“Might be more that a little.”
“Let me just grab a couple of photos for my feed.” It was clear Noah didn’t love the idea, but he didn’t protest, either. It would have been a shame to go all the way out there and not come away with at least a few pictures.
As Noah went to gather the horses, I reached for my phone.
My hand patted an empty back pocket.
“Oh, my God. No, no, no. This can’t be happening.” I spun in a circle, scanning the ground. “My phone’s gone.”
“You put it in your saddlebag like I told you, right?”
“I was taking pictures of Yeti in the meadow. I must’ve …”
Thunder growled in the distance, and Noah glanced up at the darkening sky. “We need to head back now. Phone or no phone.”
“We have to look for it!” The idea of being without my phone for even five minutes was almost paralyzing. The thought of leaving it behind, alone, lost in the wilderness, was simply unimaginable. My heartbeat shifted into a higher gear, and beads of sweat erupted from the pores on my forehead. “Everything we did today will be worthless without it!”
Noah’s face hardened. “Worthless?”
“You know what I mean.” From the look on his face, I wasn’t sure that he did. But I couldn’t worry about Noah’s hurt feelings; I had a crisis to deal with. I had to find my phone. “It’s not just today’s pictures that are on there. It’s everything I took the entire week. Dawn patrol. The river. All the stuff back at the resort. This entire trip would be for nothing.”
“Yeah,” Noah said, his voice low and cold. “I heard you the first time.”
“Noah, don’t.”
Noah slid one boot into a stirrup and launched himself into Duke’s saddle. “It probably bounced out of your pocket somewhere between here and the meadow. We’ll keep our eyes open on the way back down the trail.”
“That phone is my entire life.”
Noah shook his head, the pity clear in his eyes. “We’re too exposed up here when the lightning comes. We have to go now, phone or no phone. So either you get on your own horse or I throw you over mine.”
The first fat raindrops began falling about ten minutes later. Noah dug his heels into Duke’s side and the big horse surged forward, Biscuit right behind him. Thunder roared and lightning crackled across the sky.
Noah pulled a pair of flashlights from his saddlebag once the sun disappeared behind the mountains. Our light beams swayed across the rocky terrain in desperate search of my phone, but each flash of lightning made our efforts seem increasingly futile.
Another electric bolt split the sky, this one close enough to make the tiny hairs on my arms stand at attention. Yeti howled, then bolted down the trail. Even the fearless wolf-dog was terrified, which did absolutely nothing for my rapidly deteriorating confidence.
“Is Yeti going to be okay?” I yelled, trying to make my voice heard over the wind’s howl.
“She’ll be fine,” Noah shouted back as a sudden gust whipped my hair across my face.
In the distance, sheets of rain advanced across the valley.
“We can’t stay out here. It’s too dangerous.” Noah squinted at the sky as if he could intimidate the weather into submission. “But even more dangerous is what Jenn will do to me if something happens to the horses. We can’t have one of them slip and break a leg. We need shelter. Now.”
“Where are we going to find shelter in this?” Thunder boomed and lightning flashed.
The raindrops somehow got bigger. Wetter. Colder. Suddenly, finding my phone became much less of a life and death situation, at least compared to the real life or death situation we were in.
“Follow me,” Noah commanded. Not waiting for my reaction, he shifted Duke into reverse, grabbed Biscuit’s reins, and looped them around his own saddle horn. “Let’s go!”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
With Noah driving Duke faster and leading Biscuit by the reins, we surged down the trail like we were riding a water flume ride, twisting and turning down the mud slicked trail. The rain came down in buckets now, turning the world into a gray blur.
I could barely make out Noah’s shape ahead, trusting Biscuit to follow Duke’s lead. My hair hung in wet ropes around my face, and my clothes clung to me like I’d been thrown into the middle of the ocean.
I didn’t even see the opening, but Noah expertly guided both horses down an alternate route that appeared out of nowhere. The descent steepened, and I had to lean back to avoid somersaulting over Biscuit’s head. I clutched the saddle tighter, fingers numbed, as the wind picked up, whipping the pine branches into a frenzy.
