He’d spent years in difficult conditions himself, had been cold and exhausted, and he understood what it took to choose that voluntarily and keep choosing it.
But in his case, he was rarely far from help. When skiing, he was with a coach or a team. The biathlon courses were smaller and tighter. Even the expedition he’d done, the one he’d touted as experience to qualify him for The Frozen Divide, was carefully controlled.
She was in her element, though. Being out here didn’t bother her. She radiated confidence.
He wanted to tell her that but wasn’t sure he could get the words to come out right without turning it into a jumbled mess...like he usually did when talking to her.
They crested the rise, and she stopped to check her watch—a quick glance at the distance and the time, then ran whatever calculation she used to know where they were against the plan.
“How’s the hip?” She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking straight ahead.
He hadn’t mentioned his hip. He’d been aware of it for the last mile, the right hip flexor pulling slightly from the sled harness at a different angle than he was used to. He’d been compensating, and apparently she’d seen it.
“Tight.”
“Waist belt.” She glanced at him. “The harness distributes it better, though it’s still not perfect. The longer you’re out here, the more you’ll feel it.”
“I’ll get a harness.”
“Before your next overnight,” she agreed. “Not optional.”
He noted that she’d saidnext overnight. As if there would be one. As if this one was going well enough that another made sense. He wasn’t sure she’d meant to imply that, and he wasn’t going to point it out.
They rode the sleds down the hill, his control better this time.
“We’ve got a good mile or so of flat now.” She gestured toward the bend in the road. “This is a good place to practice your speed with the sled.”
They set out at a tempo running pace. Several inches of crusted snow covered the road, no longer groomed like ithad been by Silver Mane’s Lodge. Snowmobiles had cut a path through it, and they kept to those tracks.
Snow was still coming down, straight and small, and the headlamps caught it in a way that made the world feel closer and quieter than it already was. His legs had found the rhythm they’d lost on the hill work, and everything was working again, sled and feet and breathing all tuned to the same frequency.
As they ran, at a pace he found challenging with the conditions and pulling a sled, but which seemed perfect for Steph and her abilities, his mind drifted. He thought of the Elkridge Endurance, the event that was supposed to put his new company on the map and give him a second career. Registration launched on the first of January, and they’d been doing some heavy promotions.
He’d even had an interview with Joe Monroe, who wrote for an online Wyoming paper that he developed, as well as selling articles to several other news outlets.
Monroe said he’d heard a rumor there were issues with the permits and the sheriff’s department asked for a delay while they investigated. Jack wasn’t sure where the reporter got his information, but he had denied it, saying the process had started but it was still early to receive the permits.
That was what Liam had told him to say, anyway.
Now he wondered if there was more to it, and if Joe Monroe knew something Jack didn’t. Liam and his family name, and the complications that came with it, might be a problem as far as Sheriff Hepner was concerned. Or the holdup could be a result of the poachers, somewhere in this same wilderness, operating and unidentified.
Either way, Jack knew they had time. It was only the middle of December, and the Elkridge Endurance wasn’tuntil the last weekend in August. None of that mattered right now.
Steph was six inches to his left and three years ahead of him on everything that mattered out here.
He tried to work through his feelings for Steph the same way he did when he was attempting to be rational and kept arriving at the same result.
Jack was walking through the dark in the snow, beside a woman who didn’t like him, who was good at everything, and he couldn’t look at the road ahead without seeing her at the edge of his vision.
He wasn’t sure this was a problem he could think his way out of.
She pointed her lamp at a section of icy road ahead as she slowed her pace. “Stay left. The runoff from that bank freezes across the right side. I hit it last year and went down.”
He moved left.
She’d been here before, in this exact place, and she remembered the ice on the right side of the road from a training run a year ago. She carried that kind of information the way other people carried useful facts, ready and available.
He wanted to impress her. He recognized that the way he recognized most things he’d rather not have to deal with—clearly and a little too late.
