“Are you okay if I take off?” She paused in the middle of pulling on a long-sleeved pullover and he tried not to get distracted by the gentle arch of her lithe body. She really was a beautiful woman: lean, graceful, with a dancer’s strength.
“Go on. Get out of here,” said the other man.
Michael nodded to the guy before following Amanda out the door.
“Sorry about that,” she said when they were outside. “Mr. Randolf is harmless, but he can be a little grumpy.”
“He likes you.”
She tipped her head to the side, considering. “I’ve worked for him for a long time. He’s like family to me.”
That was the other thing about her. He’d watched her with her brother and sister, the way they teased and supported each other. Anyone who managed to make it inside her circle should count himself very lucky. It was another thing the dumbass didn’t seem to understand. Instead of joining whatever group she’d surrounded herself with, he constantly seemed to be pulling away. Unless, of course, it looked good in front of his boss.
“I can tell.” He followed her to her beat-up Subaru, and she hit the button to unlock the door.
“Do you want to give Rainy Day Women another chance?”
He hated the idea of turning away from a challenge, but he remembered the way he felt watching her climb the route before her fall. And they only had a couple of hours before Ethan showed up with his boss and Mrs. Bransford. Amanda was going to coach both teams up one of the beginner pitches to get started, and then they had some strategy for the competition to work out.
He didn’t want to waste the little bit of time they had alone together fighting over a climb that in all honesty was probably too hard for him. Learning to climb had taken on less significance when he realized she’d be able to coach that part of the event. But as it turned out, he enjoyed it. He liked the challenge of trying to find finger and toeholds and he loved that there was strategy and more than brute strength involved.
“Good Lord, no,” he said and she laughed. He glanced over from the passenger seat and grinned. Making her laugh was even better than making her smile. “Maybe we should go ahead and do the competition route.”
The teams competing in the climbing section of the challenge had to take turns on two routes, the Ladder and Rope Burn. Points were awarded based on how fast the climbers made it to the top and more subjectively, the style they used getting there. Even with Amanda’s far superior coaching abilities, it wouldn’t hurt for him to have firsthand knowledge of the route. Given that the rest of the team was meeting them there after work, it also meant he could spend more time with Amanda and less time traveling.But it was really the efficiency that interested him, he thought, allowing himself that one face-saving lie.
“The Ladder it is.” Amanda slid the car into gear and pulled out onto the main road.
“Do you have any ideas about how you want to handle the event?” asked Michael, trying to focus his attention on where they were going and the competition rather than the woman sitting in the seat beside him. In the enclosed space, he could smell the light floral scent she wore overlaid with the fainter scent of wood smoke from the store. It was proving to be a major distraction.
“I won’t know until we get out on the rock, but I think Mrs. Bransford—Jessica—might be good. She used to be a dancer and climbing Stone is more about flexibility than brute strength.”
“Tell me about it,” he said, remembering the way he felt watching her the last time they’d climbed.
“You weren’t really trying to figure out how to get out of climbing Rainy Day Women, were you?”
“Hell yes. I would have bailed right away if I could have worked out a way to do it with my pride intact.”
“I thought you were being a know-it-all, assuming because you had the upper body strength that you could just muscle through. I might have let that color my opinion of you a bit.” She slanted her glance sideways at him, and her smile tightened something in his chest.
“I was just trying to figure out how to not look like a complete failure in front of my pretty climbing guide.”
He heard her suck in her breath and wondered exactly how far past too far he’d gone. He hadn’t meant to tell her she was pretty—she wasn’t pretty; she was beautiful—but the words slipped out. She waited a long moment, and he thought about trying to clarify, but honestly how was telling herSorry, I didn’t mean to say you were prettygoing to make anything any better?
“Flattery isn’t going to make me take it easy on you,” she said, and he let out the breath he’d been holding.
Something about being around this woman got him all twisted up. He needed to come up with a better plan or he was going to cause a problem for himself with his client.
“What about Mr. Bransford?” he asked, steering his thoughts and the conversation back to the competition.
“Who knows? Men, especially the kind used to getting their way, often have a hard time on the rock, but maybe he’ll take direction better than I think. Either way, if I’m right about Jessica, we should have two solid runs—mine and hers. If it isn’t enough to move us forward, at least it should be more than enough to keep us from getting knocked out.”
“What about Ethan?”
“What about him?” she asked, sounding defensive.
He hadn’t meant anything other than curiosity about the other man’s climbing abilities. He’d never ask, but he wondered what she thought he meant.
“What kind of climber is he?” He watched her face carefully, looking for any sign of what she was thinking.
