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Up Close and Dangerous Page 45
Author: Linda Howard

“Of an infinite variety.”

“They come in something other than male and female?”

She chuckled, enjoying the banter. “One brother and one sister, two half brothers I never see, three half sisters I never see, and a whole raft of stepbrothers and stepsisters whose names I have to think about, and most of whom I wouldn’t recognize if we collided head-on.” She thought she’d recognize the guy with red hair and a cleft chin, but she never could remember his name. He was her mother’s second husband’s son, one of them, with his second wife—her mother had been his third. Thinking about it all made Bailey’s headache worse.

“Are you close to your brother and sister?”

She noticed he didn’t ask about her parents, but then he was a smart guy so he probably figured that would be a pointless question. “My brother, Logan. He and his wife, Peaches, were the ones I was going rafting with. My sister, not so much. She has her own issues.”

On a peripheral level she noticed how comfortable she was now, not physically, but mentally. Rescue would reach them tomorrow, and this whole nightmare would be over. She wouldn’t recommend being in a plane crash, not fun on any level, but she thought she’d gained a friend from the experience. She felt a small ping of astonishment that she would ever consider Captain Sourpuss Tight-ass Justice a friend, but she’d discovered he wasn’t a sourpuss, and the only thing tight about his ass was the way it looked, which was pretty damn yummy.

“You’re going to sleep,” he commented. “I can tell by the way you’re breathing.”

She hummed an agreement in her throat. He adjusted his position, pulling her closer, and she settled into his arms, against his warmth, as if she had always slept there.

19

ON THE THIRD MORNING, THE DAY DAWNED SUNNY AND bright. When Cam crawled out of the shelter, he discovered that he was considerably stronger than he had been the day before, plus his headache had lessened. The swelling of his eyelids seemed to have lessened, too. He didn’t feel like jumping hurdles or running marathons, but he walked unaided, albeit slowly, and without having to hold on to anything.

Bailey was feeling better, too; her fever had broken during the night, drenching her with sweat. That hadn’t been a good thing, not in below-freezing weather. She had made him roll onto his side facing away from her, and she had pulled off her damp clothes and put on dry ones. Considering the very limited space in the shelter, he wished he could have seen the contortions, but he hadn’t cheated by taking a peek. After she’d turned into a statue when he kissed her, he didn’t want to spook her again. In the same spirit, he’d made doubly sure he hadn’t prodded her with an erection even though he’d awakened several times with a real urge. The time was coming, though…

But first they had to get off this damn mountain.

Their food situation was becoming critical. There were two candy bars left, and they were becoming weak from lack of food. The fact that they’d both slept most of the past thirty-six hours had helped because they hadn’t burned many calories, but if they weren’t rescued today…

He hadn’t revealed to Bailey how disturbed he was that they hadn’t been rescued yesterday. A satellite should have picked up the signal from their ELT, and even though the mountain had had cloud cover all day, a rescue team could have been dropped off at a lower, more accessible location, and made it up to them.

The problem was that an ELT was battery-powered, and would transmit for only twenty-four to forty-eight hours. They’d passed the twenty-four-hour mark yesterday morning, and were fast coming up on the forty-eight; if the signal hadn’t been picked up by then, it wasn’t going to be picked up at all. When a rescue team hadn’t reached them yesterday, he’d started to worry that maybe the ELT’s batteries had been weak and had petered out before a search had even been started.

He looked up as Bailey made her way through the trees back to the shelter, stopped in front of it, and gave him a determined look. “You have to stay out here a while,” she said, and her tone of voice didn’t give him any options. “I can’t stand it any longer. I stink. I don’t care how cold it is, I have to wipe myself off and put on clean clothes. And after I finish, you have to clean up.”

“You put on clean clothes last night,” he pointed out, just to devil her. “And I don’t have any clean clothes.”

“That’s your fault,” she shot back. “I don’t know what made you think you needed only one change of clothes for an overnight trip.”

“Maybe the fact that one is all I ever carry.”

“Yeah, well, you have to plan for emergencies. What if you’d spilled coffee down your clean shirt at breakfast? You’d be stuck.”

He wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. Maybe it was the way she stood so ramrod straight, or the mulish set of her jaw, that made him think better of it. But it was funny, listening to her lecture him about clothes. Maybe if she were still wearing the sophisticated pants and jacket she’d worn when she boarded the plane the lecture wouldn’t have seemed so out of place, but her appearance now made bag ladies look fashionable.

She wore so many clothes she had no shape, and the flannel shirt tied over her head was the crowning touch. No, maybe that would be the socks on her hands. Then again he had her shirts and pants wrapped around him, because he obviously couldn’t wear them. If she looked better than he did, that was really bad. And if he could have gotten her socks on over his hands, he’d be wearing a pair of them, too.

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Linda Howard's Novels
» Kiss Me While I Sleep (CIA Spies #3)
» All the Queen's Men (CIA Spies #2)
» Kill and Tell (CIA Spies #1)
» Cry No More
» Dream Man
» Ice
» Mr. Perfect
» Now You See Her
» Open Season
» Troublemaker
» Up Close and Dangerous
» White Lies (Rescues #4)
» Heartbreaker (Rescues #3)
» Diamond Bay (Rescues #2)
» A Game of Chance (Mackenzie Family #5)
» Midnight Rainbow (Rescues #1)
» Mackenzie's Magic (Mackenzie Family #4)
» Shades of Twilight
» Mackenzie's Pleasure (Mackenzie Family #3)
» Son of the Morning