They passed the mug of hot electrolyte drink back and forth between them, and each had a stick of jerky. By the time they were done, Lily was sitting up straighter and Scott could think more clearly. “Are you ready to keep going?” he asked.
“Yes. But which way?” She gestured to the woods surrounding them. “All I can see are trees.”
“We still have the compass.” He took the instrument from his pocket. “We just have to keep heading east until we reach Axis Ridge.”
They set out again, Lily in front, Scott trailing. He sighted in the compass. “Head for that tall ponderosa with the broken limb hanging down,” he said.
When they reached the ponderosa, they checked the compass and set a course toward a large blue spruce. So far, keeping due east had been easy. But then they had to fight their way around a thicket of scrub oak and wild roses, the thorny canes of the roses snagging their clothing.
Scott crashed through the underbrush behind her, attempting to keep them on the right path, but after the fourth time he told her she was veering too far left she turned and glared at him. “If you think you can do better, you walk in the front.”
He didn’t fare much better breaking trail, and by four in the afternoon he was dazed with exhaustion. Lily stumbled after him, silent. All he could see was more trees, trunks sprouting like hair on the head of a giant as far as the eye could see. Which proved how exhausted he was, if he was thinking in those kind of fanciful metaphors. He stopped, and Lily walked right into him.
He caught her by the shoulders to keep her from falling, then just held on to her. “We need to stop,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“How did Jackson and his kidnapper ever survive out here for a week?” she asked.
“They were really lucky,” he said. “And not that bright to have come up with that as a plan.”
“I guess if Denny’s suspicions are right and a foreign power is behind the attempt to get the weapons technology, maybe they have no concept of what winter is like here. Or what a mountain wilderness is like.” She hugged her arms more tightly around herself.
“You’d think they would do more research,” he said.
“Maybe greed makes people take shortcuts,” she said. “Or they thought it would only take a day or two before Denny would give in to their demands.”
If Jackson had frozen to death, or died in the avalanche, would that have ruined the kidnappers’ plans? Or would they have gone forward anyway, lying about Jackson’s fate? Maybe that’s what the note Denton Endicott had received after the avalanche had been—a lie to make him hand over the information the kidnappers wanted.
Scott tended the fire while she rummaged through her pack. “Looks like coffee and peanut butter for dinner,” she said. “Or you can have tea.” She held up one of the bags.
“Coffee,” he said.
“Then I’ll have coffee, too,” she said. “It’s easier to share if we choose the same thing. Besides, I think I need the caffeine.”
He sat beside her on a log while they waited for the water in the cup to boil. “I’m trying really hard not to think about Jackson out there alone in the cold,” she said. “But I’m not doing a very good job.”
He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him. All the boundaries that had made him careful not to touch her in their everyday life had vanished here in the woods. “How are you feeling?” she asked after a moment. “I mean, where you were shot?”
“A little bruised,” he said.
“Let me look,” she said. “I mean, what if you have a bullet in you after all?”
“I think I’d know if I had a bullet in me.”
“I’ve read that adrenaline can mask pain.”
He swiveled so that his back was to her and shed his jacket. The cold air traveled quickly through his fleece and base layer top, and he shivered involuntarily.
But the shivering ceased when Lily pushed his clothing up to his shoulders and trailed her bare fingers up his back. Heat scorched him along the path of her touch. She stroked lightly at a place near the middle of his spine. “There’s a bruise here,” she said.
“Yeah.” Though what he felt wasn’t exactly pain. Every part of him had tensed at her touch, fighting the urge to lean into her.
She traced the line of one of his ribs. “You have a scar here,” she said.
He had to think a minute to remember. “Rock climbing accident. I was seventeen. Fell and broke a couple of ribs. Decided it wasn’t for me.” He had lost the capacity to form complete sentences as her hand drifted lower. If her fingers feltthis good, he imagined what it would be like to have her kiss her way down his body…
She pulled the shirts down. “You can put your jacket back on now,” she said.
