Page 15 of When Glitter Meets Gold

“Back up there?” He drawls out the words. “Sure, let me go grab my climbing gear.” His mouth forms a straight line as he glares at me. “You want to get back to the road, you have to go around first. Best I can do is radio for help when signal comes back.” He flashes a radio from his pocket. “I’m sorry, but that’s your only option.”

I consider it.Going around.Whatever that means.If it means getting back to civilization faster, then maybe it’s my only option. God, who am I kidding? I won’t last five minutes out here.

“Listen,” I take a step closer to him, noting the way his dark brown hair falls across his forehead and how his eyes are a bright shade of blue.Those eyes…“I can’t be out here. This wasn’t the plan. I just…don’t do well in…places like this.”

He studies me, the act causing his dark brows to pull together tightly.

“I…” I begin again, but trail off, because I can’t stop staring at him. That hair, those eyes…

My neck cranes, and my body takes an involuntary step closer to him. His shoulders are massive, his chest huge. He definitely works out, or chops several dozen blocks of wood every hour, on the hour, which doesn’t make sense…because that’s not the way I remember…

Wait. Why do I remember him?

He’s eyeing me cautiously, like he wants to take a step back. He keeps his position, however, reluctantly allowing me to inspect him.

“Don’t I…know you?” I ask, my eyes raking over his features as I attempt to connect the dots.

“No,” he replies without missing a beat. Then he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Great, you’re concussed. Okay fine, we’ll hike a few miles this way. We should hit a tower, and by then, we should get some signal. There’s a downpour coming, but you’ll be fine to rest up in the tower until they?—”

“Jack?” I say as the slow realization turns me dizzy.

He freezes in his tracks, like a taser victim fighting the sting. He twists on his heel, pinning me with a razor-sharp glare. “What did you just call me?”

“Jack,” I repeat. This time confirming it to myself. “Jack Baker. Itisyou.”

It’s my turn to feel the need to withdraw, because a thousand feelings engulf me, and not a single one of them is pleasant.

He shakes his head. “I don’t go by that name anymore.”

“You.” The word comes from an absent part of my brain. Then I’m pointing a shaky, deranged finger at him. “You’re the reason I don’t do well in places like this.”

Jack glares at me from under a heavy-set brow, sheer bewilderment in his eyes. “What? Who are you?”

He doesn’t remember. The last time we saw each other, I was eight. I’ve changed a lot since then. But he was older, by what? Four, five years? He’d grown up of course but everything’s still there. His strong features, solid build, and obviously, his inability to behave any way other than with arrogance.

I have no doubt that the same arrogance is the thingstopping him from recalling who I am, our last meeting erased from his memory. Me being scooped from a slime-infested swamp by my dad because my legs had frozen in terror beneath me. The Baker siblings watching from nearby, laughing hysterically as an entire colony of ants,fire ants—yes, there’s a shocking difference—took up residence in every crevice of my body.

Of course he didn’t recognize me, he’d probably forgotten all about me the moment I fled his property that dreadful day. Our parents, once close friends, had argued and apologized, then argued some more, but in the end, we’d never seen them again.

That single experience is the reason I moved to New York, to be amongst traffic and pollution and moisture-absorbing concrete.

“Sara,” I say through ground teeth. “Sara Kirby.”

He narrows his gaze. His head tilts from one side, then slowly to the other. His mouth opens as if to ask a question but stops short. I can practically see the cogs in his brain turning, grinding, until…click.

“Maybe,” he says weakly.

I wait for the rest as blood blisters beneath my surface, and the memories I’ve repressed for seventeen years seep in.

When he crosses his arms over his chest and simply nods, I drift manically toward self-combustion. Either I remove myself from this man’s presence or I’m going to implode to cinder on the spot. After all this time, a “maybe” simply isn’t going to cut it.

I spin, breaking into a limp-march as I charge off into the wilderness, ignoring the vines grazing my arms and glasslike gravel poking into my freezing, shoeless foot as I stomp-hobble off.

“What are you doing?” Jack calls after me reluctantly. “You’re going the wrong way. That way isn’t even an option. You’re going to get lost.”

“I don’t care,” I hiss as I slap at a low hanging branch that ends up bouncing straight back up to smack me under my chin.

“Hey,” he calls after me again, followed by a long, low growl. “Could you just be careful over there, it’s uneven.”

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