BIG: (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (26 page)

They camped a few hundred meters further into the woods from the glade, and with the shelter from the mountain, Annalesa had the satisfaction of starting a fire that actually stayed lit.

Ric kept things simple with the tent. It was spring loaded, crammed into a circular bag, and erected itself with one flick of his wrist. After hiking all day, they settled for eating baked potatoes and canned Irish stew, then shared his sleeping bag, going pretty much straight to sleep.

She woke as dim morning light pressed through the thin fabric of the tent to see Ric crouching in his boxers at the unzipped door, peering up into the trees.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows, breath caught, and whispered, “What are you looking at?”

Ric reached an arm back and beckoned.

She scrambled over next to him and followed his line of sight, seeing a row of little dark brown shapes in a row hanging from the branch of a tree. She squinted. “Are those... bats?”

“A Brandt bat. I think. They’re kinda tiny.” He handed her his binoculars. “These little guys can live almost twice as long as humans.”

She adjusted the scope and peered at them. Next to the bat closest to the trunk was a pine cone which dwarfed the bat completely. “Wow. They
are
really tiny.”

“Now, aim down to the ground, just at the edge of the clearing. Between the two bent pines.”

Annalesa trained the binoculars where he’d said and picked out a hunched figure about twice the size of a fat cat, pushing sticks along the ground. It had huge front teeth.

“Is that a... beaver?”

Ric’s nod was just visible from the corner of her eye.

“I thought beavers were Canadian?”

“This is a Eurasian beaver.” Ric pulled back and hauled a red thermal top over his head. “I got to know a lot of the wildlife up here.”

“Personally?”

“Not in the I-sing, they-join-in Snow White way, no.”

She chuckled at the thought and scrambled back into the relative warmth of the tent, reaching for her clothes and deodorant. “It’s weird. I thought it was empty up here, but I suppose you just need to know what to look for.”

“It’s empty of people. Not quite the same thing.”

She put her clothes down and sat, crossing her legs. Ric’s face wasn’t tense exactly, but he seemed nervous. “You okay?”

“Yeah. It’s just good to be healthier than I was last time I came up here.”

“This is some kind of pilgrimage, isn’t it?”

Ric met her gaze and put his hand over hers. “Exactly that.”

They washed and dressed in silence, had breakfast, and sat by the fire until the wind wicked it out. Annalesa snuggled into his side and pulled his arm over her shoulder.

“So how long were you out here last time?”

“Six months. I got here as soon as I was allowed, after my last surgery.”

“You stayed out here for
six months?”

“When I first saw you back in Maine, before the party... I’d only been back in civilization a few weeks.”

“Wow.” She blinked. Well, that explained his total silence between Christmas and graduation. Ric must have sworn Brad to secrecy or something. Or maybe the vigil-of-the-wild trek was a Ryker family thing? “Did you go to Florida to thaw before coming to Maine?”

Ric burst out laughing and took her chin between his fingers, giving it a light tweak. “How the hell
could you know that?”

“The tan, Ric. You did
not
have a European tan when I caught you slamming tires with your sledgehammer. This place might be good for making you a hard man of the woods, but not so much for boosting your melanin.”

“You don’t miss much, do you?”

Annalesa thought of her idiocy in thinking Ryan had changed, but didn’t voice her doubts about that. She just shrugged. “I notice a lot, but probably still not enough.”

“Enough for me.”

She got up when he did, helping him clean up all their stuff and wrestle the tent back into its case. With all her stuff packed up, she watched him clear all traces of their existence in the area, even putting the unused firewood back into the shrubs. He moved fluidly, totally at ease in his surroundings. It warmed her all the way through, seeing him so relaxed.

“I think I get it,” she said finally. “You hated your former life and you wanted to change. So you did—and then... you came here. Is this...? This is where you felt like you were born, isn’t it?”

“No. This is where I died. I’m going to take you to where I was born.”

The sun was rising as they broke out of the woods onto the tundra, where the cold had sapped the life out of the ground. The only vegetation for a half mile in each direction was lichen. They walked carefully across the slippery tufts until they reached the coastal path again.

The rough road ran along the fjord for miles, but Annalesa didn’t care. She loved the pull in her legs and the feel of sharp, clean air filling her chest. It was a lot of exercise but it felt great. By the time they were done with this trip, her belly would probably be concave.

A grey blot in the distance got larger until it became the yawning mouth of a cave jutting up from the shale that formed the border between sea and frosted grass. Ric stalked toward it and paused at the entrance until she caught up.

His huge hand spread across the rock over the aperture, which—close up—didn’t seem as black as it had from a distance. Putting her hand out, she stretched her fingers into the darkness and her fingertips touched something soft. For a moment she thought she was going crazy, ‘feeling’ darkness, but when she pressed her palm into the softness, she realized she was touching a pelt.

“Walrus skin,” Ric explained. “Three of them overlap to keep the heat in the cave.”

She looked up to see that a seam had been sewn at the top of each, a long branch threaded through and secured to the inside wall of the cave on each side of the entrance with some kind of bracket. “How did you know about this place?”

“It’s protected and on very few maps. It’s an ancient site considered sacred by the Vikings and the Sami.”

“Who were the Sami?”

“They have a dozen names, but you might know them as the original Laplanders. They were the only people to occupy northern, arctic Europe for thousands of years—even before the Norsemen.”

“What makes the place so special?”

Ric pulled back the curtain of hides and Annalesa almost fell backwards as the wall of heat buffeted her. He tugged at her sleeve. “Best take your jacket off before we go in. It’s something like eighty degrees in there.”

Annalesa stripped off her windbreaker, hardly able to believe she’d be sweating this close to the Arctic Circle. “Is this place... volcanic?”

“Yep. It was a bolt hole for whole communities.”

“Communities? How big is this cave?”

Ric pulled the curtain back so she could step inside and she gasped at the size of the cavern as it spread out beneath the ground. Holes in the rock acted like skylights, letting great blocks of sun shaft down to the cavern floor. The dust motes hung in the air where the light fell. Peering beyond them, she saw perhaps a dozen tunnels running off from the back of the cave.

Crude steps were cut into the ground but they were well-leveled and she felt steady on her feet as she trotted down a dozen stairs and stopped in front of a fire ring in the middle of the first mezzanine of the cave. It was about six feet wide and tidily-built.

She looked back at Ric. “Did you make this?”

“I refurbished it. The original had been there probably hundreds of years.”

Annalesa tried to get her head around the idea of him
living
in this cave—no electricity, no food—alone. She reached back and caught his hand. He twined his fingers between hers and followed her silently as she examined the walls, which were covered in cave art that had to go back a thousand years.

“Can I touch it?”

“Sure.”

She was grateful to him for not telling her to be careful. She dabbed her finger against a crudely-drawn wolf and her finger came away clean, but smelling of old, musty ochre. She didn’t know much about prehistoric art, but some of the decorations running up and down the pillars were shapes made from hand-prints, a style of communication as well as decoration that went back tens of thousands of years. She pulled a flashlight out of her backpack and guided the beam along the wall to a detailed drawing in fine lines of burnt wood and more red ochre.

It looked as if two men were lowering a third by his arms into an ice hole. She tugged the flashlight right, and another picture showed the ice-hole man by the side of the ice, spread out and still. A third showed a group of hunched figures praying around what looked like a totem, and the last showed the ice-hole man standing over the praying people, clearly come back to life. Something hitched in Annalesa’s chest and her fingers closed convulsively around Ric’s.

“You okay?” he murmured.

“No, not really.” She felt tears start behind her eyes but wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t actively upset. Just... shocked. “I hate to think that your former life was so bad that you had to come here to strip everything away.”

“It worked.”

She nodded, wiping the tears from her eyes.

God girl, get a grip. He’s opening up for once, and you’re here blubbering.

Turning back, she saw him crouching by the side of the fire ring, pulling a broad stone from the floor. It was a foot by two and had to weigh something like fifty pounds, but he slid it to the side like he was moving a pillow. Bracing one hand on the ground, he reached into the hole and pulled out a set of copper pans and a couple of metal spatulas with wooden handles.

“You really lived here for six months?”

“Nope.” He pulled out a large can with a handle. “Like I said, I died here.”

She thought of the picture of the man being dunked into the ice and nausea rose. “Ric, please don’t say that again unless you plan to follow it up with an explanation. I’ve got this mental image of you being drowned and coming back to life like Frankenstein.”

He quirked a smile. “No, it wasn’t quite like that. But I do kind of have his scars, don’t I?”

“I’m not going to push you to explain before you’re ready, but please stop freaking me out.”

“I’m sorry.” Ric stood and wrapped his arms round her waist. “That’s not what I was trying to do, but I don’t know how else to explain leaving an entire life in this place and starting a new one.”

She pressed up from the balls of her feet and kissed him. “Let me ask the question differently. Did you stay here for six months?”

“Yeah. I’ve never felt so free. Well, until now. It means a lot to me, you coming. Want dinner?”

“That’d be great.”

Accepting the total change of subject, she sat down while Ric started a fire, but wasn’t allowed to rest her legs for long. She groaned as he tugged her to her feet. “Where are we going?”

“To get water.”

She followed him further down into the cave and stopped behind him next to a man-made stone gulley, filled a few feet deep with water. Glacial melt, she guessed. And, from the look of the gutter-like trenches cut into the ground, rainwater too. They collected a couple of cans of it and took it back to the fire to boil.

Dinner was the remainder of their back-pack supplies. They shared two cans of condensed chicken soup, corned beef, and the last of the rye bread. She was finishing off her corned beef sandwich when she looked over to see Ric holding out a slab of Lindt mint chocolate. She almost snatched at it.

“Chocolate!”

“Hey, hey! Let’s have half now, half later. It’s one thing I really missed down here. Desserts.” He peeled the bar open and snapped off about four strips for her, passing it over. He nibbled at his own. “I miss this stuff when I’m in the States. Europeans do chocolate so much better.”

“Finally, something that Americans don’t do better.”

“I don’t diss Europe that much, do I?”

“For someone who lives in Norway, you do.” Annalesa chomped at her mint chocolate, reveling in the taste. “Oh God, this is gorgeous.”

“I thought you’d appreciate a little taste of civilization. There’s no need for you to go as lost-in-the-wilderness as I did.”

“Thank you.” Annalesa finished her second strip, stopping to finish her mouthful before going on. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for the Bear Grylls thing. Not for more than a couple of days at a time, anyway.”

They cleaned up, then Ric disappeared again to the back of the cave, returning with an armful of furs. He set them down by the fire, reaching into his Bergen to pull out the sleeping bags, which he pulled out unzipped. The furs went on top of the sleeping bags, then he tucked a sheet over both layers, making a large mattress. A second sheet went on top.

“It’s warm in here,” he explained. “But the ground’s not exactly comfortable.”

Annalesa did the flop test on the mattress, finding it ridiculously comfortable. “Wow. This is so soft!”

“Nothing less for my part-time Valkyrie.”

She grinned, but her smile faded as he pulled a rifle from a slotted hole on the inside of the Bergen and assembled it. “Are we going to need that?”

“It’s always better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.”

“True.”

“And here’s a Lady Sif, since you sneakily left yours in Maine.” Ric gave his eyes a mock roll and set the pistol into a stone which had a deep notch in the surface. “I’ll be back. I’m just gonna check the back exit.”

Annalesa stripped down to her vest top, realizing how right Ric was about the heat in the cave. He disappeared into the tunnel that ran past the water gulley and sauntered back a moment later, clapping grit off his hands. He crossed his arms and pulled his t-shirt over his head, tossing the garment onto his hiking bag.

The firelight kissed orange and primrose shadows across his hard chest and tight stomach. He was so slim now, his hiking bottoms seeming to cling beneath his hips through sheer willpower alone. Annalesa felt goosebumps rising as he thumbed down the trousers, tossing those onto his t-shirt. His socks followed, leaving him bare save for snug-fitting black briefs which did nothing to diminish the solid softness of their contents.

“I have something to do for the night. I’ll be back by sunrise.”

“What?” She gaped at him. “Where are you going?”

“It’s easier to hunt in the twilight.”

“Hunt?”

“Unless you want roast lichen for breakfast?”

Annalesa looked wistfully at the soft double-mattress which she’d now have all to herself. She’d been looking forward to curling up with him, his hard thigh between her legs, her face against his chest.

“Don’t pout, Leesa.”

“I’m not pouting,” she pouted.

“You are totally pouting.”

She looked up to find him naked, pulling the band from his hair. It tumbled down to his shoulders, making him look more Norse than she’d ever imagined in her most outlandish fantasies. The fire flickered behind him, making a silhouette of his body and a fuzzy bronze halo of his hair.

“I’m not pouting now.”