Hidden Heart Read online

  Suddenly, his pole, which had been resting in the water as he held it, gave a vicious tug and was almost ripped from his hands, and that decided him.

  “South and west,” he said, hoping he wasn’t using Spencer until he dropped. “As quick as we can. If we can break free of this current I can feel, we can park the raft and let you rest.”

  Spencer snorted, leaning over the rail and shoving hard enough with his own pole that Theo could feel the change in direction. “Let me drop dead is more like it,” he said. Then he swore. “Theo, I’m not getting much traction here, are you?”

  Theo grunted. “Mostly I’m pushing off trees and underbrush. Why?”

  “Well, the fucking branches aren’t long enough—but we’re also too high. How sturdy do you think those stairs are?”

  “The ones in the water?” Theo asked, suddenly seeing where this was going. The stairs were set in the center. As a porch, they were in the front, in the middle of the length. As a raft, they were on the side, dragging the raft sideways and making the already unwieldy object hard to steer. They’d been built sturdily, bolted to crossbeams and hammered together with eight-penny nails—Errol had needed to chop through the braces while Theo had been inside getting Thelma. Sturdy, yes, but sturdy with Spencer’s weight on them while that part of the boat was getting dragged over trees and catching on everything under creation? “I have no idea! They’re in a horrible place. I keep expecting them to get caught up and dragged off the raft. You’re not thinking—no, Spencer. Just….”

  But apparently telling Spencer “no” was like telling a cat to get off the counter. Neither one worked very well, but at least the cat knew he was doing something wrong.

  Spencer held on to the railing, taking one step and then the other. Theo knew he’d submerged his dressed leg when he sucked air in through his teeth, but that was about it. After that, Spencer bent a little at the waist and Theo could feel the course correction as Spencer shoved.

  “How’s that?” Spencer asked, his voice taut with pain and cold.

  “It’s great,” Theo said shortly. “Fantastic. And when you drop dead of hypothermia and blood loss, you’ll simply fall off the raft and make my life so much easier. You must have been the pride of your regiment or flight or whatever. Six feet, four inches of stainless-steel testicles reporting for duty, sir!”

  Spencer made one of those smirking sounds that was starting to make Theo homicidal. “Yeah. That was me. Balls of solid rock. Not the pride of any-fucking-thing, but my gonads are in prime condition, thank you.”

  Theo was busy steering, so he couldn’t look at Spencer’s face to see what his expression was when he said this, and he was starting to realize that was important. Spencer’s mouth was like a wind-up toy: a little bit of sparring and it would probably go off in his sleep. But his eyes—wide and dark gray and inexplicably hurt—gave more away than Theo thought he was aware of. For instance, looking into Spencer’s eyes had told Theo that he truly loved Elsie, his co-pilot, and he thought his bosses walked on water, and that the story of Annie the loyal calico cat had really moved him.

  And that he apparently thought he was expendable.

  “Whatever,” Theo muttered. “Do me a favor, and if you do feel like keeling over, say something, okay? I’m going to be fishing you out of the drink either/or, but I’d love some warning.”

  “Kid, I told you—my people are coming back, one way or another. If I’m dumb enough to fall into the fucking water, leave me. You’ll be fine.”

  “But you won’t be!” Theo snarled, loud enough for the words to echo off the water, off the mountains, maybe even off the sky. “Wow, Spencer Helmsley, whom I’ve known for less than half a day, maybe, what happened to you to make you think you’re ballast?”

  “None of your fucking business,” Spencer snapped back. “I’m here for search and rescue, and I will do my goddamned job. Now shut up and let me concentrate so we don’t end up going down Grizzly fucking Rapids!”

  Theo stewed for a good half hour, keeping them on course while Spencer gave mighty heaves of his manly shoulders to help break the raft out of the current. He wasn’t sure why he was so pissed. Sure, Spencer had barked at him, but he tended to growl and bark a lot. It didn’t seem to mean anything in the long haul. The thing that was getting under Theo’s skin was that he really didn’t seem to care if he lived or died. Not at all. And Theo was starting to like him, dammit! As loath as Theo was to admit it, Spencer was damned entertaining. But more than that, he was competent and brave, and he didn’t seem to let anything get him down. Not really. He just kept thinking about the next move. He didn’t take anything about himself too seriously, not even his own pain.

  And that probably applied to the inside pain as well as the outside pain, Theo imagined, his throat tight. Something had hurt him badly at some point—some human being. Maybe that was why he was so obsessed with his dog.

  Theo’s brooding was interrupted by another tug on his barge pole, this one harder and more insistent than some of the other currents and eddies. He looked up and his breath caught.

  “Oh shit,” he said, because swearing be damned. “Spencer! Spencer, are you seeing this?”

  Spencer made a harsh sound, and Theo guessed that shifting his weight when his leg had been immersed in the freezing water probably hurt like a nuclear bomb in his flesh. Theo looked behind him and saw Spencer had turned and slogged up the porch steps onto the deck itself and was leaning, white-faced, against the fence railing.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. “That’s a surprise.”

  “I had no idea how much they’d cut the road into the floor of the valley,” Theo muttered. “I should have known. There were embankments fifteen feet high on both sides. Hell! What are we supposed to do now?”

  From their height they could see the water funneling down onto the road. The drop served to create a vicious, elephantine current, and if they got much closer to the drop, they’d be lost in that madness, and Theo wasn’t sure the raft could take it.

  “Veer right!” Spencer said grimly, forcing himself down the steps again. “And damned quick. C’mon, man, heave!”

  The next twenty minutes were frantic. Theo was leaning over the edge of the railing at the front, his feet locked into the slats so he could get as much traction as possible with his pole. Spencer’s counter heaves to keep them straight were getting bigger and broader and more desperate with every push.

  “Theo!” Spencer called, when Theo’s arms burned and his lungs were threatening to give out. “Do you see those trees?”

  “Got ’em!” Theo called back. “They’ll hold us!”

  Ahead was a small copse, thick enough to block the water, slowing it down a little and calming the current, but not so tight that they’d dam it up. A few more frantic minutes of poling and the raft bumped up against the trees with a now-familiar thump.

  “Here,” Theo said, heading for the garden hose. “You get the fuck out of the water, and I’ll tie up the boat.”

  “Sure,” Spencer said, and Theo watched as he took a shaky step up and then almost collapsed, arms wrapped around the railing.

  “Fuck!” Theo snarled. “You stay right there. Right there, dammit, while I get us secure.”

  They were up against a smaller tree, the trunk narrow enough that Theo could wrap his arms around it and pass the hose’s sprayer head from one hand to the other. He used the handle of the sprayer to fix the knot and then, keeping his hand on the rail, practically ran to Spencer.

  “We should tie you to the raft,” Spencer mumbled, taking Theo’s offered hand to pull himself out of the water. “Like I was supposed to be secured to my chopper. Damned flight suit. Should have known better—probably time for a new one. You think about them as bombproof, but things wear down. Fabric. Cars. Hearts. Too many hits and things fall apart.”

  “Wow. If this is you tired, you must be a blast after a beer or two.” Theo got him up one more step, pulled Spencer’s arm around his shoulder, and walked him to
the ice chest where the wool blankets were stored. Carefully, he lowered Spencer down so he was sitting, back to a rail post, and started wrapping his torso and shoulders in blankets, pulling him forward to put one of the foil ones behind him.

  “I used to live by a bar,” Spencer mumbled. “Didn’t get shitfaced that often. Went mostly to visit the dog. It was before Colonel, when me and Glen roomed in South San Francisco, by Burlingame. That was fun,” he said, smiling a little. “I thought at first, well, fuck. Living with the boss. That’s gonna be a wet blanket. As long as you treated the refrigerator with respect, Glen was all right. On days off we had sports games and PS4. Damien stayed there when he wasn’t down at his boyfriend’s. I was like, ‘Hey, got a bar, got a dog I can visit, this is okay.’”

  Theo was too busy checking his sodden bandage to interrupt his rambling. Besides, maybe if he let Spencer talk, he’d say something real.

  He stripped off what was left of the leg of the suit and looked unhappily at the bandage, which was still taped to Spencer’s shin. Ugh, what a mess!

  “Spencer, I’m going to take the bandage off and wrap the wound in gauze but leave it open,” Theo said worriedly. Rent flesh in water for that amount of time—gangrene, rot, infection. God, Spencer was lucky his leg didn’t just fall off in punishment. “I’m going to drape one of those foil blankets over it to see if we can keep it dry, but that means we have to stay parked here for a bit.”

  “They can’t see us down here,” Spencer told him, his voice thin. Theo looked up and saw he was shivering hard, from cold, pain, shock… whatever.

  “I’ll do something,” Theo said, trying to think like Spencer. “We’ve got a zillion of those foil blankets. I’ll tie one to the side of the raft. They should see that.”

  “Okay,” Spencer agreed. “Try that.”

  Oh, he did not look good. Not good at all. He was shaking so hard Theo wasn’t sure how he could stay upright.

  With hurried movements—and what he was starting to think of as “sea legs”—he secured one of the foil blankets around the fence rails, using the medical tape to fix it to itself. This one he pulled over their heads as a sort of waterproof overhang, and Spencer—once he saw what Theo was doing—helped by sitting up straight and using his own head as a support.

  “Look at me.” Spencer giggled weakly. “I’m a tent pole!”

  “Better than ballast,” Theo muttered. Spencer’s body was throwing off heat in catastrophic waves, and before Theo put on his gloves, he held a hand up to Spencer’s forehead, grimacing at the fever there.

  And then Spencer did a surprising thing. He closed his eyes and leaned into the touch, like someone starving for it, someone who’d needed tenderness all his life.

  Theo slid his hand from Spencer’s forehead to his cheek, and rubbed a high cheekbone with his thumb. “You gonna take a rest now?” he asked softly.

  Spencer nodded, eyes still closed. “No choice.” One side of his mouth rose crookedly, and Theo gave in to temptation and rubbed that crooked little corner. Spencer’s lips were lean and firm, and the skin was soft under Theo’s thumb.

  “Me neither,” Theo murmured. And with that, he leaned in and pressed his lips to Spencer’s for a brief kiss before rocking back on his heels and skinning on another pair of gloves.

  Spencer’s eyes flew open as Theo was pulling on the gloves.

  “Why did you do that?” he demanded suspiciously.

  “Me? I’m a simple country boy,” Theo said, giving him a wink to show that his heart wasn’t pounding and his knees weren’t shaking from nothing more than a simple touch of lips to lips. “Never know when I’m gonna get a chance to hit on a big bad pilot again.”

  Spencer gave a soft snort. “With your sweet little face? You would walk into any club, Woodchuck, and have a dozen heat-seeking missiles at your disposal, to do with as you pleased.”

  Theo snorted, although the word picture was downright pornographic enough to start an ache in the only warm place in his body. “Yeah, not my speed. I bet you’ve had plenty of experience, though.” But nothing special. Theo didn’t even need to see Spencer’s eyes shift sideways in what looked like embarrassment to know that.

  “Sex is mostly free and mostly fun,” he said. “Beats game shows when you’re bored.”

  “Thought it might,” Theo replied, and suddenly his groin wasn’t the only thing aching. “Bet you’re good at it too. Make sure your partner’s all happy fine, make them breakfast, let them use the shower.”

  “I try to be a gentleman,” Spencer agreed, but he sounded suspicious, and well he might.

  “Right before you lose their number or tell them gently that you only do one-night stands but they were really sweet and this way you can be friends.”

  Theo went to work on the bandage, tugging gently at the tape as Spencer’s muffled grunt told him that he’d hit a little close to the mark.

  “Sounds like you’ve been there,” he muttered.

  “I have not,” Theo corrected, using gauze to smear antibiotic ointment on the wet, almost bloodless wound. God, this could not be good. “But I’m starting to understand you. Any man who would fall out of a helicopter to rescue a guy but does this much work to drop dead before they can know each other is the kind of guy who’d make breakfast but who wouldn’t ask you out to dinner. I’ve avoided that kind of thing my whole life.”

  “I was right,” Spencer said, his breath coming faster, which was Theo’s only indication that he was in some real pain. “You are destined for picket fences.”

  “I was conceived on a beautiful Christmas morning,” Theo told him, his movements as clean and efficient as possible. If he paused, even for a moment, his hands would be shaking too hard to do this right, and Spencer needed him even if he didn’t want to. “Before the sun even came up, when my parents could see the moonlight on the snow under the stars, in their first apartment in Colorado, before they moved to Tucson. My mom told that story every birthday—not the particulars you know, just that I was a beautiful moment. Even when I knew I was gay and I wasn’t going to be making any babies by a moonlit window, I remembered that. Sex is supposed to be beautiful.”

  “Wow, Woodchuck,” Spencer said gruffly. “Take all the fun out of it.”

  “It can still be fun,” Theo told him, because he’d had enough time to give this a lot of thought. “And I don’t expect choirs of angels and rainbows and unicorns, particularly not the first time. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t mean something. Even if the relationship doesn’t last, remembering that you cared about someone—that needs to leave a mark.”

  He finished the loose bandage and spread another foil blanket over Spencer’s lower body, making sure there was some air between leg and blanket. If Spencer was going to have any hope at all of keeping that limb, it was going to need to stay as dry as possible for a while. He finished up and checked Spencer’s face, surprised to see his eyes were open and fixed on Theo.

  “What?” he asked, uncomfortable suddenly.

  “You’re a virgin,” Spencer said, and Theo rolled his eyes.

  “That’s your takeaway?”

  “Don’t… don’t kiss me again, okay?” Spencer said, and the hurt in his voice was unmistakable.

  Theo glared at him. “I’m not making any promises,” he said stubbornly. “What’s the matter, Spencer? Afraid it will mean something?”

  Spencer looked away, and Theo caught his breath.

  “You are,” he said. “You are desperately afraid it will mean something.”

  “Shut up,” Spencer said thickly. “I’m not doing this.”

  “Yeah, you are.” Theo was so mad at him. Looking at the wound, his fever… his kindness. Theo wasn’t going to let him wander away—not after seeing what a terrible job he did of taking care of himself. “You and me are doing this. We’re going to get rescued, and I’m going to be there when you wake up, and if I have to dump soup down your throat with a funnel, I’m going to make you own up to some emotional honesty in t
he middle of all your bulldookie, Spencer Helmsley, because nobody falls out of a helicopter for me and doesn’t get some follow-through.”

  Spencer closed his eyes—probably because he felt like hell, Theo acknowledged, but also, probably, because he was at a loss. Well, too bad. Everything Theo owned in the world had likely just been blasted out of this valley and over the edge of the canyon, and all Theo had left was the knowledge that his parents had taught him right and people were meant to be there for each other.

  If Spencer happened to be on the receiving end of that, so be it.

  Theo had enough time to clean up and dispose of the mess back in the hazmat bag in the ice chest when Spencer finally spoke again.

  “I’m not sleeping with anyone who says bulldookie.”

  Theo chuckled. “If it’ll make you feel better, I can say bullshit once in a while, when you really peeve me off.”

  “So, every five minutes? ’Cause that’d be awkward. Probably better not.”

  Theo felt some heat welling up in his chest. Some hope. “For all you know, I am everything you’ve been missing in the sack and have been afraid to ask for, my friend. But I’ll let you get used to the idea.”

  Spencer snorted. “Yeah, what are you? Thirty? By the time you’re ready to lose your V-card, I’ll be dead. Me and my German shepherd.”

  “I’m twenty-four!” Theo retorted, wounded to his balls. Testicles. Whatever.

  Spencer shot his gaze to Theo’s face, and Theo realized that he’d probably looked better. In fact he’d probably looked better after waking up with the flu, or rolling around wet in a bed of pine needles, or, hey, that one time he’d taken the youth group camping and they’d ended up sliding down a hill and ending up coated in pine sap and some weird sort of fungus.

  “I swear I’m sort of hot when I’m not half-drowned,” he said, feeling pathetic.