With Joe between her and the edge of that rocky drop-off and a wall of trees to her right, she deliberately edged toward the foliage.
“Do heights bother you?”
Clutching the insulated water bottle he’d given her, she quickly shook her head. Heights normally didn’t bother her at all. “I used to work on the thirty-second floor. My apartment was on the tenth.” There had also been glass or a guardrail between her and all that space.
It only looked to be about ten feet to the bottom. A single story. Still, with all the rocks down there, a fall would hurt. Joe, however, seemed totally unfazed by how close he was to the edge as he told her that this section of the trail was short, only an eighth of a mile or so. Short or not, she needed to pay less attention to how he actually enjoyed being so far from civilization and more attention to where she was putting her feet.
Narrowing her focus to the path, she concentrated on where she stepped while he pointed out a squirrel darting up a tree and Bailey trotted ahead of him. It was only when the trail curved again, trees once more hugging both sides of it, and the path angled what seemed like straight up that she let herself be distracted by the scream of her thigh muscles and the rustling in the bushes.
She wanted to know if there was anything carnivorous in these woods. He told her there probably was, but that on the carnivore side, he’d personally never encountered anything bigger than a fox. What she’d heard was probably just a rabbit.
A few hundred yards later, a raccoon streaked across her path. She didn’t scream. The hand she clamped over her mouth after she gasped prevented it. It was the same way she usually reacted to the cats.
Joe said nothing to minimize, patronize or otherwise imply that she was acting like a girl. He just identified the little masked beast, stuck a little closer to her and called Bailey back to walk with them since the dog had been responsible for flushing out the critter to begin with.
His attitude remained patient, almost…relaxed, she thought. Still, she had the feeling when he glanced toward her at times, that he was mentally shaking his head at her. Or, most likely, having second thoughts about having brought her along. Even if he wasn’t, she was.
With her heart rate finally back to racing only from exertion and not from fright, and with Joe within grabbing distance, she reminded herself of her purpose for subjecting herself to his little slice of heaven and let herself be distracted by the crumbly-looking silver-green stuff growing on some of the trees and fallen logs.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing to a patch lit by a sunbeam.
“Lichen.”
Whatever that is, she thought. “It’s a great color. Perfect for a shimmery fabric like dupioni or charmeuse.”
“It’s made up of an alga and a fungus.”
“Algae?”
“That’s plural. Alga is singular. The plant is thallophytic.”
She eyed him evenly. “I have no idea what thallophytic is.”
He eyed her back. “I have no idea what you just said, either.”
His mouth wasn’t smiling. Only his eyes were. But any thought of explaining silk fabrics to him evaporated with her next heartbeat.
“It means it’s a plant with a single-cell sex organ. There’s another explanation, but then we’d have to get into gametes and haploid chromosomes.”
His glance had slipped to her mouth, causing her pulse to jerk and pick up speed all over again.
She absolutely did not want him to know that he affected her. Not wanting him to have any effect on her at all, she simply turned away and moved on, slapping at bugs as she went.
“What’s dupioni?” he called after her.
She kept going. “It’s a silk fabric, woven with slubbed yarns. You’d get a nice drape in the ten momme range.”
“What’s mummy?”
“It’s a Japanese unit of weight used to measure and describe silk cloth. That’s not how other fabrics are assessed, but then we’d have to get into weight grades and thread counts.”
Joe hung back. Watching her go, his attention moved from the totally impractical little purse strapped to her back to the sweet curve of her backside, to the long length of her legs. His glance had barely reached the heels he couldn’t believe had carried her this far when she gave a little jump to the side and frowned at a stick she must have thought was a snake.
He couldn’t help wondering when she was going to tell him she was done, that she’d had enough of the nature thing and that he could take her home now. She wasn’t having a good time. But when he caught up with her, she didn’t say a word other than to remark about the intensity of the fall colors and the crystal-blue sky. She did, however, look visibly relieved when they finally entered the wide meadow and he led her to a spot by the wide stream cutting through it.
Surrounded by green pines and sugar maples the color of fire, he watched her sink to a flat boulder. Beside her, the water bubbled white as it tumbled over a dam of rocks.
“Who’d have thought,” she murmured, over the water’s burble and splash. “A spa.” Watching the bubbles, she casually slipped off her boots to reveal socks that matched her rust-colored vest and rubbed one arch. “You have no idea how I miss massages and seaweed wraps.”
He hadn’t a clue what a seaweed wrap was. Some kind of sushi, maybe. Massage, however, he definitely understood.
Slipping off his backpack, he lowered himself to the rock across from her. With his boots planted a yard apart he pulled the pack to him and took out two granola bars.
He handed her one. “What else do you miss?”
Thanking him, she peeled the wrapper back halfway, took a bite and continued rubbing. “Thai takeout at two in the morning,” she said as soon as she’d swallowed. “There’s this place around the corner from where I used to live that makes the most amazing shrimp soup with lemongrass, and their Pad Thai is to die for. And shopping the sample sales. And all the theaters and the clubs and my friends.” She lifted the granola bar, started to take a bite, stopped. “I think I even miss the sirens.”
She’d never known quiet could be so…silent…until she’d moved to Rosewood. She glanced around her. Out here, it was quieter still.
“What about you?” she asked, not wanting to taunt herself with anything else she could have mentioned. “If you were to move from Rosewood, what would you miss?”
Two-thirds of his bar was already gone. As he considered her question, the last third disappeared.
With his forearms on his spread knees, he watched her work at her arch.
His expression thoughtful, he nodded to what surrounded them. “Access to this. My friends. My practice.”
Leaning forward, he reached out and circled his hand around her ankle.
“Let me do that,” he said, and propped her sock-covered foot up on his knee. Pushing his thumbs into her heel, he rotated them in tiny circles to the middle of her arch.
Rebecca slowly slid to the ground to lean against the rock. If she’d intended to protest, she forgot all about it as her toes curled.
“My patients’ pets,” he continued as if he’d had no break at all in his thoughts. “The lakes where I boat. High-school football games in the fall. Basketball in the winter. Baseball in the spring. We have some pretty good teams,” he informed her, still rubbing. “We could use some new turf on the football field, though. It’s going to be a mud bog when it starts to rain.”
She’d thought his touch calming before. Now, with even the muscles in her shoulders going limp, she thought it purely…magic.
“Did you play sports in high school yourself?”
“Some.