Read Online When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) by Lori Handeland - Free Book Online Page B

of Grace and raised his head. Their noses brushed, she was that close. Relief flashed through him a moment before the anger in her eyes made him wonder if his panicked ramblings were true. She looked mad enough to kill. But she really wasn’t the type, was she?
    “I’m going to kill you, Dr. Chadwick.”
    Hmm, maybe she was. Look at Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Mild-mannered-looking guys one and all. Not every murderer had “crazy” tattooed on their forehead like Manson. Too bad.
    Slowly Dan sat up, slid away from her. At least there was no bear—at the moment—though perhaps he’d be better off if there were.
    “You wanna calm down, Grace?”
    “Don’t tell me to calm down!” Her voice had a shrill edge.
    “All right.” He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I won’t.”
    She stood and her skirt swirled about her ankles. Since he was still on the ground, he got an extensive flash of skin, too. He couldn’t help it; his gaze went to her leg and stuck there.
    Snap, snap. She clicked her fingers in front of his face. “Doc? Stay with me.” She held out her hand. He just stared at that, too.
    “Get up, you’re all wet.”
    Actually he wasn’t, but he probably would be soon. Thunder rumbled again. The storm he hadn’t believed was coming, came.
    He climbed to his feet without her help, as if she could pull him to his feet. When he stood, she put her hands on her hips and scowled. “You scared me half to death,” she accused.
    “Me? You left me alone to die in the woods with the bears.”
    “There aren’t any bears.”
    “But you said—”
    She cut him off with an exasperated sound. “All right, there are, but now that you’ve knocked down half the forest, they aren’t anywhere near here. Bears are more afraid of us than we are of them.”
    “Then why—?”
    “I was playing with your head.”
    Dan rarely got mad. He just wasn’t a guy with much of a temper. So few things were worth getting angry over. Because of his size he’d always worried about what he might do if he got too angry. Right now, with the tang of terror fresh upon his tongue, he just didn’t care.
    “You let me believe there might be bears lurking behind every tree, then left me out here? I might have had a heart attack. Or was that what you were hoping for?”
    She scowled. “I didn’t leave you anywhere. You couldn’t keep up. Besides, I was sitting on your porch. All you had to do was walk straight for twenty feet. You couldn’t even do that. Did you know you walked in a complete circle?”
    “I did not. I stayed on a straight line. You just left me in the middle of the forest.”
    She stomped across the short distance separating them, grabbed his hand in surprisingly strong fingers, and yanked him after her. Ten feet, straight ahead, the forest thinned. Another ten feet and they stepped into a clearing. There sat his cabin, the lake, the camp.
    Idiot.
    “So if I was walking in circles, but only twenty feet from the cabin, and there aren’t any bears, why are you trembling?” he asked.
    “Just because there aren’t any bears doesn’t mean you can’t die in the woods. It happens at least once every summer and a lot every winter.”
    “What does?”
    “A clueless tourist walks into the woods and never comes back out.”
    “I don’t see how that could happen.”
    “Look.” She pointed behind him.
    Dan turned. The forest rose, thick and tall. Dark. Mysterious. Deadly. Where they’d walked through he could not see. It was as if a path had opened for Grace and himself, then closed. Which was impossible. Logically he knew that, but from where Dan stood he could not see any way to walk through the trees back in the direction they had come. He shivered at the implications.
    Grace came up behind him, a calming presence at his back. At leas t he wasn’t alone. “You get disoriented when everything around you is ten times taller. If you don’t have a compass, and most of you