Up Close and Dangerous (26 page)

“A sprain, but I think I can walk it off,” she said. Flexing the ankle hurt, but after the initial throb the pain seemed to lessen. She tried to get up, but was hampered by the snowshoes that remained securely tied to her feet. If the right one had come off when she fell, her ankle probably wouldn’t have suffered at all. “Help me up.”

Catching her hands, he tugged her to a standing position and held her while she gingerly put her weight on her foot. The first step was fairly painful, but the second one was less so. “I’m good,” she said, releasing his hands. “No serious damage.”

“You can ride on the sled if it’s bothering you,” he said, frowning as he studied her gait as intently as if she were a Thoroughbred.

Bailey stopped in her tracks, thunderstruck by what he’d just said. Did the man have
no
sense? “Are you crazy?” she yelped. “You can’t pull me all the way down this mountain.”

He glanced up, the expression in his eyes cool and determined. “I not only could, I’ll do whatever I have to do to get you home.”

For some reason, that simple statement rattled her. She shook her head. “You shouldn’t feel that way. It isn’t your fault we crashed. If anything, it’s mine.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Seth,” she said simply. “He made me angry, I threatened to decrease the amount he gets every month, and he retaliated. It’s my fault, all of it. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

He shook his head. “I don’t care what you said, that doesn’t justify him trying to kill two people.”

“I’m not justifying his actions. I’m saying I triggered them. So you have no reason to feel responsible—”

He tugged his face mask down. “I don’t feel responsible for the crash.”

“—or for me,” she finished doggedly.

“Things aren’t that simple. Sometimes blame has nothing to do with responsibility. When you treasure something, you want to take care of it.”

Treasure
. The word arrowed through her, pinned her to the wall. He shouldn’t be saying things like that. Men
didn’t
say things like that, it was against their natures. “You can’t treasure me,” she said, automatically withdrawing from him, mentally if not physically. “You don’t know me.”

“Well, now, there we disagree. Do the math.”

The last sentence left her completely at sea. “What math? Are we talking about math?”

“We are now. Let’s take a break, and I’ll explain it to you.”

He tied the sled harness to a tree so it wouldn’t start sliding down the mountain, then they sat side by side on a rock, one that had absorbed a little heat from the bright sunlight. Bailey had on so many clothes she couldn’t really feel the heat, but at least a chill wasn’t seeping through the layers. She pulled her own face mask down and closed her eyes for a minute, pretending the sun was warm on her face.

They drank some water, then each had a bite of the remaining trail mix bar. They’d halved one of the bars that morning, and they’d agreed to slowly eat the other one during the course of the day, figuring their energy would flag more on the first day. As they went down in altitude and oxygen became more plentiful, theoretically they’d have more energy—theoretically. She hoped they were right, because so far everything had been a real struggle.

He said, “This is the fourth day, right?”

“Right.

“Counting from eight o’clock on the first day, which was when we took off, it’s now been seventy-six hours.”

She nodded. The first day, the day of the crash, didn’t count as a full twenty-four hours. Counting from the time they’d taken off, the first twenty-four hours had ended at eight a.m. on the second day. “I’m with you so far.”

“How long does the average date last? Four hours, maybe?”

“Four or five.”

“Okay, let’s say five hours. Seventy-six divided by five is the equivalent of…fifteen dates. If you divide it by four, we’re on our nineteenth date. Split the difference; we’re on our seventeenth date.”

“All right,” she said, amused by the inventiveness of his theory, whatever it was. “Seventeen dates, huh? We’re practically going steady.”

“Going steady, my ass. We’re on the verge of moving in together.”

She gave him a quick look to see if he was joking, but he was watching her with a steady determination that rocked her down to her boots. He was serious: he wanted more than she’d ever given anyone. He wanted more than sex. He wanted a commitment—and there was nothing in the world that terrified her more.

But he…he said he
treasured
her. Bailey couldn’t remember anyone ever, in her entire life, putting her welfare ahead of his, but that was what Cam was telling her.

“I can’t—” she began, intending to give him some excuse, whatever she could think of, as a reason for not becoming involved.

“You can,” he interrupted. “You’re going to. We’ll take things slow, ease you into the concept. I understand you’re dealing with childhood baggage, and that’s the kind that’s hard to unpack. But sooner or later you’ll trust me, and accept that someone cares about you.”

She wanted to tell him that wasn’t a problem. People had cared about her before. Logan cared about her. Jim had been fond of her. She had friends…well, she’d had some friendly acquaintances before she married Jim, but they’d distanced themselves from her so she supposed they hadn’t been real friends. Even her parents had cared about her, about all their children, though ultimately not as much as they cared about themselves.

She wanted to tell him all that. The words formed in her brain, but refused to form on her tongue. She would be lying. Trust
was
a problem. Her defense against people not caring about her was that she wouldn’t care first. In the don’t-care category, she was already ahead of everyone she met.

Except him. She couldn’t get away from him. She couldn’t forget about him, couldn’t
not care
about him.

And…he said he treasured her.

She looked into those sharp gray eyes, and felt the ground fall from beneath her. She was lost, utterly without defense against him. She burst into tears. “Oh, no,” she sobbed, mortified. “I can’t cry.”

“You could have fooled me.” He put his arms around her and held her close, rocking back and forth a little in comfort. “I think you’re doing a great job.”

He was overlooking the obvious. She pulled away and tried her best to suck it up, before she got into real trouble. “No, really. I’ll h-have ice on my face.”

“Betcha I could melt it,” he said, a slow smile curving his lips.

Damn him, she was in such trouble.

28

T
O GIVE THEMSELVES ENOUGH TIME TO CONSTRUCT A
sturdy shelter, they stopped for the day at three o’clock. They were still high in the mountains, at the mercy of icy winds, below-freezing temperatures, and possibly more snow, though the skies above were clear at the moment. Weather systems could arrive fast, and it wasn’t as if they had access to the Weather Channel to keep an eye on conditions. Another factor for stopping then was that they came across a large tree that had fallen across some boulders; the tree provided a ready-made central support, which saved a lot of work. If they continued on for another hour or so, they might not find anything as suitable.

Bailey was exhausted, but to her relief the altitude sickness hadn’t returned. Tomorrow, she thought, they could walk a little longer, a little farther—maybe. They were almost out of food, and when the last candy bar was gone, their energy would fast decline. They had to descend far enough to begin finding berries, nuts, edible leaves—anything—or their situation would rapidly worsen.

“I guess the first thing we do is build a fire,” she said, looking forward to the warmth and psychological lift.

“Tonight, anyway,” he said absently, looking out over the mountainous expanse. “After tonight, I’d rather save the juice for when we’re farther down, out of all this wind.”

She closed one eye, looking askance at him. That seemed like reverse logic to her. “Don’t we need a fire more now?”

“For warmth, yeah, but we survived without a fire for two nights, so we know it isn’t strictly necessary. I was thinking about using the fire to signal our location. We can’t do it now because the wind dissipates the smoke, and I’ll be damned if I’ve found any location that’s completely sheltered, considering how it swirls.”

Bailey turned and looked in the same direction where he was looking. The day was clear, the air so cold and crisp that details stood out. The massive mountains reared against the sky, white peaks outlined by pure blue. She could see the snow line, and below that rich green, which promised warmer temperatures and at least the possibility of food. “How far down do we have to go?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m hoping the snow line will be far enough down. This is a federal wilderness area, so the forestry service monitors it for fires. Anything that seems to be man-made gets checked out.”

So they could be rescued in a day or two, depending on how long it took them to get out of the winds. Two days ago, even yesterday, she would have been ecstatic at the possibility, but now…now it was too late. Two days ago she had been heart-whole. Oh, being warm and well-fed would be nice, but what if, once they were no longer bound together by necessity, Cam’s interest in her waned? She didn’t trust emotion anyway, and she certainly didn’t trust it under emergency conditions.

She was torn, and she hated that. On the one hand, the sooner she could get some separation from him the better. On the other hand, oh dear God, she wanted this to last. She wanted to believe in a happily-ever-after, a love that lasted a lifetime. She knew people who
seemed
to love each other that long, the way Jim had loved Lena, but a niggling doubt had always kept her from buying into the concept. Maybe Jim had loved Lena, but what if Lena hadn’t loved Jim? Jim had been mega-rich; maybe Lena had looked around but not seen anything better. Bailey didn’t like being that cynical, but she’d seen too much to believe in the fairytale version of love.

Love was a crapshoot, Bailey thought, and she’d never been a gambler. She had no idea what to do, how to handle this situation. Part of her wanted to just let go and enjoy being with him as long as it lasted; after all, it was unrealistic to expect a lifetime of happiness, and probably impossible to boot. Only an idiot was
always
happy.

Was the period of happiness worth the unhappiness that followed a breakup? Most people seemed to think so, because they got on the love train time and time again. After getting tossed off they’d mope around a while, maybe act out and do something stupid, but eventually they were back at that station, ticket in hand, ready to board. She hadn’t thought the momentary gain was worth the pain, so she’d watched the train circle around without her. Now she’d been ambushed and tossed into the baggage car, and no longer seemed to have a choice.

Cam trailed a finger down her cheek. “You’ve wandered off. You’ve been staring into space for five minutes.”

Wrenched back to the here and now, her mind was momentarily blank. “Ah…I was thinking about what happens when we go home.” She mentally applauded herself. Good save! That was a
very
reasonable response, under the circumstances.

He looked grim. “I can’t tell you. Without evidence of what he did, probably nothing, and we can’t go around making charges without something to back them up or he can sue us for slander.”

“He’d love that. That would give him a public forum to air all the things he’d said about me, and you can bet Tamzin would back him up.” She felt sick at the thought of a lawsuit that would dredge up every ounce of muck Seth could find or fabricate. She wasn’t afraid of real muck, because people who didn’t take chances seldom got dirty. There were no shady dealings in her past, no affairs with married lovers, no drugs, no police record of any kind.

None of that would stop Seth, though. He could probably put on the stand fifty people who would swear they’d slept with her, or done drugs with her, or that she’d told them of a sleazy plan to marry a dying man and con him into signing over control of his fortune to her. In fact, probably the only reason he hadn’t done that already was that control of the trust funds hadn’t been in Jim’s will, where it could be challenged. Jim had set up the funds before he died—before they married, in fact—and put her in charge, and her performance had been excellent. Seth would look like a fool challenging
that
. Moreover, the monthly disbursement was very respectable. Nothing compared to the whole of the trust fund, of course, but very respectable.

“I think we have to let him know that
we
know,” Cam said. “And have told our suspicions to a third party, so if anything else suspicious happens to you, the finger will point straight to him. Unless he’s gone crazy on meth or something like that, he’ll understand that there’s nothing he can do.” He leaned over and kissed her, then briefly caught her lower lip between his teeth and gave a gentle tug. “I also suggest you move in with me, so he doesn’t know exactly where to find you. You’d have to be nuts to stay in that house all alone.”

Her heartbeat skittered with excitement, and her stomach clenched with dread. Bemused both by his proposition and her mixed reaction to it, she said, “There’s a big gap between kissing a few times and moving in together, Justice. Moving makes sense. Moving in with you, not so much.”

“I think it makes a lot of sense,” he said mildly. “But we’ll talk about it later. Right now we need to get busy or we’ll have to sleep in the open.”

He dug a pit for the fire while she gathered rocks and wood for both the fire and constructing the shelter. The fallen tree provided most of the wood, because it had been down long enough that the wood was dry on the inside and the branches easily snapped off. They followed the same procedure as before with the battery, and within half an hour small flames were merrily licking at the firewood.

Because there were two of them working, and because Cam had a much better idea what he was doing than Bailey had had that first day, the shelter quickly came together. The angle of the tree where it lay across the large rock created, at the highest point, a space large enough that they could sit up. Cam had positioned the fire so some of the heat would radiate against the rock, and thus into the shelter. Sheltering the fire from the wind was still a problem, so he stacked limbs in a berm on the other side of the fire, building it higher until the flames stopped dancing so wildly.