Out of This World

alarming sound.

Axel crashed his way free of the bushes. “Hey, dudes. What’s shaking?”

Rachel pulled free. “How did you find us?” She shook her head. “Never mind. Just get us back to Hideaway.”

“Why, what happened?”

“Well, did you see that lightning?” she asked.

Axel scratched his head through his wool beanie. The tassels swung with his every movement. “Lightning? We don’t get much lightning here in Alaska. Now wind-we get a lot of that. One-hundred-mile-an-hour gusts that can knock a man flat on his ass.”

“You’re sure you didn’t see the lightning? Or hear the thunder?” she asked him incredulously. “It shook the earth like a huge quake.”

“I heard the rain, that’s it.” Axel peered into Rach’s eyes. “You been smoking or something?”

Rachel made a sound of annoyance and looked at me, the question in her eyes.

In answer, I shook my head. I had no idea how Axel could have missed the unmistakable thunder-and-lightning storm, brief as it’d been.

“Whoa,” Axel said, getting a good look at us.

“What?” I actually glanced behind us for the source of horror on his face, but to my great relief, I saw nothing.

“Dude, look,” Axel insisted, pointing at my chest. “You’re smoking.”

Rachel looked at me as well, and gasped. “I told you!”

I glanced down at myself. It was a little disconcerting to find it was true. I was smoking.

“We had a little incident,” I said.

“Sweet.”

Sweet?

“Listen,” Axel said, looking around us a little uneasily, “I think we should go back to the inn.”

“I agree,” Rachel said. “You lead the way.”

“Oh.” Axel eyeballed the landscape all around us. Then he stuck his hands into his pockets, and looked around some more. “Why, you lost or something?”

“Not technically,” I muttered.

Rachel shot me a look. “Yes, technically. We’re lost. L-O-S-T, lost.”

“No prob.” Axel scratched his chest, looking around as if he had all the time in the world.

I looked at Rachel. She looked right back. Was this really happening to us? Because it was getting hard to tell if this was real or just some crazy-ass nightmare.

“Axel?” Rachel prompted after a full moment of silence.

“Yeah?”

“Get us out of here?”

“Oh. Right.” He turned and began to walk, then stopped. “No, not this way,” he muttered to himself, and did an about-face. “This way. Yeah.”

Rachel reached for my hand as we went to follow him, and pulled me close so that she could whisper in my ear. “Maybe you should take off your shirt.”

My stupid heart leaped. “What for?”

“So we can tear it into strips and tie pieces on branches to mark our way. Since our guide is as lost as we are.”

“We’re not lost.”

She sent me a baleful look. “We are so lost.”

Axel pointed to the bushes through which he’d come a moment ago. “There. Follow me.” And he vanished into them.

Now that my erection was gone, I had enough blood to operate my brain again. And I was able to think that we hadn’t ducked through a bush to get here.

“Yeah, not going in there,” Rachel said, staring at the bushes as she backed herself into me. “No way.”

“Why?”

“Axel?” she called out to the bush.

No response, and she wriggled closer to me, which wasn’t so good for my thinking capabilities.

“He’s gone already,” she said. “He thinks we’re right behind him.” Grabbing my hand, she pulled me after her at a speed that was shocking given I’d had no idea she could even move that fast. “Rach-”

“We’re going around the bushes,” she said, still gripping my hand as if it were a lifeline. “There are…things in those bushes. Spiders, and creepy crawlies, and more spiders.”

“Okaaay.”

“Axel!” she called out as we rounded the bushes.

I thought I heard him call back to us, and we followed his voice, but after a few twists and turns through the heavy growth with no sign of him, we stopped again.

Rach sagged against the closest tree for one brief beat before letting out a soft cry and straightening away from the trunk as if it were possessed.

But she was the possessed one.

“Oh my God.” Turning in a circle, she looked madly around the small clearing like a cornered animal, one hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and wild. “They’re everywhere!”

“What’s everywhere?”

“Creepy crawlies!”

“Rach?”

She shook her head violently, holding up a hand to hold me off.

Uh-oh. She’d cracked. She’d utterly lost it. I knew firsthand that she didn’t fall apart easily. She had an inner strength that got her through any hardship that came her way. I’d seen her struggle through a tough college curriculum while working full time to support herself; I’d seen her work like crazy to make it on her own in the art world; and I’d seen her go through the death of her father. She’d lived through them as she experienced everything else: with her spirit and strength intact.

But she was at her limit here. That, or she’d hit her head harder than she’d let on. Fearing that, I stepped toward her, but she backed away. “Hey. Hey, are you okay?”

“No. No, I’m not okay. There’s…things out here, Kel. Rabid raccoons and crazy squirrels and gigantic bugs and…” She clamped her mouth shut. Still wet, she shivered.

I took another step toward her, and she jerked.

“It’s just me,” I said in the voice I used with the dolphins when they were spooked. “Just me, Rach.”

Her gaze ran over my face, my body, and then she went beet red, squeezing her eyes tightly shut. “Yeah. It’s just that, well, it’s a lot more of you than you think.”

Huh? “Come on. We’ll go back.”

Her laugh sounded more than half-hysterical. “Yeah. How exactly?”

I reached out my hand for hers, tugging her close. “We’ll get back.”

“So you’re not lost?”

“Well…” I looked around. “Maybe just a little.”

“Oh God.”

“But I can get us unlost. Okay?”

“How about to L.A.? Can you get us back to L.A.?” she joked weakly, then stopped my heart when she snuggled against me, pressing her face to my throat.

God, I loved when she did that.

Unable to help myself, I banded my arms tightly around her. I might have buried my face in her hair and inhaled deeply, too, but no one had to know that part, because it was the story of my life: lusting and yearning after this woman who usually thought of me as something she might absently pat on the head and feed a cookie.

So instead, I just held her for as long as she wanted.

“Something’s really-” She broke off.

“Really what, Rach?”