Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2)

by Tamara Morgan

  They fit together, she and Scott. When she kissed him, he kissed back, his mouth relentless as his breath sought hers again and again. When she nipped the side of his mouth, half in playfulness, half in protest, he growled until she did it again. When she arched her back, feeling the outline of every hard part of him against her, his…plastic body popped.

  “Oh, geez. Oh, shit. Oh, no.” She tried to roll out from underneath him, but he had her pinned to the floor. “Please tell me that wasn’t your head.”

  “Neither the head nor the shaft, I’m afraid. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re still fully dressed.” His sleepy eyes sparkled down on her, and if she wasn’t so worried about the state of the doll under her ass, she might have said he looked happy. “But I’m willing to rectify that if you are.”

  “I mean it, Scott.” She slapped a hand against his chest, the warm, hard wall of his pecs not moving in the slightest. “Get off. I think I just killed you.”

  “You’re constantly killing me,” he said, falling into a moment of tenderness and brushing her hair from her face with a smile. “Day and night. In my life or out of it. You exhaust me, Carrie Morlock, but I can’t seem to quit you.”

  She shifted and felt the roll of a spherical object move from the top of her waistband to the small of her back. It was his head—and it was definitely detached from the rest of his body.

  She’d murdered him. Real-Life Scott was on top of her, gazing at her with a look of longing, willing and hot and hard where his erection pressed against her thigh, and she’d murdered the voodoo doll that controlled his future.

  Since he didn’t appear to have any intention of moving, she twisted her back and managed to fish out the rubbery ball that contained his fate. Holding it between her fingers like a bingo counter, she brought it to his attention with a groan. “This is bad.”

  “Aha! Is that what you were hiding?” He took the proffered head. “It’s kind of creepy. Is it supposed to be the Joker?”

  “No, Scott. It’s you.”

  “It doesn’t look anything like me. My eyes aren’t blue.”

  She managed to get herself up into a seated position, exposing the rest of the pieces. The doll’s body was still intact, but it had cracked open in the center of his chest, and hairball Mara looked mostly like a piece of dust that had wafted down the empty hallway.

  “That’s your body.” She pointed at it with a sinking feeling. It was one thing to mess around with this sort of thing in Lexie’s company, venting her rage in questionably healthy ways, but it was another to let Scott in on the game. It was one he wouldn’t care to play.

  But Scott just picked up the rest of the doll, twisting it sideways to get a better look.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. How is this my…” He paused as he took in the sight of the red vest, which, though askew, was easily recognizable. “Oh. You have a doll of me. In my vest.”

  This was it. This was the end—all over again. The second he realized she’d made a voodoo doll to try and curse his life even more, he’d be out of her lap and back to obstinately loathing her in no time.

  “You’re a very strange woman, you know that? Here.” He mashed the disembodied head onto the empty pillar of the neck and handed the doll back to her. It wasn’t an improvement. Voodoo Scott now bore the squashed, cracked look of the undead. “Do you torture him in your spare time?”

  “Yes.” There was no use hiding it. “And I make him act out impossible scenarios I want to come true.”

  “How interesting. Have you ever considered seeing a therapist?”

  “This isn’t funny, Scott. We put a curse on this doll, Lexie and I.”

  “You and Lexie did this?”

  She nodded.

  “You put a curse on a doll in a red vest?”

  She nodded again.

  “And then you ripped the head off the doll?”

  “It was an accident,” she said quickly. “I was trying to invoke some good luck for the mission. I figured we could use it.”

  She counted inside her head, starting at ten and working her way down, waiting for the inevitable explosion. It hit at about six and a half.

  “Oh, Carrie.” As he was still close enough that it counted as an embrace, Scott’s laugh—long and loud and once one of her favorite sounds in the whole world—shook them both. He even managed to put his arms around her, burying his head in her neck and breathing deep. “Only you would think of wreaking vengeance with the Joker. Only you.”

  She stiffened, breaking the shackle of his arms. “Are you kidding me right now?”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a jerk lately,” he said, clearly misinterpreting her one hundred percent justifiable rage. He was not choosing this moment to be cavalier. “I don’t blame you for wanting to pop the heads off dolls in the name of revenge.”

  “Don’t you understand? Look at his cracked chest. I shattered him open.”

  “It’s nothing. A toy.”

  “How can breaking a toy be nothing, but a mirror is grounds for separation?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “It was exactly like that.”

  He tried to put his arms around her once again, but she was having none of that. He didn’t get to be patronizing about this. Not when she’d spent the entire past month of her life tiptoeing around him, fearful of doing so much as stepping on a crack in his presence.

  She jumped to her feet to avoid another sexually fraught tussle on the ground. Scott followed suit, though at a much more leisurely pace as he unfolded himself.

  “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound right now?” he asked.

  “Me? I’m the crazy one?” He had no idea how crazy she could get. If he kept looking at her like that—as if she were one cabbage short of a patch—she refused to be held accountable for her actions. “You’re the one who ended an entire relationship in the name of bad luck. You’re the one who broke my fucking heart because I washed an article of clothing.”

  A spasm of something like pain moved over his features, a flash that disappeared as quickly as it came. “It’s okay. The doll isn’t a big deal.”

  “It’s a huge deal.”

  “It’s only a toy.”

  “It was also only a vest.”

  There was that spasm again. This time, it lingered, rendering him soft and vulnerable in ways that weren’t helpful in maintaining her current state of irritation. “It wasn’t the vest, Carrie. Of course it wasn’t that.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “It’s not…” He groaned, a war taking place behind his sleepy eyes. “It’s not what you think. I wasn’t upset about the vest, specifically. It’s more about what the vest represents.”

  Carrie had always sucked at symbolism. “Which is what, exactly? The status quo? Your superiority as man? Your refusal to confront your feelings in any way that actually matters? I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to explain it to me in painstaking detail, because from where I stand, you’re just a hypocrite with anger management issues.”

  Oh, he wanted to yell at her—she could tell. He wanted to grab her by the upper arms and shake her until she saw sense. He wanted to cover her body with his and force her to forget everything but the way his kisses melted her insides and propelled her toward forgiveness.

  It was what he’d always done in the past when things reached this point, these seconds before detonation, this precarious moment of truth they never allowed to boil over.

  He would have done it, too—kissed her, shaken her, forced a stalemate that would give them another few weeks of relationship limbo before they cycled back to this exact same place—but the sound of a low-throated cough startled them both.

  “I hate to get in the middle of a lover’s quarrel.” Max’s voice sounded from the end of the hallway, his tone as somber as if he were announcing a death. Maybe Scott’s. Possibly hers. “But I thought you’d want to know the sun’s finally up. It’s time to head out.”

  Chapter Sevenr />
  They couldn’t have picked a more beautiful place to die.

  Scott hadn’t spent too much time this far north of Spokane, pushing through the over one million acres of national forest that extended to the Canadian border. There was plenty of wilderness closer to home for him to enjoy, what with all the rivers and woods and lakes that surrounded Spokane, and it always felt like this part of the state was just showing off. Considered the foothills to the Rocky Mountains, there was nothing but undulating hills of evergreens as far as the eye could see. It was a landscape painting done up in rich blues and greens, all of it frosted over with swirls of white that lifted the helicopter and tossed them around like salt in a shaker.

  “What was that?” he asked as a rattling sound clanked through the rotors and made the whole helicopter shudder. His hands gripped the sides of his seat hard enough to cause the muscles of his forearms to strain, his fingertips long since grown numb despite the Hestra gloves that covered them. “And are we supposed to be going sideways?”

  He was ignored as the crackle of a male voice came through the headset that allowed them to speak over the continual whirring of the blades. “We’re getting close, Carrie. See that peak about thirty miles out?”

  “I see it.”

  “We were camped near the bottom of that eastern slope, which is where I’d guess Mara would have returned once she realized everyone had gone on without her. The closer you can get us to the base of that mountain, the better.”

  “Roger that.”

  The helicopter took a nosedive to the right, following the instructions to a tee. They’d been issued from Nate the Park Ranger, an eager and highly freckled young man who sat in the back with Ace and Max, the three of them strapped down and on the lookout for any signs of life below. Nate had been on the original mission with Mara—part of the Abandonment Team, as Scott liked to call it—and he’d been prepared to dislike the much-too-young bastard from the start. But in addition to being brave enough and willing to head out in weather like this, it turned out he was some kind of GPS savant. Despite the fact that he couldn’t be very far into his twenties, he knew this forest—all one million acres—the way Scott knew the different cadences of a dog’s bark.

  Another gust of wind lifted them from below, a temporary weightlessness that did little to calm the churning in Scott’s stomach. He clutched the seat harder.

  “Would you relax?” Carrie reached over to pry his hands away. As this action required her to let go of the helicopter controls, he didn’t think it was fair of her to make such lighthearted commands. “This is nothing. There’s barely even any wind yet.”

  “It doesn’t feel like barely any wind.”

  She took her eyes off the horizon to study him, making him wish he hadn’t spoken at all. Not only did he prefer her eyes straight ahead, where they could pick out potentially hazardous outcroppings of rock, but he was afraid that too much direct eye contact would result in another outpouring of emotion between them, a continuation of the hallway confession he’d been so close to making before.

  It wasn’t the vest, Carrie. It’s what the vest represents. Change. Uncertainty. The idea that it wasn’t luck that shaped his life but the cold, hard fear that had encased his heart since he was twelve years old.

  Yeah—that wasn’t a conversation he was having while the only thing standing between them all and death was Carrie’s grip on what amounted to a joystick. He’d seen her play video games. She couldn’t even line up rows of candy.

  “Since when are you so scared of flying?” she asked. “Back at the church, you were all calm and mocking my fears about the beheading.”

  “That was before you told Ace that helicopters are basically ten thousand different parts of machinery working together to kill us.”

  She laughed and flipped some sort of mechanism on the vast panel of numbers, dials, switches, and different parts of machinery working together to kill them. “Lucky for you, I’m used to dealing with antagonistic equipment—and people. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if everything ran smoothly for once.”

  He didn’t have a glib reply for that one, but after about thirty seconds of listening to the wind howl around them, he wished he could have come up with something. He didn’t like hearing the storm any more than he liked the nagging repetition of his own thoughts, which had been going nonstop for hours. It was as if he was listening to a constant loop of Mara-Carrie-Mara-Carrie.

  One was missing; the other had already gone. And Scott couldn’t seem to make up his mind which one of them he wanted back more.

  “I don’t like the look of those clouds over there.” Nate’s voice buzzed in Scott’s ear, providing him with a temporary respite.

  “I don’t either,” Carrie said, but that didn’t stop her from turning toward the patch of grey that surrounded their destination. “That’s where you want us, right?”

  “As close as possible without dying, if you don’t mind.” Even now, Nate was upbeat, his enthusiasm contagious. “I’m supposed to be at my parents’ for Christmas brunch next week. They’ll kill me if I miss it again.”

  “And I want to make it back for Tina’s holiday pageant,” Max said. “She’s a sheep. I made her costume myself.”

  “I don’t care what happens as long as we find her,” was Scott’s contribution. But that wasn’t in the spirit of things, so he tried again. “Newman’s expecting me for Christmas dinner, though, and he sucks at cooking for one.”

  There was a pause and static as Ace’s headset crackled to life. “I got nothing. You wanna make plans for Christmas with me, Carrie? We can eat cranberries out of the can and watch Die Hard.”

  “I’d love that,” Carrie said, and Scott’s chest snagged at how sincere she sounded. They’d never gotten around to making holiday plans together, and she didn’t have anyone else in the area. He forgot, sometimes, just how alone she was—how much of her high energy existed to make up for all the quiet times in between. “As long as Die Hard is a secret code for Love, Actually.”

  “You wish.”

  They might have clogged the airways with a heated discussion of the relative merits of a mumbling Bruce Willis versus mumbling Hugh Grant, but a gust of wind grabbed the tail of the helicopter and lifted it, tipping them like a teapot.

  Carrie swore as she struggled to maneuver them flat again, pulling against the monumental weight of gravity. “I hope everyone is buckled in,” she said tightly. “Things are about to get rocky.”

  “About to?” Scott muttered, more out of fear than condemnation, though of course it sounded like the latter—a fact Carrie picked up on in a second.

  “Is this storm too violent for you? My bad. Let me turn around and find a different way around this seven-thousand-foot-mountain.”

  “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. You’re doing a great job.”

  She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, no longer willing—or able—to take her eyes from the shaking control panel. “That better not be a compliment I hear coming from your lips right now.”

  “I mean it,” he protested. “If we make it through this in one piece, I’ll—” What, exactly? Never doubt her again? Stop believing in superstitions? Beg her to take him back?

  That last one sounded pretty good, actually.

  But all he managed to say was, “Thank you.”

  “Oh, no you don’t.” She swore again as the helicopter dipped to the tree line before pulling back up again. The closer they got to the ground, the faster it appeared they were going, the snow powdering off the trees from the spinning of the blades, the whole contraption shuddering against the change in altitude. It felt as if they were trapped inside a snow globe about to shatter against the side of a cliff. “No being nice. I want you to tell me how you feel. Tell me how I ruined your life. Tell me how much you’ll hate me if we don’t find Mara in time.”

  “I would never—”

  “Please yell at me, Scott.” Carrie didn’t even give him the side-eye that time,
so concentrated was she on keeping them aloft. He almost couldn’t hear her over the whirring of the blades against the wind. “Muster up every bit of hatred you have and let it go.”

  Tight white lines around her mouth gave her an intense look, and he could feel the tension and strength radiating from her body even on his side of the cockpit, but she didn’t once lose her concentration.

  He’d never been further from hatred in his life. “I can’t.”

  “Then make something up.” She practically bit the words off. “This is fucking scary, okay? There. I admit it. The wind is picking up and I lost radio contact with anyone outside this helicopter about five minutes ago and there isn’t nearly as much clearance as I prefer for landing. Voodoo Scott is still lying in the bottom of my bag without his head, and even though that doesn’t seem to concern you, it scares the crap out of me. And I’m about ten seconds away from losing my pilot’s license for a dog you love more than you’ll ever love me. If I need you to argue with me to make this feel normal again, then you’ll do it. Do you understand?”

  Not even a little. Given a thousand years together, he would never understand Carrie Morlock—reckless and brash, kind and funny, the only woman who had ever made him feel whole.

  But he could yell. Over the headset, in front of his best friends, without a care for who was listening in. If his heart was going to continue bleeding out here on the table, he might as well make it splash.

  “Is this the fastest way to get to our destination?” he asked. “Steady Pete could have had us there hours ago.”

  Some of the tightness around her lips relaxed. “Are you trying to tell me how to do my job, Richardson?”

  “Someone has to. You almost ran us straight into that tree.”

  “I missed it by at least a hundred feet. Trust a man—trust you—not to see what’s right in front of his face.”

  Oh, he saw it. He dreamed it. He was scared to death of it. “Maybe I can’t see anything because I’ve been too busy trying to keep up with you. If you’d slow down for one goddamned minute…”