Trouble in Paradise

clenched around the paddle; she stopped breathing, and her whole body jolted when another hidden boulder bounced the canoe, but those tremors of fear only heightened a sensual excitement greater than a roller coaster ride. This was real, not play. This was life. Breathing. Being aware. Sound, touch, sight, even the taste of the sweet, icy water…

Laughter suddenly bubbled up inside her as she saw what Griff saw ahead. The white water ended in a scant two-foot cascade. Beyond it the stream was perfectly calm again. Even as she could see what was coming, she knew there was no way to avoid it. They were headed straight for the falls. Griff paddled valiantly, but they were approaching at a speed too fast to control. The canoe careened through the air, hurtled smoothly into the quiet water below the cascade and then unceremoniously flipped over and dumped its passengers in waist-deep water as cold as a Popsicle.

Sputtering, Susan surfaced hands-first and wildly shook her head to clear her eyes of water and hair. The shock of icy water was painful, causing her lungs to desperately haul in extra air. She searched frantically for Griff.

He was standing in the water a dozen feet away. In that instant, his dark brown eyes flicked over her, and transmitted a dozen messages. You’re all right? He could see that she was. He could see that she was laughing. The next time you talk me into doing something like this will be a cold day in hell.

Aaah. His male pride was wounded because he’d misjudged the soft sounds of the rapids from around the bend. Susan started giggling again. Griff surged through the water in pursuit of the canoe. Susan snatched one paddle and one plastic-wrapped sleeping bag, and started towing them toward shore. She was shivering violently by the time she reached the pale, stony shore of a tiny island. And she was still trying to wipe the smile off her face.

She watched Griff for yet another minute. He’d righted the canoe and salvaged the other plastic pack. He looked like a wet, shaggy blond bear with his sleek, silvery head and camel-colored flannel shirt now clinging to his burly shoulders. He was pulling the canoe behind him, very properly subdued… Unlike his wife, his eyes said. His wife-the one with big ideas about shooting the rapids.

She turned away but started to chuckle again as her numbed fingers tried to open the plastic pack containing their sleeping bags. She might not be able to throw a baseball, but she was no stranger to wilderness country, and she knew that this task had to take precedence over changing her clothes. She had to ensure that no water had gotten into their pack. It hadn’t. Griff could occasionally be careless about where he dropped his shoes at home, but he was as fussy as an old hen over safety while camping. Their clothes were rolled inside, equally dry, but as cold as her fingers.

Behind her, she heard the canoe scrape over the pebbly bed of the stream as she fumbled to take off her dark, sopping sweatshirt. Goose bumps decorated her skin as cool forest air rushed around her damp flesh. Her tennis shoes felt as heavy as lead, and her toes were miserably squishy; but still she sent Griff a glance dancing with amusement.

“Why did I listen to you?” he lamented.

“It was fun and you know it.” Her Viking was disgusted with himself; she started chuckling again. She pulled off her shoes and peeled off her jeans; Griff did the same. “It kills me. You can’t even hear it now.”

“Hear what?”

“Listen,” she said softly, and just for an instant they stopped their frantic attempts to get warm and dry.

The roar of rushing rapids was only a murmur now. The forest so totally masked sounds that they might have been in a completely different world. Silence touched their small, private island. Aspens and white birch formed an orange and gold roof; the forest floor was rich, dark earth, carpeted with moss and rustling with dry leaves. Across the winding stream was a jutting finger of land that reflected their own landscape. It was a very old virgin forest, with spaces between the trees large enough to drive through-if a car could make it to this country, an eventuality she hoped no amount of human ingenuity would ever be able to bring about.

Stark naked, they suddenly smiled at each other, anticipating the fire they would build for warmth, anticipating how good the coffee was going to feel in their stomachs…anticipating the night ahead. Each other. The plan had been to find a special spot in the wilderness to camp for the night…

“It’ll do,” Griff said. His voice came out on a husky note that seemed to echo through the woods.

***

Crouched on his heels, Griff added another dry branch to the fire. Crackling flames shot orange sparks into the darkness, and a long hiss of smoke trailed off on the breeze. Just ahead of him the stream was jet-black and still, as shiny-dark as the star-peppered sky. Earlier, they’d caught trout and cooked it over the coals, listening to the loons’ maniacal cries; before that, Griff had rubbed Susan down until she complained that her skin was neither flint nor steel and she was more than warm enough without his going so far as to set her on fire.

He wasn’t convinced. If she caught cold because of that unfortunate dunking, he was going to be furious…and from the very beginning he’d made every effort to keep his temper in check for Susan’s sake. That she had delighted in shooting the little rapids and was more than ready to take on tomorrow’s adventures rather floored him. One minute Susan was so distinctly a lady, all sweet and gentle, all shy and reserved about expressing her feelings, and the next minute…

How could he label the other side of her? Still on his haunches, Griff swiveled his head around to study her. They’d lost her hairbrush in the water. A sleeping bag was swaddled around her, her bare toes peeking out from beneath it. Her head was thrown back. The silky mop of dark hair framed a face golden by firelight, sensually lovely in its translucence, strong in its serenity.

The image of a Dakota Indian woman shot through his mind. He wouldn’t have said it aloud because he knew she would throw a handful of sand in his direction. The white man’s word, squaw, had nothing to do with the reality of Indian cultures. The Dakotas were the first Indians to claim these northern woods, their women strong and earthy and fiercely loyal. The nomadic Dakotas often went hungry because of their dependence on the buffalo. It fell to the women to pack up the children and belongings and move with the wandering herds. Their strength was the core of the tribe, the tie that bound the rest together…

Susan was that way. Taking on his troubles by choice, the choice of love. He was increasingly irked at the obsessive way she was taking on his children, however. He’d expected it, because he knew Susan and her capacity for love, but he had not expected that their own relationship would be so quickly shifted by the wayside. The free time he both expected and needed from her seemed to be increasingly spent in projects she created for his children. That Tom hadn’t come for the weekend yet seemed only to be another reason to do more for Tiger and Barbara. He wasn’t angry with her. But these four days were theirs alone. They’d gobbled up the privacy so eagerly, with talk and sharing and laughter. Perhaps subconsciously he’d wanted to remind Susan that their first commitment was to each other…

And his desire to claim her, his possessiveness, ran deeper in his feelings for Susan than it ever had in his relationship with any other woman; it was as primitive as the landscape around them, as private as the night, as potent as the arousal he felt just looking at her.

“Griff? What are you thinking about?” From the shadows, Susan had been lazily inhaling the forest smells, the pungent earth and leaves, the hint of smoke and sweet crispness of clean air and darkness. Suddenly aware of the silence, she had glanced at her husband and found Griff staring at her, his silver-blond head framing rough-sculpted features, all shadow and taut stillness by firelight. When he stood up, he was a primitive woodsman from a century ago, brawny shoulders barely contained in a rough woolen shirt, jeans molded to long, muscular thighs. His shadow cast a giant’s figure on the pebbly stream bank, and far into the woods she heard the strange, mournful howl of an animal, primal and hungry.

“Griff?” A shiver touched her. For no reason. Certainly not fear, yet images suddenly crowded her mind when he started stalking toward her, causing her blood to hurry through her veins as she reacted to the man, to the wilderness at night, perhaps to some primitive instinct that struck a responsive chord in her.

He wanted to make love to her. Now. She saw it in his eyes before his hand so much as touched her… He pushed the sleeping bag back from her shoulders and claimed her hands, pulling her up.

His mouth settled down on hers, with all the luxury of length to length. She rose up on tiptoe, willingly caught in the hunter’s snare. He scared the hell out of her when he was like this. It was such damn fun being scared. Danger made her pulse race, quickened her heartbeat. Griff would take, would have, this night, like a warrior coming in