First he took her dream of organizing a major race in Basin County, then years of quiet work for Windy Basin Youth were reduced to background noise the second he came on the scene. Now this.
As the family pulled away, Steph opened her door and stepped out of the SUV.
The cold hit her square in the face, and she welcomed it. Cold she could work with. Cold made sense.
She was pulling on her balaclava when she noticed a vehicle, a couple of spaces beyond where the SUV had been.
A truck. Dark, newer, the kind with enough clearance for winter roads. Someone stood outside, fiddling with their pack.
Steph went still.
He hadn’t seen her yet. He was looking down at the waist buckle of his pack, the breeze off the mountains pushing at his jacket. She knew the set of those shoulders. She’d been more aware of them than she had any reason to be since the morning he’d pulled her off Grand Avenue.
Jack Swisher.
She said a word she generally kept to herself and reached back into the SUV for her trekking poles.
Chapter 10
Jack
Jack had been waiting in his truck for twenty minutes. Driving up, he had an irrational fear that he would miss her, that the road conditions would slow him down and be an issue. As if she didn’t need to take the same snow-packed roads.
When he arrived and didn’t see her SUV, he’d relaxed a little until a new worry cropped up. What if she had a second vehicle? He was looking for the one she’d used to tow the trailer at last weekend’s Jingle Run, but maybe she had something else as a daily driver.
Each time someone returned to their car from playing in the snow, he let out a sigh of relief. He’d been watching a young family sled down a hill near the lot, following them as they made their way back to their crossover. As he watched, lights appeared on the highway.
He held his breath until the vehicle came into view. A wide smile spread across his face when he realized it was a full-size SUV, the same color as Steph’s rig.
“Showtime,” he muttered to himself as he stepped out of his truck and started getting his gear together.
Take it slow, he told himself.Give her time to get parked and do her thing. Then fake surprise.And play it cool.
He moved the trekking poles from his left hand to his right and looked down the road like a man who was simplyenjoying the scenery and not at all watching for a specific vehicle. For a specific person.
It hadn’t taken much. After the Jingle Run, after she’d mentioned the overnight training run and then gone quiet about it, he’d gone back to the videos he’d found before. There were several of them—interviews, club updates, a short documentary someone had done on the Basin County Running Club two years back.
He’d watched them before, for business reasons, but this time, he paid attention to different things. The way she talked about preparation. The routes she favored. What she said about mimicking race conditions as closely as possible. One video wasn’t about her specifically, but about winter endurance racers in general. Steph had been interviewed about how she trained.
Then he’d found the coffee shop owned by Brooke Davies, who worked the registration table at the Jingle Run. Steph had mentioned Brooke owned Irma Brew and was running an ultra in a few months. She’d used Brooke as a specific example for not starting serious training too soon. That was when Jack realized Steph had no idea he was registered for The Frozen Divide.
Early Wednesday morning, he drove into Irma from Elkridge and stopped by the coffee shop. Brooke hadn’t been there. A woman named Becky had, and Becky was the kind of person who enjoyed a conversation with a stranger.
By the time he’d finished his cappuccino and scone, she’d told him about the running club, about Steph’s training plans, which were apparently something of a legend not only among club members but with the town of Irma, and how she’d talked to Steph just the day beforeabout her plans to head up to Silver Mane’s Lodge on Saturday for a nighttime run.
Small-town living made information gathering considerably easier than he was used to. Too easy, maybe.
It was also the kind of thing worth paying attention to from a security standpoint. If he could walk into a coffee shop and learn someone’s weekend plans, so could someone else. He figured that was one of the reasons the recent issues in Basin County had been so easy to pull off. People loved to talk.
He pushed that thought aside and focused on the SUV. The driver was still inside, so he couldn’t be sure it was Steph, though the racing of his heart told him it had to be.
Why he was there, waiting by his car in the cold, was simple: he felt an irrational, unwelcome need to make sure Steph didn’t head into the dark alone.
Things had been too weird lately for her to be out there alone in the middle of the night. The timing of the run meant none of her usual running group was available to join her, and as Becky said, most of them weren’t cut out for a nighttime run in the snow.
“She’s a winter warrior,” Becky had said. “There aren’t many like her.”
Jack figured that since he was also signed up for The Frozen Divide, he was the most likely person to be out there and could prevent her from running alone. He told himself that was the only reason.
