Now she chuckled. “Yes. But it is interesting that you’re not really a survivalist. It’s not you you’re trying to save. It’s your mother. That’s why Big John Hammer drove you to rage. He killed your mother all over again, and you couldn’t save her.”

Adam sucked in a breath. “Not my mother—”

“It’s not difficult psychology, Adam. Every person you teach to survive the winter is your mother. On the Amazon trek, when you lost those two souls, you were eleven years old again, finding your mother frozen in the snow. You broke your vow, you failed in your goal and since then, you’ve been wandering, lost. You blame yourself, just like you did when you were a kid caught up in circumstances beyond your control.”

“On the Amazon trek, I was an adult, and I was responsible.”

She thrust her face into his. Her eyes burned, and her voice crackled with anger. “No, you were not responsible! It was Big John Hammer staging his autobiography. He is the one who should suffer, not you. Never you. Stop blaming yourself now.”

For someone so diminutive, she spoke with great authority. “How do you see so clearly what I can’t?”

“You’re a huge tangle of emotions, and I’m Alexander the Great.”

He’d never thought of himself as a Gordian knot.

She pulled on her T-shirt and tightened the hat under her chin. “I’m going to go play in the ocean. Want to join me?”

By that he assumed they were done talking and he was to do what he’d been told—get over himself. “Aren’t you going to put on more clothes first?”

“There’s nobody around!”

“No, but...” He cast an eye up to the top of the cliffs.

She stood, leaned down and kissed him, a hard, enthusiastic kiss, and ran a few steps, then paused. “When you get your life figured out, come on. It’s fun!” She dashed toward the Pacific.

Somehow she’d managed to get sand all the way up her calf, up her thigh and onto her right butt cheek. Which was so cute he wanted to brush it off slowly and with great care. Using an artist’s brush. No, using his fingers.

That was not any way to relieve a surging erection.

Reluctantly he tugged on his underwear and shorts, buckled his belt and watched her.

She opened her arms and flung herself at the oncoming wave. It splashed around her in a joyous spray, engulfing her to the belly. She shrieked, ran backward away from the wild Pacific, shrieked again. She ran sideways, lifted a piece of driftwood out of the foam, threw it as hard as she could into the waves, then as the ocean brought it back, she chased after it.

He could hear her laughing.