Which was why he was here, at the ass-crack of dawn, ready to risk permanent injury to get to the top of this shit. If Alexis had kept on the phone long enough to tell her sister where she was staying, this would have been unnecessary, but noooooo.

He leaned down to rub his knee, knowing damn well that his anger was misplaced. It didn’t make it miraculously disappear to know the source was a combination of the physical aggravation from his knee and his bruised pride from the fact that she’d slipped out of bed without him so much as stirring.

He’d dropped the ball.

Luke braced himself for the pain that was about to become his world and started up. Faced with this challenge, he couldn’t help thinking that this would have been an easy hike before that IED blew off half his right leg. He would have spent it joking and laughing. Now… Now, it was a struggle to take the next step.

And hell if the reminder of all the ways his life was different didn’t piss him off. He wasn’t whole anymore. If he had been, the Air Force would have kept him on as a pararescuer. But he couldn’t meet the physical requirements—he didn’t even come close the one time he’d tried. To do his job, he had to be at the top of his game, and that’s something he never would be again.

By the time he hit the halfway point, he was breathing hard, and his leg shook with the effort. Pathetic. If he were smart, he’d stop and rest his knee for a little bit. He kept going, because the sad truth was that if he stopped now, he was going to have a hard time getting started again. Better to just muscle through it and hope that the trip down would be less difficult.

He glanced up, thankful that the dark clouds overhead had kept all but the most determined tourists off the trail. He didn’t want an audience for this. As it was, he got pitying looks as a group of chatting girls bypassed him. One fact solidified in his mind as his knee screamed from the effort of hauling himself upward.

This was Alexis’s fault.

Not his weakness, but having to put it on display. He bet she’d just bounded up this hill, marveling at how wonderful the world was. Spoiled-rotten princess.

That’s not fair and you know it.

Yeah, he did. He didn’t feel a whole lot like being fair right now. When he got to the top of this beast, he wasn’t sure if he was going to kiss the hell out of her or yell until he was blue in the face.

The path opened in front of him, leveling out to the cliff itself, a wide, flat rock that overlooked the fjord from a truly impressive height. The shock of it had him stumbling to a stop. Even though the path upward was brutal, it was closed in enough that he hadn’t realized how high up they were until now. It would be a brutal drop if someone went over the edge. And Europeans weren’t worried about putting safety cables or fences in place to keep some idiot from taking a running leap into oblivion if they were so inclined. Maybe they saw it as a way of natural selection, but it didn’t do a damn thing for his blood pressure.

But even with that staggering beauty in front of him, his attention zeroed in on Alexis and stayed there. She stood alone between two groups of people, and even from this distance he could see her face lifted and her eyes closed. Inexplicably, she wore a sundress with her hiking boots. His mind flashed back to the climb he’d just done, and he couldn’t help imagining how much easier it would have been if he had a view up that dress to keep him motivated.

But seriously, who the hell wore a sundress to hike a cliff? Obviously someone with no connection to reality.

He started to take a step forward when her shoulders squared. She looked like she was about to march into a battle, like she was steeling herself for something terrible. Luke looked around, frowning when he didn’t see anything particularly terrifying. What was she doing?

Flannery had said she was afraid of heights. Not that he’d believed it, knowing Alexis scaled this bitch. This mountain was wicked steep. Alexis picked up her pack and took a cautious step forward—toward the edge of the cliff. He could actually see her take a deep breath and then force herself another step forward.

She’s terrified. Fear screamed from every line of her body, seeming to get more intense the closer she got to the edge. She staggered to a stop about six feet from the cliff, her shoulders so tense, it looked like she might break into a million pieces. But she didn’t retreat. She didn’t move forward any more, but she didn’t back away, either.

Against all reason, a slow appreciation wound through him. He knew about facing fears—he’d spent most of his two years of training for the PJs doing just that. Yeah, he’d been afraid of drowning and failing his patient instead of something so mundane as heights, but that didn’t make the courage she showed any less real.

But it couldn’t be clearer that fear had her all locked up. She looked like a rabbit in the face of a wolf, frozen and hoping the danger would pass if she didn’t move. You can do it, princess. You have claws. Use them. A minute passed, and then another. If someone didn’t do something, she’d be here all night. Or worse, she’d talk herself away from the edge. He didn’t climb all the way up here for her to back out. Luke cursed under his breath and started for her.

Alexis could barely breathe past the panic fluttering in her veins. So high. It had been scary climbing up here, because the urge to turn around and see exactly how far she’d ascended was nearly overwhelming. But the closed-in feeling of the path had helped steady her. Now there was nothing but wide-open spaces at the top.

Six feet from the edge, frozen in terror, the sheer drop to the water of the fjord nearly two thousand feet below… Actually, it’s 1,982 feet. “Oh God.” A few more feet and she’d be at the edge, within reach of that paralyzing drop. It was all too tempting to shake off her fear and back away. The only person she was trying to prove something to was herself—it wasn’t like she was going to disappoint anyone if she didn’t touch the edge of Pulpit Rock.

Anyone but herself.

If she couldn’t do even this, then what the hell was she doing in Europe to begin with? This isn’t any harder than what I’ve spent the last few years going through—than what Mom went through. If she could do that, I should be able to take these last few steps and touch the edge. The only thing standing in her way was her fear.

But the fear was an overwhelmingly physical thing. It clawed down her throat and through her chest, making her skin feel too tight and her breath come too fast. I have to be sedated for plane rides. What the hell was I thinking hiking up here?

She was thinking she wanted to put Old Alexis in the dust. Climbing to the top of a cliff, let alone one that had a two-thousand-foot drop off the end of it, wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities a few months ago. And she was here. She’d made it to the top. Now she just needed to take the last few steps and banish the mousy part of her that would rather go with the flow than rock the boat, once and for all.

Mom would have walked out there without hesitation.

Yeah, well, Mom wasn’t afraid of heights. Mom wasn’t afraid of anything.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

She almost ignored the words, sure that the angry man on the other end couldn’t be talking to her, but she knew that voice. Intimately. Alexis looked over her shoulder and, for one eternal second, she was sure she was experiencing a fear-based hallucination. Because there was no other way to explain the sight of Luke bearing down on her, storms in his green eyes. Except then he was in front of her and glowering in that way she was already coming to recognize.

She blinked, but he didn’t disappear. “What are you doing here?”