“Yet you left it all to run away to New York to become a newspaper reporter. But now you’re back.”
“Not by choice. I plan to return to New York as soon as I get back to my father’s house.”
“Ah, I see. Somehow, I thought you had other plans.”
“Such as?” she asked, turning to look at him. “Did my father tell you that I had other plans?”
“Only that you were ready to settle down, that you were still young enough and he had hopes that you—”
“Young enough for what?” she interrupted.
“Why, to start a family I would imagine.”
Chris bit her lower lip to keep from replying hastily. “No, I don’t think I’m over the hill yet, even at my advanced age. I assume women can still bear children at my age.”
“I didn’t mean to give offense.”
Quickly, Chris looked at him and a wave of guilt ran through her. Here she was walking in the forest with a handsome young man who was trying to be polite and she, because of some imagined infatuation with a man she barely knew, was being almost rude to him. She smiled at Asher. “I’m sure that you didn’t, Mr. Prescott. How did you meet my father?”
Asher returned her smile. “He and my father were friends and did some business together. I saw you once when you were a little girl. You were with your mother. I thought she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.”
“So did I.”
He began to gather firewood from the ground, making a stack of it at her feet.
“And why did my father choose you to go on this rescue mission?” She also picked up a few pieces of wood and added them to the pile.
“I think he took who he could get. There aren’t many men my age who have no business, and, after working for myself for so many years, I can’t seem to settle down to just being an employee.”
“I know how you feel. My father continues to tell me what to do and how to do it, even sending men after me when I don’t obey him.”
“Yes, but you’re a—” Asher took one look at Chris’s sparkling eyes and stopped. “I almost put my foot in it that time, didn’t I?”
She cocked her head to one side. “Would it matter if you alienated me?”
Asher gave her a big grin. He really was quite pleasant-looking, not anything like Tynan, of course, but very handsome. “I’m alone in the woods with a beautiful woman and you ask if it would make any difference if she’s angry with me? Why, Miss Mathison, this time and place is a dream come true and I would as soon die as ruin it.”
She laughed at his pretty speech as he picked a tiny purple flower from a bank of moss and gave it to her with a little bow. Chris stuck the flower behind her ear and smiled at him.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I guess we’d better get back.” He picked up an enormous pile of wood. “Put the rest on top of this.”
“No, I’ll carry my share.”
“Miss Mathison, while I am around, no woman shall ever carry firewood. Now do as I say and put the rest of that on this pile.”
“You sound just like my father,” she said with a sigh.
“Thank you very much. I admire and respect your father and I take it as a high compliment that you consider me like him in any respect. Now, lead the way because I can’t see a thing.”
Laughing, pleased that he’d said that he liked her father and didn’t complain about him as most people did, Chris led him back to camp. Asher said that not only could he not see but he couldn’t understand her directions, so Chris “had” to hold two fingers of his left hand to guide him back to camp.
When they entered the camp, Tynan was bending over the fire frying fish dipped in cornmeal. He looked up when a laughing Chris and a laden Asher arrived, but put his head down again quickly.
Chris suddenly felt ridiculously happy. Holding the divided skirt of her habit out, she began to hum.
“I don’t guess you’d care to dance, Mr. Prescott,” she said, holding out her arms. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Tynan but he didn’t even look up.
With obvious happiness, Asher took Chris’s extended hands and began a quick dance about the little clearing. It was a cross between the Virginia Reel and a square dance that was exuberant and happy. Chris followed his lead and no matter how fast he led her in the dance, even when her feet barely touched the ground, she stayed with him.
“Watch out!” she heard Tynan shout just before she and Asher tumbled into a foot-deep depression filled with ferns.
They lay there together, Asher’s arms around her protectively, Chris’s skirts around his legs, while Tynan stood looming over them. “Are you two all right?” he asked, his brows drawn together in a scowl.
“Never been better in my life,” Asher said, then planted a hearty kiss on Chris’s cheek.
Still grinning, she turned to see Tynan looking at her oddly.
“I think we can eat now,” Tynan said before turning away to return to the campfire. “That is, Miss Mathison, if you are finished with your dancing.”
“For the moment,” Chris said and went to take a place by the fire.
Chapter Six
Asher was in rollicking good spirits after their impromptu dance and he did his best to entertain Chris, even singing to her. She joined in and they made an enthusiastic duo.
Tynan sat to one side of them, head down, whittling on a stick, not participating but not leaving them either. Once, as she was singing with her cheek close to Asher’s, it occurred to her that maybe Tynan didn’t know how to participate.
It was midafternoon before anyone thought of leaving and then it was Chris who stopped the laughter and suggested that they clear up and go.
Tynan tossed his stick away, put his knife in his pocket and slowly started toward the horses. As Chris was tightening the straps on her bedroll, he stopped beside her.
“That was nice,” he said. “Real nice.”
“Where did you grow up?” she asked quickly.
“Not where people sang,” he answered just as fast. “You like the man?”
“Of course. You’ve pointed out what a fine man he is, haven’t you? And you’ve told me to stay away from you so I should be pleasing you now.”
He looked at her in a way no man had ever looked at her before. His eyes seemed as if they could burn her. “You do please me.” Abruptly, he turned on his heel and walked away, almost crashing into Asher.
“What was that about? He looked angry. Is something going on that I don’t know about?”
“Mr. Prescott, I have no idea what you know and what you don’t.”
“Chris, I must give you some advice. Tynan isn’t the sort of man…well, I mean, a girl like you…I don’t like the interest he’s taking in you.”
“Interest in me?”
“Your father told him you were a Montgomery and he asked what that meant.”
“And did you know to tell him?”
“No, I didn’t, except that they are your mother’s people. People like him don’t have relatives, they don’t even have names.”
“Mr. Prescott,” she said icily. “You and I will get along a great deal better if you keep your opinions about Mr. Tynan to yourself. After all, I’ve known the both of you an equal length of time so I see no reason to trust you over him.” With that she mounted her horse, and all the rest of the day, she felt Asher Prescott’s eyes looking at her thoughtfully.
For two days they traveled hard. Three times the men had to cut away small logs across the trail, and once Tynan and Asher had to lead the horses across a log as wide as some boardwalks. Another time they spent hours on either end of a crosscut saw hacking a way through a tree down across the trail. At night they fell into their blankets and slept hard—at least Chris assumed Tynan did too since he slept apart from the camp.
On the evening of the second day, Asher kissed her again. They’d ridden together for a while during the day and he’d asked her more questions about her newspaper career. He also apologized for what he’d sa
id about Tynan, saying he was only concerned about her safety. That evening he asked her to walk with him and, when they were a few yards from the camp, he told her how pretty she was and asked permission to kiss her. Chris said yes.
She’d kissed very few men in her life and wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. Asher’s arms went around her, holding her pleasantly and his kiss was warm and dry and comforting but nothing like the quick, happy kiss of Tynan’s. No fire ran through her body. Nothing made her lean toward him wanting more.
“What the hell are you doing, Prescott?” came Tynan’s outraged voice, making Asher release Chris. “I came out here thinking you’d gotten lost and here you are mauling Miss Mathison.”
“I was not mauling. I asked permission—” Asher halted, his face angry. “What’s it any of your business anyway?”
“My business is to return Miss Mathison to her father.”
“And I don’t believe that’s all you’ve been hired to do either,” Asher said.
“Go back to camp,” Tynan ordered Chris. “Now!”
She scurried to obey him, leaving the two men alone. Later, Asher returned to camp by himself and grinned at Chris. “Sometimes employees forget their places and have to be reminded,” he said with a wink.
Tynan didn’t return to camp that night and in the morning he was quiet, always keeping his distance from Chris.
A part of her wanted to scream with frustration over the mystery of what was going on. What was her father’s original reason for having her taken through the rain forest? He couldn’t have known Hugh Lanier would be chasing them. Why had her father hired a man who barely knew how to build a fire outdoors to help in a place like a rain forest? Why was Tynan one minute pushing her toward Asher and the next acting like a jealous lover?
The day after Asher kissed Chris, Ty allowed them to stop in the late afternoon. As Chris helped Ty unpack, she tried to make converstaion but he only mumbled answers to her questions.
“What is wrong with you?” she hissed under her breath. “You haven’t spoken to me since last night. Are you angry with me about Asher?”
“What you do is your own business,” he said, unsaddling a horse. “I’ve been hired as your guide and nothing more.”
“It’s you who keeps pushing me off to be alone with him. It’s ‘Miss Mathison, go with Prescott and fetch wood,’ and ‘Miss Mathison, why don’t you and Prescott go fishing?’ Every minute you’re pushing me toward him. So if I kiss him, isn’t that what you had in mind?”
“Nothing’s in my mind. Look, why don’t you go over there and sit down? Why are you always following me? Can’t you ever give a man a moment of peace?”
Quick tears came to Chris’s eyes as she turned toward the fire. He called her name but she didn’t look back.
Once, she felt that Ty was trying to catch her eye but she didn’t look up at him, and after a while she heard him leave the camp.
“I’m going to take a walk and write in my journal,” Chris said to Asher, removing her notebook, pen and ink from her saddlebag. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.” She then went down the path in the opposite direction of Tynan.
Chris walked for longer than she meant to. Tynan’s sharp, angry words had hurt her and she wanted to think about what she had been doing and what she wanted to do in the future.
It was odd how this man attracted her. Never before had she made such a fool of herself over a man.
After a while, the light began to fade and she moved just off the trail to sit on a log and write in her journal. Maybe if she put in all the facts of this odd trip, she could figure out what was going on. She wrote a good deal about the one man who was so kind to her as opposed to the man who seemed to hope that she’d fall into a deep hole.
She was sheltered under the tree branches and a particularly heavy umbrella of moss and didn’t at first feel the cold drops of rain begin to fall. One minute she was warm and dry and the next she was sitting under what seemed to be a waterfall that began in the sky.
Gathering her things with haste, she dropped her pen. She was leaning over the log to get it, searching in the plants, when the entire side of the trail suddenly gave way and Chris went tumbling down. The log rolled out from under her and she caught at a tree root as she went flying down the side of the forest wall.
Hanging there, suspended, the icy rain coming down on top of her, her feet touching nothing and not being able to see anything below or above her, she prayed for help. “Tynan,” she whispered, not able to hear herself above the rain crashing down.
“Tynan!” she shouted.
Her hands were beginning to slip. She tried to keep a cool head about where she was and how she could get out of this mess. If she could only see how far it was to the bottom of the drop. For all she knew, she could be six inches from the ground.
Twisting, she tried to look below her, but the rising mist made it impossible to see anything. One of her hands slipped.
After several long minutes of struggle, she got both hands back on the tree root. She could feel the skin begin to tear away. She tried to swing forward, hoping to get her foot into the mud and rocks of the bank.
“Curse all the Montgomery women for being short,” she said when she couldn’t reach the bank.
Suddenly, she stopped as she thought she heard a sound above her.
“Tynan,” she yelled with all her might. “Tynan. Tynan. Tynan.”
She hadn’t finished her last scream before he was there beside her, his back sunk into the mud of the bank, his long arms reaching for her and pulling her to him.
She clung to him like a monkey to a tree, wrapping her body around his, her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist.
He began to go down the side of the bank, scooting along, pushing debris out of the way as he moved. Chris held to him, her face buried in his neck. Even when he started walking, she didn’t let go.
“Here,” he said at last, peeling her off of him.
When he stood her on the ground, she found that her legs were weak. Both their bodies were covered in mud.
“Sit there for a while and rest.” He pointed to an outcropping of rock behind her, and, gratefully, she sat down, out of the pelting rain.
As she looked up at Ty, the misty, cold rain coming down behind his head, she knew she’d never seen anything as welcome in her life. Quite naturally, she put up her arms to him.
He came to her, holding her so tightly she could barely breath. “I knew it was going to rain,” he said. “I was getting the tents up when you walked off. I thought you’d have sense enough to come back when it started. God, Chris, you’re going to be the death of me. It’s a wonder I found you.”
Chris was so happy that she was safe and that he was here that she began kissing his neck exuberantly. “I knew you’d find me. I knew it from the moment the ground fell away. One minute I was sitting there and the next I was falling. I wasn’t even sure it was raining.”
Ty forcibly pulled her arms from around his neck—and he looked like a man in great pain. “Chris,” he said in a pleading voice, “have you ever seen a grown man cry? I mean really cry? Like a brokenhearted two-year-old?”
“No, I don’t believe I have or that I want to.” She was reaching for him again. “Ty,” she said.
He caught her hands in his, holding them together in front of him. “Then please stop this,” he said. “Please leave me alone. Don’t follow me, don’t touch me, don’t mother me, don’t put salve on my back, don’t cry when I get mad at you. Don’t do anything. I’m begging you, please.”
Chris leaned toward him. “It doesn’t matter to me that you were in prison. You may think that I’m of a different class than you but I’m not. Ty, I think I may be in love—”
He put his hand over her mouth. “Don’t say it. Don’t ever say it. I couldn’t bear to hear it. We’ve only known each other for a few days and in a few more we’ll never see each other again.”
“The number of days doesn’t matter. Do
you know how many men have asked me to marry them? I receive proposals in the mail. I’ve been to dinner parties and had two proposals by the end of the meal, but I’ve never even been tempted—not by marriage or by their attempts at seduction. But you, Tynan, you’re the man I want.”
Ty’s face went through one contortion after another and for just a moment, he leaned toward her as if he meant to kiss her. But the next second, he ran from the dry rock cropping, out into the rain.
“Don’t you understand that I CAN’T? I can’t make love to you. Now get up! We’re going back to camp and don’t come near me again.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her out into the rain with him, then half pushed her up the steep bank. Once on the trail again, he didn’t touch her, just pointed the way back to the camp.
Chris knew that some of the water on her face was a deluge of tears but she didn’t know how much until she reached the camp. There were three tents set up, one for each of them. Under a tree, its opening facing away from the other two tents, was a tarpaulin that she knew was Tynan’s.
Ty stood back, arms folded over his chest while she went into the tent he pointed to.
It took Chris an hour to change into dry clothes, because her tears kept running down her cheeks. She cried all night long. The first man she’d ever loved and this had to happen.
When morning came, her face was red and swollen, her nose half again its usual size and her head was aching. When Tynan came to tell her that they’d stay in the tents until the rain stopped, she couldn’t look at him, but just kept her head down and nodded.
By noon, Chris was exhausted from so many hours of crying and thinking, but she’d made some decisions. Slowly, she built a little fire under the dry leaves of the tent and heated some soup left from the day before.
She took her rain gear from the pile of garments in a corner. There was no furniture in the little tent, just a sleeping roll, a few clothes and now the little fire under the flap outside.
With her back rigid, Chris left the tent. The rain was coming down very hard and when it hit the hot kettle, it gave off wisps of steam.