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She stared at me, horrified. “There isn’t atrail? Why hasn’t someone fixed that yet?”
“You volunteering?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Exactly. Trail-building is back-breaking work and it takes a team of people who are doing that work for free.”
“Got it,” she said hastily. “Okay, show me how to read this crazy-ass map, because I can’t make sense of the damn thing.”
“It’s a topographic map.” I explained what the squiggled lines meant, and how the closer they were together, the steeper the elevation. “The best way to learn is by doing, so let’s head out.”
“Okay.” She hefted her pack onto her slender shoulders. It dwarfed her small frame and since it contained a liter of water for each of us, it wasn’t exactly light.
“I can take that.”
She arched her brows. “So can I. And I need to get used to carrying the weight, don’t I?”
She had a point. It felt wrong letting her carry the too-big pack while I carried nothing, but insisting otherwise would cross the line from chivalrous straight into asshole. She was physically able to carry it. She needed the experience. She said she could do it, and I would take her at her word.
“Okay,” I said finally. I grabbed a fistful of her shirt and tugged her closer. Then I set about adjusting the various straps so she would at least be a little more comfortable. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. “There. You’re all set now.”
She smiled up at me. That strange feeling returned to my stomach, hot and restless. Not butterflies, because I was pushing forty, not fifteen. But it wassomething.It made me want to stand absolutely still and also run a hundred miles.
I settled for following the dirt path into the woods. Eventually the dirt changed to a rockier footing, but even in her sneakers she didn’t seem bothered by it. We stopped every hundred feet or so and she tried to pinpoint our location on the map. The first few times she got it wrong, to which she cheerfully said, “Fuck!” and tried again.
Until she stopped getting it wrong and started getting it right.
I grinned, shaking my head. “She’s a quick learner, huh, boy?” I said to Brandon. It was a rhetorical question, but Brandon made a quick woof in response that sounded almost like a chuckle.
At the sound, Nora turned with a grin of her own. “Is he being good?”
“Yeah, no problems here.”
“I was talking to the dog,” she deadpanned. “Of course Brandon is being good.” She gave him an affectionate pat. “Best birthday present ever.”
Birthday present? But didn’t that make Brandon hers?Justhers? I loved dogs as much as the next guy, but I couldn’t imagine agreeing to see my ex every week, not when a clean break was possible.
“Tell me about that,” I said carefully. “How did you wind up with joint custody of your birthday present?”
She grimaced. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“Hm.” She squinted at the map, looked up and around at our surroundings, then at the map again. “We’re here?” she asked, indicating our position on the map with her finger.
I nodded, but I wasn’t going to let her dodge that easily. “So…Colonel Brandon?”
“Right.” The reluctance in her voice was obvious. Shereallydidn’t want to talk about it. I had almost decided to let her off the hook when she said, “Grant and I had a plan. Get married after college, then I would go to grad school while he worked, and after we had both settled into our careers a little, we would start a family. I was twenty-eight when I decided I was ready, but he wanted to wait until we were thirty. So, okay. We would wait. And then I turned thirty.”
We both looked at Colonel Brandon, who was definitely not a baby.
“You got a dog instead?” I asked.
“Sort of,” she hedged. “You know how we first met? When I locked myself out of my house?”
I nodded. Attempting to commandeer a police horse wasn’t the sort of thing I was likely to forget.
“I do stuff like that. All the time. It’s nothing new. My mom used to call me Hurricane Nora, because I was my own natural disaster. It’s not that I’m a flake. I’ve never been late on filing paperwork for my clients or forgotten to show up. I just…make mistakes at very inconvenient times.” She shrugged. “So Grant thought I should have a practice baby. Colonel Brandon. Grant gave him to me for my thirtieth birthday.”
