Two Alone (16 page)

Apparently she'd been in a much deeper sleep than she had planned on. When Cooper came barging through the door shouting her name, she sprang up so suddenly that her head reeled dizzily and yellow dots exploded in
front
of her eyes.

"Rusty!" he shouted. "Rusty, did you— Dammit, what are you doing in bed?" His coat was open, his hair wild. His checks were ruddy. He was breathing hard, as though bed been running.

"What am 1 doing in bed?" she asked around a huge yawn. "I was sleeping."

"Sleeping!
Sleeping!
Didn'
t
you hear the plane?"

"Plane?"

"Stop repeating every damn word I say! Where's the
fl
are gun?"

"The flare gun?"

He was all but foaming at the mouth. "Where's the flare gun? There's a plane buzzing overhead."

Her feet hit the floor. "Is it looking for us?"

"How the hell should I know?" He tore through
t
he cabin, uprighting everything he laid his hands on in his frantic search
for
the flare gun. "Where is that...here!" Brandishing the gun. he raced outside, leaped over the porch, and scanned the sky. In stocking feet, Rusty hobbled after him.

"Do
you see it?"

"Shut up!" He cocked his head to one side while he listened carefully. The unmistakable hum of the engine reached them
at
the same time. They turned simultaneously and were met with a dismal sight.

It was an airplane, all right. Obviously a search plane, because it was flying low. But it was flying in the opposite direction. Firing the flares now would serve no purpose except to waste them. Two pairs of eyes remained on the diminishing speck until it grew too small to see and the whine of the engine could no longer be heard. It left a deafening silence in its wake. As the noise had died, so had their chances for a probable rescue.

Cooper came around slowly His eyes looked cold and colorless and so laden with murderous intent
t
hat Rusty took a step backwa
r
d.

"Just what the
hell
were you doing asleep?"

Rusty preferred him shouting. Ranting and raving she knew how to deal with and respond to. This soft, hissing, sinister-as-a-s
e
rpen
t
voice terrified her. "I...I finished the wash," she said hastily. The words tripped over themselves. "I was exhausted. I had to lift—"

I
t suddenly occurred to her that she owed him no stuttering apologies. From the beginning, he'd assumed charge of
t
he flare gun. It hadn't been out of his possession since they'd left the wrecked aircraft.

Belligerently, she placed her hands on her hips. "How dare you blame this on
me!
Why did you go off without the flare gun?"

"Because I was mad as hell this morning when I left. I forgot it."

"So it's your fault the flare wasn't fired, not mine!"

"I
t
was your fault that I was so damn mad when I left."

"If you can't control your shor
t
temper, how can you expect me
to
?"

His eyes turned dark. "Even if I'd had the gun and fired it, they could have missed it. But they damn sure could have seen smoke from our chimney. But, no. You needed a beauty rest. So you went to sleep and let the fire burn out."

"Why haven't you built a signal fire, a big one, one a potential rescuer couldn't miss?"

"I didn't think I'd need one. Not with a chimney. Of course I didn't count on you taking afternoon naps."

She faltered, then said defensively. "Chimney smoke wouldn't have attracted their attention anyway. That's nothing out of the ordinary."

"This far off the beaten track it is. They would have at least circled around to investigate."

Rusty groped for another valid alibi. "The wind is too strong for a column of smoke to form. Even if the fire had been going, they wouldn't have spotted our smoke."

"There was a
chance."

"Not as good a chance as seeing a flare, if you had had the gun with you."

It would have been prudent not to point out his dereliction of duty at that particular moment. His lower lip disappeared beneath his mustache and he took a menacing step forward. "I could easily murder you for letting that plane go by."

She tossed her head back. "Why don't you? I'd rather you do that than keep harping about my shortcomings."

"But you provide me with such a wealth of material. You've got so many shortcomings that if we were stranded here for
yea
rs
I would never get around
t
o harping on all of them."

Her cheeks grew pink with indignation.
"
I
admit it! I'm not qualified to live in a rustic cabin in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't a life-style I chose for myself."

His chin jutted out. "You can't even cook."

"I've never wanted to or needed to. I'm a career woman," she said with fierce pride.

"Well, a helluva lot of good your career is doing me now."

"Me, me, me," Rusty shou
te
d. "You've thought only of yourself through this whole ordeal."

"Ha! I should be so lucky. Instead I've had you to think about. You've been nothing but an albatross."

"It was not my fault chat my leg got burr."

"And I suppose you're going
t
o say it wasn't your fault tha
t
those two men went dotty over you."

"
It
wasn
’
t.
"

"No
?
" he sneered nastily. "Well, you haven't stopped putting out signals that you'd like to have me in your pants."

Later, Rusty couldn't believe she'd actually done it. She'd never guessed that she had a latent violent streak. Even as a child, she'd always given in co other children to avoid a confron
t
ation. By nature she was a pacifist. She'd never been physically aggressive.

But at Cooper's intentionally hurtful words, she launched herself a
t
him, fingers curled into claws aimed for his smirking face. She never reached him. She came down hard on her injured leg. It buckled beneath her. Screaming
with pain, she fell to the
fr
ozen ground.

Cooper was beside her
instantly,
h
e
picked her up. She fo
ught hi
m so strenuously that he restrained her in an armlock. "Stop that or I'll knock you unconscious."

"You would, wouldn't you?" sh
e asked, breathless from her eff
orts.

"Damn right. And I'd enjoy it."

Her struggles subsided, more out of weakness and pain than capitulation. He carried her indoors and set her down in the chair near the fire. Casting her a reproachful look, he knelt on the cold hearth and painstakingly coaxed the fire back to life.

"Does your leg still hurt?"

She shook her head no. It hurt like hell, but she'd have her tongue cut our before admitting it. She wasn't going to speak to him, not after what he'd said, which was patently untrue. Her refusal to speak was childish, bur she clung to her resolution not to, even as he separated her torn pants leg, rolled down her sock, and examined the zigzagging incision on her shin.

"Stay off it for
t
he rest of the day. Use your crutches if you move around." He patted her clothes into place, then stood up. "I'm going back
to
get the fish. I dropped them in my pell-mell rush to the cabin. I hope a bear hasn't already made them his dinner." At the door he turned back. "And I'll cook them if it's all
t
he same
to
you. They look like good fish and you'd probab
ly
ruin them."

He slammed
t
he door behind him.

They were good fish. Delicious, in fact. He'd cooked them in a skillet until they were falling-off-the-bones tender, crusty on the outside and flaky on the inside. Rusty regretted passing up the second one, but she wasn't about to devour it ravenously, a
s
she had done the first. Cooper added insult to injury by ea
ting
it when she refused it. She wished he would choke on a
bo
ne
and die. Instead, he complac
entl
y licked his fingers, smacking noisily, and patted his stomach.

"I'm stuffed."

Oh, boy, did she have some excellent comebacks for that leading line. But she maintained her stony silence.

"Clean up this mess," he said curtly, leaving the dirty table
an
d stove to her.

She did as she was told. But not without making a terrible racket that echoed off the rafters. When she had finished, she threw herself down
on
her bed and gazed at the ceiling overhead. She didn't know if she were more hurt or
angry. But whichever, Cooper L
andry had coaxed more emotion from her than any other man ever had. Those emotions had run the gamut from gratitude to disgust.

He was the meanest, most spiteful human being she'd ever had the misfortune to meet, and she hated him with a passion that
app
alled her.

True, she had begged him to get into bed with her last night. But for comfort, not sex! She hadn't asked for it; she hadn't wanted it. It had just happened. H
e was bound to realize that. H
is puffed-up, colossal ego just kept him from admitting it.

Well, one thing was for certain: from now on she was going
to
be as modest as a nun. He'd see the skin of her face, possibly her neck, surely her hands, but that was it. It wasn't going to be easy. Not living together in this—

He
r thoughts came to an abrupt halt as she spied something overhead that provided the solution to her problem. There were hooks over her bed, exactly like the ones Cooper had used to drape the curtain in front of the bathtub.

Fil
led with sudden inspiration, she
left the bed quickly and retrie
v
e
d an extra blanker from the shelf against the wall. Completely ignoring Cooper, who she knew was watching her covertly, she dragged a chair across the floor and placed it beneath one of the hooks.

Standing on the chair, she had to stretch her calf muscles— more than they'd ever been stretched in aerobics class—in order to reach the hook, but eventually she managed it. Moving the chair directly beneath another hook, she repeated the procedure. When she was done, she was left with a curtain of sorts around her bed, which would give her privacy.

She shot her cabin mate a smug glance before she ducked behind the blanket and let it fall into place behind her. There! Let him accuse her of asking for "it."

She shuddered at the memory of
t
he crude thing he'd said to her. Add
uncouth
to all his other disagreeable traits. She undressed and slid into bed. Because of her nap, she couldn't fall asleep right away. Even after she heard Cooper go to bed and his steady breathing indicated that he was fast asleep, she lay there awake, watching the myriad flickering pa
t
terns
t
he fire cast on
t
he ceiling.

When the wolves began to howl, she rolled to her side, covered her head with the blanker, and tried not to listen. She clamped her finger between her teeth and bit down hard to keep from crying, to keep from feeling lost and alone, and to keep herself from begging Cooper to hold her
w
hile she slept.

Eight

Cooper sat
as
perfectly still as a hunter in a deer s
t
and. Motionless, feet planted
far
apart, elbows propped on widespread
lees,
fingers cupped around his chin. Above
t
hem, his eyes red at her unblinkingly.

That was the first sight Rusty saw when she woke up the following morning. She registered surprise, but managed to keep from jumping out of her skin. Immediately she noticed that the screen she had so ingeniously devised and hung around her bed the night before had been torn down. The blanket
w
as lying at
e
foot of her bed.

She levered herself up on one elbow and irritably pushed her i
t
out of her eyes. "What are you doing?" "I need to talk to you."