Trisha burst out laughing. “Some help! I did the running and you called out between mouthfuls of berries.” She swiped at Georgia’s face, then at the counter and table, clearing up swiftly and efficiently. She resisted the urge to wipe off Kern’s lazy grin as well.
“I’m beginning to get the feeling there’s a reason you’re not sitting down for your lunch, Tish,” Kern drawled.
“Are you?”
“Could I touch your beard?” Georgia requested. “I’ve never touched a beard.”
His eyebrows rose slightly at the request, but he obligingly bent down.
“Kind of scratchy,” Georgia judged.
“I can’t shave with my left hand,” he said as justification. “But in another day or so-”
“Oh, keep it, Kern,” Trisha said impulsively, and then could have bitten her tongue. What was it to her if he were clean-shaven or bearded, and the slate-gray eyes were suddenly on her like a floodlight. “Or shave it off. As you like, of course,” she added with careful indifference.
“So you suddenly have a liking for beards, do you?”
“No, I-”
“Suddenly you put together an old-fashioned mountain breakfast in fifteen minutes flat. I see you’ve got your makeup off and a smudge of dirt on your jeans. And up on a horse again…” He shook his head in mocking disbelief, but his eyes held a gleam in them that reflected last night’s memories. Those things were not the only things that had changed in Trisha. “If you don’t watch it, you might just fall in love with the mountain life all over again, Tish-”
“You must not have been listening to the story,” she said stiffly. “If you needed proof I’m a city girl, Kern, all you had to do was hear how I fell off the most placid ‘lamb’ in your stables!”
Kern stood up, stretching lazily. “Would you like a good rubdown, bright eyes? If you’re complaining of stiff muscles…” His eyes took in the fit of her snug pair of jeans, the way it would all fit together without the pair of jeans. Unwillingly Trisha could feel a faint color escape to her cheeks, imagining, as he meant her to, his palms intimately working on…muscles.
“There’s no need,” she said crisply. “Besides, right after I finish here I’m taking Georgia’s mother some soup. She isn’t feeling well, and after that-”
After that she’d taken one look at the camp’s log-cabin headquarters, and decided to make it the afternoon’s project. She had to have something to do with herself for two days, and the need for cleanup was a direct measure of Kern’s inability to get around since his accident. Jack certainly hadn’t objected to the idea; he had all but thrown his arms around her at the offer to reorganize the chaos of files and first-aid supplies and camping equipment.
“Somehow I’m not surprised you managed to make arrangements to be away from here for the afternoon,” Kern said dryly. “I thought you’d choose shopping, though, Tish. It’s a much farther distance to town.” He waited, but she offered no reply. “Rhea’s invited the two of us over for dinner at seven.”
Trisha turned from the door where Georgia was already headed out, her back suddenly stiff. “Well, you go, of course,” she said casually. “I don’t think I will, Kern. By then I’ll be tired.”
He was silent for a moment, and she looked back at him, unable to read the oddly disturbed look in his eyes. “That’s what you want, Tish?” he said deliberately.
“I-yes, of course it is.” To think of Kern with another woman…but of course it was the only answer she could give. She was not part of his life anymore; he wasn’t even asking her to be part of his life again. He was only asking her to sleep with him, and she had to be certain he understood she wasn’t interested.
It was past nine. About a dozen people were stretched out lazily around the campfire, all of them more or less in the same condition: grubby, sleepy and sated from the community dinner cooked on the fire not an hour before. Trisha had a half-full can of beer in her hand-she never drank beer-and her tousled blonde head and shoulders were slumped against a huge old log, with Jack on one side of her and little Georgia on the other. She surveyed her stretched-out legs and the absolutely filthy appearance of her jeans with rueful amusement, half listening to the lazy conversations around her. Jack had just put down an old country fiddle that seemed to know all the old Appalachian hill songs, and she was still humming a few in her brain, too tired even to put on her shoes.
“It was a bear and her two cubs, I swear it was…you’ve never seen anyone run so fast in your entire life…”
“The trout were just jumping for the bait…”
The stories were getting better as the hour was getting later. The smoke from the fire curled in a lazy spiral straight up the cloak of trees surrounding them, making a natural tepee. The night was sleepy warm, and she could hear the hooting of an owl in the distance.
“What I’d give for a life like this all the time,” a short, stoop-shouldered man murmured from the distance. “Hey, Jack, what do you have to do around here to buy a piece of ground?”
Jack stirred, edging up to a sitting position beside Trisha. “The way I understand it, there isn’t any land for sale around the Smokies. The government gets first shot, unless it’s an issue of direct inheritance. It was Kern’s grandfather who willed this to him, as I understand it.” He looked to Trisha for confirmation, who simply nodded, her eyes half closed as she stared into the fire.
“I just read the park has some 516,000 acres. I wouldn’t think anybody’d need more than that,” someone else said.
“Well, from here, we can’t protect enough land like this,” came another lazy voice from the far reaches of the fire. “I’ve been to the Rockies and I’ve been to the Tetons. Each mountain area’s got its own flavor-this one isn’t the grandeur, it’s the richness. You just can’t get tired of it; there’s more different colors of green than an artist could come up with; there’s the change in seasons and no end to the wildlife. I keep wondering how God even came up with it…”
Smiling, Trisha half sat up, curling up her knees and resting her arms across them. Her soft-spoken voice seemed part of the night, gentle, warm and sensual. “There’s a Cherokee legend about how these mountains came into being. The Indians say that at the beginning of the world everything lived in the sky, all the animals and the people. The world was just an ocean, no land, but unfortunately it got to be crowded up there in the sky, so the Cherokees sent down a little water beetle just to check out the possibilities. Well, the beetle dove to the bottom of the water and brought up mud and more mud, and finally that mud burgeoned up to form some land. But it was still too soft for anyone to live on, so the people sent down a giant buzzard to find a dry spot, but he became tired about the time he was over what was to be Cherokee country. His wings were flapping when he sunk down on the land, and all that flapping dried the mud in the pattern of mountains and valleys…”
“These mountains and valleys, they say.” Kern’s voice vibrated low as he wended his way through the lazy pairs of legs to get to her side. Through a chorus of greetings he seemed to be looking only at her, and before she was even aware of it, Jack had obligingly moved and made a place for him next to Trisha. Long, jeaned legs suddenly stretched out next to her. An afternoon and evening of Jack’s subtle admiration invoked none of the disturbing sensations that Kern’s presence instantly did. Ebony hair and beard, ebony eyes by firelight-he was the pirate who savored his treasure, this land and its richness. Savored, protected, cherished, would kill to keep, she thought whimsically.
“Tish used to love the old Cherokee legends. Has she told you about the Little People yet? They’re the keepers of history to the Cherokee, the spirits who come out only at night to share the legends and songs that are too old for any man to remember.”