“Mm-hmm.”
“Awhile. At least until we can’t see the spotlight? Until the snowmobile moves farther away?”
She nodded against his shoulder—a single motion, accepting the information. She wasn’t falling apart.
He wasn’t surprised.
Steph Pierce had built a life of doing hard things. From her choice of leisure activities and hobbies to the degree she pursued—a bachelor’s in recreation and park administration, plus a master’s in physical education with a focus on outdoor education, according to the college’s website, where she was the Associate Professor of Health, Outdoor, and Physical Education. She’d spent years doing hard things and probably learned long ago not to fall apart.
They’d made a mistake when they left the meadow. He knew it, and he was sure she knew it too. Talking about it wouldn’t change anything, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what they should’ve done.
They should’ve packed up when they heard the snowmobile and hurried back to the lodge. He had knownthat from the beginning and should’ve insisted they not investigate.
But deep down, he knew Steph didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do, and getting her to leave the area was beyond him. Now they were here, and the mistake that weighed on him most was not the logistical one.
It was the part where he’d staged a parking lot coincidence and walked into the wilderness with a woman he had no business caring this much about, and now she was pressed against him in a crevice, with snowmobiles cutting through the trees and the temperature dropping and help a long way off.
He cared about keeping her safe. Not in the abstract way where he cared about anyone in danger. This was different. This was Steph.
The woman who carried dried mangoes under her jacket and willingly shared. Who remembered where the ice had been on a route she had run a year ago. Who looked at the road ahead the way other people looked at the things they loved.
The wind pushed through the gap in the rock, and she pulled her jacket tighter. He shifted slightly, putting more of his shoulder between her and the wind. It didn’t help much, but it was all he could do. He reached for her hand again.
She let him.
The snowmobile was circling back. He tracked the engine sound and watched the light move through the canopy above the tree line, calculating the pattern. The operator was working in widening arcs from the camp systematically. He suspected the man who spoke in a flat tone was the one on this machine.
That was the detail that concerned him the most. The man who’d given one order and produced a spotlight, who’d stood at the timber’s edge listening while his crew worked, who hadn’t raised his voice once—he was running a methodical search and would keep running it until he was satisfied. He was unlikely to give up.
Was Steph right about the snow not giving away their tracks? He didn’t know, but he hoped so. No way would this guy think shoe prints were elk tracks like the other one had suggested. Certainly, by now, he’d used the light and recognized shoe prints as opposed to hoof prints.
Jack looked at what he could see of the sky through the gap in the rock. The cloud cover was dense, the wind was up, and the temperature was dropping. Neither of those things helped the people with the snowmobiles, and both of them helped him and Steph.
He’d take it.
Steph turned her head slightly, and he felt more than saw her looking up at him in the dark. Her face was close. He could see her eyes, the steadiness in them, the focused look of someone who was managing their own fear by staying practical.
“They’ll give up when the conditions get bad enough,” she said. “They have product to move. They can’t stay out here forever.”
“Neither can we.”
“No,” she hesitated. “But we’ll stay as long as we need to.”
She said it like it was obvious, the way she said most things that were simply true, and he believed her. Steph wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t quit. Neither would he, not while she was depending on him.
The engine noise dropped off to the south. Farther now, moving back toward the camp.
He didn’t relax. Not yet. But he let himself register the shift.
The wind pushed through again, harder this time, and he could feel Steph’s coldness in the tension of her shoulder against his, the small involuntary adjustments her body made against the dropping temperature.
He leaned further into her, wishing there was enough room to put his arm around her. To pull her close. She settled against him as the rock pressed at their backs and the wind worked at the edges of the gap.
Chapter 19
Steph
At least one of the snowmobiles was still out there. The engine rose and fell through the trees, circling patiently. Scouting. The sound had moved farther off twice in the last twenty minutes, and twice it had come back. Whoever was on it hadn’t given up.
