Trouble in Paradise

Chapter 7

Susan dipped her paddle into the water once, then twice, finally lifting the dripping oar to let it rest across the gunwales of the canoe. Griff was leaning back against the bow, facing her, his legs stretched out and his ankles crossed, a hat tipped lazily over his forehead to block out the rays of the still-potent sun. The canoe made no sound as it traveled through the still, clear waters.

They’d been following the narrow stream all day. Like the lace of a spider’s web, the maze of rushing water pivoted and curled in endless, intricate patterns. As they rounded a bend, Susan saw the trees that regally crowded the back of the stream. Birch and elm, aspen, maple and locust, all arched for the sky, their leaves seemingly painted in brilliant fall colors. The late-afternoon sun glinted on apricot and scarlet, gold and russet. Not a leaf stirred, not a sound troubled the forest.

A mile farther upstream and another quarter-turn, suddenly huge boulders crowded the shoreline, as though a giant had whimsically stashed his marbles in this private niche of northern Minnesota. Certainly no one would intrude on his treasures here. At a single splash of the canoe paddle, a dozen ducks would flutter skyward in alarm, honking and squawking at the first hint of an intruder.

One more mile, one more turn, and the stream widened slightly, its current growing swifter. Vertical cliffs jutted sharply up from the banks. A sharp eye could see a cave or the thin diamond spill of a waterfall, both possessively concealed by nature among foliage and rock.

“Tired?” Griff murmured.

“Impossible.”

“Hungry, then?”

Susan was starving, but when she didn’t answer, Griff raised his head to look at her, his eyes as warm as that lazy late sun. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever known who’s as greedy for this country as I am. You realize that you refused to stop for lunch?”

“I refused? You had the paddle at noon.”

“You took over when I wanted to go ashore on that island.”

“You were fed,” Susan protested.

“Granola bars. Baby food.”

The canoe rocked precariously when Susan tipped off his hat with her toe; then she had to pick up the paddle again or risk running into the stream bank. They both fell silent, listening to the sudden mournful cry of a loon in the distance. Night was coming; the bird announced it.

Primitive wilderness, some called these boundary waters of the north. More water than land, thousands of acres completely inaccessible by car. A moose had made them laugh that morning; such a regal, magnificent half ton of a beast, chomping on a mouthful of dripping weeds. Squirrels and foxes and beavers had posed on the stream bank all day, too astonished at the sight of human intruders to be afraid. White-tailed deer had lapped thirstily at the crystal waters, bolting if the paddle made a splash.

Griff reached out toward her, and with a grin Susan handed him the paddle and watched him settle down to work. They didn’t need words. Being alone with Griff had intensified that private communication they had, that feeling of love that didn’t need explanations. His children had nothing to do with it, nor did her working life or his.

“Hear it?” Griff murmured.

The whispered gush of the rapids was a distance away, but Susan couldn’t mistake it. Already Griff was carefully shifting to a kneeling position. Sunlight glinted on his muscled forearms as he claimed a more definite grip on the paddle. “Susan…”

“Take it, Griff.” All day they’d been searching for white water, a whim of Susan’s. She’d always wanted to shoot a rapids. Shivering suddenly, she took up the second paddle. Their food and sleeping bags were sealed in plastic, well protected from a dunking. Adrenaline streaked through her blood as Griff sure-stroked silently, faster and faster, toward yet another bend in the stream.

Suddenly, ahead she could see whipped-cream foam on the water and the fast rush of silver around golden rocks in the sun.

“Susan! Hold on!”

But she already knew. The canoe lurched as it grazed a hidden rock and then surged forward in a downstream rush. The roar of fast water filled her ears; blinding sunlight flashed and faded among the tree limbs on the shore. White water splashed into the canoe, soaking both of them. Susan was freezing, gasping cold. Griff didn’t have to tell her that the whispering sounds they’d heard a moment ago had been deceptive. One clumsy stroke and the canoe would capsize. One wrong move and they could crash into solid rock…

Danger sent excitement through her nerve endings. Excitement, but not fear. Griff was with her. Her hands clenched around the paddle; she stopped breathing, and her whole body jolted when another hidden boulder bounced the canoe, but those tremors of fear only heightened a sensual excitement greater than a roller coaster ride. This was real, not play. This was life. Breathing. Being aware. Sound, touch, sight, even the taste of the sweet, icy water…

Laughter suddenly bubbled up inside her as she saw what Griff saw ahead. The white water ended in a scant two-foot cascade. Beyond it the stream was perfectly calm again. Even as she could see what was coming, she knew there was no way to avoid it. They were headed straight for the falls. Griff paddled valiantly, but they were approaching at a speed too fast to control. The canoe careened through the air, hurtled smoothly into the quiet water below the cascade and then unceremoniously flipped over and dumped its passengers in waist-deep water as cold as a Popsicle.

Sputtering, Susan surfaced hands-first and wildly shook her head to clear her eyes of water and hair. The shock of icy water was painful, causing her lungs to desperately haul in extra air. She searched frantically for Griff.

He was standing in the water a dozen feet away. In that instant, his dark brown eyes flicked over her, and transmitted a dozen messages. You’re all right? He could see that she was. He could see that she was laughing. The next time you talk me into doing something like this will be a cold day in hell.

Aaah. His male pride was wounded because he’d misjudged the soft sounds of the rapids from around the bend. Susan started giggling again. Griff surged through the water in pursuit of the canoe. Susan snatched one paddle and one plastic-wrapped sleeping bag, and started towing them toward shore. She was shivering violently by the time she reached the pale, stony shore of a tiny island. And she was still trying to wipe the smile off her face.

She watched Griff for yet another minute. He’d righted the canoe and salvaged the other plastic pack. He looked like a wet, shaggy blond bear with his sleek, silvery head and camel-colored flannel shirt now clinging to his burly shoulders. He was pulling the canoe behind him, very properly subdued… Unlike his wife, his eyes said. His wife-the one with big ideas about shooting the rapids.

She turned away but started to chuckle again as her numbed fingers tried to open the plastic pack containing their sleeping bags. She might not be able to throw a baseball, but she was no stranger to wilderness country, and she knew that this task had to take precedence over changing her clothes. She had to ensure that no water had gotten into their pack. It hadn’t. Griff could occasionally be careless about where he dropped his shoes at home, but he was as fussy as an old hen over safety while camping. Their clothes were rolled inside, equally dry, but as cold as her fingers.

Behind her, she heard the canoe scrape over the pebbly bed of the stream as she fumbled to take off her dark, sopping sweatshirt. Goose bumps decorated her skin as cool forest air rushed around her damp flesh. Her tennis shoes felt as heavy as lead, and her toes were miserably squishy; but still she sent Griff a glance dancing with amusement.

“Why did I listen to you?” he lamented.

“It was fun and you know it.” Her Viking was disgusted with himself; she started chuckling again. She pulled off her shoes and peeled off her jeans; Griff did the same. “It kills me. You can’t even hear it now.”

“Hear what?”

“Listen,” she said softly, and just for an instant they stopped their frantic attempts to get warm and dry.

The roar of rushing rapids was only a murmur now. The forest so totally masked sounds that they might have been in a completely different world. Silence touched their small, private island. Aspens and white birch formed an orange and gold roof; the forest floor was rich, dark earth, carpeted with moss and rustling with dry leaves. Across the winding stream was a jutting finger of land that reflected their own landscape. It was a very old virgin forest, with spaces between the trees large enough to drive through-if a car could make it to this country, an eventuality she hoped no amount of human ingenuity would ever be able to bring about.

Stark naked, they suddenly smiled at each other, anticipating the fire they would build for warmth, anticipating how good the coffee was going to feel in their stomachs…anticipating the night ahead. Each other. The plan had been to find a special spot in the wilderness to camp for the night…

“It’ll do,” Griff said. His voice came out on a husky note that seemed to echo through the woods.

Crouched on his heels, Griff added another dry branch to the fire. Crackling flames shot orange sparks into the darkness, and a long hiss of smoke trailed off on the breeze. Just ahead of him the stream was jet-black and still, as shiny-dark as the star-peppered sky. Earlier, they’d caught trout and cooked it over the coals, listening to the loons’ maniacal cries; before that, Griff had rubbed Susan down until she complained that her skin was neither flint nor steel and she was more than warm enough without his going so far as to set her on fire.

He wasn’t convinced. If she caught cold because of that unfortunate dunking, he was going to be furious…and from the very beginning he’d made every effort to keep his temper in check for Susan’s sake. That she had delighted in shooting the little rapids and was more than ready to take on tomorrow’s adventures rather floored him. One minute Susan was so distinctly a lady, all sweet and gentle, all shy and reserved about expressing her feelings, and the next minute…

How could he label the other side of her? Still on his haunches, Griff swiveled his head around to study her. They’d lost her hairbrush in the water. A sleeping bag was swaddled around her, her bare toes peeking out from beneath it. Her head was thrown back. The silky mop of dark hair framed a face golden by firelight, sensually lovely in its translucence, strong in its serenity.

The image of a Dakota Indian woman shot through his mind. He wouldn’t have said it aloud because he knew she would throw a handful of sand in his direction. The white man’s word, squaw, had nothing to do with the reality of Indian cultures. The Dakotas were the first Indians to claim these northern woods, their women strong and earthy and fiercely loyal. The nomadic Dakotas often went hungry because of their dependence on the buffalo. It fell to the women to pack up the children and belongings and move with the wandering herds. Their strength was the core of the tribe, the tie that bound the rest together…

Susan was that way. Taking on his troubles by choice, the choice of love. He was increasingly irked at the obsessive way she was taking on his children, however. He’d expected it, because he knew Susan and her capacity for love, but he had not expected that their own relationship would be so quickly shifted by the wayside. The free time he both expected and needed from her seemed to be increasingly spent in projects she created for his children. That Tom hadn’t come for the weekend yet seemed only to be another reason to do more for Tiger and Barbara. He wasn’t angry with her. But these four days were theirs alone. They’d gobbled up the privacy so eagerly, with talk and sharing and laughter. Perhaps subconsciously he’d wanted to remind Susan that their first commitment was to each other…

And his desire to claim her, his possessiveness, ran deeper in his feelings for Susan than it ever had in his relationship with any other woman; it was as primitive as the landscape around them, as private as the night, as potent as the arousal he felt just looking at her.

“Griff? What are you thinking about?” From the shadows, Susan had been lazily inhaling the forest smells, the pungent earth and leaves, the hint of smoke and sweet crispness of clean air and darkness. Suddenly aware of the silence, she had glanced at her husband and found Griff staring at her, his silver-blond head framing rough-sculpted features, all shadow and taut stillness by firelight. When he stood up, he was a primitive woodsman from a century ago, brawny shoulders barely contained in a rough woolen shirt, jeans molded to long, muscular thighs. His shadow cast a giant’s figure on the pebbly stream bank, and far into the woods she heard the strange, mournful howl of an animal, primal and hungry.

“Griff?” A shiver touched her. For no reason. Certainly not fear, yet images suddenly crowded her mind when he started stalking toward her, causing her blood to hurry through her veins as she reacted to the man, to the wilderness at night, perhaps to some primitive instinct that struck a responsive chord in her.

He wanted to make love to her. Now. She saw it in his eyes before his hand so much as touched her… He pushed the sleeping bag back from her shoulders and claimed her hands, pulling her up.

His mouth settled down on hers, with all the luxury of length to length. She rose up on tiptoe, willingly caught in the hunter’s snare. He scared the hell out of her when he was like this. It was such damn fun being scared. Danger made her pulse race, quickened her heartbeat. Griff would take, would have, this night, like a warrior coming in from battle, an Indian in from the hunt, a woodsman who had endured months of loneliness. This Griff had a side to his character other than just tenderness and compassion…

One by one, he undid the buttons of her shirt. His palms slid the material off her shoulders. Cold air rushed over her vulnerable flesh…and she suddenly felt terribly sensitive to cold.

He tugged her arms up and wrapped them around his neck, his mouth still hard on hers with a pressure that arched her head back. Over and over, his hands swept the contours of her back, forcing her sensitive breasts against the rough, abrasive wool of his shirt. His tongue stole between her parted lips, probing the inside of her cheek… She was suddenly not so cold.

His hands gradually took a long, slow trail downward, exploring the satin inward curve of her spine, splaying possessively over her bottom, stretching down to stroke the supple muscles of her thighs. His arousal pressed like an announcement between them. Feel it, Susan. No games. No soft seduction.

Yet it was a seduction. His thumb and forefinger twisted the button on her jeans; then his hand stole inside, chasing the material down at the same time that he was caressing her hips and thighs. Her underwear was drying on a bush near the fire; he knew that, yet her total nudity seemed to shock him, setting off a flash fire in his eyes as he looked at her. The sound of his ragged breathing set off an answering response in Susan.

She pulled free, just far enough so that she could reach the buttons of his shirt. Her trembling fingers pulled rather than unfastened; she soon tired of the frustration and groped for the waistband of his jeans. Two could play this game. He wasn’t wearing anything beneath his clothes either; she wanted to feel flesh, just as he did; she wanted to know this man deep inside her. In her heart, she acknowledged a sudden fierce loneliness she hadn’t known was there before, born of the weeks past, of an anxiety over the distance between herself and his children, of a fear that their love had somehow changed as they settled in to the real world of being married and living together and dealing with the problems of his offspring.

These days together in the wilderness had destroyed that distance. Griff was a smart, smart man to have insisted on this time alone with her. She had been opposed to the trip; they had so much to do; she hated leaving everything a mess… Very smart, her Griff.

When her hands kneading the tight, taut skin of his buttocks, she heard a guttural groan from deep in his throat and raised her head to look at him. His pupils were dilated, his brown-black eyes all shine and glaze as he kicked off his pants and shrugged out of his shirt. She felt a shimmering, sheer feminine pleasure at the response she drew from him almost without trying… and she was more than willing to try.

Her eyes swept up and down, up and down, admiring his muscular body naked in the night, his muscles as sinewed as those of the cougars that haunted the woods, his hair the color of the silver mink, his body as virile and bluntly male as the most predatory of all nature’s creatures: man.

He stood still while she studied him; he stood still as she stepped forward again to close that distance and apply the tenderest of silken kisses to his throat. Her fingers skimmed down in deliberate, featherlight attack, sweeping over his arms and shoulders, then his powerful chest, finally teasing more provocatively as a single finger traced the length of all that virility.

“Susan…” She heard the guttural warning; his mood wasn’t playful. His arms reached for her, but she shivered and danced free of him.

“Shall we play hide-and-seek in the woods at night, Griff?” she whispered. She danced yet another step away, her breasts firm and glowing like satin in the firelight, her supple hips all grace in motion…and seduction in invitation. Those clear eyes of hers were full of intoxicating feminine powers, and he exulted in them.

In two steps, he had lifted her high in his arms, her soft laughter echoing long into the night. “You think I’d let you walk out there and risk a wolf taking a sweet little nip out of your fanny, do you?” he growled.

“I’m not afraid.”

“Aren’t you?” he murmured.

The balance of power shifted as he eased her down on the sleeping bag and captured her legs with one of his. His eyes met hers, a dark look of such fierce possession that her breath caught. She was not afraid. Of wolves.

His rough cheek glazed the smooth flesh of breasts already tight with need, already aching for his touch. His whiskered cheek contrasted to the soft texture of his lips, closing first on one breast, then the other, his tongue flicking insistent little messages on her nipples. Her fingers threaded in his hair, splaying in his scalp, encouraging his head that much closer. She was suddenly submissive.

His mouth swept lower, taking in the flat contour of her stomach, hungry for the curve where leg joined torso. Her thigh flexed, of its own volition, wanting to draw him in and hold him, yet she had a terrible feeling he knew her too well. It would happen, but not yet. He wanted to play a very masculine game of let’s-see-who’s-the-master-at-tease; she wanted to say, Silly, silly, Griff. You can have the title. I never cared…

The earth, the stream, the trees, all sent out powerful scents in the night. Susan sent out the faintest, most elusive sweet musk, a fragrance Griff drew in as he breathed, kissing his way down the stretch of her leg, trailing kisses up her side, over the lovely curved hip and waist, under the swell of her breasts.

“Griff…”

He paid no attention, stopping only to smother that whispered cry by touching tongue with tongue. His forefinger traced a leisurely path down her profile-forehead, nose, over those swollen and parted lips, down the vulnerable hollow of her throat to the crevice between her breasts, over her heart, down…

Her whole body shuddered when his finger claimed her moist secrets, his hand cupping that private mount as if laying claim to treasure, inviting the responsive twist of her hips. She whispered something incoherent, almost frantic, and his palm released her. He shifted up again and she thought, Now. Now, Griff…

Instead, his lips took that same lazy path, first exploring her gentle profile. Forehead, nose, throat, the hollow between breasts; his lips loved that hollow. He loved the perfect flat slope of her stomach, the soft, curling mat below; he loved her flesh and scent and shape, every mystery that made her Susan. The need to possess, to own, to take, was sheer lust, a full-blooded male instinct that was raging through him, out of control. Nothing could prevent him from possessing her now. Yet the same need to possess, to claim, to take, was just as fiercely a part of love, and he didn’t raise his lips again until he had felt a long, low quiver tremble through her entire body.

She was still shuddering when he shifted his hips over hers, when she felt his hand beneath her buttocks, lifting her. That first fierce thrust filled her, caused a thousand stars to explode behind her eyes. She cried out, lost somewhere in a wilderness of consuming passion. So powerful, so painfully intense… She felt her sense of self slipping, her sense of being Susan. The rhythm that locked their bodies together denied that there were two; insisted there was only one.

Her cry of ecstasy matched his, but it was Griff’s primal moan that she heard, echoing over and over in the privacy of the night.