by Mia Sheridan
“I’ve missed you,” I whispered. My voice caught, emotion pushing the words from my chest in a rush of joy, of gratitude, of so many feelings that had been trapped inside me for so long. In walling off the pain, I’d also walled off happiness and hope. I knew that now.
Dane paused, and I lowered my head, our eyes meeting as he gazed at me with adoration, the same look that had caught at my heart when I’d seen it in the groom’s eyes in Victor’s studio. Dane had looked at me like that on our wedding day, and he was looking at me like that now. I let out a sound that was part joy and part pain before Dane kissed me again, whispering, “I’ve missed you too, honey.”
For a time, we simply kissed and touched, delighting in the languorous joy of giving and receiving pleasure, of re-learning each other’s bodies, even though we hadn’t removed any clothes. My hand roamed under Dane’s shirt, his skin silky and warm, his heartbeat quickening beneath my palm. He pressed his erection between my legs, eliciting tingles of pleasure even through my jeans. Oh.
I closed my eyes, losing myself in the physical pleasure—the only one that hadn’t been taken from us in this unforgiving wilderness. Dane thrust slowly against me as we kissed again and I gasped, wanting more, wanting him inside me so badly I ached. “More,” I moaned.
Dane put his hand up my sweater, sliding over the skin of my belly slowly, torturously, his palm warm and slightly calloused. That felt so good, but when he reached my breasts and pulled one bra cup down to thumb my nipple, I cried out in bliss. He moaned against my neck as he continued to play with my nipples and I writhed against him. “Oh God, Audra, I’m so hard. I don’t think I can wait.”
“Don’t wait,” I begged, using my hands to unbutton my jeans, wriggling this way and that so I could pull them and my underwear down my thighs.
Dane reached under the blankets as well and I heard the zip of his jeans right before he came over me, adjusting the blankets so they were pulled over his back. He reached down with his hand and slipped a finger through my folds, our eyes locked in the dim light. When his finger dipped inside me, I sucked in a breath and his eyes went half-mast. He used his finger to bring the slippery proof of my arousal up, running his finger along my outer lips slowly and finally circling the spot that made me pant and cry out.
Dane leaned in to whisper in my ear as he pleasured me. “I’m going to make you come this way, honey, because there’s no way I’m going to last longer than about a minute once I get inside you.”
“Mmm,” I moaned, arching upward into that magical hand. He stroked me gently but with the perfect amount of pressure as if he’d never forgotten how to touch me so that my body spiraled toward climax. It made me feel cherished, adored, loved. “Dane,” I gasped as I soared up, up, finally tipping over the edge as I cried out his name once more. In the back of my pleasure-soaked brain, I heard his grunting sound of approval and before I’d even begun to come down, I felt the blunt tip of him at my entrance. He moaned as he pushed inside, easily entering on one quick thrust.
“Ah, Jesus,” he groaned as he started moving, slowly, his expression tensed, as if he wanted to make it last but was barely holding on. He clenched his eyes shut for a moment as his thrusts increased in pace. I closed my eyes, glorying in the fullness of his invasion. “Look at me,” he said, his thrusts becoming jerky.
I did as he said, opening my eyes and staring at his pleasure-tightened expression, seeing what was so clear in his eyes. This wasn’t only sex, not only the enjoyment of a physical encounter. Not like in San Francisco. This was a reclaiming. I knew it because I’d been claimed by Dane Townsend once before and it’d made my heart leap fiercely the first time just as it did now. “Tell me you’re mine,” he grunted.
“I’m yours,” I breathed. Forever.
That same expression of deep satisfaction came into his eyes, right before he pressed into me once, twice, and then tipped his head back, his expression contorting with the pleasure of his orgasm.
I wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him to me as he shuddered one last time. Dane rolled off me slightly so I wasn’t taking on his full weight, but most of his body was draped over mine and I luxuriated in the hot, heavy mass of him covering me. He was even warmer now and for a moment, I drowsed, caught somewhere between sleep and wakefulness as my body and mind drifted back down to earth.
Dane didn’t pull out of me. I noted lazily that he’d come inside me, but I couldn’t care about that now. Not when there were so many other things to worry about. That one seemed distant and unimportant, a worry, perhaps for another time, another place.
Here, there was nothing but the dictates of our hearts. Here, we grasped what pleasure could be found in the union of our bodies. There was nothing else—only us. And we either wandered away from one another, an unbearable, lonely suffering, or we clung together. And so this time, we clung. This time we forgave, for the alternative was far too bitter and we knew it well.
“I love you, Dane,” I whispered, the feeling so strong in that moment it felt as if it had fallen from my heart. Like those shooting stars, light streaking through the murky darkness.
Dane lifted his head, stared into my eyes for a moment, and as the expression on his face filled with so much tenderness, tears came to my eyes. “I love you too. I know now that I never stopped.” He nuzzled his nose against my own. “I love you,” he repeated. “In this lifetime and in any that follow. I will always love you, Audra.”
I smiled on a quick inhale of breath, my heart squeezing with love for him. “I will always love you too.”
For long minutes we simply cuddled, our hearts beating in time, living only in that moment because it was all we really had. I played with his hair as his hand ran lazily over my hip. I felt half-awake, like this all might be a dream and at the thought my heart lurched. I knew it wasn’t . . . but what if . . . what if it was and I woke up in my house, alone, staring at the cracked ceiling.
Dane lifted his head and looked at me as if he sensed the change in my mood. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just . . . do you think . . . I mean, if not for this accident . . . do you think we would have . . .” My heart clenched and I sucked in a breath. “Do you think we would have lived the rest of our lives apart?” In some ways, all the revelations I’d experienced were a direct result of these extreme circumstances. Would I have seen the light, allowed Dane’s love back in, felt just desperate enough to finally speak all my ugly truths if I’d been able to run away, to erect more walls? Would Dane have pushed me like he had if we’d been anywhere but here? It scared me to think about it. More perhaps, than being stuck on this mountain. Which was . . . unbelievable. But true.
He smoothed my hair back, leaning in and kissing me once on the forehead. “I don’t know. But maybe”—he smiled—“the universe wasn’t going to stand for that so it sent a flock of birds who made the ultimate sacrifice so we’d come to our senses.”
I let out a small laugh, the tension uncoiling inside me. The universe wasn’t going to stand for that. “If we get off this mountain, I’m going to build a statue in honor of those birds.”
Dane laughed, pulling completely out of me as he rolled to the side.
I bit my lip and turned to him, rubbing my nose on his shoulder, my smile fading. “Do you think the plane will come back?” I asked.
Dane paused for so long, I tipped my head back and looked up at him. He glanced down at me, pressing his lips together once before answering, “No.”
My stomach dropped. I’d known that would be the answer. “What are we going to do? We have enough food for today and then, that’s it.” I felt tears pricking my eyes and a feeling of angry resentment raced through me—resentment at what or whom, I didn’t know, but it was there. I wanted to bask in the beauty of lovemaking, the joy of having told Dane I loved him and hearing it back. But we were not in a position to revel in either. The cold, harsh truth was that no one was coming for us. We were almost out of food, and we might very well starve
to death up here. We’d lit the fire together again last night, right before my phone charge went out. We had no way to make another fire if this one died, and our supply of wood to burn was limited and becoming more so every day.
“We’re going to keep the fire burning, for one.” He began to sit up and I did too. “And then we’re going to talk about our options.”
I pulled myself together as Dane did the same, lifting the “door,” and crawling outside as I followed him. We both stood, Dane stretching and then reaching for me, pulling me to his side. I looked up at him as we huddled together in the chilly morning air. “We have options?” I asked.
“Not many. We can either try to survive the winter, or try to hike out of here.”
“Hike out of here? How? We’re surrounded by rock walls and cliffs too high to climb down without breaking our necks.”
He put his hands in his pockets and shivered slightly. I frowned, bringing the back of my hand to his cheek and feeling his skin. It felt hot and slightly clammy. “My God, Dane, I think you have a fever.”
“A fever? I actually feel more cold than anything, not hot at all.”
“Well, you are. Do you think it’s your leg?”
“If it is, I’m sure it’s just a low-grade fever as my body heals. Or, I have a bug or something. I’m fine, Audra. Really. I’ll let you know if I feel bad. In the meantime, soak up my heat.” He pulled me to his side again, and even in my worry, it felt wonderful to be pressed against him. We could cuddle anytime we wanted now. There was joy in that.
I sighed. “Okay, speaking of heat, we need to collect some firewood.”
“Let me put the last of this on the fire and then we’ll go out together. I saw a wolf or a coyote or something yesterday, and I don’t want you to come across one of those things on your own.”
“A wolf? I’ve heard them at night, but I thought they were far away. Are they dangerous?”
“I don’t know, but let’s not find out.”
I shivered slightly, not just with cold but with the thought of running into one of those wild things on my own in the forest. Not that there was much meat left on my bones at the moment anyway. I probably wouldn’t look very tasty to a carnivore.
We collected as much wood as we could, Dane lifting me up to reach the higher branches he couldn’t reach on his own. I was able to collect more that way. The higher the branches went, the stronger they got, and we still had no way to chop them off, relying on our own ability to pull and wrench them off the trees. By the time we were done, my arm muscles ached, but we had a decent-sized pile of wood.
As we were heading back, I noticed a furry brown plant growing near a dip in the snow. I rushed over to them, turning toward Dane. “Cattails,” I said. “The stalks are edible.”
“How do you know?”
“I work with plants. I don’t know . . . I come across weird information in books, magazines. These won’t fill us up, but they’ll feed us.”
“Hand me the wood you’re holding and pick as many as you can,” Dane said, coming up right behind me. I transferred the branches to his arms so his pile was up to his chin, and he waited as I plucked as many cattails as I could from the ground.
We headed to our camp and fed the fire and then ourselves, Dane’s expression grim as our eyes met over the precious little food left. I reached for a cattail, pulling off the fluffy head and handing Dane the stem. “It probably won’t taste great, but it has vitamins in it. Wash it down with some water.”
He nodded, ripping off a piece of the stem with his teeth, chewing and swallowing. “Not bad, actually. Kind of starchy and sweet.” He took another bite as I plucked another stem for myself, taking a bite and nodding in agreement with his assessment of the taste. It wasn’t bad. I still felt hungry after we’d eaten, but the hunger’s sharp edge had been dulled and for that small mercy, I was grateful.
“What are your ideas about climbing out of here?”
Dane looked at me, putting the last piece of the cattail stem in his mouth and eating it slowly. “We’d have to make something—a rope—to get us down one of the cliffs. I think the eastern one is our best bet. There’s a rock formation to tie one end to and it looks just slightly lower than the others.”
I nodded slowly. He’d obviously put some thought into this. He must have admitted to himself days ago that our rescue hopes were over. “What could we possibly use as a rope? We don’t have anything strong enough.”
“We could strip the leather from the airplane seats and cut it into strips, tie it together to form a long rope,” he said.
“You said we wouldn’t get back on that plane, that forcing a seat from the base would jar it too much to be safe.”
“I know what I said, but it might be worth the risk. It might be our only option.”
I stared at him. It seemed like a terrible option. That precariously balanced plane scared the hell out of me. I had a bad feeling about it. If it even slipped a little, the ice it was on would only make it slip that much more easily. “What if we get down the cliff and then there isn’t a path from there that doesn’t involve an even higher cliff?”
Dane puffed out a breath, sticking his hands in his pockets and shivering slightly. “There’s no way to know that. We just have to decide if it’s worth the risk.”
“We’d have to leave our fire behind, with no way to make another one. And how would we bring the things we need to make a shelter?”
Dane massaged the back of his neck. “We could use the same method you did to get me up here from that plane. We’d make a sled, decide what we couldn’t do without, and carry that behind us. Maybe we’d make a strap so the sled would be easier to drag.”
“God, Dane, you really have thought about this.”
“I think we have to. No one’s coming for us. We’re on our own.”
My heart seemed to contract slowly and then expand all at once, my breath coming out in a quick gasp. But I forced myself to breathe deeply, to nod my head. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to survive this, Audra. Do you trust me?”
I stared at the man sitting across from me, the man I’d fallen in love with so long ago, the man I’d never truly gotten over. We’d gone to hell once together, and we’d walked out separately. In some ways it felt like we were in hell together, again, just a different sort. But this time, we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. This time, we were going to link hands and survive. Somehow. Somehow. “Yes. I trust you.”
His expression softened and he smiled, small, tender. “You and me?”
“You and me,” I confirmed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Audra
Dane’s fever was getting worse. I rolled toward him two mornings after we’d spoken of trying to get to a lower altitude, putting my hand on his sweaty forehead as his eyes blinked open. “Hey,” he said, his voice gritty with sleep. My heart started beating faster when I saw his reddened cheeks and slightly glazed eyes.
“Your fever is getting worse,” I said.
He put his hand on my cheek. “I know.”
“It’s your leg. You have an infection, Dane. I don’t know what to do.”
“There’s nothing to do. We just need to let my body take care of it. It’ll be fine.”
“What if it isn’t, Dane? Not everything is always fine. Things don’t always just end well! Sometimes they end horribly. We know that better than anyone.”
Dane regarded me for a moment, his gaze moving over my face, pressing his lips together as if he wasn’t sure what to say. He took a long breath, blowing it out. “This will end well.” He leaned forward and kissed me. I knew he was trying to distract me, but I let him. “It will,” he said, and I suspected he was trying to convince both of us. Hope was a funny thing—it didn’t rely on evidence to exist. And I guessed that was sort of the whole point.
He made love to me slowly, his heat simultaneously worrying me and providing comfort. Afterward, he held me as we dozed some more, ne
ither one of us rushing to get up to a breakfast of water and cattail stems. I felt weak, sick, and so tired, I just wanted to sleep continuously.
“I’m going to try to hunt today,” Dane said.
I opened my eyes and stared at the rock in front of me. “How? What?”
“I’ll try some different things. A rock, maybe just surprise. These animals aren’t used to humans in their forest. Hell, it can’t hurt.”
I was pretty darn sure animals would know instinctively to be cautious of anything bigger than them, but I didn’t say that. Maybe we both needed the hope of food—no matter how pitiful the plan, no matter how unlikely of working. Maybe we just needed to feel like we were trying.
“No, I guess not. But you should rest.”
“I’m not resting, Audra. I have a mild fever. I’m not useless.” He sounded offended, his pride hurt, and I knew it still upset him to think about me alone for the first couple of days out here while he’d been unconscious.
“I know that.”
We were both quiet for a few minutes and I’d almost fallen back to sleep, when Dane said, “Can I ask you a question?”
I paused, but nodded. “Yes, anything.”
“Why do you still live in that house?”
I thought about it for a moment, admitting the truth to myself, letting it sit inside for a moment before sharing it with Dane. I knew the answer, and it pained me to admit out loud. “To punish myself.”
“Oh, Audra. Why?” His breath was soft on my neck. His arms held me tightly and I felt safe, loved. I wanted his forgiveness, and I wanted to forgive myself.
“It was my fault that my dad died too.”
“Your fault? How could it be your fault? His heart gave out, sweetheart.”
“I know. But I put him in that home so I could start my own family, and suddenly”—I swallowed back the tears—“suddenly, strangers were taking care of him. I think he just gave up. He didn’t want to be there. I saw it on his face when I visited him, but I convinced myself he’d grow to like it.”
