Page 12 of Chasing the Fall

There were downsides to being a child prodigy. I’d gone to college when I was fifteen and graduated when I was seventeen after an accelerated program. I’d never had the experience of dating my peers, either the brief time I attended the local high school or during the couple of years I spent on a college campus.

Not that any of the guys in either space would’ve been interested in me. As quickly as my brain developed, my body developed with equal slowness. I was flat as a pancake until I hit nineteen and suddenly grew a pair of tits.

Now, I was little more than a brain in a woman’s body that had yet to be tried. I had yet to experience all of those things that normal girls were pros at by the time they hit twenty-one.

I blow an imperceptible breath out and will my response to Bran’s presence to settle. There’s too much working against us to even be thinking about this stuff. Even if we were free to explore this weird something between us, he wouldn’t be interested in a virgin.

Irritated with the direction my thoughts have taken, I power down and stand up. “I have somewhere I need to go.”

Bran stands, too. “Where?”

Nunya.I don’t think I should tell him—not just yet, anyway—what it is I want to do.

I let my gaze travel over his jeans and boots. They’ll do. “Hiking.”

“Hiking?” His expression registers skepticism. “It’s forty degrees outside. Why the hell do you want to go hiking? In case you missed the news, there’s a serial killer out there.”

Moving to the door, I pull a lightweight jacket down from a hook and shrug into it. “I’ll protect you, and I gave my reasons. You coming or not?”

With a roll of his eyes, Bran picks up his own sweatshirt and pulls it on over his T-shirt. “You’re a brat, you know that? I’m driving.”

When he lifts his arms, a narrow strip of flat, lightly furred belly peeks between the shirt’s hem and his jeans. Mouth dry, I open the door and escape through it before he catches me staring. “Fine, whatever.”

“What is this place?”

A half-hour later, Bran pulls into an unmarked, half-overgrown gravel road I direct him to. I’m not sure how to tell him that the road fades into a trail that winds through the forest and up the side of the mountain, ending in a clearing that houses the small cabin where Shiloh was held by a madman a few years ago.

“Just a trail I heard about and wanted to explore.” I paste my best, most guileless smile on and open the door to the truck.

Bran rubs at his eyelid with his forefinger—is it twitching?—and follows, his boots crunching on the gravel. “Why do I feel like you’re not telling me everything?”

“Who me?”

“No, fucking Rudolph.”

I ignore him, and for a while, the only sound is the crunch of leaves underfoot. The sky shines a brilliant blue through the canopy, thinner now due to it being the end of November. “It’ll be Christmas soon,” Bran says, his words echoing the random thoughts playing through my mind.

I nod. “In just a couple of weeks, this area will be covered in snow.”

“Elevation?”

“Yep.” We fall quiet again, but it’s a loaded quiet this time. I’m hyper aware of him just behind me, of how he’s adjusted his stride to fit my own, shorter one. Of his breaths, steady and untaxed, puffing out into the cold air. Of his warmth at my back. “What do you do for Christmas?” I ask, desperate to break the cocoon of awareness that shrouds us.

“Go to the bar,” Bran says.

“What?” My head swivels as I stare. “Are you joking?”

He shrugs. “The Irish are my family now, Tally. I don’t have a mom filling my stocking and making eggnog.”

Tally.I don’t like that I like that. I focus on his words instead of the warmth that fills me at the nickname. “I don’t, either,” I return, my voice terse.

“Shit, I know. I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay.” I wave aside his apology. “That’s not the point. The point is that my family is gone, but I still do stuff. I still decorate. I still do all the little things that Mom did.” I eye the path before me, making sure not to trip on any of the overgrowth beginning to narrow the trail. It doesn’t look like anyone’s been through here in a while. “It’s how I keep her memory, and Dad’s, strong.”

Bran’s hand settles on the back of my neck, squeezing softly and sending a faint tremor of response through me. “I get that.”

Another ten minutes, the path opens up into a clearing. Across an expanse of grass broken up by a small pond, a small, tidy cabin sits. I stop just inside the tree break, staring over at it with a mix of resignation and foreboding. “What the…?” I hear Bran’s soft exhalation behind me. His voice turns hard. “What is this place, Tallulah?”

---