Wedding Survivor (33 page)

Marnie grabbed a couple of forks from a basket on the kitchen table as Eli pulled her out of the cabin and onto the porch. They parked themselves on the plush wicker chairs on the porch; Marnie gave him a fork, and they balanced the dish on Eli's knee and dug in with the determination of two people who knew their next meal might not come for quite a while.

And they were both thankful for having forked over the thirty bucks a couple of hours later when Cooper called back and asked Eli and Marnie to come meet them at the ravine, because that was when they both knew their next meal could very well be tree bark.

Cooper, Jack, and Michael were on the other side. With Eli on this side, the four of them did a lot of walking back and forth and peering down into the ravine and talking on their radios while Marnie sat under a tree, her head propped in her hands, staring distantly.

They were arguing the merits of climbing over the tree when all four of them heard a snap. "Shit," Jack said, just as the bridge gave away, and its middle section, and the tree, crashed the one hundred yards to the bottom of the ravine and the raging river there. The four of them leaned over to have a look.

"Okay," Michael said a moment later. "We go to plan B. Anyone got a plan B?"

No one had a plan B, and after more pacing back and forth, the four men determined they were really in a pickle. At that point, Jack, Coop, and Michael got on their four-wheelers and headed down to do some more thinking. Eli strolled to where Marnie was sitting.

"So here's the deal," he said, dispensing with any chitchat. "They can get to Farmington to get what we need to repair the bridge, but the repair will probably take a couple of days. They can bring in a chopper from Farmington or Durango to pull us out before then, but then everyone will know what's going on up here, and the press will descend like vultures and there probably won't be a wedding. That's the risk we take."

"Are you kidding? Olivia would just as soon leap into the ravine as have the press shooting her stuck up here without benefit of her makeup girl," Marnie said.

Eh' grinned at her accurate assessment "Jack can get us out, but he has to go to Denver to get a rotor blade, and pay someone a small fortune to come up and help him replace the blade. We're talking three to four days in that case."

"Can't we hike out?" Marnie asked, glancing at the ravine.

"Maybe Vince and I could. It's probably twenty miles around, mostly rough terrain and some of it very steep. I don't think the princess and Rhys could make it. Crossing the ravine would require a lot of repelling, then climbing up, and I don't have the proper gear for that I could possibly do it, but I can't leave anyone on this side."

She looked again at the ravine and shuddered. She could just see Eli hanging there by a thread and glanced up at him. "So… we're stuck for at least two days, and maybe as long as four?"

"Looks like."

"But… but what about the guests?" she asked, tossing a rock aside. "What about the wedding tomorrow? And the spiritual guy An who is going to marry them that I have to pick up from the airport in Durango? What about a
bathroom
?"

"Michael says he can handle the guests, not to worry. He's going to break out some of that champagne you had shipped up, if there's any left—"

"Oh
no—"

"And the wedding will go down when and how Olivia and Vince want it, considering the circumstances. We can get someone to pick him up, and if we have to, we can bring them down here and have the spiritual guy marry them over the radio."

"All the planning, all the work," Marnie moaned, leaning her head against the tree trunk, her eyes squeezed shut.

"As for a bathroom… I don't know what to tell you, other than there is the outhouse and some very big rocks to step behind."

Rocks
? Marnie's head snapped up. "But… but what about baths?"

He shrugged. Rubbed his hand on his nape. "Depending on how the firewood holds out, it may be a cold one."

"Oh. My.
God.*"
she cried.

"Hey, it's not that bad," he said, his expression serious but his eyes shining with amusement as he held out his hand to her. "I think you smell pretty damn good."

"Maybe it's not me I'm worried about."

He laughed. "Come on, coppertop—let's go deliver the good news to the rest of the group."

Marnie looked at his hand and then at him. Eli read her mind and lifted one brow above the other. "I think we declared a truce last night, didn't we?"

She suddenly laughed and smiled that brilliant smile he'd missed the last couple of days as she put her hand in his. "I'll say!"

Eli pulled her up; she popped up and landed so close to him that their bodies grazed one another. "But it's a truce only until we're out of here," she said, and poked him in the chest. "And then it's back to petty bickering as usual. Deal?"

Eli pushed some of her wild hair behind her ear. "Deal," he said, and affectionately touched his finger to her nose. As they turned around and walked to the cabin to deliver the news to the rest of them, Eli knew that for all his fretting, it was too damn late. He'd definitely fallen. Headlong.

AFTER they delivered the bad news, there was a lot of loud arguing about it for a couple of hours. Olivia and Vince were adamant that no one find out they were stuck, lest the press have a field day with it. "Can you imagine the headlines?" Vince shouted. "World's Biggest Action Star Stuck on the Wrong Side of a Bridge!"

He glared at Rhys when the man had the audacity to laugh.

Eli wasn't crazy about it either. "You think we want Thrillseekers Anonymous held out as the extreme sports outfit behind this fiasco?"

"You're all overreacting," Rhys said, as if he didn't mind being stuck on this side of the bridge. In fact, he was busily going through one of his coolers, muttering to himself.

As for Marnie, all she could think of was a bath, and where exactly she would sleep tonight. She wouldn't mind sleeping with Eli, nosireebob… but she sort of wondered where last night's storm had left them—it wasn't a declara-tion, it was survival. That's what he'd said, and frankly, she didn't know if her heart was strong enough to survive sleeping with him and then not being with him.

As
survival
had not been clearly defined, she was a little leery of sleeping in Eli's tent because she had absolutely no self-control. But then, Rhys was weighing in at about three hundred pounds and guarded that spice-cooler-thing with his life, so she figured his tent was out of the question. That left the cabin, and given Olivia's bad mood, which was darkening by the minute, Marnie wasn't sure that was such a great idea, either.

Olivia and Vince were starting to snipe at one another again, too, with Vince blaming Olivia for having to have this "ridiculous, asswipe kind of wedding," and Olivia blaming Vince for "being such a shrimp he couldn't help them out of a bucket."

When Marnie tried to step in to stop the bickering, Vince told her to shut up, and Marnie came very close to punching him. But Eli stepped in before she could take a swing at the shrimp and, standing between Marnie and Vince, said, "All right, folks. Everybody take a deep breath. This bickering isn't going to get us anywhere, so the next one of you who says a disparaging word against another will be the first person we try and build a human bridge with."

He did not look like he was joking. Everyone promptly bowed their heads and glared at the floor.

"That's more like it," Eli said, and was about to say something else, but the bitchfest was suddenly interrupted by the unmistakable sound of laughter in the far distance. And four-wheelers.

"What's that?" Vince asked.

"Dunno," Eli said, looking toward the ravine where the bridge had once been. They all looked at one another and then were suddenly marching toward the ravine.

By the time they hiked down, there were already a dozen cheerful guests on the other side, riding tandem on the four-wheelers, led by Jim and John. By the look of things, they were all having a grand time.

"Who the hell is
that
?" Olivia demanded of Marnie as the professional guests got off their four-wheelers and helped the others off.

"Jim and John," Marnie said. "Our professional guests."

"What the hell is a professional guest?" Vince demanded.

"Shut up, Vincent," Olivia muttered and walked down to the edge of the ravine.

"Hi Livi!" Olivia's mom yelled.

"Mom! What are you
doing
?" Olivia cried, spying her mother in a tight spaghetti-strap camisole and even tighter running pants.

"We're riding around!" her mother shouted back. "Oh, Livi, it's so much
fun
!" she squealed, and stared adoringly at her companion, a dark swarthy guy Marnie did not recognize.

"Dear God, she's doing the cinematographer!" Olivia whispered, horrified.

"Dear God, they've been
drinking
," Rhys added breathlessly, still huffing from the hike down from the meadow.

"Livi, we brought you something!" Delia yelled, and held up a plastic grocery sack. "Can you guess what it is?"

"Where's my manager? Where's Donnelly?" Olivia demanded.

"Oh hell, I don't know!" her mom cheerfully returned. "Probably in Durango or somewhere. Don't you want to know what this is? It's champagne! No reason you should be high
and
dry," she said, and the group laughed roundly, as if that were the most hysterically witty comment they'd ever heard.

"You are
not
drinking the champagne for my wedding!" Olivia cried, horrified.

"Well, what the hell are we supposed to do? You're stuck over there and we're stuck over here! Oh, stop looking like that! We'll just get some more," Delia shouted, and handed the bag to the cinematographer. "It's two bottles. We wrapped it in bubble wrap so they won't break."

"Ohmigod, that shit is two hundred dollars a bottle," Marnie moaned as the swarthy guy walked to the edge of the ravine.

"Shall I throw the bag to you?" he called out in heavily accented English.

"No!" Eli said sternly, but the man was winding up. "Ah, for the love of Christ, he'll never make it."