As always, Tasha cheerfully ignored his flat tone. “Hey, if you’re not too busy, I was wondering if we could get together. I’d love a few comments about the climb you’re about to take.”

The woman was ballsy, which he’d always liked. Well, until her enjoyment of a takedown had left him at her mercy in front of the entire town. “Really, Tash? After gutting me like a fish on the front page?”

With a cluck of her tongue, she corrected him, “Technically, the gutting was on page two. And I did try to contact you. Not my fault you stopped taking my calls.”

Easton grunted. He’d stopped taking her calls because those calls were only for one thing. Call him old-fashioned, but Easton preferred an actual relationship with his…relationships.

“Come on. I’ll buy you a drink, and we can talk about it.”

Tasha was complicated. To say they’d dated would have been an overstatement. To say they didn’t was to leave out some very important details. But he liked her enough to keep getting tugged into her vicinity.

“I’m busy now,” he told her, annoyed at his own lingering regret. “I have a gear check with my team.”

“I’d love to see what—”

“Nope.”

“What about one question on—”

Easton barked out a laugh. The woman was relentless in the pursuit of a story, and he had to respect her ability to get the information she wanted. Which made it even more fun to tell her that he legally couldn’t say squat.

“I’ll meet you for coffee at Dirty Joe’s, but it’ll have to be quick. The climb is off the record because I signed an NDA yesterday.”

The silence over the phone told him she was spinning that bit of information over in her mind.

“What are they doing that requires an NDA?”

“It’s par for the course. There’s no story here, only some people taking photos of animals on Mount Veil because they can’t film in town. That’s it, Natasha.”

“Okay, fine. We’ll figure out a way to get around the NDA.” A pause, then she added in a low purr, “You know I love it when you say my full name.”

Yep. Which was why he always told himself not to say it.

• • •

Coffee with Tasha wasn’t safe. Neither was the location where she wanted to meet, but Dirty Joe’s Coffee Woes was adjacent to the park where he’d scheduled River and her team to meet him. Easton didn’t have a home office. A website—grudgingly done by Ash—was the limit to his advertising. He wasn’t interested in expanding, and he received far more requests for climbs than he could ever accommodate.