Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2) (3 page)

“Dealer takes three,” he said, and drew his own cards. Goddammit. A two, a jack, and a five. The worst possible hand he could have pulled. As Ace slapped his cards down and Max liberally swore, Scott realized she’d managed to come out ahead yet again.

“Full house!” she chirped merrily, and leaned in to pull the stack of coins her way. “Mama’s buying herself a new pair of shoes.”

As she was seated directly across the table, her enthusiasm provided a generous glimpse of her breasts straining against her low-cut white sweater. He’d have bet every penny in front of him—a small pile that was dwindling by the second—that she’d worn it on purpose.

It was the Carrie Morlock way of doing things. Distract and awe. Cause major accidents. Somehow manage to avoid the fallout afterward.

That must be one of the benefits of being the most beautiful woman in the world. Statuesque and perfectly proportioned, everything about Carrie’s body was designed to beg—and receive—forgiveness. The endless curves of her hips and breasts, long legs that were as strong as they were well-formed, a softly purring voice she could tease as easily into a taunt as she could a proposition…it was difficult to imagine any more erotic combination of features. To make matters worse, what nature had gifted her with in sex appeal, it immediately contradicted with deceptively sweet features. In addition to her puppy-dog eyes, she had long dark hair and a heart-shaped face that should have turned her into America’s sweetheart.

Unfortunately, Scott knew all too well that she had a bite that was ten times worse than her bark. And the woman could bark. Almost as well as she howled.

“I’m sorry. Is Mama buying some shoes not macho enough for our agreement?” She cocked her head to the side and studied him with a calm air. Even though he knew—just
knew
—she was pulling out all the stops to get a reaction out of him, he couldn’t seem to keep his lips from pulling downward. “How’s this instead? Daddy’s heading out to buy wine and women.”

“No,” he grumbled. “That’s not macho either.”

“Sports cars and aged whisky?”

He glared.

“Fine, fine. I’ll buy soccer balls and jock straps. Sheesh.”

“Really? Those are the most masculine items in your imagination?”

She smiled sweetly. “Well, if I based my idea of masculine off what’s in your house, I’d have to go with organic wheatgrass and ladies’ shaving gel.”

He didn’t have to look at Ace and Max to know they were enjoying this, their suppressed laughter doing a good job of shaking the poker table. Not that he could blame them for it. He’d have been enjoying this situation if it was any other man Carrie had gotten her hooks into.

But it wasn’t. It was him. He’d been the one to fall under her spell—and he was the one paying for it now.

“That shaving gel was for you,” he said through his teeth.

“Liar. You said it works better than the man stuff, because it has the extra aloe that makes your skin so soft. And it does, too. Remember that time you asked me to shave your—”

“If you value what’s left of your life, you’ll stop right there.”

She just smiled harder. He supposed this was retribution for his foul mood before, but he didn’t know what else he was supposed to do in this situation. Normal women understood what it meant to break up. The man got to keep his friends. The woman got to keep that one really comfortable sweatshirt he’d never be able to replace. That was how things worked.

“What?” she said, dripping with faux innocence. “You’re the one who likes a clean shave.”

Across the table, Max chortled. Scott opened his mouth to tell his friend where he could stick his own hairy balls, but the table started shaking again. This time, however, it wasn’t because of his friends’ amusement. That was the familiar shake of a Search and Rescue pager going off.

It was a vibration everyone in the room knew well, a kind of alarm system that worked as a call to action. The moment disaster struck—a missing person, an accident in the mountains, a winter snowstorm that trapped moms in minivans—the pagers went off, and anyone who was free to help out came in. It shouldn’t have been a moment for anything more than temporary alarm, the four of them banding together to head out into the cold to lend a hand.

Except his was the only pager going off.

“What the—?” He glanced down at his hip, surprised to find nothing more than a phone number flashing on the screen. Usually, there was a code, a series of three numbers that designated what and where and why, but this was just a local phone number. “Did you guys run out of batteries out or something?”

Ace pulled his pager out and shook it. “Mine’s still good.”

“Mine too,” Max confirmed with a glance.

Carrie didn’t need to say anything. She changed the batteries on her pager every week like clockwork. God forbid a call go off and she not be there to answer it. She lived for the high drama and adrenaline of other peoples’ misfortunes.

“I’m sure it’s a glitch.” Scott attempted a nonchalant shrug, but a feeling of fear began churning in his gut and spreading outward. This was no glitch.
Glitch
implied an element of chance, which was something that had been missing from his life since the day Carrie walked into it. “It’s a local number, so somebody probably dialed wrong.”

“What’s it say?”

“Five-oh-nine, four-four-six…” As Scott registered the digits, his voice died away. “Oh, shit. It’s Newman’s home phone.”

As the head of their SAR unit and a man he considered one of his closest friends, Newman was never an ideal source of bad news—and this late in the day, getting a personal page was even worse. Alarmed, Scott’s gaze drew to Carrie’s. Months of having her constantly by his side had rendered him unable to handle his problems without turning to her for support, and he knew he’d find her sympathy waiting for him.

He wasn’t disappointed. Her delicately arched brows came together in a wrinkle in the center of her forehead, her lips parted to showcase her sympathy. He had to physically stop himself from reaching for her, remind himself that so far from falling into her girlfriend-like concern, he needed to do everything he could to stop it.

“Oh, calm the fuck down,” he said irritably. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

He knew it was a horrible thing to say. Every time something cruel moved over his lips in her direction, he could taste the bitterness of it on his tongue, poisoning him from the inside out. But he couldn’t come up with any other way to force the necessary distance between them. If he showed her a glimmer of kindness—or, God forbid, regret—he was done for. She’d be back in his life and in his arms before he knew what happened, and he wasn’t sure he had the strength to end things with her again.

It almost broke him the first time.

Thankfully, she took the bait. “Excuse me?
You
calm the fuck down.”

“I am calm. I’m so calm you could tell time with my heartbeat.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m so calm you can’t even tell I have a heartbeat.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “I’ve known that since the day I first met you. A heartbeat would require you to have a heart first.”

“Me?” Carrie sprang to her feet, sending poker chips flying. The bottom of her sweater snagged on the cheap tabletop poker cover, tugging it hard enough that the upper lip of her bra flashed over the top. It was white and lacy, as usual. Probably with some fancy French label that made it ridiculously easy to ruin thousands of dollars’ worth of lingerie with his teeth. If she ever decided to present him with a bill for damages incurred in the bedroom, he’d have to declare bankruptcy. “You think
I’m
heartless? Talk about the kettle and the pot getting into a racist argument. There’s enough love inside you to fill a teaspoon. Maybe.”

“That’s not my fault. I never claimed to love you.”

One would think that coming up with the cruelest possible insult would finally pierce through Carrie’s iron-thick armor and cause her to back off, give a man a moment’s reprieve so he could finally breathe again.

One would be wrong.

Ignoring the fact that the deep vee of her sweater was now practically around the bottom of her breast, she pulled away from the table and moved into his face. She was always doing that—getting up close and personal, forcing him to look at her, talk to her, acknowledge how much a part of his life she’d become after just eight months of being together. He’d been with his last girlfriend for two
years
and felt nothing more than a twinge of disappointment when she announced she was leaving him.

Nothing about Carrie caused twinges. She was a constant, undulating, full-body pang.

“Oh, really?” she said, her voice low. “Funny. That’s not what you said when I had my mouth wrapped around your cock a few weeks ago.”

He didn’t. He hadn’t. He never would have allowed himself to say what he felt from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her.

“I said no such thing,” he retorted. “You must have been delirious.”

“Ha. You wish. Try bored out of my mind.”

“If you found the task that tedious, maybe it’s because you weren’t doing it right.”

Now she wasn’t in his face so much as pressed all the way against him, her lips inches from his, her breasts jutting against his chest until he was reduced to nothing but sensations of memory and longing. She tilted her head just enough to send a waft of her perfume—also expensive, also French—over him, her mouth so close to his ear he could hear the vibrations of her breath. “You can stand there and bluster all you want, but you and I both know how much you enjoyed having me suck you off.”

He wished there was some way he could argue that fact, but there wasn’t. Just as Carrie was annoying and pushy and generous in her everyday affairs, so too was she annoying and pushy and generous in bed. He could picture all too well the sight of her kneeling before him, greedily handling his belt buckle, informing him of the many different ways she planned to use her tongue to pleasure him.

So, yes. She was right.
Boring
was the last thing he could ever accuse her of being.

But dangerous? Catastrophic? A whirlwind of bad luck and disaster? Yeah. Those ones still applied in full.

“If you came all this way to proposition me, you’re wasting your time. This—” he made a vague twirling gesture her direction, “—does nothing for me anymore.”

Zip. Zilch. Not even a glimmer of pain, no sign at all that he’d so much as scratched her surface.

“Oh, that wasn’t a proposition, my friend,” she said with a flash of her perfect, glinting teeth. “You’ll never get another one of those from me. Not even if you do a striptease like the one you gave me for my birthday.”

Across the table, Max fell into a coughing fit while Ace feigned an intense interest in his discarded hand.

“I swear, it’s like you’re actively trying to kill me,” Scott muttered. There was a time, not too long ago, when the most those two men knew about his life was that he trained rescue dogs for a living and drove an outdated Blazer. Now, his heart was practically bleeding on the table in front of them. Right alongside what remained of his dignity. “I can’t do this right now. I need to call Newman.”

Her antagonism snapped off in an instant. “Do you want me to come with you?”

Yes. Wholeheartedly. Without reservation.

“I’ll be fine,” Scott lied. He directed his next remarks to Max and Ace, determined to turn the tap and get the antagonism going again. It was the only way he could make it work, this idea of a life without her in it. “Try not to lose everything to her while I’m gone, would you? She plays with the ring on her right hand when she’s bluffing, and her breath comes out in short puffs when she’s excited.”

Unable to resist one last opportunity to get the better of her, he added, “Well, that and the ear-splitting howl that makes every dog within hearing distance bark. But you’ll recognize that one when you hear it.”

# # #

“Are you at a bar right now?”

“A bar?” Scott looked around Max’s tiny wood-paneled kitchen, which was decorated in a curious mixture of seventies wall-hangings and brightly—if not skillfully—colored drawings of princesses and dragons. “Um, no. Why? Should I be?”

“I hear background noise.” As if to verify Newman’s statement, an outburst of laughter sounded from the living room—Carrie’s outburst, naturally. She was probably in there telling the guys all about Scott’s sexual proclivities. “Is it a party?”

“Of sorts. I’m at Max’s house. I’m here with Ace and Carrie for poker night. Did you want to include them on this call?”

“No—no, it’s nothing like that.” Newman paused, his silence weighty in a way that did little to provide reassurance. “If I remember correctly, Max has a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Get a drink of something, would you? Something strong.”

Scott cringed. “Do I have to?”

“I would.”

That was all he had to say to confirm Scott’s worst fears. Even though he wanted nothing more than to hang up the phone and get back to Carrie’s juvenile card playing and sexual taunts, he prepared himself to carry Newman’s orders out instead. Sixteen years of service under the older man’s expert SAR guidance had trained him well. When the lives of innocent people were on the line, you did what was asked—plunged into freezing rivers or scaled icy mountains or drank to numb the pain—no matter how much you might not like it.

Most of the time, you didn’t like it.

Scott set the handset on the countertop and poked his head into the living room. “Hey, Max? What do you have that’s stronger than beer?”

“Uh…on me right now?” Max looked around the poker table, as if expecting a bottle to appear on the felt top. “Not much, to be honest. I tossed everything out once Tina started spending weekends here.”

“Really?”

Max shrugged apologetically. “Parenthood.”

“Anyone else?”

“I have prescription-strength cough syrup in my purse,” Carrie offered. “Does that count?”

“Not really.”

“Amateurs.” Ace reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts—his standard attire at all times except on a rescue—and extracted a metal flask. “Here.”