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“Ouch!”
Her nose stung.
Her dog howled.
Okay. She was totally awake now and the parachute was coming closer. Nylon whipped and snapped, louder, nearer. Boots overhead took shape as a hulking body plummeted downward. She leaped out of the way.
Toward the mountain wall—not the cliff’s edge.
Chewie’s body tensed, ready to spring into action. Coarse black-and-white fur raised along his spine. Icicles dotted his coat.
The person—a man?—landed in a dead run along the slippery ice. The “landing strip” was nothing more than a ledge so narrow her gut clenched at how easily this hulking guy could have plummeted into the nothingness below.
The parachute danced and twisted behind him specter-like, as if Inuit spirits danced in and out of the storm. He planted his boots again. The chute reinflated.
A long jagged knife glinted in his hand. His survival knife was a helluva lot scarier looking than hers right now. Maybe it had something to do with the size of the man.
Instinctively, she pressed her spine closer to the mountain wall, blade tucked out of sight but ready. Chewie’s fur rippled with bunching muscles. An image of her dog, her pet, her most loyal companion, impaled on the man’s jagged knife exploded in her brain in crimson horror.
“No!” she shouted, lunging for his collar as the silver blade arced downward.
She curved her body around seventy-five pounds of loyal dog. She kept her eyes locked on the threat and braced for pain.
The man sliced the cords on his parachute.
Hysterical laughter bubbled and froze in her throat. Of course. He was saving himself. Nylon curled upward and away, the “spirits” leaving her alone with her own personal yeti who jumped onto mountain ledges in a blizzard.
And people called her reckless.
Her Airborne Abominable Snowman must be part of some kind of rescue team. Military perhaps? The camo gear suggested as much.
What was he doing here? He couldn’t be looking for her. No one knew where she was, not even her brother and sister. She’d been taught since her early teens about the importance of protecting her privacy. For fifteen years she and her family had lived in an off-the-power-grid community on this middle-of-nowhere mountain in order to protect volatile secrets. Her world was tightly locked into a town of about a hundred and fifty people. She wrapped her arms tighter around Chewie’s neck and shouted into the storm, “Are you crazy?”
“No, ma’am,” a gravelly voice boomed back at her, “although I gotta confess I am cold. But don’t tell my pal Franco I admitted as much. My buddies can’t fly close enough to haul us out of here until the storm passes.”
“And who are these buddies of yours?” She looked up fast.
No one else fell from the clouds. She relaxed her arms around her dog. He must be some branch of the military. Except his uniform wasn’t enough to earn her automatic stamp of approval, and she couldn’t see his face or read his eyes because of his winter gear and goggles.
He sheathed his knife. “Air Force pararescue, ma’am. I’m here to help you hunker down for the night to ride out this blizzard safely.”
All right, then. That explained part. It was tough to question the honorable intentions of a guy who would parachute into the middle of a blizzard—on the side of a mountain—to rescue someone.
Still, how had he found her? Old habits were tough to shed.
“Um”—she squinted up at the darkening sky again—“are there more of you about to parachute in here?”
He shifted the mammoth pack on his back. “Do you think we could have this conversation somewhere else? Preferably after we find shelter and build a fire?”
That much she agreed with.
Staying out here to talk could get them killed. For some reason this hulking military guy thought he needed to save her. She didn’t understand the whys and wherefores of anyone knowing about her presence in the first place. However, simply walking away from him wasn’t an option.
Easing to her feet, she accepted the inevitable, sheathed her knife, but kept her hand close to it. Just in case.
She would not be spending the night in a warm shelter, curled up asleep with her dog. She would have to stay awake and alert. With too many secrets, she couldn’t afford to let down her guard around anyone, and sprinting away wasn’t exactly an option.
Her uninvited hero was already taking charge. “We need to find the best location to minimize the force of the wind, then start digging out a snow pit.” He had some kind of device in his hand, like a GPS. “I’ll keep the instructions simple, and you can just follow my lead.”
