few months, so it was overgrown with weeds and the front porch was covered with dead leaves. At least he didn’t spot any broken windows, which inevitably led to an invasion of critters.

He climbed the stairs to the porch and unlocked the front door. The cabin smelled winter-musty, but everything appeared in order. “Take your boots off and leave them on the porch,” he instructed. “No sense tracking mud everywhere.”

Sydney looked at the dog, which was standing just outside the threshold, waiting for permission to enter. His feet were coated in mud. “What about him?”

“Nero, go lie down. You can’t come in like that.”

With a sigh that sounded decidedly human, as if he’d understood every word Russ said, Nero lumbered to a sunny spot on the porch and plopped down. He looked over his shoulder at Sydney, silently imploring her to show some sign that she didn’t hate him. For whatever reason, the dog had taken a liking to her.

Sydney entered the cabin in her stocking feet. “It’s really rustic.” She gave a glance to the mounted deer head over the fireplace, the braided rug, the granny-square afghan on the ancient sofa. She shrugged out of the backpack and let it fall with a clunk. “You don’t actually hunt, do you?” She glanced again at the deer and wrinkled her nose.

“Nah.” Not since he was a kid, anyway. Bert had taken him a few times when he first moved to Linhart, but it wasn’t really his thing. “I fish sometimes, but really this is just a place to get away from everything.”

“I would think Linhart is far enough away from everything.”

“Now you’re dissing my town.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to. Linhart is beautiful, really. And quiet. I just don’t see why a person would need to get away from it.”

“It’s not so quiet during tourist season. Spring through early fall, it’s wall-to-wall people.” And sometimes he just needed to get away from Winnie. When she got a moneymaking idea in her head, she would pester Russ about it endlessly. She would never follow him here, that was for sure. The former Las Vegas showgirl didn’t much care for walking on dirt, either.

“Do you want to see the boxes?” he asked Sydney. “They’re upstairs in the loft. If my cousin ever got that space cleared out, we’d have another bedroom.”

“I’m not sure why you’d need another, if you come up here to be alone.”

“Maybe I won’t always be alone.” Maybe someday he would have a wife and kids who’d want to rough it here with him. Although, given his track record, that was becoming less and less of a possibility. He’d yet to convince any of his girlfriends to tromp up here with him-not even Deirdre. Then again, she’d worked in the governor’s office in Austin and would have looked as out of place in the woods as a flamingo in a desert.

None of the other women from his past would have fit in, either. Melanie What’s-Her-Name, the oil company lobbyist, had broken out in hives when he’d taken her on her first and last canoe trip. Elizabeth, the hotel events coordinator-well, he’d never even tried to picture her anywhere in the great outdoors.

Sydney was probably the only female to see this place in fifty years and she had come under false pretenses.

Still, he couldn’t deny she classed the place up. Something about her was different from those ultrasophisticated women he’d been involved with in the past. Or perhaps he was merely trying to rationalize his attraction to her.

“All right, let’s have a look at those boxes,” she said briskly.

He led her up a narrow spiral staircase to a loft bedroom. As soon as Sydney reached the landing, she let out a soft “oh” of surprise.

The room was literally full of boxes, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and every one of them filled with yellowed papers, photographs, scrapbooks, letters, postcards and who-knew-what.

“It would take me a month to go through all this stuff!”

“You can take as long as you want,” Russ said mildly. “There’s enough food, between what’s in the backpacks and the kitchen cabinets, to last you several days. I’ll come back to get you whenever you say.”

“You’re going to leave me here alone?” Panic edged her voice.

“I have a business to run.”

“I can’t stay here overnight,” she objected. “I didn’t bring clothes or a toothbrush or-”

“There are plenty of clean clothes in the bedroom closet and dresser drawers, and I packed a few toiletries in the backpack. But if you don’t want to stay, I understand. We have to start back within a few minutes, though, if we want to make it home by dark.”

She looked at the boxes, then back at Russ, weighing how badly she wanted to find Sammy Oberlin’s heir against how badly she didn’t want to spend the night in the woods.

“Fine,” she ground out. “I’ll stay one day, and if I can’t find anything by then, forget it. I’m going back to New York.”

Exactly what he’d been hoping to hear. But as he looked at her, standing in the loft staring forlornly at all the boxes, he felt nothing but guilt. He didn’t want to leave her here alone with her work, which wouldn’t lead to anything anyway. He wanted to take her downstairs, bundle her into the feather bed, burrow under the down quilts and make love to her until neither of them could move.

“I guess I better call the B and B and let the sisters know I won’t be back tonight.” Sydney looked around for a phone but didn’t spot one. “Let me guess. No phone.”

“I do come here to get away from everything,” he reminded her.

“Good thing I remembered to bring my cell phone.” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled it out. She’d just bought it a couple of weeks ago, the latest and greatest on the market.

Russ eyed it with interest. “I’ve never seen a phone like that.”

She held it out for his inspection. “Cool, huh? I can use it to read e-mail, do research on the Web, listen to music-it’s an mp3 player, too. With this thing I’m always connected, always at the office. I never miss a call.”

“Um, yeah, well, hate to break the news, but unless it’s a satellite phone, you won’t get service out here.”

“What? That’s ridiculous. Everyplace has cell coverage these days.”

“Not these woods.”

She checked the screen more closely. Sure enough, her phone wasn’t receiving a signal. “My father will be worried sick about me if I don’t call him tonight.” Sydney gnawed on her bottom lip, then reminded herself to stop. It was a nervous habit she thought she’d conquered years ago.

“I can let both the B and B and your dad know where you are,” Russ said.

She could just imagine. Some strange guy calls and claims Sydney is stuck in the middle of nowhere and can’t be reached, but don’t worry? “Why don’t you call my aunt instead?” Sydney suggested.

“Sure, no problem.”

Aunt Carol would be cool about it. She could keep her father calm if he got worried.

Russ wrote down the number Sydney gave him and stuck it in his pocket. “Have fun, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She couldn’t believe he was leaving, just like that. But she couldn’t very well beg him to stay.

Russ started a generator, so she would have electricity. Then collected the dog from the porch and started the hike back to the car. Sydney watched him until he was out of the clearing, disappearing into the trees.

She felt abandoned and forlorn. When she’d first visualized herself going through all these boxes of historical papers, she’d thought Russ would be helping her-identifying people in photos or the authors of letters. It had sounded like so much fun, a treasure hunt.

Doing the job alone wasn’t nearly as appealing. But she kept the goal in mind-verifying the identity of the Oberlin heir. Maybe one of those boxes held a ten-million-dollar clue.

But before she could do anything, she had to use the bathroom. She wandered into the single downstairs bedroom, but the only door led to a closet which was, as Russ had promised, filled with spare clothes. Changing into a comfy pair of jeans and a sweatshirt sounded like a good idea-after the bathroom.

But there was no bathroom.

Sydney inspected every inch of that cabin. There was no bathroom. She ran out to the front porch.

“Russ!” she yelled as loud as she could. “Russ, come back! I have a problem!” But he must have been too far down the trail, because he didn’t return. Either that or he had chosen to ignore her.

That was when she spotted a small building off to the side, shielded by some sapling trees. “Oh, no.” It couldn’t be. Surely she was just missing something, a hidden door or something. Surely he didn’t expect her to…But, yes. As she drew closer to the small building, she saw the quarter moon carved into the door.