Plain Jane & The Hotshot by Meagan McKinney Read Free Book Online Page B

forgetting to lower her voice as they approached the summit campground.
    â€œYeah, well, you know what?” Nick tapped his left temple. “You’re free to hate my guts all you want. But I think you’ve left some of your groceries at the market. You’re certifiable, lady.”
    â€œRight, I agree! I must be nuts to be alone with you.”
    Unfortunately for both of them, she was wrong about one point—they were no longer alone. In fact,this last, heated exchange was once again heard by everyone in the camp.
    The rest burst into spontaneous cheers and applause, and Jo felt her cheeks heat with embarrassment.
    â€œOh, yeah, she wants you, Nick,” one of the smoke jumpers yelled out, and Nick, too, flushed to his earlobes.
    â€œPoint, set, match!” hollered another.
    And it was Hazel alone, Jo noticed, who was not enjoying a good laugh. Instead, she was only smiling.
    The crafty, knowing smile of a master manipulator.

Six
    T hanks to the relentless schedule that her two cronies planned, Jo had little time to brood over the latest embarrassment Nick Kramer had caused her. Instead, she and her companions were subjected to a crash course in wilderness skills.
    It was Hazel and Dottie who gave the initial lessons in proper river rafting. They had packed along two military-surplus canvas-and-rubber rafts.
    Now both crafts were afloat in a calm pool above the churning white-water rapids of “the chute”—a stretch of the Stony Rapids River that descended a steep slope to the canyon floor. The falls were well out of sight from this point, but Jo could hear the water hissing and brawling in the distance, a constant but muted roar.
    â€œKayla!” Dottie shouted at the younger woman, shaking her head in exasperation. “Hon, what in pluperfect hell are you doing? We said paddle east, not west.”
    Kayla pouted. “Sorry, Aunt Dottie. Isn’t east your right hand, west your left?”
    â€œOnly if you’re facing north,” Hazel explained with a martyr’s patience.
    â€œNo wonder we were going in circles,” Bonnie muttered in Jo’s ear while Kayla corrected her stroke. “She’s so dizzy, it seemed like a straight line to her.”
    Jo hardly noticed. She could see the spray from the falls beyond making little rainbows in the bright afternoon sunlight. The only ominous sight was the smoke from the nearby fires that sometimes drifted over the sun like a thick, dark filter.
    â€œThe chute is all bark and very little bite,” Hazel scoffed. “It’s rated one of the easier rafting sites in the state, or we wouldn’t send you greenhorns through it at the end of the ten days. I’d ride it myself if my hinges weren’t a bit too rusted. I quit running the river about five years ago.”
    â€œYou’ll thank us after you take the plunge,” Dottie assured them. “It’s more fun than the best roller coaster you’ve ever been on. You’ll be proud you did it and ready to do it again. Wait and see.”
    Jo noticed the black smoke on the ridge beyond, and she was plagued by the same question that had gnawed at her off and on since yesterday: was she treating Nick Kramer unfairly?
    Are you a ball-breaker by nature, or is it just me you despise?
    Just you, she had told him in the heat of anger.
    But then again, maybe all that heat had not been anger. Maybe it was something else, something more needful and demanding that she was trying to deny. It was hard to pretend that Nick wasn’t an exciting and sexy man.
    If I’m really so glad to be rid of him, she admitted in candor, then why is he on my mind so much?
    Indeed, she might just as well be with him.
    Kayla studied Jo’s preoccupied face. Despite her “dumb blonde” act, the pretty Texan seemed uncanny at sensing thoughts.
    She said something, but lost in her reverie, Jo didn’t hear her.
    â€œPardon me?”
    â€œYour mind is