Exposed Hearts: Lesbian Romance (Signed eBook)

Frankie Martinez is three months out of a breakup and functioning well enough that nobody mentions it except Shannon.

Then Bridge Cahill pulls herself over the edge of an eighty-foot cliff in the middle of Frankie's SAR training day — no rope, no harness — corrects Frankie on the gender of a stray dog, and walks back down the trail without looking back. By evening she's at Rosie's bar. By midnight, somewhere considerably better.

Bridge is in Elk Ridge training for Moonlight Buttress — twelve hundred feet of free solo in Zion Canyon. She travels light, keeps her history close, and had no plan for Frankie Martinez. The stray turns out to be pregnant. Bridge keeps showing up anyway.

What neither of them says: Frankie is falling for someone who has spent nine years making sure nobody gets close enough to matter. Bridge is falling for someone who texts people's brothers out of pure instinct and no malice whatsoever — which is how the whole thing nearly unravels.

It doesn't. But it costs them both something to get to the other side.

In spring, Frankie drives Bridge to Zion. She's afraid. She goes anyway. So does Bridge.

Strangers to lovers
One night stand to more
Slow burn emotional arc with early heat
Dual POV
Opposites attract
Guarded/open dynamic
The fixer and the person who doesn't want to be fixed
Hidden past / secret revealed
Big misunderstanding
Protective best friend
Meeting the family
Found dog
Surprise pregnancy (canine)
Phone sex
Outdoor / adventure setting
Found family

CHAPTER ONE
FRANKIE
Shannon ran a tight training day, which meant we'd been on the crags since seven and Jake had already been told to shut up twice.
"I'm just saying, if you offset the anchor by eighteen inches you get a cleaner pull on the redirect."
"And I'm just saying, set it the way I showed you or don't set it at all." Shannon didn't raise her voice. She never needed to. "Colton. Check his anchor."
Colton walked over, inspected Jake's work, and moved one of the cams without comment. Jake watched him do it and opened his mouth and then closed it again, because even Jake wouldn't question Colton. Nobody questioned Colton. The hierarchy of anchor positioning expertise was undisputed.
"Better," Colton said. That was generous.
August in the high country. Blue sky, the kind that went on until it forgot to stop and left the rock warm under my hands. We were at the Elk Ridge crags, south-facing walls, sixty to ninety feet of clean sandstone, popular with sport climbers on weekends and mostly empty on a Wednesday morning. For the first time in an age we were all together on a school day.
Shannon had us running rope drills — anchor builds and changeovers, litter-lowering practice. SAR bread and butter. The stuff that had to be automatic, so when a hiker went over an edge or a climber took a fall, you didn't have to think about the system, only the person.
I'd taken the morning's first rappel and jugged back up, fed rope for Colton's descent, and now I was on belay for Kowalski, who was over the edge practicing a mid-face changeover and swearing about it.
"Martinez, how much slack?"
"Plenty. You've got room. Just commit to the transfer."
"I am committing."
"You're hovering. Hovering is where people get hurt."
"Hovering is where I live," Kowalski muttered, but he made the transfer. Clean enough.
Shannon was at the command point with Kep at her feet, clipboard in hand, watching the edge. The Hernandez brothers were on the adjacent wall, arguing about rappel speed. Three years of disagreements and they'd never once agreed on technique, only that the other one was wrong.
Kowalski came back over the lip, breathing hard. I unclipped him, checked the anchor, stretched. Eight a.m., and I'd been on the rope since we started.
Shannon glanced at me. "Take a break, Martinez."
"I'm fine."
"Wasn't a question."
I walked away from the edge. Found a flat rock on the summit and sat. Drank water. The top of the crags was broad, scattered with our gear: rope bags, harnesses, litter frame, the portable radio kit Shannon insisted on for drills. Below us the valley floor spread out in dark green and dust. Up here, just hawks and the sound of Jake chewing a protein bar.
Sitting still was the hard part. Not the drills, not the heat, not managing Jake. The sitting still. Because sitting still meant thinking, and thinking meant the gap where a person used to be, and the gap meant Dee, and Dee meant three months of silence in a cabin where the coat hook was empty and the bed was too wide and I'd stopped buying two of anything at the grocery store because the second one sat there going off, reminding me.
Three months. Everyone had moved on. "Frankie told us about Dee, made a joke, moved on. What a trooper. How well she's coping." And I was coping. Eating, sleeping, working, showing up. All systems operational. If the systems felt hollow from the inside, that was between me and the quiet.
The dog appeared from the south trail.
He came up alone, trotting with purpose. Small, tan and black, wiry coat, terrier build. No collar. No leash. No owner behind him on the trail. He'd been feeding himself for a while and doing a mediocre job of it. Ribs just visible. But he moved with his head up, scanning, and when he reached the summit and saw seven people in helmets surrounded by rope, he sat down at the edge of the group and considered his options.
"Stray?" Colton asked, phone halfway to his pocket.
"Or dumped," I said. "No collar. He's not feral, though. Feral dogs don't sit and assess you. They bolt or they charge."
Everyone had paused. Ropes slack, drills on hold. Shannon raised an eyebrow at me. Go check him out.
I went. Not fast. Not direct. Wide arc, body angled away, giving him distance. I'd done this in classrooms with shy kids, in the field with nervous animals, on creek banks waiting for a dipper to surface. The principle was the same: don't be the biggest thing in the room. Don't be a threat. Be weather. Be air. Be so boring that curiosity wins.
Fifteen feet from him, I sat down. Cross-legged, hands in my lap, eyes soft, averted.
He watched me. His tail still, ears forward. One paw lifted, then lowered. He was weighing me up: she's big, she's close, she's not moving, what does she want?
I waited. I'd said the same thing to a class of eight-year-olds last week, belly-down on a creek bank. Patience was the whole curriculum. Everything I taught came down to one thing — slow down, let the animal decide you're safe.
He moved first. Stood, shook himself, walked toward me. Considered, three steps at a time, pausing to check I hadn't changed the terms, or was about to surprise him. When he reached my knee, he stopped. Sniffed my boot. Sniffed my hand. And sat down beside me, not quite touching, close enough that I could feel his warmth through my cargo shorts.
"There you go," I said. "Nothing terrible happened."
His tail moved. Once. A single wag.
I sat. He sat. Two strangers sharing a patch of summit in the August heat, and then he leaned. His ribs against my thigh, his whole body letting go, and he sighed. Weeks of carrying his own weight, and here, a solid place to rest it.
Before I realized, I was wearing a lopsided grin, and my chest relaxed in a way it hadn't in months.
"He came to you?" Shannon said, with a nod, her voice low.
"Yeah. No collar, no chip I can feel. He's thin but getting by, or at least that's how it seems. Two, three weeks on his own, I'd guess." I scratched behind his ear. He closed his eyes. "He's not going anywhere."
Jake materialized at my shoulder. He wanted to help, but he knew he'd make it worse. At least he was self-aware enough to keep his movements slow.
"Should've brought Dee up here," he said, then let out a quiet chuckle. "I'd have pushed her off for what she did to you."
The air changed. Colton became interested in his phone. The Hernandez brothers found a sudden need to inspect their ropes. Shannon's jaw tightened a fraction, but she didn't intervene. She knew the difference between protecting and interfering.
"Subtle, Jake." I kept my voice light. "I'll save the cliff-based revenge for someone worth the paperwork."
Jake's face went through its stages. Regret, panic, deeper regret. "That came out wrong."
"It came out exactly the way it was going to, because it came out of your mouth." I handed him my water bottle. "Here. Drink. The heat's making you worse than usual, and usual is already a lot."
He took the bottle. Didn't drink. Stood there radiating guilt. He'd bring me a six-pack by Friday and apologize with all the grace of a man returning a borrowed lawnmower at the end of summer.
The stray had settled against my leg. Eyes closed, breathing steady, like he'd come home.
Then a hand appeared over the edge with a grunt.
Chalk-dusted. Long-fingered. It found the lip of the rock and gripped, and then a second hand, and then a forearm, tanned and scratched, and a woman pulled herself over the edge of the cliff and stood up among our gear like she'd arrived playing by an altogether different set of rules.
No harness. No rope. No helmet. Climbing shoes on sandstone and a chalk bag at her waist and nothing else between her and the eighty feet of air she'd just climbed through. She straightened, rolled her shoulders, and looked out at the valley like she'd earned the view and wasn't going to be rushed.
We all turned. Nobody moved.
She was sharp-jawed, dirty blonde hair pulled back, forearms scratched and chalked. She had the build of someone who carried nothing unnecessary, but god, the muscle. Her breathing was controlled, the climb barely registering. She stood in the middle of seven people's safety equipment and none of it was hers.
"Jesus Christ," Jake said.
I couldn't speak. My whole professional life was built on the principle that you don't go up without protection, that the mountain doesn't care how skilled you are, that the rock will kill you the same whether you're a novice or a veteran. And this woman had just climbed eighty feet of sandstone with her hands and her wits then stepped over the lip like she was getting off a bus.
It took a while but then she noticed us. Took in the ropes, the helmets, the litter frame. Her eyes moved across the group and landed on me, sitting on the ground with a stray dog against my leg, and the corner of her mouth lifted.