to the boat below like God’s breath.’
She stared up at him, her icy fingers clenched tightly in his, breathing as fast and shallow as she had after their kiss. Every single thing she knew about him and his past evaporated in that moment and he was just a man she trusted, a man she admired. A man heavy with flaws but so very heavy with brilliance, too. A man who could get her through this and any other challenge she ever had in life.
She smiled, even if it did wobble. ‘You’re so full of it, Tennant.’
His head dropped and his smile broke sunlight across the whole valley. ‘But did it work?’
She looked inward. Her pulse had leveled out, her breathing had eased and even the distance below them seemed to compress into something survivable. This was just like jumping off the high board back in school.
A really, really high board.
She turned and faced outwards, keeping her hand curled in his. ‘It worked.’
Behind them the tattoo guy counted down.
Five … four …
When he got to three, Hayden turned suddenly, bent and pressed his mouth to hers, hot and hard.
One.
Gravity tore their lips apart as they fell forward, free and fast, and her stomach heaved. The sound coming out of each of them was much the same, just harmonised. Then the straps around her ankles tightened into a fabric vice and her free fall arrested and she was dunked bodily into the Kawarau River before being yanked out again and hurled back into the air like a rag doll.
Her smaller size meant she bounced in opposition to Hayden, laughing and sobbing and crying out to the gods that she’d just defied by surviving such a fall. Life coursed through her veins like the drug it was, and she simultaneously felt the exact position of every cell in her body. Every decision in her life suddenly grew acutely clear—the wrong turns and the right. Above her dangling self she saw the yellow pickup boat moving into position and the pressure of her full weight on her ankles started to bite. Her hair pointed in long, straight, drenched shards to the earth.
‘Oh, my God!’
She turned to face Hayden, hanging upside down like Spiderman next to her. He reached out a hand, stretched out a finger and snagged one of hers, pulling her close as the pickup guys hooked her bungee with a boat hook. It took only a minute to pull them down into the boat and release the ankle boots. She fell, as heavy and inelegant as a load of fish from a dragnet, into the base of the boat. Hayden sprawled in next to her. Their cords vanished back up into the sky.
There were no words.
There was no past and no future.
There was no one in the world but them.
She twisted in the puddle on the floor of the boat and threw her arms around Hayden, overcome. Their wet, heated bodies fused together along with their lips. His hands bunched in her wet hair and pulled it out of the way so that his mouth could raze her own. She sucked in his air and his smell and the very flavour of him and pressed herself more fully against him, desperate for more. Wondering how she’d survived this long without ever feeling this.
Her head spun more now than during her free fall.
He twisted her into him and dragged her across his lap as the little boat began to move to the edge of the gorge. She fed off his heat and gasped at the furnace of his touch.
It was the gasp—or maybe the touch—that drew a tactful throat-clear from one of the two men running the boat. ‘Adrenalin,’ he volunteered. ‘We get this a lot.’
She immediately stiffened and went to pull away but Hayden simply lifted his lips and pulled her back to lie in the soggy bottom of the dinghy, staring at the sky. Together. His heart hammered right below her ear where she rested on his chest. Hers matched it. It hadn’t stopped pounding since she’d first stepped onto the bridge all the way up there, and it was still repeating as hard as their outboard motor now.
As she lay there using Hayden as a pillow, the cadence of the thumps and the punctuation of his breaths formed a hypnotic blanket. Slowly … so slowly … her pulse eased, her breath returned and her mind was quiet.
‘Land ho,’ one of the two men said as the dinghy bumped against the edge of the gorge. She would have scrambled out anyway but it was doubly tough in saturated clothes that clung and inhibited her progress.
What was it with her and Hayden? She seemed to be forever plucking sodden garments from her body when he was around. This time she didn’t bother. If he wanted to stare at her wet butt as he followed her up the long, steep trail back to the top of the gorge he could knock himself out.
It wasn’t as if they were strangers any more. Not after that kiss. Or the one before it.
‘Retinas intact?’ she asked, back over her shoulder, when she should have been apologising for launching herself on him.
He laughed through the puff of scaling the gorge wall. ‘So far so good.’
The climb became torture, so close behind the chemical rush of the jump and the muscle collapse of recovery, and took all her strength and air. Conveniently, it also excused her lapse into silence.
She used the time to think.
What had just happened?
He might have kissed her briefly at the top of the jump but it had been more of a solidarity kiss, a kiss for courage. What they had just shared splayed out in the bottom of the boat, despite the audience, was something else altogether. Something far more dangerous.
And she’d started it.
The adrenalin, of course. The skipper of the pickup boat had excused it as much. In that moment she’d needed nothing more in the entire world than someone to connect with. But would she have done that with some stranger that she’d just met?
No.
This was about Hayden.
She’d felt it when she’d first walked up to him at his cottage and he’d looked at her with such sultry interest. She’d felt it surrounded by children, crouched across a suburban battlefield from Leonidas, and doubly so when they’d lain in the sun drying. She’d definitely felt it when he’d kissed her half to death to make his point just a few nights ago.
All of those moments were just leading to the one they’d just shared in the boat.
And he knew it.
You started to buy in to me touching you months ago …
He’d warned her. He’d told her how his vision of strategic seduction worked. Why should she be surprised, now, to discover his manipulations were working?
Except … was it manipulation if you really wanted it?
If you started it?
Then again, wasn’t that one of the key principles of his theory? Convincing her it was her idea all along.
She emerged at the top of the gorge slightly ahead
