“Yeah?” Her eyebrows rose in interest.
“Sure.” I started to walk with her but glared back at Mark, who was in a fit of laughter, and Cole was about to join in.
Dicks.
We headed up the path. I began to jog, and she seemed to easily keep up with my pace. I decided to take a harder trail just to test her endurance.
“So,” she hopped off a ledge where I figured she might ease down, “does your family live in Montana too?”
“Yeah.” I jumped over large split in the rock and turned to offer her a hand, but she dove straight across.
“Brother or a sister?”
“Yeah.” I barely heard her and moved onto a small ledge and inched across it. If I fell, it was only twenty feet down, but I wanted to see if she’d follow or just go around.
“Both parents still alive?” She slid her right foot onto the rock to test her balance.
“Yeah.” I watched once I got to the other side and couldn’t help but let my eyes roam over her tight pants. I was always respectful with women. My parents raised me well, but they hadn’t prepared me for Sloane’s tight little body all smothered in spandex.
She crossed, hopped off, and brushed her hands clean of rock dust.
“Are you always this forthcoming, or do I just bring out the one-word answers in you?”
I smirked and stared down at her, loving her in my element. Some of her hair had worked loose from her ponytail, and the dark color framed her intense blue eyes.
“Most women.” I stopped myself, curious as to why I even felt I should say anything. I closed my mouth and continued to climb.
“Have we graduated to two words now?” She chuckled behind me. “All right, then.”
I hated how much I enjoyed her banter, and the fact that she didn’t pry to know what I had been about to say made me almost want to elaborate. We slipped into quiet mode as we moved around the mountain. On the steep part, I turned around to help her, but she’d found her footing and jumped up next to me.
“You don’t have to look so surprised.” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.
I lifted a hand. “Sorry. I guess your heels threw me off.”
“Is that why you took me the hard way around the mountain?”
“Huh?”
“Abigail told me about the different routes.” Her hands went to her hips, and she lifted an eyebrow at me. “I know there are two other ways to get here.”
I pressed my lips together to hide my smile. She’d known and had never once mentioned it the hour we’d climbed. She was good.
“Are you testing me, Black?”
“Possibly.”
She nodded and looked down before she laughed. “Well, you’re going to have to try harder than that.”
“Seems that way.”
I turned and fell into a fast pace, and she followed in silence until we reached the top of the lowest peak.
“Wow,” she scanned the panoramic view, “miles and miles of wide-open space.” She closed her eyes and let the afternoon sun warm her face. “I can see why you like it here.”
“I don’t stop here,” I corrected her, really just wanting the opportunity to stare at her a little longer with her eyes closed.
“What do you mean?” She turned to look up at the wall of rock that rose another sixty or so feet and jutted outward. It was an intense climb and one I did at least once a week. “You climb that?”
“Yeah.” I nodded and pushed off where I was standing.
“That’s insane,” she huffed.
“Hence the reason I do it.” I grinned as I stepped toward her. I pushed down my usual wall. I deserved at least one moment of freedom from the hell I carried inside. “What do you like to do for fun?”
She let out a long sigh before she shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t normally have a lot of free time anymore.”
“But when you do?” I was pretty close now and enjoyed how much I towered over her. She was slim and tall, but I was taller. She tilted her head back to look into my eyes.
“I love to be outdoors, no phones, no computers, no TV, just unplugged.”
I nodded, extremely happy with her answer. I’d misjudged Sloane, thinking she was all city. Not that she would be happy in the country, but it was good to know she wasn’t an uptight-citified woman who couldn’t handle outdoor life.
“Why do you get to ask questions and I can’t?”
I shrugged. She was right, but I wasn’t good at opening up like she was.
“You owe me an answer.”
“One.”
“Okay.” She tapped her fingers against her pink lips. “Do you mind me being at Shadows?”
That threw me for a loop.
“Why would you ask me that?”
“Because you seem to get annoyed when I’m around. You’re one way with the family and another with me.”
I swallowed down the knot in my throat. “Reasons.” I shrugged.
“You promised me an answer, John.” She filled what little gap there was between us.
“Ask me another.”
“No, I want this one.”
“Pass.”
She suddenly smirked. “I never pegged you for a quitter.”
“I’m not a quitter.”
“Okay.” She went to turn, but I snagged her arm and whirled her back to me. Her chest rose, which drew my gaze to her cleavage. I shook my head clear and tried to think straight.
“There are things about you that make it hard for me to be around you. It’s not something I can discuss very easily.”
“Okay,” she whispered as her gaze dropped to my lips.
My pocket vibrated, and I pulled it free and slowly let go of Sloane. “Hello.”
“Son, you need to come home. We can’t get…” Screaming in the background made my stomach coil into a familiar hard knot.
“I’m on my way.”
And just like that, my reality came screaming back to me, and I felt myself pull in again.
“I need to leave,” I muttered to her and raced back toward the path.
“Is everything okay?”
“No.”
We made it down the mountain within thirty-five minutes. I jumped into my truck without saying a word to Sloane. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk; I just had bigger things on my mind. My world wasn’t meant to be shared with two.
I arrived at my parents’ house in just under an hour. Even from my truck, I could hear her screams. I rushed inside and found my sister with her hands over her ears, her mouth wide open, with tears streaming down her face.
“Oh, thank God!” my mother shouted.
“What happened?” I dropped to my knees and held my twin sister’s head between my hands.
“We were trying to get her in the car, and she just panicked.” My mother pleaded, “She has a doctor’s appointment, and now we’re going to be late. I-I just don’t know what to do anymore.”
I glanced at my father, who was in the hallway, his face expressionless. He looked checked-out, as he often did these days.
“Ellie,” I whispered. “Ellie, look at me.”
Her bloodshot eyes opened, and she finally registered me. “John?”