Filed To Story: The Things We Leave Unfinished Novel Free
Stop looking at her fucking hips.
“What are you afraid of?” I turned my Mets cap backward and shoved my glasses to the top of my head.
“Falling off the mountain!” She pointed to the rock face. “It’s a pretty realistic fear when you think about climbing it.”
“Think of it as vertical hiking.” I shrugged.
“Unreal.” She jabbed her finger in my direction.
“I was only kidding about the life insurance comment. I won’t let you fall.” Ever. She’d already been let down too many times.
She scoffed. “Okay. Right. And how exactly are you going to prevent it?” She lifted her eyebrows.
“I’ll be your belay partner and control the rope in case you fall. See, we put the harness on-“
“Why the hell do you even have an extra harness? Do you just fly around the United States, hoping to pick up women climbers?” She folded her arms across her chest.
“No.” Though I couldn’t help but wonder if that thought was spurring her on or not. Sure, it made me an ass, but the thought of Georgia getting all worked up out of jealousy was pretty fucking hot. “It’s my extra harness in case mine breaks. I like to climb, therefore, I bring my equipment when I’m going somewhere with mountains…you know, like Colorado.”
“How did you even know about this place, anyway?” she asked, still downright hostile.
“I found it the last time I was here.”
She tilted her head.
“During the days I was waiting for you to decide if I was good enough to-“
“You promised!” And the finger was back again.
I pressed my lips in a tight line and breathed in through my nose for a count of three. “Georgia, I’m not going to force you up that rock face-“
“As if you could.”
“-but I am promising that if you choose to climb, I will not let you fall off the mountain.” I lowered my face to hers, making sure she knew I was serious.
My best friend thinks I should jump you. My brain was pretty much a broken record after hearing that.
“Because you control gravity?” She blinked.
I had never met a more frustrating woman in my life.
“Because I’m going to-“
She lifted that brow again.
I sighed. “If you wanted to climb, I would go first and hook the rope up. I scouted it the first time I was here.”
Her brows lowered. “And what would keep you from falling off?”
I swung the backpack from my shoulders and shook it lightly. “I’d clip in. We’re not talking about Yosemite here. It’s pretty well-traveled. Then as you climbed, I’d have you on belay, so if you did slip off, you’d just hang there dangling until you found your footing.”
Her jaw dropped. “You what?”
I lifted the backpack slightly. “You would be attached to one end of the rope, and I would have the other.”
She drew back.
“You’d be safe,” I promised.
She shook her head, her mouth tightening.
A thought dawned on me. “Georgia, if you don’t want to climb because you’re scared of heights, or you don’t want to scrape up your hands, or you just flat don’t want to, that’s fine.”
“I know that.” Her eyes said she hadn’t known that. What? Like I was going to shove her up the mountain while she begged me not to?
“Right.” My chest ached. “But if you don’t want to climb because you think I’ll drop you, then that’s a whole other matter. I promise you that I will not drop you.” I kept my voice even and low, hoping she’d hear the truth in my words. “I’m really good at this.”
She swallowed, then glanced at the bag. “I barely know you.”
“See? More articles your best friend missed out on. You can run a google search on my climbing history if we’ve got service up here. It’s pretty well documented that I’m an avid climber, and I don’t just mean the easy stuff.”
Her forehead puckered. “I never said you weren’t.”
My stomach lurched. “So it’s not my skill level you’re worried about,” I said slowly.
She averted her gaze and shifted her weight. “You could be a serial killer,” she suggested, sarcasm dripping from her tone as she lifted her hands.
Deflecting. She uses humor to deflect.
“I’m not.”
“You kill off a lot of people in your books. Just saying.” She looked up the rock face, tilting her head back.
“Not through homicide, and now who’s talking about books?”
A smile tugged at her lips.
“Besides, there are three other climbers right there.” I pointed to a group midway up the face. “Pretty sure they’d rat me out if I murdered you in broad daylight.”
She stared at the other climbers silently.
“You’re not going to climb, are you?” I asked quietly.
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.