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She was still sitting in a heap on the floor and crying hard when he came back. She was tired. There wasn’t a place on her body that didn’t ache either from sleeping on the ground or walking on crutches or suffering Quinn Gawrylow’s squeezing caresses.
She wanted good, honest food. She’d gladly trade her Maserati for a glass of milk. Her clothes had been ripped by tree branches or ravaged by this barbaric hoodlum she was marooned with. The fur coat she had prized so highly had been used as a litter.
And she had seen men die.
Five in the plane crash. Two at the hands of the man who now threw himself down beside her. He roughly raised her head by placing his callused fingers beneath her chin.
“Get up,” he ordered. “Dry your face. You’re not going to spend the rest of the day sitting around crying like a baby.”
“Go to hell,” she spat, lifting her chin out of his grasp.
He was so furious, his lips hardly moved when he spoke. “Look, if you had a good thing going with Reuben and his pa, you should have told me. I’m sorry I ruined it for you.”
“You bastard.”
“I would have been all too glad to leave you in this paradise and strike out for the river by myself. But I think I should tell you that Reuben had a lot of children in mind. Of course you might not have ever known if the kids you hatched were his or his daddy’s.”
“Shut up!” She raised her hand to slap him.
He caught it in midair and they stared at each other for several tense seconds. Finally Cooper relaxed his fingers from around her wrist. Snarling angrily, he stood up and kicked a chair as far across the cabin as he could.
“It was either them or me,” he said in a voice that vibrated with rage. “Reuben fired first. I got lucky and deflected his rifle just in time. I had no choice.”
“You didn’t have to kill them.”
“No?”
An alternative didn’t leap into her mind, but she was sure that if she thought about it long enough she would come up with one. Temporarily conceding, she lowered her eyes. “Why didn’t you just keep going?”
His eyes narrowed to slits as he looked down at her. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it.”
“Oh,” she ground out. “I can’t wait until I’m rid of you.”
“Believe me, the feeling is mutual. But in the meantime we’ve got to tolerate each other. First thing on the agenda is to get this place cleaned up. I’m not spending another night in this stink hole.”
Her jaw went slack with disbelief. Slowly her eyes roamed the grimy interior of the cabin. “Clean this place up? Is that what you said?”
“Yeah. We’d better get started, too. The day’s getting away.”
He righted the chair he’d just kicked over and made his way toward the pile of dingy bedding where Reuben had slept the night before. Rusty started laughing and her laughter was tinged with impending hysteria.
“You’re not serious?”
“Like hell I’m not.”
“We’re spending the night here?”
“And every night from now on until we’re rescued.” She came to her feet, propping herself up on one crutch while she watched him strip both beds and pile the bedding in the middle of the floor. “What about the river?”
“That might have all been a lie.”
“The Mackenzie River is real, Cooper.”
“But where is it from here?”
“You could keep walking in the direction they said until you found it.”
“I could. I could also get terribly lost. Or injured and stranded. If you went with me, we might not make it out before the first real snow, in which case we’d probably die of exposure. If you stayed here and something happened to me, you’d die of starvation before the winter was over. And I’m not even sure the direction Reuben led me in was the right one. I’ve got 359 other choices from this cabin, and getting around to them all would take over a year.”
