CHAPTER TWO LAWSON
She swayed the second she stood up and I caught her before she could fall and did the only thing I could.
I picked her up. One arm beneath her back, the other under her knees.
For a moment, I just stood there. The river was behind me. My fishing gear lay on the bank where I’d abandoned it when I’d heard her first scream. She’d called me Bigfoot and now had her arms laced around my neck like she…
I was not finishing that thought.
I turned away from the river and up the trail. It would split in a few yards. One way toward the rafting office, one toward my cabin. Something protective rolled through me and for a moment, I considered taking her there. I could bandage her cut. Get her warm.
I shook that feeling off like a dog coming in from the rain because I was a dog for having those kinds of thoughts.
She made a noise of surprise, her arms tightening around my neck. “What are you doing?”
“Preventing you from doing a header against river rocks.”
“I can walk.”
“The evidence suggests otherwise.”
“She started it,” she murmured, but I caught it.
“She?”
“The river. Bodies of water are usually female.”
“That explains a lot,” I grunted.
She looked up at me like I was a fascinating something she had never seen before. Like the mythical Bigfoot she had accused me of being.
“The shipwrecks. The Sirens. Hurricanes used to be named exclusively after women until men decided that was unfair. I never understood that. Did being named for destructive events make us more powerful somehow?”
She was cute. Annoyingly cute despite her penchant for talking. I did not do cute. Cute led to attachment. Attachment led to complications. Complications led to people leaving or dying or both if life wanted to get creative.
So, no. I did not do cute.
I shifted her higher against my chest as the trail steepened. I’d made Lone Mountain my home after retiring from the military on a medical discharge. I’d busted my knee during my last tour of duty and couldn’t get medical clearance to stay in because it still had the tendency to go out on me.
Race Gentry owned most of the mountain, but he sold off pieces here and there to men like me who wanted to make a home here. He was like the rest of us, ex-military and fucked up as shit.
Or he had been. He’d gotten married a few years ago. Now he tried to rescue more men. He’d sold me twenty acres that had included a run-down log cabin. I’d fixed it up but it was only big enough for one person. I looked down at the woman in my arms.
I chose this solitary life. I didn’t want to be surrounded by noise or people.
Mostly people. I had enough to live on. Enough to see me through the years.
As for women? I scratched the itch when it was necessary.
I didn’t need to play savior to a chaotic, chattering woman who fit against my chest like she’d been measured for it.
“You’re scowling again,” she said.
“I always scowl.”
“I noticed.” She adjusted slightly in my arms, and I tightened my grip again. “Honestly, it’s impressive. Your face has committed fully to the lifestyle.”
Everything about her was dramatic. The flailing in the river.
The shrieking. The way she’d yelled at the rapids like they were behaving that way just to piss her off.
And God help me, I’d almost laughed when she screamed rude after smacking the rock.
Almost. Then she’d disappeared under the water for three terrifying seconds.
My jaw tightened at the memory. Three seconds wasn’t long. Except it was. Long enough for every instinct in my body to go feral. Long enough for adrenaline to punch hard through my chest while I stepped into that river without a single conscious thought.
Instinct had taken over the moment I spotted her in the water. Pull her out. Get her warm. Keep her close. The instructions had been simple and absolute and I’d followed them without question. The same way I knew when a tree was about to come down the wrong way.
Those instincts had saved me more than once.
The sight of her resurfacing — sputtering, panicked, alive — had hit me somewhere low and dangerous. Which was ridiculous. I didn’t know her. Didn’t want to know her.
Women came up to Lone Mountain looking for adventure and left the second reality got uncomfortable. I preferred the mountain. The mountain didn’t make promises.
“You keep squirming like that and I’m dropping you back in.”
“You wouldn’t.” She looked absurdly confident about it. “You’re too responsible. And you secretly like me.”
Absolutely not, I wanted to say. It would have been a lie. I did like her, and I’d known her for less than half an hour.
“Besides, I’m cold.”
“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 second my 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 the opening of 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 steri-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.”
“All the more reason to get back on the horse.”
She watched as we talked, looking like she had a front-row seat at the most fascinating tennis match of the century.
“Cut the pissing contest, boys.” An older female EMT walked right between me and Jared, pushing us out of the way before kneeling in front of the woman I’d rescued. “Let’s check your head, hon.” She held up a small light. “Follow this for me.”
She followed it. Then her eyes drifted slightly. Caught herself. Followed it again.
I watched, and didn’t like what I saw.
“Any headache?” the EMT asked.
“A little.” Amy’s tone was carefully casual. The way people spoke when they were downplaying something. “More like a, um, fuzziness.”
“Nausea?”
“Define nausea.”
“Amy.” Her name came out low and rough.
She looked at me, apparently surprised I’d used her name. I was surprised too. “Maybe a little nausea,” she admitted. “But that could be the shoe loss. It was very traumatic.”
The EMT sat back and looked at Jared and me in turn. “She’s showing signs of a mild concussion. She needs to be monitored tonight. No sleeping unattended, someone needs to wake her every two hours through the night, watch for worsening headache, confusion, vomiting.”
“I’m fine,” Amy protested.
“You just told me everything’s fuzzy,” the EMT said pleasantly. “Fine is relative.”
Amy sighed dramatically. “Everyone’s acting like I got swept over Niagara Falls.”
“She didn’t come with anyone,” Jared said, cutting in with a smile on his face. “Booked solo.”
“Well, I’m not going to the hospital.” She looked at Jared. “You can take me to the lodge.”
Jared turned and looked at me. “Come on, help a girl out.”
“I’m not a damn bed and breakfast.”
“Never said you were. Help her out anyway.”
“I’m about three seconds from throwing you in the river, Jared.”
Jared grinned. “I know. But you’ll do it anyway.”
Amy tilted her head back farther to look up at me. Tiny. Not fragile exactly. But soft in ways a smarter man would have walked away from.
Mine.
The thought came hard and absolute.
My entire body went still.
No. Absolutely not. I didn’t do that anymore. Didn’t claim things. Didn’t keep people. Didn’t need anyone waiting for me at home.
The mountain was enough.
Except standing here looking at this soaking wet woman smiling up at me like I hung the damn moon—it didn’t feel like enough at all.
“So, I am staying with Bigfoot?” She looked at Jared again.
“Looks that way, sweetheart.” Jared laughed. “And his name is Lawson, by the way.”
I looked at him. He stopped.
But he pulled his keys from his pocket anyway. He’d had this whole thing worked out before he opened his mouth. “Take the truck.”
I took the keys without a word. I was going to have a long conversation with him about all of this.
I looked back at Amy on the tailgate. She was watching me with those dark eyes, tired now.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said quietly. “I can figure something out.” She said it like she meant it and like she expected me to take the exit.
I didn’t answer. I bent down and picked her up, settling her against my chest before walking across the lot to Jared’s truck. She was quiet while I buckled her in. No jokes. No Bigfoot. Tired, and hurting, and trying not to show either.
I closed her door. Walked around. Got in. The cab was small, which put her close. Close was exactly what I’d been fighting all afternoon. I started the engine.
“Lawson.”
I looked over.
“Thank you.” That was all.
I nodded and put the truck in gear.