He wasn’t the man she’d built in her mind. The one who had everything handed to him, who showed up witha checkbook and a famous face and helped himself to what she’d spent years trying to build. That man had been easier to deal with. Simpler. Easier to keep at a distance.
This man was someone who had rebuilt himself after losing everything he thought his life was going to be, using the only tools available to him, in a small Wyoming town where he didn’t know anyone and didn’t belong yet. She recognized that kind of determination. It looked familiar because she saw it every time she looked in a mirror.
The mylar crinkled faintly as she moved.
The space between them wasn’t large. The crevice hadn’t gotten any wider in the past hour and a half. But the way she was aware of the space had changed. His arm against hers under the emergency blanket. The line of his shoulder. The way his breath came out quiet and even in the cold, the same rhythm it had been when they were running.
She had stopped trying to look anywhere that wasn’t directly ahead about twenty minutes ago, and the effort of not looking was becoming its own kind of obvious.
He turned his head slightly. She knew it without confirming it.
The snowmobile was barely audible now. The wind had dropped off, leaving the dark very still and the silence very complete and the cold pressing in from all sides except the one where Jack was.
She was going to blame the dark and the hours and the adrenaline, and she was going to be wrong about all of it.
She turned her head.
He was already looking at her. Not the way someone looked at another person across a table or a room. He looked at her like the space between them had already disappeared. His eyes were steady and dark, and there wasnothing unreadable in them for the first time since the morning he’d pulled her off Grand Avenue.
She leaned toward him.
Something cracked in the darkness beyond the rock. Loud. Close.
Chapter 20
Jack
Jack stopped breathing.
The sound was close, maybe twenty feet out. Not one of the machines. A branch, maybe. Stepped on or caught when passing by.
He was still staring at Steph, leaning close. He put his finger to his lips. She nodded, her eyes on him.
Slowly, he turned his head and then twisted his torso to look out into the dark beyond the crevice opening. Nothing moved. He held his breath as he watched the trees, watching for any shift in the shadows.
A low, rhythmic sound carried through the dark.
He felt Steph relax before he fully understood why, the tension going out of her shoulder against his in a single, gradual exhale.
Elk. The word formed in his mind at the same moment she moved her mouth next to his ear, her whisper grazing his ear and making his skin tingle.
“Maybe deer,” she added, and a fresh wave of heat ran through him.
He let his own breath out slowly. Whatever the temperature had dropped to since they’d been in the crevice, the animals didn’t seem to care. He reminded himself that not everything that moved in the dark was a threat.
The shapes shifted at the tree line and disappeared deeper into the timber, unhurried, unaware of the two humans pressed into a crack in the rock twenty feet away.
Jack listened.
The snowmobiles were gone, the sound having faded away sometime in the last few minutes. He didn’t trust the silence. Men like those from the camp were unlikely to give up. How could they when their entire operation hinged on not being caught?
Jack didn’t claim to understand the poaching operation or why they were even doing it. Liam had told him about the task force but didn’t give the why behind such a thing. He supposed the pelts or furs had value, and he remembered hearing things about grizzly bear parts being used in Eastern medicine.
“The herd out there might be a good thing. Create more tracks and confusion,” Steph said, not as close to his ear this time but he could still imagine the sensation. A sensation he could get used to.
He nodded as he looked out the crevice crack, through the forest to the sky beyond. He checked his watch. They’d been in the crevice for coming up on two hours. His legs had gone from aching to numb and back to aching again, and he was fairly sure the cold had worked its way through every layer he had on, even with the addition of the emergency blanket.
He was also keenly aware of Steph beside him.
