by Dakota West
“For a while, earlier, there was one in this tree right here,” Trevor said, pointing to a scrubby little pine tree clinging to the edge. “I got to watch it eat a mouse.”
“Gross!” said Sloane, staring up into the tree, sounding more excited than grossed out. “Did you see it catch the mouse?”
“No,” said Trevor. “Just eat it.”
“That’s so cool,” she said. “About a week ago, I was sitting on a rock pretty far off the trail, eating lunch, and I saw a fox get a rabbit,” she said. “I felt really bad for the rabbit, but it can be amazing to see nature in action. I had no idea foxes were so sneaky or fast.”
Trevor just nodded, his eyes still scanning the view.
Behind them, Austin sat on the rock and started pulling food out of his backpack.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got two giant sandwiches, a bunch of apples, potato chips, some cheese and crackers, a baggie full of cookies, and, uh...” he trailed off for a minute, still pawing through the bag. “A container of chicken salad, some cold bacon, biscuits, jam, butter, and a bottle of chocolate milk.”
Trevor’s eyebrows went up, and he couldn’t help but smile.
“So Barb packed you a lunch?” he asked.
Sloane looked at Trevor and then at Austin, her face inscrutable.
“Yup,” said Austin. “What do you want?”
“Biscuit and jam as an appetizer,” said Trevor. “Then I’ll see where the day takes me.”
“You didn’t tell me we were meeting Trevor here,” Sloane said. She went through the pile of food and pulled out a cookie.
“Oh, we just... ran into Trevor?” Austin said. He looked at Trevor for confirmation of that.
Trevor didn’t respond. It wasn’t like Austin was doing a great job of pretending this was a chance meeting, so he just slathered jam onto his biscuit and pushed it into his mouth, letting the flaky, sweet, buttery goodness take over his senses.
Sloane’s eyes narrowed, but she focused on her cookie, then noticed Austin looking at her, a smile around his eyes.
“What?” she said, her mouth full.
“You’ll ruin your lunch,” Austin said.
“It’s pre-ssert,” she said, swallowing. “Like dessert, but before the meal. Live a little.”
The way they already talked to each other tugged at Trevor’s heart.
Just admit it, you’re jealous, he thought.
He was. He was jealous that Austin and Sloane got to spend time together, in broad daylight, with other people around. He was jealous that they’d already started teasing each other like that, friendly and flirty, and Trevor was on the outside.
“Toss me a cookie, will you?” Trevor asked.
Sloane handed him the whole bag. He took two. Why not?
“See, Trevor knows what life is all about,” Sloane said.
“How about you, Austin?” Trevor said, holding up the bag. “Feel like living on the edge for lunch today?”
“Are you daring me to eat a cookie?” Austin said, his voice a fake growl. “I’ll do it. I will.”
He snatched the baggie from Trevor, their fingertips just barely brushing.
You just flirted with him in front of someone, even if it’s her, Trevor thought. What the fuck are you doing?
It felt right.
Austin bit into the cookie, raising his eyebrows at Trevor and Sloane in a challenge.
“There,” he said. “See, I know how to have fun.”
Sloane laughed, her own mouth full of cookies, and Trevor couldn’t help but smile.
It could be like this, a tiny voice whispered in the back of his head.
No, it couldn’t, he thought.
“So, Sloane,” said Austin.
“So, Austin,” she said, perfectly mimicking his casual tone.
Austin frowned very slightly. Trevor couldn’t help but enjoy it.
“What’s the real reason you’re hiking the PCT?”
Her eyebrows went up, and she reached across the rock where they were sitting to snag the potato chips.
“I told you the real reason,” she said.
“I didn’t hear it,” Trevor said.
Sloane looked at the chips in her hands for a few moments. They were at elevation, and the bag was puffier than normal, and the girl looked like she might be thinking of just popping it.
Instead, she tore it open the normal way.
“I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend,” she said, stuffing a chip into her mouth.
“All at once?” Trevor asked.
“More or less,” she said, around the chips in her mouth. “Derek broke up with me about two weeks before the startup I was working at failed pretty hard,” she said. “I came into our offices one day and some workers were already taking the front desk out.”
Trevor whistled low.
“They didn’t even tell you?” he said.
“Nope,” Sloane said.
“What’d the startup do?” asked Austin. Now he was tearing one of the giant sandwiches apart as carefully as possible, trying not to let the roast beef and tomato and lettuce fly everywhere.
“It was for an app that helped people find parking in Seattle,” she said. “Well, in theory. We could never get it to work. I thought we still had a couple months left of venture capital funding, but I guess that went into the custom espresso machine, the video game room, and the ball pit.”
Austin and Trevor looked at each other.
“You had a ball pit?” Trevor asked. He still had half a biscuit in his hand, and was just staring at Sloane.
“I know,” she said. “It was a dumb thing to spend money on.”
“Seattle sounds weird,” Austin volunteered.
“Why, we don’t spend our days roping cows?” Sloane teased.
“Yesterday I fixed a fence and spent a while using Quickbooks, thank you very much,” Austin said.
“I made pancakes this morning,” Trevor said. “I haven’t roped a cow in weeks.”
“Well, I haven’t been in a ball pit in weeks,” Sloane said. “So there.”
She stuck her tongue out at Austin and Trevor, and they both laughed. Trevor could hear someone coming up the trail, still pretty far away. They were talking loudly, but for once, he didn’t care.
Let some hikers see the three of them together. What did it matter? For the first time in ages, he got to spend time with his mate — real time, not just sex in the cabin in the middle of the night — and it felt perfect.
“I was actually training to do part of the PCT anyway,” she said. “I was going to take time off work and hike from Washington to Oregon, so when I got let go, I just sort of... expanded that plan.”
Trevor nodded. Then he reached over and grabbed the other half of the sandwich that Austin was eating, his hand brushing Austin’s leg, not caring if Sloane saw.
It’s so strange that such a little thing can feel so liberating, he thought.
One of the voices on the trail up to the overlook was shouting, and he and Austin exchanged an annoyed glance.
Why do people have to ruin such nice places like that? He wondered.
Chapter Eight
Sloane
Sloane tried to ignore the asshats coming up the trail. The entire time she’d been hiking, the other people had been ninety-five percent lovely. Most of them valued the solitude and quiet just like she did, but the other five percent included people who found it perfectly acceptable to shout, scream at each other, walk four across, block the entire trail for selfies, or bring portable speakers onto a trail and blast their terrible, shitty music.
That five percent seemed to include the people coming up the trail now, and she fixed a glare on the place where the trail let out onto the overlook. She hoped that the glare conveyed her feelings about them, and that she was pretty sure that there was a special circle in hell for noisy, rude hikers.
They didn’t emerge from the trees yet, and her glare didn’t work. She stopped glaring and tried to ignore
them.
“How do you guys know each other?” she asked Trevor and Austin.
It was obvious that they were more than just acquaintances. Besides, Sloane wasn’t an idiot, and didn’t buy for a second that they’d accidentally run into Trevor up here. Something was fishy, even if Sloane couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
Is Austin trying to set me up with Trevor? She wondered. She put another potato chip in her mouth, jostling the snack-sized bag around to get to the bottom. He’s really cute — okay, he’s fucking gorgeous — but I’m leaving tomorrow, so I don’t really see the point.
She eyed Trevor, trying to be sneaky about it. He seemed a little quieter and more reserved than Austin, but he had a light behind his eyes that most people didn’t have.
Also, he was ripped as hell. He wore a t-shirt and pants, obviously, but his t-shirt was half-stuck to him with sweat, and she could have told from his forearms alone that he was stacked with hard rippling muscles.
Plus, those strange, entrancing gray eyes.
That did mean that Austin wasn’t interested, though, which definitely made Sloane feel some kind of way. Disappointed? Sad? Slightly betrayed, even though she knew she didn’t have any kind of claim to him?
You’re here for less than twenty-four more hours, she thought to herself. You’re not getting with either of them, just enjoy your picnic and stop overthinking it.
Austin and Trevor looked at each other and shrugged.
“Just ranch stuff,” Austin said. “Our places are next to each other, so I guess we met that way.”
“I guess,” Trevor echoed. He gave Austin a look that Sloane didn’t quite understand, but she ignored it.
They’re shifters who live on ranches, she thought. She flapped her own shirt in front of her, trying to get some of her sweat to evaporate, but she wasn’t having much luck. You’re not going to understand everything they do.
“You just seem like you’re pretty good friends,” she said.
No reason not to poke at this, she thought. After all, they’re hiding something, that much is obvious.
“Sure, I guess,” said Austin.
Trevor didn’t say anything.
“I mean, since we met you up here,” Sloane went on.
Austin opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked at his sandwich, frowning.
“I told you that wasn’t gonna work,” said Trevor.
“No, you didn’t,” said Austin.
“Well, I thought it,” said Trevor.
“Doesn’t count.”
“We’re good friends,” said Trevor. Sloane thought that she could sort of see his face twitch when he said the word friend, but she couldn’t be sure. “Wolves and bears are traditionally not friends, so we keep it a secret.”
He took his bandana and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck again. Sloane finished off her sandwich, feeling the sweat practically pool in her bra, the sun beating down on her.
“Do you have the water?” she asked Austin. “It’s fucking hot.”
He tossed her a bottle, then exchanged another look with Trevor.
“I know of a place where we could cool off,” he said.
“Is it shady?”
“Yes,” he said.
There was a sparkle in his eye that suggested to Sloane that she wasn’t getting the full story. She narrowed her eyes.
“What else?”
“Austin, come on,” said Trevor. He leaned back on his hands, and his damp shirt fell against his abs.
I would lick the sweat right off of — stop it! Sloane thought.
Well. I would.
She tore his face off of his body and to his face.
“It’s just an idea,” Austin said. “A cool, refreshing idea.”
“What’s the idea?” Sloane said. She was starting to get a little punchy about always being the only one who didn’t know what was going on.
“There’s a swimming hole,” Trevor said. “It’s beneath a waterfall, not that far off the trail, but almost nobody knows about it.”
“Even on a day like today? It’s not insanely crowded?”
Trevor smiled, the light coming into his gray eyes.
“The only thing I’ve ever seen get insanely crowded in Ponderosa County was the John Deere dealership when they had a buy-one-get-one-free sale,” he said.
“Barb still talks about that day,” Austin said. “For a while she was petitioning them to run it again.”
“It’s a good deal,” said Sloane. She leaned back and shaded her eyes with her hands, only see both the men look at her skeptically. “What? I don’t have to know anything about tractors to know that’s a good deal.”
“We could go dip our feet in,” Trevor said.
“I didn’t bring a swimsuit,” said Sloane.
Austin shrugged.
“Let’s go,” he said. He shoved the food back into the backpack, drank most of a bottle of water, and then they were on the trail again.
It wasn’t far to the swimming hole, and the entire time, Sloane had to watch Austin’s butt as he descended the narrow trail in front of her.
Stop it, she told herself. Why are you even looking? You hike out tomorrow morning, and you are not hooking up with some shifter who you barely know.
“You missed the turn off,” Trevor called from behind them.
Austin stopped short, then turned and looked. Trevor pointed.
“Oh, oops,” said Austin, and they turned onto the other trail that Trevor had pointed out. Once more, he brought up the back as they descended a quick slope. Sloane could already hear the roar of a waterfall, and the air got cooler and cooler, the closer they got to water.
Then, they came around a bend and there it was. The waterfall wasn’t huge — it was more of a whitewater, almost, with the creek running down a series of rocks — but it was blue and white, and the pool of water at the bottom was the most refreshing-looking thing Sloane had ever seen.
Best of all, they were the only ones there.
A couple of flat rocks made up the only shore area there was, and without a word, they all walked over to them. Right away, Sloane sat and took her shoes and socks off, dipping her toes into the water.
She pulled them back instantly, gasping.
“Holy shit that’s cold,” she said.
Austin and Trevor both just laughed.
“It’s glacial runoff,” Austin said. “You’ve been hiking for how long, again?”
Delicately, Sloane stuck a single toe back in, making a face.
“I don’t go swimming in it,” she said.
The boys looked at each other.
“I dare you,” said Trevor.
Austin raised his eyebrows.
“I dare you more,” he said.
“I dared you first,” Trevor said.
“Oh, stop,” said Sloane. She stuck a second toe into the water, grimacing.
They both stood over her, their hands on their hips, poised at the very edge of the water.
Sloane looked up. Three toes in the water.
I wouldn’t mind seeing them wet, she thought.
Quickly, she pushed her whole foot into the water, trying to get her mind off the thought of both of them, soaking wet and, at the very least, shirtless.
It worked, and she squealed. Then she clapped both hands over her mouth as Trevor and Austin laughed.
“I didn’t know people could make that noise,” Austin teased.
“Shut up,” said Sloane, her voice muffled by her hands. “I thought you were getting in the glacial runoff.”
“Only if Trevor goes first.”
“I’m not going first.”
Sloane took her hands off her mouth and slowly put the heel of her other foot into the water, bracing herself.
“What about at the same time?” she asked.
Stop, she thought. Now you’re going to see them wet and half-naked, and what good is going to come of that?
You. Are. Leaving. TOMORROW.
She
leaned her head back and saw the two of them looking at each other. There was still something they weren’t telling her, she was totally certain, and whatever it was, she could see it for a moment in the glance between them.
“Okay,” they said, nearly in unison.
Then Austin grabbed the neck of his t-shirt and pulled it over his head, and at the same time, Trevor took his off by the hem.
Sloane tried uselessly not to stare.
Austin was a little more jacked, and Trevor was a little leaner, but she wouldn’t have kicked either of them out of bed. For just a moment, she let her eyes wander over the thick, rippling muscles that covered their bodies, turning her head from one side to the other. She tried to check them out casually, even though she was pretty sure it wasn’t working.
Do they even know how hot they are? She wondered. They should be posing for romance novel covers somewhere, instead of going on a hike with some girl.
She didn’t mind the path they’d chosen.
As she was trying to check Trevor out while also being subtle, she heard the sound of metal on rock behind her, and turned to see Austin’s pants hit the ground. He stood there, grinning, his thumbs under the waistband of his boxer briefs.
“Excuse me, some privacy please?” he said.
Sloane turned bright red and clapped her hands over her eyes. On the other side, she heard Trevor’s pants hit the ground as well. Despite herself, she turned her head ever so slightly, trying to sneak a look through her fingers.
“No peeking,” came Trevor’s slightly raspy voice.
Sloane slid her fingers shut.
This is so unfair, she thought, even though she didn’t know what, exactly, was unfair. She wasn’t naked. They weren’t getting an eyeful of anything besides her feet, which she didn’t exactly consider her best or sexiest feature.
“On three,” Trevor said.
“What am I doing,” muttered Austin.
“One, two...”
“Three!” shouted Sloane, taking her fingers off her eyes.
She was in time to see both of them jump off the rock and into the water, their tight, perky butts and the hard muscles of their backs. Both went under and then came up roaring.
