Love is a Battlefield: Games of Love, Book 1 (20 page)

“It wasn’t my idea,” she said. “Anne brought the hot tub. She’s a friend of mine from the JARRS group—a very supportive and outdoor-savvy friend, I’ll have you know.
And
her brother works at REI, so there’s plenty more where that came from. But in my defense, I only told her to bring camping gear. I certainly didn’t say a thing about all the luxury amenities.”

All
the luxury amenities? Julian suddenly wished he’d taken better stock of the women’s supplies as they’d unpacked. They’d last a lot longer than he thought if there were chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne over there.

He ran a quick but appraising eye over their side before laughing out loud.
Outdoor-savvy, huh?
Clouds of mosquitoes gathered around the lamps they’d left lit near the entrance of the tent, where the nylon hung gaping and open. Apparently, the lure of the hot tub overrode common sense.

“It’s all fun and games until you realize how many bugs are crawling inside that open door of your tent.”

Kate looked back between Julian and the tent, her lips thin and white with the sudden pressure of being wrong. She shoved her mug in his direction and stormed across the field. It was better than a movie, watching her rummage through her things until she came across a can of insect repellent so big it might have taken down an entire ecosystem.

He had to struggle to keep seated while she covered the tent and all its surroundings with the killer spray before zipping up the doorway, undergoing a minute investigation of the ground and all its crawling contents before she was satisfied the job had been done properly. A quick word to the raucous hot tub party, and she stalked back across the field.

“See? That wasn’t so hard.” There was a slight sneer in her voice—meant, Julian knew, to put him in his place. It was unnecessary. He was exactly where he wanted to be right now.

“You’re right—you have a real skill with insecticides.” He waited until she was comfortably settled on the ground before adding, “Though you might as well have taken a bottle of lighter fluid and doused it over your sleeping bags. That stuff’s pretty flammable, and the wind picks up over the bluffs at night. You really aren’t good at this outdoor lifestyle, are you?”

The look Kate sent his way was almost too good to be true. There was no way to capture the narrowed eyes, the furious blush, the slight part of her lips—no, that wasn’t true. There was one very good way of capturing those lips, and it involved his hand on the back of her neck, tilting her head up so he could explore all the softness of lips parted in passionate indignation.

But, no. She was just a girl, and one who had only recently placed those lips up to an expensive glass of wine in a toast with his enemy. One whose motives in coming over with hot chocolate and a skirt couldn’t be designed to help him in any way.

So he laughed instead. Loud and long and fully deserved.

“Try not to burn down the whole park, will you? Then neither one of us will have anywhere to host our events.”

The entire contents of a mug of hot chocolate splashed over his shirt, marshmallows clinging like wayward polka dots to his chest. The beverage had cooled considerably, so the intended effect—dramatic and decisive—fell short of its goal. Which only made Julian laugh that much more.

“And you are not invited to our hot tub to clean up,” Kate muttered, turning on her heel and stomping away.

For a moment, he thought the words meant she’d be joining the party across the way, where he could see Jada settling comfortably in Peterson’s lap and Nick, who he was pretty sure was underage, kicking back his fourth or fifth beer. To his relief, she bypassed the laughter and headed right into her tent for the night.

But not, of course, before carefully extinguishing every light within ten feet of her liberally debugged comfort zone.

Chapter Ten

A Lady’s Complexion

Kate slept fitfully. She’d never camped in her entire life—the closest her family had ever been to roughing it was when she was a kid and they stayed at a hotel with only three stars attached to its name.

First of all, it was cold. Even though Anne had brought her a sleeping bag she swore was designed for sub-freezing temperatures, the bare tent floor beneath Kate’s body seeped like ice up into her bones, and she felt like a ninety-year-old woman with no body fat. So of course she’d been forced to wrap herself up in Julian’s light athletic jacket in order to stay even remotely warm, and his smell, the crisp scent of Irish Spring soap and fresh-cut wood, invaded her dreams, weaving in and out of her consciousness like a ghostly hand. Sometimes the hand wrapped right around her heart, clenching tight before releasing with an oddly-timed thud. Other times, it curled up heavily in the full weight of her breasts and right between her legs, throbbing with restless intensity.

And then her portable alarm clock started ringing at five thirty, before the sun had even had a chance to do more than twitch a few feeble signs of life over the field.

“Turn that thing off, Kate,” groaned Anne, her arm fumbling for the snooze button.

Kate opened a pair of very groggy eyes and tried to stretch, but her body was so stiff she might as well have been frozen to the dirt. Her head pounded from where she’d been hit the day before, and her mouth felt like it had been scrubbed with steel wool.

“Oh my God. People do this for fun?”

She couldn’t see very much, either. The tent let in only a few rays of diffusive light, but from what she could tell, everything seemed to have shifted in the night, their sleeping bags and equipment collecting in the middle of the tent as though they, like their owners, needed to huddle for warmth. One owner, though, was nowhere to be found.

“Where’s Jada?” Kate croaked.

“Good morning, my lovelies!” Jada poked her head into the tent and beamed at them. She looked freshly washed and scrubbed, her hair pulled back in an immaculate ponytail and nary a line across her face. Kate promptly threw a dirty sock at her.

“There better be coffee out there.”

Anne sat up and stretched. “And food. I forgot how hungry I get when I’m camping. It’s all this fresh air.”

“There’s coffee and pancakes and eggs,” Jada promised. “But there are also five very large, beautiful men. So don’t you dare come out until you’ve done something with that hair. And yes, Kate, I’m talking to you.”

Kate pulled a face. In college, she’d had to put locks on her bedroom door to prevent Jada’s sunrise bliss from getting in the way of her rest. The woman had some sort of early morning disease that rendered her completely gorgeous and irritating before nine a.m., Pacific Standard Time.

“You made breakfast?”

“Don’t be stupid. I went to McDonald’s. Now get up—I’m serious. They’re getting ready to throw trees.”

Anne scrambled into action, shooting Kate a single apologetic glance before pulling her own perfectly cute and curly hair back into a ponytail.

“Sorry, Kate. I’ve always wanted to see this. And if I’m going to be sleeping on the ground with you for the next few weeks, I’m taking my kicks where I can get them.”

Kate pulled the blankets back up over her head. This wasn’t going to work. Two more weeks of late night hot tub sessions and early morning wake-up calls? She still had to get home, feed Gretna, shower, get dressed and go to work. Her lunch hour would be spent finalizing things with the florist, and she had to leave early for an appointment with a vintage milliner at two—the woman did amazing things with a feather and was planning on setting up a booth at the Fauxhall Gardens.

And then she had to return here to sleep on the ground again, with all the bugs and the medicinal scent of apparently useless insect repellent spray, and only Julian’s casual, handsome mockery to comfort her.

“I might end up burning this whole place down on purpose,” she muttered into the blankets.

“What’s burning?” Jada stood above her, a brush and a washcloth in her hand. “Kate, did you touch those plants Anne told you to avoid? No—don’t tell me. I don’t want to know what you were rolling around in last night. Just get up. I’m making you presentable.”

Kate emerged from the tent about five minutes later, feeling a little bit more human thanks to a thorough face scrubbing with icy cold water and Jada’s cruel hand forcing her hair into two thick braids that hit her shoulder blades. That woman should have been a matron in a German boarding school.

But the moment she saw the men standing on the far end of the field, Kate decided she didn’t regret the touch of primping. Anne wordlessly handed her a coffee in a to-go cup.

“They’re amazing, Kate. Where did you find them, again?”

“Right here,” she murmured.

The men were lined up in a row, clad in shirts and shorts despite the crisp morning air. All of their attention was on McClellan, who balanced a huge, six-foot tree trunk in his two hands. He squatted low to the ground, and Kate could see all those muscles that had seemed stacked on top of one another the day before being unfolded and put to good use. He braced the log against the side of his neck, which seemed an awful lot like a splinter hazard, and with a mighty, ancient roar, pulled up to a standing position, using the squat and his arms to propel the log up and out, forcing it to sail through the air. The vertical lift caused the log to flip top to bottom in a full rotation before hitting the ground with a heavy thud, and the weight of it reverberated in Kate’s feet, even from several hundred feet away.

The cheers of the four other men indicated the throw was, indeed, as impressive as it seemed.

Kate and Anne were shocked into an awed silence, but Jada gave a longing sigh.

“You’ve got to wonder what else a man with that kind of strength can do.”

“In my experience, the really strong ones don’t have the kind of stamina you’d expect,” Anne said, her voice perfectly grave.

Jada nodded knowingly. “That makes sense. It seems such a pity, though.”

Kate looked back and forth between the two women, neither one of them paying her the least bit of attention. It seemed she was in a magical place where the world set into motion before the sun came up, trees flew through the air, and meek, mild Anne revealed a sexual past that rivaled Jada’s. What on earth could be next?

“Maybe you can tell us, Kate. Is stamina an issue?”

That
could be next, apparently.

Kate’s skin grew hot and prickly, and she found she couldn’t meet either Jada’s or Anne’s suddenly interested gaze.

“I don’t know, thank you very much.”

“Kate, we saw you head over to the enemy camp only to come back wearing his clothes. We were in a hot tub. Not blind.”

Jada turned to Anne. “She never kisses and tell,” she explained, like a teacher to a particularly undereducated child. “Which is a damn shame. When you’ve got a man like that holding the bar, I imagine there isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t wonder how he measures up.”

“So how high is his bar?” Anne giggled, getting into the spirit of it and using her hands to hazard a few ludicrous suggestions.

“Did he adopt the old straddle technique?” Jada asked, naming an old track-and-field high jump method. “Oh, no—don’t tell me! He was a Fosbury Flop!”

“I’m not having this discussion with you two right now. It wasn’t at all what you’re imagining. Sometimes, you know, it’s about more than…”

“The size of the bar?”

Anne and Jada had apparently become the best of hilarious friends overnight, full of promises to torture and antagonize Kate. Life was getting rosier by the second.

“So, are you going to sleep over in Julian’s tent tonight?” Jada asked, waggling her eyebrows.

“Very funny,” Kate replied, making a face. Jada wasn’t happy until everyone was having sex. “I don’t intend to sleep with the enemy. Even I know that’s a one-way ticket to a bottle of poison and a dagger to the heart.”

“You mean a sgian dubh,” Anne said.

“A what?”

“It’s the pretty little knife they tuck into their socks to slit throats and cut open boxes and stuff. Michael showed me his. That’s what you’d have to use to end your miserable, Romeo-less life.”

Jada nudged Kate with a laugh. “See? Even Anne’s getting a look at the Scottish equipment.”

“The sporrans are pretty interesting too,” Anne added. “Those little pouches that hang from the waist of the kilt?”

Kate knew what she was talking about. She thought they looked like tiny leather shields, crafted to protect their vital man bits from a wayward blow.

“Some of them are leather, but Michael and a few others use more traditional animal fur. Badgers, I think. They use their sweet little taxidermied heads as the flap to the pouch.” Anne frowned a little. She was one of those very good vegetarians—the ones that didn’t even eat eggs or marshmallows.

“Oooh, did Michael show you his pelt, Anne?” Jada laughed. “Looks like I’m the last one to get to ride a Scotsman.”

“I wish you’d ride them on out of here,” Kate muttered. She gazed out toward the parking lot, where the line of cars sagged uniformly under the weight of camping supplies meant to last both sides for weeks. “If we don’t do something soon, this is going to end in a stalemate. And then we’re done for. Forcible removal weighs very, very heavily in their favor.”