Mountain Moonlight - By Jane Toombs Page 0,44

sleeping bags, Davis said, "This is fun."

For you, maybe, she thought, lying rigid, unable to relax with Bram practically nestled against her.

"It's sort of like summer camp," Davis went on, "but more like we're a family camping in our tent."

His words fell painfully onto Vala's heart.

Bram tried to think of some quip to toss into the silence that stretched out after Davis's last remark, but he couldn't come up with a thing.

He knew what the kid meant. Often during one of his guide trips, the people who'd hired him, sometimes strangers to one another, developed a sense of camaraderie born of shared hardships on the trail. He'd always stayed aloof, friendly without making anyone a comrade.

This time he'd screwed up. For one thing, he rarely had as few as two people to guide. But what had really got to him was who the two people were. Vala and Davis. He'd gotten to know them so well it seemed incredible that they'd soon be more than half a continent away from him.

His thoughts drifted to the story Vala had told about her grandmother. He'd picked up on what he saw as the moral to be learned from the tale because he'd been guilty of using his version of the past to color his world. What if, as he'd been slowly coming to realize, his version was skewed?

His father hadn't really neglected him, even if he wasn't around much of the time. When they'd been together, which seemed to be more often than Bram had once believed, his father had done the best he could to teach his son what he felt was important, to offer as much of his heritage as a kid could understand.

Bram sighed, belatedly noting his sigh was intermingling with Vala's. "Can't sleep?" he asked softly.

"Too many ghosts of the past hovering," she said. "I guess I shouldn't have told Ella's story."

If he moved even slightly, they'd be touching. Two sleeping bags made a lot of padding between them, but he decided not to risk it anyway.

"I know what you mean," he admitted. "Plus this intimate sleeping arrangement where we can't be intimate."

"That, too."

"Davis asleep?"

"His breathing sounds as though he is," she said.

"When we started on this trip," Bram said slowly, feeling his way along, "I didn't expect what happened to us to happen, if that makes sense."

"Neither did I. It was the farthest thing from my mind. For the first two days I was mad at you most of the time."

"Come to think of it, I was damned annoyed with you, telling me you could ride when you'd never been on a horse. But I have to admit you proved to be a quick learner."

"And I acquired the sore muscles to prove it."

"You might be a liar, Vala, but you proved you're a good sport."

"A lie told to help someone else doesn't count."

"As Davis would say--whoa. Some definition."

"Consider yourself warned."

All the warning signs had been there, Bram realized--the girl from his past, the old attraction reviving with the added spice of her now being an adult, the rising desire. He'd noted and ignored each and every one, plunging on like a desperately thirsty man heading for water.

Serve him right if he drowned.

"The kid saw us kiss last night," he said.

"I know. He figures we must like each other."

"Don't we?"

"I refuse to answer on the grounds it might incriminate me."

"Coward."

"Better safe than sorry."

"Is it?"

She didn't answer.

What did he want from her other than what he knew they had? He wasn't sure. This yearning he felt was something beyond his experience.

"Falling asleep?" she asked.

"Not yet."

"Tell me something about you that I don't know," she said.

She already knew too much about him. He searched for something innocuous to tell her and Sheba popped into his mind.

"My cat," be began. "I didn't pick Sheba out, she just happened to me. Showed up as a half-grown kitten yowling on my front doorstep a little over a year ago. No one in the neighborhood claimed her. The gal next door thought the kitten might have belonged to the people across the street who'd moved out a couple days before."

"Sheba was hungry and lonesome, equal parts of each. I'd never been around Siamese cats, didn't realize they talked to you. Or grew on you. Or were completely zany felines. After a couple of days we bonded and now we're stuck with each other."

"What becomes of Sheba when you're off guiding?"

"My friend Nick from across town likes cats so he takes care of her when