his left a branch cracked and footsteps came towards him through the trees. Footsteps that were making no effort at concealment.
All the hairs rose on his neck. He stood still as a statue, scarcely breathing, and saw a slim figure emerge from the trees. It scrambled down the ditch, up the other side, and on to the road.
‘Hello, Shea,’ he said.
She gave a shriek of terror and whirled to face him. She was wearing a white shirt, a small haversack slung over one shoulder.
Quickly Simon stepped out on the road. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I saw you from the truck—or at least I saw something, I didn’t know it was you.’
‘Do you always creep up on people like that?’ she said shakily.
He came closer to her. Her eyes were wide-held and the pulse was racing at the base of her throat. ‘You were hiding in the woods,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘No, I wasn’t!’
‘Come on, Shea.’
She swallowed, and tried again. ‘OK, so I was. I wanted to walk back to the base, that’s all. By myself.’
‘You were swimming?’ Simon asked, thinking furiously.
‘Yes. Steve gave me a ride up to the far end of the lake, but I told him I’d find my own way home.’ She looked straight at him, her eyes black like the sky. ‘I really want to be alone, Simon...it’s only a ten-minute walk.’
He said quietly, ‘You overheard Everett.’
‘No!’ She caught herself, but not quickly enough. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Are you angry with me because I interfered?’
Her eyes dropped from his face to his chest, with its tangle of dark hair over muscles hard as boards, then skidded upwards again. ‘Don’t you have a shirt?’ she said fretfully.
‘I couldn’t hold my towel, my shirt and Everett all at once,’ he said. ‘And in the excitement of the moment I left the shirt back there on the bank. Don’t change the subject.’
She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans, hunching her shoulders and staring past him into the dark woods. ‘Yes, I heard him.’
‘He’d had a couple of beers too many, Shea.’
‘So is that supposed to excuse him?’ she retorted.
‘Nothing excuses what he said.’
In such a low voice that he had to strain to hear her, she said, ‘He made me feel dirty all over.’
She looked heart-stoppingly vulnerable, a side of her he had never seen before. As gently as if she were a fawn he might startle with his touch, he slid his hands down her arms, cupped her elbows in his palms, and discovered that she was shivering. ‘You’re cold,’ he said, concern for her overriding the urgent need to pull her in his arms and hold her. ‘Let’s go to the truck. I’m pretty sure Jim left his jacket on the seat.’
She was now staring at his chin, and he was not sure she had even heard him. ‘I love my job!’ she burst out. ‘I already told you that—I can’t imagine doing anything else. But do you have any idea how hard it is to be the only woman in a world of men—day after day, night after night? I’m the only female pilot in the province. And you saw how many women there are in the ground crew—none. I get so sick of men sometimes!’
‘Sick of men like Everett. Joe and Brad and Steve—they wouldn’t lay a finger on you.’
‘I know that, of course I do.’ She bent her head. ‘Everett stood next to me at breakfast this morning—he looked at me as though he was undressing me; it was horrible.’
She suddenly pulled away from him, scrubbing at her eyes with her fists. ‘I loathe weepy women,’ she gulped.
‘Oh, hell,’ Simon said violently. Forgetting restraint, he took her by the shoulders, drew her to his chest and held her, rocking her back and forth. ‘I’m sorry you overheard Everett, Shea, and I swear he’ll never look at you again like that. Not if I’m anywhere in range.’
‘You did sound fairly convincing,’ she muttered.
He could feel the tiny warm puffs of her breath on his skin. Fighting to keep his head, aware through every nerve in his body how beautifully she fitted into his arms, he said, ‘And I’m more than sorry about that stupid mistake I made at the helicopter the first time I met you.’
She raised her head, looking full at him, and suddenly smiled, her mouth a generous curve. ‘I think you redeemed yourself tonight—thanks.’
His breath caught in his throat. She had smiled at him, and he wanted to kiss her so badly, he ached with the need. He said huskily, ‘You’re beautiful when you smile, Shea—it was worth waiting for.’
Her palms were resting flat on his chest, the imprint of each of her fingers burning into his skin. Her smile faded, and she suddenly pushed back from him. ‘This is crazy,’ she said breathlessly; ‘I don’t even like you!’
It was as if she had taken a knife and thrust it in his belly. His lashes flickered. She added incoherently, ‘Don’t look like that, Simon! I—’
He didn’t want her to know that she had hurt him. That he was vulnerable to a woman he scarcely knew. A woman, moreover, who could not by any stretch of the imagination be accused of leading him on. ‘Come on, I’ll drive you back to the base,’ he said, his arms dropping to his sides as he took a step back from her.
She grabbed him by the arm, giving it a little shake, and said in an impassioned rush of words, ‘What I meant was that I didn’t like you when I first met you and then there was that whole business of the letter to Jim. But I do know how hard you’ve worked since you got here and I know Everett won’t bother me again, nor any of the others very likely, and I haven’t even thanked you properly.’
He glanced down. Her nails were digging into his flesh. Her fingers were not long and tapering like Larissa’s, but shorter, and somehow capable-looking. He remembered how, all too briefly, they had lain against his chest, and in his imagination he could picture them elsewhere on his body, holding him, caressing him. His loins stirred. Very deliberately he rested his own hand over hers, holding it captive, playing with her fingers, and the whole time his gaze was trained on her face.
Her eyes widened perceptibly. Surrender, pleasure, and panic chased across her face in rapid succession, before she tugged her hand free and jammed it in her pocket. She said with the kind of rawness that bespoke complete honesty, ‘I’ve never met anyone like you before.’
He said, groping for the truth himself, ‘Maybe that’s because you’ve been waiting for me.’
‘Simon, I don’t like this conversation one bit! If the offer’s still open to drive me back to the base, let’s go. If not, I’m walking back right now.’
He could not possibly hold her here against her will, not with Everett’s words so fresh in both their minds. ‘The offer’s open. And I meant what I said.’ And, he added silently to himself, maybe
