“Goldilocks?”
Dammit. Not him, not now. She fisted her hands in the snow, letting it sink into skin, cold and wet, reminding her where she was.
The Sierras, taking that baby step on the way to the rest of her life.
Risking.
Adventures.
All of it, everything she’d never given herself pre-bridge collapse.
“Katie.” Cam crouched at her side putting his hand on her back. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Yes.” Please go away.
Instead, she felt his hand skim over her spine, as cool and soothing as the snow beneath her. “Are you sick?”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re green is what you are.”
“I just need a moment.” She pushed to her feet and headed back to the lodge, figuring he’d take the hint and leave her alone. After all, he seemed to like being alone.
But she could hear his boots crunching in the snow behind her. “I’m fine,” she told him over her shoulder. “Really.” To prove it, she sped up, and then what the hell, ran, wishing she could outrun her demons as easily. Inside the lodge, she raced up the stairs, and then at the top, ran out of gas, sagging against the accolades-laden wall.
Whew, this altitude was killing her.
That, or it was the panic attack, which sucked. While she concentrated on getting air into her overtaxed lungs, she tipped her head back and read Cam’s plaques for the hell of it. Slope-style champion. Overall champion. Gold medalist. Half-pipe champion. Winter X Games champion…It went on and on.
It was amazing to her, the guy who’d appeared at her bedside last night, the same guy who’d been at turns irritating, surprisingly kind, then irritating again, seemed to have won just about every single winter event there was over the past twelve years.
There was nothing for this entire year, though, which struck her as odd.
Since thinking about Cam was infinitely more appealing than facing the fact she’d just had a doozy of a panic attack, was still having if her near-hyperventilating breathing was any indication, she kept at it. She had to wonder why, after the incredible career outlined in front of her, had he suddenly stopped placing in events. Had he retired? “I could get behind retiring,” she muttered, “if I wasn’t so fond of eating.”
“Do you always talk to yourself on the job?”
As she turned to face the champion himself, her damn glasses, clearly not aware of the panic attack in progress, fogged.
Chapter 4
Okay, so apparently he was always going to appear when she was somehow embarrassing herself or out of her element. She turned to face him. With her glasses fogged, she could see only the outline of him, the tall, dark, and attitude-ridden Cameron Wilder. He was encroaching in her space, so she put her hand out to hold him off, setting it against his chest. He was solid, so unexpectedly, thoroughly solid, with the heat of that strength radiating through his sweatshirt, that she ended up holding on instead, fisting her fingers into the soft material just below the Burton blazed across his chest.
“What happened back there?” he asked quietly, calmly, and as the cool snow had, his voice soothed her frazzled nerves. He brought his hands up, running them down her arms once in reassurance.
“Oh, nothing. Just a little panic attack.” Okay, a major one. “No worries, it passed.”
“Okay.” She could feel him looking at her very carefully, he of the sun-kissed unruly brown hair, razor-sharp green eyes, and scruffy face. He removed her fogged glasses, cleaning them on the hem of his sweatshirt while she squinted and focused the best she could, surprised to find what she’d said was true-her panic attack had passed.
“Why do they fog?” he asked, which wasn’t the question she’d expected.
But then again, nothing about him was expected. “Um…they do that sometimes.” Apparently, if a hot guy got too close, which almost never happened.
He set her glasses back on her nose. She could have told him not to bother, that if he kept doing stuff like breathing, they were probably going to keep fogging, which was odd, because this close up she could see that he wasn’t classically handsome. Nope, his nose was slightly crooked, and then there was the scar bisecting his left eyebrow. He had fine lines fanning out from his eyes, reflecting he’d lived his life, a real life out here in the mountains, and also apparently all over the planet with a board strapped to his feet, which fascinated her.
She bet he never had to remind himself to live balls out.
Now that she was okay, his eyes were filling with a general mischief, wicked bad-boy glint, but she also sensed a hint of something much deeper inside him, something…haunting, and though she had no idea what it was exactly, it was that that drew her in.
“So why the panic attack?”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “It’s just a residual thing I’m dealing with.”
“A residual thing. Such as…?”
“Really? You want to talk? Because last night you paid me not to-”
“I want to know what scared you.”
Ah. So he still didn’t want to chat, not really, but was asking out of concern. Probably wondering if his brother had hired a crazy woman.
She picked up the phone message pad and turned on her computer, watching as Safari automatically loaded Yahoo news. And there for her horrified eyes popped up a news video of the Santa Monica bridge, collapsed as if it had just happened, cars sticking out from beneath like from a horror flick.
She didn’t see her car. That was because, as she knew all too well, hers had slid off the cliff, catching on two large trees, leaving her hanging, literally.
A few gray spots swam in her vision. Shit. She heard something hit the floor and realized it was the pad falling from her fingers.
“Katie?”
She swallowed hard and shut the browser on the screen. Marginally better. “Long story.”
“Cliff Notes version,” he said, eyes narrowed in on her face.
“Okay.” She’d done her best not to talk about it, never to talk about it, but clearly that wasn’t working for her. “I had an…accident. A bad one. I nearly died. Actually, I sort of defied the odds by not dying. It messes with my head sometimes, that’s all.” She looked at him, saw the sympathy in his eyes, and decided she liked it better when he was irritated by her. Much better. “So what do you say you give me a hand with month end?”
She saw the relief come in to his eyes. He’d probably been worried that she was going to do something horrifying, like cry. Ha! She was tougher than that. Way tougher.
Almost always.
“You do remember me from last night, right?” he said, playing along with her, letting her change the subject. He leaned that tightly muscled body against her desk, hooking his thumbs into his front pockets. “The most unhelpful man you’ve ever met?”
“Yeah.” Much as she was grateful that he’d let the panic attack go, she winced at the memory of him finding her in his bed. “But in my defense, I was a little…discombobulated last night.”
“Yeah.” He offered a little smile that fried more than a few brain cells. “Me too.”
“Really?” He’d seemed…exhausted, but definitely at ease, especially in his own skin.
“Hell yeah. I came home and found a beautiful woman in my bed that I didn’t put there.”
She stared up into his face. It didn’t say much about her love life that having him call her beautiful made her melt in spite of his extreme unhelpfulness.
Except now that she knew he’d been a professional athlete, she knew something else too. He probably had women throwing themselves at him all the time. Groupies and snow bunnies and the like. “I didn’t realize you were a celebrity.”
He looked puzzled until she gestured to the walls that were a shrine to him.
“Annie did all that.” He looked around and gave a visible wince. “I’ve taken it all down a hundred times. The last time, she threatened to cut off my food supply, and I take my food supply very seriously.”