Page 17 of Bear In A Boutique
He shoved one of his bottles into her free hand. “You can never have too much water.”
“Thanks.” She slipped the bottle into her backpack.
Ryker motioned for her to follow him and started down a narrow path. They walked in silence, and he became acutely aware of her presence behind him. He’d never noticed a woman quite the way he did Olive. Every time he saw her, he cataloged something new and different about her. Her smile. The sound of her footsteps. The way her body moved. He hadn’t realized how often he focused on her until he tried harder to ignore her. It wasn’t working and yesterday at the boutique had made it a hundred times worse.
Needing to break the silence, he thought of something to say.
“Did you do a lot of hiking in Missouri?”
“Not really.”
Aside from her home state, Ryker realized he knew nothing about her.
“How’d you get into hiking, then?”
“I started tagging along with Lulu and Fox on their hikes. Your brother never has a lack of awesome trails to take us on.”
Ryker chuffed. “He lives for that shit. Just don’t let him convince you to eat worms.”
“Gross.”
As a wilderness survival expert, Fox had a lot of disgusting survival tricks up his sleeve.
“Did you live in Missouri your whole life until you came here?”
She didn’t answer right away. “Yep.”
“Your family still lives there?”
Her silence stretched longer this time. Glancing over his shoulder, he paused to wait for her to catch up.
“Yeah.”
One word, hard and final. He took the hint. She clearly didn’t want to talk about herself.
The terrain quickly changed from a flat, even trail to a steep incline with logs wedged into the ground to make rudimentary stairs. The edges were splintered and crumbling, and Ryker knew from experience that one wrong step would cause your foot to slip. She could fall down the incline and break a leg, or worse, crack her head.
Maybe coming out here wasn’t the best idea after all. Olive came up behind him and inhaled deeply.
“I love that smell. “
His bear picked up scents constantly, to an overwhelming level. Ryker learned early how to block most of them out. “What smell?”
“Petrichor.”
He arched a brow. “Petrichor?”
“The way the Earth smells after it rains. Wet soil, decaying leaves, the amplified scent of flowers.” She adjusted her backpack. “There’s so much to love about this place, you know?The views, the sounds, the smells. I’m finding new things all the time.”
For an outsider, that was probably true. For him? Estes Park was just a place he wanted to leave.
“It’s not like this in the city, is it?”
“No, and I’m never going back.”
The bitter finality of her words said so much. Something had happened in her old home that caused her not to want to go back.
“Are we going up?”
