Steph told herself he was stealing her dreams by starting the Elkridge Endurance, but the truth was she’d changed her dream years ago. Having a world-class event was no longer her goal.
Being a mom was.
That’s why she’d decided to keep the money she’d saved for a race and hold on to it to create a family. Adoption was a wonderful thing, but it wasn’t without cost. She had enough money now to welcome a child into her home. And she would do it. Soon.
She expected she’d return to distance events when her child was older, but until then, she wanted to focus on motherhood.
“Do you remember when I told you that saving my life on Grand Avenue that day didn’t change anything?”
Jack made a sound that was almost a laugh. “I remember.”
“I was wrong about that.”
He looked at her. His eyes were steady and dark, and she didn’t look away from them.
“I was wrong about a lot of things,” she said.
The pressure of his hand tightened comfortably on hers.
Steph thought about what Jocelyn had said at Thanksgiving, out on the cold patio with their breath turning to steam and the warm blur of people moving behind the sliding door.
He’s also very tall. It had been said in that tone that meant something far beyond height. His height wasn’t really what her friend meant. What she meant was,this guy might be the one. Jocelyn had seen it before Steph was ready to, and she was rarely wrong about these things. Steph had spent weeks being irritated with her for being right.
Now she would have to admit it, and Jocelyn would be insufferable about it, and Steph would let her.
But first, they needed to get out of this mess.
The snowmobile sound reached them before she’d finished the thought.
Not distant. Not on the other side of the highway. Close, rising and falling through the timber. He’d found a way across.
Then a second engine joined the first.
Jack’s hand moved as he brought the rifle up in the same motion, smooth and immediate, his eyes going to the approach through the trees. She was already moving, shifting her position in the rocks to give herself a sightline on the terrain below the outcropping and keep herself hidden.
“Two machines,” he said.
Heart pounding, she looked at the terrain between the outcropping and the timber. The approach was not easy ground—broken rock and uneven snow and the kind of surface that slowed machines even when it didn’t stop them.
She pulled out the beacon and typed fast.Trapped and in immediate danger. Two armed men on snowmobiles. They will kill us.Need immediate response.She hit send and tucked it away.
Jack was already scanning the terrain, the rifle steady, his wrapped feet braced against the rock. Whatever pain he was in, she couldn’t see it in his hands or his eyes. He was completely present, completely focused, reading the approach with the same attention he’d given everything all night.
She moved beside him, tucking herself behind the rock.
The engines were louder now, both working hard, the sound bouncing off the rock faces and filling the outcropping and making distance harder to judge. She tracked the lights through the trees on the lower ground. Moving fast, the operators pushing the snowmobiles harder than the terrain warranted, the kind of speed that said they’d found the tracks and were committed to following them.
“They won’t give up,” Jack said.
“They won’t,” she agreed.
He looked at her sideways. “Ideas?”
“We stay in the rocks. Keep the high ground. Make them come to us on foot.”
“They could shoot us from where they have to stop.”
“We stay hidden.” Steph paused. “Isn’t there something about shooting uphill that’s more of a challenge?”
