“It’s actually on my list.”
“It is?” Mr. Black Sheep wanted to go to the biggest tourist trap in the city? And here she’d already been scouring her brain for edgier suggestions.
“Yeah, I have this thing where when I’m visiting somewhere, I like to go to the highest point if I can. Take in the view.”
She cocked her head. He really was kind of a mystery. “What’s the highest point in Thunder Bay?”
“Tower Mountain,” he said without hesitation.
“All right,” she said, slapping her hands on the marble breakfast bar and sliding off her stool. “I need to get changed.” And take about a thousand Advils. And talk Elise off the ledge. She glanced at her watch. She’d been going to suggest they meet there at eleven, which was two hours from now. But was that too long a gap? Could Cameron do any damage in the next two hours? He yawned, interlaced his fingers, and pressed his arms up and over his head, stretching like a cat. A very dangerous, tattooed, man-eating cat.
Woman-eating cat.
“I’ll meet you there at ten,” she said.
Chapter Five
When Cam ambled into the lobby of the CN Tower at 10:03, Jane was already there perusing brochures. She had changed into another pair of curve-hugging skinny jeans, and she was wearing a form-fitting black T-shirt and a pair of leopard print flats. The woman certainly had a lot of flats. And T-shirts. Last night, at the bar—and in his bed—she’d been wearing a sort of fancy T-shirt, made out of silk or something, and of course she’d had a blazer over it for the not-in-bed portion of their evening, but it had been a T-shirt nonetheless. He was starting to realize that the jeans-T-shirt-flats combo was her thing. As uniforms went, it wasn’t bad. It worked for her.
“This is a total racket,” she said, looking up as he approached. “They basically want fifty bucks a head if you want to go to both observation decks.”
He took the brochure and peered at it. “Or we could do this EdgeWalk thing, and that package gets you into everything else, too.” It was stupidly expensive, but, hell, he had his “tuition” savings burning a hole in his pocket. And life had been a little short on thrills since he’d gotten back from Iraq.
“I knew you were going to want to do that.” She put her hands on her hips. “Because I’m starting to understand: You. Are. Insane.”
“Not your thing?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Let me count the ways. Numbers one through two hundred and ninety-five are the dollars it would cost me. And then there’s the part where you’re paying them to dangle you off the freaking CN Tower, Cameron!” She grabbed the brochure back from him and read it aloud, her voice getting higher. “A hands-free walk on a five-foot-wide ledge encircling the top of the Tower’s main pod, eleven hundred and sixty eight feet, or a hundred and sixteen stories, above the ground.” Then she shook the brochure under his face.
He took it back from her and read on. “Yeah, but also there’s the part where ‘trained EdgeWalk guides will encourage participants to push their personal limits, allowing them to lean back over Toronto with nothing but air and breathtaking views of Lake Ontario beneath them.’” He was taunting her now, but she was kind of irresistible when she was incredulous.
“What part of ‘insane’ did you not understand? Do you need synonyms? ‘Crazy,’ ‘deranged,’ ‘delusional.’ Anything ringing a bell here?”
“You don’t have to do it with me.” He shrugged. “But think how many brownie points this will get you with Elise. You do this, and it’s like you’re the valedictorian of babysitting.”
He’d hooked her. He could tell by the way she tilted her head and squinted her eyes at him. She was searching for a rebuttal, but she didn’t have one. “I’m not babysitting you.”
He raised his eyebrows. She didn’t seem to remember that she’d admitted as much at the bar last night.
“So the whole valedictorian of babysitting thing doesn’t apply,” she added.
“You were probably the actual valedictorian, anyway,” he teased.
“Salutatorian. Wendy was the valedictorian in our high school.”
“Wendy?”
“One of Elise’s other bridesmaids.”
“You and Wendy and Elise went to high school together?” he asked. He was having trouble imagining Jane as a girl. She seemed like the kind of person who had been born thirty years old.
“Nope, just Wendy and me. I’ve known Wendy since she moved to our neighborhood when we were ten. We picked up Elise—and Gia, the fourth bridesmaid—in university. Gia is four years younger than us, though.”
“And how long ago was university?”
“Are you asking how old I am?”
“I might be.” He wasn’t sure why he cared, except that he couldn’t peg her. She was young-looking, with her smooth skin and her cute, if utilitarian, wardrobe. But in other ways, she seemed so world weary, in a way that went beyond her prissiness.
“So just ask me.”
“Jane, how old are you?”
“Thirty-one.” Four years older than he was. But then his own age felt as un-pin-down-able as hers in some ways. Everyone saw him as the immature boy he’d been for so long. But some of the shit he’d seen made him feel like he was a hundred years old.
She cleared her throat, and he realized he’d gotten lost in his thoughts, so he reached for a joke to cover himself. “Thirty-one is definitely old enough to have your personal limits pushed with nothing but air and the breathtaking view of Lake Ontario beneath you.”
“Goddamn you, Cameron MacKinnon.”
He grinned. “I dare you. But I bet you won’t do it.” Suddenly, he really wanted to see Jane hanging off the edge of this impossibly high tower. He wondered if she’d be a screamer.
Whoa. A shiver ran up his spine as that thought brought to mind a totally different image of her screaming.
“And if I take this crazy bet, what do I get?”
“The satisfaction that comes with having your personal limits pushed.”
She swatted him.
“The breathtaking views, too, of course.”
She swatted him again, harder this time, and he grabbed her hand and held on to it in order to halt her attack.
“How about this?” she asked, not taking her hand back and getting right in his face. “I do this demented EdgeWalk thing with you, and you forgo today’s booty call. Or tonight’s. Or whenever you were planning it.”
He whistled. This woman knew how to bargain. He was, frankly, taken aback. But also kind of impressed. He hoped Elise knew what a first-rate nanny service she was getting.
“Because, really, if you’ve slept with one random, you’ve slept with them all,” she went on. “But how often do you get to dangle from a one-hundred-and-sixteen-story building with a bestselling young-adult author? I’ll post us on my Instagram.”
Shit. He was going to agree to her nefarious terms. What was the matter with him?
“Come on,” she wheedled. “Tit for tat.”
Well, at least he could go down swinging. So he took her arm, steered them toward the ticket windows, and said, “I think you mean tat for no-tit.”
Jane was really scared. Like, really, really scared.
Even the elevator was freaking her out. By the time their guide explained that the ascent would take only fifty-eight seconds, her stomach had already been left behind on ground level. She jerked a little and had to restrain herself from grabbing Cameron’s arm.
He must have noticed, because he shot her a concerned look. She summoned a smile she feared looked as fake as it was.
“Let’s do this first,” he murmured in her ear when the guide announced the stop for the glass floor.
“Yes!” she said a little too vehemently. Because a glass floor was nothing compared to, like, being tethered to the outside of a building more than a thousand feet in the air, right?
Wrong.
“Ack!” She did grab Cameron’s arm this time. They were standing at the edge of a glass-paneled floor that showed them the view straight down the hundred and sixteen stories to the street below.
“It’s kind of wild, isn’t it?” Cameron said mildly, leaning over like he was on an actual ledge. “It’s like your brain knows the glass is thick, and it’s perfectly safe, but…”
The more he leaned forward, the harder she pulled back on his arm. He was exactly right. The rational part of her understood there was nothing to fear. There were kids gleefully jumping up and down on neighboring panels, for heaven’s sake.
“But sometimes you’ve gotta open your eyes and jump,” he said, breaking out of her grasp and jumping backward so that he landed on one of the glass panels.
She could have kept her hand on his arm, followed him out onto the glass, but she didn’t. As their fingers slipped past each other, a twinge of regret pinged around in her chest, but it was swept away as someone on the next panel shrieked in laughter.
Cameron was grinning, too, looking down at his feet.
She turned and walked away, her heart beating as if she had walked out on the glass. She busied herself reading an interpretive panel on the wall that informed her that the glass floor could hold forty-one polar bears, or thirty-five moose, or three and a half orcas. So there was basically no way, short of the apocalypse striking, that anyone was falling through that glass. God, what a wimp she was. Children were doing this. Her face heated.