Jennifer Greene - Rock Solid

The best part of the view, though, was watching their leader. Cash hiked the group up a hill so steep that Lexie started suffering oxygen deprivation…but she still felt the emotional tug that she’d experienced the night before. She’d loved how he’d confronted her about Sammy—it wasn’t about her personally, she understood that, but about anyone who could potentially hurt the boy. She loved his protectiveness, loved the look in his eyes when he talked about Sammy, and yeah, she’d liked that personal pull between the two of them, too.

He hadn’t kissed her…but he’d wanted to. And she hadn’t kissed him…but she’d wanted to. It had been a long time, if ever, since she’d felt that kind of rope-tug for a stranger—particularly for someone so completely unlike herself.

Right then, though, he was herding his minigroup in a circle. “Okay, everybody…Lexie, you’re our new man today but as you’ll discover, we start every morning the same way, with some kind of problem-solving exercise. It’s kind of a way we warm up together, and first, we pair up. I’ll work with Stuart, and Lexie, you pair up with Slim Farraday…Slim really knows the ropes.”

Lexie immediately smiled reassuringly at the frail-looking Slim, thinking nothing sounded too tough so far. The “problem-solving” business sounded interesting rather than athletic, and surely anything that Slim could physically do, she could do as well? She pushed up her pastel shirt to the elbows as Cash continued talking.

“Okay. Lexie and Slim, this is your problem for the morning. You see the creek beyond the trees there?” Of course they saw the creek. Impossible to miss anything so dazzling in the infernal morning sunshine. “All right. You two have a half an hour to get to the other side of it. That’s all you have to do.”

“Just hold on a minute, Geronimo.” Lexie waved her hand to catch his attention. “There’s no bridge. And you didn’t give us any tools or ladders or anything—”

“That’s right,” Cash affirmed. “In fact, that’s the point. You’re going to have to use whatever you can find in nature to solve the problem.”

Hands on hips, Lexie wandered over to the dazzling creek in question. The water was so clear that she could easily see the creek-middle had to be waist deep. The distance couldn’t be eight feet, more like seven, but still too far to jump, and certainly too challenging a distance for Slim to try jumping. One dip of her finger announced that the water temperature was sub zero—if that warm—so wading across was completely out of the question.

Mr. Farraday sidled up next to her. “Cash always seems to give us what looks like an insolvable problem. But every morning so far, we’ve managed to find some way to solve it in spite of ourselves.”

“And we’ll solve this one, too,” Lexie assured him. She’d made her first paper million before the age of twenty-two, hadn’t she? How hard could it be to cross a little creek? And Cash—the cad—was already out of sight. Some gentleman he turned out to be, pairing the two husky macho guys, and leaving an undersized Ms. Klutz with Mr. Frail.

“I know we can do it,” Mr. Farraday affirmed, and then scratched his chin. “But…how?”

“Hmm…” Again, she pushed up her sleeves. Her system was still offended at being deprived of caffeine, CNN and her ticker tape, yet somehow her pulse was picking up a charge. Challenges had always been one of her favorite things. Inexplicably it made her feel…safe…when she took on something that was supposed to be impossible for her to do.

Firing up on the problem, now, she motioned to the woods behind them. “God knows, I’ve been tripping over fallen branches since we started walking this morning…so how about this. Slim, you scout out the longest branches you can find. Don’t lift ’em. I’ll lift ’em. And we’ll just make ourselves a bridge out of the fallen branches, secured by those rocks in the middle of creek…and then we’ll just walk across. Piece of cake, right, partner?” She lifted her hand.

Slim gave her a gentle high-five. “Right, partner.”

When Cash heard the sound of a female shriek, he took off at a dead run—knowing, of course, who had to be doing the shrieking.

He charged around trees and brush, barreling to the creek edge…only to see Lexie—still caterwauling—sitting on her butt in the middle of the creek, soaked right up to her neck.

Even as he clomped in the water to fetch her, he was mentally shaking his head. There was a reason he’d paired Lexie with Slim this morning for this particular problem-solving exercise—and blast it, the reason was that she couldn’t fail. The only logical way to cross the creek was to make a bridge of branches—and the terrain had the whole winter’s worth of down pine branches to make that easy. And they’d done that. Made a darn secure little bridge across the water. And Slim Farraday, with no problem at all, even with his arthritic hip, had made it to the other side with no difficulty.

But then there was Ms. Klutz.

“Cash! Help me! I’m going to die of hypothermia! It’s so cold I can’t breathe and I can’t move and I can’t—”

“You’re not going to die and it’s not that cold.” He bent down and grabbed her. For a drowned rat—and a miniaturesized drowned rat at that—she weighed a ton. The branches and mud in her hair didn’t help. And when she hurled her arms around him in a monkey-hold, she almost tipped both of them back in the water—not to mention that her soaked, clinging body completely drenched his in two seconds flat.

God knew why he had the sudden, desperate urge to kiss her. There wasn’t a hormone alive that could conceivably wake up in these temperatures or conditions, and his mind wasn’t on sex but on frustration. The first exercise he gave clients was always intended to give them a feeling of success and confidence, and he’d wanted that even more for Lexie, because she’d been so damn clear that she already expected to fail. Only damnation, no one had trouble with this exercise. Ever. Before. Her.

“I’m freezing, I’m freezing—”

He knew. He could feel her tight, wrinkled nipples, through his drenched shirt and hers. He could feel her fanny under his hands as well, maybe even feel her goose bumps. God knew, she was clutching him tighter than glue. “I know you’re cold. But you’re going to be back at the lodge and climbing in warm, dry clothes in ten minutes, tops, I promise. And after that, you partner with me,” he said irritably. Hell, his teeth were starting to chatter now, too.

“With you?”

“Yeah. With me.”

She lifted her chin so she could look in his eyes. “Um, Cash? This was my fault. Not yours. I told you I wouldn’t do well with the program, didn’t I? I don’t do well with anything physical. It’s just reality—”

Maybe it was her reality, but it wasn’t his. Any other client who’d taken a tumble, he’d give them the morning off, let them soak up some sunshine with their feet up. But a principle was on the line here.

Cash wasn’t sure what the principle was, but there had to be one. He hadn’t built Silver Mountain into a first-class executive retreat by letting clients fail. That was part of it. His whole program was based on making sure every dad-blamed exhausted executive got something good out of it, and he sure wasn’t breaking that record for her. And somehow she’d done something to him so that he couldn’t get his mind off her. That had gotten tangled up in the principle, too.

Bottom line was, an hour later, Keegan had been sent out to handle the program for the others, and Cash was fresh-showered, dry-clothed and pacing the front lobby, waiting for her. Spare minutes after that, Lexie bounced down the stairs, wearing a new pastel pair of jeans and another cute little pair of tennies and what looked like a raw-silk shirt to him—even if the pattern was a country plaid. Her hair was dry already—how long could it take to dry a couple of inches of bouncy curl? And she was smiling up at him before he’d even had a chance to erase his scowl.