Page 40 of Brawler
His mouth slashed into a grin that made no sense to her here, a reckless flash of light when her whole body was locked in terror. How could he smile at a moment like this? A quick, wicked cut of light, gone as fast as it came. “Yes, sir, Mighty Mouse.”
“Do not call me?—”
He heaved. Suddenly his weight was more over the rim than under, chest skidding, boots scrabbling, hands clawing purchase while she gave him everything she had in angles and friction and stubborn. The leash sang. The root moaned. Beast growled. Stone complained. Then he was up, rolling hard away from the edge, an avalanche of sand and pebbles racing past where his body had been.
Silence fell. Not actual silence, because the jungle never shut up. Cicadas buzzed like faraway electricity. A bird laughed fromsomewhere to their left. Water kept talking below. But silence between the three of them. Her. The man sprawled on his back, chest raging. The dog who had planted himself like a rock with one paw on Brawler’s vest as if to pin him to the earth.
She could not seem to convince her hands to release the line. Her fingers had formed to the leather and would not uncurl. He noticed in that way he noticed everything, even with his ribs lifting like a bellows. He rose to his knees and reached for her. Not fast. Slow, like gentling a frightened animal. He worked the leash off her hips, freed her hands one by one, rubbed his thumbs along the raw grooves the strap had drawn across her skin.
“You anchored,” he said softly, voice roughened sand. “You used the root. You wrapped the line around your body for a brake. Where did you learn that?”
“Breakneck Ridge,” she said, and her laugh came out bright and breathless. “Anthony’s Nose. Central Park boulders with toddlers strafing my ankles like incoming missiles. Life is a jungle. It teaches you.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Not like she was a problem or a complication or a mission asset he had to keep alive. Like she was a surprise he would keep unwrapping if she let him. The twitch at his mouth softened the way it had earlier when she had teased him about being a master climber. Not just amusement now. Warmer.
“You saved my life, Emily.”
“Consider us even,” she said, though she knew it was not even at all. A strange grief rose in her, old and familiar, Danielle’s name moving under it like a fish you could feel but not see. She pressed her palm to the bruised line at her hip and breathed through it.
He followed her glance to the crumbling edge. The pupils in his gray eyes narrowed, assessment returning, habit threading through relief. “Let’s go,” he said. “This shelf is done.”
“Agreed.”
He pushed to his feet and offered his hand. She took it, and the heat of his palm slid into her skin like an answer she had not realized she had been asking for. Beast surged up and shouldered himself between them with a sense of purpose, tail high, as if to declare that any further dying would require his personal approval.
“Chaperone,” she muttered, and the dog sneezed like a laugh.
They moved, careful around the place where the world had tried to take him, the jungle pressing close and green and alive. Behind them, the cliff face gave a last soft crack, a tired sigh as a little more edge surrendered to gravity, then everything went, leaving a gaping hole too big to jump. They weren’t going back that way. Ahead, the path turned into shadow and root and the steady, quiet sound of water.
“Emily,” he said without looking back.
“Yes.”
“You aren’t only a master climber. You’re a badass.”
“Okay, Jolly Green—” He threw a look over his shoulder, his eyes narrowing. She smiled, small and fierce. “You started it, Neanderthal, with that Mighty Mouse quip.”
He huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh. Then they disappeared into the green, two stubborn creatures and the dog who loved them, and the jungle closed behind them as if it had never planned to let go.
Brawler triedto work the kinks out of his shoulders as the jungle pressed tight, breathless with the weight of damp stone and thick canopy until at last the ground sloped into a darker seam, shadowed openings yawning black against the green. Caves. Shelter. A place that could keep them alive if he chose right.
Fuck, Emily had known what she was talking about.
Those kinks tightened, not pain, not quite, but Emily embedded in his muscles and tissue. He’d underestimated her with her diminutive size and his civilian mindset.
His adrenaline was high all over again. He would have been fucked if not for her quick thinking. His first thought was that she couldn’t hold him, but then she’d proved him wrong, even figured out to loop in his dog for more stability. Due to his training, his fitness level and the thousands of pull-ups, he’d been able to get himself back to solid ground.
Thanks to her.
The illuminated, beautiful, pain in his ass pixie dust.
His need to catalog her into a specific type was because he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her. But she wouldn’t fit into the round hole he tried to peg her into, bringing up a confused frustration that twisted his guts.
Anger felt safer, anger and resentment that she was testing every resolve he had. Reassessing her was chewing up his bandwidth. He’d thought she was just another civilian to protect, someone fragile to keep out of the line of fire. But she kept showing him she wasn’t fragile at all. She was just as much a survivor as he was.
Moving ahead, his senses stretched wide, reading the angles the way another man might read a book, trying not to focus on the way her face had contorted from the strain of holding him, the way she always said his name, like it was the most beautiful sound on the planet, the faint scent of citrus that clung tohim, that mouth when it connected to his, soft, warm, wanting. Women had been convenient places to stick his dick and fuck until his pressure valve turned and gave him blessed relief.
But that strategy wasn’t going to work with Emily. It would never work with her.
