Page 14 of Lost With You
“I’d like to hear one or two.”
“We’ve got three weeks coming. I’ll ration them out.” She swung her legs up and planted her feet on the bench. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she sat sideways, gifting him with her profile. “Have you ever heard about that guy who parachutes off skyscrapers? I’ve interviewed him. I’ve also interviewed a man who lives in Yosemite. I mean,livesin Yosemite. Kills deer and hunts rabbits to eat, shelters in a cave. I keep telling myself I’m going to write it all down someday. Call itTravels Across America. But I never seem to have the time between assignments. This job, it keeps me on my toes.” She pressed her cheek on her knee and looked at him from under those sultry lashes. “Sounds like your Pops’ story would fit right in with all those tall tales.”
“It would.” The music of a chorus of evening bugs suddenly swelled. With the grill lighter, he lit a citronella candle on the picnic table. “He was only a boy when his grandfather took him on a couple of smuggling trips, but he remembered the markers on the path. He was forced to memorize them, he told me, just in case he got lost and had to find his own way home. Landmarks, rock formations, petroglyphs, that kind of thing.”
She looked up from under her lashes, her damp hair lit by the golden sun, letting her silence create a vacuum he couldn’t help but fill with words.
“Here’s what really sparked this expedition.” He rolled the bottom of his beer in the pool of its own condensation. “A couple of years ago, I was doing some research on the French and Indian War, and I found a map folded up in an old history book in the archives of the New York Public Library. It had been drawn by a French explorer hired to figure out how the fur traders were sneaking their wares to the English. The map was quite a find on its own…but I saw something else in it.”
“What?”
“The map included a small drawing of an owl’s head not more than fifty to a hundred miles from where we are sitting right now. A marker for the same sort of journey Pops took as a boy. But the one marker on the map was made nearly two hundred years earlier.”
She lifted her head from her knees. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
“The whole thing has the smell of old parchment, I know. But I’m convinced Pops’ memory is true.” At least it had been back then. “If I can find those landmarks, if I can link them to that map, then Pops wasn’t weaving tales for the amusement of his grandkids. He was regaling us with American folk history.”
“Wow.” She slid her empty beer bottle back on the picnic table. “We’ve got a story here. Youarea romantic, Dylan.”
He squinted toward some far horizon, unwilling to admit to his fatal flaw.
“I have to write this down.” She swiped her phone, stopped the recording, and swung her legs off the bench. “While it’s still fresh.”
He couldn’t look away as she stood up, the hem of her dress shooting down to swish around her knees.
“I assume,” she said, grabbing her empty plate and the bottle of ketchup, “that we’re launching at dawn, Captain?”
“A little later than that. We have to pack the car, lash the canoe, and get to the dock by nine a.m.” He followed her slim back with his gaze as she headed to the kitchen. “Get some rest, Casey.”
You’ll need it.
He doubted he’d sleep a wink.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dress this brawny historian in buckskins, and you might mistake him for a character fromThe Last of the Mohicans…
Casey cut off the mental narrative as she jogged down the country road. Did anyone read James Fenimore Cooper anymore? Probably not. She’d have to dream up another opening line. She’d lost count of how many she’d attempted since she’d closed herself into the bedroom last night. But every time she ventured to describe Dylan MacCabe, she hit a mental wall—or slid into torrid fantasy.
She dragged in a deep breath so she wouldn’t pass out on the last lap of her run on the country trail. Jillian, her therapist, had warned her that her body would eventually come back to singing life.You still have a beating heart,Jillian had insisted.You still have a woman’s needs.Her therapist had been referring to sex, but Casey had crossed that barrier with a minimum of emotional upheaval. She could handle a night’s pleasures. But on a three-week camping trip with Dylan, she couldn’t just slide out of the sleeping bag and make a discreet exit.
She grunted and focused on the ground flying beneath her feet and then on the rush of air in and out of her lungs. This wasn’t the time to second-guess the decision to join the expedition, or churn herself into a frenzy with doubts. She caught sight of the graveled driveway ahead and turned up the path with new determination. She’d committed to this venture. Today, they were launching, and she would be in that canoe.
She was halfway to the front door when she slammed into a man’s solid chest.
“Whoa, Casey!”
She bounced back. Two strong hands clamped around her arms, stilling her recoil. Suddenly, she was inches from the solid chest she’d just been thinking about, as if Dylan had rolled out of the steamy bedroom of her imagination.
“Hey,” she said, stumbling back, seeking balance as an excuse not to look at him. “Am I running late?”
“You were running, all right.” He smelled of shower soap. His worn-to-softness tank showed off the naked bulges of his deltoids. “Hard and fast.”
“I figured I’d do a few miles while you were showering.” She darted around him to step onto the porch. “I’ll shower quickly and be ready to go—”
“Take your time,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s the last hot shower you’ll get for a while.”
She ducked into the house and rushed through the shower anyway, because the shower smelled like his soap, and it was unsettling to be cocooned in the mist that still held that scent. Within twenty minutes, she was outside, carrying the backpack he’d lent her, packed tight with only the stuff she would need. She flung it in the back of the Jeep as he checked the bungee cords that held down the birch bark canoe. He was all business. He didn’t even glance at her cutoff shorts, the loose tank, the peek of the yellow bathing suit, as he locked up the cabin and fired up the Jeep.
