Two Alone

“Well, a helluva lot of good your career is doing me now.”

“Me, me, me,” Rusty shouted. “You’ve thought only of yourself through this whole ordeal.”

“Ha! I should be so lucky. Instead I’ve had you to think about. You’ve been nothing but an albatross.”

“It was not my fault that my leg got hurt.”

“And I suppose you’re going to say it wasn’t your fault that those two men went dotty over you.”

“It wasn’t.”

“No?” he sneered nastily. “Well, you haven’t stopped putting out signals that you’d like to have me in your pants.”

Later, Rusty couldn’t believe she’d actually done it. She’d never guessed that she had a latent violent streak. Even as a child, she’d always given in to other children to avoid a confrontation. By nature she was a pacifist. She’d never been physically aggressive.

But at Cooper’s intentionally hurtful words, she launched herself at him, fingers curled into claws aimed for his smirking face. She never reached him. She came down hard on her injured leg. It buckled beneath her. Screaming with pain, she fell to the frozen ground.

Cooper was beside her instantly. He picked her up. She fought him so strenuously that he restrained her in an armlock. “Stop that or I’ll knock you unconscious.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?” she asked, breathless from her efforts.

“Damn right. And I’d enjoy it.”

Her struggles subsided, more out of weakness and pain than capitulation. He carried her indoors and set her down in the chair near the fire. Casting her a reproachful look, he knelt on the cold hearth and painstakingly coaxed the fire back to life.

“Does your leg still hurt?”

She shook her head no. It hurt like hell, but she’d have her tongue cut out before admitting it. She wasn’t going to speak to him, not after what he’d said, which was patently untrue. Her refusal to speak was childish, but she clung to her resolution not to, even as he separated her torn pants leg, rolled down her sock, and examined the zigzagging incision on her shin.

“Stay off it for the rest of the day. Use your crutches if you move around.” He patted her clothes into place, then stood up. “I’m going back to get the fish. I dropped them in my pell-mell rush to the cabin. I hope a bear hasn’t already made them his dinner.” At the door he turned back. “And I’ll cook them if it’s all the same to you. They look like good fish and you’d probably ruin them.”

He slammed the door behind him.

They were good fish. Delicious, in fact. He’d cooked them in a skillet until they were falling-off-the-bones tender, crusty on the outside and flaky on the inside. Rusty regretted passing up the second one, but she wasn’t about to devour it ravenously, as she had done the first. Cooper added insult to injury by eating it when she refused it. She wished he would choke on a bone and die. Instead, he complacently licked his fingers, smacking noisily, and patted his stomach.

“I’m stuffed.”

Oh, boy, did she have some excellent comebacks for that leading line. But she maintained her stony silence.

“Clean up this mess,” he said curtly, leaving the dirty table and stove to her.

She did as she was told. But not without making a terrible racket that echoed off the rafters. When she had finished, she threw herself down on her bed and gazed at the ceiling overhead. She didn’t know if she were more hurt or angry. But whichever, Cooper Landry had coaxed more emotion from her than any other man ever had. Those emotions had run the gamut from gratitude to disgust.

He was the meanest, most spiteful human being she’d ever had the misfortune to meet, and she hated him with a passion that appalled her.

True, she had begged him to get into bed with her last night. But for comfort, not sex! She hadn’t asked for it; she hadn’t wanted it. It had just happened. He was bound to realize that. His puffed-up, colossal ego just kept him from admitting it.

Well, one thing was for certain: from now on she was going to be as modest as a nun. He’d see the skin of her face, possibly her neck, surely her hands, but that was it. It wasn’t

going to be easy. Not living together in this—

Her thoughts came to an abrupt halt as she spied something overhead that provided the solution to her problem. There were hooks over her bed, exactly like the ones Cooper had used to drape the curtain in front of the bathtub.

Filled with sudden inspiration, she left the bed quickly and retrieved an extra blanket from the shelf against the wall. Completely ignoring Cooper, who she knew was watching her covertly, she dragged a chair across the floor and placed it beneath one of the hooks.

Standing on the chair, she had to stretch her calf muscles—more than they’d ever been stretched in aerobics class—in order to reach the hook, but eventually she managed it. Moving the chair directly beneath another hook, she repeated the procedure. When she was done, she was left with a curtain of sorts around her bed, which would give her privacy.

She shot her cabin mate a smug glance before she ducked behind the blanket and let it fall into place behind her. There! Let him accuse her of asking for “it.”