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“Great. That takes care of the flora and fauna.”
“Ha-ha, very funny. How far is it now?”
“At a guess, I’d say about five and a half miles.”
She groaned. She’d been rowing steadily ever since the creek widened. Thanks to his constant carping, she was beginning to get the hang of it, but her hands would never be the same. “I don’t suppose you have a pair of gloves, do you?”
“I’m sorry.” Actually, Lyon thought, she wasn’t all that bad. Her form was lousy, but what she lacked in physical strength, she made up for in determination. He should have thought about her hands, though. If he could have got to his knife, she could have hacked off his sleeves and pulled them over her hands like a mitt.
Jasmine felt tears sting her eyes. She hated pain, she really did. She hated itching, hated mosquitoes, hated noxious vines that hated her right back, but most of all, she hated being here in the middle of the wilderness, not knowing where she was or how she was ever going to get back.
She was a coward. She’d always been a coward. After her father left, she and her mother never stayed in the same place more than a year or two. She used to wake up in the middle of the night terrified that she would come home from school and find her mother gone, too, and strangers living in her house.
She leaned forward—from the hips, the way he’d told her—and bumped the oars against the wallowed-out wooden oarlocks. Dammit, she would get him there if it killed her! She refused to be put out in the middle of this damned swamp in the dead of night, without so much as a flashlight.
“Take a break.”
“It won’t help.”
“Do it. I’ve got a handkerchief. Dig it out of my hip pocket, rip it in two pieces and wrap it around your palms.”
She really didn’t want to break her rhythm. And she had one, she really did. He had a lousy disposition. He’d fussed at her constantly, but he’d taught her the rudiments of rowing a boat.
Taught her enough to know that if she never set foot in one of the damned things again, it would be too soon.
“Do it, Jasmine. I don’t want you bleeding all over me.”
“Why, because you’re afraid the scent of fresh blood might attract alligators?” She lost her rhythm. A blade caught the water and jerked at her arm, and she uttered a five-letter word. Tears trickled down her cheeks, making her rash itch all the more.
“At least when I hit the headlines—Actress Lost in Damned Dismal Swamp, Feared Dead—my grandmother won’t recognize my name.”
Three
The sky was beginning to grow pale when Lyon opened his eyes. Being careful not to move, he drew a shallow, experimental breath. He still hurt. Hurt like hell, in fact, and where he didn’t hurt, he ached. The difference was subtle, but it was there.
He toyed with it as his senses came quickly alive. Mental exercises served a purpose when physical exercise was out of the question.
Like now. A fourteen-foot skiff was no place to spend a night. Especially not with a broken back and a knee that was still none too reliable.
Especially not an open skiff. In February. The warm spell was over. The temperature must’ve dropped into the forties last night.
They’d stopped for a rest. Her hands had been hurting. He’d been hurting all over. He’d known there was no hope of reaching camp before dark, and rather than risk taking a wrong turn, he’d let her sleep. And then he’d fallen asleep himself. Not a smart thing to do, but then, his options weren’t exactly limitless.
“Ah, hell,” he muttered, gazing bleary-eyed at the woman still huddled in the stern of the boat. She’d turned up the collar of her shirt, rolled down her sleeves and done her best to cover those long, naked legs with a few rumpled tissues and the flap of her shoulder bag.
“Wake up,” he rasped.
She groaned and tried to draw her knees up to her chin. Her no-longer-whıte shorts weren’t particularly skimpy. They’d been designed to come halfway down her thighs, but when a woman had legs as long as hers, there was still a lot of flesh left exposed to the elements.
Not to mention exposed to the eyes.
“Jasmine, look alive. We’ve got to get some heat going.”
“Turnip therm’stat.”
“Right. You do ıt—you’re the closest.”
She opened one eye. The other one was swollen shut. Shivering, she mumbled something that sounded like “Where Nell ama?”
“By my reckoning, you’re approximately five miles north of Billy’s Landing, about half a mile west of Two Buzzard Ditch, and a mile or so east of Graceland.”
“Oh,.”
She scratched her cheek and then her ankle, and smiled. There was something dangerously disarming about a woman who woke up shivering, scratching, blinking one eye and still managed to smile.
She yawned, rearranging splotched remnants of calamine lotion. “Graceland? I thought that was in Tennessee.” Her voice was early-morning soft. Husky. In another woman, under other circumstances, he might have taken it as an invitation.
With Jasmine he took it as merely easy on the ears.
“Bad joke. Think you can do a few warm-ups without falling overboard? We need to get your blood circulating.”
“Too late. ’S frozen like a raspberry snow cone.”
He yawned, too. And then, unexpectedly, he grinned. Couldn’t recall the last time he’d smiled, especially before breakfast, but she seemed to have that effect on him.
Lyon had come here to be alone. If he had to have company, he’d have preferred a chiropractor or a physical therapist. Instead, he got Jasmine Clancy with her poison ivy and her blistered hands and her world-class legs. He wasn’t sure just what breed of woman she was, but she didn’t belong here. One way or another, he probably ought to get rid of her.
“How’re you doing? Back still broken?” she asked in a voice that reminded him of late nights, rumpled beds and soft women.
“It’s better.” It was worse. A hell of a lot worse, but there was no point in giving her all the bad news at once. “Are you hungry?”
“Starved. I don’t suppose this yacht of yours runs to a galley?”
“Chef’s night out If you can manage to get your hand into my left side pocket, you might find half a chocolate bar. It’ll be messy, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll take it.”
It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded. She eased herself up to a kneeling position, but in doing so, she was forced to straddle his legs. The boat rocked. She grabbed the sides, winced at the pain and waited for things to calm down again.
Lyon waited for her to recover her balance, grab the thing out of his pocket and get the hell off his lap. He would have dug it out himself if he hadn’t been afraid to move anything connected to his back. Which included his arms.
Fine pair they were. He shifted slightly to give her access. Cargo pants had plenty of storage room. He didn’t particularly want her exploring it all.
Cautiously, she dragged one knee alongside his legs and leaned forward to slide one hand into his left side pocket. Her hair tickled his face. It was wilder than ever—probably hadn’t seen a comb in days—and it smelled faintly of...lilac?
Oh, hell, if there was one thing he didn’t need it was a woman who smelled of lilacs. “Come on, come on, we don’t have all day,” he growled.
He was discovering—rediscovering, at least—things about himself that he’d just as soon have left safely buried for another few years.
Such as the fact that the male of the species was about ten parts brain to ninety parts testosterone. If there was one thing he didn’t need screwing up his ten percent at the moment, it was that other ninety percent.
Her fingers fumbled against his groin. He could ick himself for not wearing a shirt with pockets. He could kick himself for not eating the whole damned thing instead of saving half for the trip back to the campsite in case he ran out of energy.
She dug out a knife, a pocket calculator and a shapeless lump that was half a chocolate bar that had melted and stuck to the wrapper. “Don’t you want any? One bite, that’s all I need. Just enough to wake me up. Chocolate has caffeine, doesn’t it?”
“Nah, I don’t want any. You eat it all, you’re the one who’s going to have to get us out of here.”
So then he had to watch while she unwrapped the thing and licked it off the paper. Nearby, a small flock of fish ducks dived for breakfast. A great blue squawked a protest and lifted from the banks, long legs dangling gracefully.
He scowled at the birds and then he scowled at her long, graceful, mud-stained, briar-scratched legs. And then he scowled some more just on general principle. “We’d better get going. If you want to go ashore for a minute, there’s a place just downstream from here where the bank’s pretty clear.”
“I’m thirsty. I don’t suppose you have anything to drink, do you?”
“Warm beer?”
She shuddered. “I’ll wait for coffee, thanks. You will offer me a cup of coffee before I head back to the motel, won’t you?”
He shrugged, which was a painful mistake, but it was all the answer she was going to get. He’d offer her coffee, all right, but she wouldn’t be going back. Not anytime soon.
As dainty as if it were a perfumed finger bowl, she dipped her hands over the sides, swished them around, then wet a tissue and daubed at her face.
Pity. He’d been admiring the rım of chocolate around her mouth. Shifting painfully into the most comfortable position he could achieve for the long trip ahead, he said, “You missed the spot beside your nose. No—left side. Got it.”
And then he had to wait while she took a brush from her purse and set to work on her hair. “I won’t be much longer,” she said when she caught him staring at her. “It’s just that I can think better once I’ve washed and brushed. I’d give anything if I had my toothbrush.”
Closing his eyes, Lyon braced himself to endure the next few hours.
“This is it?” Jasmine shipped the oars. He’d used the phrase earlier and she liked the sound of it. It sounded...brisk. Decisive. If there was one thing she could use about now, it was a shot of brisk decisiveness.
He appeared to be waiting for further comment. When none was forthcoming, he began the painful, awkward business of getting to his feet. She offered to help.
“Just stand back, okay? No, don’t touch me!”
She wasn’t about to touch him.
Well, yes...maybe she had reached out to him, but that was purely instinctive. It would take someone really heartless to stand by and watch a man suffer the way Lion—Lion?—the way he was suffering. “Watch out for the wet place on the floor,” she cautioned.
“Deck.”
“I knew that.”
The look he sent her would have blistered paint. “Hold the boat steady when I start to swing my left leg over the side, will you?”
She grabbed the sides. Her hands hurt like the very devil, but she grabbed and held on until something in the way he was looking at her tipped her off that this wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
Crouched over, one hand on his back, the other gripping the scarred wooden trim that ran all the way around the edge of the boat, he glared at her over his shoulder.
Jasmine glared right back. “I’m doing the best I can. If you don’t like it, hire someone else.”
Under the heavy growth of beard, his face was roughly the color of wet plaster. He was sweating. The temperature had to be somewhere around zero minus ten. Personally, Jasmine had never been colder in her entire life than she’d been last night, and he was sweating.
“Pick up one of the oars,” he said through clenched teeth.
She picked it up. He obviously read her mind, because he said, “If you’re going to knock me in the head, wait until I’m on shore, will you? You don’t want to show up at your motel with a dead man on board. Too much explaining to do.”
She took a deep breath, puffed out her cheeks, which made her face start itching all over again, and said with deceptive mildness, “All right, I’m holding onto the oar. I’m pretty sure this one won’t try to get away, but what about the other one?”
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