Page 65 of Puppy Love

He reached a hand down to help Sophie to her feet, pausing just long enough to meet her eye with a look of mingled pleasure and embarrassment. She could tell he wanted to say something that would rob the moment of awkwardness, but there was no opportunity.

Sophie found she didn’t mind too much. This…conversationwould hold.

“I guess you’d better take me to him,” Harrison said, giving in with a sigh. “But I swear to everything that man holds dear, if he’s not bleeding out somewhere at the bottom of a ravine, I’m going to truss him up and toss him in the back of my truck for the rest of this trip. And you’ll be back there with him, Sophie, if you don’t stop laughing.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, not sorry at all—not even when Jessica relaxed enough to laugh with her.

“I’d say it’s just a muscle contusion, but you’re our best medic,” Jessica said. “I really am sorry. It looks like you were—”

“There’s no need to finish that sentence,” Harrison said, but it was too late. Any and all fear Jessica may have felt at interrupting her superior in the middle of frolicking in the wilderness had all but disappeared.

I should probably feel guilty for ruining his reputation, Sophie thought. But she didn’t. Not when her body was still thrumming with the memory of his touch.

Not when she had high hopes that, this time, the wall was so far gone she could get him to touch her again.

Chapter 15

“Your card is a four of hearts,” Sophie said, her face lit by firelight and a shy smile. “Either that or the queen of spades, but I think Marcus has that one.”

“Goddammit, she’s right again!” Derek thumped his good foot on the hard-packed earth. His other not-so-good one was elevated and had an ice pack pressed against the calf.

A muscle contusion, just as Jessica had suspected. A muscle contusion that Harrison could only consider the best—and worst—timed injury known to mankind. Five minutes later, and he had no doubts that he would have fulfilled Sophie’s wishes right then and there.

On the ground. In the cold. Unaware of anything except the suppleness of her every goddamn curve.

“I thought for sure I had you that time.” With the flick of his wrist, Derek consigned his card to the campfire, offering only a glimpse of four hearts before it flared and disappeared from view. “You tricked me.”

Marcus, a somewhat gangly youth who’d only finished his first summer with them last year, turned his card. It showed a stony-faced monarch clad all in black. “Itisthe queen of spades,” he admitted. He also handed his card back to Sophie, though what good it would do when Derek had already burned up half the deck was beyond any of them. “How did you do that?”

“A good magician never reveals her tricks,” Sophie said with a mysterious air. She promptly ruined it with, “It’s mostly done by counting the cards. I can show you, if you want.”

“Would you really?” Marcus’s eagerness was matched only by his crestfallen expression when he glanced over at Harrison and changed his mind. “Uh, maybe some other time. It’s more fun if you don’t know how the sausage is made, you know?”

Harrison attempted to arrange his features in a more conciliatory pattern of parts. He wasn’t supposed to scare everyone away from the campfire before the ghost stories even started. Besides, Marcus could hardly be blamed for Harrison’s current state of mind.

And body.

Harrison might be emotionally conflicted when it came to his relationship with Sophie, but his body had no qualms about asserting what it wanted.

It wanted to feel her writhing on the ground underneath him again. It wanted to explore the swells and dips of skin that felt like ribbon-wrapped satin. It wanted to enter her so slowly she came screaming before he made it all the way inside.

“I, for one, love sausage and all its incumbent parts.” Derek winked and grinned at Harrison from across the fire. “Tell us, Sophie. Tell us about the meat.”

There was nothing Harrison could do to recoup his position after that. He’d lost his edge. He’d lost his edge, and everyone—with the exception of Marcus, who was still young and new enough to regard him with awe—knew it.

It helped to glance down and check on Bubbles, who was strapped to his chest in what he could only describe as a state of sleepy euphoria. The campfire had been going for a full hour now, with various pots of food-like items bubbling away on top. Other than one scrambling attempt to free herself from the pouch when they first approached, the puppy was doing well. Mostly because her head was burrowed against his chest and she refused to roll her eyes in that direction. As long as she could pretend there were no flames and that her whole world was the steady beat of his heart next to her, she was perfectly fine.

It seemed that Sophie had been right about the pouch all along. Not only had it been easy for him to set up camp with the puppy safely strapped to his chest, but Sophie had known, with her usual insight, exactly what Bubbles needed to feel safe. To be cradled like a baby. To be held somewhere tight and warm.

In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that everyone was watching him with a wariness that made him feel like the village freak, this pouch would have been the ideal solution to all his problems.

“Where’d you learn all that stuff anyway?” Jessica asked. She paused to stir the bowl of roots and dirt that was the only thing she and Sophie had managed to catch after a full afternoon’s harvest.

That, at least, made him feel somewhat better. Sophie could worm her way under his skin, charm his father into lighting aromatherapy candles, and mystify his friends with magic tricks, but her hunting-and-gathering skills could definitely use some work. It was the most primeval of triumphs, to gloat over a woman who couldn’t trap and maim animals, but what he could he do?

He was man. Hear him roar.

Sophie’s gaze shifted to Harrison’s, a somewhat wary light glinting in the reflection of the fire. He immediately regretted his triumph.What an ass I am.Of course Sophie was less than proficient at wilderness survival. He didn’t know all the details of her illness—Oscar wasn’t the kind to just tell someone else’s life story—but he had enough imagination to picture it.