Wild in the Moment
But then he forgot her looks altogether, because her fingers dug really deep into his pocket. Instead of closing her hand around his best friend, though, her fingers emerged into the light, clasping his cell phone.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Come on, 911, come on…”
All right, so possibly he wasn’t as excited about her or life as he first thought. His eyelids drooped; he couldn’t keep them open. His mind felt as muzzy as steel-wool soup. He heard her voice on the phone, caught partial snatches of her side of a conversation, but he seemed to be uncontrollably fading in and out.
“Sheriff, this is Daisy Campbell…yeah, Margaux and Colin’s oldest daughter…. George Webster? You’re the sheriff now? Well, that’s great, but listen, I…”
She pushed a red-nailed hand through her wild mane of hair. “Yes, I’m back from the south of France. And yes, it’s beautiful there. But listen, I…”
She jerked to her feet and spun around, talking faster, appearing more and more agitated. “Yes, I changed my last name back to Campbell. You’re right, marriage wasn’t for me. Everyone always said that, didn’t they? That I’d never settle down…” She seemed to try to interrupt him several more times, and then finally spit out, “Sheriff! Would you listen? I’m at the Cunningham place. They’re not here—”
Again, the person on the other end must have talked some more, because she cut in again. “Well, that’s nice to know, that they’re vacationing in Pittsburgh, but the point is that there’s a strange man here…. Teague Larson, you say? Yes. Yes. It does look as if he’s a carpenter or electrician or something, but the point is that he’s hurt. Bad hurt. And no, I can’t very well calm down and take it easy. I know there’s a blizzard but…”
Fade out. Teague tried to catch more, but beneath his eyelids all he could see was a canvas of pea green. Dizzying swirls of pea green. A stomach-churning paisley pattern of swirling pea green.
At some point—who knew how long—he felt her hands on him again. She pulled off his tool belt, which felt a million times better. Smooth, chilled fingers pressed the inside of his wrist, then the carotid artery in his neck. After that, she laid her cheek right on top of his chest, with all that vibrant dark hair tickling his nostrils. Moments passed before she spoke into the cell phone again.
“I can’t do a pulse. I’m not a nurse, for Pete’s sake. Yes, it seems as if his heart’s beating strong, but I have nothing to compare it— What the Sam Hill do you mean days! I know we’re in the middle of a blizzard. I don’t care. I want an ambulance here right now!”
Okay. If she was going to do the shrieking thing, he was going back to the unconscious thing. Angel or no angel, the pain just wasn’t worth it. If she patted him down again, he’d rethink it, maybe wake up again, but until then there just wasn’t a lot of motivation to stay with it.
“Damn it, I’m telling you he could be hurt badly! He could have broken bones. And there’s blood beneath his head. Okay, okay, I’ll…”
More colorful swirls filled his mind. Not pea green this time. More like the blend of colors from stirring whipped cream into coffee. At first the swirling sensation was as fast as a whirlpool, but then everything seemed to slow down, soften, dance to a far quieter tune.
When he heard her voice again, she seemed calmer. At least a little calmer. She’d quit swearing a blue streak at the sheriff, anyway.
“Yeah, I did that. Yeah, okay. I can do that, too. And yes, I can plug in his cell phone somewhere, as long as there’s power here. But you have to promise to pick him up as soon as you can. I can keep calling with a report every few hours, but the very second you can get an ambulance or Medi-Vac here, I want…”
Teague remembered nothing else for a while. When he woke the next time, shadows had darkened. The wind outside was still howling like a lonely wolf, but the kitchen was completely silent. The naked light fixture over the sink glared straight in his eyes—but not for long.
Huge, gorgeous dark eyes suddenly blocked that sharp, bright light. It was her again. She was real, after all. Who’d ever believe it?
And then there was her voice, not screaming at all now, but low, low as a sexy blues singer, low as sexual promises in the dead of night, whispering an ardent, “Merde!”
Two
Daisy had notoriously bad judgment—and bad luck—with men, but this was ridiculous.
“Even Jean-Luc never put me through this,” she muttered. “If I never take care of another man as long as I live, it’ll be too soon. I’m not only going to be celibate. I’m going to buy a chastity belt with a lock and no key. I’m going to take antiestrogen pills. Maybe I could try to turn gay. Maybe I could try hypnotism, see if there’s a way I could get an automatic flight response near an attractive guy….”
Temporarily she forgot that train of thought, enticing though it was.
Man, she was tired. Her eyes were stinging. Her feet ached. Her heart hurt. She had no battery of energy left, hadn’t for the last hour, but it’s not as if she had a choice to keep moving.
Crouching down by the fireplace in the Cunningham living room, she touched a match to kindling, and while waiting to make sure the fire took, mentally ran through a checklist of what still had to be done.
She’d scooped up a box of candles from the Cunninghams’ pantry, collected matches, three flashlights, then found a metal tray to put it all in. She located the generator in the basement, which was great, because who knew how long the house would have power? But power, of course, was just the tip of the iceberg.
No one grew up in Vermont without blizzard training. She’d brought in four loads of cut wood from the garage. Stacked it in the living room by the fireplace, then checked the flue and stacked the first branches and kindling. Before starting the fire, though, she’d raided the downstairs closets and cupboards for coats, pillows and blankets. She pulled the curtains and closed all doors to the living room, rolling towels at window and door bases so drafts couldn’t get in.
The living room had been updated since the kitchen, judging from the furnishings—which were heavy on the neutrals, and colored up with afghans and pictures and keepsakes. Cluttered or not, Daisy judged it to be potentially the warmest room in the house, which was why she’d set up everything here. It was basic winter storm thinking. Conserve energy. Conserve resources. Not to mention, she didn’t want to intrude on the Cunninghams’ house or stuff any more than she had to.
All that seemed pretty solid planning—only, she’d been running on fumes for hours now. At least she wasn’t still cold, but she was darn close to falling asleep standing up—and there were still three chores she absolutely had to do.
One was fill the bathtubs, for an emergency water source. The second was food. Soup would do, but she simply had to get something in her stomach soon.
And then there was the other chore.
The kindling took. She watched the little flames lick around the branches, then catch on a small log, and knew her baby fire was going to make it. So she dusted her hands on her fanny and stood up. With a frown deeper than a crater, she aimed for the kitchen.
He was her other chore.
Somehow he had to be moved—but how on earth was she supposed to move a man almost twice as big as she was?
Hands on hips, she edged closer. Long before she’d started the house preparations, she’d tackled what she could for the stranger. Feeling guiltier than a prowler, she’d opened cupboards and drawers until she’d located the Cunninghams’ first-aid supplies. As quickly as she could, then, she’d put a clean towel under his head and tried to cleanse the head wound. After that, she tugged off his boots. He’d groaned so roughly when she touched his right foot that she’d gingerly explored, pulling off his sock—and found one ankle swollen like a puff ball.
Great. Another injury. She’d wrapped the ankle with some tape—God knew that might be the wrong thing if he had a broken bone. But doing nothing seemed the worse choice, so she kept moving, packed the ankle in some ice, then covered him with a light blanket for shock. For quite a while she just stayed there with him, hunkered down, worried sick he was going to die on her—until she realized she was acting like a scared goose.
She wasn’t helping him, staying there and tucking the blanket around him another dozen times. The only thing she could do was get her butt in gear and do some survival preparation stuff. So she’d done all that, but now…
Damn. She couldn’t just leave him on the hard kitchen floor. It was drafty, cold, dirty. The couch or carpet in the living room was warmer, safer, more protected.
But how to move him, without moving his right ankle or his head? How to move his weight at all?
She thought, then trekked upstairs, thinking Mrs. Cunningham had to have a linen closet somewhere. She found it and pulled a sheet from the bottom shelf, hoping it wasn’t a good one. The plan was to somehow wrestle him onto the sheet, with the hope that she’d be able to pull him across the floor that way.
If that didn’t work… But she amended that thought. It had to work. She had no other ideas.
Crouching down, she gently pushed and prodded until she’d maneuvered the sheet under his weight. It took a while, partly because she was so worried about injuring him further, and partly because she kept glancing at his face.
He took her breath away; she had to admit it. He just had the kind of looks that really rang her chimes. Rugged jaw, dusted with whiskers. The kind of thick, rough hair that never stayed brushed, not too short, not too styled, just…himself. Shoulders that wouldn’t be subdued in an ordinary shirt. Jeans worn soft, the kind that said he didn’t give a damn what they looked like.
Physical, she thought dispassionately. One look, and she could immediately picture him hot and sweaty, throwing a woman on the bed and diving in after her. The kind of guy who was lusty about sex, lusty about life, lusty about everything he did. Bullheaded. Those kinds of guys always were. The thicker the neck, the more stubborn the brain. And the bigger the feet, the bigger… Well, it wasn’t as if she cared how big he was under that zipper.
She was immune. She could look, she could enjoy—as long as he stayed alive for her, anyway. But she already knew he was totally wrong for her. She didn’t know why at that precise moment. Maybe he was married. Or maybe he couldn’t define faithful with a big-print dictionary. Or maybe he’d found some creative, new way to break a woman’s heart.
The details didn’t matter.
The reality was that she had never—ever—fallen for a good guy. The flaw was in her, not them. She had some kind of chemistry surge near bad boys. The difference between when she was seventeen and now, though, was that she faced her problems. No more ducking or denial.
Which meant that when and if she liked the looks of a guy, that was it—she shut the barn door and padlocked it.
Right now, though, she couldn’t be worried less about falling for Mr. Adorable. She was focused on one goal and one goal only—which was to pull the big guy into the living room before she collapsed from 1) a broken back, 2) exhaustion, 3) starvation, or 4) all of the above. My God, he was heavy. Sweat prickled the back of her neck. She pulled with all her might, groaning to give herself extra strength, and still only managed to drag him a few more inches.
Jean-Luc, her ex, had less character than a boa constrictor. But at least he’d been relatively light. Even when he’d been three sheets to the wind—or high—he’d usually been able to at least help her move him around. This guy…
When she glanced down at him again, the guy in question not only seemed to be conscious, but was staring with fascination at her face. “Not that I mind being carried…but wouldn’t it be easier for me to get up and walk?” he asked.
She couldn’t kill him. No matter how mad she was, you just couldn’t murder a man who was already hurt. But an hour later she was still ticked off.
That was also the soonest she could find time to close the door on the kitchen and call the sheriff to make another report.
“I hear you, George,” she said into the receiver. “And I admit it. He’s alive. I even admit that it doesn’t look as if he’s going back into a coma anytime soon. But I still have no way to know how badly hurt he is. I need an ambulance. Or a helicopter. Or a snowmobile—”
While she listened, she also ground a little fresh pepper onto the potato soup. The stove and refrigerator were still functioning in the torn-up kitchen, but that was about it. There was no sink or running water. All the pots and pans and dishes had been moved elsewhere, ditto for silverware, food and spices.
Daisy considered herself outstanding at making something out of nothing—not because she’d ever wanted that talent, but God knows, because being married to Jean-Luc had required some inventive scrambling to just survive. She’d always been her mom’s daughter in the kitchen, besides. So she started out with a bald can of potato soup she found in a basement pantry, then found kitchen tools and the spices in boxes in the dining room, then raided the depths of the fridge, finally came through with some bacon crumbs and a beautiful hunk of cheddar.
The chives and pepper weren’t as fresh as she’d like, but a decent soup was still coming together. If she could just get rid of her unwanted invalid, she might even be able to relax.
“Yes, George, I hear that wind outside. And I can’t even see for the snow. But that’s why you guys have snow machines, isn’t it? To be able to rescue people in all conditions? No, I’m not exaggerating! At the very least, he needs some X-rays. And some antibiotics or medicine like that—oh, for Pete’s sake.” She stared in disbelief at the cell phone. “No, I won’t go out with you when this is all over, you…you cretinous canard! Des clous!”
The French insults didn’t even dent his attitude. George just laughed. The sheriff! The one person in town who was supposed to rescue you no matter what the problem!
When it came down to it, the law had never done her a lick of good.
The soup was finally ready. She wrapped a spoon in a napkin, flicked off the kitchen light and carried her steaming bowl into the living room. The fire was popping-hot now. She’d have to wake up in the night to make sure it was fed—otherwise it’d go out, and suck all their warmth out the chimney. But for now, the cherry and apple logs smelled as soothing as an old-fashioned Christmas.
She ignored the shrieking wind, as easily as she ignored the long, blanket-covered lump on the couch. Darn it, she’d earned this meal. And she was actually getting woozy-headed from exhaustion and jet lag and too many hours without something in her stomach. Quickly she settled in the giant recliner—obviously Mr. Cunningham’s favorite chair, judging from the hunting magazines stacked next to it—and reached for the spoon.
A sexy voice—a pitiful, weak, vulnerable but nevertheless sexy voice—piped up from the deep shadows of the couch. “Could I have just a little of that?”
“No.”
A moment passed, and then the voice piped up again, this time adding a desperate, ingratiating tone on top of the weak and pitiful. “It smells really good. In fact, it smells fantastic.”
“Tough. You’re not getting any food.”
When he responded with silence again this time, she had to relent. “Look. I’m not eating in front of you to be mean. There’s nowhere to sit in the kitchen and I’m beat and this is the only other room that’s really warm. Honestly, though, it’s just not a good idea for you to have food after a head bump. You could throw up.”
Like any other guy who’d made it to first base, he immediately tried for second. “I won’t. I promise I won’t.”
“So you say. But the sheriff said I was to make sure you stayed awake, check your pupils every couple of hours and not give you any food until tomorrow morning.” She scooped up more soup, still not looking at him. She still remembered the ka-boom of her heartbeat when she half carried the big lug into the living room. Then she’d had to suffer through a whole bunch more intimate body contact in the process of settling him on the couch and tucked him in again.
That was her whole problem with men. They looked at her a certain way, she caved. He was one of them, she could sense it, smell it, taste it. For right now at least he was hurt. How much damage could a guy do when he was hurt? Particularly when she refused to look at him. She wasn’t volunteering for any more of those ka-booms.
“Please,” he begged charmingly.
She plunked down her soup, growled a four letter word in total disgust, then marched into the kitchen to spoon out another bowl. A small bowl. She brought it back with a scowl. “You get two spoonfuls. No more.”
“Okay.”
“You keep that down, then we’ll talk. But I don’t want to hear any whining or bribes.”
“No whining. No bribes. Got it,” he promised her.
Yeah. That big baritone promising not to whine was like a bear promising not to roar, but she slid the ottoman over and sat down with the bowl. “Don’t try sitting. Just lean up a little bit.”
“I think there’s a slim chance I could feed myself.”
“I think there’s a big chance you’ll eat the whole bowl. That’s the point. I’m controlling this.”
“Ah. A bossy, controlling woman, are you?”
“No. A scared woman. If you die or get hurt any worse, I’m going to be stuck with you until this blizzard is over.” She lifted the spoonful, and he obediently opened his mouth, his eyes on hers. Again she told herself he was hurt, for Pete’s sake. But how the hell could an injured guy have so much devilment in those eyes?
“Are we going to sleep together in here?”
She sighed, then plugged his mouth with another spoonful. “When I’m hurt,” she said pointedly, “I usually make an extra point of being nice to the people who are stuck taking care of me.”
“Well, if you won’t sleep with me, would you consider taking a shower with me? Because I’ve got sawdust itches from my neck to my toes. My hands are full of grit. I just want to clean up.”
“No showers. No baths. What if you fell?” But when she fed him another spoonful, she had to consider the thought. “It could be a good idea to make sure there isn’t any dust or debris near that head wound, though.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. And I couldn’t fall if you took the shower with me. Maybe if we got around to formally introducing ourselves? I’m Teague Larson—”
“I know. The sheriff told me. And I’m Daisy Campbell. You can either call me Daisy—or Battle-Ax—but either way, no shower. I’ll try to cook up some way to get your hands clean. If we still have water and power tomorrow, maybe we can talk about a shower for you then. But tonight we’re doing what the sheriff said for a concussion.”
“I don’t have a concussion.”
“You knocked yourself out. You could very well have a concussion,” she corrected him.
“I knocked myself out because I was an idiot, took a chance I shouldn’t have taken. But my head’s too hard to dent, trust me, or ask anyone who knows me. In the meantime, I don’t suppose there’s any more soup? Or any real food somewhere?”
“The kitchen’s a complete disaster—which you should know, since you’re the one who tore it up. I was lucky to find the soup and a pot to put it in. You’re not getting any meat or heavy foods, anyway, so don’t waste your breath looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
She fed him one more spoonful of soup, then ignored those soulful eyes and carted the dishes into the downstairs bathroom. Without running water in the kitchen, she was stuck doing dishes in the bitsy bathroom sink—but that was the end of the chores. She could still do a dozen more things to prepare for a loss of power, but they just weren’t going to happen. She was two seconds away from caving.
When she returned to the living room, she brought the invalid a fresh glass of water and a warm washcloth to wipe his hands, then knelt at the hearth. Once the fire was tended, she fully intended to sink into a nightlong coma. The blaze was going strong, but she needed to poke the fattest logs, tidying up the bed of ashes, add on two more slow-burning logs.
“The way you talked to the sheriff, you seemed to know him.” Teague, darn him, sounded wide awake.
“George Webster? I went to school with him.” She hung up the poker and turned around. “He followed me around my whole senior year with his tongue hanging out.”
There, she’d won a grin. His eyes tracked her as she pushed off her shoes and shook out a blanket. “I’ll bet a lot of boys followed you with their tongues hanging out,” he said wryly.
“A few,” she admitted. “What kills me now is realizing how immature I was. I wanted the guys to like me. I wanted a reputation for being wild and fun. And whether that was dumb or not, I had two younger sisters, both of whom looked up to me. I should have been thinking about being a role model for them, and instead…”
“Instead what?”
“Instead…” She curled up in the overstuffed recliner and wrapped the blanket around her. God knew why she was talking. Probably because she was too darn tired to think straight. “Instead there was only one thing in my head in high school. Getting out. I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave White Hills and do something exciting. I was never in real trouble—not like trouble with the police. But someone was always calling my mom on me. My skirt was too short. My makeup was too ‘artsy.’ I’d skip English to hang out in the Art Room. I never did anything big wrong, but I can see now it was all just symbolic little stuff to show how trapped I felt in a small town and how much I wanted to leave.”
“Yet now you’re back.”
“Only for a short time. I just need a few weeks to catch my breath before moving on again.” Even though her eyes were drooping, she could hear the ardent tone in her voice. She so definitely wasn’t staying. A few hours back in White Hills, and already she’d been caught up in a blizzard and a guy problem. It was a sign. She should never have tried coming home. Even for a month. Even knowing she’d been pretty darn desperate.
“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come to be living in the south of France?”
Her eyes popped open—at least temporarily. Maybe tiredness had loosened her tongue, but she couldn’t fathom how he’d known she lived in France.
He explained, “Pretty hard not to know a little about you. You’re one of the exotic citizens of White Hills, after all. Daisy Campbell, the exotic, glamorous, adventurous girl…the one all the other girls wanted to be, who had the guts to leave the country and go play all over France with the rich crowd….”
“Oh, yeah, that’s sure me,” she said wryly, and washed a hand over her face. Sometimes it was funny, how you could say a fact, and it really was a fact—yet it didn’t have a lick of truth to it. She hadn’t been playing in a long time. Anywhere. With anyone. “Anyway…I ended up living in France because I fell in love with an artist. Met him at one of his first American shows, which happened to be in Boston. I can’t even remember why I was visiting there…but I remember falling in love in about two seconds flat. Took off and married him right after high school.”
“I take it he was French?”
“Yeah, he was French. And he wanted to live in Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne had studied with Emile Zola. And then Remy-en-Provence, where Van Gogh hung out for a long time. And then the Côte d’Azur—because the light on the water is so pure there, or that’s what all the artists say, that there’s no place like the French Riviera.”
“Hmm…so you traveled around a lot. Sounds ritzy and exciting.”
“It was,” she said, because that’s what she always told everyone back home. They thought she was gloriously happy. They thought she was living a glamorous, always-exciting dream of a life. No one knew otherwise—except probably her mother, and that was only because Margaux had the embarrassing gift of being able to read her daughters’ minds.