Rock Solid

“Well, I’ll see you in the morning then, Lexie.”

“I’ll turn out the lights—”

Again she spun around, so fast—again—that her incredibly lethal elbow almost landed a hook in his ribs. “I’ll get the lights, don’t worry.”

“Did I—?”

“No, no, you didn’t do a bit of harm. I just don’t want you walking in the dark in an unfamiliar place. I’ll follow you in a minute, and clip the lights off after that.”

But he lied, Cash mused. She was harm. He couldn’t explain how she’d done that ooga booga thing with him a few moments before, but for damn sure, he didn’t respond to normal women that way. Something about her was different.

And worrisome.

Three

At 6:29 a.m., Lexie’s right hand poked out from the cocoon of blankets, lifted midair and waited. When the alarm clock buzzed 6:30, her palm slammed on the sucker almost before it had a chance to screech.

Blearily she opened her eyes. She was used to insomnia, used to surviving for days on end with short-sleep. She was also used to getting up at insanely early hours. But she wasn’t used to dreaming about strange men, and it put her off her stride.

She swung her legs over the side of the unfamiliar bed, switched on the light, winced at the glare and then tested her body for complaints. A lack-of-sleep headache pounded in her temples. Her feet hurt from too many hours of traveling the day before, wearing impractical shoes. The muscles in her neck were painfully tensed from too many hours of tossing and turning. All in all, Lexie figured she should be good and miserable.

Instead, an image of Cash McKay pounced in her mind like a charge of fresh, delightful, invigorating lightning. Instantly she forgot all the creaking body parts—or else they self-healed with amazing speed. She couldn’t wait to get up and see what the day brought.

Yikes. The terrifying thought bounced through her head that she was losing what little mind she had left.

By the time she’d slipped on pale jeans, a pastel shirt and new hiking shoes—the leather soft as butter—she was scowling…and feeling more like herself. How could she possibly be looking forward to this day? If she were at home, by now she’d have made three phone calls, checked her home fax and inhaled early-morning CNN before her teeth were brushed. She didn’t know how the Dow or NASDAQ had closed yesterday. She could hear birds, but not a single sound of anything electronic anywhere. It wasn’t natural.

She wasn’t going to make it here four weeks. Heck, she wasn’t going to make it four days.

And downstairs, there he was—and not just Cash, but his sidekick. Actually, through the thick red-stone door of the dining room, a number of male bodies were milling around the laid-out buffet, but it was only the dad and son team who snared her attention. One of them was practicing spelling words for a test that day, and all Lexie could think was how adorable they were, both in worn-in jeans and dark long-sleeved T-shirts and boots, both with a cowlick, both with the same swaggering walk. The pair of them could have a matching sign on their foreheads—Cash and Son, two against the world, no women wanted.

Since she wasn’t looking to be a woman in anyone’s life, Lexie felt unsure why the two McKays put such a darn lump in her throat. They were just so…darling together. So fierce. So obviously a family, with love they wore like a protective shield. They so obviously belonged together and watched out for each other. But then the one with those sexy, battered eyes spotted her in the doorway.

“Morning, Lex, come on in and grab a plate. You met Slim Farraday and Stuart Rennbacker last night, didn’t you?”

She greeted both the guys, and yes, she remembered them from dinner the evening before. Slim was the banking mogul, a little man with kind eyes of around sixty who walked with the frailty of someone who’d recently been ill. She’d instinctively wanted to mother him, and they’d had a great time talking capital gains and futures the night before. Stuart was on his third stay at Silver Mountain, and was a blustery, gruff man in his forties, with the look of an executive and worry built-in around the eyes. They’d both been welcoming to her yesterday, but since it’d been a long sleepless night, she wasn’t capable of being friendly until she’d mainlined a couple cups of the obvious.

“Sorry, babe, no coffee.”

She spun around at the sound of Keegan’s voice. Judging from looks, the scruffy-faced kid couldn’t be more than a few years younger than her, but Lexie felt as if she were worlds older in life. Keegan was just one of those perpetual-student types of people. Sweet. Idealistic. Full of good cheer and endless ideas—which meant he was annoying first thing in the morning. She narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, no coffee?”

Keegan motioned to the tray he was carting in from the kitchen. “I’ve got a high energy drink made for all of you. It’ll give you all the zoom that coffee does but without any of the negative side effects. Trust me, you’re going to love it.”

On a scale between grape cough syrup and castor oil, Keegan’s high energy drink fell about in the middle. Disgusting. And it had no caffeine. In spite of the bulging buffet table, the offerings were primarily granola and fruit. No eggs Benedict, no toast slathered with guava jelly, no nice, fattening, cholesterol-stuffed doughnuts. Ten minutes later, Lexie was hustled outside with the guys, her stomach whining from starvation and deprivation both.

She wasn’t into nature—and didn’t want to be—but even a hard-core morning grump couldn’t help but savor this one. A lake cupped between two mountains gleamed like sterling silver in the morning sunlight. A whisper of fog danced around the trees, the scent of wet pines so strong it was almost a perfume. Squirrels scampered out of their path. A deer frolicked so close that Lexie tripped and almost ran headlong into a tree because she couldn’t stop staring at the darling. And the sky was downright scary. It was such a stinging-fresh blue that she suddenly realized how long it’d been since she’d been anywhere that city pollution hadn’t grayed and diluted the sky’s natural hues.

The best part of the view, though, was watching their leader. Cash hiked the group up a hill so steep that Lexie started suffering oxygen deprivation…but she still felt the emotional tug that she’d experienced the night before. She’d loved how he’d confronted her about Sammy—it wasn’t about her personally, she understood that, but about anyone who could potentially hurt the boy. She loved his protectiveness, loved the look in his eyes when he talked about Sammy, and yeah, she’d liked that personal pull between the two of them, too.

He hadn’t kissed her…but he’d wanted to. And she hadn’t kissed him…but she’d wanted to. It had been a long time, if ever, since she’d felt that kind of rope-tug for a stranger—particularly for someone so completely unlike herself.

Right then, though, he was herding his minigroup in a circle. “Okay, everybody…Lexie, you’re our new man today but as you’ll discover, we start every morning the same way, with some kind of problem-solving exercise. It’s kind of a way we warm up together, and first, we pair up. I’ll work with Stuart, and Lexie, you pair up with Slim Farraday…Slim really knows the ropes.”

Lexie immediately smiled reassuringly at the frail-looking Slim, thinking nothing sounded too tough so far. The “problem-solving” business sounded interesting rather than athletic, and surely anything that Slim could physically do, she could do as well? She pushed up her pastel shirt to the elbows as Cash continued talking.

“Okay. Lexie and Slim, this is your problem for the morning. You see the creek beyond the trees there?” Of course they saw the creek. Impossible to miss anything so dazzling in the infernal morning sunshine. “All right. You two have a half an hour to get to the other side of it. That’s all you have to do.”

“Just hold on a minute, Geronimo.” Lexie waved her hand to catch his attention. “There’s no bridge. And you didn’t give us any tools or ladders or anything—”

“That’s right,” Cash affirmed. “In fact, that’s the point. You’re going to have to use whatever you can find in nature to solve the problem.”

Hands on hips, Lexie wandered over to the dazzling creek in question. The water was so clear that she could easily see the creek-middle had to be waist deep. The distance couldn’t be eight feet, more like seven, but still too far to jump, and certainly too challenging a distance for Slim to try jumping. One dip of her finger announced that the water temperature was sub zero—if that warm—so wading across was completely out of the question.

Mr. Farraday sidled up next to her. “Cash always seems to give us what looks like an insolvable problem. But every morning so far, we’ve managed to find some way to solve it in spite of ourselves.”

“And we’ll solve this one, too,” Lexie assured him. She’d made her first paper million before the age of twenty-two, hadn’t she? How hard could it be to cross a little creek? And Cash—the cad—was already out of sight. Some gentleman he turned out to be, pairing the two husky macho guys, and leaving an undersized Ms. Klutz with Mr. Frail.

“I know we can do it,” Mr. Farraday affirmed, and then scratched his chin. “But…how?”

“Hmm…” Again, she pushed up her sleeves. Her system was still offended at being deprived of caffeine, CNN and her ticker tape, yet somehow her pulse was picking up a charge. Challenges had always been one of her favorite things. Inexplicably it made her feel…safe…when she took on something that was supposed to be impossible for her to do.

Firing up on the problem, now, she motioned to the woods behind them. “God knows, I’ve been tripping over fallen branches since we started walking this morning…so how about this. Slim, you scout out the longest branches you can find. Don’t lift ’em. I’ll lift ’em. And we’ll just make ourselves a bridge out of the fallen branches, secured by those rocks in the middle of creek…and then we’ll just walk across. Piece of cake, right, partner?” She lifted her hand.

Slim gave her a gentle high-five. “Right, partner.”

When Cash heard the sound of a female shriek, he took off at a dead run—knowing, of course, who had to be doing the shrieking.

He charged around trees and brush, barreling to the creek edge…only to see Lexie—still caterwauling—sitting on her butt in the middle of the creek, soaked right up to her neck.

Even as he clomped in the water to fetch her, he was mentally shaking his head. There was a reason he’d paired Lexie with Slim this morning for this particular problem-solving exercise—and blast it, the reason was that she couldn’t fail. The only logical way to cross the creek was to make a bridge of branches—and the terrain had the whole winter’s worth of down pine branches to make that easy. And they’d done that. Made a darn secure little bridge across the water. And Slim Farraday, with no problem at all, even with his arthritic hip, had made it to the other side with no difficulty.

But then there was Ms. Klutz.

“Cash! Help me! I’m going to die of hypothermia! It’s so cold I can’t breathe and I can’t move and I can’t—”

“You’re not going to die and it’s not that cold.” He bent down and grabbed her. For a drowned rat—and a miniaturesized drowned rat at that—she weighed a ton. The branches and mud in her hair didn’t help. And when she hurled her arms around him in a monkey-hold, she almost tipped both of them back in the water—not to mention that her soaked, clinging body completely drenched his in two seconds flat.

God knew why he had the sudden, desperate urge to kiss her. There wasn’t a hormone alive that could conceivably wake up in these temperatures or conditions, and his mind wasn’t on sex but on frustration. The first exercise he gave clients was always intended to give them a feeling of success and confidence, and he’d wanted that even more for Lexie, because she’d been so damn clear that she already expected to fail. Only damnation, no one had trouble with this exercise. Ever. Before. Her.

“I’m freezing, I’m freezing—”

He knew. He could feel her tight, wrinkled nipples, through his drenched shirt and hers. He could feel her fanny under his hands as well, maybe even feel her goose bumps. God knew, she was clutching him tighter than glue. “I know you’re cold. But you’re going to be back at the lodge and climbing in warm, dry clothes in ten minutes, tops, I promise. And after that, you partner with me,” he said irritably. Hell, his teeth were starting to chatter now, too.

“With you?”

“Yeah. With me.”

She lifted her chin so she could look in his eyes. “Um, Cash? This was my fault. Not yours. I told you I wouldn’t do well with the program, didn’t I? I don’t do well with anything physical. It’s just reality—”