“I trust you.”
She says it like she means the cliff. I hear it like something else. Something I want and have no business wanting. I turn away and start toward the rocks before I do something stupid, like touch her again just because she’s close enough.
Behind me, Layla follows.
We’re approaching the edge -- the point where people risk everything for the feeling of exhilaration, or the edge they approach and shy away from.
Which one will Layla be?
Chapter 3
Layla
My first thought is that the safe ledge does not look safe. My second is that Hudson’s definition of safe and mine were clearly raised in different households -- possibly on different planets. I stand on a flat shelf of sun-warmed rock above a deep blue-green cove, staring down at water that looks entirely too far away, while Hudson crouches near the edge like gravity signed a personal agreement not to inconvenience him.
“This is the safe one?” I ask.
He glances back at me over one broad shoulder. “Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
His mouth twitches. “Wouldn’t have brought you here if I wasn’t.”
Hudson stands, and my attention does exactly what it has been doing all morning. It goes where it absolutely should not. To his shoulders. His chest. His dark hair, slightly damp at the ends like some kind of wilderness calendar model.
The worst part is his eyes. Blue should not be allowed to look that direct. Blue should be gentle, like a soft spring sky. Hudson’s blue is not gentle. It is mountain water over stone -- clear, deep, and cold enough to wake every nerve in my body.
He steps closer, and I remember I am supposed to be afraid of the cliff, not him. Although honestly, the cliff might be the safer option.
“Come here,” he says.
I look at him, then at the ledge.
“That phrase has gotten a lot of women into trouble, hasn’t it?”
His eyebrow lifts. Heat crawls up my neck. I did not mean to say that out loud. Well… maybe a small, reckless part of me did. The part that agreed to meet a shirtless mountain man so he could teach me how to jump off a rock.
Hudson’s gaze settles on me, and I brace for a smile, a tease, a flirtation -- something that lets me laugh off the sharp edge of what just slipped out. He gives me none of that.
He only says, “Not the kind I won’t get them out of.”
Good grief. I just forgot how to breathe. There should be a warning system for men like him. A siren. A flashing sign. A pamphlet at check-in.
Welcome to Eight Pines. Please enjoy your stay. Kayak rentals open at eight. Beware of younger mountain men with dangerous hands and inconvenient emotional clarity.
Younger. That word has been tapping at the back of my mind all morning. Hudson isn’t boyish. Not even close. There is nothing soft or unfinished about him. He moves with the certainty of someone who has carried heavy things, fixed broken things, slept under storms, and pulled people back from bad decisions more than once.
But he is younger than I am. I knew it the second I saw him in full daylight. Not much younger, maybe. But enough. Enough that my common sense has been standing in the corner of my brain with its arms folded, glaring.
I’m thirty-seven years old. Divorced. A second-grade teacher who owns sensible cardigans and knows how to organize emergency sub plans in under fifteen minutes.
Hudson looks like he knows how to build a shelter from fallen branches and make a woman forget she was ever married to a man named Harold. Which is exactly the sort of thought I should not be having.
“Layla.”
My gaze snaps back to his face.
“Did you hear anything I just said?”
