away from Sydney. “What’s gotten into you, boy?” To Sydney he said, “I guess we have no choice but to take him with us. I hope I don’t end up carrying him back.”
Sydney pictured Russ hiking back to the car with the big dog on his shoulders. He probably wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Clearly, he was ridiculously fond of the beast.
Yet another reason she should keep her distance. As if she needed more reasons.
Russ slowed his pace slightly, remembering he had a greenhorn with him. Sydney, however, showed no signs of fatigue. She wasn’t even breathing hard, though her face was pleasantly flushed from the mild exertions
But the trail got rougher from that point on. They were hiking more or less parallel to Deer Creek, which had cut a small canyon in the limestone as it wound down the hill. They made several more crossings, sometimes using log bridges, sometimes hopping from rock to rock.
They paused at a particularly difficult spot, where the trail narrowed and climbed almost straight up for several yards. Russ pushed Nero up ahead of him, then doubled back to give Sydney a hand. As she scrambled up, a branch knocked her hat askew.
When she reached the ledge where he was standing, he straightened her hat. And there was that lone curl, dammit, dangling against her cheek.
If anything her face turned a darker shade of pink. Suddenly all he could think about was how it would feel to kiss her, to crush those full, soft lips with his and kiss her until common sense was nothing but a dim memory.
And then he did it.
She responded like a flower to the sun, open, soft, pliant. Her arms went around his neck, her fingers twining in his hair as his mouth plundered hers. He pulled her slender, lithe body against his, feeling the heat of her, smelling the essence of her, the incredible texture of her lips.
He wanted to feel more of her hair. He plunged his hands into the thick, black mass, knocking her hat off.
She made a noise in her throat that could have been excitement, or it could have been the beginnings of an objection. Whatever, it brought him to his senses. When he ended the kiss, her reaction was immediate. She pulled away from him as if he were a hot branding iron.
“I didn’t mean-”
“That wasn’t supposed-”
They both started speaking, broke off, then laughed nervously. Russ took a couple of steps back, almost falling over a rock. He needed to get out of touching range.
“I didn’t plan that,” he finally said. “It was that damn curl that fell over your cheek. It drove me temporarily insane.”
She shoved her hair behind her ears self-consciously, then retrieved her hat. It wasn’t altogether useless, he realized. At least it had a small brim that shaded her face from the sun. She repositioned her pack on her shoulders and set her gaze on the trail ahead. Russ realized the subject of the kiss was closed.
“The cabin’s not much farther.”
During the next ten minutes, Russ kept an anxious eye out over his shoulder, but Sydney seemed to be doing fine. Still, he was relieved when they made the final creek crossing. Another hundred yards and they reached a clearing with a cabin in the center.
“Oh, wow,” Sydney said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was impressed or appalled.
He remembered his own thoughts the first time he’d seen it. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, made of rough-hewn logs with a stone chimney and two porches that ran the length of the whole cabin, front and back.
But no one had been up here in a few months, so it was overgrown with weeds and the front porch was covered with dead leaves. At least he didn’t spot any broken windows, which inevitably led to an invasion of critters.
He climbed the stairs to the porch and unlocked the front door. The cabin smelled winter-musty, but everything appeared in order. “Take your boots off and leave them on the porch,” he instructed. “No sense tracking mud everywhere.”
Sydney looked at the dog, which was standing just outside the threshold, waiting for permission to enter. His feet were coated in mud. “What about him?”
“Nero, go lie down. You can’t come in like that.”
With a sigh that sounded decidedly human, as if he’d understood every word Russ said, Nero lumbered to a sunny spot on the porch and plopped down. He looked over his shoulder at Sydney, silently imploring her to show some sign that she didn’t hate him. For whatever reason, the dog had taken a liking to her.
Sydney entered the cabin in her stocking feet. “It’s really rustic.” She gave a glance to the mounted deer head over the fireplace, the braided rug, the granny-square afghan on the ancient sofa. She shrugged out of the backpack and let it fall with a clunk. “You don’t actually hunt, do you?” She glanced again at the deer and wrinkled her nose.
“Nah.” Not since he was a kid, anyway. Bert had taken him a few times when he first moved to Linhart, but it wasn’t really his thing. “I fish sometimes, but really this is just a place to get away from everything.”
“I would think Linhart is far enough away from everything.”
“Now you’re dissing my town.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to. Linhart is beautiful, really. And quiet. I just don’t see why a person would need to get away from it.”
“It’s not so quiet during tourist season. Spring through early fall, it’s wall-to-wall people.” And sometimes he just needed to get away from Winnie. When she got a moneymaking idea in her head, she would pester Russ about it endlessly. She would never follow him here, that was for sure. The former Las Vegas showgirl didn’t much care for walking on dirt, either.
“Do you want to see the boxes?” he asked Sydney. “They’re upstairs in the loft. If my cousin ever got that space cleared out, we’d have another bedroom.”
“I’m not sure why you’d need another, if you come up here to be alone.”
“Maybe I won’t always be alone.” Maybe someday he would have a wife and kids who’d want to rough it here with him. Although, given his track record, that was becoming less and less of a possibility. He’d yet to convince any of his girlfriends to tromp up here with him-not even Deirdre. Then again, she’d worked in the governor’s office in Austin and would have looked as out of place in the woods as a flamingo in a desert.
None of the other women from his past would have fit in, either. Melanie What’s-Her-Name, the oil company lobbyist, had broken out in hives when he’d taken her on her first and last canoe trip. Elizabeth, the hotel events coordinator-well, he’d never even tried to picture her anywhere in the great outdoors.
Sydney was probably the only female to see this place in fifty years and she had come under false pretenses.
Still, he couldn’t deny she classed the place up. Something about her was different from those ultrasophisticated women he’d been involved with in the past. Or perhaps he was merely trying to rationalize his attraction to her.
“All right, let’s have a look at those boxes,” she said briskly.
He led her up a narrow spiral staircase to a loft bedroom. As soon as Sydney reached the landing, she let out a soft “
The room was literally full of boxes, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and every one of them filled with yellowed papers, photographs, scrapbooks, letters, postcards and who-knew-what.
“It would take me a month to go through all this stuff!”
“You can take as long as you want,” Russ said mildly. “There’s enough food, between what’s in the backpacks and the kitchen cabinets, to last you several days. I’ll come back to get you whenever you say.”
“You’re going to leave me here alone?” Panic edged her voice.
“I have a business to run.”
“I can’t stay here overnight,” she objected. “I didn’t bring clothes or a toothbrush or-”
“There are plenty of clean clothes in the bedroom closet and dresser drawers, and I packed a few toiletries in the backpack. But if you don’t want to stay, I understand. We have to start back within a few minutes, though, if we want to make it home by dark.”
She looked at the boxes, then back at Russ, weighing how badly she wanted to find Sammy Oberlin’s heir against how badly she
