Blood and Chrysanthemums Read Online Free PDF Page A

thinking back to the times he’d done the routes. The best days had been lazy, sunny mornings, when he hadn’t felt like doing anything more ambitious. He tried to transfer the memory to night and replace the backing heat of the sun with the cool light of the moon.
    “It’s possible, especially with a headlamp,” he conceded. “But not recommended.”
    “Could they be done solo?”
    “Most of them have been done that way at one time or another. By people who know what they’re doing. In daylight,” he added, mistrusting her questions, focusing for the first time on why she might be asking them. She couldn’t be intending to solo the damn thing by moonlight? Except that sounded exactly like what she was intending to do. Christ, Mark, what have you done? If this woman ends up at the bottom of the mountain with a broken back, it’ll be your fault. He hadn’t been thinking about what she might do with the information. Christ, he hadn’t been thinking at all. . . . except about her eyes and her distracting lower lip and the fact that it had been a long time since he’d noticed those things in anyone. Was he so desperate to get laid that he was willing to risk her life?
    Before he could absorb the consequences of his impulsive offer, she had folded the map into her purse. She looked at her watch. “I have to go. Thanks for telling me about the climbs.”
    “Ardeth. . . . don’t do it alone. I mean it. If you want to go, call me. I don’t care if it’s noon, or four o’clock or two in the morning. Don’t go alone. Promise me.”
    Her eyes flickered away and he saw her gathering herself to rise. He reached out, caught her fingers and held tight.
    “Promise me.”
    He felt her fingers flex beneath his, then his hand was holding only air. He caught a faint glimpse of something that looked like regret in her eyes, and she was gone.
    Mark sat still, staring after her, coffee cooling forgotten on the table.
    Stupid bastard, he told himself. You had to open your mouth. You had to want to impress her. You had to want her.
    It’s not your fault, part of him insisted. She’s an adult, after all. She can make her own decisions. And she could have found those routes in any guidebook, from anyone. But he had told her. He had been too entranced by her interest, too eager to find some reason to talk to her.
    She didn’t have any idea of the risks involved. She thought it would be like the wall, where you’d actually have to work at it to hurt yourself. On real rock, anything could happen. Real rock broke bones, shattered spines. Real rock could kill.
    Maybe she wouldn’t go after all. But he didn’t believe that. There was something about her interest, her attention to his instructions, that made him certain that she would try it, sooner or later.
    So it is your fault. What are you going to do about it? he challenged himself. What could he do? He didn’t know where she lived or how to get in touch with her. But maybe Sally, who worked for the town, could bend a few government rules and give him a clue. It wasn’t as if Banff was big, for god’s sake. Eventually he would run into her on the street.
    If he didn’t . . .
    He could always go out to the mountain to look for her. Just a quick hike around the trail to see if she was there. Yeah, he thought in self-mockery, just a quick hike of an hour or two in the middle of the night. But the idea exerted a strange appeal. One miserable trek would probably help assuage his guilt and if he found her. . . . well, she could hardly send him away when he’d done all that out of concern for her.
    Of course, even if he did it—for whatever chivalrous or selfish motives—it would probably not be the night she chose, and she’d end up injured, paralyzed of worse.
    Mark sighed and took a sip of coffee, barely noticing that it had gone cold. He looked out the window of the shop and, for the first time in years, prayed for rain.

Chapter 4
    The photograph was of a