Chapter Four

Hitchkin Island was a small lump of sand and trees in the middle of a lake and, as luck would have it, almost a perfect oblong shape. A narrow strip of beach consisting mainly of gritty brown sand and areas of pebble fringed the five-mile perimeter. The middle was mostly inhabited by spruce trees, some common bird life and now, also, a fuck-ton of rabbits.

Thanks to maps she’d obtained from the Doak municipal office, Gus had divided the island into four quadrants and had been gridding each quadrant using cans of all-natural, biodegradable spray-paint the last few days. The number of each gridded section had also been sprayed on the ground to correlate with their number on the map. Today, the last quadrant, the southeastern one, where the cabin was located, would be finished—a lot earlier, hopefully, with Marshall’s help—and it’d be ready for the team’s arrival tomorrow.

But, after a warm night filled with quite anatomically detailed dreams about Marshall Dyson, she was irritable. Marshall’s cheeriness wasn’t helping.

“You’re not a morning person, are you?”

Wrong. Gus was a morning person—usually. Which made her even more annoyed. “I love mornings,” she corrected. She loved the quiet and stillness as she lay in bed, contemplating another day on earth. “I just don’t particularly like company first thing.”

She stopped short of saying his company, but the way he threw his head back and laughed left her in little doubt he’d gotten the unspoken inference. The fact she noticed the long stretch of his neck and that he hadn’t shaved this morning was extra-specially annoying.

“Is that why you don’t have some special guy in your life? You like your own space?”

Gus glared at him. He sounded like her mother. “If you’ve been sent by my mom, you can pack up and leave now. I don’t care if this is your island or not.”

He laughed again, clearly undeterred. “Let me guess, she wants grandkids and the pressure’s on?”

“Yeah. You got one of those, too?”

“No.” He shook his head. “My mom’s no longer with us.”

“Oh…shit.” Great. Well done, Augusta. Her face heated. “Sorry, I didn’t…I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s okay.” He shrugged like it wasn’t a new hurt, but Gus felt awful anyway. “It was a long time ago.”

A long time ago? Thanks to Google, she knew he was the same age as her. Just how old was he when his mother died? The thought was unsettling. Even more unsettling was the quandary of whether she should ask him about it. Was she supposed to?

Was it expected?

Just what was the etiquette about discussing dead parents with someone whose dick she’d seen but she’d only actually known for the sum total of about twelve hours?

“Shall we get started?”

Gus almost sighed out loud as he took the decision out of her hands. “Yes, let’s go.”

After a minimum amount of explanation about the process and instruction to note any nests he came across, Marshall was up and running. They’d settled on a plan of attack, which involved both of them going to the farthest corners of a quadrant and working their way to the middle.

It was good for two reasons. The first was removal of temptation, given that the man was wearing shorts that revealed toned, bronzed thigh muscles and a T-shirt that clung to his pecs and abs like Krazy Glue.

The second was giving him the area with the most trees.

Because trees had to be worked around and often didn’t fit into the neat three-feet by six-feet rectangles they were spraying on the ground, they complicated the system. Having done most of the marking herself, Gus was thoroughly sick of trees.

They labored away for most of the morning, stopping frequently to refill water bottles at the cabin. If Marshall had a question—usually to do with trees—he found her and asked, but he quickly got the hang of using the map to replicate the grid system, so she left him to it.

At midday, he appeared suddenly and said, “I’m going to grab something to eat. You want anything?”

“No, thanks.”

“You’ve been working all morning. You should eat.”

Gus shook her head. “I’ll grab something later.” She was so full of water she wasn’t particularly hungry, plus, she always carried a couple of trail mix bars in her pack on jobs like this for when her stomach rumbled.

But she did take a moment as Marshall headed up the porch steps to slip down the track to the lake. She noticed a large orange kayak beached near the tree line and figured it must have been Marshall’s transport to Hitchkin yesterday.

The sun belted down from overhead, but she ignored it just as she ignored the beauty of the lake all around her to cross to where it lapped the beach. She crouched, used both hands to scoop cool water up and splashed it over her face, neck, and chest. She sighed as it sizzled against her heated skin, and she kept splashing more water over herself until her core temperature cooled.

Her T-shirt was wringing wet by that stage, but she didn’t care. She had her swimsuit on underneath so she could jump in the lake once they were done, and it was a perfectly decent one-piece.

There’d be no wet T-shirt spectacle for Marshall, should she still be damp when they ran into each other again.

“Looks like you have the right idea.”

Gus almost lost her balance at the sound of his deep baritone. Of course he was behind her. She should have known that prickling at her nape wasn’t just the breeze drying the water there.

She stood quickly, folding her arms across her chest before turning to face him. The state of her nipples had turned her perfectly decent one-piece downright lewd.

The man was like the freaking nipple whisperer.

A good decision, it turned out, as Marshall’s gaze—predictably—dropped to the wet cling of her T-shirt. It didn’t linger, though, and there wasn’t any indication he was still thinking about her boobs as his gaze returned to her face. Men had been staring at her chest since she was thirteen. Very few had been so un-obnoxious about it.

Kudos to Marshall.

“Hey,” she said, peeking out at him from under the brim of her hat, thankful to be able to hide beneath it a little. “Thought you’d be eating in the cabin.”

He tossed an apple in the air. “Nah. I prefer the outdoors. Going to eat on the jetty.”

Gus glanced at the wooden structure that extended out over the lake, low to the waterline, its legs mostly well below the surface. It wasn’t very long or wide or anything flashy to look at, just bare boards, but it was in good repair and the end broadened into a ten-foot by ten-foot platform good for fishing from or sun-baking on or for a boat to pull up alongside and unload things.

A wooden ladder at the edge gave easy access to the lake if someone was too chicken to just step off. Gus had eaten her evening meal there on her first night, with her feet dangling in the water, and had enjoyed the ambience.

“Want to join me?” He pulled another apple from his pocket. “I brought two.”

He smiled at her then, and Gus ignored the tightening of her belly and the sudden influx of saliva into her mouth. “Thanks, but no.”

The whole thing seemed a little too…companionable and not something she should contemplate with her T-shirt clinging to her like Jessica Simpson at a car wash.

“I’m going to head back and keep going for a while. But you enjoy.”

She didn’t give him a chance to try to tempt her into staying, just turned around and determinedly walked off the beach.

Half an hour later, Marshall waved at her as he headed back to the tree line. It was hard to tell, but Gus was pretty sure his shirt was wet, too. She quickly averted her gaze to the rectangle she was marking on the ground as a vision of his naked body from last night crowded her brain. Her T-shirt was practically dry now, and as her body temperature notched up a degree that had nothing to do with the sun overhead, she suddenly wished it was still wet.

Concentrate, Augusta.

By her reckoning, there were only a couple more hours of work to go, but the longer she ogled the help, the longer it would take her to finish. And if she started fantasizing about him? In broad daylight? She could be here all day. And God knew the integrity of the grid system would probably suffer significantly from such distraction.

This was a detailed job that required close attention. No half-assing allowed.

Within the hour, Marshall was out of the trees and they were working around the perimeter of the cabin clearing, which had been excluded from the grid because there were no rabbits residing in the football field-sized area. As they came closer together, Marshall seemed determined to converse.

“I’ve seen a few rabbits hopping around between the trees,” he said after they’d had a technical conversation about the grid that involved a bunch of mental arithmetic he’d easily conquered. “I thought they were nocturnal?”

Gus had seen quite a few over the last three days, not counting Rambo, who she’d released this morning and who would, no doubt, be back this evening.

“No, actually, they’re crepuscular.”

“Okay, doc, might have to dumb down the fancy words for the construction worker.”

He grinned at her, seeming completely unconcerned that she might think him lacking in the brains department, and she sucked in a breath. He looked big and strong and solid, bronzed and healthy, the all-American outdoorsy guy in his baseball cap, soaking up some Colorado sun.

For a brief moment, she wondered what it’d be like to be here on this island with him for pleasure instead of business. To not have been recovering from a cheating ex and allow herself to give in to the tug she felt when she looked at Marshall. To have taken that apple to the jetty with him and flirted a little.

It was ridiculous. She’d known him for a day. One day. Which was some extra special crazy sauce, given she already knew he wasn’t her kind of guy. He might be sexual crack and very different to the man he was in court, but someone who hadn’t thought through the consequences of a trap-and-release program didn’t have the best interest of animals at heart.

And that guy definitely wasn’t her type.

She wasn’t here to hook up with evil Elmer. Gus wasn’t here to hook up with anyone. She didn’t do hookups. Not that she disapproved of the pastime—girl power and all that—she just didn’t personally indulge.

She’d learned hard and young that her looks attracted men like flies, and that made her both bait and trophy. So she was careful and cautious with men—always. It took her a while to take that step into physical intimacy because being bragged about as some kind of conquest felt awful. And she’d thought she’d finally found the right kind of guy in Rick.

She’d been wrong.

“Doc?”

Gus stared at Marshall for a second or two as she dragged her head back into the conversation. What were they talking about again? Dumbing down. Right… Given how quickly he’d grasped the grid concept and competently performed a series of complex mental arithmetic, she didn’t think Marshall had a problem with his IQ.

“Crepuscular means they’re active most often in the early evening and the early morning. Around twilight and dawn.”

“So, they will come out during the day?”

“Yes they will, although they do tend to lie low to avoid predators. They’re probably a little more active during the day here because Hitchkin is a lot safer for them than other environments. They were lucky they were released here and not anywhere on the mainland or a more populated island.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

She glanced at him, at the wistful note in his voice, watched his profile as he looked all around him. Gus wondered if he and Jeremy had had the run of the place when they’d been kids, bouncing around from morning to night, playing cops and robbers or hide-and-seek among the spruce. Was he seeing the ghosts of his childhood flitting among the trunks, hearing the echo of their brotherly laughter?

She felt absurdly like sliding her hand onto his forearm and curled it into a fist to suppress the urge, turning her attention back to the tape measure in her hand.

“Nearly done,” she said.

They were finished an hour later, and Gus was well and truly ready for the lake. She could almost feel the cool lap of water against her skin, and even going back to the cabin to store the maps and other info they’d collected today made her impatient.

Fortunately for her, Marshall got a phone call just as they were leaving the cabin, and he waved her on. Relieved to have a break from his presence, she hurried to the water, barely breaking her stride as she kicked out of her clothes the second her foot hit sand. At midafternoon, the sun had passed to the other side of the island, leaving the area adjacent to the jetty within the long reach of the towering spruce’s shadows. It was still warm, but the heat of the sun was no longer a hot beam on her skin.

Gus ran into the lake, the water deepening quickly to her waist before she sank into the cool, wet embrace and rolled onto her back, pulling her hair out of its band, letting it float like a mass of seaweed around her head.

She shut her eyes. Oh yes. This.

Luxury.

After the hot work of the day, this cool weightlessness was utter bliss. She opened her eyes and stared into the giant domed abyss above her, impossibly high and blue and pristine, unmarred by clouds or the contrails that crisscrossed the sky over Chicago.

She could get used to this.

Gus swam and kicked and floated happily for half an hour before her relaxation was ruined by the approach of Marshall. She spotted him coming down the track in a pair of red board shorts that hugged his hips and molded to his legs, finishing just above the knee. He’d taken his cap off, and hat hair hadn’t ever looked so good. But it was his bare chest that made her grateful she was touching the bottom of the lake.

Seriously, the man’s chest was a work of art. Someone should paint it. Hell, sonnets should be written about it. If Gus had been given to swooning, she’d have drowned in the lake for sure.

That thought kicked her legs into action, and she was wading out the same time he was striding in, his legs powering through the water. There was no way she could be in here with him and not want to put her hands all over his body.

Her eyes were drawn to his abs as he drew closer, his happy trail a blazing beacon. Happy trail… How apt was that name? She was still a good few meters away from him, but there were parts of her anatomy that were happier than they’d been in months.

It should be illegal for one man to have so much influence over the female body.

“Sorry,” he said apologetically as he drew even with her, his eyes fixing firmly on her face. “There were some issues on a job site that needed attention before work commences tomorrow.”

Gus shrugged. “It’s fine.” He didn’t owe her any explanations.

“You’re leaving already?”

“Yep.” She nodded briskly. “Got a lot of work ahead of me, inputting the data from today on the laptop, and a ton of calls to make to check that everything’s on track for tomorrow.”

And staying in the water with him was not an option. She was here to conduct a rabbit census and oversee a removal and adoption program, not frolic in the lake with him like they were on vacation in the Maldives.

“It’s a shame.” He ran his fingers through the water between them. “The water is beautiful.”

Gus nodded awkwardly. “Yes. But, you know, no rest for the wicked.”

A slow, lazy smile broke over his features at her choice of words. It was one of her mother’s favorite sayings and consequently deeply ingrained into Gus’s vocabulary, but Marshall was obviously happy to misconstrue. “You’ve been wicked, Augusta?”

She shivered at the low, growly way he emphasized her name and his unwitting insightfulness. Her thoughts ever since she’d met him may not have been wicked, exactly, but they’d been far from pure.

Gus forced out a self-deprecating laugh. “Sorry, just a figure of speech. You enjoy now.”

She pushed on, determined to get out of the lake and far away from Marshall while being as nonchalant as possible. No easy task with his scrutiny feeling like a lead weight on her back.

Oh yes. He might have done well not dropping his gaze from hers as they’d spoken, but he was definitely checking out her ass as she walked away.

A few hours later, Gus stood and stretched her neck and back, twisting her body from side to side to work out the kinks from sitting hunched over her laptop. She’d made all the calls and was about halfway through loading the data she’d collected over the last few days—topography, vegetation, location of nests, etc—into the rabbit census program on her laptop. It was going to take her several more hours to complete, and she was glad she’d decided to do it all at the end rather than at the conclusion of each day.

It gave her a holistic grasp of the island and the issues they might face. Plus, it was going to give her something to do tonight, something to concentrate on besides a certain guy who was sleeping under the same roof.

She had no idea where the guy in question was; he hadn’t been back to the cabin, for which she was thankful. She’d vaguely heard some noises outside from time to time that she’d assumed were him, but she had miraculously managed to push thoughts of him and his happy trail aside while she attacked the figures. A necessary miracle, because all of this had to be inputted before the census could start tomorrow.

The downside of leaving it to the last minute.

She wandered out to the porch to get some fresh air before she hit the laptop again, absently massaging the back of her neck. The aroma of smoke tickled her nostrils and Gus noticed a plume of white curling into the air from the direction of the beach.

Telling herself she could do with a good stretch of her legs, she decided to investigate.

The sky was starting to soften as she headed down the track, and Gus was surprised to realize it was after six o’clock. There was a light wind blowing off the lake, and she adjusted her ponytail, pulling it higher to expose her nape as she walked. It was pleasant out, the evening not as warm as it had been the last few days, the breeze alleviating the temperature further and fluttering the hem of her white cotton dress around her knees.

Gus saw the fire blazing bright in the middle of the beach before she even stepped foot on the sand. The logs had been set up like a teepee by someone who knew a thing or two about campfires, and they were obviously not long lit, the flames licking high above the wood.

She glanced at the jetty, where Marshall was sitting, feet dangling over the edge, a fishing rod clasped in his hands. He’d donned a shirt and looked perfectly at home as he reeled in and cast out again, the fishing line sailing through the air in a perfect arc, the lure plopping into what seemed the middle of the lake.

She shook her head. What couldn’t the man do? Build things, start a fire, read maps, fish? He was a regular Bear Grylls. And a lot like her dad in many ways. Her father was a military man, all fit and outdoorsy, the kind of resourceful guy you’d want by your side if you were ever stranded on a desert island.

Maybe that’s what attracted her so much? How good he was with his hands. And not in a sexual way—although she’d bet every last penny he’d excel in that department, too—but in a strictly masculine sense. Marshall was the kind of man who got shit done. He was the guy who went clubbing saber-tooth tigers and woolly mammoths. He was a caveman.

She shook her head in self disgust. Several hundred thousand years of evolution and that was what she was finding sexy?

It couldn’t be so.

In an effort to prove she’d evolved higher thinking and could be near him without wanting to go gathering berries or have his babies, Gus headed for the jetty. Her sandy feet felt gritty against the bleached boards as she ambled in his direction.

“Hey,” he said, turning his head as she neared. He smiled, and that same lurch she’d been feeling ever since she met him lurched again. It felt awfully primitive, which was not proving her point.

“Hey,” she replied, ignoring the increase in her pulse as she came to a stop.

His gaze was appreciative as it made its way up to her face. There were probably three feet between them, but he might as well have slid a hand under the hem of her dress and trailed his fingers up her thigh.

Higher thinking, Augusta. Pull yourself together.

“You finished for the day?”

“Nope.” Gus shook her head to disperse the imaginary feel of his fingers on her skin. “I have a few more hours to go yet. Just thought I’d stretch my legs. Take a break from the numbers.”

He nodded. “I found my grandfather’s rods. Join me for a bit.” He patted the boards beside him. “Nothing like staring out over water to make one happy to be alive.”

She should say no, but she found herself gathering the skirt of her dress between her legs and lowering herself down. Ensuring there was a reasonable distance between them, she adjusted her ass against the wooden planks still warm from the day and dangled her feet over the edge, trailing her toes through the water.

It was calm and peaceful, and neither of them said anything for long moments; they just stared out over the lake, absorbing the quiet, nothing but the crackle of the fire behind them and the lap of water against the pylons beneath. Her shoestring strap fell down her arm to reveal she still had her one-piece on underneath, but she paid it no mind. She only had eyes for the evening light settling over the mainland, giving it a soft, dewy focus, and a flock of birds flying in formation overhead.

Gus dragged in a breath. The air was so fresh and clean and, despite the contentiousness of her being here, she was immensely pleased to be experiencing Hitchkin.

“How’d you come to have an island in the family?” she asked, hauling her strap up as her gaze fixed on a tiny cottage all the way over the other side of the lake.

The relaxed line of his body tightened in Gus’s peripheral vision.

“I don’t know…something about my great-great-granddaddy winning it in a poker game or something equally clichéd. It’s been in the family for generations.”

Gus was about to press for more when the line dipped in the water and Marshall came to life with a quick, “Whoa.”

“You got one?”

He grinned and said, “Sure do,” as he started to reel it in.

It took him less than a minute to get his hands on it. A minute where it seemed every muscle in his body moved and shifted beneath his flesh. She was so caught up in the physicality of it she almost missed Marshall swiftly and efficiently knocking the fish’s head against the boards, killing it in an instant.

“Look at this little beauty,” he beamed, holding up a good-sized fish.

“A trout?”

“Sure is.” He tossed it into a bucket beside him. “Right, one more and we’ll have dinner on our hands.”

Quickly, he baited his hook with a worm he’d pulled from a container and threw it back in again. The lure made a neat little plopping noise as it hit the surface of the water. “Oh.” He turned to her as if suddenly struck by a thought. “I suppose you’re a vegetarian?”

“No.” Gus shook her head. “I’m not. But I do tend to eat a lot of food without meat if I don’t know where it came from.”

“For animal cruelty reasons?”

“Yeah. I’m fussy about where my meat originates. I like to know it had a good life before it died and that it was humanely killed. I love the smell and taste of cooking meat, but I can’t abide cruel husbandry or killing methods, so if I can’t satisfy myself as to that, and often you can’t at restaurants et cetera, then I usually stick with the vegetarian option.”

He nodded slowly as if he was really considering her point of view. “That’s fair enough.” He raised an eyebrow. “So…the fish?”

“The fish is fine.” She smiled. “It’s been ranging free in this beautiful lake. It was caught quickly, and it didn’t suffer in its death.”

“That’s a good way of looking at it.”

She shrugged. “It’s nature, isn’t it? Humans are animals, too, and we’re at the top of a food chain where the big creatures eat the small creatures. But we’ve evolved a conscience, so I think it’s inherent for us to use it.”

The line pulled again, and Marshall’s attention was snagged away once more as he quickly reeled another trout onto the jetty. This time it took him about thirty seconds, and the fish was dead in the bucket next to the other one in under a minute.

“Care to join me for fried fish on the beach?”

Gus’s breath caught in her throat at the invitation. She knew she should keep her distance, that cookouts on the beach with a good-looking man her nipples were clearly addicted to could be a really stupid thing to do. It would be wiser to decline.

But her inner, more cautious Gus was strangely on board with the idea. And that chick was freaky for a good feed of freshly fried fish.

“I’d love to.”