by Julie Miller
She didn’t intend to do anything else. “You’re the safest place I know.”
He scanned the clearing outside before jogging into the trees, retracing their steps down toward the creek from the day before. “Come on. I want to get to the river.” Once he was certain she could keep up, he released her, allowing her the use of both hands to balance herself as they half climbed, half slipped down the steep, uneven terrain. “There’ll be less snow there, and the ground is still frozen enough we won’t leave footprints.”
“The river? As in the bottom of the gorge?” She’d have to sprout wings and fly if he wanted her to cover that distance in a hurry.
“Creek flows into it about a mile from here. Before it hits the waterfall.” She’d heard the running water yesterday when she’d stopped to rest, although she hadn’t been able to place its location. But she trusted that Jason knew exactly where they were going. “Then it drops down.”
“About a thousand feet!”
“A series of waterfalls, not one big one. There’s plenty of river in between. We’ll be more exposed, but we can cover the distance faster. Flatter terrain. Fewer obstacles. They won’t be able to cross it with their vehicles unless they backtrack several miles. Keep moving. These rocks are loose.” He pointed out the hazard even as he ordered her to follow him across. They created a mini-rockslide and Samantha glanced up the slope behind them, wondering if the noise and movement was loud enough for the men to track. She grabbed onto an exposed root to slow her skid toward the next tree trunk. Then she hurried after him toward the rock face they’d scaled the evening before.
“Thank you for explaining the plan to me.” The consideration was a far cry from the bossy, taciturn man who’d pushed her to her limits without so much as a please or You hangin’ in there? the day before. He wasn’t a hard man, cruel and uncaring and all about the job as she’d initially thought. He was a wounded man, guarded with his thoughts and words and feelings because he’d been hurt so badly and had lost so much.
Yet he’d held her and kissed her and shared a part of himself last night. He listened when she talked, conceded when he could, and now explained when he couldn’t. Samantha’s heart pounded a little harder in her chest, and it wasn’t just from the exertion of their quick descent. This was more than a crush she was feeling for Jason.
If she was completely honest, this was more than she’d ever felt for Kyle. Her feelings for her ex had been about excitement and discovery and the satisfaction of pleasing her father and alleviating his concern. She’d felt useful. She’d thought Kyle needed her. But that had all proved superficial, a ploy to gain her trust and make her feel something for him. On the surface, Jason didn’t need anybody, certainly not a self-conscious citified brainiac who thought and talked too much. But now she had an idea of how isolated he was from the world—another survival tactic. She understood now that what he needed was compassion, acceptance, maybe even forgiveness for the tragedies in his past he blamed himself for. In all the months she’d known Kyle, he had never touched her heart the way these few hours with Jason had. Kyle needed her money and her connections to her father. Jason needed her. To listen. To hold. To trust. The idea that she could mean something to a man like Jason was as frightening as it was empowering. Although her experience with men was next to nil, what she felt for Jason Hunt seemed a little scary, yet it was more precious, more profound than anything she’d felt for the man she once thought she’d marry.
“Eyes on me, Sam,” her beat-up mountain man reminded her, interrupting her thoughts. Her mountain man? Talk about errant thinking. He pointed to a knob of exposed granite. “That’s your next handhold. Step where I step.”
Focusing on the demands of the moment, she obeyed his every order, facing the rocks as he did when the trees thinned out. Although she imagined real rock climbing required a level of upper-body strength she lacked, he made it easy for her by pointing out toeholds and tiny gaps and protrusions where she could grip the rock.
Suddenly, the woods were eerily quiet. Samantha stopped, standing on her tiptoes on a small lump of granite, her gloved fingers flexing around the outcrop where she clung. She held her breath and tipped her face up toward the trees, unsure whether she should risk feeling relief. Had Buck’s men gone the wrong direction? Had Jason’s knowledge of the mountain saved them yet again? “Do you think we lost them?” she whispered on her next exhale.
“I think they found the shack. They’ll be on our trail soon enough. I didn’t take the time to hide anything when we left.” His hands closed around her waist and he lifted her down to the flatter ground beside him. The brief sensation of heat at his touch, and the surprising flare of confidence she felt at discovering just how close she’d been to reaching the bottom on her own, vanished as soon as he tugged on her hand to get her moving again. “They won’t be able to drive down this steep slope. They’ll have to split up to cut us off one direction or the other or pursue us on foot. And we’re not slowing down.”
Only, they were. At first, she thought he’d slowed his pace to accommodate her shorter stride. But now she saw he was limping. So much for cauterizing that shrapnel wound. The bloodstain on his pant leg was spreading, and the rip at his shoulder was oozing blood, too. Jason had clearly fought with one of Buck’s men. Had he been ambushed? Just how badly had he been hurt? “Did you have to kill someone to get away?”
“Him or me,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I chose me.” She remembered yesterday’s arduous trek across the mountain. Yesterday, his strength had seemed indomitable, his skills unparalleled. Today, he seemed a little more human. A little more vulnerable. His breathing seemed more labored than it had yesterday. Jason was hurting. What was this rescue assignment costing him? And not just physically.
“He’s the one who shot you?”
“It’s just a graze.”
He squeezed his hand around the wound on his left shoulder, wiggling his left fingers as if they might be going numb. That wasn’t a good sign, was it? His right palm came away bloody before he dipped it in the icy water to wash it off. That definitely wasn’t a good sign. Samantha’s heart lurched in her chest to think of all he had suffered on his mission to help get her home. But he didn’t complain about the pain or what he’d been forced to do. He was a machine again, hurrying along the bank, testing which rocks weren’t coated with a treacherous sheet of ice before climbing across and jogging up to the next line of trees through the snow.
Samantha followed along, grateful for the long, baggy jeans instead of the soiled dress she’d worn on yesterday’s hike. The cool temps shouldn’t sap her energy quite as quickly today. But it was still a challenge to keep up with Jason’s relentless, if uneven, pace. “That arm’s still bleeding,” she admonished, unable to hide her concern. “You need stitches. Antibiotics, too, I’m guessing. At least let me pack it off for you. When was your last tetanus shot?”
The air around them was suddenly alive with the growl of gunning engines, moving closer. Snowmobiles. When they heard a series of rapid-fire gunshots and angry shouting in the distance, Jason cursed. Buck’s men had found their trail again. Samantha turned toward the sound. With the noise echoing off the rocks and trees, it was hard to tell which direction they were coming from. She was only certain that there was more than one vehicle moving through the forest now. Had they split up like Jason had suspected? Could they be surrounding them? Getting close enough to shoot at them again?
She startled at the brush of Jason’s fingers sliding against hers. “Less talking. More running.”
Keeping hold of her hand, he hauled her up the creek bank and led her into the trees again. Despite his injuries, he lengthened his stride, forcing her to push herself into a faster speed.
“Is one ahead of us?”
“Above us. On the forest service road that runs parallel to the river. If he gets ahead of us, he can cut us off before we reach the walking bridge across the ri
ver. The others are searching the trees. They’ll figure out where we are any second.” He pointed to the right. “Remember downhill. That’s where the river is. If anything happens to me—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you!”
“—go that way. Stay out of the snow and follow it. You’ll be in cell range before you hit the next drop-off.”
“I don’t have a phone!” she gasped. A staccato of bullets thwapped through the tops of the trees over their heads. Instinctively, she ducked as bits of twigs and pine needles rained down on their heads. “Jason!”
“They’re firing blind. Hoping for a lucky shot.”
The shots were too damn close to be any kind of luck for them. “If they’re shooting this way, they must know we’re going to the river.”
“There isn’t any other way out of here unless you packed some rappelling gear I don’t know about.”
Another spray of bullets chopped up the snow a few yards behind them. “Jase?”
They were running now. Endlessly running. Samantha’s vision narrowed to the broad strength of Jason’s back. There was only Jason and running and deafening sound. Gunfire. Engines. Shouting. Their boots slapped against the frozen, hard-packed dirt as the layers of snow thinned, and every breath was a noisy gasp. Snow and danger was up the slope to their left. She caught glimpses of the river, of their escape route, off to their right through the trees now. But as the noises grew louder and the enemy closed in, it seemed farther and farther away.
But that distance was an illusion. As was the promise of safety. She could hear some of the words Buck and his men were shouting now. Or were those radio communications?
“River.”
“Can you see them?”
“This way!”
“Nobody touches her but me. I’m the one who’s going to make her daddy pay.”
The creek and ribbon after ribbon of melting snow running off from the higher elevations poured into the river, and the river widened. They were close enough to see water splashing against the rocks and loose chunks of ice bobbing along the surface. But it was already too wide for them to simply walk across on stepping-stones as they had the creek. The current picked up speed as the water deepened, transforming the tinkling sweetness of a slow-moving stream into a thunderous crash of water against rock that vibrated through the mountain itself.
The loudest sound of all was her pulse pounding in her ears as her heart raced and her legs pumped to keep pace with Jason’s. But he was faltering. She was lagging behind. Blindly guessing their location or not, the bullets and voices and snowmobiles were closing in on them. They’d never reach the river and the walkway bridge across it in time. They weren’t far enough ahead of Buck and his men to get to the open ground where she and Jason could move faster. She’d never quite understood her father’s love of hunting, and now that she’d spent the last forty-eight hours of her life as somebody’s prey, she knew she’d never be a fan of the sport.
Yet as fear crept into her mind and fatigue claimed her body, the instinctive adrenaline of survival pushed it aside and cleared her thoughts. Her brain was her best weapon. That’s what she needed to listen to.
They couldn’t outrun bullets or snowmobiles.
She slowed to a jog. “Jase? I’ve got an idea.”
A crazy one. Full of risk. Until they got off this mountain, though, every decision was a risk.
He snatched her hand again, urging her into a run. “We need to get out of this snow, so they have to move on foot.”
“No. We need to go toward them.”
“Honey, we—”
“Listen to me.” She tightened her grip and jerked him to a stop. The fact that he winced at the sudden stop and rubbed at his injured thigh told her this was the right plan of action. She curled her fingers into the front of his jacket, asking him to hear her out. “You can’t keep up this pace when you’re hurt and losing blood like this. I can’t keep up this pace.”
His heavy breaths stirred a tendril of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail. “Then we’re looking at a shoot-out, and the odds aren’t in our favor.”
“We have to outsmart them. Not out-shoot them. Can you take out one of the men on a snowmobile?” She picked up a dead branch, holding it up like a baseball bat.
“If we get close enough, yeah.” Then his expression changed. Maybe not so crazy, after all. “Yes.” Nodding, he plucked the branch from her fingers and took her hand again, pulling her up the incline toward the service road. “We need transportation. That’s half a great idea.”
“What’s the other half?”
“Can you swim?”
“The second rule you said to me was that I shouldn’t get wet.”
The growl of the snowmobiles got louder as they neared the service road. “Right. You’ll freeze. We’ll both freeze. Can you swim?”
“Yes.”
“Then I know how to buy us some time and get us off this mountain faster.”
He released her when they reached the flat surface of the snow-covered gravel road that had been carved around the curves of the mountain to give emergency vehicles access to the wooded slopes, as well as create a natural fire break. Her attention was drawn to the ominous buzz of the approaching engine while Jason scanned the trees on either side of the road.
Deciding on his best vantage point for the attack, he led Samantha across the road, obscuring their tracks by dragging the branch through the snow behind them. “Get behind that tree.” He pushed her back against the trunk, hugging his body around hers, shielding her from view from any angle. She clung to the front of his jacket, holding him close so that he’d be hidden from view, as well. “Be ready to go on my mark.”
It was only a matter of seconds before the Arctic Cat and a now-familiar armed figure in black camo came around the bend in the road. Jason’s gray eyes locked onto hers for a moment. He inhaled a couple of deep breaths. Steeling his nerves? Schooling his energy for the blitz attack? Reassuring her?
When she released her grip on him and nodded, he smiled. And then he was gone.
Even if she’d had a clear view of the road, the next several seconds would have passed by in a blur. The snowmobile was almost upon them when Jason charged, swinging the thick branch as if he was aiming for the bleacher seats. The wood caught the rider squarely in the chest, and between his speed and Jason’s strength, the man went flying.
As the unmanned vehicle careened off the road and plowed into a snowdrift, Jason tossed the branch and raced toward the stunned man. The man in black staggered to his feet, clutching at his rib cage. He muttered something just as Jason tackled him and they rolled into the ditch beside the road.
Although Samantha’s heart was telling her to go to Jason to make sure he was safe, her brain told her he was expecting her to stay away from whatever fight was taking place. Since securing the snowmobile had been her idea in the first place, she ran in the opposite direction. A quick examination of the vehicle revealed a dent in the front fender, but the gas tank hadn’t been damaged, and the engine was still idling with power. She straightened the runners, climbed on board and shifted it into Reverse, backing out of the drift and centering it on the road for their escape.
“Ah, hell.”
She shifted into Neutral and jumped off, hurrying to Jason’s side. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay.”
“Then what...?” She ran up behind him, resting her hand against his back and assessing the degree of pain on his face as he knelt over the unmoving man. When he didn’t answer, she followed his gaze to the stocking mask he clenched in his fist and on down to the man’s scraggly dark beard. There wasn’t a single line marring his face. Samantha frowned. “He’s younger than I am. This guy wants to kill me? Why? I don’t even know him.”
“I do.”
When he didn’t elaborate or change the somber disa
ppointment in his expression, Samantha squeezed his shoulder. “Jase?”
The walkie-talkie hooked to the young man’s pack blared to life. “Murphy, you got them? Damn it, cuz, answer me! Everybody, head east!”
She felt the energy galvanizing the muscles beneath her hand. Jason stood, towered over her, pushed her up to the road. “Get back on the snowmobile.” As she straddled the seat, he climbed on behind her. “You know how to drive this thing?” Samantha nodded. This model was fancier than the one she’d ridden in college on a spring break ski trip with her father, Joyce and Taylor, but she understood how an engine worked. She kicked it into gear and turned in the direction of Jason’s hand. “That way.”
They zoomed down the road, zigzagging a few times to dodge the spots where the gravel was starting to peek through. Even with her glasses secured to her face by the knit cap she wore, she squinted as the wind whipped past them. Under different circumstances, she might have enjoyed the feel of Jason’s hands at her waist, the warmth of his body at her back as they raced along in the cool, crisp air. But these circumstances were starting to feel far too familiar. Men shouting threats. That swarm of hornets, albeit smaller now, still pursuing them.
She turned her chin to her shoulder, shouting to be heard. “How many of them are there?”
“I counted eight to ten men, including Buck, up at Mule Deer Pass. They’re down to five or six now.”
“Won’t they give up if you keep killing them?”
“Orin’s not dead. He’s unconscious.”
“Orin? Who’s Orin?”
She automatically ducked as a pop of gunfire shattered the air behind them. Jason hunched his shoulders over hers. “Drive!”
There was someone on the road behind them now, and he was picking up speed, firing random shots as he steered the snowmobile and tried to take aim. “I got ’em now, Buck!” he shouted. “That five million is ours!”
