“Protein bar it is.” He caught the one she threw at him and sat on the second bag. Their knees brushed once, twice. He held his breath, expecting her to move away and, when she didn’t, slowly let it out. “Still need to check your injury, Elias.”
He sniffed. “Gonna let me see how yours is doing?” Geez, when did talking about their wounds turn into a seduction? Or was that just him?
“Sure.” A pause. “Are you?”
His nod couldn’t come close to conveying the excitement swirling inside him right now. He swallowed it back with the first bite of food.
While he polished off his bar in three seconds flat, she consumed hers slowly, methodically.
“How’s the head?”
Her quick smile was dazzling. “Hurts like hell.”
“Still dizzy?”
She considered. “Sometimes. At least my appetite’s back.”
“Right. The stomach thing.” He accepted a second bar from her, though it probably wasn’t wise. They should save these for later, when they’d be even more exhausted than they were now. Although, at this point, he could feel the energy seeping from his body.
“Felt like crap. But, hey, I wouldn’t be here if I’d felt fine.”
“Why not?”
“I was supposed to fly my teammates to Anchorage this…yesterday morning? No. Two days ago. Wow. Anyway, I stayed behind ’cause I was sick.”
“Teammates?”
She met his eyes, calculating or maybe debating something internally. Apparently, she decided to share. “Ans and Von are two of the guys I work with. They’re friends, too. We were looking for you.” She scrunched her lips up into something between a smile and a grimace. Had to tear his eyes away so he could concentrate on eating. “Well, we thought we were looking for Campbell Turner. We’d received intel that you—he—was in this area. A private eye crashed here in the winter and—”
“I saw that plane go down.”
Her eyes got huge, but she didn’t say anything.
“Seems to be my thing recently. Watching helplessly as planes crash.”
“What happened? Why did they crash?”
“Squall hit ’em. You know they call this place the Alaskan Bermuda Triangle, right?” At her nod, he went on. “I was too late.”
“Were you going to notify the authorities of their location or…”
“Planned to after the thaw.”
She nodded. “I guess we’ll figure out a way to deal with that when we get out of here. We need to get those bodies back to their families.” She polished off her bar and stared at the ground for a few seconds, then turned to look at him. “I didn’t sleep at all my last night in Schink’s Station. I felt like absolute crap, but you know, the moment I opened my door to see Old Amka standing there, demanding I fly to you, everything pretty much changed.”
“Yeah. For the worse.”
When she didn’t immediately respond, he glanced up, a little uncomfortable to find her eyes on him, her brow wrinkled. “No. No, Elias, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Change for the better?”
“In a weird way, yeah.” Her hands stayed busy, nimbly folding up the wrapper, sticking it into the trash pocket in his pack—he didn’t comment on how she knew which one it was. At this point, it wasn’t even his pack anymore. It was theirs.
She checked to see if their coats were dry, sat back, and tapped out a rhythm on her knees. Catching his eyes on her, she stopped abruptly. “Don’t do too well with…idleness.”
“On the run, stitches in your head, a probable concussion, and you’re bored.”
“Not bored… Antsy.” Her shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug that managed, even in multiple layers of oversized clothing, to look elegant.
