Ethan Hyt looked up at her and their eyes met for a moment.
She froze in place, because there was a flare of heat there that she could not pretend she hadn’t seen.
She had sensed . . . something from him before. She’d been unsure if she was reading him right or if it was just wishful thinking on her part, because she had liked the look of Ethan Hyt since the day she’d met him.
There was a crash in the bush, and it broke the tension of the moment.
Ethan turned and rose to his feet, looking toward the sound.
“An animal?” she asked.
“Probably a granib. They’re common here.”
Granibs were small mammals with delicate hooves and tiny horns, as cute as cute could be, and Velda wished it had shown itself—she had always wanted to see one in the wild.
Ethan took the meals off the heat in exchange for a pot of water, and Velda forced her legs to move.
She carefully lowered herself down on a rock to sit, and Ethan shot her a quick grin.
“Stiff?”
“Barely mobile,” she agreed. “Whereas you look like you’re unaffected.”
“I train every day,” he said, giving a shrug. “You kept up well enough.”
She peeled the top off her meal and focused on it for a bit, then considered offering to make the jah, before she realized that wasn’t going to happen without a lot of groaning, so she let Ethan do that, too.
They drank it in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes.
“How long do you think they’ll look for us along the river?” Velda asked, suddenly desperate to fill in the silence.
“A while,” Ethan said. “They’ll assume we want to be found, and it will take them time to work out we’ve deliberately vanished.”
She wondered if anyone would work out the reason for that. They hadn’t heard or seen any sign of the rescue party since they’d made it into the forest, but sooner or later, someone would begin to look further afield.
She forced herself to her feet and helped Ethan clean up, then let him lead the way again.
The rest and food had given her the boost she needed, and the way he took them wasn’t as steep from here, as they dipped into a deep valley between two mountains.
By the late afternoon, though, it got harder. Things got dark quickly in the lee of the mountain, and the cliffs cast long, dark shadows across their path.
The next time they heard water, Ethan took them down a gentle slope toward it, and while there was no pool or waterfall here, the river was wide and deep—good enough to clean up in—and there was a flat area of ground up against the same slope with a scoop out of it that was almost a cave. It looked as if the river had flooded at some point and burrowed into the hill and it would make a decent camp, with some overhead cover for a fire.
“Happy?” he asked.
“If you’d told me we could stop walking, I’d be happy. This looks like luxury.” She set her bags down with a groan of relief, and started taking off her clothes.
“What are you doing?” He had always controlled his expressions around her, but now he looked shocked.
“I’m getting out of my clothes so I can jump in that river before it gets too dark and cold,” she told him. They were Aponi, after all. Going naked was not that scandalous.
“I’ll get a fire going, and then join you,” he said, and she decided that she wasn’t going to feel guilty about not helping him, because as he said, he trained every day.
She was the amateur.
She was glad she’d made it without slowing him down too much. Or maybe she had, and he was just too polite to tell her.
When she was naked, she took her personal pack with her to the river bank and left it on a rock near the water, then gingerly slid in. Her gasp had Ethan glancing over at her, and she looked at him over her bare shoulder. “Cold,” she said.
