Page 61 of I Do, I Do, I Do
“Ben,” she said, speaking rapidly. “Thank you for saving my life at the risk of your own.” He could have bobbed up under the ice and drowned before breaking free. The frigid temperature could have paralyzed him and cost him his life. “I’m forever grateful. I…I was thinking about you right before I fell into the water.” This new femme fatale persona was amazingly brazen and brave.
Her tinted glasses made his eyes flash cobalt blue, and he looked so handsome that he stopped her breath in her throat.
“I was thinking how foolish I’d been to worry about the impropriety of us seeing each other. We’re friends, after all. At least I think—I hope we’re friends,” she added, feeling flustered. She was new at femme fatale assertiveness.
His hands opened and closed, and she had a sudden light-headed notion that he wanted to take her into his arms. “If I have my way, you and I are going to be more than friends,” he said in a low, intimate voice that almost made her swoon.
“Ben? Juliette?” Clara called to them as she retied the scarf that held down her hat and protected her mouth and nose. “The others will be waiting.”
Clara’s intrusion reminded Juliette that she and Ben could never be more than just friends. “I’m content with your friendship,” she murmured in a voice filled with regret. She wished they really could be more than friends. She loved his easy confident stance and the way his jacket emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. “I wonder how you’d look without that awful shaggy beard.” Dismay rounded her lips. “I didn’t mean…What I meant was…”
He laughed and then grinned at her. “If you don’t like the beard, it’s as good as gone.”
“Oh, but I didn’t say that. I just—”
Clara took one of her arms, and Zoe took the other. “We’re going.” Clara looked over her shoulder. “Ben Dare, do we have to drag you along, too?”
“I hope you ladies enjoyed a good night’s sleep,” Ben said, falling in behind them. “It’s going to be a long, hard day.”
The first time Zoe explained sledding, Juliette had listened in horror. The second time through, she had committed Zoe’s instructions to memory. She had promised herself that running along behind a dogsled wouldn’t be as awful as it sounded.
But it was. To begin with, she could barely see over the four hundred pounds of goods piled on the sled she guided. Until she realized the dogs would follow the sleds ahead, she worried that she couldn’t see well enough to guide them effectively, assuming that she could guide them at all. In rapid order she learned that a more important concern was keeping up with the others.
After the sled shot forward, pulling out of her grip, and she fell flat on the ice, Tom again showed her how to run. Not on her tiptoes, as she’d tried to do, but flat-footed in a rhythmic side-by-side, almost shuffling-forward motion. Once she practiced, she discovered she could maintain a pace that was faster than she would have believed herself capable of setting.
During the first hour her thoughts vacillated between worrying how thick the ice was to feeling self-conscious about Ben observing her waddling run.
In the second hour, she watched sleds with blankets rigged as sails zip past her, and envied the sailors because they could stand on the back runners and let the wind carry them.
When they stopped at noon for hot coffee, she asked Tom why they couldn’t have sails, too.
“When the wind dies you’ll see why the dogs are a better choice for the long run.” Extending a paddle over the flames of a small hot fire, he toasted a slice of bread and cheese. “Without wind, the men will have to pull the sleds themselves.”
“How are you little ladies doing?” Bear Barrett asked. His voice boomed across the lake, and a few people looked their way. “Are your legs holding up?”
Gentlemen didn’t mention legs in the presence of ladies, but Juliette liked Bear just the same. Initially, his size and scarred face had frightened her, but now she thought of him as a cheerful and kind man. He made her think of a shaggy-haired Viking, golden and warlike in his zest for life, intensely loyal to those of his own tribe.
When Tom shouted and halloed to another party, waving them toward the fire, Juliette’s heart squeezed in her chest. The party was made up of men. They would have seen her naked on the shore or would certainly have heard about it.
Bear studied her expression before he dropped a huge hand on her shoulder. “No one is going to say one damned word about you falling through the ice,” he said gently, with surprising tact.
Her lip trembled, and she spoke in a whisper. She would die of humiliation if anyone referred to her nakedness. “But what if they do make a comment?”
“Then Ben Dare is going to whup the innards out of them. Ben put out the word. If anyone upsets you, they’ll answer with blood and bruises, by God. And me and Tom will be standing right behind Ben, ready to step in if he wants a little assistance.”
“Ben did that?” Turning toward the sleds, she watched him tying a new set of burlap bags over the dog’s feet to protect their paws from patches of jagged ice.
The party of men drawing up to the fire were additional clients of Tom’s. Juliette caught them sliding glances in her direction, but as Bear had promised, none of them uttered an impolite word.
Learning that Ben was willing to fight any man who offended her cast him as more of a hero than she already believed he was. This turn of mind surprised her. Until this journey Juliette hadn’t known the sort of men who engaged in violence and hadn’t wanted to. She felt certain that Jean Jacques would never have joined the brawl on the shore.
But the men around her didn’t shy from physical confrontation or disdain it. They were quick to punish insult or offense—and to protect their women. Juliette liked the way their hardness made her feel safe and cherished and respected in a way that good manners alone could not accomplish.
“I should be ashamed of myself,” she muttered. Some of her new attitudes were not for the better.
“For what?” Zoe asked, looking unhappily down at her boots. “I think I’m getting a blister.”
“For condoning violence.”
