Blazing Bedtime Stories (11 page)

“It’s the tea,” he said flatly.

Damn. The man was a mind reader.

“It’ll keep you awake and pretty much pain-free all night. And that, uh, side effect will wear off soon.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“For a writer, you’re not a good liar, Ms. Templeton.”

Double damn. He had recognized her. “You know who I am?”

He nodded. “It took me a few minutes. The name sounded familiar. I saw your picture on a poster at a bookstore once. You write books for kids, right?”

Probably not the kind he imagined. “For the most part.”

“Are people going to be looking for you?”

In a normal situation, if she felt in any way threatened, she would have snapped, “Hell, yes, the National Guard will be out searching for me by now, buster.”

But she didn’t.

“No.”

“Okay.” He stepped across the room, lifted the heavy curtain and peered out into the night. “Look, I have to go out for a little while.”

Her jaw dropped. “At midnight?”

“You’ll be fine,” he insisted. “There’s more tea on the table beside you if you start hurting again, but try not to drink too much.”

“I’ll pass, thanks. I’ve had quite enough of the side effects. Don’t you have a bottle of aspirin lying around?” She always did. Of course, hers was in her purse, which was in her car, which was now resting at the bottom of a swamp.

Wow. Her insurance agent was not going to be happy.

“No, I don’t.” He dropped the curtain and walked over to the bed, staring down at her. Frowning, he murmured, “I know you could have a concussion, and I’d stay if it wasn’t so important. The tea will keep you awake, so just lie here and try to relax, okay?”

She did feel incredibly jazzed up, nowhere near ready to fall asleep. Almost the way she had felt when that strange, Rumpelstiltskin-like man had touched her earlier.

“That man,” she mumbled, suddenly realizing he was the one she’d been hearing as she drove blindly through the woods.
Stray from the path
. His words. And his voice.

“What man?” Hunter asked, his tone sharp. “Did you see someone in the woods?”

“Someone crazier than you?”

His eyes narrowed. “The tea can make you a little jumpy, but that mouth, it’s all you, isn’t it?”

Scarlett couldn’t contain a cocky grin. “’Fraid so.”

His lips might have quirked the tiniest bit. But whether he was going to smile or sneer, she honestly didn’t know.

She wasn’t going to find out, either.

Because without another word, Hunter swung around and crossed the room, grabbing a long duster coat off a hook. He tugged it on, then put a tattered fedora on top of his head.

The Indiana Jones look
so
worked on this guy.

He reached for the doorknob. “I’ve gotta go.” Before he slipped out into the night, however, he added a warning. “Stay inside until I get back. You don’t want to be wandering around in the dark. There are…things out there. And do
not
open the door to anyone.”

He mumbled something else under his breath.

“What?”

He grudgingly explained. “Strange people live around here. If a grumpy-looking dwarf shows up, just stay quiet and pretend you’re not here.”

Scarlett couldn’t contain a snort and she rolled her eyes. “Yeah, and, uh, I have to beware of old crones bearing apples, right?”

“That’s ancient history,” he muttered.

Then he was gone, leaving her to wonder just what the hell she’d gotten herself into.

And why she didn’t seem to care.

H
UNTER HEADED BACK
to the cottage at dawn. The night had proved fruitless, as he had thought it would. Morning came earlier here—the days were shorter all around—and he’d had just a few hours to track. The only good thing was the daylight hours would pass quickly, too. He’d be back out to start all over again the moment the sun went down.

Lucas wouldn’t be able to stay in after dark. It didn’t matter where he was holed up, he’d be drawn outside into the moonlight as surely as a salmon was drawn upriver to spawn every year.

Hunter glanced at his watch. It was 3:00 a.m. But streaks of pink and orange sliced the sky, preparing it for the arrival of the sun. The woman in his cabin would almost certainly notice.

“Of course she will,” he mumbled, shaking his head. Half frustrated, half ruefully amused, he changed his watch to a time she’d find more realistic.

The sharp-tongued blonde he’d rescued seemed to notice a lot. While the tea he’d spooned between her lips had probably worn off, he didn’t think the ten-cups-of-coffee high it had given her had been the reason for her sharpness. Huh-uh. He suspected that was all Scarlett Templeton.

“Scarlett,” he said, rolling his eyes. She was about as far from a Southern belle as he was from Rhett Butler. No, she was fast-talking, quick-witted, aggressive and strong.

Not to mention beautiful enough to fry every brain cell in his head and leave him breathless.

He hadn’t been prepared for that, for her to clean up like something straight out of every man’s fantasy.

His
fantasy, truth be told.

Not that he allowed himself such luxuries anymore. His last re
lationship had ended two years ago. That had been just before his mother had died. After she’d told him the truth about the world he thought he knew. And the life his mother had lived in another place entirely—with Lucas Wolf’s father. He’d sort of soured on relationships after that.

He’d since had offers of just about anything, just about any way it could be had—after all, he lived in the Big Easy. But he hadn’t been interested. Not while his life was focused on one thing: tracking down the criminals who slipped back and forth between the worlds, using each realm to hide from their crimes in the other. He’d worked as a cop for ten years back then, seeing people evade prosecution for their crimes. Finding out how some of them had disappeared so completely had been a personal gauntlet thrown at his feet.

But, in times gone by, when he had enjoyed normal pleasures like an active sex life—
ancient history
—Scarlett had been exactly the kind of female who’d driven him crazy with lust.

He’d seen the blond hair when he’d rescued her, of course. But out in the bayou, he hadn’t realized how silky it was, or how the soft waves would feel in his hands. Since her eyes had been closed, he hadn’t known they were a deep blue the color of the sky on a starry night. He’d been too concerned about picking bits of glass off her cheeks to realize how creamy and smooth her skin was. Or to judge the beautiful shape of her face, the softness of her full lips or the gracefulness of her slim neck.

It wasn’t until he’d gotten her to the cabin, laid her on his bed and carefully started removing her clothes that he’d realized any of those things. Cleaning her up, gently washing off her tiny cuts, had been like revealing a masterpiece beneath a painted-over canvas.

He’d begun the task with resolve and impersonal concern.

By the time he was done, he’d been shaking with desire and unable to think straight.

Thank God she’d awakened when she did. Because he’d done as much as he could while still retaining his sanity. Moments before she’d come to, he’d noticed a drop of blood on the snow-white lace barely covering her full breasts. But it would have taken a much stronger man to go that far. No way could he remove the last bits of her clothing. Not without being instantly overwhelmed with the need to touch her for reasons other than to tend to her wounds.

Seeing her reach to touch herself in her sleep had almost put him over the edge. He’d known what she was dreaming. The gentle thrust of her hips, the restless quiver of her legs, the visible tautness of her dusky nipples beneath the lace had made it clear.

“Damned tea.”

That was it. She was under the influence. The tea might have dulled her pain, but it also heightened all her other senses. No decent man would ever take advantage of that.

Some perps might argue it, given the brutal tactics Hunter had occasionally needed to use on the job—both his former one, with the NOPD, and his current one—but he was still a decent man. Even if he’d been entertaining a lot of indecent thoughts in the hours since he’d left Scarlett.

Not gonna go there,
he reminded himself. She was a woman, just like any other woman. He was a professional and had a job to do. From this moment on, his sex drive was going to pretend Scarlett Templeton was a ninety-year-old nun.

He knocked before opening the heavy oak door. Ninety-year-old nun or not, God help him if he walked in on the woman naked.

Getting no response, he knocked again. “Scarlett?”

Nothing.

Hoping she was just asleep, he pushed the door in, his gaze shifting toward the bed where he’d left her.

It was empty. A quick glance confirmed that the rest of the shadowy cabin was as well.

“Damn it, woman, I’m not rescuing you again!”

Then a scream split the dawn air, piercing and terrified.

And he realized he might have spoken too soon.

S
HE HADN’T
seen that.

She had
not
seen that.

It was the same thing she had
not
seen right before she’d crashed.

“A man,” she whispered as she raced through the woods, in the direction she hoped would lead back to the cabin. “It was a man,” she repeated, the words becoming a mantra.

Not an animal. Not a beast. A dark, swarthy man. One who had scared the bejesus out of her. She didn’t have one bit of bejesus left. Whatever bejesus was.

Damn it, where was the cabin? She should never have left it.
Why didn’t you listen to him?

Because she’d been bored and jittery and stubborn. And because there hadn’t been a damned bathroom.

She would have sworn she hadn’t gone more than a few dozen steps from the door. She’d picked her way carefully, using the lantern he’d left to light her way so she wouldn’t accidentally tumble into the mouth of a hungry alligator. Or worse…a big-ass snake. God, she hated snakes.

But even with the lantern and the sun on the verge of rising, the woods seemed to close in around her, growing darker rather than lighter. Nothing appeared familiar. She couldn’t even see the outline of the cabin’s roof through the thick forest.

Running was still better than stopping, though. Better than once again seeing what she
so
hadn’t seen before the crash, or just now, in the woods.

Damn that tea. It had made her a little crazy. And a little wild. Crazy and wild and horny. Not a good combination.

Only she hadn’t had any tea before the crash.

Screw that. You imagined it. Now run!

She kept going, her legs pumping even though her feet hurt like hell as she ran across jagged earth, dead brush and rocks. Her soles would be a bloody mangled mess if—
when
—she got back to safety. She’d found her clothes without any problem, but had only been able to locate one of her shoes when she’d gotten up a little while ago. So she had ventured out barefoot.

It wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done. But all she could think about was answering nature’s call and getting back before
he
could return. Because having to ask him to take her to “use the facilities” seemed infinitely worse than risking stepping on a sharp stick.

But perhaps not worse than seeing a…
a man. Just a man who ran supersonically fast!

“Scarlett?” a voice called.

Hunter. Oh, thank God. She almost cried in relief.

True, he was still a stranger. But she’d take her chances with the one who’d stripped her and yet managed to remain a gentleman—which hadn’t exactly thrilled her at the time, to be perfectly honest—over the guy she’d just glimpsed through the trees.

“Here! I’m over here.” She darted toward the sound of Hunter’s voice, so glad he’d come back, she couldn’t even worry about his anger that she’d disobeyed his order to stay put.

Bursting from the shadows, she spied him running toward her, the cabin silhouetted beneath the rising sun directly behind him. She stumbled a little over her own injured feet, pain giving way to just a bit of awed lust at the way the golden morning framed his big, tough body.

She hadn’t imagined it. He really was that handsome.

And furious.

“What happened? Why did you leave the cabin? Why did you scream?” She almost flew into his arms. He wasn’t exactly in the mood to catch her. Instead, he grabbed her, and shook her lightly, the way a parent would after a kid ran out in front of a car. “Jesus, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

“I almost gave myself one, too,” she said, gulping in deep breaths of refreshing morning air. It was almost too refreshing—she wasn’t used to it. Give her the pungent scents of beignets and booze and the Mississippi over the great outdoors any day. All this pine, flora and fauna was making her dizzy.

Pine. Flora. Fauna.

No swamp.

She tugged away, her eyes narrowing. Slowly turning in a circle, she ignored his questions, focusing only on where she was. She’d barely even noticed her surroundings in the darkness when she’d wandered away from the cabin, but there was no creepy road, no bayou, no Spanish moss or skeletal oaks.

That road. It had been so strange. She hadn’t been able to decide, when driving through it, whether she was traveling through a forest or a bayou. It had seemed to be both. Now, there was no bayou at all.

“Where did you bring me?” she whispered.

“What?”

She cleared her throat. “This doesn’t look familiar. Just how far are we from where I crashed?”

She turned around in time to see the way his eyes shifted as he answered. “Not far.”

Scarlett crossed her arms, knowing he wasn’t being completely honest with her. “So take me back.”

“Back to your car? You bet, darlin’. Have fun digging it out of the muck.”

Narrowing her eyes, she ordered, “Take me to civilization.”

He shrugged. “Can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got work to do. I lost enough time taking care of you. You’re going to have to wait here with me until I finish what I came here to do.”

Her jaw dropped. “You’re
kidnapping
me?”

His unconcerned shrug told her just how worried he was about that. “So much for the ‘thanks for saving my life.’”

“You saved my life. That doesn’t mean you get to run it.” Unable to help herself, Scarlett cast a quick, worried glance over her shoulder. Those damn woods looked Hansel-and-Gretel innocent now, unlike the trap they’d become when she’d been racing through them. Remembering what had happened to that mischievous twosome, and how close they’d come to being dinner, she snapped, “I want to go home.”

He frowned, pushing a weary hand through his hair. “I’d like to accommodate you. But I can’t. Give me one more day, all right? Then I promise I’ll get you back where you belong.”

One more day. She didn’t want to be here for one more hour. But she couldn’t deny the idea of spending another whole day with Hunter didn’t exactly break her heart.

Swallowing and forcing the thought of the shadowy figure from the woods out of her mind, she nodded. “Okay. But you…you’ll be nearby, won’t you?”

She should have kept her mouth closed. Because the quiver in her voice and her quick glance at the woods reminded him of what she’d kind of been hoping he’d forget.

“Why did you leave when I told you not to?”

“Like I said. You don’t run my life.”

His jaw tightened, fire snapping in those green eyes. “I warned you it was dangerous.”

“No,” she replied, “you didn’t. You told me there were temperamental dwarves, and ‘tings’ out there. Not
dangerous
things.”

His voice low, intense, he asked, “What did you see?”

She shook her head, wanting nothing more than to go inside and
crawl into that soft bed. She didn’t hurt—the magical tea still had a good grip on her pain–but some of the energy had waned and she almost felt as if she could drop where she stood.

The other side effect had, thankfully, disappeared, too. Right now, what she most wanted to do with the man in front of her was punch him and make him take her home.

Okay, okay. He was still incredibly hot. And maybe, once she got him home, she’d want to keep him for a while. But the sexual urge wasn’t quite as intense as it had been during the night when sensuality and lust had filled every cell of her body.

“Damn it, woman, tell me what you saw.”

Woman?
Woman?
“Don’t call me woman.”

“You sure ain’t a man from where I’m standin’,” he said, raking a hot gaze from the top of her raggedy hair to the bottom of her…. “Aww, hell,
cher,
what’d you go and do to your feet?”

Before she could answer, he swept her up. But not at all like Rhett Butler had swept
that
Scarlett up the stairs. Instead Hunter hoisted her over his shoulder and dumped her there, hanging like a big sack of dog food. With one hand wrapped around her thighs, the other on her bottom, he kept her where he wanted her.
Humiliating.
But oh, lordy, did the position give her a great view of his strong, muscular back, lean waist and a tight butt she wanted to grab with both dangling hands.

He’d probably drop her.

He kicked the door open with the toe of one boot, carried her across the room and dumped her onto her back on the bed. She bounced twice, then collapsed back into the pillows.