Heartbroken Heights Read online

  Heartbroken Heights

  Sporthearts Book 1

  M. Frankie

  © Copyright 2019—All rights reserved.

  It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: Chloe

  Chapter Two: David

  Chapter Three: Chloe

  Chapter Four: David

  Chapter Five: Chloe

  Chapter Six: David

  Chapter Seven: Chloe

  Chapter Eight: David

  Chapter Nine: Chloe

  Chapter Ten: David

  Chapter Eleven: Chloe

  Chapter Twelve: David

  Chapter Thirteen: Chloe

  Chapter One: Chloe

  Sometimes, the higher you climb, the harder life tries to shove you back down. Except in this particular instance, life was a rock that turned beneath Chloe’s hiking boot as she stepped on it, sending her foot sliding back a few inches as she flailed her arms in an attempt not to fall right back down the slope she had just trudged up.

  She righted herself, breathing a little heavily. “Whew! Close one.” Despite the frigid late-December Nevadan air, she wiped a thin layer of sweat off her forehead.

  “You almost died,” Stacey joked, backtracking along the trail to rejoin her best friend. “Do you want to stop for a couple minutes?”

  “No way. I mean, we’re stopping for lunch soon anyway,” Chloe pointed out. She knew why Stacey had asked, though. Chloe’s curvy body didn’t lend itself well to many physical activities. But I’m not as out-of-shape as I look! she reminded herself in the privacy of her mind, even if she wouldn’t say anything to make Stacey feel guilty. Before her senior year of undergraduate classes at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chloe had done a lot of hiking. She had never let that little extra in her hips and tummy stop her from enjoying fresh air.

  As they continued along one of Red Rock Canyon’s most popular hiking trails, Chloe found that she couldn’t stay irritated with her friend. Usually December covered Red Rock Canyon with a fine layer of snow, but not this year. Chloe’s best friend and roommate from her college days had decided to fly from her home in Austin, Texas to Reno, Nevada after Christmas and spend the last few unusually-mild days of December with Chloe, exploring the numerous attractions and state parks around the Biggest Little City in the World.

  Even if the weather had been less favorable, Chloe wouldn’t have minded. The cold had never bothered her much, despite growing up in Los Angeles where people complained if temperatures dropped below fifty. Here, the lows could reach the twenties.

  Maybe it’s because we travelled around so much, Chloe mused, wondering what gave her bones the strength to weather the cold. Her mother and father had loved to travel before her father got sick during her first year of high school, and her family had hit many of the most prominent national parks in their spacious camper. Cold had never deterred them, and it didn’t bother Chloe now.

  Chloe sighed, but she kept the sound quiet, not wanting Stacey to hear and ask if she wanted to stop again. Those trips felt like ancient times now that Chloe was twenty-four years old and had been without a father for seven years.

  Stop it, she commanded herself, trying to drag her focus back to her footing on the rocky trail. Chloe still missed her father deeply, but she had stopped crying about something that couldn’t be changed years ago. Besides, with her job as a financial advisor, she almost never had the chance to go out on hikes like this. She needed to enjoy the beautiful scenery and the rare and coveted companionship of her best friend to the utmost.

  After another hour, Stacey pointed out a low, flat rock. “Mother Nature left us a picnic table!”

  Chloe chuckled and the two sat down, rifling through their backpacks for sandwiches, trail mix bars and fruit cups. “I’m so glad you had the chance to come out here before we both go back to work. We need to do this more often.”

  “Yes, but next time you’re coming to Austin.” Stacey shook her head and gave a little exaggerated shiver. “I know this is supposed to be mild weather for this time of year, but… brr.”

  “It’s not that cold,” Chloe insisted. “It’s better than sweltering heat. What’s mild weather for Austin? A hundred degrees?”

  “Basically,” Stacey chuckled. “How’s work?”

  Chloe’s smile slipped, but she hid it with a sip from her water bottle. “It’s fine. You know. It pays the bills, it feeds me, all the important stuff.”

  “Sometimes that’s all you need.” Stacey raised her own water bottle in a joking toast.

  All you need. There’s a difference between “need” and “want”, I guess. Chloe definitely needed her job at Sentinel Financial. Her rent wasn’t going to pay itself. But, did she want the job? Not if “want” meant that she had any love or passion for it. She tolerated it, that was all. There was nothing wrong with it—her coworkers were polite, her boss was a nice guy, the coffee machine always worked and her clients weren’t generally problematic. There was just absolutely nothing remarkable or interesting about the position, and Chloe already dreaded walking into the office tomorrow morning for another Monday of forced smiles.

  Chloe Beck, financial analyst. It just doesn’t sound right.

  “Ready to get moving?” Chloe asked suddenly, stuffing her trash into her backpack. “It gets dark pretty early.” As long as her feet moved forward through the scenic Red Rock Canyon, she could ward away thoughts of her stagnant life.

  Besides, there was a lot to see here. Chloe couldn’t believe that she had never made it out here before, even though Red Rock Canyon was just over half an hour from Reno. Whoever had named this place must have been too overcome with wonder to use any imagination, because Red Rock Canyon was exactly that—miles and miles of majestic red sandstone cliffs that rose to rival the sky’s dawns and sunsets.

  I could make a great post out of this if I was still blogging. Chloe almost snorted a little at the word still. She had never worked on her blog enough to say that she was blogging, just done a post here and there during some of the last trips her family had taken together. The blog had remained untouched for years, and Chloe didn’t have the time to travel and resurrect its focus on national parks, wildlife and how to experience both while leaving no human trace.

  More regrets. Chloe had almost secured a job that would have let her pursue her dream, but the man who would have been her employer had hired a tall, thin, modelesque and underqualified beauty over Chloe. That one still stung.

  “I think this is supposed to be the hardest part of the trail,” Stacey said, pausing a few steps ahead.

  Chloe pulled her thoughts back to the hike and followed Stacey’s gaze to see that the trail narrowed, turning into a fairly thin line of sandstone bordered on one side by looming cliffs and a steep drop on the other. “It’s a bit narrow,” she agreed. Maybe a little narrower for Chloe than Stacey, but it should still be perfectly doable, and there were wooden guardrails to protect hikers from the side with the drop. No more slipping and it’ll be just fine.

  Before she started after Stacey, Chloe shrugged off her jacket. She had gotten a bit cold while sitting down for lunch, but now that her lungs were pumping and her legs were working the jacket was making her uncomfortably warm.

  They went a little slower once they stepped onto the narrow section of th
e trail, keeping one hand on the rail. There were times when the drop crept inwards a little and the canyon wall inched closer, forcing them to turn sideways and lift the bottoms of their backpacks to fit between the rail and the wall, but for the most part there was plenty of space. Chloe could see why this was considered a beginner hike if this was the most difficult part of the trail.

  “Uh oh,” Stacey called back to Chloe. “Um…”

  Chloe leaned slightly over the rail to see past her and spotted a line of hikers coming toward them down the trail. “There’s space to move out of the way if we backtrack a bit,” Chloe offered after a quick glance behind her at the section of trail they had just traversed.

  “No need.” Stacey pointed ahead. Three of the hikers had scampered easily up a short wall to a wide shelf to sit out of the way, and the others were motioning Chloe and Stacey forward and pressing themselves against the wall.

  “Are those sleeping pads?” Chloe commented curiously to Stacey as they hurried forward to avoid inconveniencing the other group as much as possible.

  “They’re rock climbing pads,” Stacey corrected.

  “Oh.” Chloe had heard of rock climbing as an up-and-coming sport, but she had never met anyone who did it. Now that she had, she wondered if all people who rock climbed were this fit. The two girls were visibly muscular, and the three guys… absolutely delicious. Bulging muscle had always intimidated Chloe just a little and besides, self-proclaimed “gym rats” cared about their gains, not covert glances from girls with a body like Chloe’s.

  But these guys… wow. No bulging muscles here. They were lean, tall and almost unassuming until one happened to flex for any reason, then sculpted lines formed smooth, rippling muscles from nothing. Only their arms told the true story of their passion in the form of jumping veins and spanning tendons.

  Luckily, she had to walk directly toward them to pass. She had plenty of reason to stare unashamedly, so she allocated a little of that time to regarding their gear curiously. Two of them carried the aforementioned pads, three carried large black bags in their hands, and all of them wore backpacks from which an assortment of shoes hung. They lounged on and against the rocks, looking at home as Chloe might on the couch in the apartment she shared with her roommate.

  “Hi! Nice day for a hike,” the girl in front called as Chloe and Stacey neared the group.

  “Absolutely,” Stacey replied enthusiastically. “Nice day for climbing, too.”

  “Definitely! Gets a little windy up there, though.” The girl pointed up the cliffside.

  “I bet!” Stacey easily made it past the group.

  Now it was Chloe’s turn. She was a little more careful, lifting the hand in which she still held her jacket so that her elbow cleared the railing, letting her press closer to it. Chloe passed one, two, three and then four climbers, reciprocating the friendly smiles and nods from each person. Then she approached the fifth one, who should have been the last.

  But he wasn’t. Chloe had counted two women and three men, but she had missed one climber. Standing with his back to the rough sandstone, a fourth man waited for her to pass with his arms crossed, the hood of his jacket laying over the top of his backpack and the sleeves pushed halfway up his upper arms. Those arms were crossed carelessly over the top of a folded pad resting on its end on the ground, and for just a tiny, secret second, Chloe let herself imagine what it would be like to have them around her instead.

  Looking at his windswept brown hair, symmetrical and chiseled jaw and brilliant blue eyes, it was hard to imagine how Chloe could have missed this specimen of a man. But after a second look, she realized something. The rest of the group chatted as she and Stacey passed, handing a guide book back and forth amongst themselves, but this man stood apart, chin raised and eyes glued to the landscape of the canyon. So intense was the strength of his gaze that Chloe followed it herself, just for a second, searching for whatever he must have lost out there.

  The toe of her boot caught the corner of the folded pad and Chloe made the strangest, squeakiest sound of her life when she tripped and found her stomach pressed against the guardrail, her face and chest leaning over the deadly drop.

  An iron grip caught her wrist and pulled her back, causing her to trip for a third embarrassing time. This time, supporting arms and a steady grip waited to hold her upright instead of a rough guardrail, and she finally managed to catch her balance and look into the eyes of her savior.

  It was the man who had been so preoccupied with the view. Instead of quiet thoughtfulness, though, worry and apology clouded his handsome features. “I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”

  You know, I don’t think I am, but a hug would fix me right up. Chloe shoved this ridiculous sentence into the back of her mind and flipped the switch on her mental garbage disposal. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, resisting the urge to rub the sore spot on her tummy where the rail had dug into her ribs. “I got distracted by the view.” Oh no! Chloe tried to keep a blush from rising. She hadn’t meant it that way.

  Luckily, the rock climber didn’t read into her words. “I should’ve moved the pad though, that’s my bad.”

  When Chloe had tripped, she startled a few gasps from the waiting climbers, but they quickly recovered their good spirits. “Way to go, David,” the woman who had first greeted them joked.

  “And we have to let this clumsy guy belay us,” one of the men chimed in, shaking his head in mock disbelief.

  Chloe didn’t know what “belay” meant, but the climbers’ banter helped calm her nerves and let her speak with a little more strength in her voice. “Seriously, it’s fine. No harm done… oh,” she said suddenly, realizing that the fingers of her left hand now gripped nothing. “Well, I dropped my jacket. But it doesn’t matter that much. It was kind of old, so I need to get a new one anyway.” That last bit wasn’t true, but she didn’t want David to feel guilty. The cost of a jacket was nothing if she could make someone feel a little better about something that really wasn’t his fault.

  “Alright.” David clearly wasn’t satisfied, but there was nothing either of them could do, so he let it go… and let Chloe go, leaving a ring of warmth around her wrist where his hand had been. “Still, I'm sorry. Really.”

  “Still, it’s fine,” Chloe repeated, beginning to inch away toward Stacey, much as she would rather stare at David for a while longer. Clearly, they were two of a kind—neither wanted the other to feel bad or at fault, and they would keep apologizing until the canyon froze over. “Have a good… climb!”

  “We will, thanks, bye!” Chloe couldn’t tell exactly who had said those words since at least three of them chimed in, but she could tell that David hadn’t said any of them. He just smiled apologetically and watched Chloe trudge after Stacey until the other climbers hopped down from the wide shelf. The malicious tripping-hazard of a pad was the last thing Chloe saw of David as he followed his friends out of sight around a twist in the trail.

  “Well,” Stacey said matter-of-factly when Chloe stopped next to her, “you almost died again.”

  “Literally,” Chloe agreed, although she didn’t think she could actually have flipped over the guardrail.

  “But we did learn something from this experience,” Stacey added.

  “Uh… you get me into trouble?” Chloe suggested.

  “You get me into trouble. We learned that rock climbers are super cute and we need to find some for ourselves.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes, but didn’t disagree. Too bad she would never see one particular rock climber again.

  As it turned out, Chloe was wrong about that.

  The sun had just set when she and Stacey took the last steps of their hike and exited the trailhead at which they had entered, tired and a little chilly but pleased with themselves. “Perfect timing,” Chloe said happily. Still got it! When you travel and do a lot of things outdoors, you kind of get a feel for how much you have time to do before the sun goes down. She and Stacey hit the timing on the nose.

  “Heck ye
ah! Let’s put our stuff in the car and then I’m going to run to the bathroom.”

  They were two of the latest to finish the hike, it seemed, because very few cars remained in the lot, and there were no people that Chloe could see. Well, except for one who sat at one of the picnic tables under the information center’s pavilion.

  The guy sitting there stood as they approached Chloe’s car, which was close to the pavilion. A streak of nervousness shot through Chloe—even though the parking lot lights were bright and there were campsites closeby, she still felt a little isolated all the way out here.

  The light fell on his face, and Stacey nudged Chloe’s arm with the tiniest of smirks on her face. Chloe ignored her and stopped in front of him. “David?”

  “Yeah. I found your jacket.” He held out the jacket. “I wouldn’t exactly call this old.”

  “Well, I guess it isn’t that old.” Chloe took the almost-new, expensive Patagonia jacket, pressing the material between her fingers. “How did you find it? I didn’t think there were trails down there.”

  “Well… there are, but I actually climbed down to get it,” David admitted, his nails making rough scraping sounds as he scratched his short beard.

  “You—" Chloe didn’t even know what to say to that. Had he really? “Well… thank you. That’s really, really nice of you.”

  “It was no problem, and it was actually kind of fun. Climbing is always fun for me.” David paused at the look of consternation on Chloe’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “There was a pocketknife in the pocket, but it must have fallen out when I dropped the jacket.” Chloe smiled through her disappointment. “I can always get a new one.” No, I can’t. Not one like that, not one her father bought from a state park for her fourteenth birthday, but David didn’t need to know that after he had already gone to so much trouble for her sake.

  “We’re climbing again tomorrow. If you want to give me your number, I can let you know if I happen to find it,” David suggested.