The coloring on his left hand was marginally better. She assumed it was because he’d been carrying the rifle in his right and was trying to keep his left hand covered whenever he could. That would be a natural instinct in thecold. When she had the left hand done in the same manner, she said, “How about adding my mitten over the top?”
“I’d rather not. I might need to shoot left-handed.”
“You can shoot with both hands?”
He shrugged. “I needed to know how to do both in case I fell and hurt my right hand or wrist.”
She supposed that made sense, but she’d never considered it before. Never really considered how he was a professional through and through and completely dedicated to his sport.
Of course he was. Someone didn’t almost make the Olympics without that dedication. In her mind, Jack had been little more than an irritant, not an actual person with actual dreams and goals before he swooped into Basin County and tried to destroy her dreams.
That’s not fair. My dreams changed long before Jack came on the scene.
Steph stayed crouched beside him as the realization of everything settled over her. They’d been running and hiding and running again, and there hadn’t been space for the thing that needed to be said. And now there was a moment, and she was going to use it.
“Why did you react that way?”
He didn’t answer.
“Jack.”
“I heard you.”
“Then answer me.”
His jaw tightened. She could see it from where she crouched, the muscle working along the side of his face. He kept his eyes on the trees and his hands on the rifle as the silence stretched out.
She scooted away from him and sat in a more comfortable position. “I deserve an explanation.” She kepther voice even. “You called me careless, and I want to understand why. That’s not an unreasonable thing to ask.”
He looked at her then. Something moved in his face, the same thing she’d seen at the tree line before the culvert, the look of a man standing at the edge of something and calculating the crossing.
For a moment, she thought he was going to do it, step off the edge and say whatever it was that had been sitting behind everything since he’d stood in the snow and said all those things.
He looked back at the trees.
The moment closed.
Steph breathed out through her nose and let it go. She couldn’t force it. She understood that much about him already. Whatever he was carrying, it wasn’t going to come out because she pushed at it. It was going to come out when he was ready, or it wasn’t going to come out at all, and she was going to have to decide what she did with that.
Jack was a strange one. He could talk endlessly about nothing, tipping into chaotic drivel when he was nervous or excited, but the moment things turned serious, he shut down. Maybe that was normal. Steph understood how people filled silence when they were uncomfortable, words spilling out faster than sense as a way to outrun what they didn’t want to say.
As near as she could tell, it was not quite like that for Jack. It seemed more like he got excited and simply started talking, a spark in his eye when something caught his interest.
He had been like that earlier when they talked about movies. And according to Jocelyn, he had rambled on after the car nearly hit Steph. Steph hadn’t noticed at the time, too busy feeling grateful she hadn’t been run over. Thatprobably made sense too. Nerves mixed with a near-death experience could cause him to ramble.
But now his jaw was held so tight she thought he might break a tooth. He was keeping his words to himself for now.
She pulled the beacon from her pocket and checked the screen.
The last message sat unchanged. No update had followed, even after she’d sent her message saying they were being shot at.
She checked the time stamp. The team should’ve been there already.
What’s taking them so long? And why hasn’t there been a response to my last message?
She looked at the signal indicator and then at the sky above the rock formation, dark and flat and giving nothing away. They had the coordinates. They knew the situation, knew there were armed men intent on killing them.
Steph looked at the screen again as if looking harder would produce a different result.
