Free Follow A Wild Heart (romance,) by Bobby Hutchinson

tiny kiss on her parted lips, then drew back with a rueful smile.
    "That's about the last thing I want at the moment, but it's probably the best idea."
    He was going to hate himself any second now for being such a chivalrous jerk. In fact, he did already.
    What had made him stop and question what was happening? Whatever it was, it had never bothered him before today. One of the things a guy learned around the age of fourteen was never to ask a girl if he could kiss her, and here he was at thirty eight, asking like an utter fool.
    But this feeling in him for Karena went beyond insistent body demands.
    Karena was watching him, and he smiled reassuringly at her. She was beautiful, seductive and innocent at the same time. Her lips were puffed from his kisses, her golden skin flushed with rosy color. The sun was making a shining halo of her silvery mop of hair, and the shutters she could draw over those gray eyes were absent, so that it seemed as if he could peer through their translucence and see into her soul.
    "You didn't eat much." His voice was gruff, and he stuffed sandwich packages into plastic bags and then into the basket.
    "I guess you caught me on a day when I wasn't very hungry."
    For food, anyway. But, oh, the hunger for him...
     
    The rest of the afternoon, they paddled around in the canoe and talked about everything under the sun except the growing awareness between them. He told her more about his childhood, and she listened closely, laughing at anecdotes of the boy Logan had been.
    "I wanted to be Tarzan when I grew up, and I used to go around with a shoelace tied to these damn glasses so they wouldn't fall off when I swung from tree to tree," he confided.
    When the day began to slide toward evening, they reluctantly returned the canoe and drove back to Bemidji.
    "I'll go pick up Danny and the twins. We'll be cheering you on tonight," Logan assured her as he left her at the festival grounds. "Then we're going out for a celebration dinner, all of us. No arguments."
    "But you don't even know whether I'll win or not," she protested.
    He smiled mischievously. "You've got it all wrong. We're celebrating my win, Karena. My luck at meeting you. But if you win, we'll celebrate that, too." He bent swiftly and kissed her, and after he left she stood thoughtfully watching the car drive away.
    It hardly seemed possible that she'd known him only two days.
     
    That evening, Karena fought valiantly to win the women's division of the logging sports all around championship, and she succeeded. Both Sara Wise and Suzy Evans gave her affectionate hugs when her name was announced as overall winner. Suzy nearly cracked her ribs, in fact, so exuberant were her congratulations.
    Danny, the twins and Logan had cheered wildly from the stands during each heat, and she'd had to force her concentration to the task at hand instead of listening to the tall man sitting between the children.
    After being announced the winner, when she stood on the makeshift stage to accept the generous check and the bronzed trophy, her gaze skipped past the official making the presentation to note the proud grin Logan was wearing in the front row.
    "It gives me great pleasure to award this trophy to you, in the spirit of all logger sports and those who keep the tradition alive," the announcer was saying, and Logan gave her a thumbs-up salute.
    For an instant, she found herself wishing the festival were beginning instead of ending.
    She still had to drive home tonight. She had to go to work in the morning, she reminded herself. None of this was part of her real life, especially not Logan Baxter.
    "Wonder if I might have a word with you in the festival offices before you leave, Ms Carlson?"
    The gray haired man's gruff voice commanded her attention. One of the judges, he wore a business suit and she nodded automatically at his request, wondering uneasily what breach of festival rules she might have unwittingly committed.
    "I'm Stanford Willis. Fifteen minutes from