Chapter Five 

An hour later, Bob suggested they give trying to get some sleep another try.

"Ohhhh, I guess so," moaned Brenda. "Can Dammit sleep with me?" she asked. Dammit had spent the majority of time sitting or lying beside Brenda's legs while she tried to think up lies, and Bob told her stories that were true, but which she thought were lies.

"That dog sleeps wherever she wants to," said Bob. "You can invite her, but don't get your hopes up."

Brenda stood up and stretched. Her muscles felt sore, but it was a good kind of sore. She went to the opening of her tent and called the dog, which ran happily to her and sat down, tail wagging. She looked back at Bob.

"I can't get undressed in that tiny thing," she said, pointing at the tent. "Promise you won't watch me?"

"I could help you," said Bob, twirling imaginary moustaches.

"You're awful!" laughed the teenager. "Just don't watch me. You've already seen more of my skin than most men." She snatched off the cap he'd given her and bent over to point her bald pate at him.

"Yes, Ma'am," said Bob, his voice in an exaggerated groan. "I am the worst of the whole lot. The only reason they sent me with you was so that you wouldn't mind leaving this poor earth."

She stood back up, and looked at him, her gaze level.

"You know, you talk to me differently than anybody else. Nobody else would make a joke about me dying."

"I'm sorry," he said, sounding sorry. "I didn't mean to cause you pain."

"No, that's not what I meant," she said. "I know I'm going to die. Everybody else knows it too, but they all tiptoe around it like they can wish it away or something. But you're different. I like that."

She walked over to him and leaned up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.

"Thank you," she said, dropping back to her heels.

Bob stared at her. She really was pretty amazing, regardless of her age. The maturity with which she accepted the inevitable was admirable.

"My pleasure," he said softly. "Especially if it gets me more kisses." He grinned. "I don't get many kisses from sexy young girls."

"That's just because you're the worst of the whole lot." She stuck her tongue out at him. "And you're ugly ... and you smell bad ... and you scare the girls by talking about bears." She put her hands on her hips as he assumed a wounded look. "I can think of more if you want. I'm just trying to help."

Bob turned to his dog, who was sitting, her head swiveling back and forth between the speakers.

"I'm going to bed now, Dammit. This shy little filly won't let me watch her get naked, so you watch for me, OK, girl? You can tell me all about it in the morning."

Ignoring Brenda, who tried to dredge up an outraged look, but managed only a grin, he crawled into his tent. 
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Brenda shivered as she dropped her shirt, and bent to step out of her jeans. Dressed only in bra and panties, she realized that he hadn't put out the fire. It had burned low, but the glow still lit up the side of her orange tent. She wondered if he was peeking at her.

"Should I put the fire out?" she called to his tent.

His muffled reply told her his head was already inside his sleeping bag.

"No, it'll be OK. We'll be up in three or four hours anyway."

Feeling somehow unsatisfied - that he wasn't peeking - she unhooked her bra and skinned her panties down. Then, shivering, she crawled into her tent and arranged herself in her sleeping bag. She whispered to Dammit, who nosed through the opening of the tent. She held the top of the bag open, and the dog crawled in with her, turning around, her sharp claws treading on Brenda's stomach. Then the dog flopped down alongside Brenda's side, and laid her head on Brenda's shoulder. Brenda tugged the cap back on her head, and felt warmer immediately. Dammit gave a long sigh and licked Brenda's shoulder once.

Within minutes, everyone in the camp was asleep. 
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Bob got up around five, but didn't wake the girl. They had time to do what she wanted, even if that was sleep. The trip was planned for three days, but if it extended, that was fine. He was sure her parents wouldn't mind. As soon as he was out of his tent, he saw Dammit wiggle through the flaps of the girl's tent and trot over to nose at him.

"Morning, traitor," Bob whispered softly. Dammit wagged her tail.

He walked into the woods to empty his bladder, and then took a walk around, to see what had changed since he was last in this area. It had been on his mourning tour, so he didn't expect to find anything of interest. He didn't, but he enjoyed his walk, stretching his muscles. He hadn't shaved, and the girl's offhand comment about him smelling was probably true. He could deal with that later in the day, when it was warmer.

He found bear sign. It was relatively fresh, only three or four days old. He cast about, and found three sets of prints, one larger, and two small sets. He estimated the she-bear weighed a couple of hundred pounds. The cubs were very young. Knowing they'd made it through the winter made him feel good. He didn't begrudge her this mountain. Unlike a lot of ranchers, Bob felt like there was still room for all of them. The bears rarely bothered his herd, and stayed shy of people. They didn't hurt anything, and he didn't want to hurt them. Wolves were a different proposition, but there weren't many on his property. Since being reintroduced into the wild, they'd spread beyond the borders of the national park that had brought them back. He was keeping an eye on them. He'd heard some stories from other ranchers. Wolves did more damage to cattle than bears. They did damage to bears too, for that matter. Many a cub had been taken by a pack of wolves, while the mother bellowed and snarled, unable to protect more than one cub at a time. So far, he'd only seen sign of two or three wolves on his property. He hoped it stayed that way. It would bear watching.

He approached the campsite silently, as he always moved. He was startled to see Brenda, standing outside her tent. She must have just awakened, because she was bent over, her back to him, shimmying into a pair of panties. He stopped, staring. Part of his mind wandered, as he watched her do the same thing as he had seen Dannie do countless times. As she pulled at the waistband, she wiggled her hips in a way only women could wiggle, as if she were lowering her pussy and hips into them, rather than pulling them up. She ran her thumbs around the waist, settling it where she wanted it, and then bent to pick up a bra. Her clothing was neatly piled at her feet.

Dammit, who had sat down, when her master stopped, barked. It was a "Why are we standing here?" kind of bark.

Brenda turned, startled, and Bob saw her teenaged breasts, capped with rosy pink nipples. Her eyes went wide, and her hands came up to cover each breast. Turned at the waist like that, with not a hair showing on her body, her hands drew attention to her nakedness in a way that sent a streak of almost pain through Bob's balls.

"Sorry," he said, turning around to face away from her. "I didn't know you'd be up."

Brenda scrambled to get her clothes on. She was so discombobulated by the situation that she dropped her bra and pulled on her fresh shirt without it. She climbed into her clean jeans. Had Bob been watching, he'd have seen that little hip wiggle he'd seen before. It would have made him harder than he already was. Right now he realized he was glad he'd turned around, because he was mostly hard. He was almost shocked by the eroticism of what he'd just seen, and its effect on him.

"I'm really sorry," he said to the trees he was facing.

"It's ... OK ..." she panted, buttoning the jeans. They fit tightly enough that she didn't need a belt. She stood there, barefoot, looking at his back. "You can turn around now."

Bob, trying to lighten the mood, tried a joke. "You made me promise I wouldn't watch while you got UN-dressed. You didn't say anything about when you were getting dressed again."

Brenda didn't quite know how to feel. At least twenty doctors had seen her naked. She'd always felt a little strange, as they poked and prodded, taking blood samples, and CAT scans, and everything else they did. Half of it didn't have anything to do with her head. They were always testing things to see if the cancer had spread from there. But they didn't act like they noticed her nakedness. The doctors were always aloof and distant. She was always just a patient to them. Having this man see her naked was different somehow. She realized she was flushed, and excited, and tried to examine that reaction. She didn't feel embarrassed, exactly. It was something different than that.

She remembered his eyes, when she had realized he was there, and turned to see them. They had looked different, somehow bigger, as if he were seeing something amazing to him. But she was just a girl. He'd been married. He'd seen a real woman naked ... lots of times. Why had he looked at her like that? Her mind flickered to his comment that she was "sexy." She'd wanted to believe that, but it was impossible. She was a skinny bald girl, with two or three months to live, if she was lucky. Everybody had told her that when she started going downhill, it would happen fast. She'd get very, very sick, and then die. It would only take a week or two.

Yet, he had looked at her like she WAS a woman ... maybe even a sexy woman.

He still hadn't turned around.

"It's OK, really," she said. She sat down to pull on socks and tennis shoes.

He finally turned. He was walking funny, and his hands were hovering over his groin, like he was the naked one, and he was hiding himself from her.

"I'll just get breakfast back down here," he said, going to the rope that the saddle bags were suspended from.

It was when he reached for the rope that she saw the bulge he had been hiding. She may have been inexperienced, but she wasn't stupid. She knew what an erect penis looked like. She and her friends had surfed the net plenty of times, giggling and clicking on pictures that they squealed over. Most of those pictures were fakes, of course. No man could have a penis that big. It would stick out all the time, even when it wasn't hard. They had checked out plenty of men, peeking at the front of their pants, and hadn't seen bulges like that. It had been fun, but it wasn't real. They all knew that.

But HERE was a bulge, and she knew what that bulge meant. It meant she WAS sexy ... beyond all doubt. He had reacted to her, and had been embarrassed about it.

By fate, perhaps, the sun chose that exact moment to break into view, and brilliant sunbeams flitted through the trees around them to dapple the ground with spots of bright yellow light. Brenda felt like she might explode with joy, and that if she did, the pieces of her body would be like those bright yellow splotches of sunlight, glowing with happiness. He might be embarrassed about what had happened, but she now knew that a man DID find her attractive ... desirable. It was like a new sun had come up in her life. It was a new day in Brenda Jean Ronson's life, and she wanted to open up her arms to welcome it. 
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It may have been Bob's embarrassment over getting a stiff prick in front of a teenage girl. Or maybe he kept thinking about what she looked like, standing there in panties, her hands covering her nipples. For whatever reason, he burned breakfast. Not that it mattered to him. He ate whatever he cooked on the trail, good or not.

Brenda's reaction, though, was decidedly different.

"How can you EAT that?" she gasped, after one bite. He was shoveling food into his mouth with the efficiency of a man on the trail, wanting to get done with the necessities, and be on his horse.

"What's wrong with it?" he asked, taking time to actually taste, and answer his own question. Male pride kept him from voicing how badly it tasted, though.

"I'm surprised you're alive if you eat like this all the time," she said, putting her plate down.

"Nobody's forcing it down your throat," muttered Bob.

"I know who's fixing lunch," she said firmly. "And it's not you!"

"I've done very well on my own cooking for the last month or so," he said, sounding injured.

Brenda walked straight to him, and started feeling his arms. She moved on to his ribs and he jumped back. He was still mostly hard, and her touch felt intimate somehow.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm trying to figure out what you have under those clothes. It's surely not flesh." She giggled as he tried to get away from a mere girl and went after him, her fingers grabbing for where his love handles should be ... but weren't. "If you've been eating THAT kind of cooking, you're stuffing your clothes with rags or something. There's no WAY eating that stuff could make muscle."

Bob got a grip on her wrists, and proved that there WAS muscle in his arms.

"Behave!" he ordered.

"Says the man who sneaks up on poor innocent girls and watches them as they get dressed." She stuck out her tongue at him again.

"Yeah, go ahead," he growled. "Stick your tongue out." He fell, by habit, into something he'd said before, but to his much older wife, when she did that. "I wouldn't want that thing in my mouth either!"

He realized with a start, how inappropriate that kind of thing was, and let go of her. She hadn't even noticed his sexual innuendo. She was still laughing at how uncomfortable she had made him feel. Then she felt a twinge of conscience at needling him, and stepped back. He was poised for flight, an unconscious reaction to the situation on his part. He wasn't used to dealing with situations like this, and was very uncomfortable. There was an awkward moment of silence. It was broken when both, at the same time, said "I'm sorry."

Bob felt a surge of affection for this slip of a girl, who had only months to live. It made him uncomfortable. Affection, along with the fact that he couldn't get the image of her slim body, standing there almost naked, out of his mind made him feel like a pervert of some kind. He turned away as he realized his prick was getting harder, rather than softer, and busied himself with getting things packed.

Brenda watched him for a moment, her brain agile, despite the tumor that was pressing against parts of it. She recognized, on an unconscious level, that she bothered him, and associated it with what had happened. Thinking about her body "bothering" a man was something new and interesting ... a subject she had never really spent any time reflecting on before.

Every woman arrives at a time in her life when she realizes she has power of a sexual nature. She sees, usually in a man's eyes, something that tells her on a basic level that she can control a man, at least to some extent, based on that sexual aspect she has just discovered in herself.

That epiphany usually results in one of two reactions. One is that she doesn't understand that power and it scares her. It's a little like holding raw energy in one's hands that feels dangerous. Some women back away from that power and refuse to embrace it or use it. It becomes something "other women" use ... but not her ... at least not right then. The other routine reaction is that she sees it as a new toy, exciting and interesting ... something to be played with ... something for fun and amazement or amusement.

In neither case does the woman fully understand what's going on. If she embraces the new power, it will take years, usually, to turn that into a force that will affect her life in only positive ways. If she pushes it away, it will be years before she realizes, if she ever does, that she has turned her back on something that COULD have affected her life in positive ways.

With Brenda Jean Ronson, though, who measured life in weeks, instead of years, the reaction was different. She had a way of examining things much more deeply than other girls her age. Life was short, from her perspective ... VERY short ... and each new thing she discovered had to be examined closely, to see if it was worth incorporating into the short time she had left to explore things with.

Brenda found this new thing ... this power over a man, however innocent ... somewhat intoxicating.

There was another aspect of this epiphany that is worth mentioning, when it came to Brenda. Brenda was a "good girl" ... a "moral girl." She had been raised to be modest and polite. She knew she was smart, and that she had talents which were important. She also knew that humility was just as important. She had seen other girls "working their sex" to get what they wanted from boys, or even teachers. She had always been somewhat disgusted when those girls flaunted their sexual power. She was completely aware of the way advertisers capitalized on feminine sexuality, and every woman's desire to be found sexually attractive. She was also aware that most women would never reach the pinnacle that those advertising models made it to, with their professional hairstylists and makeup artists. It was all a lie, really ... a fantasy drilled into every television viewer's brain, that all women should look and act like that. Rather than reaching for that impossible dream, she concentrated on being the kind of girl people would miss when she was gone. To her, being a good girl had a high priority. She wanted people to remember her for the positive things in her life.

But, when you have only months to live, priorities have a way of shifting. You look at the life you have left a little differently than the rest of humanity, which just assumes there will be countless days ahead to explore the world and reach for that which pleases you.

In that moment of epiphany, where the impossible dream looked almost real in Bob's eyes ... her priorities underwent a subtle shift.

It wasn't anything blatant, and she wasn't actually aware of the change in her behavior. The first thing that happened was that when she realized she had dressed without a bra, she just decided to stay that way. She had never gone anywhere in her life without wearing a bra, at least not that she could remember. Her body had developed early, and her mother had put her in bras since she was eleven. As they mounted and rode away from the campsite, she was intensely and intimately aware of the difference in feeling, as her shirt moved and scraped across her sensitive nipples, which had never been stroked before. It made her feel giddy ... naughty, almost, as her unfettered breasts bobbed and bounced beneath her shirt. Within a mile she was flushed and panting, just from the unexpected, and unintended sensations her nipples spread through her body.

The world looked different, somehow ... brighter, with more vivid colors, even though the only colors she saw were in the pallet of greens and browns. The air smelled fresher, somehow, and the smell of horse, and leather caressed her nose in a way foreign to the average city girl.

She felt excited about life.

It was in perhaps another hour, as they sometimes walked, sometimes cantered, and twice broke into a full run across meadows, that she felt something else new. It was the pressure of the saddle between her legs, where she sometimes hit the saddle with a thump. In one sense, it wasn't new, because it felt like something very much akin to what she sometimes felt when she washed between her legs a little too long in the shower. She had always stopped, mostly because her mother had firmly taught her, as a young girl, not to wash there too long. Her mother didn't explain why this particular part of her body should be clean, but not TOO clean. It was just something she learned. And, when those delicious feelings began to assert themselves, she just assumed she had washed too long ... and stopped. She didn't know it, but the poisons and radiation her body was bombarded with, had spared her, in large degree, of the overwhelming surge of hormones that assailed most girls her age. She had never actually been ... horny ... in her whole life.

The scraping of her shirt, combined with where the saddle repeatedly smacked her pussy, to say nothing of the hormones that, since her chemo and radiation therapies had been abandoned, now coursed through her veins ... changed that.

Two hours into their second day of riding in the mountains of the Lazy N, Brenda Jean Ronson was horny.

She didn't understand the feelings that coursed through her body. All she knew was that it felt wonderful. At times, she thought it must be some strange effect of her tumor. That worried her a little. She knew to expect changes as her body surrendered to the thing that was killing her slowly. But it felt so good that she couldn't help but luxuriate in those feelings. If this was dying, maybe dying wouldn't be so bad after all.

Her eyes strayed more and more often to Bob, loping along on that magnificent black horse, looking like he weighed ten pounds, instead of almost two hundred. The way he swayed, to avoid a low hanging branch, or leaned forward as his horse scrambled up a rocky incline, made him look like he and the horse were really one creature, almost like the fabled centaurs of myth.

When they stopped to stretch their legs, and snack on freeze-dried fruit, she felt nervous and full of energy. She babbled, knowing she was babbling, but his calm acceptance of her bombardment of questions - about him, the ranch, the horses, even Dammit - and the way he patiently answered those questions, made her babble seem completely acceptable. He was an adult ... old enough to be her much older brother ... but he paid attention to her, and she just felt fabulous.

Bob, for his part, noticed her flushed appearance and motor-mouth. But, like her, he assumed it was some facet of her disease. He didn't feel pity, exactly. She was too vibrant and cute to feel sorry for. Her questions were good ones, usually, and he enjoyed telling her things.

Along the way he showed her places that gave her an education in geology. There was a place where half the mountainside had collapsed, taking trees with it. The scar was probably thousands of years old, but was still easily visible as a wide swath of bare rock and rubble, with trees all around it. There were places where they could see five different kinds of rocks in the same place, rocks that had been created in completely different mixtures of natural elements, but which lay side by side, thrown there, together, by unimaginable forces at some distant time in the past. There were huge boulders that had been split cleanly in half by some incredible force. They rode between such halves of rock.

You cannot spend an extended time in the mountains, without thinking of how they were made. The upheaval and violence of their creation is clear, and reminds one that nothing alive could have survived being in the middle of that creation when it happened. Yet, that awful, violent beginning has led, for the most part, to incredible beauty and peace, with life teeming all over it. The most violent of beginnings led to the most serene and beautiful of places to be.

These things had affected Bob for years, and now they affected Brenda too. She had never felt so alive in her life, and she gave Bob most of the credit.

To say she developed a crush on him is unfair to her. She didn't have any starry-eyed dreams about him. He was just a person who had unlocked something in her that was wonderful, even if she couldn't put her finger on just what that was. As a result, she felt drawn to him in ways that most teenagers would think of as "love," but which to her was more like how she felt about family, or a treasured friend. 
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They continued down slope in the afternoon, and now they leaned back in the saddle a little more. It took the pressure off of Brenda's inflamed clitty, and allowed her to resume a more or less normal breathing pattern. On the other hand, as the horses set their front hooves, going down, it jolted the riders, and her breasts bobbed in higher arcs, scraping her nipples until she felt the need to squeeze them sometimes. She did that unconsciously. Her attention was on the beauty all around her.

Though the descent was gradual, they came down fifteen hundred feet in three hours. It got warmer as they descended, and it was only natural for Brenda to undo a couple of buttons at her neck, to let the breeze of their passage fan her hot chest and aching nipples. She also pulled off the sleeping cap, which had been keeping her head warm, and stuffed it into a rear pocket of her jeans.

Again, she heard the sound before she saw what caused it. It was a dull roar of sorts; a deep hissing sound that almost brought to mind the deep, rasping breath of a dragon or some such beast. It was steady, though, without the pauses that breathing would generate. Buttercup tossed her head and whuffled, speeding up a bit, until she was right on Ranger's tail. The big horse turned his head to look backward, and Bob's head swiveled too.

"She smells the water," said Bob. He looked at her horse's face like she was a human being, and spoke to her the same way. "You thirsty, girl?"

Buttercup answered with a whinny, and head-butted Ranger's right hindquarter, as if to say "Move over, brute, and let a lady through."

Bob laughed and told Brenda to drop her reins. She did, and was amazed at how empty her hands felt, even though all she'd been doing was holding them. She hadn't had to give her horse any directions. It had followed Ranger for miles. But she had grown accustomed to feeling the leather in her fingers. Suddenly it was hard to ride, as Buttercup kicked into a canter. The easy rhythm she had learned fled, and her butt bounced as Brenda grabbed for the saddle horn. That leaned her forward and suddenly, her pussy was bouncing directly at the base of the horn. The swell of the horn forced her knees apart, which only increased the pressure. It was like a two hundred pound leather hammer, thumping her clitty. Had she stood in the stirrups, she would have eased both the bouncing and the pounding, but, instead, like a greenhorn, she bounced.

That the horse only went fifty or sixty yards is probably why she stayed in the saddle as something exploded in her groin that she had never felt before in her life. That something had origins in heat, that expanded like a ball of fire into her abdomen, streaking up to her nipples. If she hadn't been clinging to the horn with both hands, she would have squeezed those nipples instinctively.

She was overwhelmed by a combination of dizziness, her body flopping in the saddle, a sudden inability to breathe, and ecstasy of a kind she'd never experienced before. Buttercup trotted around a boulder and Brenda's eyes took in the thirty-foot waterfall that was suddenly loud. There was a haze of white mist where the water thundered into a pool that appeared to be boiling, at least at that point. Buttercup came to a jarring stop and dropped her head to drink. Brenda teetered, her legs betraying her by trying now to stand up, which only tipped her forward even more.

The saddle horn stopped her from sliding down Buttercup's neck into the water. It dug into that spot that was still full of joyous heat and ecstasy, and that was making her so weak she just wilted, lying down across the horn, leaning automatically to mitigate the force of that horn digging into her belly. She felt herself sliding to her right and, in a burst of energy, tried to dismount, instead of falling off. Her hands, still on the horn, caught her with a force that jerked her shoulder joints hard. Her right foot caught in the stirrup, and her left one flailed, trying to find a place to land. She could feel her hands slipping ... could sense the meeting of land and water beneath her ... and knew she was going to fall gracelessly into the pool.

Then, out of nowhere, strong arms cradled her at her knees and shoulders.

"AACK!" she grunted as her hands slipped free and she fell a few inches, only to end up in Bob's arms, her right foot still tangled in the stirrup.

"Let's get your foot loose first," came his deep voice in her ear. She was suddenly aware that his right hand, in catching her, had cupped her right breast. She was still tense ... still "ready" to fall to the ground, and concentrating on her foot was difficult. When she WAS able to think about that foot, she tried to kick it, but the stirrup wouldn't cooperate. Her foot had turned sideways in it, and it was stuck. She kept thinking about how good it felt to have his hand on her breast, putting pressure on her tingling nipple, and she couldn't concentrate on her foot.

Bob didn't know quite what to do. His arms were full of wriggling teenage girl. He was acutely aware of her breast in his hand. He hadn't meant to grab her there ... it had just happened that way. And all her kicking did was move that breast around in his hand. He couldn't lift her back up into the saddle, and he couldn't let her down. He wanted to laugh at the fact that his brain recognized that she smelled good as her smooth bald head rubbed against his face while she kicked.

Her foot finally came free and she went limp, panting. He tried to set her down, but her knees were rubbery, and she turned into him to put her arms around him for support. His big hands pressed to her back, now, and stroked up and down.

"You're fine now," he said.

"Easy for you to say," came her voice, muffled from being pressed into his chest.

"What happened?" he asked. "You were doing so well."

"I don't know." She was breathing more regularly now, and looked up at his face. "All of a sudden I ... like ... forgot how to ride or something ... and then this amazing feeling came over me and I was bouncing around and she stopped and I sort of fell off."

"You OK now?"

"I think so," she said, feeling strength come back into her legs. She felt unaccountably happy, for having just made such a fool of herself. "I actually feel wonderful!" She pulled away from him a little, testing her knees. Her shirt drifted away from her chest, and Bob was suddenly staring at bare cleavage, the inner slopes of her breasts showing almost to their crowns.

Damn! She was so cute! He felt the telltale flow of blood into his groin, and stepped away from her in self defense.

"You need to shave," she said, lifting fingers to her bald scalp, where his two day growth had scratched her. "And you still need a bath, too," she added, wrinkling her nose.

"Well, this is where I take them, sometimes," he said. "It's cold as the dickens, but the bottom is sandy and smooth."

She turned to look at the pool. "You're kidding!" She turned back to look at him. "Aren't you?" Her voice strained a bit to overcome the noise made by the waterfall.

"Not a bit," he said. "That water is just a hair over forty degrees, and it'll turn you blue, but, on a hot day, it sure feels good to get clean."

Brenda had a sudden image in her head of the two of them, standing in cold water ... naked. She was startled by the thought. She didn't think about standing around naked in front of a man. She leaned over and put her fingertips in the water.

"Brrrrr," she said, shaking her fingers off. "No way, Jose!"

"Suit yourself," he said easily. "You can climb the rocks by the falls while I clean up. The view up there is astonishing."

Bob went to his saddle bags and dug into them to bring out a clean shirt and pants. Ranger was drinking, while Buttercup had drifted away to crop at the tender green shoots that grew in the clearing. 
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Brenda climbed. The rock here, though sharply sloped, was rough, and presented plenty of hand and footholds. She turned once, to look back down, and saw Bob's naked upper body, standing in the pool. He was washing his arms and chest. His hands dipped to his groin and she looked away ... back up. He was naked again. Within the space of just a day, she had been around a naked man twice. She realized her nipples were still tingling ... or maybe tingling again. She was breathing hard now, from the climb, but already she was even with the tops of the trees, and she'd only gone a third of the way up. She'd already passed the place where water gushed from a crack in the rock, and was above that now. The sun felt hot on her shoulders, and she felt herself beginning to sweat.
