the PJs doing just that. Yeah, he’d been afraid of drowning and failing his patient instead of something so mundane as heights, but that didn’t make the courage she showed any less real.
But it couldn’t be clearer that fear had her all locked up. She looked like a rabbit in the face of a wolf, frozen and hoping the danger would pass if she didn’t move. You can do it, princess. You have claws. Use them. A minute passed, and then another. If someone didn’t do something, she’d be here all night. Or worse, she’d talk herself away from the edge. He didn’t climb all the way up here for her to back out. Luke cursed under his breath and started for her.
Alexis could barely breathe past the panic fluttering in her veins. So high. It had been scary climbing up here, because the urge to turn around and see exactly how far she’d ascended was nearly overwhelming. But the closed-in feeling of the path had helped steady her. Now there was nothing but wide-open spaces at the top.
Six feet from the edge, frozen in terror, the sheer drop to the water of the fjord nearly two thousand feet below… Actually, it’s 1,982 feet. “Oh God.” A few more feet and she’d be at the edge, within reach of that paralyzing drop. It was all too tempting to shake off her fear and back away. The only person she was trying to prove something to was herself—it wasn’t like she was going to disappoint anyone if she didn’t touch the edge of Pulpit Rock.
Anyone but herself.
If she couldn’t do even this, then what the hell was she doing in Europe to begin with? This isn’t any harder than what I’ve spent the last few years going through—than what Mom went through. If she could do that, I should be able to take these last few steps and touch the edge. The only thing standing in her way was her fear.
But the fear was an overwhelmingly physical thing. It clawed down her throat and through her chest, making her skin feel too tight and her breath come too fast. I have to be sedated for plane rides. What the hell was I thinking hiking up here?
She was thinking she wanted to put Old Alexis in the dust. Climbing to the top of a cliff, let alone one that had a two-thousand-foot drop off the end of it, wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities a few months ago. And she was here. She’d made it to the top. Now she just needed to take the last few steps and banish the mousy part of her that would rather go with the flow than rock the boat, once and for all.
Mom would have walked out there without hesitation.
Yeah, well, Mom wasn’t afraid of heights. Mom wasn’t afraid of anything.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
She almost ignored the words, sure that the angry man on the other end couldn’t be talking to her, but she knew that voice. Intimately. Alexis looked over her shoulder and, for one eternal second, she was sure she was experiencing a fear-based hallucination. Because there was no other way to explain the sight of Luke bearing down on her, storms in his green eyes. Except then he was in front of her and glowering in that way she was already coming to recognize.
She blinked, but he didn’t disappear. “What are you doing here?”
“I have a better question. What are you trying to prove?”
She stared, not liking the way he gave voice to the very same question she’d just been thinking. “What?”
For a second, he hesitated, but then his brows dropped. “Christ, princess, I’m not even using big words—what are you trying to prove by crawling up here in that sad excuse for hiking gear? World’s prettiest thrill-seeker, too afraid to even look over the edge of a cliff?”
Anger straightened her spine, and she took her first full breath since she reached the summit. How dare he? He doesn’t know a damn thing about me. What happened in Cork didn’t give him free rein to steamroll all over her. Speaking of Cork… “Says the man who’s stalking me.”
“I’m not stalking you. I was minding my own goddamn business, taking in the scenery.” He motioned around them. “And who do I stumble over at the top? A scared little princess.”
She hated when he called her princess. Alexis glared down at his knee. That hike had been tiring for