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Map folded in his pocket, he led Jo out of town, up a stony path that wound its way up to the cliff tops where they’d be able to get a better view of the base tucked into Skarsvag’s waters.
The rhythm of walking soothed him and he breathed deep the scent of damp earth and the resinous tang of pine trees that dotted their climb. Slowly, the sun warmed his back, easing the tension across his shoulders, helping to mute the nagging discomfort in his shoulder. The skin was tender from bruising, but he still had a full range of movement. He was going to take that as a win.
Jo kept pace, her breath coming in short measured pants, and again he couldn’t help but admire her determination and lack of complaint. So many people would be bitching already. Car broken down, hiking in the dark through the snow, sleeping rough in a cabin, then another steep climb first thing in the morning. He knew plenty of men who would already have had enough.
He snuck glances whenever the view distracted her as they climbed higher. Her hair had come loose in the gusty wind and her cheeks flushed from the cold and exertion. It only accentuated her features. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but the intelligence in her eyes burned like lightning and the determined set to her mouth spoke of a woman who knew her own mind.
She’d watched him this morning at the water pump. He’d known before he turned she was watching, had felt the burn of her gaze and damn if that hadn’t turned him on. Despite the glacial water, the rough graze of the snow as he rubbed it over his body to wake himself up, he’d felt nothing but the scorching blaze of her attention.
And then.
That unexpected kiss in the cabin.
The softness of her lips against his finger as he fed her a morsel at breakfast. She didn’t know what her touch did to him. He wanted more. He was tired, bone tired of being alone, and this woman was making him question everything he thought in his life was true.
A flurry of snow stung his forehead, needling him back into the here and now. Right now, his focus had to remain on the job, ensuring Jo found the information she needed while keeping her safe.
“Wow. What a view.” Jo halted, breathless, on a small plateau, a wiry juniper bush at her feet. Indigo water lapped far below, capped white by the blustering wind. The landscape flashed bright and dark as clouds scudded overhead at speed.
Griff retrieved his phone from his pocket and used the camera to zoom in on the activity below. He scanned left and right, lowered the phone. Their current location was recessed, obscuring a significant proportion of the view below. He glanced over his shoulder to where the path continued to climb in a jagged rise to the summit.
Jo tracked his gaze. “We need to go higher?”
He faced her. “How are you with heights?”
She set her hands on her hips and shook her head, a smile touching her lips. “Good, apparently.”
The path became increasingly rocky, and so steep in some places they had to scramble hand and foot over quartz-studded rock crusted with golden lichen. The last few tens of feet, he guided Jo away from the path into the dense scrub that snagged at his legs. Rotund bees buzzed past him, making the most of the last of the flowers, their fuzzy bodies defying gravity.
“Jeez.” Jo came to an abrupt stop. “I nearly fell down there.”
Griff scrambled down beside her. To her right, a fissure plunged deep into the darkness of the rock-face. Cool air rose from within, briny with minerals. He spotted something else. Manmade. Yellow and red. Instruments embedded in the rock, thin poles running east to west across the fissure.
Jo sat with a huff, her lower lip sticking out. “What is that?”
Griff pushed straggly grass out of the way to get a better look. “Seismic instruments. A rockfall here would be catastrophic.”
“Really?” Jo looked to where Skarsvag was a smudge of color on the water’s edge. Her face dented in a frown. “They have earthquakes here?”
“Some seismic activity. It’s the landslides that the seismic activity triggers that are the problem. The rockfall from fjord walls, steep cliffs alongside the water, it displaces a massive body of water and can lead to a tsunami.”
Her eyes widened. “Tsunami?”
“The fjord acts like a funnel, increases the power of the wave. It can be devastating and it’s happened before.”
She wrapped her arms around her knees. “I didn’t realize.”
Griff scooted over to sit beside her. “Yeah. People think of oceans with tsunami. Not inland water.” He opened the camera on his phone. “I think this is as good a view as we are going to get.”
“It’s beautiful up here.” She smiled. “I can see why you love it. Climbing that is.”
He allowed himself a moment to soak in the world spread below, buildings the size of ants, people almost too tiny to see. All the worries and cares of the human world were miniaturized so they no longer mattered, and there was only rock and sky and freedom.
Fuck. He’d missed this. Buried the acknowledgement till he was here, back in his element where he belonged. He might not be hanging by his fingertips from a cliff face, but being here, high in the sky, it still healed him.
Griff drew in a measured breath and held it, so the mountain might soak into him, saturate his every cell. “Yeah, it is.” He turned his attention back to the task at hand. “Let’s see what we have.”
Jo leaned in to look at his screen. He did his best to ignore the loose strands of her hair tickling his chin.
