The ground was cold. Even through her sweats, she could feel it: damp and hard. She moved commando-style, propelling herself forward on her elbows, and pushing against the ground with her sneakered toes. Halfway under, it occurred to her that a flashlight might not have been a bad idea. She squinted. Her vision was not the best, even despite her contacts. Spending six hours a day staring at a computer screen had made sure of that.
The objects that loomed at face level were disconcertingly unidentifiable. At least they didn’t move! In the Casuarinas library, a series of rooms in the main building that were crammed ceiling to floor with volumes, she remembered spotting a book on snakes. She wondered fleetingly if having thumbed through it one evening when she was at a loose end had been wise. Imaginary vipers and adders (was there a difference?) had a way of cropping up at times like these, especially when you had an excellent memory for anything you read once.
“Think like a werewolf,” she muttered. “Think strong.” That was her battle cry, one so silly that she had never dared to share it with anyone. Some people whistled a happy tune when they were afraid. Some people hummed. Hailie, well, Hailie thought like a werewolf. More specifically, she tried to think like Veda, the she-wolf heroine of her last three novels, who, to put it bluntly, didn’t take flack from anyone, especially not real spiders and imaginary snakes.
“Courage, courage, courage.” Her mantra was barely audible, but it propelled her several yards forward into even more profound darkness. She giggled. Veda had impeccable night vision. She wouldn’t have had any problem finding her way around down here!
Something moved. Hailie went as still as a rock. Was it the object of her rescue mission, or was it a sign that any moment now, she would be the one needing to be rescued? “Meow?” she asked softly.
“Hello!”
Her startled body jerked, arms and legs going rigid, head snapping up so suddenly it smacked against the underside of her cabin. “Ow!”
“Hello?” Closer still.
That was not the voice of a cat! Hailie had an overactive imagination, but she was not a raving loon. One hand massaged what would soon be a substantial bump on the crown of her head, while she struggled to twist in the direction of the sound. At the end of the tunnel that threatened to hold her prisoner was a glimmer of light, and that light was just enough to make visible a pair of legs clad in denim.
“Somebody there?” she asked, although it was a stupid question, as someone obviously was. What she meant to ask was: Who is it? Next time, maybe when a dozen jackhammers weren’t pounding away at her skull, she would be more precise.
The feet—and they were rather large feet—turned slightly, as if the man they were attached to were trying to determine the source of her voice. “Are you there? Miss … Circe?”
Damn. That could only be the artist. Two hours late, and then he chooses the worst possible time to turn up. Wasn’t that just like a man! Well, there was nothing for it but to reveal her rather embarrassing location. “Under here!”
“Ma’am?” A pair of knees appeared at the opening of the crawlspace as the man dropped to them. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she muttered. She tried to turn around, but space didn’t allow her to. There was nothing for it: she had to back out. She began to wriggle out the way she had come, slowly, all thoughts of Veda gone from her mind. Like most writers’ imaginings, her favorite she-wolf tended to evaporate in the presence of others.
Her interloper was persistent. “Do you need help?”
“No,” she answered shortly. Being caught squashed into a narrow crack was embarrassing enough. She didn’t have to add insult to injury by allowing herself to be helped out of it.
Perhaps he was hard of hearing. Perhaps he simply didn’t put much stock in what other people wanted and didn’t want. Either way, once she had squirmed free of the opening and found herself still embarrassingly prostrate but twisting to look up at him hunched inquiringly over her, he was holding out his hand to help her up.
‘Tall’ was the first thing that ran through her mind. Very tall. And that’s not just because I’m all the way down at snake-eye level. The latter thought was enough motivation for her to get up off the ground, and fast. Grudgingly, she took the extended hand, and found herself being gently lifted to her feet.
The evening’s last gloaming, and the security light that had automatically switched on, gave her enough light by which to see him clearly. She was sure she goggled. He was … gorgeous. She had not overestimated his height, in spite of her formerly biased perspective. Tawny skin glowed, even in the gathering shadows. He could do with a haircut, and his hair looked as if he’d just gotten out of bed.
The open collar of his jacket was at her eye level, and she’d never considered herself short. She let her gaze rise from the exposed hollow below his Adam’s apple, up along his throat—were those moles? Sprinkled like coarse brown sugar, spilled by a careless cook, was a trail … no, a constellation … of cinnamon flecks that stood in sharp contrast with his skin. In the south, they disappeared into his shirt. In the north, they forced her eyes upward, as her mind played connect-the-dots, until they led her to their pinnacle, their North Star, just on the curve of his full lower lip.
Hailie heard her breath escape through her teeth.
His eyes were the color of caramel in an iron cauldron, moments before it reached boiling point and bubbled over. They were impossibly deep, impossibly bright. Twinkling. You’ve got stars on the brain, you twit, she chided herself irritably, even as she tore her gaze away from those astounding eyes to seek out their rivals, now appearing in the darkening sky.
For his part, the man was no more abashed than she in his examination of her. Her body prickled as he began at her hair, which she kept in braids because nobody with an ounce of sense would allow hair that wild and thick to stay loose for more than a day, not unless they were prepared to have it shorn off the next, after it had wound itself into inextricable tangles. He took in the fine gold hoops at her ears: peasant earrings, her mother had disapprovingly called them. They were too wild for a nice girl, Mom used to say. Indiscreet.
At her face, he lingered.
Hailie squirmed. Her writer’s ability to leap from her mind into another’s allowed her to see exactly what he did, though those astounding eyes. What he would see was a grubby woman in old, gray UCLA sweats, covered in dirt and under-the-cabin grime. A perfectly ordinary woman, sad to say. She had no illusions about that. After the splendor of her hair, there was little left to comment upon. Her skin was an unremarkable shade of brown, her eyes an unremarkable size and color. Her height, average, weight average—or at least, that was what she told herself whenever she yearned for a second helping of pie. Her dress size was not significantly larger or smaller than that of any other woman she knew; her bra size was always the first to be sold out at the department store. Walk down a crowded street, and she turned no more heads than any other woman. She was, she knew, neither here nor there, neither pretty nor plain.
And yet, this man was staring.
His gaze had returned to her face, and stayed there. In his inquisitive examination of her, which bordered on the impolite, he reminded her of a small boy whose curiosity made a mockery of social convention. Her artist looked very young indeed. She’d been expecting someone dedicated enough to devote the long, grueling hours that it would take to pull this project off, and mature enough to handle the criticisms and differences of opinion that inevitably came with working as a team. What she got was a boy with sparkly eyes.
“Great,” she heard herself say. “I asked Tony for an artist. He sent me a kid.” She slapped her hand over her mouth, too late to prevent her thoughts from becoming words.
The laugh that rolled out of him filled the space between them. “I am an artist,” he said. “So don’t fire Tony.” His voice was rich and deep, a black coffee voice to go with his caramel syrup eyes and cinnamon sprinkles. Oh, she had a sweet tooth!
Still mortified by her faux pas, she stammered. “I’m sorry. I have this awful habit … I say the first thing that pops into my head.”
“I noticed.”
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