Taking the Leap (River Rain 3)

His life might have completely changed after what happened in that fire.

But he hadn’t, not really.

Before Peri, hell, just last night, he was a man who got a lot of female attention.

He’d had women do some crazy shit to get his.

And he’d been around women who were shy who wanted it but had no idea how to go about getting it.

Alex was not creeped out about his legs, his chair, or his prosthetics.

She was a woman who wanted his attention, had no idea how to get it, and worse, had no idea what to do with it once she got it.

How the hell did he miss that?

Last night, he’d been flirting with her, lowkey, but he was doing it.

And he had to admit, when she responded…

No, the way she responded, all bashful and cute, he’d taken it out of lowkey mostly because he’d noticed her eyes, her voice was doing a number on him, and her hair was in those righteous pigtails that were so thick, straight up, his fingers itched to pull on one to see how close he could get her to him before she pulled away.

Then she’d gotten nervous, panicked and escaped.

Because the guy she was into was coming on to her, and she was Alex, she had no idea how to deal.

Christ.

Not only had he missed all that, he’d been a dick.

And not just a dick.

A colossal one.

“Well, hell,” he whispered.

Judge was right, he had to get his shit tight.

And he had to smooth things over with Alex.

But right then, she was gone.

He’d come up with a plan to sort that and then he’d sort it.

They had a lot in common, and unfortunately, when he finally got his head out of his ass about her, it was at a time when he realized he wanted to fuck her.

But they worked together, he was fired up about this job, about working with Judge and Kevin, about doing the good they were going to do, he knew Alex was too, so he reckoned neither of them wanted to screw it up.

So they’d figure it out.

For now, there was nothing he could do, so he took a deep breath, turned, and walked out of Judge’s office to go do something he had zero interest in and something else he only had slightly more interest in.

Look at and decide on furniture and logos.

Chapter 2

The Evening

Alex

I let myself into my place Friday evening, relieved beyond anything that it was the weekend, and I didn’t need to expend any more effort trying to stay away from Rix.

Our bar celebration was Wednesday night.

He and I had our thing on Thursday morning, and fortunately, when the guys came back from the new offices, Rix didn’t have the opportunity to approach me directly. Judge holed us into the conference rooms to finalize the furniture and logo situation (they’d needed me to be a tiebreaker on both, because Hale had also picked his top choices, and what stunk about that was that I’d voted with Rix and Kevin (the stinky part was the instant (both times!) I voted with Rix, he gave me a big smile (the first time) and a wink (the second), guess he was over it, bluh).

We also went through a bunch of other stuff about our hiring strategy and policies and procedures and shared assistants and interns, and you know, little stuff like the entire infrastructure that would support us going forth and building global programs that had wildly meandering arms including environmentalism and climate change, keeping kids active, getting them out of rural settings, and using lessons learned out of doors to build self-reliance and help guide errant kids back to themselves.

I had strong feelings about some of this (particularly that it was too much of it), but I’d been too shy to speak up, considering, in all of our other meetings about this stuff, Rix was there, clouding my brain with his sheer magnetism and blinding me with his good looks.

Not anymore.

(Okay, so maybe in the last two days I’d been clouded and blinded, but not as much as I used to be.)

Now I knew Rix wanted to talk to me, probably to smooth things over after he said something so incredibly offensive.

I mean, he thought I had a problem with him because he’d lost his legs?

How horrible is that?

Truly!

So, yes, until we sat together in the bar, we’d never had a real conversation, so he didn’t know me.

But for heaven’s sake.

I worked for the charitable arm of a huge retail store that took pains to reduce their carbon footprint as much as possible, collected money for conservation causes at the tills, and had a CEO who was one of the leading voices for environmental issues in the entire country. That charitable arm being working with kids to get them out in nature. Until recently, I organized the volunteers, and I, myself, had my own trails I worked with the kids, some of whom (both my volunteers and my kids) had varying disabilities.