“Jodie.”
“Okay, no.”
He started down the trail, sure-footed and utterly unbothered by the fact that he was carrying a full-grown woman. She felt his chest move when he breathed.
Stop noticing that.
“How did you end up on the trail?” she asked, because talking was better than the alternative, which was noticing things she shouldn’t.
“Day off. This is my favorite trail. No one ever comes up here.” He glanced at her. “How did you end up on the ground?”
“My date left me here.”
Mac stopped walking.
He looked at her.
“He went to get help,” she added. “And he took my backpack with him so that I didn’t have to carry it.”
“With all your gear?”
“And my phone.”
The look on Mac’s face suggested he had thoughts about that which he was choosing not to share. He started walking again.
“So he alpine-divorced you, eh?”
“He what now?”
“It’s when a guy takes his wife or girlfriend he wants to get rid of up a mountain, pushes her off or leaves her there to die, and calls it an accident. There was a famous case where some guy did it in the Alps so that’s how it got its name. Alpine divorce.”
Wow. Mac ispissed.
“Dale didn’t push me. And he’s not my boyfriend. This was our first date. Stephanie set us up.”
The corner of Mac’s mouth turned up. Of course it would—Stephanie made everybody laugh.
“It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to me this week,” Jodie offered.
“No? Then you’ve had a really crappy week.”
“Shitty.”
“That’s what I said. Crappy.”
So the rumors were true—Mac absolutelyrefusedto swear in front of a woman.
“Yeah, I really could have used you last Saturday,” she told him. “Where were you?”
“Probably doing something completely pointless that I would abandon immediately to know what happened to you that was worse than this.”
This isn’t so bad right now.
“Okay. Last weekend I was cleaning out my shed and I gave away my dad’s rototiller.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad yet.”
“Yet. I put an ad online and I got a response. The guy said he’d swing by to pick it up Saturday morning. My definition of morning is sometime before noon, but apparently his is three o’clock.”
