No, it isn't. Somewhere between the binding check in the snow and the tracking tutorials, between shared meals and honest conversations, this has become something more personal.
She matters to the mission. I leave it there.
It terrifies me, because she'll leave when this is over, return to her academic world and her city life, and I'll be left in these mountains with the memory of what it felt like to matter to someone like her.
"Get some sleep," I say, because the alternative is admitting things I'm not ready to say. "Tomorrow we find Waldo."
"You really think we will?"
"I think you don't give up until you get what you came for."
She settles into her sleeping bag, but I catch her watching me across the small space between us.
"What about you, Nash? What did you come for?"
The question hangs in the air between us, and a pulse starts up at the base of my throat.
What did I come for? To guide a client through a routine tracking expedition. To earn the fee that will help cover winter expenses. To do my job and move on to the next assignment.
But looking at her now, hair loose around her shoulders, eyes bright with intelligence and determination, face flushed from the warm tent—I came out here for the job. The job keeps surprising me.
"Sleep," I say instead of answering. "We've got miles to cover tomorrow."
But as the storm howls outside and Aris settles into sleep beside me, I lie awake. My hand still burns where I touched her knee. That's the detail I can't shake, not the storm, not the tracks, not the wolves. That one inch of contact through denim and cold air.
And I wonder what the hell I'm going to do when we find Waldo and she goes back to her life, leaving me with the knowledge that some connections run deeper than professional obligation or wilderness competence.
Some connections change you in ways you can't take back, whether you're ready for them or not.
Chapter Seven
ARIS
The silence wakesme before the light does.
For hours, maybe an eternity, the world outside our nylon walls has been a screaming void of wind and ice. The storm battered the tent with a violence that made the canvas snap like gunshots, a constant reminder that we were small, fragile things trespassing in a land that didn't care if we lived or died.
But now, the roaring has stopped.
I lie still in the warmth of my sleeping bag, blinking against the dim gray light filtering through the tent fabric. The air inside is cold, sharp enough to sting my nose, but beneath the chill is another scent: woodsmoke, pine, and the distinct, warm smell of the man sleeping less than two feet away.
Nash.
I turn my head slowly, careful not to rustle the thermal material of my bag. He's still asleep, one arm thrown over his head, his breathing deep and rhythmic. In the heavy tactical gear and parka, he usually looks like an impenetrable wall of wilderness competence, the "Hollister Wilderness Logistics" expert the university hired to babysit the city scientist.
But here, in the quiet gray of dawn, he just looks … human.
His dark hair is messy, falling over his forehead, softening the hard angles of his face. Stubble darkens his jaw, shadowing the scar I noticed yesterday near his chin, a thin white line that I'm inexplicably curious about. His lips are parted slightly, and for the first time since I met him at the lodge, the guarded, assessing expression he wears like armor is gone.
He looks younger. Less like the adversary I've been fighting for a week, and more like the partner who taught me how to fish on a frozen creek, who fed me when I was failing, who looked at me last night by lantern light and told me that my dedication was real, not crazy.
Some things change the shape of you before you've decided to let them.
The thought drifts through my mind, unbidden and dangerous. I shut it down immediately, squeezing my eyes closed.
No. I am not doing this. I am Dr. Aris Thorne, an evolutionary biologist on a critical grant-funded expedition. I am here to find a caribou bull named Waldo, document his migration anomalies, and prove that Thaddeus Brine's life work wasn't a waste of time. I am not here to develop a crush on a hunting guide whose profession stands in direct opposition to everything I believe in, no matter how good he looks sleeping or how surprisingly tender he can be when I'm falling apart.
Proximity, I tell myself firmly. It's just forced proximity and the adrenaline of survival. It's a known psychological phenomenon. You bond with the people you survive with. It doesn't mean anything.
