When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) (8 page)

The woods thickened and the going slowed. Their feet slid along the damp forest cover. Here, the ground remained wet well into August. The sun rarely reached past the blanket of trees to dry the ground from the winter snows and the spring rains. Purple flowers grew amidst the grass. The woodsy, wild scent of mushrooms and moss warred with the aroma of pine needles and sap.

Neither the moon nor the stars could be seen any longer. Grace reached into her pocket and pulled out a compass, flicking the beam across its face. She gave a sharp nod. She’d thought they were still headed in the right direction, but in the woods it paid to be certain.

“You’ve got a compass?” Dan sounded so amazed that Grace smiled.

“Doesn’t everyone?” She popped the circlet back into her pocket.

“I didn’t think
you’d
need a compass.”

Grace’s smile faded. “And why wouldn’t I?”

“Don’t you just know inherently where you are, where to go?”

Annoyance flashed through her. “Knowing how to get from here to there doesn’t come from my blood but from my brain. If you live in these woods, you need to know how to survive in these woods. Cars fail all the time. And a casual stroll can turn deadly if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’ve offended you again.”

Grace sighed. She shouldn’t get so defensive, but some things never changed, and of all people, she’d thought Dan would not judge her by her cover since he didn’t like being judged by his.

“Never mind,” she said. “We need to hurry if we don’t want to be caught in the storm.”

“Storm?” Dan lengthened his strides to keep up with her trot. “What storm? The weather report said clear, no clouds.”

She couldn’t help it. She just
had
to roll her eyes. “You listen to the weather report?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” He threw her own words back at her. She didn’t take the bait.

“Sure, but they don’t actually believe it.”

“Then how
do you know there’s a storm coming?”

“Inherent weather-predicting ability,” she said and plunged into the darkest part of the forest.

Dan walked faster, keeping one eye on the hide-and-seek white of Grace’s dress through the trees and the other on the shadows, searching for bears. Grace didn’t seem to think there were any about, but Dan wasn’t so sure. She also thought it was going to storm, and there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky when they entered the woods.

A tree branch slapped Dan in the face, yanking him from his reveri
e. He really was out of his element here, while Grace seemed completely at home. This
was
her home. He wished it had always been his.

Dan had been born and raised
in Phoenix, Arizona. He’d never fit in there. For some reason neither the arid, dry desert nor the mountains surrounding the city appealed to him. Here, the whisper of the wind through the trees calmed him and the lakes soothed. The coolness in the air, every morning and every evening, made Dan feel more alive than he’d ever felt before. He should have been born here—like Grace.

Dan blinked. He’d lost sight of her white dress while lost in thought. He hurried to catch up. The forest closed in around him, the foliage at his back thicker, the trees up ahead taller, the brush on the sides denser. Dan had no idea where he was or which way Grace had gone.

Drawing a deep breath, he opened his mouth to shout her name, then hesitated. Grace said he was too loud. Perhaps because bears responded to screaming tourists just as sharks were drawn to the vibrations and gyrations of swimmers? He snapped his mouth closed.

He would just keep going straight ahead. How hard could walking in a straight line be?

Pretty hard, Dan discovered. Nothing looked straight in the dark. If he came across a fallen tree he had to climb under, go over, or inch around it. Grace had taken the flashlight with her. Where the beam had seemed bright and shiny at his side, now he could see no hint of the light around anywhere. He became disoriented. After what seemed like hours, but was probably only ten minutes, Dan panicked and stopped in a tiny clearing.

Why, oh, why had he allowed himself to lose sight of Grace? Why had she left him behind to die?

Dan laughed to himself. “So melodramatic.”

“Who?” asked an owl.

Dan jumped at the sound. Why couldn’t he get used to the noises of the flora and fauna of the forest?

The sound of something crashing through the brush in his direction made Dan wish he’d kept his mouth shut—and stayed in Arizona. He might not be used to the noises out here, but he knew what a large, lumbering body sounded like.

Maybe he wasn’t being so melodramatic after all. Maybe he
was
going to die here. Maybe Grace had planned this whole thing. In fact, that made more sense than Perry, the weasel, leaving them in a lurch. And who had been prepared for this little jaunt, with shoes in her car, flashlight in the glove compartment, and a compass in her pocket? Grace, that’s who.

And why? With Dan out of the way, Grace got the grant.

Another crunch and a crash, closer, made Dan push aside conspiracy theories for the moment. He had more pressing concerns. Such as—should he climb a tree?

As if he could. The trees in this part of the forest were huge, with little in the way of footholds, and far too big for even a guy of his size to put his arms around and shimmy up. Even if he could climb one, Dan remembered hearing on the Discovery Channel that bears could climb better and quicker than people. They could also run pretty fast—especially if they were chasi
ng something. What you were supposed to do if a bear showed up was pretend you were dead.

No problem there. Dan was just about ready for a heart attack.

He dropped to the ground, curled himself into a ball, with his knees beneath his chest and his hands clasped behind his head. He made a pretty large target, but if he was lucky maybe the bear was on its way to a honey tree and would run right by.

No such luck for Dan, but then he’d never been very lucky. Thunder rumbled in the distance, like an omen. The anim
al crashed into the small clearing, ran across the grass—and tripped over Dan, landing right next to his head.

Dan tensed, waiting for teeth and claws to tear him apart. Instead he caught the scent of Grace and raised his head. Their noses brushed, she was that close. Relief flashed through him a moment before the anger in her eyes made him wonder if his panicked ramblings were true. She looked mad enough to kill. But she really wasn’t the type, was she?

“I’m going to kill you, Dr. Chadwick.”

Hmm, maybe she was. Look at Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Mild-mannered-looking guys one and all. Not every murderer had “crazy” tattooed on their forehead like Manson. Too bad.

Slowly Dan sat up, slid away from her. At least there was no bear—at the moment—though perhaps he’d be better off if there were.

“You wanna calm down, Grace?”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Her voice had a shrill edge.

“All right.” He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I won’t.”

She stood and her skirt swirled about her ankles. Since he was still on the ground, he got an extensive flash of skin, too. He couldn’t help it; his gaze went to her leg and stuck there.

Snap, snap.
She clicked her fingers in front of his face. “Doc? Stay with me.” She held out her hand. He just stared at that, too.

“Get up, you’re all wet.”

Actually he wasn’t, but he probably would be soon. Thunder rumbled again. The storm he hadn’t believed was coming, came.

He climbed to his feet without her help, as if she could pull him to his feet. When he stood, she put her hands on her hips and scowled. “You scared me half to death,” she accused.

“Me? You left me alone to die in the woods with the bears.”

“There aren’t any bears.”

“But you said—”

She cut him off with an exasperated sound. “All right, there are, but now that you’ve knocked down half the forest, they aren’t anywhere near here. Bears are more afraid of us than we are of them.”

“Then why—?”

“I was playing with your head.”

Dan rarely got mad. He just wasn’t a guy with much of a temper. So few things were worth getting angry over. Because of his size he’d always worried about what he might do if he got too angry. Right now, with the tang of terror fresh upon his tongue, he just didn’t care.

“You let me believe there might be bears lurking behind every tree, then left me out here? I might have had a heart attack. Or was that what you were hoping for?”

She scowled. “I didn’t
leave
you anywhere. You couldn’t keep up. Besides, I was sitting on your porch. All you had to do was walk straight for twenty feet. You couldn’t even do that. Did you know you walked in a complete circle?”

“I did not. I stayed on a straight line. You just left me in the middle of the forest.”

She stomped across the short distance separating them, grabbed his hand in surprisingly strong fingers, and yanked him after her. Ten feet, straight ahead, the forest thinned. Another ten feet and they stepped into a clearing. There sat his cabin, the lake, the camp.

Idiot.

“So if I was walking in circles, but only twenty feet from the cabin, and there aren’t any bears, why are you trembling?” he asked.

“Just because there aren’t any bears doesn’t mean you can’t die in the woods. It happens at least once every summer and a lot every winter.”

“What does?”

“A clueless tourist walks into the woods and never comes back out.”

“I don’t see how that could happen.”

“Look.” She pointed behind him.

Dan turned. The forest rose, thick and tall. Dark. Mysterious. Deadly. Where they’d walked through he could not see. It was as if a path had opened for Grace and himself, then closed. Which was impossible. Logically he knew that, but from where Dan stood he could not see any way to walk through the trees back in the direction they had come. He shivered at the implications.

Grace came up behind him, a calming presence at his back. At leas
t he wasn’t alone. “You get disoriented when everything around you is ten times taller. If you don’t have a compass, and most of you don’t” —she said
you
like she might say
naïve fools
— “you’re in big trouble.”

“What about the stars, the moon, the sun?”

“If they’re out, and you’re in a part of the forest where you can see them, would you know how to guide from them?”

Dan shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Exactly. And you’re Dan, the Wonder Doctor— think about some regular Joe out here. They’d be toast within a few days.”

“Don’t you have trackers, dogs, cops?”

“Sure. We’ve even got Indian guides. But if they don’t know you’re missing, or where you went in, it makes things kind of tough.”

Dan stared at the woods, while Grace took his hand once more. He didn’t want her to let go, so he held her fingers loosely, and didn’t move a single iota. “What should I do then, if I get lost again?”

“Hug a tree.”

“What?” He glan
ced at her but she wasn’t laughing. At least not so he could tell. “I thought you said hug a tree.”

“That’s right. Haven’t you ever seen Barney? He gives good advice.”

“Barney? Is he some north woods survivalist?”

“He’s a giant purple dinosaur.”

Had she been smoking funny-smelling weed while he wandered in circles? Dan moved closer and peered into her face to observe how big her pupils were. From what he could see in the shadows, she looked fine. She still smelled like Grace and nothing else—sexy, sinful, scrumptious. Maybe he’d taken in too much night magic himself.

Grace grinned. “
Barney
is a kid’s television show.”

“You watch kid’s television a lot?”

Her grin faded. “At hospitals. Yes.”

Dan cursed himself for wiping the smile from her face. He suspected she’d watched television with some very sick kids while they held blankets from Project Hope. A twinge of guilt came over Dan, but he refused to allow it to take root. He needed that grant. He was too close to a cure to give up now.

“And this amazing dinosaur says to hug a tree if you’re lost in the woods.”

“Yes. Stay where you are. Don’t wander. Then someone can find yo
u more easily. If you go in circles” —she raised an eyebrow at him— “you end up deeper in the forest and it’s harder to find you when you cross your own trail again and again.”

Slowly, Dan nodded. “Easy enough and it makes sense. So did you learn all this from Barney? Or did you learn some from your dad?”

“My dad?” Her voice rose in amazement. “Why would my dad know anything about the forest?”

“He’s Ojibwe.”

“So? I don’t think he stepped foot in the woods after he stepped into college.”