“Thanks for being my guide,” she said, her eyes still glued to the scene in front of us. She reached over and took my hand in hers, squeezing it once before she let it go.
My big, stupid heart gave a hard thump in my chest.
It wasn’t the organ that had reacted when I’d seen her in her little bikini yesterday. That one had been a big enough problem.
This…this was a pending disaster.
I didn’t need to see past her shell of chaos and disorder. I didn’t need to think about how well the two of us balanced each other. I didn’t need the reasons to keep my distance falling apart, one by one.
“Here, give me the menace, you do your thing,” I said, standing to put space between us.
Skye looked up at me for a long moment before she carefully extracted Kyle from his carrier and handed him over. I had expected Kyle to keep sleeping, but clearly I didn’t know cats. He perked right up and rather than stay in my arms, he climbed my chest until he was perched on my shoulder like a goddamn parrot.
“What the hell is your cat doing?” I asked.
Skye glanced up from where she was checking settings on her camera and burst out laughing. That deep body laugh brought a smile to my face. She brought the camera to her eye and snapped a quick picture. “He seems to think your primary purpose is to make him taller.”
“So he sees me as furniture, great,” I muttered as his tail whipped me in the face.
Kyle moved his front paws to the top of my head, his back ones on my shoulder. He made a weird chattering sound like a pint-sized velociraptor. “This cat is defective.”
“He’s hunting,” Skye said, snapping another picture of us before turning back to the mountains.
“So that sound is supposed to be intimidating to an eagle?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t say he was agoodhunter. Big ego, I suppose.”
“Sounds like a few hunters I’ve rescued from the backcountry over the years…hikers too, for that matter.”
“I can imagine,” she said. “I’ve found a few people in my travels myself.”
She changed her focus and started taking close-up pictures of individual plants at the lookout…then another of Kyle and me.
“Kyle and I aren’t going to be the focus of this article, are we?”
She laughed. “If I use them, I’ll block your face out. But I think these are just for me.”
Again my chest tightened in a way I didn’t like.
Chapter Eight
Skye
Ifelt light as we completed the second half of the hike. At the rate we were going, we’d be back to the cabins by lunch. I had some great pictures for my article.
What I also had was a raging case of ‘want-to-bang-my-brother’s-friend-itis.’
Was that a thing?
It had to be a thing. And it was advancing at a rapid rate.
Kyle was walking on his lead, so I had my camera around my neck. I flicked through the pictures as I walked, stopping at the image I liked the most. Aaron was standing with his thick arms crossed over his chest, a gorgeous mountain valley in the background, and a white and black tuxedo cat on his head.
It was indescribably perfect.
What was not perfect was seeing the door to my cabin wide open as we approached camp. “What the hell?” I almost took off running towards it, but stopped myself when I considered the potential reasons why it was open.
“What’s wrong?” Aaron asked as he came up beside me.
