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GWEN
When my foot gave way beneath me, I screamed, and at that moment, I was certain I was going to die—every bit as certain as I had been when the evil vines had tried to crawl down my throat.
But Kaio spun around, swinging like an acrobat at the circus, letting go of the cliff with all but one hand and reaching down to grab the rope he’d tied us together with.
It made a horrible ripping noise, but it didn’t matter—before it could come apart, Kaio had me up next to him, held in one arm like he would never let me go.
I gasped and threw my arms around his neck.
“That’s perfect,” he said, his deep voice strangely calm, though I could feel his heart racing in double-time.
Or maybe that was my own heart.
“Hold on to me,” he said. “I’m going to need both hands to climb, but we are almost at the top.”
I made the mistake of glancing down for the first time and whimpered involuntarily.
Kaio swung me around, so I was against his chest. I buried my face in his neck, wrapping my legs around his waist and clinging to him like a Capuchin monkey.
There was no way I was looking down again. Or up, for that matter. I didn’t want to know anything about the rest of this climb.
And if I had my way, I would never even go hiking in the mountains again.
Still, by the time we reached the top of the ledge, my heartbeat had steadied.
I was even beginning to enjoy the feel of his strong, corded muscles moving under me—as long as I didn’t consider where exactly we were.
At some point, he hefted me up and away from him, and I dug my nails into his shoulders.
“We’re at the top, Gwen,” he said, his tone oddly soothing.
And when I pushed out with my mind, trying to get a read on his emotions, he wasn’t even irritated at my incompetence when it came to climbing.
I, on the other hand, was irritated. It was ridiculous for me to be so dependent on him.
He sat me down on the firm ground at the top of the cliff, where I landed butt-first and instantly scrabbled back away from the edge, dropping onto my back.
Kaio followed, swinging himself up easily, as if he hadn’t just carried my deadweight the last quarter of the climb.
After a few moments, I closed my eyes and draped my arm across them, thankful to be able to stretch out flat on the ground.
A few seconds later, I got an image of a group of structures some distance away.
I wasn’t seeing them, so I assumed it came from Kaio. I opened my eyes and sat up.
“Is that some kind of town?”
“Abandoned, I think,” Kaio said.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on what he was seeing.
He was right, I thought—what had looked like a smudge of vaguely building-like shapes to my eyes came into focus when I saw them through Kaio’s eyes. It looked like an old set from a spaghetti western, complete with the word Saloon painted over an entrance with swinging doors.
Why the hell would an alien planet have a western-style town stuck in the middle of nowhere?
“The man running the games is from your planet,” Kaio said. “A place called Texas.”
A wanna-be cowboy. Of course.
