“Your misogyny is showing.”
“I don’t mean you can’t—I’m sayingno. If you were a very, very manly man, I would have the same objection to being carried down on your shoulders.”
Darcy narrowed her eyes at him, wondering if she could conk him over the head with a stone or something to carry him down in peace.
Teagan must have guessed what she was thinking, because he held his hands out in a pacifying manner.
“Look,” he said after a deep breath, “I apologize sincerely for all the trouble to you... and to the bear.”
“Did you know that there are fewer than eight hundred bears left in the whole Yellowstone ecosystem?”
“I did not. But I appreciate that.”
“Do you?” she said skeptically. “Do you really? Because it doesn’t seem like you’re worried about the bear.”
“I am. I promise I am. I won’t narc on the bear. I just—” He sighed. “You must see a lot of people at rock bottom here, right?”
Nobody who hadreallyhit rock bottom could afford to stay at the wellness retreat, but Darcy had seen a lot of people miserably sweating things out of their systems and regretting their life choices.
“Sure,” she said.
“Consider this mine. Can we please make a deal? I won’t tell anyone here that I was even hurt. And you’ll let me just crawl down the mountain. Please? It’s been a hell of a week.” His gaze was frank and vulnerable, much more direct than she was accustomed to receiving.
Darcy wrinkled her nose at her messy, raspberry-juice-and-blood-smeared problem in his Cookie Monster briefs and gym clothes. Rachel would have a cat if she saw him, probably ask why Darcy hadn’t remediated the bear infestation prior to camp opening.
He looked so distressed that she felt a wave of unwelcome sympathy swamp her determination to get back to her lecture. She was such a sucker.
“Oh, fine. Deal,” Darcy said reluctantly. She stood up and offered him her hand. With her help, he got to his feet well enough, even though he kept one hand pressed against his hip and favored his other leg. At his full height he loomed over her, his broad shoulders filling out the space despite his slender build. It was like someone had designed a big hunk of a man and then failed to equip him with the bulk he was supposed to wear.
“Thank you,” he said gravely. “Thank you for saving my life, Darcy.”
Darcy felt heat suffuse her face. She shook the words off. The critique would say she shouldn’t have loitered while he still needed medical attention. Somehow, she was sure this would turn out to be her fault.
five
Getting down the mountain felt like the easy part. Getting from the trailhead to the camp’s pickup truck while oozing blood and raspberry puree—all unnoticed by Sloane and the other guests, who were painting watercolors of the lake vista on the meditation deck—was more difficult. The adrenaline and endorphins of the bear attack and escape had ebbed from Teagan’s body by the time he crawled into the passenger seat of the ranch pickup truck. Darcy curtly forbade him to bleed on the upholstery.
She drove them for an hour east to Bozeman’s regional hospital. The ER was crowded when they arrived: asthma attacks, chest pains, and a couple of car crashes bumped Teagan to the back of the line. “I tripped over my own hideous finance bro sneakers,” Teagan dutifully told the triage nurse when he pointed out the gash in his hip. Darcy didn’t even crack a smile. She’d barely spoken to him the entire way there.
Possibly she doesn’t like you very muchwas his gloomy assessment as he kept pressure on his scratches and waited his turn to be called. This somehow seemed just as unfortunate as being stuck in the Montana hinterlands with his sister or being a little bit mauled. Of course, she’d just seen him lose a fight with a grizzly bear and need to be evacuated down twomiles of steep trail, so there was probably not a lot he was going to be able to do to change that impression.
He snuck a glance at her out of the corner of his eye. She was sitting next to him, but as soon as they sat down in the waiting room, she had put her headphones on, stretched her long, bare legs out in front of her, and appeared to go to sleep. Teagan shifted in his seat. His side ached and was starting to stiffen up. The chairs were bare plastic—probably so they could be easily hosed down and disinfected. He didn’t know how she could possibly be comfortable enough to sleep there.
As he squirmed, Darcy’s eyes popped open. She raked them over his injuries.
“You hanging in there, Bear Bait?” she asked with more concern than he’d expected.
He wasn’t sure what the alternative was, but he said, “I’m fine,” anyway. He was tacky with dried panic-sweat, raspberries, and gore, everything in his entire body hurt, and he had claw marks down his hip, but someone would presumably call his name and start fixing that when his turn was up. “You can leave if you need to get back. I’ll call a cab when I’m done.”
She snorted inelegantly. “I’m not ditching you at the ER,” she said, and now he’d offended her again. “I’ll stay till they release you.”
“Okay,” he said, striving for the same tone of neutrality, one that he hoped would convey neither that he wished she’d stay and perhaps stop calling him names nor that he wished she’d go and no longer observe him in the basest state of his life.
Darcy regarded him for a moment longer, then stood and crossed the room to the intake window. When she reached it, her face transformed, becoming open and beguiling. Sheleaned forward to prop herself on her elbows and cross her delicate ankles.
Darcy was built like a comic book superhero: dramatic curves and sharp, muscular lines, all of it contained in a tight T-shirt and cutoff shorts. The triage nurse looked just as impressed by it as Teagan had been. He instantly blossomed under Darcy’s attention, harried frown dissolving.
Darcy smiled and tucked a loose strand of her glorious hair behind her ear as she struck up a conversation with the bedazzled man, and while Teagan was too far away to catch every word, he gathered that she was telling the triage nurse a funny and highly fictionalized story... of how Teagan fell down a hill and landed in bear shit. She gestured at her side, pantomiming big geysers of blood, then finished with a beseeching clasp of her two hands together. The triage nurse leaned out of his window to get a better look at Teagan.
