“Does that surprise you?”
“A little, since I’m in the arms of Bigfoot.” She smiled up at me. She was cold. Even though it was summertime in Montana, the river didn’t ever warm up like a backyard swimming pool. It ran sharp and crisp and cold.
I walked faster.
The clearing came into view ahead. Good. I could hand her off to the other guides who would patch her up and then go back to pretending my life worked perfectly fine without chaotic women falling into my river.
Simple.
The guide had apparently radioed ahead. I walked over and put her on the back of the ambulance. The EMT started taking her vitals, which kept her quiet. For about a minute. Then she looked up at me with wet hair stuck to the back of her neck. She held out one foot. “I lost a shoe.”
I stared down at her. “You’re worried about the shoe?”
“It was cute. I bought it specifically to wear on the raft.”
I couldn’t have stopped the small smile curling my lips if I’d tried. “How did that work out for you?”
She blinked. Then her entire face lit up.
Oh, that was bad. That was catastrophically bad.
“You do know how,” she announced proudly to everyone standing around.
“What?”
“Smile. You know how to smile.”
“I didn’t smile.”
“You absolutely did.”
I crouched in front of her to look at her leg. The EMT set a kit beside me without a word, got up and left me to it. The secondmy hand wrapped around her thigh she made a sound. Barely there. But I heard it. My eyes lifted slowly to hers. Pink spread across her cheeks.
The cut on her thigh had stopped oozing, which was good, but it needed to be cleaned properly. I forced away those distracting thoughts. I grabbed the scissors and cut her leggings wider before setting out what I needed. I put my hand under her thigh. “This is going to sting.”
“What’s going to —” Then I flushed the wound and she gasped, her hand shooting out and gripping my shoulder, her neatly trimmed nails digging into my flesh. Before she could catch her breath, I picked up the second bottle. I gripped her thigh hard as I poured the alcohol over the cut.
Her other leg jerked, narrowly missing my balls.
“What the hell, Bigfoot?” I ignored her. I patted the wound dry and grabbed the butterfly adhesive strips, pulling her skin together and taping a bandage in place. I sat back on my heels. “Now I’m done.”
She looked down at her leg, then back up at me. “Aren’t you going to kiss it and make it better?”
“What?”
“Kiss it and make it better.”
She said it with complete innocence and an expression that was doing absolutely nothing to convince me it was innocent. The second the word kiss was out of her mouth my brain had gone somewhere else.
Dragging the leggings the rest of the way off. Spreading her thighs wide on that tailgate and showing her exactly how thoroughly I kissed things better, until the whole camp learned how loud she could get. I shut it down hard. I was a grown man. I had functioning self-control. I had lived alone on a mountain for years and this woman had been in my presence for less than an hour.
A hard hand landed on my shoulder from behind. I turned. Jared — owner of the rafting company, my oldest friend, and apparently my current nemesis — stood there grinning. Arms crossed. Entirely too pleased with himself. “Well, Bigfoot. You going to kiss it and make it better?”
“You’re lucky I don’t punch you into tomorrow.” He knew exactly how much I hated being pulled into other people’s emergencies. He also knew what he was looking at. Me being affected by a woman I’d known less than an hour. I could see it in his face. “Hey, Amy,” he said, turning to her. “I’m sorry your experience ended like it did.”
She was frowning at him. “I’m going to expect a full refund. And once I recover, I may leave a review.”
Jared nodded like this was completely reasonable. “I fully expect that. I’d like to give you a reason to try again.” The idea of her coming back up here for Jared’s do-over sat wrong. All the way wrong. “Back off, Jared. She just took a ride down a river she didn’t want.”
