Up Close and Dangerous (31 page)

“Here?” This was bad. If they weren’t rescued, there was no good place here to construct even the roughest shelter. Even the trees were relatively sparse in this area, which would make gathering firewood more arduous. She sighed; it wasn’t as if they were overloaded with choices. This was the end of the trail. “Here.”

He stretched his back muscles, rolled his head back and forth. Then he laughed and said, “Look.”

She looked where he pointed and saw, not all that far below them, where the snow ended. There wasn’t a sharp line of demarkation, but a gradual lessening of the snow and thickening of trees. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get there now.

Bailey lifted her face into the wind, and realized that it wasn’t much more than a breeze. Smoke from the fire might stay together enough to be noticed, if not now, maybe tomorrow. They’d build this fire big and smoky and keep it going until someone noticed and came to investigate, damn it.

Cam was already doing the prep work, scraping away snow, digging a shallow pit. Bailey let the backpack drop off her shoulders and went in search of firewood. She couldn’t gather much at one time, because she had to have one hand free for balance and climbing; on a trip back, she noticed that he’d dug three fire pits. “Why are there three of them?”

“Three is a universal distress signal: three blasts of a whistle, three fires, three stacks of rocks—whatever you use, there should be three of them.”

“The things I’ve learned on this vacation,” she said drily, returning to her task. On a practical basis, three fires meant she had to gather three times as much wood. Yippee.

With wood laid in all three pits and paper and bark scrapings as tinder, Cam sparked one more fire from the battery. Carefully they built the blaze, feeding it until the wood began blazing, then using a burning stick to take flame to the other pits. Soon all three were blazing high, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of smoke. She wanted hugh billows of smoke, a column of it reaching a mile high.

Cam was evidently thinking the same thing, because he added some green wood to all three fires. The smoke that was soon puffing out was more gratifying.

“Now we wait,” he said, putting his arm around her and pulling her in for a slow, deep kiss. She leaned against him, too exhausted to do much more than simply loop her arms around his waist.

He dragged the trash bags of clothes off the sled and positioned them side by side. With the contents punched into just the right position, the trash bags functioned somewhat like bean bags, and they both gratefully sank onto their makeshift seats. For several minutes they didn’t speak at all, but gathered what strength they had left. When he did speak, she was surprised by the track of his thoughts.

“When we get back,” he said, “don’t you dare try to pull away from me.”

She couldn’t say the thought hadn’t occurred to her several times since she’d first realized how important he was becoming to her. When she had truly panicked, however, was when she knew that it was too late to pull away. “I won’t,” she said simply, turning her head to smile at him. She held out her hand. He took it, folding her fingers in his, and raised her hand to hold against his cheek.

Just before sunset they were still sitting on their trash bag chairs, looking out over the mountains like two tourists, when they heard the distinctive beat of the helicopter’s blades. Cam rose to his feet, waving his arms as the helicopter surged into view, swooping toward them like a moth toward three flames.

33

T
HE HELICOPTER HOVERED OVER THEM, SO CLOSE THAT
wind from the blades whipped around them and Bailey could see the sunglasses the pilot was wearing. Beside him was another man; they both seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform, so she assumed they were with the Forestry Service. There was no place for the chopper to land, but what mattered was that now someone knew where they were, and help would arrive—soon, she hoped. They hadn’t built a shelter, but if need be they would sit by the fires all night to stay warm.

She was so bone-tired she didn’t think she could have helped build a shelter, anyway. She didn’t even stand up to wave at the helicopter, despite the excitement of imminent rescue—or fairly imminent rescue, depending on how long it took a team to reach them.

Cam was making some hand signals to the pilot. “Tell him to go get some sleeping bags and drop them down to us,” she told him. “And a couple thermoses of coffee. And a dozen doughnuts. Oh, and a two-way radio would be nice.” Fatigue was making her giddy, but she didn’t care.

The helicopter banked away from the mountain, returning from whence it came. She heaved a sigh as she watched it leave. Somehow this was rather anticlimactic.

Cam was laughing as he sat down beside her. “Hand signals don’t run to that kind of detail.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That there are two of us, and we’re both ambulatory, meaning a rescue team shouldn’t risk their lives trying to get to us. And that we’ve been here five days.”

She stretched out her legs and crossed them at the ankle. This was almost like sitting on a porch somewhere, admiring the view—which was spectacular—but instead of a porch she was lounging on a steep mountainside, with a vertical cliff not far to her left. “We should probably get ready for nightfall. Gather more firewood, make a shelter, that kind of stuff.”

He turned to face her, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees as he studied her face, reading the utter exhaustion there. Reaching out, he took her hand. “I’ll gather more wood, but I’m not up to building a shelter. It’s warmer here, without the wind. We’ll cuddle by the fire tonight.”

“Okay. I can handle cuddling.” She looked wistful. “I don’t guess there was any way to tell them our names, so they can notify our families?”

Cam shook his head. “I haven’t let myself think about my family,” he said after a minute. “I know they’re going through hell, but concentrating on staying alive seemed more important. They’re probably at the search headquarters, wherever the hell that is, because there weren’t any searches anywhere near us.” He paused, then said roughly, “I need to see them.”

She had thought about Logan and Peaches, she realized, about how they must be feeling, how worried they must be, but she honestly hadn’t thought for even a moment that any of the others, even her parents, would bestir themselves out of concern for her. Her mother might shed a tear or two, use her tale of woe to drum up sympathy, but wait at the search headquarters for her daughter’s body to be found? Not going to happen. Her father wouldn’t even waste a tear. He’d made it plain years ago that his first three children were pretty much off his radar. Cam was lucky in his family, in knowing without hesitation that they would be there waiting for him.

“For your mother’s sake,” she told him, “I hope you have a chance to clean up before she sees you. You also need some clothes. And a bandage over that cut, because, trust me, she needs to know for certain you’re all right before she sees it.” She examined him in the brightly flickering light from the fires. His five-day beard was scruffy, and the deep bruises under his eyes were fading to an ugly purplish-yellow. All the various scrapes were scabbed over and healing. That god-awful cut across his forehead; she couldn’t decide if her clumsy stitches were an improvement over how he would have looked without them, or not. She began to snicker. “You look awful.”

He grinned in quick response. “You look pretty bad yourself,” he said with a teasing note in his deep voice. “Like you were in a plane crash and have been living in the wild for five days. The black eye is the crowning touch, though. At least you know for certain I didn’t fall in love with you because of how you look.”

Bailey nearly jumped out of her skin. How could he throw things like that at her, without giving her advance warning so she could prepare herself—though how she could have prepared herself for that, she didn’t know. Before she could react, he cradled her hand against his cheek once more. “If I ask you to marry me, will you run screaming down the mountain?”

Shock on top of shock. She hadn’t been able to react to one before he hit her with another. The end result was that she sat there, immobilized by the impossibility of choosing which sentence to address first. Finally she managed to squeak, “I might,” and left it to him to figure out which one she meant.

He kissed her palm, and she felt his lips twitch as he fought a smile. “Then I won’t ask,” he said gravely. “Not yet, anyway. I know you need time to get used to the idea. We should let our lives settle down, see each other under normal circumstances. There’s also the problem of Seth trying to kill you, and that has to be handled before anything else. I’m thinking nine months to a year before we get married. How does that sound to you?”

For someone who wasn’t asking her to marry him, he was laying a lot of groundwork, she thought. Her heart was skipping beats, but when she looked at him she wondered how she could go the rest of her life without seeing that grin, or hearing the dryness of his tone when he was making some pithy comment, or sleeping in his arms. She didn’t know if she could sleep at all without him.

She cleared her throat. “Actually…I’m okay with the marriage part.”

“It’s just the love part that scares the hell out of you, huh?”

“I’m…doing better than I’d have thought with that, too.”

“You’re not panicking at the idea that I love you?”

“That part’s okay, too,” she said seriously. “It’s the loving you in return that scares me so much.”

She saw the gleam of triumph in his eyes. He didn’t look down to hide it, either; he let her see everything he was feeling. “Are you saying you’re afraid to love me, or you’re afraid
because
you love me?”

She drew a deep breath. “I think we need to be careful and not rush into anything.”

His lips twitched again. “Now, why am I not surprised you said that? And you haven’t answered my other question.”

There it was, the cool, relentless determination she’d seen when he was coaxing the plane to stay in the air for the precious seconds they needed to hit the tree line instead of the bare rocky summit. She could feel safe with him, she thought. He didn’t give up; he didn’t cut and run. He wouldn’t cheat on her, and if they had children he would never leave them high and dry.

“I do love you,” she admitted. The words were shaky, but she got them out, though she immediately hedged, “Or I think I do. And I’m scared. This has been an unusual situation, and we need to make sure we still feel the same after we get back to the real world, so I definitely agree with you there.”

“I didn’t say we needed to make sure we feel the same. I know how I feel. I said I understood why you needed time to get used to the idea.”

Definitely relentless, she thought.

“That’s settled then,” he said with quiet satisfaction. “We’re engaged.”

N
OW THAT THEY
had been spotted, they let two of the fires go out and spent the night lying close by the one remaining, talking, occasionally dozing. The space blanket and the pieces of foam kept them off the cold ground, and the usual layers of clothing kept them, if not warm, at least not freezing. After they had rested some and slept a little, he made love to her again. This time was slow, leisurely; after he entered her it was almost as if they both dozed again, but he would rouse enough every few minutes to gently move back and forth. Bailey was acutely aware that he hadn’t put on a condom, and the bareness of his penis inside her was one of the most exquisite sensations she’d ever felt.

She came twice from that slow, rocking motion, and her second climax triggered his own. He gripped her hips and locked their bodies so tightly together not even a whisper could have slipped between them, and a muffled groan came from his throat as he shuddered between her legs.

After cleaning up and restoring their clothes to order, they slept some more. When dawn arrived they were awake, and waiting for the rescue team. They restored the area as much as possible, got all their makeshift gear packed up, then sat by the fire with the space blanket wrapped around them. Bailey was light-headed from hunger, and she felt strangely fragile, as if, now that the battle for survival was won, all her strength had left her. Sitting beside Cam was about the limit of her remaining capability.

They heard the helicopter just after seven, and watched it land on a more accessible patch of ground about a quarter of a mile below them. As the rescue team exited the chopper she murmured, “They’d better have food with them.”

“Or what?” he teased. “You’ll send them back?”

She tilted her head back and smiled up at him. He looked as hollow-eyed as she felt; yesterday had depleted them, and without food neither of them had recovered.

The ordeal was almost over. In a few hours they would be clean, warm, and fed. The real world was coming at them fast, embodied in the four-man team of helmeted mountaineers who were steadily climbing toward them, moving in a well-rehearsed symphony of ropes and pulleys and God only knew what else.

“You folks get lost?” the team leader asked when the four men reached them. He looked to be in his thirties, with the weathered look of someone who spent his life outdoors. He studied their drawn, battered faces, the long line of dark stitches across Cam’s forehead, and quietly told one of his men to do a physical assessment.

“The hiking trails aren’t open until next month. We didn’t know anyone was missing, so it was a big surprise when they spotted your fire yesterday.”

“Not lost,” said Cam, getting to his feet and tucking the space blanket around Bailey. “Our plane crashed up there”—he pointed toward the summit—“six days ago.”

“Six days!” The leader gave a low whistle. “I know there was a search-and-recovery mission for a small plane that went missing over near Walla Walla.”

“That would probably be us,” said Cam. “I’m Cameron Justice, the pilot. This is Bailey Wingate.”

“Yep,” said one of the other guys. “Those are the names, all right. How did you get this far?”

“On a wing and a prayer,” said Cam. “Literally.”