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Maybe I should stop telling him how wonderful he was. It was getting embarrassing, like I was a fangirl or something. But I meant it. I didn’t know how to be anything but sincere.
I took a deep swallow of wine and tried to ignore the warmth in his brown eyes. “So you said you had a plan? For Hart Mountain?”
“Right. Climbing a mountain like Hart is all about preparation. There’s physical preparation and then there’s mental preparation. After running with you the past week, I think I can safely say that you’re physically prepared. You could climb Hart tomorrow if you wanted to. It wouldn’t feelgood, but you could do it.”
“I could?” Uneasiness roiled my stomach. “But you said I wasn’t ready.”
“And you’re not. Physically, you’re fine. Mentally, you have a way to go.”
Well, that was a relief. I didn’t particularly want to climb Hart Mountain tomorrow. It seemed…hard. Not like something a person should justdoon a random Tuesday.
“Physically, the hike tomorrow will be easy for you, I promise. We’re working on mental conditioning right now. What about Brandon? Can he do three miles?”
I nodded. “He’s in good shape, despite the diabetes.”
“Good.” He pointed his fork at me. “I have a theory about you, Nora. You don’t want to follow me up a mountain. You want to prove to yourself that you canreallyclimb this mountain. You want to lead. So that’s what we’re going to do. You’ll take the lead, and any decision that needs to be made, you’ll be the one to make it.”
I stared at him in horror. Where had he gotten this idea? I wasn’t someone who should be in charge with anything, much less a life-and-death situation on a mountain. All the biggest decisions I had ever made turned out to be wrong. “But…but I don’t know how to do that.”
“Not yet, you don’t. But you will. I’ll teach you the basics. Route-finding, how to read a topographic map, weather conditions, first aid. Trust me, I wouldn’t send you out there unprepared.”
“Sendme? I’m not going up the Widow-Maker alone.”
He laughed. “Of course not. I’ll be right behind you.”
I mulled that over with another sip of wine.
“What’s on your mind, Nora?” he asked. He put his fork down and rested his forearms on the table, leaning toward me, giving me his full attention.
And there it was again, that thing I liked. No judgment, just an invitation to talk it through, whateverithappened to be.
In this case,ithappened to be my fear that I would lead us right off a cliff. Which was exactly how one intrepid hiker broke his femur two years ago.
“So if we come to a fork in the trail and I guess wrong, you’ll tell me?” I asked.
“If we come to a fork in the trail, you’re not going to guess. You’ll have a map. You’re going to make a reasoned, calculated decision.”
I gave an unladylike snort. “Well, there’s a first time for everything.”
He touched my hand across the table. “You can do this, Nora. If you put in the work, you train hard both mentally and physically, then there’s no reason you can’t find your way up Hart Mountain and back again. You just need to trust yourself.”
Trust yourself. Easy for him to say. He’d probably never made a bad decision in his life.
We did the dishes, which took all of ten minutes because, as Michael had pointed out, it was a one-pot meal. I was starting to feel a little panicked. Dinner, doing the dishes together, a planned sleepover—it was all sodomestic. I was used to dates in restaurants, maybe a movie. No one ever cooked for me. It felt nice…and scared the shit out of me.
Two months, I reminded myself. It didn’t matter how many meals we shared, how many times we slept in the same bed. None of that would change the end result. Two months would pass in the blink of an eye and then he would be gone. Hell, it wasn’t even two months now. We were down to seven weeks. This wasn’t arealrelationship, no matter how much it might wear that façade.
“I need to shower, and we should go to bed,” Michael said. “Otherwise six a.m. is going to feel pretty damn rough.”
I checked my phone. “It’s only nine. I might not be able to fall asleep this early.”
His hand slid to the back of my neck, tilting my head to look at him. The heat from his gaze burned into me. “I didn’t say sleep.”
It could no longer be denied that there was a direct correlation to the flutters in my stomach and Michael’s voice. I grabbed his hand and pulled him with me.
Chapter 11
Michael
