Instant Temptation (17 page)

“It’s almost dawn,” she said softly when he didn’t answer. “I want to watch the meadow as light hits.”

“From the ridge?”

“Yeah.”

He grabbed his pack. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the creek to clean up.”

Her eyes tracked the length of his body, which seemed to affect her breathing.

“Not too late to soap my back,” he told her.

She backed up a step. “I think you can handle it.”

“Keeping your distance?”

Her eyes were filled with heat and hunger. For him. Of that, he had no doubt. But there was also a healthy amount of worry and self-preservation there.

And just a tinge of something that stopped him cold.

Fear. He understood it, though he hated it. He’d hurt her once before, all those years ago, and no matter what she said, she hadn’t forgotten. That he hadn’t known, that he would have done things differently if he had known, didn’t change the fact that he’d caused her pain.

“That’s what the instincts are telling me,” she whispered.

He stood up, looking down at her. She’d bowed her head so he couldn’t see her expression. “Harley.”

When she tipped up her face, he ran a gentle finger over her jaw. “Always go with your instincts.”

While TJ was gone, Harley sat before the fire pit and tried to think clearly. Here’s what she knew. She’d alternately resented TJ and crushed on him for years. But the resentment was gone.

And that, she was discovering, was dangerous.

So damn dangerous.

Because it left only the crush.

Unable to sit, she got up and walked. She’d only meant to pace around the fire pit, but her feet took her to the creek.

Bad feet.

TJ stood at the creek’s edge, his back to her. He’d clearly just gotten out. His hair was wet, and a few scattered drops of water dotted his broad, sinewy back.

Even knowing it was rude, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. No shirt, jeans riding low on those narrow hips, hair wet and messy, he sat on a rock to tug on clean socks. The muscles in his back bunched and worked as he pulled on his shoes.

Heat slashed low in Harley’s belly and spread to all her good spots, and she quickly turned back the way she’d come, back to where she’d slept. She plopped onto the log and was still huffing and puffing when TJ silently and suddenly appeared at her side.

Nearly leaping out of her skin, she jumped up and put a hand to her chest.

He smiled. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I was just…nothing.”

A soft laugh said he’d made her as a liar. “I heard you go running like a bat out of hell. What’s the matter, Harley, see something that bothered you?”

Yes. Yes, she was bothered. Hot and bothered. “The big bad wolf.”

He laughed again. “Should have stayed and let me show you what big…teeth I have.”

His hair was still damp and he smelled like soap. He’d pulled on a Wilder Adventures hoodie sweatshirt. He crouched at her side, his arms resting on his thighs, his body language calm and easy. “About last night. Did you hear anything out of the norm?”

She looked into his eyes, the sudden seriousness of his expression making her tummy tighten. “Oh, God. Why?”

He didn’t answer.

“Not another dead coyote?” Please, not another one.

He shook his head and lifted an empty white Styrofoam cup, complete with lid and straw.

“Trash? Where did you find that?”

“On the opposite side of the clearing from where I came in.” He paused, his eyes on hers, still calm, but just behind it, she could sense anger. “It wasn’t here when I left you.”

She let out a low breath. So someone had been with her last night, watching her. “Another hiker?”

His silence said he didn’t know. “Come on. Let’s do your thing, then get the hell out of Dodge.”

They sat on the plateau waiting for the sunrise. Harley pulled out her binoculars. “Still too dark to see down to the meadow floor,” she murmured.

TJ dug into his backpack and handed her…

“Night-vision goggles?” She stared at him, then grinned as she took them. “Okay, I take back all the bad things I ever thought of you.”

“But bad good, right?”

“Ha.” And yes. She slipped on the goggles and hummed in pleasure. “Wow! These are amazing! Think the Forest Service would ever issue these?”

“At nearly four g’s a pop, I doubt it.”

Holy shit. She turned to him, able to see him perfectly. “Why do you have them?”

“It’s a new toy that just came in. Stone brought them to me.” Reaching out, he tugged at a strand of hair. “We like to play.”

No kidding! Even in the dark she could feel the force of his personality, the heat in his dark gaze. “Too bad playing with you is more dangerous than playing with matches.”

He said nothing to that, but the gleam in his eyes suggested her assessment might be true. He turned and looked out into the dark, leaving her to her thoughts.

Suddenly, she had to know. “TJ?”

“Yeah.”

“So we’re doing this, becoming…friends?”

“Yeah.”

He sounded a lot more sure than she felt. But if they managed it, she knew she couldn’t have a better man for the job. He was intelligent, funny, strong hearted, and steady as a rock.

And yet…

And yet she didn’t see them being just friends. Not with this crazy heat between them. Eventually, he’d wear her down with his sexy innuendos, with the sheer magnitude of his hotness.

He’d ruin her for all other men.

She’d never be the same.

He’d ruin her for Nolan, whom she hadn’t thought about all night. With a grimace, she adjusted the goggles and watched for any movement in the meadow below. In the distance she caught sight of three deer, leaping through the bush, bounding gracefully with mind-boggling speed.

Something had startled them.

Probably something that had set sights on them for breakfast. Coyotes?

Or maybe whoever had been drinking from that Styrofoam cup.

She didn’t want something ominous there in her favorite place on earth, but it happened. It happened everywhere, and if she was being honest, it especially happened there in the Sierras, in real time. It was called the circle of life.

They’d seen it yesterday in its most vicious form when they’d come across the shot coyote. The irony didn’t escape her, that the mountains she loved with all her heart, the place that she needed in order to be happy, could also bring death so swiftly.

But the fact remained. Those mountains were deadly, and the rescue last night had almost proven that. Every single season at least one tragedy occurred because someone got stupid, lazy, or lost their concentration while doing something dangerous. Hell, even TJ and his brothers weren’t immune. A year and a half ago, Cam had nearly killed himself in a snowboarding accident. Stone had had a couple of close calls on SR. And TJ had lost Sam.

What would she lose, she wondered.

First you have to actually have something to lose, she reminded herself. Her life hadn’t lent itself to that, but she was working on changing it. She was getting herself where she wanted to be, and for the first time she could honestly say she was trying to move toward a life she could enjoy.

“Deep thoughts?” TJ asked.

“Did you know how much your work would come to define you?”

He looked at her for a long moment. “Are you looking for definition, Harley?”

“Maybe.”

He was quiet a moment. “When we first started Wilder Adventures, it was about getting food in our bellies and keeping a roof over our heads, doing the only thing we knew how to do well. Getting paid to play was a bonus.”

“And now?”

“And now…now I can’t imagine doing anything else.” He paused. “Is that how you feel about wildlife biology?”

It was her turn to pause, as she looked at the blazing glory of dawn. She handed him back the nightvision goggles. “Yes. But I don’t think I have the job right yet.”

He smiled and slung an arm over her shoulders. “You will.”

“You sound so sure.”

“I am.”

The sun continued to slide up the horizon, quietly spectacular. “You must be exhausted,” she murmured. “Why aren’t you home in bed again?”

He turned his head. The bright rays of the sun slanted over him, lighting his hair, his eyes. She braced for the assault on her senses, especially the sensual ones. If he kept it up, he’d wear her down in no time, and she knew it.

“I wanted to walk you out,” he said simply.

The words, softly and genuinely uttered, gave her a flutter a hundred times more devastating than she’d anticipated, and she sighed, softening as she slid a hand around to the back of his neck, her fingers playing with the ends of his unruly, silky hair.

His eyes dipped down to her mouth, then back up again in question.

She lifted her other hand to his chest, and felt the very welcome heat of him, his muscles hard beneath her hand. His heart was steady and strong, like the rest of him. “What’s it going to be like for us?” she asked. “In the real world, I mean. Because there’s all kinds of…friends.”

One corner of his mouth slowly curved up. “Like the naked kind?”

A laugh bubbled out of her at his hopeful tone. “Maybe we should go with the kind that doesn’t necessarily ignore or bicker.”

He let out a breath. “Not as good as Naked Friends.”

No, it wasn’t. And that thought shimmered between them for the rest of the hike back.

CHAPTER 16

Back at the lodge the next day, TJ was sitting at his desk, not at all happy. A few kittens were working on his shoelaces as he went through a mountain of paperwork that Stone had deemed his to handle. Normally he got through such a boring task by fantasizing. The fantasies varied in length and levels of sexual explicitness, depending on his mood. Could be a stacked brunette on her knees beneath his desk one day, or a curvy redhead riding his motorcycle in nothing but thigh-high boots the next.

But today his fantasy wasn’t make-believe. He had a specific face in his head, a very specific woman.

Harley.

In a sleeping bag—

He hissed out a breath when a gray kitten climbed up his leg. He no sooner extracted her claws out of his skin when her sister did the same thing to his other leg.

“Mew.” The soft cry was accompanied by the sweet batting of clear baby blue eyes.

“Try ouch.” He plopped both kittens to the floor. Where was he? Oh yeah, fantasizing about Harley…Doing so was even better since their trip, because thanks to Desolation he knew exactly how her soft skin felt under his fingertips, beneath his tongue. He knew how she squirmed when he kissed the spot beneath her ear, how her breathing changed when he stroked his fingers between her thighs, and he knew how she sounded when she came, those sexy-as-hell breathy little whimpers driving him right out of his mind.

Christ. He shifted in his chair and nearly stepped on a kitten. Bending, he pulled them both out from beneath his desk, set them on his chest, and looked at them.

They stared back up at him solemnly. “I’m not fooled,” he said. “You’re both menaces to society.”

They yawned in innocent tandem. Innocent his ass. They’d destroyed three important files and dumped his trash in the last five minutes alone. With a sigh, he set them back down and they curled up in a pile and went to sleep; cute and dangerous.

Like Harley. He’d told her he could fall hard and deep, and he’d been completely serious.

“TJ? Line two,” Katie called from down the hall. “Prospective hiree.”

They’d had the ad in the paper for weeks, and so far they’d gotten no serious contenders. This guy was no different. Within two minutes TJ figured out he’d never hiked or climbed above seven thousand feet and had no winter experience. That wasn’t going to work, not in the Sierras, where most of their climbs were well over seven thousand feet—try ten thousand—and in certain years, winter could last for six months out of the twelve.

TJ hung up and went back to the Mt. Everest of paperwork in front of him. It wasn’t even noon and already he was bored off his ass. By evening he’d be in the loony bin.

Stone came in and dropped into the chair in front of TJ’s desk. “Little glitch. In two days, Cam and I each have a trek.”

“So?”

“So someone let Annie answer the phone, and she accepted an unscheduled two-day kayak trip down Snake River.”

“And?”

“And you’re going to have to take it.”

“Why is that a glitch?”

“Because it’s the sort of trip that probably we should send Cam on so that Katie could go with him, but he’s already inked on a project, and he was specifically requested.”

“Still not seeing the problem.”

Stone’s eyes were laughing, but his mouth didn’t so much as twitch. “It’s four sorority girls. Cal Berkeley students looking to experience nature on the river. They want to see deer, rabbits, and wildflowers, that sort of thing.”

“Disney does Snake River?”

“Not exactly Disney. Sorority sisters. Which means it’ll be more like Girls Gone Wild in the Wild.”

Ah, hell. They’d been down that road. “You mean they want to be scared shitless while living their version of the Blair Witch project in the big, bad, wild Sierras.”

“Yep.” Stone stopped trying to hide his smile. “And have a big, bad wild trek guide there to protect them.”

“Christ.” TJ shook his head. Those trips had been lots of fun several years back, but somewhere along the way they’d lost their entertainment value. “I’m not taking that one alone.”

“Agreed,” Stone said, opening his phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Booking you a co-guide. A biologist and a photographer. Harley,” he said when TJ just stared at him.

TJ opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. “Just two nights?”

“Surely you can handle four coeds for that long.”

“Yeah.” Except it wasn’t the coeds that worried him.

Harley was once again attempting to balance her bank account when her cell phone vibrated. It’d been buzzing on and off all day. Seemed she and TJ had been seen coming off the mountain together and word had gotten out. Just about everyone she knew had called her to ask if TJ Wilder was as good as women claimed.