Page 85 of Dark Horse | AllFreeNovel

We walked in silence for a moment, the woods humming with insect buzz and the crunch of pine needles under our boots. His thumb brushed my knuckles once, accidentally, probably, but it sent a shockwave up my arm so fast I nearly tripped again.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. “You okay?” he asked quietly, not even sounding a little out of breath.

“I’m fine,” I said, far too quickly. “Super fine. The fittest person alive, in fact.”

My pulse chose that exact moment to thud hard enough that it might as well have yelled liar. His gaze dipped to my throat, where my jugular was no doubt doing a drum solo. Another flicker of a smile.

“You know…you got me good with that pepper spray,” he said, without a trace of anger in his voice.

Heat flooded my face. “I told you I’m sorry! You scared me.”

“I should’ve expected it,” he said, his voice dipping into something sexy enough to set off more sparks along my spine. “A woman hiking alone. Guy walks out of the woods. You reacted right.”

I blinked. “I did?”

He angled his head toward me, his eyes still a little reddened and watery. Somehow, that made his blue stare even more intense. “Yeah,” he murmured. “Good girl.”

I nearly tripped on literal air.

He noticed—again—and that faint smirk curved his mouth, unapologetically pleased. “You should always defend yourself,” he went on. “Anytime. Against anyone—even me. You don’t hesitate. You hear me?”

My chest tightened, not from fear this time, but from something painfully close to relief. He wasn’t mocking me or angry. He was giving me…validation.

It was nothing like the man who had punished me for every flinch, every boundary, every breath out of place.

“I…” My throat bobbed. “Yeah. Okay.”

Sterling didn’t say anything else. His thumb brushed over my knuckles soothingly, though, as if he could sense the storm inside of me.

We walked for another thirty minutes, and the fear bled out of me with each step. The trees seemed to thin. The air seemed to brighten.

We traded light and easy banter, him teasing me about my shoes—which were apparently city shoes and not adequate for Montana hiking—me accusing him of dramatic cowboy entrances, until the tension that had strangled the day finally loosened.

Then we rounded another bend…and I gasped.

The sound echoed off stone as the trail opened into a hidden clearing. A waterfall plunged in a shining white sheet over a rock face, mist blooming up in soft veils that caught the sun and broke it into tiny rainbows. The pool below glowed turquoise, clear enough that I could see smooth stones shifting beneath the ripples.

It didn’t look real. More like a pocket of the world that had slipped out of a storybook and forgotten to close itself.