Page 9 of A Rugged Beauty
Surely they hadn't been out here alone for ten days.
"Do you really think someone is looking for us?" Her voice held a trembling hope.
He hated to quash it. "I don't know. I'd like to figure out what happened?—"
"How can we, if we can't remember anything? We don’t even know our own names.”
He motioned to the cold ashes. "We can look for clues, try to think backward and deduce what happened. It might help us figure out where we are and who might be looking for us."
He circled the fire, which sent him in her direction. He was trying hard to ignore the pounding headache at the base of his skull and almost missed the way she shifted at his movement. Like she was frightened of him. He didn’t miss the calculating way she looked at him, the intelligence shining in her eyes.
"I'm going to walk around in circles small to large," he explained.
"I'll go down to the river." She cleared her throat when her voice emerged small. "See what I can find there."
He didn't miss the look she sent over her shoulder as she marched away.
It couldn't be more clear that she didn't trust him. The more he pushed his brain for some clear information, other than the general sense of familiarity and warmth toward her, he got only a blank emptiness.
He widened his circles, constantly scanning the ground and bushes and trees. Looking for anything that might help him figure out what was going on. A hoof print. Leaves or grass disturbed.
There.
Beneath the place where he'd removed his—his?—slicker from the tree branch, a pocketknife lay on the ground. He slipped it into his pocket. It'd probably fallen from the coat. It was a little thing, but the tool could prove helpful.
The man's stomach rumbled uneasily. He couldn't quite tell whether he was hungry or sick.
Another circle revealed a mess of vomit not far from where the man had woken on the ground. He’d been sick, then. He squatted to examine it more closely. He used a twig from theground nearby to shift some of the mess. Those looked like masticated berries?—
He heard the rustle of the woman's skirt as she moved through the brush. She was yards away now, though not at the river's edge yet.
She bent to reach for something, knee-height. Leaves on a bush rattled and some instinct screamed at him as he watched her considering something she’d plucked from the bush.
He stood and jogged several feet in her direction as her hand moved toward her mouth.
"Don't eat that!" He put more force behind the words than he intended and she jumped, something spilling from her hands.
As he neared, he saw the small purple berries rolling on the leaf-strewn ground.
The woman's eyes were large in her face, and she backed up a step as he approached. He stopped, not wanting to frighten her worse than he already had.
"Something made us sick," he told her. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder where he'd left the vomit behind. "There are berries, pieces of them, in the—the sick."
Her face had lost some of its color. "They look like blueberries, don't they? Surely a berry wouldn't have poisoned us..."
He shook his head. His stomach ached in some remembered warning. "Don't eat the berries. Maybe your belly is as empty as mine, but we can't risk falling sick out here—again." It hadn't hit him until just this moment how vulnerable he'd been—they'd been?—lying out in the open. In broad daylight.
What if someone with nefarious intentions had stumbled on them? What if a wild animal had come sniffing?
She opened her mouth, and heknewthat she was on the verge of arguing with him.
"Don't." The command in his voice was audible, and even though he'd meant only to protect her, she snapped her mouth closed and her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
But she left the bush behind and moved toward the river.
He kept one eye on her as he resumed his search in ever-widening circles.
When he reached the bank of the river, a good distance from where she stood, he began to put the pieces together.
