The Soldier and the Princess

Chapter thirteen

Silas

“Areyousurethis is what you want to do today?” I asked Daphne as we parked the truck, having driven as far as the pavement would allow. Turning her way, I smiled as she practically bounced in the passenger seat beside me, her face glowing with excitement. “Stone may be holed up in his office, avoiding his roommate, but you could be spending the day with Penelope, you know? Doing girl stuff.”

“Oh, this is absolutely what I want to do today. I have been staring at this place since I got here, and staying at dad’s house this last week is not helping.” She gestured out the window at the vista before us, Red Rock Canyon National Conversation Area laid out like a gorgeous red carpet. “It’s been on my doorstep for months, and now is the first time I’ve taken the opportunity to explore it.” She leveled me with an adorable little glare, the space between her eyebrows crinkling. “You aren’t backing out, are you?”

“Oh, no,” I said with a laugh. “Not at all. I just wanted to make sure you knew what you were in for.” Turing off the engine, I flipped the keys in my hand and sent her a smirk. “City girls like you aren’t usually into things like this.” At her outraged gasp, I doubled down. “Don’t you want to go shopping or some shit?”

“I—you—gah!” she stuttered in frustration. “What do you know about city girls, anyway? You’re a Texas farm boy who wouldn’t know a Saks Fifth Avenue if it smacked you in the face.”

Daphne tried to keep a straight face throughout her little tirade, but failed miserably and ended up collapsing in a fit of sweet giggles.

“You’re right,” I agreed, popping my door open and feeling the gust of hot desert air as it invaded the cab of the truck. “And thank fuck for that.”

We had driven into the park on a dusty, narrow road and had parked next to a bunch of other visitors in a shallow canyon between two low hills. As soon as she was out of the truck, Daphne darted forward, looking at the map of all the trails available to us and trying to decide which one she was most interested in.

I followed at a slower pace, marveling at the girl before me.

The last time I had seen her, she had been a child, all elbows and knees and freckles. Thinking back, I had barely registered that moment in my mind, and I realized I was kind of mad about that fact.

I didn’t understand how I had ever not noticed her; her very presence was like a beacon, drawing attention to her. It seemed like every word that came out of her mouth was fun and sweet and that she never had a bad thing to say about anyone.

Daphne was practically made of happiness, and I felt better just being near her.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, her finger pointing at a spot on the map. “This is the one I was hoping to see!” Stepping up behind her, I followed her finger to a spot marked ‘Petroglyph Wall’ and saw that it was marked as an easy trail, no longer than thirty minutes in length. “Come on!”

She grabbed my wrist, hauling me along behind her and back the way we had come and heading across the parking area. We reached the trailhead and started down a rocky trail so narrow it was barely distinguishable from the rest of the scrubland round it. The narrowness of the path meant that Daphne had to drop my arm, and I tried to ignore the disappointment I felt when she did.

Instead, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and watched as her adorable brown ponytail bounced along her back as she practically pranced ahead of me.

What I definitely did not do was stare at her ass, wrapped as it was in a pair of khaki shorts. Between those shorts, her baby blue tank top, and the hiking boots she wore, all my Lara Croft fantasies were coming true, walking right ahead of me...and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

The trail was easy, the edges marked out by a row of medium-sized stones, and there was barely any rise or fall to it at all. “They really call this hiking?” I asked incredulously. “I’ve had more difficult walks to the mailbox.”

As I said it, I recalled one time, in my youth, when a walk to the mailbox had me pausing halfway to puke. The night before, I had taken a vicious kick to the ribs from my dad, and just standing upright was enough to make me want to pass out. But I was awaiting the check from the government; dad’s disability money that came on the twentieth of every month. If he had managed to get to it before I did, he would spend the grocery money on booze, and I had been tired of eating expired cereal three meals a day.

Glancing at the open, carefree face of the beautiful girl in front of me, I doubted she had ever suffered a day in her life. I didn’t begrudge her for it; not at all. In fact, the thought that she had never known sadness made me feel exceptionally happy.

Daphne deserved the best of everything.

I hoped she’d always have it.

“Silas!” she exclaimed, the urgency in her voice drawing me out of my dirty past and back to the moment. “Get back on the path!”

Glancing down at my feet, I noticed I had stopped following the track laid out by the stones and had moved closer to her side, wanting to be able to see her face as she experienced the day. Stepping back behind Daphne, I shrugged one shoulder, effecting a casual air.

“It’s all the same dirt, Daph.”

“It’s not, though,” she insisted, giving me that cute little frown again. “The path is marked for a reason. Don’t you know the rules?”

“The rules of hiking?”

“Yes! Rules like ‘Take only pictures, leave only footprints’. What if your footsteps crush a delicate plant, or collapse a den?” she asked me, and I paused, looking back where I had been walking.

“A den?”

“Yes, a den. There are lots of animals that live underground in the area. It’s how they deal with the heat. You could have disturbed an owl burrow.”

Now I laughed. “An owl burrow? For real?”

“Yes, for real. The burrowing owl lives all over this area. They reach as far as Texas.” She smiled, letting me know we were still on good terms. “You should be kinder to your fellow Texans, Silas.”

“How do you know so much about this stuff?”

This time it was Daphne’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know,” she muttered, suddenly turning shy.

“Hey,” I said gently, wanting to touch her, to rest my hand on her shoulder and feel her warm skin beneath my fingers. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, really. I just,”—she pressed her hand to her forehead, and I wished I could see her eyes behind her big sunglasses. I wanted to know what she was really feeling, and I couldn’t do that without seeing her eyes—“Constance used to tell me that my geeky stuff was unattractive. She would say ‘no one likes a know it all, Daphne’, so I guess I just learned to keep that kind of stuff to myself.”

“What kind of stuff?” I asked as we resumed walking, this time with me as close to her as I could get while still staying on the path.

“You know, things like, the nesting habits of burrowing owls, or how far away the nearest galaxy is. Things like that. I have always been the kind of person who just had to know something, you know? Like, if I had a question, if there was something I didn’t know the answer to, I had to find out. Look it up, study it, add it to my memory banks.” Daphne chuckled, shaking her head. “I am definitely the kind of person you want on your team for Trivial Pursuit. The amount of useless stuff floating around my brain is kind of crazy.”

“I think it’s awesome,” I told her truthfully. “That kind of stuff is important. You never know what you might need to know one day.”

Daphne turned to look at me, her cheeks bright as a smile ghosted across her face. “Thanks,” she said softly as she absently reached up and drew the elastic out of her hair, letting it tumble down around her shoulders in a casual wave.

We continued on in silence after that, both lost in our own thoughts, but soon enough we had reached the end of the little trail, a split rail fence telling us we could go no farther.

“Wow,” Daphne breathed, her eyes roaming over the cliff face before us. “How cool is that?”

She was right; it was pretty cool.

Before us stood the reason the trail had its name: petroglyphs. The surface of the cliff was dotted with ancient carvings and markings, some cut right into the stone, others painted on. As I stared, Daphne moved over to the little plaque mounted on the fence and began reading the information there.

“Look at this,” she called, gesturing me to come over with one hand as she moved her sunglasses on top of her head with the other. As I stood behind her, reading over her shoulder, I couldn’t help but notice how she smelled so amazing; her regular jasmine scent mixed with the coconut of the sunscreen she’d applied before we headed out today. Leaning in close, I tried to breathe her in discreetly, wanting to commit her delicious smell to memory and not even knowing why.

Or, at least, not admitting it.

“It says here that there are two types of art on this wall, petroglyphs, which are the carvings, and pictographs, the paintings.” She spoke quickly as she ran her finger over the words, and I could see her absolute joy at learning something new. She radiated happiness and excitement, and it was beautiful to watch.

Had I ever had that kind of feeling? I couldn’t remember.

Not wanting to disturb her, I stepped back a little and slid my phone out of my pocket, thumbing open the camera app to take a discrete picture of her, hair blowing in the desert wind, her eyes bright and curious, her smile so happy.

“The people who made these pieces used them as story-telling tools and maybe even warnings.” She turned to look at me, and I slid my phone away before moving closer again. “Can you imagine being the first modern person to discover something like this? How neat would it be to be able to understand the message and know what they were trying to say?”

I smiled at her enthusiasm, and she blushed a little, her already pink cheeks deepening to a rose color.

“I think it would have been pretty fuckin’ cool to be the first one to see this, Princess.”

Daphne rewarded me with another huge smile, then turned back to the information board to continue reading. “They made the paint with plants, minerals, and even egg whites.” She snapped her eyes up to me. “I learned about this in one of my design classes. The different products that used to go into paints and things back in the day. There’s a whole movement out there about using only authentic and natural products, but that’s just so much work.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s super expensive, too.”

“Is that what you’re doing in your classes? Paint and stuff?”

“Well, I have to learn about color and the history of art in some of the classes, but I am mostly taking interior design.”

“What made you decide to take that?”

I got another of those shy shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Leaning close—and taking another sniff—I nudged her with my shoulder. “I think you do know.”

Scrunching her face up in the most adorable way, Daphne blew out a breath before answering me. “I guess it was because I felt like I was never able to control my environment. That sounds lame, but it is how I can best describe what I was feeling. All my life, I had lived in these stuffy places; uptown apartments, the freaking hotels I spent most of my time in, hell, even the schools I went to were all the same. Dark, old-world, aristocratic places that oozed money and exclusion, all wrapped in polished wood and brown leather.

“Just once I wanted to have a place with tons of lightness, you know? Maybe a desert color palate.” Daphne rested her butt against the rail of the fence and gestured around us. “Look at all these colors: reds and oranges; greens and taupes. So what if I wanted to have a sage green couch against a terracotta wall? Or if I wanted a lavender area rug and a lime throw pillow on my couch?” She was getting riled up, her breathing increasing with her passion, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.

“I guess I just wanted to be able to pick the colors in my life, and design seemed like the best way to make that happen.”