Chapter Four
Cliff
I SPLIT WOOD UNTIL my shoulders burned and then I split more.
The morning was cold, mist sitting low on the river, and I'd been out here since five with the axe and a pile of rounds that didn't need splitting for another month.
But my hands needed work, because the alternative was going back inside where Nell was drinking coffee at the dining table in my shirt, and my body had not stopped thinking about what had happened on that kitchen counter two days ago.
Two days. Forty-eight hours of acting normal while the memory of her legs wrapped around my hips and her mouth open on mine played on a loop I couldn't shut off.
We'd been polite. We'd eaten breakfast across from each other at the table and talked about the weather and her client presentation and whether the trail to the south ridge was passable yet.
The entire time I could feel the ghost of her fingers digging into my shoulders, hear the sound she'd made when I'd kissed her throat.
I'd had to leave the room twice to keep from touching her again.
I wasn't new to wanting. I'd wanted plenty of women.
Wanted them in bars and truck beds and the occasional motel room, and it had always been simple.
A pull, a yes, a morning where nobody pretended it meant more than it did.
What I hadn't had was this. The wanting that came with her laugh and the sugar by her coffee and the look she'd given me in the outpost with her back pressed against the doorframe and her knees going soft.
I'd seen it. I'd kept my hands on the rope because if I touched her in that room I wasn't going to stop.
The axe hit the round clean and the two halves kicked apart. I stacked them and grabbed another.
She hadn't mentioned the kiss. I hadn't mentioned the kiss. We'd developed a mutual agreement to pretend the kiss had not happened, which was working great except for the part where it was a lie and we both knew it and the cabin was eight hundred square feet.
I buried the axe in the stump and went inside.
She was at the table, laptop open, hair twisted up with a pen holding it.
My flannel was too big on her, the cuffs rolled, the collar showing the line of her throat.
She had her own clothes now. We'd made a Moose's run the week before, and she'd come back with trail shoes and layers and a jacket that actually fit.
But every morning she came out of the bedroom in my shirt. She looked up when the door opened.
"How much wood did you split?"
"Enough."
"For what? Winter?"
"Possibly." I poured coffee and leaned against the counter. The same counter. I put my mug down and moved to the stool instead.
She watched me move and I saw the corner of her mouth pull, just barely. She knew. Of course she knew. She was the smartest person I'd ever met and she'd figured out exactly why I was standing six feet from a surface I'd been leaning against for three years.
"I'm taking a client group on a half-day Thursday," I said. "You want to try rock climbing before that? Basic moves. Might help if Drew shows up again and wants another outing."
She closed her laptop. "How basic?"
"Bouldering. Low wall, crash pad underneath. Nothing that'll kill you."
"That's a low bar for recreation."
"It's the Cascades. That IS the bar."
I TOOK HER TO THE BOULDERING wall after lunch.
It was a natural rock face about ten minutes up the trail from the cabin, twelve feet high with good holds, and I'd set crash pads at the base.
She'd put on her new hiking shoes and a pair of dark leggings and a tank top, and her hair was pulled back tight.
When she looked up at the wall her jaw did that thing, the tightening she got when she was deciding whether to be afraid or competitive.
Competitive won. It always won with her.
"Hands here and here." I positioned her fingers on the first holds. "Grip with your fingertips, not your palms. Push with your legs. Your arms are for balance, not lifting."
She pulled herself up two feet and immediately tried to arm her way to the next hold.
"Legs."
"I'm using my legs."
"You're using your arms and your legs are just hanging there being decorative."
She shot me a look over her shoulder that would have made a weaker man apologize. I grinned. She turned back to the wall, planted her foot on a lower hold, and pushed up with her thigh. She gained a foot.
"Better."
"Don't patronize me."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
She slipped on the third move and dropped to the pad. Stood up, brushed her hands on her leggings, and went again. And again. By the fifth attempt she'd made it halfway up and her forearms were shaking and there was chalk dust on her cheekbone and she was breathing hard and grinning.
"I need you to move your right foot to the hold at two o'clock," I said from below.
"I don't see it."
"Trust me. It's there."
I reached up and put my hand on her calf, guiding her foot to the hold. My palm was on bare skin where her leggings had ridden up, and she went still. I could feel her pulse through her ankle.
"There," I said. My voice came out rougher than I'd meant.
She stepped up. Made the next hold. Her hips were at my eye level and I was looking at the wall, at the rock, at anything that wasn't the curve of her ass in those leggings three feet from my face.
I was a professional. I'd guided hundreds of clients up rock faces and kept my hands where they belonged.
My hands were not interested in where they belonged.
She made it two-thirds up before her left foot slipped and she dropped. I caught her. Instinct, arms coming up before I thought about it, and she landed against my chest, my palms on her waist, her back pressed to my front, both of us winded.
She didn't pull away. Neither did I.
"Nice catch," she said. Her voice was steady. Her pulse, where my thumb rested against her ribs, was not.
"Part of the job."
"Is it?"
I let go. Stepped back. "You want to go again?"
She went again. Three more times. Her hands were red and chalked. She'd scraped her knee on the rock. She didn't quit, and watching her refuse to give up on an activity she was terrible at hit me in a place I wouldn't examine on a Tuesday afternoon.
We walked back to the truck. The trail was narrow enough that our arms brushed, and when her foot caught a root I put my hand on her lower back without thinking and she leaned into it for half a second before straightening.
In the cab, the windows down, the afternoon light coming sideways through the trees, she turned to me.
"Thank you. For teaching me."
"You're a fast learner."
"I fell seven times."
"You got up eight."
She was quiet for a moment. The road wound down toward the cabin and the river got louder.
I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the bench seat between us, and I felt her little finger brush mine.
I didn't move. She didn't move. The touch was so light it could have been accidental, except nothing with Nell Chambers was accidental.
We sat on the porch steps at dusk. She had an ice pack on her scraped knee and I had a beer and the sky was going through its evening routine, gold to pink to purple above the ridge. The river was high and steady.
"Can I ask you a question?" she said.
"Depends."
"This place. The cabin, the trails, all of it." She gestured at the view. "What made you stay here?"
It was a simple question. Should have had a simple answer: the property was cheap, the location was good for guiding, the mountains were where I wanted to be. All true. All not the real answer.
"I got out of prison three years ago," I said.
The words landed in the quiet between us.
I hadn't planned on saying them. Hadn't planned on telling her any of it, not yet, not sitting here.
But her finger was warm against mine on the step and the light was soft and she'd fallen off a rock wall seven times today without complaining, and I just let go.
"Aggravated assault. Bar fight. I was protecting someone, but that doesn't look any different in a courtroom than the other kind." I took a drink. "Two years at Monroe. I got out, drove until the road ran out, and this is where it ran out."
She was quiet. Not the processing quiet I'd learned to read, where her brain was running calculations. Just quiet.
"I didn't have anything," I said. "No money, no job, no plan.
The cabin was a wreck. I rebuilt it because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.
And somewhere in the middle of putting up drywall and learning to cook salmon that didn't taste like punishment, I realized this was the first place I'd ever wanted to keep. "
I looked at the beer in my hand. "I don't know if I deserve it. The place. The life." I took another drink. "Most days I figure if I can get through the day without wrecking anything, that's close enough."
I'd said too much. I could feel the rawness sitting between us, exposed, and the urge to walk it back was already rising.
"Anyway." I finished the beer. "I split wood I don't need and I rebuilt a cabin. That's the whole story."
She didn't try to fix it. Didn't analyze it or reassure me or tell me I was a good person. She turned her hand over on the step and laced her fingers through mine, and we sat there while the sky finished its show and the first stars came through.
Her hand was small in mine. I held it and didn't say anything else, and the silence was the kind that doesn't need filling.
IT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.