The Mighty Quinns: Eli (11 page)

“Not necessarily,” Eli said. “I've worked as a cameraman before. On a trekking expedition in Mongolia. Maybe I could talk them into hiring me.”

Her expression brightened. “Really?”

“Yeah. I'd be the perfect choice. I know the area. I'm used to living in rugged conditions. And I happen to be sleeping with the star of the show.”

“We could do this together,” she said.

He pulled her close and gave her a hug. “See. That's not so bad.”

“They also asked if I had an ex-boyfriend.”

“An ex-boyfriend?”

“Sinclair suggested he could show up and try to convince me to come home to add a romantic interest to the show. The man is all about drama. I swear, he'd dognap Riley if he thought it would create suspense.”

“Well, an ex would add an interesting element. What did you tell them?”

“That none of my exes would be interested in the job. He said they could always hire an actor.” She cursed softly. “This show was supposed to be real, not some reality cliché fabricated for maximum conflict. Next thing you know, they'll be bringing in trained bears and mountain lions to wander around the property. Sinclair seemed obsessed with bears. I think he's really hoping that I'll get mauled and we'll be able to catch it on film.”

“Come on,” he said. “Let's get out of here for the day.”

“Where are we going?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“A luxury hotel with a spa,” she muttered.

“Done. I can call a friend of mine with a helicopter and he'll have us off this mountain within the hour.”

“You'd really do that for me?”

“Sure. If it would put a smile back on your face, I would.”

She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “We could spend the afternoon in bed. That always makes me smile.”

“I have a better idea. We can stay in the wilderness, but get away from the cabin for a while. I'm going to take you camping. And trout fishing.”

“Will it be dramatic?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, trout are very good fighters. And we will have to kill them before we eat them, so I suppose blood and fish guts could make it even more dramatic.”

Over the next half hour, they gathered food and clothes for their trip, along with a few basic cooking utensils that Lucy put in a smaller day pack. Eli noticed her mood lighten almost immediately and before long, she was laughing and teasing, excited to learn how to fish.

He helped her lift her pack onto her shoulders, then handed her the rifle and attached the bear spray to the waistband of her jeans. Once he'd hefted his own pack onto his back, he stepped out onto the porch. He whistled to Riley, and the dog jumped up from his place on the porch and fell into step with both of them.

“Do you need a compass?” she asked.

“I know where we're going. It's not that far. About an hour hike.”

They walked across the meadow, hands linked. The weather was perfect, the sky blue and the sun bright. Eli couldn't think of a better way to spend the day than tramping through the wilderness with Lucy.

Life seemed to be so easy on the mountain. But Eli had to wonder whether it would be the same once they both went back to the real world. For now, this was her job, but if she was involved in television production, then she'd need to live in Los Angeles or some other large metropolitan area. He'd never lived in a city in his life. He'd been through almost every major airport in the world, but he'd never bothered to step outside and see the city around that airport.

“When this project ends, what are you going to do next?” Eli asked.

“I don't know,” Lucy said. “I mean, when I started this, I thought it would be a stepping stone to something much bigger. But living here on the mountain has changed me.”

“How?”

“I've learned to live in the moment. I've learned how to quiet my mind and notice the beautiful things all around me. I guess most people do that when they're kids, but I never could. My childhood was a constant battle. I always had to be on guard. Here, I can just be myself.”

He slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “I wish you could have met my grandmother. She would have loved you.”

“I've been thinking about her a lot lately. Sometimes, I can feel her presence. Not her ghost, but...her spirit. The other day, I was pulling carrots from the garden and I thought I heard a laugh. It was probably just the wind in the trees.”

“It could have been Riley,” Eli said.

She laughed. “Now that you mention it, he does make a funny sound when he yawns. But I wanted to believe it was her and that she was watching over me, like some fairy godmother. I never had that, someone who cared about me. You're lucky. You actually knew her.”

“She wasn't always easy to get along with,” Eli explained. “She was incredibly stubborn and opinionated. And she treated men as if the only thing they were really good for was sex and lifting heavy objects. But she squeezed every ounce of enjoyment out of her life. When she found something that made her happy, she just immersed herself in it until something new caught her fancy.” He drew a deep breath. “And she never compromised when it came to things that were really important to her.”

In truth, the person he described sounded a lot like Lucy. But Lucy was vulnerable in a way that his grandmother never had been. Lucy's confident exterior hid what was left of the terrified child she'd once been.

Eli wanted nothing more than to fix that child, to make her life whole again and to reassure her that everything would be all right in the future. He'd come to care about Lucy and yet, he knew their future might end the moment she walked off the mountainside.

But did he even want a future with Lucy? What did that mean? Would they live together? Would they get married and have a family? Though he didn't know everything about Lucy, he knew that those sorts of ideas were not a part of her plans.

Would it be enough for him if they were just lovers? Though a no-strings relationship had always seemed ideal to him, with Lucy it would be easier said than done. He certainly didn't enjoy the thought of her with another man.

He glanced over at her. Maybe all this confusion was a result of a unique confluence of events. She seemed perfect for him because everything around them was perfect. But take the two of them off the mountain and nothing would be the same.

“I'm not going to compromise,” Lucy said. “I'm going to do this the way I wanted to do it. And I've decided that I'm going to weave a biography of Trudie into the narrative. This is going to be a tribute to her.”

“That's a wonderful idea,” Eli said.

“You'll help me, right? I mean, you knew her. I'll need to do a lot of research. Maybe you could introduce me to Buck?”

“Yeah. He has some pretty colorful stories about Trudie.”

“Great. That's decided then. We can try to get better footage, do more interesting things for the camera. But that's it. I'm not going to ruin a good idea. That would be selling out.”

Eli gave her shoulders a squeeze. After everything she'd been through in her life, she still had such an incredible inner strength. She knew exactly who she was. And the more he learned about her, the more he wanted to learn.

“Are you sure we're not lost?”

“I know exactly where I'm going,” he said.

For now, he was moving forward. He was going to enjoy the time he had with Lucy and hope it turned into something more than just a friendship with incredibly pleasurable benefits. He planned to do everything he could to prove to her that they belonged together—off and on the mountain.

* * *

“T
HIS
IS
HOW
you fillet a trout in eight or nine easy steps,” Eli said. “First, you put your trout on a flat surface then take your knife and...”

Lucy stared down at the fish lying on a flat rock, the silvery skin shining in the late afternoon sun. They'd been lucky with the fishing, but cleaning the fish was something she really wasn't interested in doing. No doubt it would involve lots of smelly and slimy stuff.

Still, she wasn't about to let Eli see her reluctance. So she'd have to touch fish guts. She'd faced far worse things in her life.

“Are you listening?”

“What?” She glanced over at Eli. “Yes. No. I was just thinking about what a nice little life this fish was living just an hour ago. Swimming around in that beautiful river with all his fish friends. Maybe we should have just let him go.”

“Well, we don't have that option anymore. This fish and his three friends are dead and we're not going to waste them.”

“A multiple murder,” she muttered. “Now, that's drama. Did you get this on tape?”

“Funny,” Eli said. “We have four very lovely rainbow trout here and nothing for dinner. You tell me, how would you cook them?”

“I would put them on a stick and roast them over the fire.”

“Why don't you cook it your way and I'll do it my way and we'll see whose fish tastes better?”

“All right,” she said.

“But first you have to clean the fish,” he said.

“I can't cook it with the guts in it?”

“No.” Eli handed her the knife, then held up his hand. “Wait, let me get the camera.”

Over the next half hour, Eli filmed the fish cleaning and fire preparation from several different angles. When it was his turn, he quickly cleaned his trout, then showed her the complicated process of removing the bones. After that was finished, he washed it in salt and a bit of water from their canteen, then grabbed the burdock leaves that he'd picked earlier.

“Roasting fish over a fire is one way to cook your catch. But you can also wrap it in burdock leaves,” he said. “Then you push some of the hot coals aside and drop the little package of leaves and fish into the fire.”

Lucy put her fish on a forked stick and found a place to prop it up near the fire. She'd cooked fish before, but never directly from its original home. Eli had already put his fish in the fire and was seated on a log he'd dragged close to the heat.

“So we have a little contest going here,” she said, plopping down beside him.

“It's not a contest,” Eli said. “My fish is going to be the best.”

“You can't guarantee that,” she said. “I might just have some mad fish cooking skills you don't know about.”

This brought a laugh from Eli. “Sweetheart, I've been cooking trout since I was six or seven years old.”

She gasped, then twisted around to face him. “Sweetheart? Did you just call me sweetheart?” She got to her feet and stared at him, her fists hitched up on her waist.

Eli winced. “All right, that might have come out of my mouth, but it's not what you think.”

“I think you were talking down to me,” she said.

“Well, I'm sure that's what my feminist grandmother might say. But
I
would say that I was merely using a fairly common term of affection. Sweetheart? Sweetie? Darling? Babe?”

“Babe? Really. You consider me a babe?”

“Well, yes. You kind of are a babe. If I were hanging out with a bunch of guys in a bar and you walked in, we would definitely refer to you as a babe.”

Lucy opened her mouth to cast back some disparaging remark about the quality of the friends he had, then stopped herself. She'd been on the defensive for such a long time that she might not be able to recognize a simple expression of affection. Or a compliment. “What does a woman have to do to qualify as a babe in your book?” she asked.

“In my book? Well, she has to be beautiful. But not necessarily in the conventional sense. I'm attracted to women who look beautiful even without all the paint and pretty clothes. Like you when you wake up. Your eyes are still a little sleepy and your hair is all falling in front of your eyes and your lips are pink against your pale skin. I've never seen a woman more beautiful than you are in the morning.”

Emotion surged inside of Lucy and she swallowed hard. No man had ever called her beautiful, or spoken to her in such a sweet and kind way. Was this really how Eli felt or was it simply another weapon in his seduction arsenal?

Lucy sat back down and folded her hands in her lap. “All right, you're forgiven.”

“Does that mean you don't mind if I call you babe? Because I really prefer babe to sweetheart.”

“You can call me whatever you'd like,” she said.

“All right, babe,” he said.

She glanced over at him to find him grinning at her. He might find this entire conversation amusing, but Lucy found it deeply confusing. These affectionate names were something that had meaning to most people, they were sentimental expressions that people shared when they were close to each other—when they loved each other.

Though she was certain that Eli wasn't in love with her, she could tell that his affection for her had deepened since they'd first met. With every day that passed, the bond between them was becoming stronger, deeper, more resilient. And now, she wondered if she might have let it all go too far.

Lucy quickly stood up. “I'm going to check on my fish,” she said.

As she brushed past him, he grabbed her hand and pulled her down into his lap. Cupping her cheek in his palm, he drew her closer until their lips met in a sweet and gentle kiss.

Lucy stared into his eyes, the flickering fire reflected in the pale blue depths. She trusted him completely and that had never happened with anyone else in her past. She realized it was dangerous, but it felt so good to share her life with someone who would never betray her.

Eli opened her jacket and then her shirt, pulling aside fabric until he'd exposed one of her breasts to the cool air. He flicked at the nipple with his tongue, drawing it to a peak before moving to the other breast.

“What about our dinner?” Lucy asked in a breathless voice.