Ashes - Book 1 (11 page)

The words come out so fast, I’m not sure I heard them correctly. I stand up and face her, shading her from the sun. “You want me to make love to you?” I clarify.

She blinks her eyes a few times and then looks up at me. “Yeah, I guess. Something like that.”

“Me on top?” I’m still incredulous.

Her mouth twitches a little. “Yes.”

“Why?” I slap myself in the forehead and quickly say, “Stupid question. What I mean is — and don’t get me wrong, I’m right there — but why now?” I reach up and stroke her cheek, loving this softer Beth and not knowing where she’s been hiding.

She lifts a shoulder. “Couple of reasons, I guess, but I was talking to Steph the other day and how she was able to get past all that happened to her last year and it made me realize how tightly I was holding onto some things that happened to me several years ago.”

“What things, Beth? Want to tell me?”

She looks around and then back up to me. “Short story is that I was raped when I was a freshman in college.”

As she says the words, I think my teeth will explode with how hard I’m biting down. I want to punch a rock. Curse. Hold her.

“I’ve been holding onto that for all these years and using it as a reason not to get close to people … men. It was also my reason for wanting to be in control, because I hated so much being at someone else’s mercy.”

“I’m sorry, Beth. I didn’t know.”

She smiles. “How could you? I swore Steph to secrecy, even though she’s since told Ken. Next week, Steph and I are going to a high school and talking to graduating seniors about date rape and how to protect themselves while they’re in college and beyond. I’m going to talk about my experience there.”

“Shit, Beth. That’s wonderful. I didn’t know you were doing that, talking to schools.”

“Neither did I until yesterday. One of the vice principals is a good friend of Captain Frank’s wife, Mary. Apparently they were having lunch or something and were talking about HEAL. The VP thought it would be terrific for us to come and talk to the seniors and help them prepare for the darker side of life.”

“I think that’s an incredible idea.”

She grins. “Me too. The seniors have to take home permission slips for their parents to sign, enabling them to attend, since we’re talking about S. E. X. So I don’t know how many we’ll have there, but it could be a couple hundred.”

“And you’re going to talk about what happened to you?”

She nods. “Yep. No details or anything, but about how I drank whatever anyone handed to me and also how I refused to file a report. Did you know that only about twenty percent of rapes are reported?”

I shake my head. That’s crazy.

“When’s this happening?”

“Thursday at ten a.m.”

“Want any moral support?”

Her eyes flick up at me, startled. “You would come?”

“Absolutely. That is, if you want me there. Say no if you don’t. I know I’d be nervous as hell speaking in front of a group of people that large.”

She smiles and flicks her ponytail to the side. “Not me. I have you know I was head cheerleader, debate team captain, and won first place for creative writing and had to read my novella to the entire student body. I just do like the self-help books say and pretend everyone is naked.”

I stick out a hand and pull her up from the rock, yanking hard enough that she bumps into my chest. I lean down and kiss her, her lips warmed from the sun. “Is it okay if I imagine you naked while you’re speaking?”

She nods up and down.

“Is it okay if I’m thinking about lying on top of you, my hips between your legs, pushing into you slowly.” Her fingers fist into my t-shirt and I nuzzle her ear with my nose before licking the salt from her neck. “Is it okay if I imagine your legs wrapped around me, your heels digging into my ass, your fingernails raking down my back as I pump harder and harder?”

Her breathing is coming faster now. I take her mouth with mine, invade her with my tongue. I curl it around hers and pull hers into my mouth. I suck and she moans while my fingers …”

“Gross. Get a room.”

Beth and I break apart so quickly that she nearly falls backward over a rock.

“Daniel Lloyd Davis, hush your mouth.”

My head whips in the direction of voices to see a family coming up the trail. Daniel has to be the boy who was smirking. He looks to be about twelve. His father whacks him on the back of the head. Not hard, just enough to make his longish Bieber hair fly up.

An older girl of about fifteen rolls her eyes and keeps chewing her gum. She’s the identical image of her mother who is still fussing at her son.

I grab Beth’s arm and pull her in front of me, hiding the evidence of my arousal.

As the family passes by, I mumble sorry and get an ‘it’s okay’ wink from the father. Daniel takes a good long, up and down look at Beth and offers his fist for a bump. His mother grabs his arm and gives us a stiff smile before laying into her son with a verbal tirade. We could still hear her as they moved around the big turn.

Two and a half hours after we stepped away from the Jeep, we make it to the summit and collapse on our blanket to eat our sandwiches. I’m damn near exhausted after carrying the pack, keeping a hand on Beth’s ass to keep her from falling and heaving us both up a nearly vertical wall of rock.

What was I thinking?

I am starving and wish I’d packed a dozen more hoagies and am pouring a bottle of water over my head. Beth is lying down, picking small pieces of sandwich off and dropping them into her mouth.

“Oh my god. That was about ten million times harder than I thought it would be,” she says.

I completely agree. Then I grab her hand and tell her to sit up, and she gasps at the view all around us. We have a three hundred and sixty degree view of Red Rock Canyon.

“Wow,” she says and turns her head. “Wow,” she says again and looks in a different direction. She says the same thing about a dozen times as she takes in the full panorama.

We had sweeping views all around us. From the Red Rock Escarpment, the Calicos, Brownstone Canyon and the snowcapped peak of La Madre Mountains, it was impossible not to feel in awe of nature’s glory.

“Mother Nature did good,” Beth breathes and takes the first full bite of her sandwich. “This view makes the past two hours of hell worth it.”

I grin. I hope she says the same thing once we get to the bottom. I haven’t told her that going down is worse than getting up.

We stay on the summit for about an hour when the wind begins whipping so hard people are losing their belongings. Most everyone starts to leave and I hold onto Beth, teasing her that the wind will pick her up and carry her away.

It doesn’t look like things will get better, so we decide to pack it up as well. We sign the guest book that’s kept in a can, then pose for a few selfies, some silly, some serious. She texts one to Steph and gets an ‘aww, you two are adorable’ message in reply.

I haul my pack onto my shoulders and curse myself for bringing so much weight. I suck it up and walk Beth to the edge that we’ll need to climb down.

“Holy hell,” she breathes out and looks up at me. “And here I thought downhill would be a piece of cake.”

Seventeen squeals and seventy-two curse words later, we essentially slide down the steepest section on our asses and make it back to where we stopped for water earlier. Beth’s eyes are huge, but we’re laughing by the time we sit down on a rock.

“I think I have a rock lodged in my rectum,” she says and rubs her butt, grimacing.

I pull her across my lap, face down. “Want me to check? I will, you know.”

She’s laughing, cursing and wiggling, struggling to get up, and I slap her ass. She stills, absolutely stops moving and all I can think is ‘oh shit, what have I done’.

I turn her over, until she’s sitting on my lap. She pokes me in the chest and says, “I can’t believe you did that.”

Honestly, I can’t believe I did that either. Not with Beth anyway. I’ve dated plenty of girls who like it rough, who beg for spankings, who were into bondage and all kinds of freaky sex. Beth isn’t one of them. At all.

She opens her mouth again, but instead of a tirade, she asks me a question I completely don’t expect. “Maybe if things go well with, you know, the, uh…”

“Missionary position,” I finish for her.

She scowls at me. “Yeah. That. If things go well, maybe we can try some other things. Would you want to do that?”

Hot damn. She’s blushing.

“What kinds of things?”

She turns in my lap until she’s straddling me. “I don’t know yet. And I feel like an idiot for not knowing, but …” her cheeks grow even pinker “… maybe we can just play it by ear?”

I lean down and touch my lips—

A scream causes us to rip apart. We stare at each other, then she’s off my lap and I’m on my feet. We wait. Another scream. It’s coming from down the mountain.

“Daniel!” The word seems to echo around us. “Help! Somebody HELP!”

Grabbing our packs, we’re scrambling down the trail as fast as we can. More screams. A man this time. The boy’s father. Someone is crying. The voices grow closer and then we see them. It’s the family we ran into earlier. The father is on his stomach, looking over the side of a drop off. The mother and sister are crying. No one is calling for help. They’re all hysterical. We need to take charge.

Dropping my pack, I peer over the side and Beth grabs my belt from the back. “Gage, be careful.”

It’s about a forty foot drop and undercut from the top. I see the boy. He’s scared, but alive, sitting up, holding his leg. It’s at an awkward angle. His other leg doesn’t look too good either.

“We see you, stay still while I find a way down,” I yell down the ravine.

Daniel, bless him, seems to be calmer than the three up here on the ledge. “Okay!” he shouts back.

I turn to the father. “Call for help. I’m going down.”

He nods and runs to his wife, who is digging in a backpack, hopefully looking for a phone. I turn and see Beth opening my pack and pulling out the things we don’t currently need.

I look around and find the anchor sites I’ll use to support my weight while I rappel down. I dump the pack and pull my belt out.

“We don’t have a signal,” the mother wails, and I point up the trail, telling her to walk that way until she finds one.

“Go!” The word breaks through her trance and she and the girl begin walking back uphill, holding the phone up in the air.

“Beth, when I get to the bottom, toss down the first aid kit and this additional rope. If you see anything up here I can use for a splint, toss it down too.”

I get the anchor set in the rock and begin the process of strapping in.

“Good thing you brought the heavy pack,” she says, breathing heavily. “I wish you had two. You could use my help down there.”

I kiss her forehead. “I need your help up here too.” I look around. “The wind is picking up again; it’s going to be a rough ride down. Look for the splint, maybe two. Drop them down and keep the family away from the edge.”

She nods and I’m amazed she isn’t fighting me about going down. I have to admit the stubborn streak in her is a love-hate thing, but this time she knows I’m right.

“I’m not sure, but they’ll probably send a chopper and do an air lift. You know what, find the mom and talk to EMS yourself. Let them know there is a firefighter, EMT certified and an RN onsite. Tell them that I’m rappelling down to aid and for them to just drop the basket and I’ll stabilize and load.”

A gust of wind knocks Beth a step sideways and I curse. Kneeling, I take another length of rope from my bag and loop it around the anchor. “When you get back down here, tie this around your waist. The wind is getting bad. Keep the family away from the ledge.” I show her how to use the carabiner to secure it. “If you can, try to convince them to head on down the trail to their car. Get their number and let them know they’ll be contacted with hospital location.”

“How far away are we from the end?”

I glance at my watch. “Hour and a half or so.”

“I’m not leaving my son!” the father yells and Beth jumps, neither of us noticing him coming up beside us.

“It’s your choice,” Beth tells him, not raising her voice. “You can stay here and do nothing or make your way back to your car and be waiting for him at the hospital.”