AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nothing she could do about it, though, so she shoved the pain aside and pulled on her left boot. It was wet, too, inside and out, another item to go on her list of things to ignore. Next came her rain slicker, but it, at least, didn’t make her shudder when she came into contact with it. She zipped and snapped, pulled the hood up, and was as ready as she could be, except for the fact that she was on the second-story sleeping platform and she needed to be at the bottom of that long ladder.
“A journey of a thousand miles,” she muttered, and hopped to the ladder.
Actually getting on the ladder was the toughest part. She had to grasp it, sit down, locate a rung with her left foot, then lever herself up and around. Once she was properly situated, she was strong enough to hold herself on the ladder using just her upper body strength while she took another step down with her left foot. The process wasn’t pretty, but it was effective.
It also took an enormous amount of effort when her body hadn’t rebuilt its reserves. Every muscle in her body was trembling, and she was breathing like a bellows; just as she neared the bottom rung, she heard the scrape of a door opening.
“Fucking nipples on ice!”
The hoarse, muted roar would have made her fall off the ladder if it hadn’t been for the telltale noise of the door. Holding tight to the ladder, she peered through the rungs at him, where he was almost completely hidden by the dark shadows at the back of the camp building. The expression made her blink. “I’ve never heard that one before,” she commented faintly. “Innovative.”
Rapidly he strode forward, his expression both disbelieving and furious as he gripped her waist and peeled her off the ladder. He stood her up for a brief second as he switched positions, bending down to hook his left arm under her knees and lift her off the floor, holding her tight against his wet slicker. “You could have broken your damn fool neck!”
“But I didn’t,” she pointed out with impeccable logic, even though she was still gasping for breath. “So I saved both time, and wear and tear on you.” She hooked her left arm around his neck, and felt a ker-THUNK kind of thud in her chest as her heart reacted to how natural it felt to be held like this, to feel free to sling her arms around him.
If anything, he looked even more furious. “I can handle getting you up and down the ladder.”
He was just standing there, instead of taking her outside, and her exertion in getting down the ladder had made the situation more dire. “I wasn’t impugning your manhood,” she said impatiently. “Just handle getting me out to the toilet. Pee now, chew out later.”
Muttering more obscenities under his breath, he strode to the back door. It wasn’t a regular door, but part of the wall itself that had been cut out and hinges installed, and was secured by sliding a two-by-eight into steel brackets. “Hold your hood in place,” he growled. “The wind’s still gusting.”
She grabbed her hood and held it as he turned sideways and maneuvered her through the door. It was like walking under a waterfall. The rain felt like a solid sheet of water, hammering at them. The portable was placed against the back of the building, just a few steps away, but if she hadn’t been wearing a slicker she’d have been drenched in a second. Ducking his head against the onslaught of water, Dare pulled open the toilet door and stood her up inside. “I’ll wait here,” he half-yelled, because the drumming of the rain on the plastic roof of the toilet sounded like, well, actual drumming.
She started to tell him not to be silly, to go back inside, but realized he wasn’t going to budge no matter what she said, so the best thing she could do was not waste time. She took care of business as fast as possible, cleaned her hands with the gel hand sanitizer, then opened the door. He had her swooped up into his arms and back inside the cabin before she could get her bearings.
He put her down so he could secure the heavy door and peel out of his dripping slicker. Balancing on one foot, Angie removed her own slicker, and he hung them over a rail to drip dry. She drew in a breath that was rich with the smell of hay, horse, and feed, which reminded her of her own horses. “The bastard,” she blurted. “He stole all four of my horses. I know he won’t take care of them; he can barely ride.”
“Then maybe he’ll get thrown and break his neck,” Dare said with a calm intent that told her he meant the comment literally.
“I hope so,” she muttered, and she was being just as literal as he was.
“We’ll get your horses back. Mine, too, if the nitwit didn’t run himself to death,” he said as he put his hands on her waist. “Alley oop.” Without pausing, he tossed her onto his shoulder. She grunted as the impact drove out her breath, but didn’t waste time complaining. Instead she grabbed him to steady herself as he began the upward climb; she was more than glad to let him carry her, because she was wiped out, almost back to square one. She was exhausted and cold, but at least she wasn’t soaking wet.
He turned his back and gave her some privacy while she pulled off the sweatpants and worked his thermal underwear back up her legs and hips, though to be honest she was already so close to conking out she wouldn’t have cared if he’d looked; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t put them on her the first time. Lying back on the mattress, she almost dozed off while he was rewrapping her ankle. Maybe she did actually go to sleep, because the next thing she knew he was sliding close against her and pulling the sleeping bag over them, enveloping them in a warm cocoon.
She snuggled back against him, oddly content. Feeling him so close to her was deeply comforting, something she desperately needed right now when she felt so off balance. Eventually everything would settle into place and she’d get a grip on things, but that time wasn’t now. For now, being warm and having him there was enough.
There were so many important things to think about, but a thought, an idea, would rise to the surface of her consciousness and then drift away, her mind too tired to hold on to it. She could actually feel sleep coming, feel herself sinking closer and closer to that delicious edge of unconsciousness, until it enveloped her as surely as his arms were wrapped around her.
Chapter Nineteen
The next time she woke, Angie had the feeling that several hours had passed, that she had finally, at last, gotten enough sleep to make a difference to her exhausted body. Outwardly nothing had changed; it was still raining, the light was still dim and gray, and they were still nestled under the sleeping bag. Somehow she knew, though, that it was now late afternoon. Dare must have slept, too, because if he’d been awake again and moving around, he hadn’t disturbed her, and she had to think he would have. She wasn’t used to sleeping with anyone, which had contributed to her restlessness, and she thought the same could probably be said about him.
He was still asleep now, his body hard and warm against hers, totally relaxed. His arm was heavy around her, his breath hot against the back of her neck, his chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm. Feeling him there like that made her want to turn into his arms, press her face against his chest, and just inhale the heated scent of his skin; for a moment, she was still just sleepy enough that she almost did i
t, almost took that step, then reality slapped her in the face and with a small jerk she stopped.
Which, of course, woke him up. He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, his arm tightening around her in what she would almost call a hug, if they were on hugging terms. The ridiculousness of the situation made her smile. They’d faced a life-or-death situation together, they’d slept cuddled as close to each other as they could get, and they weren’t on hugging terms? She knew one thing for certain: She would never, ever again view him as the enemy. She couldn’t; he wasn’t. He maybe never had been, but circumstance and her own lack of self-confidence had kept her from seeing him as he was. She didn’t think he’d ever be an easy man to get to know, his grumpy state was likely permanent, but at the center of him was a solid streak of steely willpower that kept him going when lesser men would have given up.
“You okay?” he muttered, his rough voice guttural with sleep, but he didn’t seem really interested in the answer because he nestled his cheek against the back of her head and relaxed again, as if he were going back to sleep. A moment later, though, she knew he wasn’t, because the hard-on he’d warned her not to bitch about began pushing against her butt.
She thought about bitching anyway, just to jerk his chain, but sex was another one of those areas where she wasn’t as confident as she’d like to be. In her experience, it was more trouble than it was worth: In exchange for suffering the uncertainty of exposing her emotions, as well as her less-than-perfect body and her less-than-perfect judgment, to a man who might or might not appreciate any of them, she would get to experience a climax brought about by a hand. Climax-by-penis was a fairy tale, as far as she was concerned, so why not just bypass the middle man, so to speak, and take care of her climaxes herself? The process was a lot neater, less complicated, and easy on the emotions.
Not that she was going to have sex with Dare Callahan. She didn’t want to go there and she couldn’t imagine why he would, either, except as an automatic kind of thing. She felt about as sexy as roadkill, and probably looked not much better. She couldn’t even feel flattered by his hard-on, because it was just a reaction to waking up, and had nothing to do with her, personally. He’d have one even if she wasn’t there.
So her options were that she could lie there and kind of enjoy feeling an erection poking at her even if she wasn’t the cause of it, or she could sort of casually shift away as if she hadn’t even noticed, pretend she was just waking up herself.
“Hey, don’t mind me,” he growled. “I’m just the guy with the hard-on poking at you, not somebody you really need to answer.”
