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Chapter 2
He’d risked his neck for a woman who could teach a survival course at the base.
Wade jabbed a stick into the small fire, stoking it to life. Tough to believe a half hour ago he’d jumped out of an MH-60 with the intent of saving her. Crackling flames created a bowl of warmth and light in their little eight-by-eight cave. Damp logs weren’t ideal. They smoked thicker and reeked. But bits of bark and tinder they’d collected off the earthen floor worked.
At least they didn’t have to worry about snakes in Alaska—no reptiles, period, because of the cold.
She—whatever her name was—knelt beside her big old dog, brushing icicles from the mutt’s fur. He would have offered a hand, but she didn’t appear to need his help on any level. He couldn’t help but be fascinated by her skills and poise in a situation that would scare the pants off most people.
Too bad they hadn’t found her before the storm picked up speed and limited their options for extraction.
His other team members had loaded up the stranded climbers. He’d thought he was in the clear for finding his bunk. Then the infrared cameras had shown another person moving nearby.
They’d tried to get information out of the four rescued men, but they were nearly unconscious and completely incoherent. Franco and McCabe had their hands full administering first aid. There hadn’t been more than a second to decide if that additional warm body on the screen was human or not.
A second was all he needed.
Even the slim chance another person was alone and defenseless down there meant he had to try. With the worsening storm, rescue options had been slim.
Seconds after he’d parachuted in to rescue her, she had led him to this fissure in the mountain wall, with sure and expert footing. Their Alaskan grotto wasn’t exactly the Anchorage Hilton, but it beat the time he would spend freezing his tail off, carving out a tiny snow igloo.
So now he would hang out alone with this silently efficient woman for the night, possibly longer if the storm didn’t lift. The time would pass a lot faster if she spoke. But tension radiated off her in waves thicker than the black smoke spiraling toward the cave’s opening.
Granted, they were total strangers forced into close proximity. It was one thing to spend the night protecting an exhausted victim. Another entirely to bunk down with a healthy female who didn’t need anything from him. The long, dark hours stretched in front of him. Awkward as hell if something didn’t break the tension.
The stick in his hand glowed. He held it over his head like a lighter.
“‘Free Bird,’ ‘Free Bird…’” He chanted the concert mantra, thinking back to his partying teenage years.
“Pardon?” She glanced at him over her shoulder with blank eyes.
Hazel eyes that shifted from dark brown to golden green in the firelight. A sharp—unwelcome—jolt of anticipation stabbed through him at the thought of seeing more of her.
He pitched the stick back into the flames. “‘Free Bird.’ The song. If you hold up a lighter and request the song, it’s concert code for an encore… Okay, never mind. Explaining a joke doesn’t work.”
“That’s what I hear.” She gave him a small, obligatory smile.
Standing, she shrugged out of her yellow and black parka and shook the melting snow free with efficient snaps of the wrist. She spread the coat out flat near the fire to dry, dropping her ski mask alongside. Behind her, the mouth of the cave was an opaque sheet of swirling dark, as if they’d been sucked into a black hole. Just the two of them. And her dog.
And her survival knife, which he’d noticed she never once let out of reach.
She tugged a long braid from the bib of her snow pants. Now that he looked closer, she was younger than he’d initially thought, somewhere in her twenties. Younger than his own twenty-eight. The thick snow and her confidence in such an extreme setting must have led him to jump to conclusions. The wrong ones.
He’d expected her to be tougher, more muscular, rather than a thin and wiry gymnast sort. Her face was pale and narrow with creamy skin and a full mouth that didn’t need lipstick to draw his attention. The dim firelight glinted off a long, sapphire blue streak through her brown hair.
Not what he’d expected at all.
“My name’s Wade.” And he should start ditching his gear to dry too. Should. Would. Soon.
“Hi, Wade.”
“And you are?” he asked. Not that she answered. She just kept her back to him as she unzipped her black snow pants, revealing… a hot pink wind suit? Now that was another surprise.
He shrugged out of his parka and draped it over his survival pack. “I thought we should at least know each other’s names before we strip out of these wet clothes.”
“I promise not to so much as peek.” She peeled the outer gear past her bulky boots.
Holy crap, those legs of hers went on forever and ever. He looked away. “Just trying to make some chitchat to pass the time.”
