Chapter Seven

Masculine urges governed him now. His mouth moved over hers in a deep, long, questing kiss while his body settled heavily against hers. Angling his head first to one side, then the other, he made heated love to her mouth with his greedy tongue.

Shock was Rusty’s initial reaction. His wonderful nakedness was a stunning surprise. Then, before she could recover from that, she was swept up into his tempestuous kiss.

Her next reaction was spontaneous longing. It surged up through her middle, overwhelming her heart and mind, obliterating all else but the man who was ravishing her mouth so expertly. Her arms encircled his neck and drew him closer. Reflexively she arched against him, bringing her body in contact with his hard, rigid flesh.

Groaning in near pain, he buried his face in her neck. “God, it’s so full it’s about to burst.”

“What do you want, Cooper?”

He laughed harshly. “That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“I know; but, what do you want me to do?”

“Either touch me all over or don’t touch me at all.” His breath struck her face in hot, rapid gusts. “But whatever you decide, decide now.”

Rusty hesitated only half a heartbeat before she ran the fingers of one hand up through his hair and settled them against his scalp. She used the other to comb through the crisp hair on his chest, massaging the muscles that had beguiled her.

Their lips met in another rapacious kiss. He ran his tongue over her lower lip, then drew it between his lips and sucked it lightly. The sheer sexuality of it electrified her. He took her moaning whimper as encouragement and began kissing his way down her throat and chest. He wasn’t a man to ask permission. Boldly he lowered his hand to her breast, cupped it, and pushed it up.

“I’ve been going out of my mind wanting you,” he rasped. “I thought I’d go insane before I touched you, tasted you.”

He opened his mouth over the smooth flesh that swelled above her tank top. He kissed it fervently, applying enough suction to draw it up against his teeth. He tickled it with his tongue at the same time he unhurriedly whisked his thumb back and forth across her nipple. When it began to respond and grow hard, he accelerated that fanning caress until Rusty was almost delirious.

“Stop, Cooper,” she gasped. “I can’t breathe.”

“I don’t want you to be able to breathe.”

He lowered his head and, through the cloth of her tank top, flicked his tongue against her raised nipple, playfully nudging it. Rusty’s heels ground into the bed beneath her and her back came off it. But even that revealing response didn’t satisfy him.

“Say you want me,” he said in a low, vibrating voice.

“Yes, I want you. Yes, yes.”

Driven by a wild, uncontrollable hunger, heedless of the consequences, she pushed him back and became the aggressor. Her lips moved down his throat and over his chest and stomach, striking as randomly as raindrops on parched earth. Each time her mouth touched his hair-smattered skin, she whispered his name. It became like a prayer, growing in fervency with each kiss.

“You’re beautiful, beautiful,” she whispered over his navel. Then, moving her head lower and rubbing her cheek in the hair that grew dense and dark, she said with a sigh, “Cooper.”

The passion she’d unleashed stunned him. He tilted his head up and gazed down at her. Her hair was sweeping across his belly. Her breath was disturbing his body hair. The love words she was chanting had more erotic rhythm than any he’d ever heard. Her lips...God, her lips...were leaving dewy patches on his skin.

Her head moving over him was the most erotic, most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. And it scared the hell out of him. He pushed her away from him and rolled off the bed. Standing at the side of it, he trembled visibly, swearing beneath his breath.

Hard, passionate, mindless coupling he could handle, but not this. Not this. He didn’t want any real yearning and feeling and emotion to be involved, thank you. He’d done every sensual thing that was physically possible to do with a woman. But no woman had ever expressed such honest longing. What Rusty had done suggested an intimacy between them that went beyond the physical.

He didn’t need that. No romance. No love. No thanks.

He was temporarily responsible for Rusty Carlson’s survival, but he damned sure wasn’t going to assume responsibility for her emotional stability. If she wanted to mate, fine, but he didn’t want her fooling herself into thinking that it meant something more than physical gratification. She could do whatever she wanted to with his body. He would permit, even welcome her, to indulge her most carnal desires. But that’s where it stopped. No one was allowed to trespass on his emotions.

Rusty stared up at him, bewildered and hurt. “What’s wrong?” Self-conscious now, she raised the sheet up to her chin.

“Nothing.”

He crossed the room and tossed another log on the fire. It sent up a shower of sparks that threw a brief, but bright, glow into the room. In that light, she saw that he was still fully aroused.

He saw that her eyes were inquiring and disillusioned. “Go to sleep,” he said crossly. “The wolves are gone. Besides, I told you they can’t hurt you. Now stop being a crybaby and don’t bother me again.”

Returning to his own bed, he pulled the covers up around his ears. In seconds he was drenched with sweat. Damn her. His body was still on fire.

Damn her, why had she responded that way? So honestly. With no coyness. No affectation. Her mouth had been so receptive. Her kisses so generous. Her breasts so soft and her nipples so hard.

He clenched his teeth against the memories. Was he a fool? A damn fool for not taking what she had offered so unconditionally?

But that was the hitch. It wasn’t unconditional. Otherwise he’d be lying between her silky thighs now instead of in a pool of his own sweat. That dazed expression on her face had told him that it meant more to her than simple rutting. She was reading things into it that he would never be able to deliver.

Oh, he could imbed himself deeply into that sweet feminine body and succeed in pleasing both of them physically. But he couldn’t feel, and that’s what she wanted. Maybe even what she deserved. He didn’t have it to give. His heart was the Sahara of emotional wastelands.

No, better to hurt her now and get it over with. Better to be a bastard now than to take advantage of the situation. He didn’t engage in long-term affairs. Certainly not in anything more. A relationship between them could go nowhere once they were rescued.

Until then, he’d live. Contrary to popular myth, a man couldn’t die from being perpetually hard. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but he’d live.

The following morning, Rusty’s eyes were so swollen from crying that she could barely open them. With an effort, she pried them apart and noticed that the cabin’s other bed was empty. The covers had already been neatly smoothed into place.

Good. He wouldn’t notice her puffy eyes until she had had a chance to bathe them in cold water. The weakness she’d exhibited last night made her furious with herself. Unreasonably, the crying wolves had frightened her. They personified all the threats surrounding her and made the precariousness of her situation very real.

For some inexplicable reason, her terror had manifested itself in desire. Cooper had responded. Then she had. Thank heaven he’d come to his senses before something drastic had happened.

Rusty only wished that she had been the one to come to her senses first. He might erroneously think that she’d wanted him—when in fact, what she had wanted was someone. He was just the only one around. And if he thought anything else, he was sorely mistaken.

Imitating him by making her bed—never let it be said that he was a superior survivor—she went to the sink and pumped enough water to bathe her face and brush her teeth. She dressed in the same pair of slacks she’d worn yesterday—air conditioning provided by Jack the Ripper, she thought peevishly—but put on a fresh flannel shirt. She brushed her hair and tied it back with a shoelace. It was when she was pulling on her socks that she realized she had been moving about without the aid of her crutches. There was very little soreness left in her leg. They might not be pretty, but Cooper’s stitches had worked to heal her injury.

Not wanting to feel any kindness toward him, she moved to the stove and fed short sticks of firewood into it. She filled a kettle with water and spooned coffee into it, sadly thinking about the automatic coffee maker with the built-in digital timer that she had in her kitchen at home.

Forcibly tamping down a wave of homesickness, she began making a breakfast of oatmeal. Reading the directions on the side of the cylindrical box that she’d found among the food supplies, she was glad to discover that oatmeal didn’t require any cooking skills beyond boiling water and pouring in the correct portion of oats.

Unfortunately her guess was off a trifle.

Cooper came stamping in and without preamble demanded, “Have you got breakfast ready yet?”

None too charitably, she answered, “Yes. Sit down.”

She wanted to serve him a steaming bowl of creamy oatmeal like the ones in the commercials on TV. Instead, when she lifted the lid on the pot, she gazed down into a gooey mess about the color and consistency of setting concrete, except lumpier.

Dismayed, but determined not to show it, she squared her shoulders and dug out two spoonfuls. When she dumped them into the tin bowls, they landed in the bottom of them like lead. She carried the bowls to the table, set them on the rough wood plank with forceful disdain, and took her chair across from him.

“Coffee?” he said.

She bit her lip in consternation, but got up, poured their coffee and returned to the table without saying a single word. She let her body language convey her dislike for his lord-of-the-manor attitude.

He scooped up a bite of the oatmeal and weighed it in his spoon, eyeing her skeptically. Silently, she challenged him to say anything derogatory about her oatmeal. He put the bite in his mouth.

As though instructing him on what to do with it once it was there, Rusty took a bite of hers. She almost spat it out immediately. Instead, knowing he was watching her with his eagle eyes, she chewed it. It seemed to expand instead of get smaller. Finally she had no recourse but to swallow it to get rid of it. Her stomach must have thought she was eating golf balls. She swilled down a scalding gulp of coffee.

Cooper’s spoon clattered against his bowl. “Is this the best you can do?”

Rusty wanted to come back with, “Was last night the best you could do?” But she reasoned that aiming such an insult at a man’s lovemaking abilities might be justifiable grounds for homicide, so she judiciously said, “I don’t cook that much at home.”

“Too busy flitting from one expensive, fancy restaurant to another, I guess.”

“Yes.”

Making a terrible face, he forced down another swallow of the foul stuff. “This isn’t that presalted, presweetened oatmeal that comes in the cute little packages with teddy bears and bunnies on them; this is the real stuff. Add salt to the water next time. Use only about half as much oatmeal, and then sprinkle sugar over it. But not too much. We’ve got to ration our supplies.”

“If you know so much about cooking, Scoutmaster, why don’t you do it?” she asked sweetly.

He shoved his bowl aside and propped his forearms on the table. “Because I’ve got to do the hunting and fishing and firewood cutting. But, now that I think about it, cooking is a whole lot easier. Want to swap? Or do you plan to make me do all the work while you lounge around and watch your fingernails grow back?”

In a flash and a scraping sound of wood on wood, Rusty was out of her chair and leaning across the table. “I don’t mind doing my share of the work and you know it. What I do mind is having my best efforts criticized by you.”

“If this is any indication of your best efforts, we’ll be dead of starvation inside a week.”

“I’ll learn to do better,” she shouted.

“It can’t be soon enough for me.”

“Oh!”

She spun away and when she did, the flannel shirt, which she’d left unbuttoned, flared open. Cooper’s arm shot out and grabbed her arm.

“What’s that?” Reaching inside the open shirt, he pulled down the strap of her tank top.

Rusty followed the direction of his gaze down to the slight discoloration on the upper curve of her breast. She looked at the round bruise, then lifted her eyes up to his. “That’s where you...kissed...” Unable to go on, she made a helpless gesture with her hands. “Last night,” she added huskily.

Cooper snatched his hand back, as guilty as Adam when caught sampling the forbidden fruit. Rusty could feel the blush rising in her neck. It spread as evenly and thoroughly as his eyes were moving over her. He noticed the rosy abrasions that his whiskered jaw had made around her mouth and against her face and throat. He grimaced with regret and raised his hand to his chin. When he rubbed it, the scratching noise filled the silence.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Does it...do they hurt?”

“Not really.”

“Did it, you know, when...?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t notice then.”

They quickly glanced away from each other. He moved to the window. It was drizzling outside. Occasionally a pellet of sleet would ping against the glass.

“I guess I should explain about last night,” he said in a low, deep voice.

“No. No explanation is necessary, really.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m impotent or anything like that.”

“I know you’re not impotent.”

His head snapped around and their gazes locked. “I don’t guess I could keep it a secret that I was ready and able.”

Rusty swallowed with difficulty and lowered her head. “No.”

“That leaves willing.” She kept her head bowed. “Well, aren’t you even curious as to why I didn’t go through with it?” he asked after a lengthy moment.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t curious. I only said that you didn’t have to explain. We’re strangers, after all. We owe each other no explanations.”

“But you wondered.” He pointed an accusing finger at her. “Don’t deny that you wondered why I didn’t finish it.”

“I assumed that there is someone back home. A woman.”

“No woman,” he barked. At her shocked expression, he smiled crookedly. “No man, either.”

She laughed uneasily. “That never occurred to me.” The injection of humor didn’t last. His smile inverted itself into a frown. “I don’t make sexual commitments.”

Her chin went up a notch. “I don’t remember asking for one.”

“You didn’t have to. If we... If I... With just the two of us here, for God knows how long, that’s what it would amount to. We’re already dependent on each other for everything else. We don’t need to make the situation any more complicated than it already is.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said breezily. She had never taken rejection very well, but neither had she ever let her hurt feelings show. “I lost my head last night. I was frightened. More exhausted than I realized. You were there, you did the humane thing and rendered comfort. As a result, things got out of hand. That’s all there was to it.”

The lines running down either side of his mouth pulled in tighter. “Exactly. If we’d met anywhere else, we wouldn’t have looked at each other twice.”

“Hardly,” she said, forcing a laugh. “You wouldn’t exactly fit in with my cosmopolitan crowd. You’d stick out like a sore thumb.”

“And you in your fancy clothes would be laughed off my mountain.”

“So, fine,” she said testily.

“Fine.”

“It’s settled.”

“Right.”

“We’ve got no problem.”

One might wonder, then, why they were facing each other like pugilists squaring off. The air was redolent with animosity. They’d reached an agreement. They’d figuratively signed a peace treaty. But by all appearances they were still at war.

Cooper was the first to turn away and he did so with an angry jerk of his shoulders. He pulled on his coat and picked up his rifle. “I’m going to see what the stream has to offer in the way of fish.”

“Are you planning to shoot them?” She nodded at his rifle.

He frowned at her sarcasm. “I rigged up a trotline while you were languishing in bed this morning.” He didn’t give her time to offer a rebuttal before he added, “I also started a fire under that caldron outside. Do the laundry.”

Rusty followed his gaze down to the tall pile of dirty clothes and looked at it with unconcealed astonishment. When she turned back to him, the spot he’d been standing in was empty. She hurried to the door as quickly as her limp would allow.

“I was going to do the laundry without you telling me to,” she shouted at his retreating back. If he heard her, he gave no indication of it.

Cursing, Rusty slammed the door shut. She cleared the table. It took her almost half an hour to scrub clean the pot she’d cooked the oatmeal in. Next time she would remember to pour hot water in it as soon as she’d spooned the oatmeal out.

She then attacked their pile of dirty clothes with a vengeance. By the time he came back, she wanted to be finished with the chore she’d been summarily assigned. It was mandatory that she prove to him that last night’s breakdown was a fluke.

After putting on her coat, she carried the first load of clothes outside and dropped it into the caldron. Previously, she had thought that such black iron pots suspended over smoldering coals existed only in movies. She used a smooth stick to swish the clothes around. When they were as clean as she thought they’d get, she lifted them out of the water with the stick and tossed them into a basket that Cooper had washed out the day before.

By the time she’d finished washing all the clothes using this archaic method, her arms were rubbery with fatigue. And by the time she had wrung them out and hung them up to dry on the wire that stretched from the corner of the house to the nearest tree, her arms felt as if they were about to fall off. Not only that, her wet hands were nearly frozen, as was her nose, which dripped constantly. Her leg, too, had begun to ache again.

A rewarding sense of accomplishment helped relieve some of her miseries. She took comfort in the thought of having done her job well. Once again inside the cabin, she warmed her hands by the fire. When circulation returned to them, she tugged off her boots and wearily climbed onto her bed. If anyone deserved a nap before dinner, it was she.

Apparently she’d been in a much deeper sleep than she had planned on. When Cooper came barging through the door shouting her name, she sprang up so suddenly that her head reeled dizzily and yellow dots exploded in front of her eyes.

“Rusty!” he shouted. “Rusty, did you— Dammit, what are you doing in bed?” His coat was open, his hair wild.

His cheeks were ruddy. He was breathing hard, as though he’d been running.

“What am I doing in bed?” she asked around a huge yawn. “I was sleeping.”

“Sleeping! Sleeping! Didn’t you hear the plane?”

“Plane?”

“Stop repeating every damn word I say! Where’s the flare gun?”

“The flare gun?”

He was all but foaming at the mouth. “Where’s the flare gun? There’s a plane buzzing overhead.”

Her feet hit the floor. “Is it looking for us?”

“How the hell should I know?” He tore through the cabin, uprighting everything he laid his hands on in his frantic search for the flare gun. “Where is that...here!” Brandishing the gun, he raced outside, leaped over the porch, and scanned the sky. In stocking feet, Rusty hobbled after him.

“Do you see it?”

“Shut up!” He cocked his head to one side while he listened carefully. The unmistakable hum of the engine reached them at the same time. They turned simultaneously and were met with a dismal sight.

It was an airplane, all right. Obviously a search plane, because it was flying low. But it was flying in the opposite direction. Firing the flares now would serve no purpose except to waste them. Two pairs of eyes remained on the diminishing speck until it grew too small to see and the whine of the engine could no longer be heard. It left a deafening silence in its wake. As the noise had died, so had their chances for a probable rescue.

Cooper came around slowly. His eyes looked cold and colorless and so laden with murderous intent that Rusty took a step backward.

“Just what the hell were you doing asleep?”

Rusty preferred him shouting. Ranting and raving she knew how to deal with and respond to. This soft, hissing, sinister-as-a-serpent voice terrified her. “I...I finished the wash,” she said hastily. The words tripped over themselves. “I was exhausted. I had to lift—”

It suddenly occurred to her that she owed him no stuttering apologies. From the beginning, he’d assumed charge of the flare gun. It hadn’t been out of his possession since they’d left the wrecked aircraft.

Belligerently, she placed her hands on her hips. “How dare you blame this on me! Why did you go off without the flare gun?”

“Because I was mad as hell this morning when I left. I forgot it.”

“So it’s your fault the flare wasn’t fired, not mine!”

“It was your fault that I was so damn mad when I left.”

“If you can’t control your short temper, how can you expect me to?”

His eyes turned dark. “Even if I’d had the gun and fired it, they could have missed it. But they damn sure could have seen smoke from our chimney. But, no. You needed a beauty rest. So you went to sleep and let the fire burn out.”

“Why haven’t you built a signal fire, a big one, one a potential rescuer couldn’t miss?”

“I didn’t think I’d need one. Not with a chimney. Of course I didn’t count on you taking afternoon naps.”

She faltered, then said defensively, “Chimney smoke wouldn’t have attracted their attention anyway. That’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

“This far off the beaten track it is. They would have at least circled around to investigate.”

Rusty groped for another valid alibi. “The wind is too strong for a column of smoke to form. Even if the fire had been going, they wouldn’t have spotted our smoke.”

“There was a chance.”

“Not as good a chance as seeing a flare, if you had had the gun with you.”

It would have been prudent not to point out his dereliction of duty at that particular moment. His lower lip disappeared beneath his mustache and he took a menacing step forward. “I could easily murder you for letting that plane go by.”

She tossed her head back. “Why don’t you? I’d rather you do that than keep harping about my shortcomings.”

“But you provide me with such a wealth of material. You’ve got so many shortcomings that if we were stranded here for years I would never get around to harping on all of them.”

Her cheeks grew pink with indignation. “I admit it! I’m not qualified to live in a rustic cabin in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t a lifestyle I chose for myself.”

His chin jutted out. “You can’t even cook.”

“I’ve never wanted to or needed to. I’m a career woman,” she said with fierce pride.

“Well, a helluva lot of good your career is doing me now.”

“Me, me, me,” Rusty shouted. “You’ve thought only of yourself through this whole ordeal.”

“Ha! I should be so lucky. Instead I’ve had you to think about. You’ve been nothing but an albatross.”

“It was not my fault that my leg got hurt.”

“And I suppose you’re going to say it wasn’t your fault that those two men went dotty over you.”

“It wasn’t.”

“No?” he sneered nastily. “Well, you haven’t stopped putting out signals that you’d like to have me in your pants.”

Later, Rusty couldn’t believe she’d actually done it. She’d never guessed that she had a latent violent streak. Even as a child, she’d always given in to other children to avoid a confrontation. By nature she was a pacifist. She’d never been physically aggressive.

But at Cooper’s intentionally hurtful words, she launched herself at him, fingers curled into claws aimed for his smirking face. She never reached him. She came down hard on her injured leg. It buckled beneath her. Screaming with pain, she fell to the frozen ground.

Cooper was beside her instantly. He picked her up. She fought him so strenuously that he restrained her in an armlock. “Stop that or I’ll knock you unconscious.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?” she asked, breathless from her efforts.

“Damn right. And I’d enjoy it.”

Her struggles subsided, more out of weakness and pain than capitulation. He carried her indoors and set her down in the chair near the fire. Casting her a reproachful look, he knelt on the cold hearth and painstakingly coaxed the fire back to life.

“Does your leg still hurt?”

She shook her head no. It hurt like hell, but she’d have her tongue cut out before admitting it. She wasn’t going to speak to him, not after what he’d said, which was patently untrue. Her refusal to speak was childish, but she clung to her resolution not to, even as he separated her torn pants leg, rolled down her sock, and examined the zigzagging incision on her shin.

“Stay off it for the rest of the day. Use your crutches if you move around.” He patted her clothes into place, then stood up. “I’m going back to get the fish. I dropped them in my pell-mell rush to the cabin. I hope a bear hasn’t already made them his dinner.” At the door he turned back. “And I’ll cook them if it’s all the same to you. They look like good fish and you’d probably ruin them.”

He slammed the door behind him.

They were good fish. Delicious, in fact. He’d cooked them in a skillet until they were falling-off-the-bones tender, crusty on the outside and flaky on the inside. Rusty regretted passing up the second one, but she wasn’t about to devour it ravenously, as she had done the first. Cooper added insult to injury by eating it when she refused it. She wished he would choke on a bone and die. Instead, he complacently licked his fingers, smacking noisily, and patted his stomach.

“I’m stuffed.”

Oh, boy, did she have some excellent comebacks for that leading line. But she maintained her stony silence.

“Clean up this mess,” he said curtly, leaving the dirty table and stove to her.

She did as she was told. But not without making a terrible racket that echoed off the rafters. When she had finished, she threw herself down on her bed and gazed at the ceiling overhead. She didn’t know if she were more hurt or angry. But whichever, Cooper Landry had coaxed more emotion from her than any other man ever had. Those emotions had run the gamut from gratitude to disgust.

He was the meanest, most spiteful human being she’d ever had the misfortune to meet, and she hated him with a passion that appalled her.

True, she had begged him to get into bed with her last night. But for comfort, not sex! She hadn’t asked for it; she hadn’t wanted it. It had just happened. He was bound to realize that. His puffed-up, colossal ego just kept him from admitting it.

Well, one thing was for certain: from now on she was going to be as modest as a nun. He’d see the skin of her face, possibly her neck, surely her hands, but that was it. It wasn’t going to be easy. Not living together in this—

Her thoughts came to an abrupt halt as she spied something overhead that provided the solution to her problem. There were hooks over her bed, exactly like the ones Cooper had used to drape the curtain in front of the bathtub.

Filled with sudden inspiration, she left the bed quickly and retrieved an extra blanket from the shelf against the wall. Completely ignoring Cooper, who she knew was watching her covertly, she dragged a chair across the floor and placed it beneath one of the hooks.

Standing on the chair, she had to stretch her calf muscles—more than they’d ever been stretched in aerobics class—in order to reach the hook, but eventually she managed it. Moving the chair directly beneath another hook, she repeated the procedure. When she was done, she was left with a curtain of sorts around her bed, which would give her privacy.

She shot her cabin mate a smug glance before she ducked behind the blanket and let it fall into place behind her. There! Let him accuse her of asking for “it.”

She shuddered at the memory of the crude thing he’d said to her. Add uncouth to all his other disagreeable traits. She undressed and slid into bed. Because of her nap, she couldn’t fall asleep right away. Even after she heard Cooper go to bed and his steady breathing indicated that he was fast asleep, she lay there awake, watching the myriad flickering patterns the fire cast on the ceiling.

When the wolves began to howl, she rolled to her side, covered her head with the blanket, and tried not to listen. She clamped her finger between her teeth and bit down hard to keep from crying, to keep from feeling lost and alone, and to keep herself from begging Cooper to hold her while she slept.