Chapter Seven
Aaron
My shoulders relaxed despite my heavy pack. I was so used to being on alert in the backcountry that it had taken my brain and body a minute to catch up. Or maybe I had been worrying too much about Skye.
She had kept her cool when her little frat boy made a run for it. Knowing she could handle herself, even with something as odd as a cat running off, gave something in my brain permission to calm down. To shut off that ‘only I can fix this’ part of who I was.
I could actually look around and maybe feel like I was on vacation.
The trail we were on was a loop, but it had a spot that overlooked the valley at the halfway point. We stopped for another break. “Do not let that menace out of his straitjacket,” I said, easing off my pack.
The menace in question was sleeping in his baby carrier with his head turned upside down.
The dead cricket was tucked under one of his ears.
“It’s a harness, not a straitjacket, but yes, lesson learned.
” She sat on a log and looked out at the view, and despite that it was a tight squeeze, I sat down beside her.
My elbow brushed her bare upper arm as I sat, and a tingle of awareness went down my spine.
Dammit.
I really did not need to have the hots for this girl. Her being Cliff’s sister was enough that she should be off my radar. Unfortunately, my radar had decided she was the only thing worth tracking.
I found the little sunburn on her nose endlessly fascinating. Not to mention, her unique brand of organized chaos. The way we were so different, yet still enjoyed our time together.
My thigh pressed against hers as we took in the scene in front of us. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I nodded. It was a deep, expansive valley of evergreen trees.
There was an area off to the left that’d had a wildfire a few years back, so the landscape was marred with black snags, but greenery was growing around it.
“Do you need to take some pictures or something for your article?” I asked her to distract me from how good her leg felt against mine.
“I like to enjoy it for a few minutes before I shift gears and see it as a subject for a photo, appreciate the view, you know?”
Social media was so surface level that the depth of what she said hit me hard.
When I was in a new place in the bush, all I did was scan for hazards.
Rocks, roots, drop-offs, creeks, steep sections.
Not to mention the weather and wildfire risks.
My buddy, Jasper, from the SAR had ended up stuck on a mountain in Colorado for a while during a wedding scavenger hunt, of all things, a few weeks ago.
Safety never took a break.
I’d laughed at him, but he’d walked out of it with a new girlfriend, Wren. She was a wildfire fighter who he was willing to lay it all on the line for.
It was rare that I ever took a step back and enjoyed what surrounded me. I guess I could learn something from Skye.
“Thanks for being my guide,” she said, her eyes still glued to the scene in front of us. She reached over and took my hand in hers, squeezing it once before she let it go.
My big, stupid heart gave a hard thump in my chest.
It wasn’t the organ that had reacted when I’d seen her in her little bikini yesterday. That one had been a big enough problem.
This…this was a pending disaster.
I didn’t need to see past her shell of chaos and disorder. I didn’t need to think about how well the two of us balanced each other. I didn’t need the reasons to keep my distance falling apart, one by one.
“Here, give me the menace, you do your thing,” I said, standing to put space between us.
Skye looked up at me for a long moment before she carefully extracted Kyle from his carrier and handed him over.
I had expected Kyle to keep sleeping, but clearly I didn’t know cats.
He perked right up and rather than stay in my arms, he climbed my chest until he was perched on my shoulder like a goddamn parrot.
“What the hell is your cat doing?” I asked.
Skye glanced up from where she was checking settings on her camera and burst out laughing. That deep body laugh brought a smile to my face. She brought the camera to her eye and snapped a quick picture. “He seems to think your primary purpose is to make him taller.”
“So he sees me as furniture, great,” I muttered as his tail whipped me in the face.
Kyle moved his front paws to the top of my head, his back ones on my shoulder. He made a weird chattering sound like a pint-sized velociraptor. “This cat is defective.”
“He’s hunting,” Skye said, snapping another picture of us before turning back to the mountains.
“So that sound is supposed to be intimidating to an eagle?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t say he was a good hunter. Big ego, I suppose.”
“Sounds like a few hunters I’ve rescued from the backcountry over the years…hikers too, for that matter.”
“I can imagine,” she said. “I’ve found a few people in my travels myself.”
She changed her focus and started taking close-up pictures of individual plants at the lookout…then another of Kyle and me.
“Kyle and I aren’t going to be the focus of this article, are we?”
She laughed. “If I use them, I’ll block your face out. But I think these are just for me.”
Again my chest tightened in a way I didn’t like.