Ricochet (Renegades #3)(44)
Author: Skye Jordan

He swung his pack off his shoulder and let it drop on the dirt trail. He was tired today after his second night with very little sleep—he only wished it had been for the same reason as the first. And he’d spent the whole drive here searching for some way to convince Rachel to change her mind about him.

But he sucked at this shit. He’d always been the one wanting less. Now he wanted more, none of which he could have—not only because Rachel was denying it, but because of who he was. And who he wasn’t.

Pulling the T-shirt he’d stripped off a couple of hours ago from his waistband, he wiped sweat off his face and thought about putting it back on. He’d already be sporting a sunburn tomorrow, despite the base tan scorched into him by the Afghan sun and the sweat-proof, fifty-SPF sunscreen he’d applied before starting out. But every time he caught Rachel’s eyes sliding over his chest or back, with the same spark from their first night glimmering, he decided to risk the discomfort.

He sucked in a deep lungful of the crisp fresh country air, just tinged with salt from the ocean a mile or so out, and soaked in every curve of the rolling green hills, every artfully scattered cluster of oak trees. When he turned, he found Rachel taking the final steps up the steep grade.

He stuffed his shirt away and extended his hand. She took it, leveraging herself the last three feet to the plateau at his side. Wincing, panting, she planted her hands on her knees and looked up at him. “I believe I failed to mention…that the last time I backpacked…was about eight years ago…”

He grinned. She hadn’t complained once. Not once in six damn hours of hiking this steep, rocky, sometimes slippery terrain. She had scrapes on her arms, legs, and hands, and dirt covered almost every inch of her, including streaks on her face he wasn’t mentioning because they were just too damned adorable to wipe off.

She had her hair in a ponytail, threaded through a baseball cap, and now pulled her sunglasses off, placing them above the brim of her cap before searching for water in her bag. Her tank top showed the movement of toned arm and shoulder muscles beneath smooth skin, and tight ab muscles beneath the fitted cotton. Her shorts weren’t exactly ass-hugging short, but they certainly left those luscious thighs of hers fully exposed for Ryker’s visual enjoyment.

“Well, you fooled me.” He pulled a ground cloth from his pack and laid it out. “Rest a while. I’ll call out measurements to you. Won’t take long.”

“This is the last pillar, right?”

Unfortunately. “Yep.”

“Thank God.” She stumbled to the tarp, dropped her pack, and plopped on her butt. “Oh wow,” she breathed. “Every view just keeps getting better.”

Ryker took out his own water from his pack and glanced at her as she looked up at the monolith of a bridge above them.

“This sucker is ginormous,” she said, then laughed. “How many times have I said that today?”

He didn’t know. He couldn’t pull his gaze away from the pulse in her neck. Couldn’t stop thinking about that last time they’d had sex in the hotel room, when she’d been spread across his lap, her head thrown back just like that, sweat shining on her skin the way it did now, and his cock driving deep, deep, deep into her heat—

“I’m just glad you’re a Wikipedia on explosions.” Her words cut into his thoughts, and he uncapped his water, downing half the bottle. A crisp breeze pushed cotton-ball clouds across a turquoise sky and ruffled the new grasses on the hillside. The navy-blue Pacific Ocean sparkled in the distance.

“That’s the ranch, right?” Her voice drew his gaze, and he found her looking into a smooth valley with groupings of silver-roofed deep-red buildings.

“Yep.”

She squinted up at the bridge, then back down at the ranch, and Ryker read the concern on her face.

“We’re wrapping it with Geotex,” he said.

“You never told me what Geotex is.”

“A fabric that’s strong enough to withstand flying debris. It’s what we’re using under the bridge to keep the concrete and metal from hitting the rocks on the north end.” His mind drifted backward in time, despite his best efforts to hold it in place. “Ricochet can cause a lot of damage.”

”And why do you consider yourself an expert?” she asked, a hint of humor in her voice. “Because you’ve avoided a lot of damage or caused a lot of damage?”

He wanted to smile, make light of it, but for him, ricochet was a negative theme in his life, one that caused way too much collateral damage—bouncing back and forth between his mother and foster care. Hitting one foster care home only to be sent to another, then another. School to school. Friend to friend. Woman to woman. The only constant in his life was the Army and Troy. And in the Army, ricochet, and the collateral damage it caused, took on lethal proportions.

Yes, unfortunately, he was an expert in ricochet.

He put his water away, avoiding her gaze. “I guess I’ve done my share of both.”

She’d been unusually quiet all day. Sure, the tough terrain made it difficult to talk, but he sensed something different about her, as if she were preoccupied. Almost as if she’d pulled away from him—which was just asinine, since there wasn’t anything to pull away from.

Over the last few hours, he’d gotten some small talk out of her—where she’d gone to school and how she’d gone to work for her father’s agricultural sales company afterward. She claimed she’d moved away to take this job with Renegades when he’d retired, but Ryker wasn’t buying that—at least not completely.

He’d also seen Troy head up to the trailer this morning while he and Jax had been hiking down to the storage parking, and Ryker had a hunch Troy had given her some serious anti-Ryker information to consider. He respected the way Troy was trying to take care of his friends, but Ryker didn’t appreciate being sacrificed to achieve that end.

He’d been avoiding asking her all day—he really didn’t want to know what Troy had said, but the very fact that she hadn’t mentioned it yet was making him a little crazy.

Rachel pulled the plans from the tube she’d been carrying. She leafed through the pages to find this section of the bridge.

There wasn’t any easy way to do this, so he just pushed the words out. “What did Troy say this morning?”

She found the page she was looking for and smoothed it flat. “Oh, you know.” She sighed the words as if the whole topic exhausted her. “Same old the-sky-will-fall-if-you-don’t-stay-away-from-Ryker thing.” She shook her head, and her ponytail brushed against her back. “I just…I mean, I understand what he’s trying to do and why…but then, I don’t.” She looked up but didn’t turn to face him where he stood behind her, only looked out at the ocean. “You’d never guess he’d been raving about you just a week ago. Ryker this, Ryker that. Ryker, Ryker, Ryker.” She laughed softly and looked down at the plans again. “We were all pretty sick of it, to tell you the truth. Now…all this…”