Free Wolf by Madelaine Montague Page B

coming with them and her ‘offer’ hadn’t been enticing enough to appease him. Resentment flickered through her, but she was too tired to nurse it.
    Regardless, she felt it. If he hadn’t decided to use her boat as a diversion, she wouldn’t have been in this mess to start with. She could’ve turned around and headed home and that would still have been a diversion.
    Of course, she didn’t know anything about boats or navigation. She probably would’ve run out of fuel, or gotten lost at sea, or maybe been captured by pirates. It was also possible that the manhunt for them would’ve netted her since they were following her boat, but that was beside the point!
    It was his fault! He didn’t have to be so pissy about her tagging along when she wouldn’t be in the mess at all except for him—and the other men.
    “If you feel the urge for a nature call, now’s the time,” Mac said pointedly.
    Sylvie looked at him, and then looked around to discover everyone was looking at her. Her face reddened.
    That was another thing she hadn’t adequately considered!
    Swallowing the urge to whine about having to go in the woods, she stood up and picked her way carefully through the brush until she could find a little privacy. Once she’d squatted, she learned something new about her anatomy that she’d never known before. ‘It’ didn’t actually work with gravity. It seemed, in fact, to defy gravity. Hoping against hope that the leaf she grabbed to dry off with wasn’t poison-something-or-other, she cleaned up the best she could and adjusted her sweats.
    The men were grinning when she returned. Glaring at them, she stared stonily at the woods until they shouldered their bags and started off again.
    The lack of any means of personal hygiene offended her sensibilities. Since 38
    they’d left her bottle of water with her, she waited until she thought she wouldn’t be seen and tipped a little into her palms to hit at washing her hands.
    “You’re going to get thirsty if you use your water for bathing,” Mac commented from behind her.
    She flicked a guilty look back at him and nearly fell over a bush in front of her.
    He caught her arm, steadying her, but released her the moment she’d regained her balance, making it impossible to view it as anything more than a courtesy.
    Frowning, she took another cracker from her stash and nibbled on it thoughtfully.
    Despite her offer, she hadn’t actually thought the guys would take her up on it. Not that she wasn’t willing enough to trade sex for protection if that was what it took! But she hadn’t actually thought they were as desperate for sex as Mac had seemed to indicate.
    Obviously, she’d been right. Not only had none of them jumped at the chance to take her up on it, but they seemed determined to keep their distance.
    Was it the way she’d offered, she wondered? Had it looked as pathetic to them as she’d felt at the time?
    Or were they just not desperate enough and therefore not that interested?
    She couldn’t honestly say that it had occurred to her any of the time that they would be. She’d been afraid they would rape her at first, well aware that rape rarely had anything to do with sexual attraction. Sure she’d gotten a rise out of Mac when he’d pinned her to the bed, but she wasn’t young enough and naïve enough to misunderstand that sort of thing. A man’s dick was erectile tissue and young men’s dicks responded to stimulus a lot more readily than older men’s did. They were generally aroused when it did—unlike a woman whose nipples sometimes stood erect when she wasn’t the least bit aroused—but not necessarily for a particular woman. Even if she’d been naïve enough or conceited enough, to think they found her attractive, he’d made it clear that he’d been imprisoned for a very long time, which meant he hadn’t had an opportunity to really exercise it in a while—with a woman, anyway.
    They probably thought of her as an old woman, she