Braden ground his jaw. Dreya didn’t trust anyone but herself. Besides, she was a thief, and he was a cop. He didn’t point out either of those things, though. The truth was, he’d known there was some kind of connection developing between them over the past couple of days. He wouldn’t go so far as to call it trust exactly, but it was as close as Dreya could get. Moreover, his gut was telling him that if Dreya was going to be doing something dangerous, he didn’t want her listening to anyone else but him. He wasn’t sure when he’d decided to appoint himself her protector and partner, but he had.
God, he was mental.
On the balance beam, Dreya had her head cocked to the side as if waiting for him to say something.
“You sure about this, Dreya?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She let out a tense little laugh, making him think she was still more than a little worried. “But you’d better hurry up before I change my mind.”
Danica and Clayne backed away, giving him space. That was when it hit Braden. He was really doing this. If he screwed up, he was going to be the one getting Dreya hurt, not the DCO. He took a deep breath and moved so that he was right underneath her. If she didn’t make this jump, at least he could give her something softer than the floor to fall on.
“Okay, Dreya, you ready?” When she nodded, he continued. “The bar you’re aiming for is ten feet away, ninety degrees to your right, level with your knees. You don’t need to jump out as much as fall forward.”
“And you’ll catch me if I miss the bar, right?”
“I’ll catch you,” he promised.
Honestly, he had no idea if he could catch a woman in free fall, but somewhere in the back of his mind, Tommy approved.
“See yourself making it happen, and it’ll happen,” his old partner had always told him.
Braden expected Dreya to hesitate or at least take a timid leap, but she didn’t. She simply tipped forward into a swan dive, then pushed off right before her toes left the beam.
His heart practically stopped beating when he saw her falling, his body automatically moving forward to catch her. But then, when it seemed she was going to miss the bar by a few short inches, the palms of both hands smacked into the metal, and she was swinging from it like a trapeze artist.
It was probably a little thing from Danica and Clayne’s perspective, but Braden wanted to cheer when Dreya caught the bar.
“Keep swinging like that,” he called out. “There’s another bar about eight feet in front of you and four feet up. You need to pop off the bar you’re on and gain altitude, like you’re on a set of uneven bars in the Olympics.”
He had no idea if what he was saying made any sense at all, but at least Dreya didn’t look down at him like he was an idiot. Instead, she started swinging harder.
“Say when,” she told him.
He watched her move, impressed as hell at her ability to hold on to what had to be a slick-ass piece of metal. When he judged she’d gotten high enough, he let her know.
“Get ready,” he said. “Now!”
She let go of the bar she was swinging from with more confidence than he ever could have, her palms smacking right into the next bar like she knew exactly where it was.
“Yeah!” he shouted, not able to contain his excitement this time.
Dreya navigated the rest of the aero-maze, picking up speed as Braden started getting a feel for what she could really do, and she began trusting him more.
“Done,” he announced, his hands reaching out to grab her hips and steady her when she hopped off the last beam and stuck a perfect landing on the floor.
“That was amazing.” She spun in his arms, yanking the blindfold off with a laugh. “I swear I could almost see the maze as you were describing it to me. I can’t believe that was so easy.”
Her laugh was infectious, and it was all he could do to keep from picking her up and spinning her around. “Trust me, you’re the one who made it look easy. It was insane how fast you finished that course.”
“Whoa, control your excitement for a second,” Danica said from behind them. “You’re done with the hard part, but you still have to get over the last obstacle on the course before you’re finished.”
They both turned to see what Danica was talking about, and Braden felt the excitement bleed right out of him and drip onto the floor.
The “last obstacle on the course” was a twenty-foot-high wood wall. How the hell did Danica expect Dreya to climb the thing when there was absolutely nothing on it to get a grip on?
From the look she gave Danica, it was clear Dreya knew she was screwed, too. “I can’t climb that. Not now.”
“Yes, you can,” Danica said. “You just have to want to.”
