He carefully curls his arms around me and I feel his chest expand into a deep sigh. “Dinna push your luck, little girl,” he rumbles. “Go back to sleep now.”
So, I do.
The rhythmic hum of helicopter blades wakes me the second time and it’s low enough that the pine trees we’re under are thrashing back and forth.
“Is it one of yours?”
Ethan gently sets me on my butt, covering me with the silver survival blanket he uses on top of all our other blankets at night. “I dinna think so, I don’t recognize the helicopter. If this was a MacTavish rescue, they’d be using the loudspeaker to alert me. If they have thermal imaging, we need to be very still.”
It’s just before dawn, the first, hesitant fingers of pink and red touching the horizon. I scoot closer, pulling the reflective blanket over him, too.
What if it’s a legitimate rescue? What if we’re losing our chance to be saved? I tuck my head under his chin, feeling the bristles of his beard against my temple. I have to trust that Ethan knows more about the dangers than I do.
I barely stifle a shriek as a huge deer bursts out from the underbrush across the camp, clearly driven by the helicopter’s noise. A spotlight targets the deer, then clicks off as the chopper moves on.
“Thank ya, brother,” Ethan says to the buck. “If they did spot a thermal image, they’ll attribute it to the animal. Time for us to get moving.”
Waking up with wet underwear is not nearly as pleasant as how they got that way, but I tighten my seatbelt around my baggy trousers. I’m still mortified that I more or less pinned the man down and had my way with him last night in my sleep. The memory of his hoarse whispers and his hands on my hips make my clitoris perk up hopefully.
I’m worse than a teenage boy.
The terrain is rough again, the river we’re following narrows down often to a gorge carved in the granite. Skirting the boulders is slippery and tricky, and more than once he has to grab my arm to keep me from plunging over the edge.
We’re making good time, though. By midday, I start seeing the first hints of civilization; a paved road in the distance, curls of smoke from a fireplace, maybe.
And then the first bullet hits the rocks behind us, shattering them into shards.
Chapter Fifteen
In which there are too many bullets in the wrong hands. This seems unfair.
Sloan…
“Down!”
I’m shoved behind a boulder and Ethan whips his gun out of his chest holster. The gun goes off, one, two, three times and I hear a thump and a groan. Two more shots, a crashing sound and then a scream, fading as whoever he shot went over the cliff.
I almost don’t recognize this Ethan. His expression is still and cold, his arms extended, muscles flexing and each time he pulls the trigger, he seems to be hitting whatever he’s aiming at. When he whips around, I jump.
“We’re going. Now.” He takes my arm, helping me up.
“Let me carry the bag,” I say, “you need your hands free.”
He quickly, efficiently rolls up the blankets and ties them together with another of the scavenged seat belts from the jet. “Put this over your left shoulder, aye?”
I know that kit bag of his is as heavy as hell, but he refuses to let me take it, grabbing my hand with his free one and leading me rapidly across the rocks.
“I guess that helicopter spotted us after all, huh?”
“It was almost too quick,” he says, jumping down from a boulder and reaching up to help me. “They must have spotted the jet wreckage and tracked us when they didn’t find our bodies.”
He says this like it’s an everyday thing, like being hunted by killers happens to him all the time and maybe it does, but my heart hasn’t stopped galloping in my chest and it’s taking all my concentration to hurry along behind him. My back is twitching, like there’s a bullseye trained on me and I’m waiting to feel the bullet strike.
We’re weaving through another boulder field narrowing the river and I can hear faint shouts behind us.
“Oh god oh god oh god,” I chant under my breath.
“Stay focused on where ya put your feet,” he says sharply, “I’ve got ya. We’ll get out of this.”
