He gestured down the hill. “The purple ones. Over there. I transplanted them from the bottom of the hill, since it’s hard to see the trailhead otherwise—”
Alarmingly, Darcy felt the hot prickle of tears behind her nose. She hadn’t noticed when she arrived, but he’d replanted two big clumps of vivid purple fireweed to flank the two trees that marked the second route down from the waterfall.He’d cleared all the other vegetation around their base and watered the dirt with his canteen. There were crescents of dirt under each of his fingernails, which he’d been cleaning in the stream when she arrived.
She guessed this was what she got for telling him that he was free to hit on her. Except that she couldn’t recall, in nearly two decades of being hit on, anyone hitting on her in a way that struck home quite so precisely.
She had told him to take his best shot. This was a pretty good one.
Darcy sniffled loudly, praying that it would just look like she had allergies. She wiped her nose on her arm.
She should have told him to think about sobriety instead. All this did was make her feel—well, not quite better, because maybe he hadn’t been pursuing her for help with his sobriety after all, but notworse. It made her feel. That wasn’t going to help either of them.
“Yeah, okay. Thanks,” she said, cursing the little wobble in her voice. Teagan politely averted his eyes.
Oh, no wonder nobody had ever taken Teagan in hand before he ended up in the hospital. Darcy could barely remember the lecture she’d planned to deliver about abstinence and effort and focus.
“Did you finish everything else you needed to do?” he asked with a hopeful note in his voice, gaze resting on the equipment he’d piled next to the stream.
“If the lawn’s done, I guess I did,” Darcy said, wishing she sounded more casual.
“Do you want to work on the trail with me for a while, then?” he asked, failing to conceal his interest in her answer. “If you’ve got time, you could give me the aspen lecture. I haven’t seen any around here. They’re the white ones, right?”
Darcy wavered on her feet, looking up at the man who was probably going to disappoint her in all sorts of ways that she just couldn’t manage to anticipate at this exact moment. He shouldn’t be hitting on her—or anyone. He was already good at that, obviously; what he needed to work on was his sober living skills.
They both needed to refocus on the job at hand. Regardless of what the Goederts thought of her or whether she would ever finish her degree, Darcy was responsible for wilderness education inthisjob. And regardless of whether Teagan was interested in rehab, that’s where he was.
“Your sister said you missed lunch. Did you eat?” Darcy asked Teagan. “There was a sandwich in the backpack.”
“I... did not. I thought that was your lunch.”
“It was, but you were the one outside working all day. You can’t work through lunch. You’ll get sick.”
“I thought you might come back for it.”
“It’s a really good sandwich. Peanut butter and banana on raisin bread,” Darcy said, plastering up her vulnerability with a delinquency she could address. “You should eat it.” She rustled in the backpack until she found the sandwich and unwrapped it from its wax paper.
She took a step toward Teagan, sandwich extended.
Teagan began to refuse, hands waving ineffectually to ward her off. “I’m fine, really, I had—”
Darcy pulled him to the edge of the stream and stuffed the cut edge of the sandwich directly into his ridiculous mouth. He couldn’t even manage to keep himself fed. She shouldn’t have left him alone in the woods all day.
He knew how to make an effort; he just didn’t know how to direct it toward the things that mattered. That part would have to be up to Darcy.
“I bet we can clear the way to the first switchback before dinner,” she told an unprotesting Teagan. She had one hand holding the sandwich in his mouth, but the other was pressed to his chest, just over his heart. Even through the T-shirt, she could feel it fluttering against her palm, heat boiling off his skin and bleeding through the fabric. “And maybe you can talk tomeabout your mother’s accident.”
After a moment, Teagan nodded and took a big bite. Darcy watched the muscles in his throat move to be sure he swallowed.
eight
If Darcy had worried that the Goederts might object to the expansion of her job duties to match her job description, she escaped their notice over the next two weeks. Dr. Goedert only cared that Teagan showed up for group therapy. Rachel only cared that his checks cleared the bank. It was a really good thing he had Darcy on top of things.
It was only Kristin who expressed any misgivings about Darcy’s new project, and then not until Darcy skipped down to the kitchen to pick up snacks on the day that they were to finish grading the portion of the waterfall loop which had washed out that spring. They’d discussed the necessity of water bars that morning, and this afternoon they were going to split some treated lumber left over from the new fence. Darcy wanted to get extra provisions for that work.
Although Kristin’s only responsibilities were related to cooking, the kitchen was still a disaster three hours before dinner, with dirty smoothie jars still piled in the sink.
“Bitch, you live like this?” Darcy asked.
Kristin flipped her the bird without taking her eyes off her phone. Darcy was surprised she’d even gotten thesmoothies out without Darcy there to prod her. Darcy had been off in the woods with Teagan most of the day.
