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He looked at her appraisingly, but he didn’t say he couldn’t do it. ‘You’ll need hiking gear.’
‘I have sandals and jeans. And I’m prepared to make do.’
* * *
Two hours and one breathtakingly steep hike later, Ana sat at the edge of the world and watched falcons soar. She was huffing and red-cheeked on account of the thin mountain air, half her hair had slipped its ponytail and was wrapped around her face and her calf muscles would never be the same again, but it was worth it.
Because Casimir was smiling.
She flopped back against one of the huge torch fire supports, closed her eyes and let her breathing return to regular. A royal helicopter sat on a cleared patch of even ground almost a hundred metres below them, and they’d scrambled the last hundred metres to the watch tower. Well, to be fair, Cas had traversed it with the agility of a mountain goat and Ana had scrambled alongside him until at last he’d held out his hand to her. The last part of the climb had been the steepest bit and also the easiest because of that strong, steadying hand with the blunt nails and the coiled strength behind it.
When they’d reached the top and he’d let her go, she’d felt the loss of his touch more than she cared to admit.
Eyes still closed, she scraped her hair back with her fingers and redid her ponytail. When she opened her eyes again she caught Casimir’s gaze.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Maybe that might have gone a little better with hiking gear.’ But they were alone; Casimir’s security team had already been up here and pronounced the area clear and then disappeared into the ether. Cas had then flown her up here, just the two of them, because of course he could fly a helicopter just as well as any pilot could—all-weather jacket, aviator glasses, khaki trousers and hiking boots included. ‘So where are we?’
‘Falconer’s Pass,’ he said. ‘Named for obvious reasons. It’s a World Heritage area. Plenty of endangered bird species here. And the watch towers.’ He pointed behind her, towards the other end of the pass. ‘There’s one over there. And there’s one up there, on the ridge of that mountain. See it?’
She followed his gaze, shaded her eyes from the sun and nodded, before moving forward and choosing a big broad rock to sit on, close to the edge of the cliff. She wasn’t living dangerously on the edge, even if it felt like it, as she sat and drank in the view. ‘Do you need pie? I need pie. I deserve pie.’
So he slid the pack from his back and sat beside her and spread Lor’s picnic offerings on the rock. He withdrew a slim leather-bound book from the backpack as well and set it to one side of the food.
‘You brought a book?’ Ana paused in the act of stuffing her mouth full of meat-filled pastry, not the slightest bit less tasty for not being warm.
‘It’s about a hero called Pechorin,’ he said and handed it to her. ‘I want to hear it in Russian.’
‘But the book is in English.’ She checked a page of it with the flick of her fingers. ‘And you don’t speak Russian.’
‘Never stopped you before,’ he murmured. ‘Listening to you translate is very peaceful, for some reason. Except when you get bored and start inserting random commentary in Lithuanian. Which I understand.’
‘Hnh.’ No point speaking with her mouth full so she waited until it wasn’t. ‘So what’s so good about this story?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never read it.’ He picked up a pie and ate it with far more appetite than she’d seen him display at the lunch table.
‘Lunch wasn’t so long ago,’ she said with the lift of a teasing brow.
‘Lunch was extremely stressful,’ he countered. ‘It’s entirely possible I ate less than our daughter did. And she ate one tomato.’
‘And a green bean,’ Ana informed him. ‘Sophia snacks in Lor’s kitchen—possibly in much the same fashion you do.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Thank you for spending time with her today,’ Ana said next. ‘She’s very curious about you. You’re a remote and romantic figure for her at the moment.’
He looked out over the valley below them and frowned. ‘That’s not…right. That’s not who I want to be in her eyes.’
