Tentatively, and looking where she stepped, she went to the fire. “What are you working on now?”
“Can’t tell you,” he said as he put a marshmallow onto a piece of wire. “What about you? Thinking of starting a ladies’ polo team?”
“For your information, I help Rodrigo with his business. It takes work to stay on the polo circuit.”
“I bet,” Eli mumbled. He handed her a toasted marshmallow. “You’d better tie your hair back or—” He broke off when a breeze caught her long hair and wrapped it around the sticky marshmallow.
Chelsea’s anger showed on her face. “I knew this would happen! What next? A family of bears
shows up?”
“I hope not,” Eli said cheerfully. “How about a sandwich?”
“Only if I can throw it at you.”
He smiled at her. “Jeff sent a bucket of KFC. Sound good?”
“Fried?! You want me to eat something that has been fried?”
“It’s your choice. You’d better get your camera equipment because it’s starting to rain.”
A fat drop hit Chelsea in the face. “I hate you, Eli Harcourt,” she muttered as she grabbed her gear and zipped the lid of the case closed. She started toward the car but as the rain began to come down harder, Eli held the tent flap open.
Grimacing, she went inside.
A moment later Eli entered, a big red-and-white paper bucket in his arms and four bottles of beer.
It was two hours later that Eli looked at Chelsea, asleep in the down-filled bag, and smiled. It had taken work on his part but he’d managed to get her to use the container of wet wipes to remove all the makeup from her face. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail and had eaten heartily of the fried chicken.
And in between she’d talked. Over the years, he’d been able to deduce a lot about her life from photographs and tidbits he’d heard from people. But he couldn’t know the whole truth from being on the outside. Was she truly in love with her latest boyfriend? Had she found something that occupied her life so she felt as she had when they were kids? Whenever one of their projects worked, they’d put ginger ale in champagne glasses and toasted, “To saving the world.”
To Eli’s mind, he was still trying to do that, but what was Chelsea doing now?
The rain pounding down on the little tent, the light from the lantern, the closeness, plus the food and beers, had made Chelsea open up as he doubted she had in years—or ever.
As he looked at her sleeping, he didn’t lie to himself. His desires were all selfish. He still wanted her for himself. There was something about her that . . . well, made him feel as though the half of him that had been missing for so very long had been returned to him.
As he snuggled down in the bag beside her, he knew the camping trip had worked. Of course he knew she hated camping. One of his favorite memories of their childhood was when Chelsea had climbed a tree to avoid the “creatures of the night” as she called them. Since they’d been in her parents’ backyard, there hadn’t been a lot of danger.
But to Chelsea’s mind, it had always been “one of the worst experiences of my life.”
As he’d hoped, this camping trip, short as it was, had made her so angry, had so completely taken her out of her comfort zone, that she’d told him more than she would have if they’d been in some pretty hotel. He’d seen that she tended to dazzle everyone around her and he didn’t want that.
Smiling, he went to sleep.
He awoke to a flood of complaints. It was as though their camaraderie of the night before had never happened.
“I can’t appear in public like this!” she said as she tried to comb marshmallow out of her hair. As other women before her had discovered, it wasn’t possible.
To Eli’s dismay, Chelsea pulled a little case out of her big handbag and proceeded to darken her eyelids to the point where he hardly recognized her.
By the time they were ready to leave, it was strained between them.
“Is there a bug in my hair?” Chelsea asked as they got out of the car. “Or maybe a thousand of them?”
Eli grit his teeth. “No bugs. No dirt. No mosquito bites anywhere. You are model perfect.”
“That was mean,” she said. They’d been driving back to Edilean and had stopped at an off-road diner to have lunch.