Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Colton's first thought was, Yay! A night snuggled up with Jo Talbott sounded like the best of all possible worlds.
His second thought was Oh dear, because even he knew about the There Was Only One Bed trope. And clearly, from the way her ears were bright, bright red, so did Jo. "I don't have to sleep in the bag," he promised. "Shifters run warm. I'll be all right."
"That's insane," Jo said, still blushing. "It's about twenty-seven degrees out. You cannot sleep on top of the blankets."
"It's warmer in here, though. Honestly, I'll be—"
"A half-frozen lump of misery," Jo said, and although Colton genuinely did think he'd be all right, she also wasn't wrong about that. 'All right' and 'comfortable' were not the same things, after all.
"I just don't want to make you uncomfortable," he said, and to his relief, Jo laughed.
"I'm not sure 'uncomfortable' is the word, Colton. Well, it might be," she amended almost absently. "I've never tried to put two people in a one person sleeping bag, but it's a wide one, for a mummy bag."
"A…mummy…bag?" Colton crooked a smile. "I may be mythological, but I'm not that mythological."
She glanced at him and laughed again. "It's kind of shaped like a sarcophagus, like most sleeping bags have been for the past, I don't know, twenty years? I thought you said you were an outdoorsy kid!"
"I was! We hiked! We camped! But we…ah…"
Up went Jo's eyebrows. They were more golden than her hair, straight long slashes across her forehead. "You sleep in a big lump of chimeras?"
"Kindaaaaa?"
"Of course you do. In a huge tent, or just in a nice fluffy hollow in the ground?"
Colton hunched his shoulders and smiled. "I'm not going to say we don't like a nice fluffy hollow in the ground, but we do have one of those huge family tents, yeah. You're less likely to be caught sleeping in a chimera-pile if you can lock the door on strangers."
"Good point. Anyway, so…" Jo shook the sleeping bag out of its own tiny wrapper.
It was both longer and wider than he expected after her description, and she held it up demonstratively.
It did narrow at the foot, and clearly had a hood-like thing at the top, but it looked plenty big for one person comfortably and two if they were friendly.
Possibly very, very friendly.
She's our mate, his chimera said. Of course we're friends!
Colton didn't even try to explain that one, asking, "Does it unzip into a blanket?" cautiously instead. "I just don't want to make you uncomfortable."
"Nope. The thing about mummy bags is the zippers stop around the chest, because they're the weak point in a sleeping bag's insulation.
So…" She spread the bag out, unzipped it as far as it could go, then laughed.
"Getting us both in there at all is going to be an exercise in squirming.
You're going to have to go first, I think. "
"Well, not yet. It's not late yet, even if it's getting dark."
"I can fix that, too." Jo dug back into a bag and came out with a box of tea-light-sized lanterns that she tapped on with a fingertip as she scattered them around the tent.
To Colton's delight, they were warmly yellow instead of the bright hard LED white he expected, and he let out a sigh both of relief and pleasure.
"Those are great. You're incredibly prepared."
"Small plane pilots should be. I like to camp, too, and spend a lot of time out on the range," Jo said with a shrug. "But if something goes wrong with a flight, assuming you survive at all, you really should be prepared and comfortable with your tools."
"Looking at your preparation, I now think I'd probably starve or freeze to death in about six hours."
"Maybe if you were stuck in one shape, but I can't imagine that giant chimera can't hunt. Or at least scare things to death by jumping out of the bushes."
I can hunt, his chimera said with offended dignity. I'm very fast and fierce.
"That's true," Colton said to both Jo and his chimera.
The chimera settled down, and Jo offered him one of the snack bars, which claimed to have real chocolate and peanut butter.
He took a bite as she found water bottles, accepted it, made a face, drank some, and said, "That's not bad, actually, but it's pretty dry, isn't it? "
"Yeah. On the positive side, there's plenty of snow to melt for water if we need it."
"I thought you weren't supposed to drink snow water," he said vaguely. "Too cold, or something."
"Ideally you'd warm it up next to your body, yeah, although then of course you're melting snow with your precious body heat. Fortunately," Jo stressed, "I don't think we're really all that far from a road. I hope."
"And if we are, we'll figure it out," Colton promised. "But in the meantime, since we're stuck in about thirty-six square feet together for the night, do you want to, like, split the tent down the middle, or…?"
"That'll be tricky with the single sleeping bag," Jo said with a smile.
"No, I'm good. This has got to be deep dark secret time, right?
We share our most closely-held secrets with a stranger we'll never see again, it's very romantic, or something.
Although you've kind of beaten me to the punch, haven't you?
I don't think I can top 'turns into a chimera. '"
Maybe not, but she could certainly punch him in the heart with a few words. It was perfectly reasonable of her to think of him as a stranger she would never see again, but the idea took Colton's breath away.
Tell her we'll be together always, his chimera prompted.
Can't do that, buddy. The last thing I can do right now is tell her something like that, when we're stuck here together. It's kind of coercive.
Co-what?
It means it might make her feel pushed into a situation she can't avoid, Colton said gently, and he could feel his chimera's repulsion at the idea.
Oh. Oh no. We want her to feel safe, not co-hearsed.
Coerced, Colton corrected, but he'd been quiet too long already, even in the brief, silent conversation, and Jo was starting to look worried. "'Turns into a chimera' is kind of hard to beat, yes," he agreed. "And I'm all for hearing Jo Talbott's life story, but only if you want to share it."
"I don't, usually," Jo said thoughtfully. "I mean, it's not terrible or anything, I just don't like talking about myself very much. But somehow I feel differently about you. Like…like I'm going to tell you everything sooner or later anyway, so why not get started? What do you suppose that's about?"
"Kismet," Colton suggested. "Sometimes you meet someone and you just hit it off."
"True. Old souls meeting again, maybe. Seriously, though, my story isn't nearly as interesting as yours. I grew up on a bison ranch with my brother and parents, went to college in Bozeman, came back home and found out—" She broke off abruptly and Colton's eyebrows drew down.
"Something bad? Not that you have to talk about it, but…"
Jo gave an explosive sigh. "You know how kids just assume everything's okay? It turns out the ranch never did as well as I thought. Mom and Dad are barely keeping it together, but if the bank wasn't still locally owned, it'd probably have been foreclosed on. So Josh and I—"
"Josh? Your brother?"
"Yeah. We've been trying to help, but one of those huge, and I mean huge, ranching corporations wants to buy the land, and…
it's kind of looking stupider and stupider not to sell.
But I love it, you know? I grew up all over the acreage, learned to fly when I was fifteen so we could keep an eye on it all more easily, and I don't want to let it go.
I just don't know how to keep it, either.
Good grief, I am sharing all my deep dark secrets.
I haven't really told anybody about this! "
"Sometimes it's good to get it off your chest. So is that why you do charter flights?" Colton asked. "To help bring in some money."
She chuckled, a more rueful than happy sound. "Yeah, although people aren't usually trying to throw ten grand at me for it."
"Twenty."
"Please. I wrecked the plane and landed you in the middle of nowhere. I'm lucky to get anything besides a lawsuit." She eyed him. "You're not going to sue, are you, Mister Big City Attorney-At-Law?"
"Not a chance," Colton promised. "And I'm not kidding, Jo. If you'll let me, I'll help you with a new plane."
She inhaled until it seemed like she might suck up all the air in the tent, then blew it out again in a huge sigh. "If I can prove it wasn't my fault, the insurance will probably pay out. Otherwise, I don't know, I might have to actually take you up on it. But it's a lot of money, Colton."
He made a face. "I make a lot of money, and frankly I don't get out of the office enough to spend it. Helping to fix a situation I caused would be a better use than I usually have for it."
"You didn't make a bolt of lightning hit the propeller," Jo said a bit sourly, and he leaned toward her like he'd nudge her with his shoulder. He couldn't: they were sitting cross-legged, facing each other, but she smiled at the gesture anyway.
"You also didn't cause a bolt of lightning to hit the propeller, and you wouldn't have even been in the air if I hadn't offered to throw money at you. And," he said firmly, "I'm pretty sure you'd have refused to fly at all if you genuinely thought it was risky."
"Yeah." She rubbed her hand through her hair, sending static electricity everywhere so the fine red strands hung in the air like a halo. "It was clearing up there before we left, even if it would've been hours before they got the runway cleared enough for the jets to come in."
"So the insurance is going to come out in your favor, but in the meantime, let me help." His eyebrows went up a bit. "Let me help argue with the insurance, for that matter. If you need somebody to, I mean. Haggling over legal details is kind of my thing."
"Yeah? Not winging through the air like the magical being you are?"
"Nah, that's moonlighting, not the day job."