Chapter 21
Steph
The personal beacon buzzed against her palm.
Steph angled the screen away from the crevice opening and read the message. “Not good,” she muttered.
“What’s happening?” Jack leaned close to her, his voice next to her ear.
“They’re still coming, but there was a delay. The lead vehicle slid off the road about ten miles outside of Irma. They need to wait for a replacement that can tow the trailer with the snowmobiles.”
She checked the time stamp and compared it to her watch. She was right about the signals being delayed. “This was sent over half an hour ago.”
“Half an hour? And we’re just now receiving it. Because of the GPS?”
“I think so. We need to move. Find a place where the GPS signal gets through better. They need to be able to pinpoint us.”
“Staying put is safer.” Jack’s voice was low and even. “A delay in the signal isn’t a crisis. When they get close enough, they’ll know we’re in the area. Worst case, we get a delayed message asking for our position and we give it.”
She considered that. He wasn’t wrong, yet she also understood the interference could be an issue. This big of a delay, and the GPS was only marginally better than no device at all. The signal would bounce, degrade, or simply not transmit cleanly. The rescuers would get something,whether that something was accurate enough to matter was a different question.
“But what if they need to reach us quickly? What if something changes and we need to react immediately and the message doesn’t come through in time?”
Jack didn’t answer right away. She could see him working through it. The set of his jaw said he wanted to push back, that he had more arguments ready if she needed them.
“I trust you to know what’s best out here,” he said finally. “We’ll do it your way.”
The words settled somewhere in her chest. He meant what he said. Jack trusted her, and knowing that sent warmth through her entire body.
She’d spent months building a version of him that made sense to her. That version had been easier to manage. She could point to it and call it a problem without examining what was underneath the irritation.
This version was considerably harder to dismiss. He sat beside her in the rock crevice without complaint, steady and calm, not once suggesting that following a snowmobile track into the dark forest had been as much her idea as his. He shared things he clearly didn’t share easily. He kept his head when the spotlight swept toward them and the temperature dropped and the snow increased and everything in the situation said panic was the reasonable response.
He kissed her in a way that was soft and sweet and promising.
Jack Swisher was so much more than the version she’d built. Deep down, she’d known that weeks ago. When he’d rescued her on the sidewalk, when she ran into him at the gear swap, when he worked without complaint atthe Jingle Run, simply because she needed help. She’d been learning who he was, the kind of man he really was, for weeks, but didn’t want to admit it. Not even to herself.
Especiallynot to herself.
Jocelyn noticed. She’d dropped hints at their Thanksgiving meal. She knew then that Jack wasn’t the boogeyman Steph had invented. Maybe she even knew there could be something between Steph and him that Steph refused to acknowledge.
They might have something, she could maybe admit that to herself now, but Steph needed to know Jack outside of this. Outside the cold and the dark and the men on machines somewhere in the trees. That was a conversation for another day, assuming they got out of here to have it.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“There’s another rock formation, west of here . . . I think.”
“You think?”
“It was dark when we found this place.” She shifted, and her knee made its feelings known against the rock. “Getting here was more instinct than knowledge. I’d been here before, but not in the dark and not coming from that direction.”
She looked out through the crevice, reading what she could see of the terrain. The snow was falling, and the wind was blowing. That could be good for them. It could also be bad. “I remember another set of rocks near a gulley. Not as tight as this, but enough cover. The gulley gives us an exit if we need to move fast. And the GPS will get a cleaner signal once we’re out in the open.”
“How far is the gulley from the rocks?”
“Twenty feet. Maybe less.”
He nodded, taking that in. “A little more room to move around would make my feet happy. But then again, I can’t say I hate being next to you like this.”
