Chapter 10
CHAPTER 10
J anelle heard herself gasp as Schwartz gripped her arm and pulled her behind him, pivoting in a slow circle. His eyes scanned the trees as he held the pistol out in front of him. His hand feld steady and sure, and he looked like a man who’d been handling a gun his whole life.
He probably had.
“Schwartz, what the?—”
“Stay behind me,” he commanded, letting go of her arm, but keeping her snug against him. “Put your arms up over your head and wave them around.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, but did as he asked, feeling a little silly and a lot terrified. She glanced down at the ground and saw the thing he’d plucked off the bark. It looked like fur of some sort, and it was stuck to the toe of her boot.
“Sherman, come!” Schwartz yelled. “Come, now !”
The wolf-dog bounded toward them, ears pricked and eyes wide. He looked at his master, then sniffed the air. The fur on the back of his neck rose slowly, and he let out a low growl.
“Stay!” Schwartz ordered, then turned back to Janelle. “Hold up your backpack. Keep waving your arms.”
“What’s happening?” she asked, waving the bright blue backpack overhead like a flag of surrender.
“You’re allergic to cats.”
“Yes. That’s right.” She didn’t ask how he knew. The man had clearly done his homework, though she had no idea what a cat allergy had to do with waving her arms in the air like some sort of deranged sports fan.
Sherman growled low, but stayed rooted in one place, his shoulder bumping Janelle’s knee as his fur bristled in warning. Schwartz pivoted again, keeping her close, keeping his eyes on the trees.
“Mountain lions are cats,” he said softly. “They’re also deadly.”
“Oh. Oh shit.” Realization dawned, and Janelle gripped the back of his coat, fear slicing through her.
“It must have passed close by,” he muttered. “Maybe stalking us. Stay, Sherman!” Schwartz commanded again as the dog sniffed the air and snarled. “Janelle, keep your arms up. Cougars aren’t afraid of anything, but they’ll back down from a fight if they decide the prey is bigger than they are. Make yourself as big as you possibly can.”
“I can grab a stick?—”
“No! Whatever you do, don’t bend down. You’ll look smaller. You’ll look like prey.”
Janelle swallowed hard and nodded, her breath catching in her throat as she let go of Schwartz’s back and lifted her arms again. It was hard for her to imagine anything bigger than Schwartz, but she’d never seen a mountain lion before.
She’d prefer to keep it that way.
“Sherman didn’t spot him first, so he’s gotta be downwind,” Schwartz muttered. “He’s gotta be—there!” He stopped turning and froze. He aimed the pistol, pointing at a spot in the distance.
Sherman barked and started to move, but Schwartz grabbed his scruff and ordered him to stay. The dog snarled again, but didn’t move. He glanced up at Janelle, then leaned into her with his massive, furry shoulder shielding her leg.
She glanced down at her toes and saw the fur still stuck there. She kicked it loose, her whole body throbbing with fear.
Schwartz took a step forward. Then another.
Janelle stuck close, with Sherman glued to her thigh. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the dim light filtered through the forest canopy. Then she saw it, too.
The big cat stood staring at them from atop a rotted log about two hundred feet away. She could make out the tawny hue of its fur, the softly rounded tips of its ears, the long, ropelike tail. The animal stared back, not moving toward them, not moving away.
Janelle lowered one hand and touched Schwartz’s shoulder. “Please don’t shoot it.”
“What?”
“It’s an animal, doing what animals do. We’re the ones intruding on its home.”
“Janelle—”
“Don’t kill it, Schwartz,” she pleaded, tears pricking the backs of her eyelids.
“This isn’t a housecat. He’s probably been stalking us. It’s him or us.”
She felt her eyes filling with tears. She knew he was right, knew she was being silly. Her limbs felt numb with terror, and she knew the creature could kill them all with a few swipes of its razor-sharp claws.
But her heart twisted with pity. In the back of her mind, she saw flashes of the scene in San Francisco. Her husband drawing his hand back to strike a man who was already on the ground. The sounds of the man’s anguished screams, and the hollowness that came after the screams stopped.
Janelle swallowed hard and looked at the cat. The animal stood motionless. So did Schwartz.
“He’s not advancing,” Schwartz said, reading her thoughts. “The range on a 9mm Beretta is fifty meters.”
Janelle nodded, her arms still in the air, her brain doing mental calculations. If she’d guessed right and the cat was two hundred feet away, it was out of the range of fire. Schwartz would have to give chase, or the animal would have to advance. How quickly could it close the distance between them?
“I’m going to fire a shot, okay?” Schwartz said. “I’ll fire into the trees over there, but it’s gonna fall short.”
Janelle nodded, but didn’t speak, her eyes still on the cougar. Beside her, Sherman whined his impatience.
“If the warning shot doesn’t scare him off and the cougar comes at us, I’ll shoot to kill. Understood?”
“Yes,” she whispered. She didn’t know if he was doing it to appease her or because the bullet couldn’t reach that far. It didn’t matter. Either way, she trusted him to keep her safe. To inflict the minimum amount of harm, if he could.
The gun barked in Schwartz’s hand, his arm jerking as he fired. She heard a soft whimper as he fired again, and she closed her eyes, wondering if the sound came from her or Sherman or the cat. The scent of gunpowder filled the air, and she buried her nose in Schwartz’s coat, breathing in the smell of wool and wood and man.
“He’s gone.”
Janelle opened her eyes. “You killed him?”
Schwartz turned and looked at her. “No. He ran off. The opposite direction.” He grabbed her arm again, his eyes scanning her. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I?—”
“Come on,” he said, pulling her forward. “We’re going back to the cabin. Stay close and stay in front of me. If we see the cat again and I’m in range, I’ll take the shot. Got it?”
“Yes,” she agreed, moving ahead of him as fast as her legs would carry her. Sherman fell into step beside her, sticking close. His ears stayed pricked, and his scruff bristled like a lion’s mane around his neck.
Janelle ran, her heart slamming in her chest. She scrambled through the dense trees, pretty sure she was headed the right way, totally sure Schwartz would tell her if she wasn’t. She could feel him close behind her, his breath fast and ragged, his body a shield between her and the danger.
She’d never felt so scared.
She’d never felt so protected.
Fear coursed through her and she gave a terrified yelp when her feet tangled in a fallen tree branch. But Schwartz caught her elbow and lifted her up, pushing her ahead of him.
“Just a few hundred feet,” he coaxed. “We’re almost there. Turn right at that tree.”
“The dead one?”
“It’s not dead, it’s a tamarack.”
She kept running, trying to focus on the tree so she wouldn’t focus on the danger. “Its needles are falling off.”
“It happens in the fall. The needles turn gold and drop off, but they always come back.”
She knew there was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but she didn’t have the bandwidth to process it now. She lunged past the tree, breaking left into a clearing.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “See the woodshed up there?”
“Yes,” she panted, daring a glance over her shoulder. She saw no sign of the cougar, but Schwartz was right on her heels. His eyes scanned the trees around them, his mind and his body and his pistol all poised to protect her.
She could see the cabin now and picked up her pace, certain she’d never felt such a hot surge of relief in her entire life. She gave a strangled cry and kept running, tears threatening to choke her now.
“You’ve just about made it, baby,” he urged, and the softness of the endearment left her whole body tingling with more than adrenaline coursing through her veins.
Her hands found the doorknob and she fumbled with it, her fingers too shaky to grip it.
“Here, I’ve got it.” He nudged her aside and shoved a key into the lock, pushing the door open with his shoulder.
“In you go.” He pushed her ahead of him, Sherman following close behind and Schwartz bringing up the rear. He slammed the door behind him, then turned and pressed his back to it, his body still shielding her even now.
Janelle stood panting at the edge of the living room. Her breath sawed out in little wheezes, and she knew the cat allergy had nothing to do with it. Adrenaline tasted bitter in her throat, and the smell of wet dog was strangely comforting.
She sagged with relief, her knees giving out beneath her. Schwartz lunged forward, catching her before she hit the ground.
“Easy does it,” he said, leading her to the sofa. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
She nodded against his shoulder as he set her gently on the sofa, then eased himself down beside her. The leather dipped beneath his weight, and she felt herself falling into him.
Falling for him.
She looked up, her eyes blurry with tears as she studied the man who’d just saved her life.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved me.”
He squeezed her hand, then released it. “You saved yourself. You and your damn cat allergy.”
“If I’d been out there alone?—”
“I’d never let that happen.”
“But if I had, I never would have known. The cougar would have been on me before I had a clue.”
“Probably. They’re silent hunters. They’ve been known to attack people.”
“I can’t believe you thought of the allergy,” she murmured. “I can’t imagine?—”
“I can,” he said. “I can always imagine the worst-case scenario. Then I plan for it.”
She nodded, not sure they were still talking about cougars. “I owe you, Schwartz. I owe you my life.”
He shook his head, already distancing himself from her on the couch. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m just doing what I promised my family I’d do.”
“No, you went above and beyond.” She got to her feet, legs still shaky. “And I’m going to repay you. Right here, right now.”
“Janelle, you don’t have to?—”
“I do,” she insisted, shrugging off her jacket and letting it fall to the floor behind her. “I have to because I want to. I really, really want to.”
Having Janelle smear mud on his face was not what Schwartz had in mind when she’d pledged to repay him.
Then again, this was probably a whole lot safer than a blow job.
“Hold still,” she commanded. “I’m almost done.”
“Be sure to tell me when we get to the fun part. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”
“This is going to make you feel fabulous, I promise.”
“Yeah, I think that every time I go out and rub my face in the dirt.”
“Is your skin still tingling from the willow bark water?”
“I have skin left?”
She laughed, and he felt a warm kick of relief to know she recognized he wasn’t really pissed. Truth be told, he kinda liked this. Or maybe he just liked having her hands on him. Did it matter?
Janelle plunked down on the sofa beside him, angling up to dab more muck on the side of his cheek. Her face was covered in the same gray goo his was, and he wanted her to look ridiculous with her hair piled on her head and pale rings of flesh around her eyes and mouth making her look like a homeless clown.
But she didn’t look ridiculous. She just looked beautiful. Beautiful and very, very scantily clad.
“You couldn’t wear a shirt to do this?” he muttered as she dabbed something cold on his earlobe.
“I’m wearing a shirt. It’s just a small one. A tube top. I don’t want to get clay all over my other shirts.”
“Who the hell brings a tube top to a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness?”
“I didn’t know I was going to be in a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness, remember?” She leaned across his body to swipe at his other cheekbone, giving him the opportunity to stare down the front of her shirt that wasn’t really a shirt. “You kept it so top secret where I was headed that I could have been going to the moon for all I knew.”
“Excellent point. I’m sure they wear a lot of tube tops on the moon.”
She sat back again and grinned at him. “Laugh all you want. At least neither of us is getting our clothes muddy.”
“And now I have the added bonus of finding out what it’s like to scrub clay out of chest hair.”
She laughed, then stood up and ran to the kitchen to rinse off her hands. When she trotted back to the living room, Schwartz forced himself not to pray for the tube top to go slithering down.
“Now what?” he asked.
“We wait about thirty minutes for the clay to dry.”
“What happens then?”
“We wash it off.”
“Are we to the fun part yet?”
She grinned and snuggled up next to him on the couch, not seeming the least bit perturbed by his grumbling. He felt grateful for that. Grateful and really, really turned on.
Dammit, what the hell was wrong with him? Since when did he find it sexy to have a woman smearing his face with wet dirt?
Since you met Janelle.
True. Hell, she could make him eat dirt and he’d still find her irresistibly sexy.
“Really, Schwartz, thanks again,” she said. “I’m still freaking out a little thinking about what I would have done if I’d been out there alone.”
“Wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I’d never let you be alone.”
She looked up at him then, those pale blue eyes locking with his and making him think he should have chosen his words more carefully.
“Tell me another story,” she said.
“My tale of the ashtray condom wasn’t scintillating enough for you?”
“Tell me how you ended up in Montana.”
He started to protest, to tell her it was no one else’s business why he’d chosen to wall himself off out here in the middle of nowhere.
Then he realized she’d asked how , not why . It was a simpler question to answer.
“I grew up a military brat, so there wasn’t any one place I thought of as home,” he said. “After college, I ended up at Fort Irwin at the National Training Center. Grant was just a few hours away at Camp Twentynine Palms. ”
“What did you do at the National Training Center?”
“Staff sergeant. I ran tactical training exercises for units that came there to certify before deployment. I got damn good at it.”
“Did that feel like home?”
“Not really,” he said, mulling the question. “But I liked being near my brother. I liked following my family’s military path. And then I met a girl.”
He waited to see if she’d respond. Grant had told him that he’d shared bits and pieces of this story with Anna. It would have been Grant’s version of things, not Schwartz’s, but still. Had the details traveled from one sister to the other?
Janelle looked up at him, her blue eyes curious and encouraging. “Tell me about this girl.”
He shrugged. “Not much to tell, really. I’d actually forgotten her name until Grant brought it up a couple months ago. Jenny something. We had a whirlwind romance and got engaged.”
She blinked at him, surprise registering in her eyes. “You were engaged to be married and you don’t remember her name?”
“It wasn’t important. Not for long, anyway. Things came unraveled in a hurry when she set out to fuck someone else and—well, anyway, that part of the story doesn’t matter.”
Janelle nodded, waiting for him to continue. Waiting to see where he was heading with this story.
He was kinda wondering the same thing.
“Anyway, after the shit hit the fan, I needed a change. I needed to be where the action was.”
“What did you do?”
“I gave up my gig doing tactical training at the NTC and volunteered to join a unit headed to Anbar Province. In a matter of weeks, I was down there in the thick of it. The danger zone. It’s where a lot of the fighting was happening at the time.”
“Did that—um—did that feel like home?”
“Home,” he repeated, remembering how they’d started this path of conversation in the first place. “No, not exactly. Not the physical location, anyway. But being there in a combat zone, surrounded by some of the bravest men and women I’d ever met, it was the first time I’d really felt?—”
He trailed off there, not sure what he meant to say. This was getting ridiculously touchy-feely, and it would probably be best if he got up and washed this crap off his face and chopped some wood or skinned a deer or ripped a tree out of the ground with his teeth.
But he stayed put, with Janelle’s gaze fixed on his.
“You felt like part of your family,” she supplied. “Is that it? One of these things is not like the other. Only right then, you were like them. Like the whole legacy of Patton men and women before you.”
He nodded, too surprised to speak. Even before he knew where he was headed with the story, Janelle had figured it out. How the hell had she done that?
“That’s right,” he said at last. “Or something like that, anyway.” He hesitated, not sure where to go from here. Not sure how much more he felt willing to share. She kept her gaze on his, waiting to see what he’d say next.
“So how about you?” he asked. “San Francisco always been home?”
She studied him a few seconds more, probably wondering whether to press him about the abrupt subject change. At last, she nodded, and Schwartz breathed a sigh of relief.
“San Francisco has always felt like home,” she said. “I tried staying with Anna in Portland once for a couple months, but I missed the big city. The bigger city, I should say. I’m sure Portland would seem massive to you compared with life out here.”
“It does,” he admitted. “I spent some time there one summer in college. Nice place. Not too many cities let you drive twenty minutes in any direction from the skyscraper-filled center of it and find yourself in the middle of the wilderness.”
“Yeah, that’s what a lot of people like about Portland. It’s a city, but with farms and forests on all sides.”
“And you didn’t care for that?”
“I don’t know.” She leaned back against the sofa, her body small and warm tucked up against his. “It’s been seven years since I tried living anywhere else. Maybe I’ve changed since then.”
“Since when?”
“In seven years or—well, maybe in seven days.” She laughed, and Schwartz felt the vibration traveling from her bare arm to his. “That’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“What’s stupid?”
“The idea that I could spend my whole life as a city girl and a week in the Montana wilderness, and suddenly decide I could be anything other than a city girl.”
“You can be anything you want to be.”
“You believe that?”
He hesitated, not sure what she was driving at. “People can change. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, sometimes just for the sake of doing something different.”
“Right.” She bit her lip. “Or sometimes you realize someone was a certain way all along, but you made yourself believe they were the person you wanted them to be.”
Schwartz caught the bitter note in her voice and took a moment to digest her words. Then he reached out and put a hand on her knee. “Like maybe you really want your new husband to be an upstanding, wealthy pharmaceutical distributor, so that’s what you convinced yourself he was?”
She looked up at him, her blue eyes wide and questioning. “How the hell could I not have known? I mean, seriously? What the hell is wrong with me?”
“With you?” He shook his head. “Did you run an international heroin importing ring?”
She frowned. “No.”
“Did you kill your business rivals in cold blood?”
“No.”
“Did you convince an amazing woman to marry you under false pretenses, then run around sticking your dick in other women and fathering an illegitimate child while your wife waited at home?”
She winced. “How do you?—”
“Did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Did you refuse to let your wife go even after she divorced you, then stalk her relentlessly after she witnessed you murdering an unarmed man?”
Janelle shook her head, and looked down at her hands. Schwartz took his hand off her knee and reached for her hands, prompting her to look up again. “Honey, none of that was your fault. You’ve gotta believe that.”
“But what does it say about me if my judgment is so seriously flawed that I don’t realize the man I’d pledged to spend eternity with is someone who could do those things?”
“It says you’re a beautiful, trusting, sweet-natured woman who wants to believe the best about people. And you know what?”
“What?”
“That’s inspiring. For a lot of folks, anyway. It’s enough to make someone want to live up to your opinion of them. To be the sort of person someone like you can believe in.”
She blinked at him, her eyes relentlessly blue in contrast to the dried clay on her cheekbones. “Wow, Schwartz. That’s kinda deep.”
He snorted. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Seriously, you’re sweet.” She was smiling at him now, the easing tension making her shoulders drop. “And insightful.”
“Really, don’t tell anyone.”
She smiled. “I kinda want to kiss you right now.”
“It must be the mud. Very sexy.”
“We should probably wash it off.” She slid her hands out from under his and Schwartz felt a deep ache of longing. Of wanting to touch her again, not just her hands, but everywhere.
She met his eyes, and something inside him melted into a big, gooey puddle of love and desire and a whole lot of other emotions he hadn’t felt for years. Maybe ever.
Jesus. Why was he still fighting this? He’d honest to God forgotten, and seeing her sitting there with her breasts rising and falling under that tiny little tube top wasn’t doing much to jog his memory.
“You want to go first?” she asked.
“What?”
“In the bathroom. You want to shower first to wash the mud off, or should I go?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
She cocked her head, eyeing him curiously. “It wasn’t a yes or no question, Schwartz.”
He got to his feet, then held out his hand. An invitation. She gave him a questioning look, then put her hands in his.
“I’m getting in the shower now,” he said slowly. “And I’d like to invite you to join me.”
She looked at him for a moment, her expression unreadable. Schwartz held his breath. Hell, maybe he shouldn’t have said anything. He could still take it back, just march off to the bathroom and take a nice, icy shower by himself.
Then a slow smile spread over her face, making tiny cracks in the gray clay, and Schwartz forgot all about taking anything back. Her eyes were warm and blue, and glinting with amusement and desire.
“Is this about water conservation, or something else?”
“Something else,” he said, closing his hands around hers and hauling her to her feet. “Something else entirely.”