Casey decided to let the moment pass. All he wanted to do now was to enjoy this day. This moment. And he suspected Natalie felt the same way.
“Your shape looks good to me,” he said, earning himself another groan—and another fleeting glimpse of dimples.
She glanced down. “You’re still holding my hand,” she pointed out.
He tightened his fingers just a little. “I know. It’s a very nice hand.”
Lacing her fingers with his, she smiled. “You’re flirting.”
“So, you noticed this time.”
She looked up at him through her lashes, which made his pulse rate flutter a little in response. A typical male response to a very feminine look, he thought, even as she murmured, “I’ve noticed before.”
His face was close to hers now, their lips only a few inches apart. “And did you like it?”
With a laugh, she disentangled their hands and took a step away, lifting her camera to snap his picture. “Let’s keep moving,” she said, turning to head up the trail again.
Grinning in intrigue, he followed her.
The trail narrowed again and rose even more steeply as they neared the end. They’d been accompanied almost all the way by the sounds of water—rushing, tumbling, spilling over small ledges, gurgling in pools—but now Casey could hear a distinctive waterfall roar, as he thought of it. They climbed over a few more fallen trees, hopped across a couple more rocks, and then they were at their destination. And it was everything Natalie had promised it would be.
“Wow,” he said, raising his voice a little to be heard over the noise. “This is amazing.”
Breathing a little hard from the challenge of the last part of the trail, she smiled. “I told you.”
The cascades, formed by the joining of two separate creeks at the top, tumbled ninety feet downward over a series of rock ledges into a clear pool at the bottom. Signs were posted around the area warning hikers not to try to climb the ledges, as several people had died trying to do so. Feeling the cold, breeze-borne spray on his face, Casey wasn’t even tempted to do anything so foolish. Just seeing this place was reward enough for the strenuous hike.
He turned to Natalie, who’d found a flat-topped boulder on which to rest. Her cheeks were red and she was still breathing a bit more quickly than usual, but she seemed to be rapidly recovering. She gazed at the falls with an expression that made him think she was seeing it both in the present and in her memories of earlier hikes with the late cousin she had obviously loved.
Sensing that he was looking at her, she met his eyes with a slight smile. “It didn’t take me as long to catch my breath when I came up here as a kid,” she admitted, wrinkling her nose in a way that he found very appealing. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed that you aren’t even breathing hard.”
He shrugged. “I’ve been doing a lot of manual labor lately.”
“Not to mention that you’re almost four years younger than I am,” she grumbled.
Laughing, he settled beside her on the boulder. “Like that’s enough to matter.”
She made a sound he couldn’t quite interpret, and then she swung her little backpack around in front of her and pulled out her water bottle again. “Are you hungry?”
“I could eat.”
She dug in the pack and started pulling out the food she’d brought along. They spent the next half hour eating in the damp, chilly air beside the cascades, enjoying the scenery and the companionship. Casey doubted that they’d have been lucky enough to have the site to themselves had it been a weekend, or a summer day. Which made him even more glad that he and Natalie had chosen a November Monday morning for their excursion. He liked being alone with her here.
They stuffed their trash into a plastic bag Natalie had brought for that purpose, then put that back into her backpack, making sure they left no trace of their visit behind. Fully rested now, Natalie took some pictures of the cascades and of Casey posed in front of them, and then he returned the favor, snapping several shots of her.
“That’s enough,” she said when he’d taken the third picture of her. “We’d probably better head back now.”
She started to move toward him, but her left foot slipped on a wet, mossy rock. She stumbled forward, then fell, landing solidly on her right hip.
Casey had tried to catch her, but he just hadn’t been fast enough. He reached her almost the moment she made contact with the ground. “Natalie? Are you okay?”
Looking thoroughly embarrassed, she nodded, reaching for her cap, which had fallen off in her tumble. “I’m fine. Just lost my footing. Stupid.”
“It could have been worse,” he said, his pulse rate still a bit too fast. “You could have fallen backward.”
She glanced at the falls behind them and made a face. “That would definitely have been worse.”
“Can you stand?”