Jump Point - Ophelia Sexton Page 0,15

expression, followed by an immediate flush that rose up his neck to his darkly tanned face. "Uh…"

Time to get some answers, she thought. "Look I'm grateful for the save back there, but why were you following me?"

She crossed her arms over her chest and saw his gaze drop to her breasts before he raised it again.

"Because you were headed in the wrong direction." She lifted her brows skeptically at that, and he added quickly. "And because I knew there would be bears."

Well, I can't argue with that. Dammit. "I was on course," she said firmly. "I never get lost."

"Uh-huh," Mike responded dryly. He cocked his head inquiringly at her, amusement glinting in his dark brown eyes. "Did you even check your GPS?"

"GPS is for wimps, and there's no cell signal out here," she informed him. "Besides, coyotes have an infallible sense of direction. My grandpa taught me how to navigate by the sun and the stars."

"And did your grandfather teach you to take amplitude into account?" Mike asked.

If she hadn't known him, she could have sworn that he actually sounded snarky.

What the hell is amplitude? Kara didn't want to give him the satisfaction of asking.

He apparently read her expression and sighed in a really annoying way. "It means that on the summer and winter solstices, the sun rises and sets a different number of degrees north of true east/west, depending at which latitude you are. Denver's latitude is, um…" He frowned and paused, clearly thinking. "About forty degrees. And Denali National Park's latitude is at about sixty-three degrees."

"So?" She had never really thought about her sense of direction worked. It was just something that she had learned to trust her coyote half do for her.

"It means that navigating by the sun this far north is enough to send you off-course if you haven't taken into account the difference between the sun's position in Colorado and here."

She frowned at him. "You were an engineering major, weren't you?" she accused.

He grinned and shook his head. "Nope. I majored in Environmental Horticulture and Urban Forestry at UC Davis. Go Aggies! How about you?"

"Business Management with a focus on Cannabis Studies at Colorado State," she replied with a straight face.

She could see that he took her seriously for a hot moment. Then he asked, "Seriously?"

"Well, the Business Management part is true." She shrugged. "At some point, I’m expected to help run one of my clan's businesses." She grimaced. "I already know that it's not going to be anywhere near as much fun as smokejumping."

Mike nodded. "Yeah, I know what you mean. My family owns a big organic farm in the Central Valley." He paused, and she sensed that he was on the verge of telling her more. Then he reached down to unclip the front flap of his PG bag. "Here, let me show you where we are right now and where we actually need to go."

Without waiting for her reply, he pulled out his compass and his folded waterproof hiker's map of Denali National Park.

Kara sighed and walked over to him. She stood next to him, her upper arm pressed against his, and peered down at the now-unfolded map.

Mike being Mike, he had marked his intended route to the pickup spot with a red dry-erase marker.

He tapped a small blue irregularly shaped oval about three miles to the west of the red line. "We're here, right by this lake over there."

Kara wanted to argue with him—mostly because she hated being wrong. "No shit? And here I thought you were the muscle of this operation, not the brains," she said, reluctantly conceding defeat. "I guess you may have saved me from getting the Dumbass Award for missing a pickup."

Mike took a quick compass reading, glanced at the map, then tucked both items away in his PG bag. "Follow me," he said smugly.

Chapter 6

New Direction

Okay, she wasn't mad at me for following her, thought Mike as he strode in Kara's wake. That's good, right?

But he did wonder if she was going to try to take some kind of revenge when he was least expecting it.

If that was the price of being able hold her in his arms at last, then he was willing to pay it. He knew that he'd be reliving those magical minutes for a long time to come, when her breasts had pressed against his torso while he stroked the lovely, strong curves of her back and shoulders and inhaled the sweet, smoky scent of her soft hair.

After pointing her in the