Page 13 of On the Edge

“I’m meeting with him later today,” I tell him, and I’m once again astounded at how normal my voice is given the pace at which the adrenaline is pumping through my system.

“Good. I expect a full report no later than tomorrow morning.” With that, Coach McCarthy stands, followed by Lyle, and they leave the room.

I glance over at TJ, who nods in my direction, clearly pleased with my performance. And that’s exactly what it is: a performance.

CHAPTER5

NATE

Park City, Utah

Jackson has me meet her in her office instead of out in the training room, and the way she’s sitting behind that huge desk of hers when I enter lets me know that she needs a physical barrier to hide behind.Good. Because she’s fearless in the face of anger, and never backs down from a challenge. She doesn’t hide unless she’s scared.

If she were only mad about me being here, she’d be up in arms challenging me every step of the way. The fact that she’s scared has all my sensors turned on high alert, hoping she’s fighting her own feelings for me.

“Have a seat,” she says without even looking at me. She turns a page in my medical file, her thick pale pink lips pursed.

I sit, watching her flip through the file, intentionally mute. It’s like her silence is begging me to speak, to say anything just so she can shut me down like she did at her front door last night. But if she thinks I’m going to be the first to crack, she’s dead wrong. I’m playing the long game, and I could sit here looking at that beautiful face, her gorgeous dark hair in its side braid, that seductive crevice where her neck and collarbones meet ... yeah, I could stare at this view all day. And if she won’t tell me what she’s so scared about, I’ll just have to figure it out on my own.

Is she worried about her job?There is no doubt I’m an asshole for putting her in this position, where she’s being forced to work with me against her will. If there wasanyother way, I would have taken it. But it took me so much longer to get to this point than I had planned, and now this backdoor into the National Ski Team feels like the only way back into her life.

Is she worried about her relationship with Marco?I sure as hell hope she’s worried that my reappearance will spark the flames of what we used to have, and dim whatever misplaced feelings she has for him. Because if there’s anything I’m one hundred percent certain about, it’s that her feelings for Marcoaremisplaced and I’m happy to be the one to prove that to her.

She clears her throat, but it’s not an invitation into conversation as her eyes are still focused on my file.

“How are your parents?” I ask her as she drags a finger across a page.Guess I’m the first to crack after all. Some things never change.

She inhales sharply, pauses a beat too long. “They’re fine,” she says without looking up.

Are they?Her mom has been living with cancer since we were juniors in high school. In fact, the first time Jackson ever let her guard down with me was the night she found out her mom was fighting a recurrence from the breast cancer she’d beaten when Jackson was in elementary school. Since then, she’s been a success story for a gene therapy that stopped her cancer’s growth and allowed her to live a pretty normal life.

But that pause before Jackson’s response could mean many things. A lot can happen in five years, and she’d feel no reason at this point to let me in on the private details of her life.

“Your brother?” I ask, trying to engage her in conversation.

She keeps her eyes focused on the pages in front of her when she says, “Last I heard he was in Switzerland.”

“Still snowboarding?”

“And partying,” she says, a tinge of bitterness in her voice.

Beau Shanahan, a professional snowboarder in his mid-twenties, doesn’t seem to be growing out of the party scene. I ran into him last year at a ski resort in Canada, but I don’t mention that to Jackson. For years Beau has been competing in the X Games and other similar snowboarding events and using the prize money to fuel his lifestyle of women, booze, and snowboarding. Probably exactly what Jackson thinks I’ve been doing with skiing the past few years, but nothing could be further from the truth.

She’s not inclined to give me any more information, so we sit in silence for a few minutes until she drags her finger over part of the page she’s reading and asks, “What caused the kidney infection?”

“What?” I know what she’s referring to, I just want to get her to look up at me.

She raises her eyes—a bright Kelly green around the edges of her irises and a lighter green near her pupils, surrounded by thick black lashes—and holds my gaze before squinting at me like she’s trying to read my mind. “Last year, you had a kidney infection. What happened?”

“My kidney got infected.”

She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, biting it while she takes a deep breath. On an exhale she says, “Yes, how?”

“Bacteria got into my urinary tract and infected it.” I cross my arms over my chest. Yes, I’m being purposefully obtuse, but she knows how kidney infections happen. Why is she asking?

“UTIs and kidney infections are incredibly rare in males.”

“And yet I got lucky,” I respond, my voice hard and flat because she’s trying to make something out of nothing. I’m sure she wants some excuse to find me unfit to race. But the infection wasn’t related to me giving away one of my kidneys, it was just shit luck that was made worse by the fact that I only have one kidney now, so it was that much harder on my body.

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