CHAPTER FIVE
CORA
I waited exactly three minutes before I followed Bode outside his home. Take all the time you need was a frame of reference statement, and mine expired with the dregs of my second cup of black coffee.
Mind, I needed that coffee just to stay awake. Negotiating with a block of granite—essentially my job for the day as Bode could be defined as unyielding, unfathomable and fixed point all at once.
When Bode left the house, he turned a sharp right.
Somehow, I suspected that he thought I wouldn’t find the thin track well-worn deep into the mountainside, its entrance hidden beneath a stand of Rocky Mountain Juniper clustered tightly together.
He’d snapped a few wayward twigs on his way through, leaving the path clear to me.
I sidled between the damaged branches, the sharp cedar-like notes blooming in the crisp air.
I swear this man is a mountain personified.
Shaking the thought away I pushed between the shrubby trees, careful not to dislodge a few older bird’s nests higher up, waiting on their owners’ to return next season, maybe.
I could imagine what Bode’s home must be like in springtime, teeming with life.
Newborns, chirping birds. Maybe a few fawns.
Smiling at the image of the enormous mountain man surrounded by wildlife like a mountain version of Snow White, I made my way along the narrow track cut into the side of the granite, hugging the rock face as best I could.
Bode might be used to the instant-death drop on one side, but the idea of plummeting to my fate, albeit a stunning one, wasn’t in my book for today.
A chill wind brushed my bare shoulders. Gooseflesh erupted over my skin beneath my singlet as I continued into the shadows.
How Bode made it down the ledge-like path without falling off the edge of the world, I had no idea.
The air chilled as I made my way downward, winding across the steep rock face that curved inward.
A rushing sound reached me. I wrapped my arms tighter around myself as the granite track thankfully widened out.
Without the constant threat of imminent death from slippage as my fate, I continued on at a slightly faster pace.
Another curve, and I swore I'd stare at the inside of the mountain. Instead, I discovered the rushing sound. It wasn’t wind, like I’d thought, but I had found the source of what chilled the air, apart from the breeze rushing through the valley to batter the rock face.
Water droplets splashed me, hanging suspended in the semi-saturated air as I stared into the great cavern partially lit with sunlight that filtered through from a great cathedral ceiling high above.
Almost as high, I guessed, as the base of Bode’s house.
And at the bottom of the cavern sat a pool, though the water wasn’t still.
A tall waterfall disturbed its serenity, and beneath its tumbling, endless spray stood the man I sought.
Bode’s back faced me, his chin upturned beneath the force of the unyielding element, almost as unforgiving as the man himself.
“This is where you hide,” I whispered to myself, unable to take my eyes off the naked back presented to me.
Where Bode took himself away from the world when even exposure on the mountain's stark face grew too much.
And then I knew that before, I hadn't been wrong, but I was now. If exploring Bode’s house had been an invasion of his privacy, then this was something else altogether. “I shouldn't be here.”
I retreated a step, my feet skittering on the path in my haste.
Bode, with his sense of impossibility attuned to everything in this place as remote and unattainable and as forsaken as the mountain man himself, turned beneath the water’s force. His eyes opened as he stared up at me, unflinching, almost as though he had expected me to be here.
Which was impossible, a second time over, as I hadn’t known I'd be here myself. Or had I always known I’d follow him? My feet retreated another step before I could think the motion through.
Bode raised a hand, curling his fingers inward.
Come here.
He didn’t repeat the gesture before he lowered his hand, still standing beneath the water. Those fathomless eyes closed, leaving me alone on the ledge.
Letting me make my own decisions.
I stood, watching him. Water sluiced over heavy arms and a thick torso rippled with more muscle than I knew what to do with.
Out here, all that was hard earned and I had no doubt that every part of him was much needed for pure survival.
Except maybe that smattering of dark hair across his chest that wound in a fine trail much lower.
The water obscured everything below in a haze of white.
Without opening his eyes, Bode stepped forward, out of the spray, as though knowing I needed to continue my perusal of him.
And …There was a reason this man stayed within the mountains. Because mere mortal men could not stand up next to him.
Shame on them.
Thick thighs were the perfectly proportioned home for the length that hung between them. Bode could walk for days without stopping for the look of him and what he could do with other parts…
I rolled my lips inward, willing the insta-fantasies back, then decided not to bother.
Because my feet took those next steps forward on their own.
What a liar I am. I took those steps consciously.
As long as that trek down his mountainside had seemed from his home to the ledge and to here, the next took no time at all.
I stood before him in my filthy, three day old clothes drenched with the residual spray where Bode had emerged from the water to meet me.
He still appeared as some sort of archaic mountain god drawn from an unknown realm, drifting toward his chosen mortal.
How fanciful could I possibly be?
But this was the man who drew wildlife and flora from literal gemstones, extracting their faces from perfect stones themselves. And now he stood before me, rivulets of pristine mountain water running over musculature that appeared as though he, too, had been carved from the earth’s stone.
The way he called to me, curling his fingers… I shivered. My body’s response had nothing to do with the plummeting temperature in the caves, away from the few shafts of sunlight that filtered in from above, though that same pale warmth didn't make it to where he stood beneath the water’s fall.
“I shouldn’t have come down here.” My apology tumbled from my lips, the first thought that fell out of my mouth the moment I opened it.
“Yet here you are.” Bode watched me through heavy eyes. His shoulders were more relaxed than they had been in the cabin above us.
“I followed you.” All the unnecessary words I uttered, my pithy volume stripped away by the cacophony that surrounded us.
He didn't seem bothered by the constant white noise that I couldn't block out. Those same damned fingers raised, curling inwards.
“What? No.” I wrapped my hands around my midsection in a one person hug, getting the joke.
His sense of humor was as wacky as my own.
He’d finally turned the tables on me. Up at the surface level, in his living area, he’d been the one saying no.
How neatly Bode Hunter had reversed our positions.
Still, I had my own objections to this situation.
“I’m not suicidal, thank you. It’s freezing. ”
Bode’s expression never changed, but I swore his lips flickered in the faintest semblance of a smile before he sank back beneath the wall of water, the constant spray obscuring him from sight.
“Bode?” I stared at him, or where he had been, nonplussed. Was he coming back out? Was I supposed to leave? His invitation only seemed to extend so far, and my feet were already wet.
This is insane. I just met this man.
But he was everything that seemed perfect about this place. I had walked for three days through mountains and rain storms to meet Bode Hunter. What the hell was the point of being here if I didn’t understand the real man who made such stunning art if I turned down an opportunity like this?
Yeah, because that's the real reason you want to go waterfall swimming with a man you just met who tried to kick you out of his house but couldn’t because you were too stubborn about a job you obsess over.
Not that any of that mattered right now.
My decision made for me, I stepped through the veil of water, and into his world.