Free Rock with You (Risking It All) by Rachel Lacey

over a small ravine. The zip-line carried him about eight hundred feet, ending on a wooden platform similar to the one he’d kicked off from minutes earlier.
    Here he unclipped from the line, unfastened his harness, and took off his helmet to check the Go-Pro camera he’d attached. He thumbed through its menu, searching for the video he’d just recorded. It wasn’t there.
    He swore under his breath. Somehow he hadn’t recorded a single moment of his trip down the zip-line. And he had to get this video sent off tonight to the college student he’d hired to design the website. He’d have to hike back and take the whole course again. His empty stomach grumbled in protest.
    Ignoring it, Ethan climbed down the ladder and headed for the trail that would take him back to the top. This was the end of the line, the fifth and last leg of the series of zip-lines he’d built, taking him from the main building deep into the forest behind. For now, the zip-lines were his, a place for him and his buddies to get their thrills without putting anyone’s lives at risk.
    But soon, when Off-the-Grid Adventures opened, this would be the start of a business venture that could set him, as well as his friends Mark Dalton and Ryan Blake, on the way to fulfilling a dream. A way to put their dare-deviling ways to good use, cementing themselves as upstanding citizens and making some money while they were at it.
    And as of last night, bringing this dream to fruition had taken on a new urgency. His grandmother’s words haunted him like an unwelcome ghost, flitting in and out of his vision and making his chest feel too tight.
    “An aneurysm,” she’d told him over supper. “I saw it myself on the scan. Because of the location, it’s inoperable. The doctor said it could stay like that indefinitely, but he thinks chances are high that it will rupture sometime in the next few weeks or months.”
    Weeks. Months.
    Dixie Hunter was the strongest woman he knew. She’d endured more in her lifetime than anyone ought to, had raised him since he was twelve with a firm hand and a smile on her face, and at seventy years old, she still walked a mile into town each morning to have breakfast at The Sunny Side Up Café because, as she said, she had two perfectly good legs and needed the exercise.
    And now he was to believe that a bulging blood vessel in her brain was going to take her life sometime in the next few months?
    She’d taken his hand across the table, tears shimmering in her eyes. “I need to see you settled before I go, Ethan. I need to know you’ve got something or someone to keep you out of trouble when I’m not here to nudge you back into line.”
    A hawk called overhead, drawing his gaze toward the blue sky peeking through the swaying treetops above. Settled for him would never include a family, but this place would keep him out of trouble. He just needed to make sure Off-the-Grid Adventures opened in time for Gram to see it.
    He picked his way across the stream, taking a shortcut back to the start of the course. One more ride on the zip-line, and this time the damned camera had better work. He absolutely could not afford a delay.
    Up ahead, a woman sat on a large, flat rock by the stream, her back to him, arms crossed over her knees. Ethan stopped in his tracks. He owned this property, but it bordered the public forest so it wasn’t unheard of to find a hiker wandering through his neck of the woods.
    What was unusual was that he didn’t recognize her. The population of Haven, North Carolina, numbered somewhere in the vicinity of seven hundred, and he could say with some confidence that he was acquainted with all the female residents in his age range.
    The woman before him had light brown hair hanging almost to her waist in long, loose waves. She wore a white tank top that hugged her slender frame, accentuating the curves at her waist, and a billowy blue skirt that swirled around her ankles. Intriguing. Different. And without seeing her