by J. R. Ward
“Okay, let’s go.”
He looked up. Anne was in leggings and a fleece, with a duffel hanging off her shoulder—and he couldn’t help but eye her strong, muscular legs. He had had them around his hips only once, but that was all it had taken for him to never, ever forget what it felt like to be with her.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Not that he gave a shit. She could have been taking him to get his eyebrows waxed off and his toenails painted and he’d be in.
“You’ll find out.”
She snagged a dog biscuit and led Soot into his crate—which she had refused to let Danny help set up. “You be a good boy. I’ll leave the TV on for you.”
“Music is better.” When she glanced over her shoulder, Danny shook his head. “If an ad or a show has a dog in it, it can be a trigger for him. Especially if he’s enclosed and can’t run.”
“Since when did you learn about dogs?”
“Just picked things up from Jack. They work with the canine unit a lot.”
On her way out of the kitchen, she turned the radio on to the local PBS station. And as the dulcet sounds of the BBC World Service murmured from the little speaker, he followed her lead through the front door and over to the car.
Fifteen minutes later, they were pulling into the parking lot of Mounteria, a wall-climbing place he knew well—and hell, he’d liked the trip so much, he wished it had taken longer. It felt good to sit so close to her, to have excuses, as they talked about nothing, to study her profile, to smell her laundry detergent, to listen to the cadence of her voice.
“Am I going on the wall with you?” he murmured.
“That’s up to you.”
“I think I’ll enjoy the view from below.”
As they got out, she glared across the hood of her Subaru at him. “That is not the purpose of this.”
“Can I mention it’s a side benefit?”
She swung her duffel back into place on her shoulder. “Then I’ll tell you to not look at my ass.”
Yeah, he kept quiet on that. ’Cuz he shouldn’t make promises he couldn’t keep, should he.
The sky was getting dark as they walked through the packed parking lot toward the lit entrance. Mounteria had walls for every skill and age, as well as a juice bar, babysitting, and instruction, so there tended to be two kinds of vehicles outside: minivans that carried kids and roof-racked SUVs that carried serious climbers.
Beside him, Anne was all business and he felt as though he needed to catch up even though he was walking right beside her. Then again, Anne had always been like that: Out in front even when they were in the same place, and he supposed that part of her appeal was the fact that he always felt like he was chasing her. Other women? They tried to rope him in, chain him down, get him to sit, stay, roll over. Not his Anne. She was too busy living her own life to worry about what the hell he was up to.
God, she was amazing. He just wished . . . fuck, he didn’t know what he wished for.
As they walked in, the two guys behind the registration counter looked up and went Cheers on her.
“Anne!”
“Yo, Anne.”
They were younger, bearded, and in their stringer shirts, they were sporting all kinds of lean muscle. Which naturally made him think about that elephant gun he didn’t own yet. Too bad you couldn’t get that shit on Amazon Prime.
Narrowing his eyes, Danny marched up to the counter and stood higher on his spine so he looked even bigger than he was. “I’m with her.”
“He’s my guest,” she said as she offered her card for swiping. “Can he just watch?”
“Sure, Anne.”
“Anything for you.”
Danny’s caveman wanted to reach across the granite counter and do a little swiping of his own, but he overrode that and continued on through the turnstile, entering a cavernous space that echoed with chatter from the adults and squeaks from the kids. People strung on harnesses were crabbing up verticals, clawing and toe-stretching to hold themselves to multiheighted blue, green, red, and yellow tilted panels.
Anne went over to the black climb that was the only one with no traffic on it. Then again, the bitch started on the floor and quickly curved back on itself so that you were hanging upside in midair, only your grips and your strength keeping you from peeling free and falling to the mats flat on your ass.
She was going to climb that? he thought. Holy . . . shit.
While he hung back and tried not to tell her to stop being crazy, she put her duffel down on a bench and took off her fleece. In her sports bra and her Lululemon, she was like a fitness model, and her prosthesis was a passive cosmetic restoration, a static sculpted hand and wrist that attached below her elbow and was held in place by a roll of flesh-colored fabric and plastic. With deft efficiency, she removed that and attached a base that locked in both at the elbow and the shoulder. It was an entire bionic arm, and he respected the fact that it was black and neon green, totally mechanical, and really badass. The end of it was blunt, and she screwed in a curved, fin-like terminal.
“Sit,” she ordered him.
Danny went over and lowered himself onto a bench, rubbing sweaty palms on the knees of his jeans. When that didn’t go far enough, he had to take off his windbreaker and wipe his brow. If asked, he couldn’t have explained why he was stressing.
And then he didn’t have anything to worry about.
Anne moved like a dancer, all lithe, energetic strength, and she didn’t climb up onto the overhang. She fucking leapt from the mats, jumping eight feet and catching herself. With a swing of her lower body, she gripped with her climbing shoes and proceeded to spider from hold to hold, her torso tight to the wall’s face, her fin and her real hand working beautifully.
No hesitation. No missteps, slips, recalibration.
No halter, either. Which he was very sure was in violation of Mounteria’s rules, but no one stopped her.
A lot of people stopped to watch, however. Within moments, folks gathered around, murmuring, pointing.
She went higher and higher, until she was on the ceiling four stories up. She had barely broken a sweat and her pace never changed as she continued across the ceiling over his head.
Her back was ribboned with muscle fibers, her legs and her calves knotted with strength, her shoulders and upper arms carved. He might have joked about ogling her, but when it came down to it, sex was the last thing on his mind as he played witness to her extraordinary . . . everything.
“Mom? I want to be like her.”
He glanced over at a mother-daughter pair who had come to play witness. The girl must have been about ten or twelve, and she was in pink-and-black climbing gear, her eyes wide, her hands on her hips.
“You can absolutely do that,” the mom said, “if you work hard enough.”
After a moment, Danny cleared his throat. “And if you got the guts,” he added hoarsely.
chapter
19
Anne was not into showing off. If there was one thing she’d learned as a firefighter, it was that people who wanted to make big impressions got a correction from Murphy’s law that inevitably hurt. But if Danny was going to carry around some mantle of guilt, he’d better get a clearer picture of how “badly off” she was.
Dropping back down to the mats, she clapped her palm on her leggings to get the chalk off and turned to—
A circle of people had gathered where she’d been climbing, and their expressions showed a kind of awe that made her wish she hadn’t jumped on the wall. And then there was Danny. He was sitting on a bench, his elbows on his knees, his heavy arms cranked with tension like he’d expected her to crash and burn.
He was all she could see, his eyes so intense they took ahold of her.
A tall male body with a bearded face stepped in front of her. “Another great climb, Anne.”
Shaking herself, she smiled at Chris, the front desk attendant. “Thanks.”
“You know you gotta use a harness, though, right?”
Shit. See? “That was my bad call. It won’t happen again.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “We know you got it, it’s the other people we worry about. Plus, insurance.”
“Yeah.”
Danny came up and loomed over Chris like he wanted to underscore that he had a good fifty pounds and four inches of height on the other guy. And yes, the whole world could see that I’m-a-tough-guy black eye, Anne thought.
Predictably, Chris retracted his hand like an ADT alarm had gone off on her. “So, okay. Yup.”
Then he frowned over at the wall where two young guns looked like they were ready to do something stupid. As he walked over to them, Anne was ready to leave. She’d meant to cut the conversation about disability off, and she’d done that. Time to close this door between them and move along.
Putting her prosthesis up, she pegged Danny with a stare. “Stop thinking of me as broken or not whole. Put that bullshit down and walk away. It’s not doing you any good, and it’s insulting to me.” When his eyes refused to focus on her fin, she put the thing up into his face. “Look at it. Go on, it’s not going to hurt you, and it’s not going anywhere.”
The flush that ran into his cheeks could have meant a lot of things, but she wasn’t going to parcel the emotions out. That was his job.
“Your climb was impressive,” he said. “For anyone.”
“You’ve got to look at it.”
His frown made him seem taller. “I actually don’t. Your point’s been made, and I appreciate what you’re capable of. But you can’t legislate where I’m at. It is what it is.”
“If I’m the basis for you destroying your life, you’re damn straight I can rearrange your thinking. Because it’s wrong—”
A chorus of loud talk brought her head around. One of those kids had mounted the wall and was throwing grips out at a fast clip—and Chris was pissed.
Anne refocused. “You need to let me and the past go. Just like I have.”
“Well, aren’t you self-evolved—and I don’t know that I believe you. You’re saying you’re glad you’re not on the crew anymore? That you’re psyched you aren’t coming to work at the firehouse? That you don’t miss our life?” He shook his head like he was rattling his thoughts back into order. “That life, I mean.”
“What’s my option? Drink myself into a stupor? Get into fistfights? Screw random people I don’t care about because it’s a distraction from facing reality? How about I take up smoking and—”
“I’m allowed to cope in a different way than you do.”
“Coping? Is that what it’s called? I thought the technical term was more like ‘self-destruction.’ ” As someone gasped behind her, she ignored the drama. “And honestly, I do not understand— excuse me. Will you please look at me when we’re talking?”
His stare swung back to her. “First of all, I’ll do what I want with my eyes. And second, I’m a little distracted by that.”
When he pointed over her shoulder, Anne cranked her head around. Up on the ceiling, that climber was hanging upside down by four points of contact, his hands clawed around two grips, his feet braced against a pair of others. His thigh muscles were vibrating, his forearms shaking. Drops of sweat fell like to the mats that were a good twenty feet below him, their soft impacts ringing out in the silence of the crowd, a metronome marking the time that was running out for him.
The kid was in good shape, for sure, well muscled and lean. But he’d let enthusiasm get ahead of his skills and strength, and now he was freaked out and stuck. Without a safety harness on.
Chris was talking to him. “Just stay where you are, my man. We’re coming for you.”
Anne ran across. “Let me run a harness up to him—”
“Chilli’s on it.” Chris dropped his voice. “I told him to stop. But he mounted the wall before I could—”
The guy’s foot fell free and the crowd gasped. Chilli, the other receptionist, was going as fast as he could, stepping into his own harness and buckling himself in. Good luck, Anne thought. Even if he moved like the wind, things were degrading too fast overhead and this was going to get bad. Time to get her phone—
“I’m already calling it in to EMS.” Danny put his cell up to his ear. “He’s going to hit hard.”
“Hang on, my man!” Chris called out.
The fifteen or so people let out another gasp as, sure enough, the guy lost his other foothold and swung free, all Spidey between two ’scrapers without the web. God, those hands. They were getting more slippery because of the sweat, and with all that weight hanging off them?
Anne went over to the crowd and held her arms out wide. “Let’s back up, folks. Way back.”
She put herself in front of a young girl, who had to be about twelve or so. “Hey, I love that shirt.”
The girl looked down. “I, ah . . . it’s my camp.”
“I went to Camp Hill, too.” Those eyes returned to the ceiling, but Anne took a step so she was once again in the way. “What cabin were you in?”
“It says it right here.”
Just as the girl glanced at her shirt and pointed to the name, there was a collective cry, followed by a hard hit.
Anne looked at the mother and said in a low voice, “Take her into the locker room, right now.”
That snapping sound? Had been the sound of at least one, maybe two tibiae breaking.
* * *
Danny ended the call into emergency services just as the kid lost his grip and fell in precisely the wrong position. Well, wrong assuming he didn’t enjoy the fireworks that came with a pair of compound fractures: He went straight down to the mats, knees locked as if he were going into a pool, arms pinwheeling. Like that was going to help.
The landing would have been a solid ten—if this were the Jackass Olympics and Steve-O was a judge. Instead, it was a fund-raiser for an orthopedic surgeon, the left leg sustaining a compound fracture that sent the broken bone out through the skin of the shin.
As Anne held the crowd back, Dan front and centered with the climber, now patient, taking one of the writhing hands in a strong grip. Junior was sporting the T-shirt of one of the local Catholic private schools, and between the Proactiv complexion and the clear issues with risk assessment, it was obvious they were in minor territory.
Not that people who had reached or surpassed the age of consent couldn’t be morons, too.
Kettle. Black.
“Stay still,” Danny said. “Help’s coming.”
“Is it broken? Is my leg—”
The kid lifted his head to look down his body, but Danny cut that bright idea off at the pass. Adding a visual to the pain was not going to help considering the lower part of that leg looked like a human anatomy exam.
“Stop moving, my man.” Danny pushed those shoulders back to the mat. “I want you to relax and take some deep breaths. What’s your name?”
“David. Dave Richmond.”
“Hey, Dave, I’m Danny. I’m a trained medic—how old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Are you allergic to anything?”
“N-n-n-no. Aw, man, my mom’s going to kill me.”
“Any underlying medical conditions?” Other than a garden-variety case of hormone-linked stupids. “Anything I need to know about?”
“No—what’s wrong with my leg? I can’t feel anything.”
Probably shock, but spinal injuries could be sneaky, and until there was a rule-out, they couldn’t take anything for granted.
“Just lie still, ’kay? How can we reach your mom?”
Anne came over and knelt down. “How we doing?”
For a split second, Danny was back in the past, the two of them out on an emer
gency call, bent over a patient, assessing vitals, calling in status to the ERs, going on transport. She was always his partner—
Had been. Had been his partner.
And yeah, it was fucked up to get all nostalgic about him and Anne dealing with pain and suffering and injury, but he missed that connection. That day-to-day contact. That sense that he didn’t have to say things to her; she just knew.
Because her brain and his worked the same way.
“Dave’s doing great.” In a low voice, Danny added, “Little shocky.”
“Looks it. Who’s coming on the call?”
“We are.”
Anne’s face got tight, but she hid that quick by addressing the climber’s buddy, who was all nervous off to the side. “Can you get his ID for us? From whatever locker he was using?”
The blond-haired kid looked at the break and swallowed as if he were in conversation with his gag reflex. “Yeah. Is he— Is he in trouble? I told him not to do that.”
“We just want to take care of him. So if you could get his wallet and phone, it would be a huge help.”
The friend walked off, and Anne got up and spoke to the two receptionists. Frick and Frack, the bearded nonconforming conformists, were as agitated as the Instagram set could get about anything other than the inhuman atrocity of almond milk instead of soy in their matcha lattes. Or maybe he was just being unfair as he read into their vaguely annoyed expressions.
Nah.
Distant sirens grew louder and louder, and then flashing red lights penetrated Mounteria’s glass front, strobing the kid’s panicked face. And then the friend was back with the wallet.
Danny took it, flipped the thing open, and cursed. “You’re seventeen, not eighteen, Dave.”
“I’m almost eighteen.”
“The law doesn’t count ‘almosts.’ So how about we get a parent on the phone? We’re going to need to get consent for treatment.”
“Your mom’s gonna be so pissed,” the buddy muttered.
Dave shook his head. “Can’t we just take me to the hospital—”
