Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2) (11 page)

His oh-so-warm body drew closer, rays of heat and muscle working like a lever that pushed her flat against the floor. She could feel the rubbery flesh of Voodoo Scott protesting underneath her as the real Scott loomed over the top.

She was trapped by Scotts. In front and behind—both of them much too close to her sensitive parts for her not to feel a deep pang between her legs.

“I bet I could sleep a lot better if you were the one curled up against me,” he said. His hand—a heavy, delicious thing—dropped to her thigh. “I miss having you in my bed.”

Nope. Not falling for it. Not giving in. “That’s because you’re a man. Having a woman next to you is the ultimate convenience, like a fridge full of beer and sandwiches built into the headboard.”

His hand squeezed, and even though she had about twelve sweat-wicking layers on, he might as well have been touching bare flesh. Prickles of awareness shot through her, nerve endings on alert as the reassuring weight of him pressed closer. “No, Carrie. It’s you I miss.”

“You miss the pushy girlfriend mucking up all your stuff?”

His fingers slipped higher. “Yes.”

“You miss the constant bickering?”

“Yes.” He was nearing delicate territory now, and her legs—silly, useless fools—kept opening to let him in. It didn’t help that the farther up her thigh he moved, the more he bent over the top of her. They were almost horizontal together, bodies flush, the hard-packed strength of him pulsating its intent deep inside her belly. “Don’t you?”

She sighed. Of course she missed that part. In retrospect, continually arguing with Scott might not have been the fastest way into his life and into his heart, but she liked what it said about her. She liked what it said about
them
. They weren’t the cold absence of affection she’d grown up with. They weren’t a pair of tepid lovers testing the waters. They were messy and loud and pushy and
real
.

Just like her. They made mistakes and crashed in glorious bursts of fire, but they always emerged unscathed from the wreckage.

At least, they used to. Before the actual wreckage of her life had caught up with her and he’d decided it was too high of a price to pay.

“It’s not fair,” she said, and moaned as his hand slipped higher, grazing the sensitive throb at the apex of her thighs and heading deeper in. If she didn’t stop him soon, he was going to get his hands on his voodoo doppelgänger. “I started missing you before you finished shutting the door in my face.”

His fingers grazed plastic, so she did the only thing she could think of—pulled him in for a deep, tongue-twisting kiss. It probably wasn’t the best idea, kissing a man who was already on top of her and had his hand between her legs, but no one had ever accused her of overthinking things.

Nor was she likely to start now. The impression of his body stretched out over hers—crushing her, claiming her—was one she’d never been fully able to shake, and all the sensations came rushing back to her now with painful clarity.

They fit together, she and Scott. When she kissed him, he kissed back, his mouth relentless as his breath sought hers again and again. When she nipped the side of his mouth, half in playfulness, half in protest, he growled until she did it again. When she arched her back, feeling the outline of every hard part of him against her, his…plastic body popped.

“Oh, geez. Oh, shit. Oh, no.” She tried to roll out from underneath him, but he had her pinned to the floor. “Please tell me that wasn’t your head.”

“Neither the head nor the shaft, I’m afraid. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re still fully dressed.” His sleepy eyes sparkled down on her, and if she wasn’t so worried about the state of the doll under her ass, she might have said he looked happy. “But I’m willing to rectify that if you are.”

“I mean it, Scott.” She slapped a hand against his chest, the warm, hard wall of his pecs not moving in the slightest. “Get off. I think I just killed you.”

“You’re constantly killing me,” he said, falling into a moment of tenderness and brushing her hair from her face with a smile. “Day and night. In my life or out of it. You exhaust me, Carrie Morlock, but I can’t seem to quit you.”

She shifted and felt the roll of a spherical object move from the top of her waistband to the small of her back. It
was
his head—and it was definitely detached from the rest of his body.

She’d murdered him. Real-Life Scott was on top of her, gazing at her with a look of longing, willing and hot and hard where his erection pressed against her thigh, and she’d murdered the voodoo doll that controlled his future.

Since he didn’t appear to have any intention of moving, she twisted her back and managed to fish out the rubbery ball that contained his fate. Holding it between her fingers like a bingo counter, she brought it to his attention with a groan. “This is bad.”

“Aha! Is that what you were hiding?” He took the proffered head. “It’s kind of creepy. Is it supposed to be the Joker?”

“No, Scott. It’s you.”

“It doesn’t look anything like me. My eyes aren’t blue.”

She managed to get herself up into a seated position, exposing the rest of the pieces. The doll’s body was still intact, but it had cracked open in the center of his chest, and hairball Mara looked mostly like a piece of dust that had wafted down the empty hallway.

“That’s your body.” She pointed at it with a sinking feeling. It was one thing to mess around with this sort of thing in Lexie’s company, venting her rage in questionably healthy ways, but it was another to let Scott in on the game. It was one he wouldn’t care to play.

But Scott just picked up the rest of the doll, twisting it sideways to get a better look.

“Don’t be ridiculous. How is this my…” He paused as he took in the sight of the red vest, which, though askew, was easily recognizable. “Oh. You have a doll of me. In my vest.”

This was it. This was the end—all over again. The second he realized she’d made a voodoo doll to try and curse his life even more, he’d be out of her lap and back to obstinately loathing her in no time.

“You’re a very strange woman, you know that? Here.” He mashed the disembodied head onto the empty pillar of the neck and handed the doll back to her. It wasn’t an improvement. Voodoo Scott now bore the squashed, cracked look of the undead. “Do you torture him in your spare time?”

“Yes.” There was no use hiding it. “And I make him act out impossible scenarios I want to come true.”

“How interesting. Have you ever considered seeing a therapist?”

“This isn’t funny, Scott. We put a curse on this doll, Lexie and I.”

“You and Lexie did this?”

She nodded.

“You put a curse on a doll in a red vest?”

She nodded again.

“And then you ripped the head off the doll?”

“It was an accident,” she said quickly. “I was trying to invoke some good luck for the mission. I figured we could use it.”

She counted inside her head, starting at ten and working her way down, waiting for the inevitable explosion. It hit at about six and a half.

“Oh, Carrie.” As he was still close enough that it counted as an embrace, Scott’s laugh—long and loud and once one of her favorite sounds in the whole world—shook them both. He even managed to put his arms around her, burying his head in her neck and breathing deep. “Only you would think of wreaking vengeance with the Joker. Only you.”

She stiffened, breaking the shackle of his arms. “Are you kidding me right now?”

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a jerk lately,” he said, clearly misinterpreting her one hundred percent justifiable rage. He was
not
choosing this moment to be cavalier. “I don’t blame you for wanting to pop the heads off dolls in the name of revenge.”

“Don’t you understand? Look at his cracked chest. I shattered him open.”

“It’s nothing. A toy.”

“How can breaking a toy be nothing, but a mirror is grounds for separation?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“It was exactly like that.”

He tried to put his arms around her once again, but she was having none of that. He didn’t get to be patronizing about this. Not when she’d spent the entire past month of her life tiptoeing around him, fearful of doing so much as stepping on a crack in his presence.

She jumped to her feet to avoid another sexually fraught tussle on the ground. Scott followed suit, though at a much more leisurely pace as he unfolded himself.

“Do you have any idea how crazy you sound right now?” he asked.

“Me? I’m the crazy one?” He had no idea how crazy she could get. If he kept looking at her like that—as if she were one cabbage short of a patch—she refused to be held accountable for her actions. “You’re the one who ended an entire relationship in the name of bad luck. You’re the one who
broke my fucking heart
because I washed an article of clothing.”

A spasm of something like pain moved over his features, a flash that disappeared as quickly as it came. “It’s okay. The doll isn’t a big deal.”

“It’s a huge deal.”

“It’s only a toy.”

“It was also only a vest.”

There was that spasm again. This time, it lingered, rendering him soft and vulnerable in ways that weren’t helpful in maintaining her current state of irritation. “It wasn’t the vest, Carrie. Of course it wasn’t that.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“It’s not…” He groaned, a war taking place behind his sleepy eyes. “It’s not what you think. I wasn’t upset about the vest, specifically. It’s more about what the vest represents.”

Carrie had always sucked at symbolism. “Which is what, exactly? The status quo? Your superiority as man? Your refusal to confront your feelings in any way that actually matters? I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to explain it to me in painstaking detail, because from where I stand, you’re just a hypocrite with anger management issues.”

Oh, he wanted to yell at her—she could tell. He wanted to grab her by the upper arms and shake her until she saw sense. He wanted to cover her body with his and force her to forget everything but the way his kisses melted her insides and propelled her toward forgiveness.

It was what he’d always done in the past when things reached this point, these seconds before detonation, this precarious moment of truth they never allowed to boil over.

He would have done it, too—kissed her, shaken her, forced a stalemate that would give them another few weeks of relationship limbo before they cycled back to this exact same place—but the sound of a low-throated cough startled them both.

“I hate to get in the middle of a lover’s quarrel.” Max’s voice sounded from the end of the hallway, his tone as somber as if he were announcing a death. Maybe Scott’s. Possibly hers. “But I thought you’d want to know the sun’s finally up. It’s time to head out.”

Chapter Seven

They couldn’t have picked a more beautiful place to die.

Scott hadn’t spent too much time this far north of Spokane, pushing through the over one million acres of national forest that extended to the Canadian border. There was plenty of wilderness closer to home for him to enjoy, what with all the rivers and woods and lakes that surrounded Spokane, and it always felt like this part of the state was just showing off. Considered the foothills to the Rocky Mountains, there was nothing but undulating hills of evergreens as far as the eye could see. It was a landscape painting done up in rich blues and greens, all of it frosted over with swirls of white that lifted the helicopter and tossed them around like salt in a shaker.

“What was that?” he asked as a rattling sound clanked through the rotors and made the whole helicopter shudder. His hands gripped the sides of his seat hard enough to cause the muscles of his forearms to strain, his fingertips long since grown numb despite the Hestra gloves that covered them. “And are we supposed to be going sideways?”

He was ignored as the crackle of a male voice came through the headset that allowed them to speak over the continual whirring of the blades. “We’re getting close, Carrie. See that peak about thirty miles out?”

“I see it.”

“We were camped near the bottom of that eastern slope, which is where I’d guess Mara would have returned once she realized everyone had gone on without her. The closer you can get us to the base of that mountain, the better.”

“Roger that.”

The helicopter took a nosedive to the right, following the instructions to a tee. They’d been issued from Nate the Park Ranger, an eager and highly freckled young man who sat in the back with Ace and Max, the three of them strapped down and on the lookout for any signs of life below. Nate had been on the original mission with Mara—part of the Abandonment Team, as Scott liked to call it—and he’d been prepared to dislike the much-too-young bastard from the start. But in addition to being brave enough and willing to head out in weather like this, it turned out he was some kind of GPS savant. Despite the fact that he couldn’t be very far into his twenties, he knew this forest—all one million acres—the way Scott knew the different cadences of a dog’s bark.

Another gust of wind lifted them from below, a temporary weightlessness that did little to calm the churning in Scott’s stomach. He clutched the seat harder.

“Would you relax?” Carrie reached over to pry his hands away. As this action required her to let go of the helicopter controls, he didn’t think it was fair of her to make such lighthearted commands. “This is nothing. There’s barely even any wind yet.”

“It doesn’t feel like barely any wind.”

She took her eyes off the horizon to study him, making him wish he hadn’t spoken at all. Not only did he prefer her eyes straight ahead, where they could pick out potentially hazardous outcroppings of rock, but he was afraid that too much direct eye contact would result in another outpouring of emotion between them, a continuation of the hallway confession he’d been so close to making before.

It wasn’t the vest, Carrie. It’s what the vest represents.
Change. Uncertainty. The idea that it wasn’t luck that shaped his life but the cold, hard fear that had encased his heart since he was twelve years old.