Free Dangerous Love by Teresa Ashby Page A

probably left over from last summer which was when the local kids tended to play down here. Some things never changed she thought wryly. Kids were always up for a bit of adventure away from the television and computer games.
    But it meant that Jay hadn’t been here. She was bitterly disappointed. She’d hoped to crawl in and find him huddled up in blankets looking sorry for himself or at least to find some of his stuff.
    And now she had to get back down again. How could she have forgotten how hard that was? Getting up to the cave was the easy part. Getting down was another animal entirely.
    Getting down was cutting yourself on sharp barnacles and jagged stone and bruising yourself on lumps of unforgiving rock. And it was one thing to get those kind of wounds when you were ten years old and shrugged off such things, but when you were a grown woman of twenty-nine with a lot less bounce and a lot more fear, it was quite another.
    And why oh why hadn’t she grabbed trousers when she got dressed?
    Just how did she used to do it? She looked up. There was always the choice of keeping on right to the top. At least then she wouldn’t have to look down. When she did look down she saw Bram looking up at her, arms folded across his broad chest and fought back a wave of dizziness. Ugh, it looked a long way to the bottom.
    “Nothing,” she called down, trying to hide the wobble in her voice. “No sign of him at all.” She wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. Her heart hoped it was a good thing, but her head told her something else. Georgie said he’d disappeared and Jay wasn’t the sort of boy to have gone off and left Georgie behind. Not deliberately.
    “Come on down then,” he said. He knew very well that coming down was harder than going up. She had no idea how to even start.
    “I can’t,” she admitted.
    “Why not? You want to stay up there and live in a cave? Your bed would get wet every time there was a spring tide and you’d end up smelling like a fish.”
    Damn him, this wasn’t funny. She was tired, wrung out and she just wanted to be back on the beach so she could continue looking for Jay who was probably hiding out somewhere with absolutely no idea that such a big search was taking place. At least she still hoped he was, because she was not going to listen to that voice in her head telling her they were too late.
    Maybe he hadn’t disappeared at all. Perhaps he was there and saw Georgie go over the cliff and panicked. He might even have made his way home and be hiding under his bed or something equally daft. She hoped so. She hoped so with all her heart.
    “Want me to come up and get you?”
    “No!” she said. “Not with your back and your ankle.”
    “Well I can’t leave them on the beach,” he said.
    “Oh, ha ha,” she said sarcastically, but still she couldn’t stop a smile twitching the corners of her lips.
    He looked up and grasped a handful of weed, shoving his foot into a dent in the rocks.
    “Bram, don’t you dare come up here. Stay where you are. I’ll get down somehow and if I can’t, then…” she looked upwards. “I’ll just keep going up. I’ve done it before.”
    Going up was easier than coming down.
    “Now that really would be stupid,” Bram said and he was already six feet off the beach. “I’m not coming all the way up to you, just far enough to guide you down. Okay?”
    She wanted to tell him to get lost, but she knew she needed help and there was nothing to gain by trying to do it on her own. Except maybe a few broken bones and a badly bruised ego.
    “Okay,” she said reluctantly and when he was just a few feet below her, he told her to turn round and come back down towards him.
    “I’ll guide your feet into place,” he said. “Trust me.”
    Trust him? But what choice did she have? Very soon others would join them and she’d be showing off her lack of climbing skills not to mention her knickers to half the town.
    “Okay, Regan, keep coming, keep