the bank just as they’d rounded the bend and flapped right overhead. If she’d been standing, she could have reached out and touched it.
If she’d been standing, she would have probably fallen overboard. Heaven help her if that happened, because she couldn’t swim a stroke and whatsisname wouldn’t be able to pull her out.
“What is your name, anyway?” She slapped at a mosquito and winced when it set off her itching again.
He hesitated just long enough for her to wonder why he hesitated at all. “Lyon,” he said.
“Oh, right. As long as it’s not alligator.”
“What’s yours?”
She didn’t hesitate. She, at least, had nothing to hide. “Jasmine. Jasmine Clancy,” she said, just in case he was wondering where he might have seen her before.
“Great. That takes care of the flora and fauna.”
“Ha-ha, very funny. How far is it now?”
“At a guess, I’d say about five and a half miles.”
She groaned. She’d been rowing steadily ever since the creek widened. Thanks to his constant carping, she was beginning to get the hang of it, but her hands would never be the same. “I don’t suppose you have a pair of gloves, do you?”
“I’m sorry.” Actually, Lyon thought, she wasn’t all that bad. Her form was lousy, but what she lacked in physical strength, she made up for in determination. He should have thought about her hands, though. If he could have got to his knife, she could have hacked off his sleeves and pulled them over her hands like a mitt.
Jasmine felt tears sting her eyes. She hated pain, she really did. She hated itching, hated mosquitoes, hated noxious vines that hated her right back, but most of all, she hated being here in the middle of the wilderness, not knowing where she was or how she was ever going to get back.
She was a coward. She’d always been a coward. After her father left, she and her mother never stayed in the same place more than a year or two. She used to wake up in the middle of the night terrified that she would come home from school and find her mother gone, too, and strangers living in her house.
She leaned forward—from the hips, the way he’d told her—and bumped the oars against the wallowed-out wooden oarlocks. Dammit, she would get him there if it killed her! She refused to be put out in the middle of this damned swamp in the dead of night, without so much as a flashlight.
“Take a break.”
“It won’t help.”
“Do it. I’ve got a handkerchief. Dig it out of my hip pocket, rip it in two pieces and wrap it around your palms.”
She really didn’t want to break her rhythm. And she had one, she really did. He had a lousy disposition. He’d fussed at her constantly, but he’d taught her the rudiments of rowing a boat.
Taught her enough to know that if she never set foot in one of the damned things again, it would be too soon.
“Do it, Jasmine. I don’t want you bleeding all over me.”
“Why, because you’re afraid the scent of fresh blood might attract alligators?” She lost her rhythm. A blade caught the water and jerked at her arm, and she uttered a five-letter word. Tears trickled down her cheeks, making her rash itch all the more.
“At least when I hit the headlines—Actress Lost in Damned Dismal Swamp, Feared Dead—my grandmother won’t recognize my name.”
Three
The sky was beginning to grow pale when Lyon opened his eyes. Being careful not to move, he drew a shallow, experimental breath. He still hurt. Hurt like hell, in fact, and where he didn’t hurt, he ached. The difference was subtle, but it was there.
He toyed with it as his senses came quickly alive. Mental exercises served a purpose when physical exercise was out of the question.
Like now. A fourteen-foot skiff was no place to spend a night. Especially not with a broken back and a knee that was still none too reliable.
Especially not an open skiff. In February. The warm spell was over. The temperature must’ve dropped into the forties last night.
They’d stopped for a rest. Her hands had been hurting. He’d been hurting all over. He’d known there was no hope of reaching camp before dark, and rather than risk taking a wrong turn, he’d let her sleep. And then he’d fallen asleep himself. Not a smart thing to do, but then, his options weren’t exactly limitless.
“Ah, hell,” he muttered, gazing bleary-eyed at the woman still huddled in the stern of the boat. She’d turned up the collar of her shirt, rolled down her sleeves and done her best to cover those long, naked legs with a few rumpled tissues and the flap of her shoulder bag.
“Wake up,” he rasped.
She groaned and tried to draw her knees up to her chin. Her no-longer-whıte shorts weren’t particularly skimpy. They’d been designed to come halfway down her thighs, but when a woman had legs as long as hers, there was still a lot of flesh left exposed to the elements.
Not to mention exposed to the eyes.
“Jasmine, look alive. We’ve got to get some heat going.”
“Turnip therm’stat.”
“Right. You do ıt—you’re the closest.”
She opened one eye. The other one was swollen shut. Shivering, she mumbled something that sounded like “Where Nell ama?”
“By my reckoning, you’re approximately five miles north of Billy’s Landing, about half a mile west of Two Buzzard Ditch, and a mile or so east of Graceland.”
“Oh,.”
She scratched her cheek and then her ankle, and smiled. There was something dangerously disarming about a woman who woke up shivering, scratching, blinking one eye and still managed to smile.
She yawned, rearranging splotched remnants of calamine lotion. “Graceland? I thought that was in Tennessee.” Her voice was early-morning soft. Husky. In another woman, under other circumstances, he might have taken it as an invitation.
With Jasmine he took it as merely easy on the ears.
“Bad joke. Think you can do a few warm-ups without falling overboard? We need to get your blood circulating.”
“Too late. ’S frozen like a raspberry snow cone.”
He yawned, too. And then, unexpectedly, he grinned. Couldn’t recall the last time he’d smiled, especially before breakfast, but she seemed to have that effect on him.
Lyon had come here to be alone. If he had to have company, he’d have preferred a chiropractor or a physical therapist. Instead, he got Jasmine Clancy with her poison ivy and her blistered hands and her world-class legs. He wasn’t sure just what breed of woman she was, but she didn’t belong here. One way or another, he probably ought to get rid of her.
