“Oh yeah? What do you want to do to me?”
He tried not to smile, but it was impossible. He could feel the corner of his lips turning up as she looked at him.
“I think you can guess.” It was everything he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since she left his hotel room that night. But somehow it was more fun not to say it. To leave her knowing and not knowing every filthy thought that was churning through his mind.
And his body.
Especially when she picked up the harness.
“On second thought, maybe this is too dangerous,” he said with a groan.
She hooked the harness over one finger, letting it dangle in front of her. “Don’t tell me you’re all talk.”
He snatched it from her hands.
Focus.
He showed her how to step into it and then slid it up her legs. It had sure as hell never been this distracting to outfit anyone else for the first time. His fingers lingered against the line of skin where her T-shirt lifted up from her leggings. He couldn’t help brushing the curve of her ass as he unnecessarily quadruple-checked that the harness was secure around her hips.
“I think it’s tight,” she said, marching her fingers up his chest.
“Oh, it’s very tight,” he said, unable to conceal his groan.
“Is that how you want it?” she murmured, her playfulness making her all the more seductive as she pretended she didn’t know exactly what she was doing to him.
“You know what I want.”
“To put me completely at your mercy while I cling to the face of a rock and bawl my eyes out?”
“You got the first part right.” He kissed her nose. “The second part needs a little work.”
When he put his own harness on, there was no hiding how he felt about her being “at his mercy.” Dudes in harnesses always created an…interesting situation. Getting into a harness with a hard-on was ten times worse. Not only was he standing at attention, but the harness wrapped around his thighs and made his shorts bunch, exaggerating the effect.
Claire eyed him appraisingly. “I see why you like this sport.”
“It’s not usually like this,” he said.
“It’s not usually that big?” she asked, eyes wide.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether you’re around.”
“Lucky for you I’m right here.” She grazed the straining head of his cock through his shorts. He thought she was going to go for it—he desperately wanted her to go for it—but just as quickly she pulled away, letting him know it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“Are we doing this or what?” she asked lightly, one eyebrow arched, reminding him that it had been his idea to come here instead of spending all day in his king-size hotel bed.
Because they were supposed to be talking about their kid. He was supposed to be showing Claire he was trustworthy. Responsible. Different.
He took deep breaths and tried to think of his grandmother, his tax returns, the time he’d gotten tangled up in his rope as he was climbing so that when he fell, he did a somersault in the air and cracked his helmet against the rock.
Not that he was going to tell Claire about that. She didn’t need to be any more worried than she already was. But it helped make him able to form sentences again.
“You’re not nervous, are you?” he asked, reaching for the ropes.
“That you’re going to kill me? I seriously can’t wait.”
He laughed. “I promise, I’ll have you the whole time.”
She folded her arms. Maybe that wasn’t the best selling point. He tried again.
“I’m completely trained and certified. I actually do know what I’m doing.”
She looked surprised. “You’ve been busy.”
“Not really,” he said. “Rehab. Getting seriously into climbing. Finally releasing one album in the last five years.” He checked the items off on his fingers, then wiggled the three of them.
Claire grabbed his hand to fold his fingers down.
“You’re too hard on yourself,” she said softly, then seemed to realize they were veering into uncharted territory and let his hand go.
He didn’t want her to. He wanted to lay her down on the soft earth, yank off those fucking cute leggings hugging her ass, and make her come again on his tongue.
But no matter how she’d teased him, he sensed they weren’t quite there yet. He didn’t know what she really wanted. Maybe she thought the night at the hotel was a fluke, a one-time deal—a bit of nostalgia she might wake up to regret. She could have gone for him as soon as she saw how hard he was, but she’d held back.
And holding back was exactly what he didn’t want her to do. Because he wanted her. Again. Whether it was responsible or not.
He looked at her, almost ready to say something else—what it meant to him that she was giving him this chance.
But he didn’t know how to express it, how to turn the feeling in his chest into words he could say.
So instead he looked up at the cliff and asked if she was ready.
“I already told you,” she said. “No.”
He grinned. “But you’ll do it.”
“I don’t know why.”
“I do,” he said and wanted to laugh when she looked at him like she was actually surprised.
“You’ll do it for me,” he said. And she may have denied it up and down, but when she looked up at the rock and took a breath, he knew deep in his gut that it was true.
He only hoped that he could earn it. That she wouldn’t come to regret her faith in him the way she had before.
Chapter Thirteen
Claire looked up at the rock and tried to stop her head from spinning. This was insane. Even more than that, this was so not who she was.
It was reckless. Dangerous. She had no training, no experience, had never even climbed on one of those indoor gyms with the carefully arranged, obvious, and totally secure hand and footholds.
And now she was in the middle of the woods with someone she hadn’t seen in half a decade, someone she barely knew anymore, and she was literally putting her life in his hands when he’d strapped that elaborate rope set-up into a harness that hugged her thighs so snugly it brought a blush to her face.
Although not as much of a blush as when he’d put on his own and revealed exactly how he felt about being out in the woods with her.
Stop it, she told herself sternly. She couldn’t forget that Ryan was trying to kill her, even if her imminent death was promising to make her very, very wet in the contraption he’d wrapped her in.
Note to self: this man knows how to tie knots.
And brace her steady.
And make her shiver with nothing more than a glance, or the slightest touch to her hips, her thighs.
Oh, God. None of her friends knew where she was. Maya was happily sitting on some alphabet square during reading time, trusting Claire to pick her up at the end of the day as usual, having no idea her mom was right now being completely rash and irresponsible, putting her life at risk with a man she’d deny up and down to knowing if Maya dared to so much as ask.
“You’re not going to die,” Ryan reassured her, as though he could hear the spiraling panic of her thoughts.
“You don’t need to act like this is so funny,” she said.
“Not even a little?”
She stuck out her tongue. Real mature, but she’d learned a few things from hanging around so many kindergarteners. Namely, how to get the point across when you suspected you were beat.
He had an enormous number of carabiners and other contraptions weighing down his harness, and lengths and lengths of rope. When he was finally ready, he called her over and pointed out the route they were going to take. Claire’s contribution was mainly to reiterate that he was crazy, but she affirmed that she got it when he asked about ten million times if she knew what to do.
He was going to climb up first, putting in the anchors that would secure t
hem if either of them fell. She’d belay him on the way up, supporting him with her body weight. Then when he got to the top, he’d do the same for her.
“You’ll always be strapped in to me,” he assured her. “I won’t let you go anywhere.”
The two of them connected to the same rope, their bodies balancing each other, keeping them safe. I can’t, Claire wanted to say.
But the words stuck in her throat.
He took his time starting the climb, and she got to watch him move. He read the rock with his fingertips, feeling for the precise places to lay each anchor, pulling it securely until it was taut. He planned each move so carefully, deciding where a hand should go, a leg, pushing off against the rock, using his muscles to propel himself up.
He was connected to her, too, and when he called for her to lean her body into the rope and eased his weight down so he was sitting in the harness, she could feel how secure he was, suspended by the way she held him there.
The rope strained in her hands. The power was terrifying. If she messed up, he’d plummet. He could slam into the rock. Into the ground. She could seriously hurt him.
She could kill him.
She gripped the rope tighter until, looking down, he told her not to.
“You get the force from your body,” he told her. “Your hands won’t stop the rope. If I fall, the rope could tear right through your hands and hurt you.”
He was the one suspended twenty feet in the air. But all he was worried about was her?
She couldn’t wrap her head around it. She leaned back like he said, and because nothing bad happened, she had to accept that he wasn’t going anywhere as long as she held him and remembered to breathe.
Ryan trusted her.
She’d left him when he hadn’t known why.
But he trusted her all the same.
She sensed this was a pretty straightforward route for him. He made it up faster than she would have guessed, making it look easy. Not quite effortless—not with the way she saw his muscles strain in his shoulders, his back, his thighs. The way his calves tightened as he pushed off from the rock and lifted himself up another inch, another foot, and finally propelled himself over the top.
But it wasn’t easy. Not one fucking bit.
She knew it as soon as he got to the top, reset the ropes, and told her to get started.
She wanted to tell him the joking was over. The pure, naked truth was that she couldn’t do this. They may have had fun together, but it wasn’t real. It didn’t actually mean anything. He needed to climb down this instant so she could head back to her home and her life, keeping both feet safe and secure just as she’d said.
But then she looked up at him, leaning over the edge of the rock high above her, and suddenly she didn’t want to give up. When would she ever be back here with her own private rock climbing lesson, a chance to see all the beauty that was practically in her backyard? She was so busy she hardly ever had a chance to get out and enjoy the mountains where she lived. Wasn’t this her chance?
It wasn’t like agreeing to this was actually going to change her life. It was just a day. Just a few hours of something completely out of character before she returned to her usual self.
So, she raised her arms and found a crack of rock to hold on to. Raised her foot to a ledge, took a deep breath, and pushed off.
His voice guided her, telling her where to put her hands and then her feet as she made her first tentative moves.
Her muscles protested. Her stomach clenched. Maybe this was high enough. She’d proven herself. Could she get down now?
But when she looked over her shoulder, she saw she wasn’t anywhere near as high as she thought. Maya climbed higher alone on a jungle gym, and Claire didn’t bat an eye. Was this really all she could handle?
She took a deep breath and faced the rock again. No more thinking. Thinking slowed her down, distracted her from the guiding sound of Ryan’s voice. Thinking made her muscles object, demanding she let herself down and stop this charade.
While Ryan’s voice, his promises, the memory of his body made her keep going.
She reached the first anchor he’d set. There was a clear crack in the rock and it gave her something solid to hold on to. She was grateful for what her fingers could do, for the strength she already had in her arms and her hands from massage.
Her legs were another story. Where was she supposed to put her foot? The shoes had a rubber role that Ryan claimed was supposed to feel sticky and keep her on the rock, but it sure as hell didn’t feel like that on some “ledge” that was more like a half centimeter of roughness on the rock surface. And he wanted her to put her weight there?
Now she was too high up to simply jump back down, and the first true fear spread through her. Not nervousness, not apprehension, but genuine terror that she was stuck there, too afraid to keep going but too far gone to turn back.
“I can’t do it, Ryan,” she called up to him, her voice breaking.
She was trying. Surely he’d give her credit for that. But he was going to have to belay her down. She’d meet him back at the base of the cliff, both of her feet planted on the soft moss of the forest floor.
She’d make it up to him. She’d ensure he didn’t regret taking her out. An “I’m sorry” blow job at the bottom would more than compensate for her failure to be everything he wanted from her on this day. She could do that. It wasn’t like she would mind.
Then she imagined Maya at sixteen, seventeen, Maya at twenty-one out in the woods with some boyfriend, thinking to herself, “I’ll just give him a blow job and he’ll forgive me,” and she wanted to throw up in her mouth.
That wasn’t even what Ryan was asking for. His voice was patient, calm, still coaxing her to put her foot on that nub he claimed was a ledge. He sounded like he could hang out there all day, like he wouldn’t budge from his place on top of the rock for however long it took her to find her strength.
“You can do this,” he said. “You just have to trust me.”
“I’m scared,” she admitted. About the rock. About what he was asking of her.
Trust me.
What if she couldn’t?
What if she’d made that mistake before…and promised herself it would never happen again? That she would never rely on anyone anymore. That was why she had her own practice, even though it would have been cheaper to pool resources with other therapists. That was why she was raising Maya on her own, even though living in Seattle would have made it easier for her parents to help. Trust? That was for people who didn’t know any better. Claire may not have been perfect, but she’d learned how to live on her own.
“Let go of the wall and lean back,” Ryan said.
“What?”
“Let go,” he repeated. “Let yourself sit in the harness, just like you’re sitting in a chair.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s no chair up here.”
“You have the harness for a reason. Let it work for you. I promise I’m not going to let a damn thing happen to you.”
His voice was so forceful, so certain. He had to be lying to her—he couldn’t hold her!
But she wanted to believe him. She was out here in the wilderness, dangling by a rope, and he was right. She’d have nothing if she didn’t trust him now.
Tentatively she inched her body weight back, imagining herself sinking into a chair. A magical, floating chair whose total absence she didn’t want to think about too much.
But it worked.
Somehow, it was just as he said—just as he’d done when he was the one up here and she was holding the rope below. The harness angled in such a way that she really was sitting, hanging out halfway up a freaking rock cliff like she had all the time in the world.
She laughed out loud, relief making her dizzy. Or maybe that was the oxygen rushing through her now that she was giving her muscles a much-needed break.
“Pretty cool, isn’t it?” he called.
“You’re holding me up?” she asked.<
br />
“The ropes are,” he said. “I’m just the anchor.”
He was.
He was her anchor.
Oh, God. It made her head swim.
She kicked lightly against the rock, pushing herself back just a little. Trying it out.
“Do you feel safe?” he asked.
She squinted up at him, using her palm to shield her eyes from the sun.
“No,” she said with a laugh.
She may not have been able to see him clearly, but she could guess how his eyes were crinkling, that flash of blue through the gray when he smiled.
“Be honest,” he chided.
“No,” she repeated. But then, “My brain says no.” She kicked off the rock again, feeling the harness cradle her. “But the evidence says otherwise.”
“Trust the evidence, then.”
“Are you telling me my brain is unreliable?”
He gave a gentle tug on the rope—not enough to scare her. Just enough to let her know he was there.
“Believe what you see. What you feel. What you know is real, even if it goes against everything you once thought was true.”
Claire swallowed. Okay, this was getting heavy. She could guess that she was getting heavy, although he acted like he could stand there supporting her all day. She brought her hands back to the rock, found a foothold, and shifted her weight forward again. Before she realized what she was doing, her toe was balancing on the edge Ryan had been telling her to stand on, and her muscles were pushing her up.
Screaming at her, obviously. Telling her this was insane, and what was she climbing toward, anyway?
But she had to find out. Nothing could make her turn back now. Not even the certainty that whatever was happening between her and Ryan was even more dangerous than scaling a cliff and would hurt a heck of a lot more if she fell.
Chapter Fourteen
Claire pitched herself over the top of the rock and lay panting at his feet. Her legs were trembling, her face was sweaty, and she was spewing a string of expletives he’d never heard come out of her mouth. But it was worth any amount of groveling he’d have to do to Eddie and the guys from Little White Lie to see the smile lighting up her face.
Make Me Yours (Men of Gold Mountain) Page 8