Bea by Peggy Webb

her. Imagine. Her paired with a him. . Ridiculous.
    She hurried inside the tent, grabbed the sleeping bag and made a dignified exit. Strike dignified. The darned bag got caught in the tent flap and she wrestled with it for two full minutes while her audience sat there laughing his head off.
    When she finally got it free, she just stood there and glared at him. Unfortunately, he was not the kind of man to be subdued by a nasty look from a woman.
    “What are you doing?” He spoke in such a maddeningly pleasant voice she wanted to shoot him.
    “I’m moving my sleeping bag.”
    “And where do you plan to move it to?”
    “Oh, just someplace nice and breezy. It’s too stuffy to sleep in a tent tonight.”
    “It will get colder later on.”
    “If I’m not mistaken, this bag is duck down.”
    “You don’t want to sleep on the ground,” he said. “Something you don’t want is liable to crawl in there with you.”
    Something she hadn’t wanted had crawled in there with her last night, she thought. But she didn’t say it aloud. Actually, he hadn’t crawled in with her; she’d crawled in with him. And she’d liked it more than she cared to admit.
    “I’ll sleep in the truck. Nothing is going to crawl in with me in the truck.”
    He didn’t say anything, merely tightened his jaw and stalked off to the tent.
    Once Bea was headed toward his truck, she didn’t look back. She hadn’t meant to sleep in the truck; she had meant to spread her bag under that huge pine on the other side of their campfire. But she supposed sleeping in the truck wasn’t such a bad idea. At least she wouldn’t find herself curled around Russ Hammond in the morning—curled around him and liking it.
    First she spread her bag in the cab and tried sleeping there. But she kept bumping her elbows on the steering wheel, and her feet kept getting tangled in the door handles.
    Finally she got out and spread the bag in the truck bed. It was roomier, harder than the tent floor, but roomier, nonetheless.
    She raised herself on her elbows and peered through the darkness toward the tent. She couldn’t see a thing. She guessed Russ was inside on his pallet, sleeping like a baby, his big body warm and toasty, his chest rising and falling with reassuring regularity. Maybe he was even snoring a little. He had last night, she vaguely remembered. There was something comforting about a man lying beside you snoring, something appealing, something homey.
    Sighing, Bea lay back on her hard bed. Finally she slept.
    o0o
    Russ lay on his pallet awhile, alone once more, but that was nothing new. The aggravating thing was that he didn’t like it. He kept missing the smell of perfume in her hair and the soft kittenish way she fit against him when she slept.
    Unable to sleep, he rummaged around in his duffle bag till he found a book; then he read for a while by the dim glow of his flashlight. But he couldn’t concentrate. He kept thinking of Bea out there in his pickup truck.
    The most stubborn woman alive. Once, in the middle of chapter four, he started to go out there and get her; then he decided against it. She might get a little cold later on, but she’d be all right. He guessed he would let her have her foolish way just this once.
    With that settled, he put the book aside and slid under his covers.
    o0o
    While Bea and Russ slept, two men crept out of the dark, scrabbling their way over the rocks, passing a jug of moonshine back and forth.
    “This ain’t the way to travel, Hank.”
    Hank hitched his baggy overalls over his skinny frame and handed the jug to his cousin.
    “Don’t look at me, Bobbie Joe. I wasn’t the one tore up the truck in that ditch back yonder.”
    Bobbie Joe hugged the jug to his fat stomach awhile, as if it were a woman; then he took a long swig and wiped his lips with the back of his hairless hand.
    “Well, I wasn’t the one wanted to set out at pitch-black dark.”
    “How else you gonna leave when everybody in the county’s after