Taking the Leap (River Rain 3)

I fought a grimace, because I was so that girl who would bang heads with the guy as we both bent to retrieve something.

He nabbed my keycard, then handed it to me.

“’Night, Alex,” he’d muttered.

“’Night,” I’d replied, used the keycard, and without further incident, got into my room.

He didn’t move from his spot in the hall until I was in and had flipped a light switch, and that was sweet, him being gentlemanly, waiting until I was safely inside.

I gave him a silly wave, which made his lips quirk.

And the door closed between us.

I alternately floated on air, and panicked, while getting ready for bed.

Once there, I’d tossed and turned, wondering how I was going to handle not only spending nearly six days pretending to be Rix’s fiancée, but all that went into getting to know one another so we could convince my family I was.

I did this until eventually, I fell asleep.

Now, though, with Rix not there, the desert before me, and my morning plan to be up early so I could hit the trail our server at dinner had told us ran off the north side of the hotel, up a gentle grade, and in twenty minutes, you’d have a vista that included some rock formations that were definitely worth a short, forty-minute hike, I thought…this was doable.

Things had gone awry between us, but I’d been wrong.

Rix was not a jerk.

Rix was a good guy.

No, he was a great guy.

He cared a lot about what we were hoping to do at Trail Blazer, and he wanted to do it well, reaching as many as we could, making as much positive change as was possible.

He was also funny and he was interesting and he was a good listener and he clearly loved his family and he was going to do something really, amazingly sweet—pretend not just to be my boyfriend, but in order to make a bigger thing of it to be in Blake’s face, he was going to be my fake future husband.

If he could be that awesome, I could do this.

I had no misconceptions that I was going to sail through this without a few clumsy moments.

But how hard would it be to get to know Rix, to share about myself, maybe to learn to hold his hand, accept a kiss on the cheek and perhaps a peck on the lips…or two.

And then we’d come back from New York, and we’d be friends, sharing funny stories about the look on my sister’s face when she first saw Rix. Or how my father tried to figure out how to best a man who didn’t live his life trying to make the point he was better than everyone else and didn’t care in the slightest about something as inane as that, because he knew no one was better, people were just different.

Then later, someday when Rix found his real future wife, I could joke with her about Rix and my glorious but brief engagement, and it wouldn’t destroy me that his love went to someone else, because I’d have him as my friend, and maybe her too.

Okay, that last part was probably pushing it.

On this thought, I reached out to my phone, canceled the alarm and got out of bed.

I brushed my teeth, made in-room coffee, got changed into some olive-green trekker shorts, an apricot V-necked tee, slathered on sunscreen, and quickly downed some caffeine while putting on my lightweight hiking boots. Then I grabbed my faded-camo bucket hat and sunglasses and headed out to the trail.

It was a gentle ascent, nice and winding around some steep rock that jutted up its sides, so eventually the resort was out of sight, and you felt you were alone in nature.

But once the end of the trail was in sight, so was something else.

Rix had had the same idea as me.

He was up on a bluff, wearing khaki, lightweight performance fabric hiking pants and a basil green tee.

And he didn’t miss my approach, his cocky white smile aimed my way seemed to be gleaming in the sun.

But I’d stopped, because he was tanned and he was gorgeous and he needed a shave, but I liked his scruff, and he was smiling at me and he was out on the trail before six-thirty and I found that all so ludicrously attractive, I felt like weeping.

“Al, get up here,” he ordered.

Al?

No one called me Al.

It was horrible.

But from Rix’s lips, I adored it.

I got up there and saw why he was impatient for me to get there.

Not only were we in a spot that offered a spectacular vista, down below, there was an area made of sandy, waving, smooth, and in places, bulbous rock. It looked like the terrain of a different planet. I could see a studio in Hollywood wanting to film some Galaxy Quest-style movie there.