Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tangled, warm and sated with Jo in his arms had not been how Colton expected to begin the morning, but if there was a more perfect way to begin it, he couldn't imagine what that might be.
He knew they should probably get up and take advantage of the daylight to get farther west, to find civilization and reassure everyone they were all right, or at least try to turn his phone back on and see if there was any signal, but lingering in 'bed' for a while sounded…
…well, it sounded good, if not exactly 'so much better.' There were people who would be worried about them, and Colton would spare them as much worry as possible.
On the other hand, another hour or so probably wasn't going to matter all that much either way. He nuzzled Jo's hair, and she sighed contentedly before murmuring, "So this 'mates' thing, that's why my first thought when I saw you was 'I wanna marry this guy?'"
Colton chuckled very softly. "Sort of? Humans would call it love at first sight, for sure. It's just that for shifters there's not any of the doubt humans have about whether it's completely crazy to see somebody for the first time and think 'I'm going to marry them.' It's like…coming home."
"Yes!" Jo pushed up on an elbow so she could see him.
Her smile was bright and beautiful, and her eyes shone.
"Yes, that's exactly right. I never felt so immediately comfortable with someone before, not like that.
It is like coming home to somewhere you really love, and it's familiar and safe and perfect.
" She flopped back down, because there really wasn't room in the sleeping bag to be propped up, and Colton kissed her hair.
"Yeah. Like that. I just…let's be real," he said with another soft chuckle. "I would have asked if I could come back to see you, but I hadn't been planning to tell you I was a shifter, much less about fated mates, ninety minutes after we met."
"You waited two whole days for the fate thing.
" Jo rubbed her nose against his chest, the gesture affectionate.
"But no, I get why. I mean, I get why you didn't want to tell me about that when we were stuck together for two days, and no, I wouldn't have expected you to mention the whole chimera thing short of having to jump out of an airplane, yeah.
No. It's kind of ratcheting the 'getting to know you' thing up to eleven, isn't it? "
"Or a hundred and twelve," Colton agreed ruefully. "On the other hand, my chimera is happy."
Jo managed to put an eyebrow waggle into her voice: "I bet he is."
Colton laughed aloud right against her head, which made her laugh in turn. "Loud!"
"Sorry! But that wasn't what I meant!"
"No," she said, tilting her head to grin up at him before nestling in again. "I didn't think it was. Why is he happy?"
"He thought I should tell you at the airport. So now he's gotten his way, even if I was slow about it from his perspective."
"At the airport," Jo echoed, amused. "That would have been a little much. And dangerous. You wouldn't want to prove it to me by shifting there, and I'd have thought you were a nutjob if you'd told me without being able to prove it."
"See?" Colton said aloud to his chimera. It pretended to be sleeping so it could ignore him, and he chortled and kissed Jo's hair again. "See, I knew I was making the right choice there."
"You did. About all of it. And part of me doesn't want to get out of this sleeping bag, Colton. Part of me wants to just stay out here in the wilderness so you don't have to go back to New York."
He groaned softly and tightened his arms around her. "Yeah, I know. It's going to take me a while to move my practice out here—"
"What?" Jo pushed up again, her deep green eyes wide with astonishment. "To do what?"
Colton blinked uncertainly. "Move…move my practice out here? Montana doesn't have bar reciprocity, so I'll have to re-take the exam and study state law, but the truth is I can probably still maintain most of my practice in New York. The kinds of cases we do—"
Jo jolted in to kiss him, silencing him thoroughly. Colton made a happy, if startled, oomph into the kiss, and when it broke, Jo put her forehead against his, her eyes closed. "I wouldn't have asked you to move."
"Well…no, but…law practices can move. Ranches can't."
Jo squeaked like a sob had caught in her throat and hugged him hard. "Wow. I hadn't even gotten that far. I—wow."
Colton smiled almost apologetically. "In your defense, I've had two days to think about this. I've known since the moment we met that I would do anything to stay by your side."
"That's still…that's still pretty wow," Jo whispered. "Mr. Perfect doesn't usually appear out of nowhere and sweep a girl off her feet, you know."
"You'll think I'm less perfect when I introduce you to the other nine thousand people in my family," Colton said wryly.
"I bet I won't. How many of you are there really?"
"Ten. Eleven including me. And several married couples and kids."
"Sorry, I'm still back on 'ten.' What? You have ten siblings?"
"Only eight," Colton said, entirely aware that that didn't really improve things. "I was including my parents."
"There are only two of us! Four if you count me and my parents! Eight siblings?"
"Chimeras are rare," Colton mumbled. "My parents—"
"Wanted to make sure they were less rare, I guess! Just for the record, I'm not that enthusiastic!"
Colton laughed aloud again. "God, me either. I mean, if we're talking about the big stuff, I'd like kids, but it's not a deal-breaker."
"Me too! But not nine of them! Two! Two is a nice number! Oh." Jo rolled back again so she could see him. "Will they be chimeras?"
"Two is a very nice number. And yes, probably. Shifters almost always breed true."
"Wow. Wow, okay. All right, that's enough of that conversation for now. I need to adjust. And," she said reluctantly, "I need to pee. I don't want to get out of the sleeping bag. It's going to be so cold out there."
"I can get out and give you your clothes so they warm up."
"Then you'll freeze!"
"Yes, but I'll be very brave and masculine about it."
Jo giggled. "If you can reach our clothes we can put them all in here and warm them up at least a little before either of us has to get dressed."
"There is absolutely no way either of us can get dressed if we both stay in here. I think we've done great things with the room we have—"
Jo's answering grin suggested she thought so too, but she let Colton continue.
"—but there's just not enough room in this thing for two people to get dressed.
I'm goin' out." He scrambled out of the bag, gasping at the much-colder air outside of its cozy closeness, and pulled his clothes on in record time.
"Oh my God those are cold! No, stay in there, you definitely need to let yours warm up.
" He gave Jo her clothes, which were cold enough that she shrieked just having them in the bag, and then, since he was out and dressed, he made a break for the great outdoors to relieve his own bladder.
Jo was squirming around in the sleeping bag when he returned, presumably getting dressed. Colton, teeth chattering, zipped the tent back up. "The good news is that compared to outdoors the tent is a tropical island."
"You know, hanging my naked butt over a snowbank was never the way I wanted to gauge temperatures," Jo's muffled voice said from within the sleeping bag.
She emerged a minute later, made a break for the outdoors herself, and came back as fast as humanly possible.
They both finished bundling up in as many layers as they could, sharing energy bars and cold bottles of water, until Jo finally exhaled and said, "How far did we make it yesterday? "
"We're more or less out of the Hacksaws," Colton promised. "And we're not flying anywhere today. Or ever again, in these temperatures."
"Yeah, no," she said with a sigh. "I should have thought about wind chill. But if we're out of the mountains, hopefully it's a straight shot to civilization now. Maybe not a fast one, but a straight one. Have you checked your phone?"
"It's currently frozen solid." That was a slight exaggeration, but not much.
Colton had turned his off after the wreck, so the battery might still have some life to it, but at the moment, it had spent the night outside of the sleeping bag, and was cold.
"I'll try it after it's leeched some of my body heat. "
"I can't believe you have any left after warming me up last night. You saved me, you know," Jo added quietly. "Thank you, Colton."
He wanted to again protest that her health had been risked because of him, but she was right: neither of them had thought of the wind chill. So he nodded, taking her hand to press his mouth against it, and said, "I'm glad you're all right," which had to be the biggest understatement ever spoken.
"Me too," she whispered back, then shook herself and put on a back-to-business voice. "Okay, so we're out of the Hacksaws. That's great. It was grey but not snowing just now when I went out, so that's also good. What was the ground situation like last night?"
"Deep." Colton raised his eyes to give her a tiny smile. "Of course, the ground is always deep…"
She snorted, amused as she was supposed to be. "You meant the snow."
"Yeah, I did. It is deep, though. I'll probably have to break it, or—you could ride me, so you don't have to walk along behind. We might make better time."
"I think I should walk at least some of the time. Keep the blood flowing. You know, we…" She trailed off, then shook her head.
"We what?"
"We're not actually that far from—well. The ranch backs up against the Hacksaws, which isn't the same as being 'not that far' from it, since the range is about seventy miles long.
" She smiled and shook her head again. "For a minute I was like, why don't we just go straight home, but we need to start by knowing exactly where we are, and also…
" She paused, considering. "I was going to say, 'and also we should probably go somewhere more formal to let them know we're okay,' but now that I was going to say it, I don't know why.
We just need to get to a phone and or signal. Where we call from doesn't matter."
"If it was warmer, I'd fly you straight home," Colton promised.
"Once we figure out where 'straight home' is from here. And—how far did we fly yesterday, anyway? Or maybe I should be asking how fast you fly, or—"
Colton shook his head. "Chimeras glide faster and better than they fly, and yesterday was a lot of flying. And a lot of up-and-downing. Normally I fly eight or ten miles an hour, but I don't think I was going anything like that fast yesterday."
Jo's eyebrows darted up. "It seemed faster. But…no, that makes sense. Maybe not quite as fast as cycling, but it felt so different it seemed faster. So we could have gone…five miles, or thirty, yesterday."
"I think closer to five. Like I said, a lot of up and down. We were in the air about three hours before you stopped responding and I realized something was wrong, and then it took me a little while to find somewhere safe to land."
"Not that I'm proposing flying again right now," she said with a glance toward the tent door, "but with less up and down, it'd probably be safer. The air's warmer, lower down."
"Let's only cross that bridge if we come to it. If it turns out we're eight miles from your ranch, then great, but otherwise let's stick to old-fashioned feet."
"Or paws." Jo smiled at him, and as if she'd set a cue, they began packing up, Colton keeping an eye on her to make sure she was all right.
She seemed to be: she moved easily, she wasn't tired, and her mood was upbeat.
He swore to himself they would stop and camp again the moment she seemed to flag, because getting back to civilization wasn't as important as making sure they both got there healthy and strong.
But she kept up easily as he broke a trail for her in his chimera form, though she yelped with surprise as he crested a ridge and suddenly shifted back to human. "Everything okay?"
"Come see." He stepped aside and she joined him on the hilltop with a gasp of appreciation.
It was as if half of creation had laid itself out for them in a flawless winter wonderland vista.
Unbroken snow shone blue and white for miles, the far edges littered with the dark green of evergreens capped in their own snow.
Mountains soared up on both sides of them, brown and white and blue against a broken grey sky that sunlight shot through, here and there.
A black thread ran across the bottom of the vista, suggesting a river, and in the far distance, at the horizon, the smudge of a city could be seen.
Jo gave a cheer. "Civilization!"
"A long damn way away!" That didn't stop Colton from scooping her into his arms for a hug, or beaming down at her once she was back on her feet. "Any idea where we are, now?"
"I think this is Shotgun Glacier. It's not stable enough to climb, so I've never seen it from up here, but if I'm right…
" She took her phone out, checking its power and then holding it up as if it could find a signal if it had another three feet of elevation.
She muttered, put it back in her pocket, and shrugged.
"If I'm right, we actually aren't all that far from the ranch, which means we got blown farther off course than I thought, but…
well, it doesn't matter. We're almost out of the woods.
We've got to be careful, though. This snow will be hiding crevasses that won't hold our weight. "
"I would suggest we not test it, then." Colton shifted into a chimera and, lacking eyebrows to lift in question, wrinkled his forehead at Jo instead.
"Only as far as the bottom of the glacier," she promised, and crossed her heart so insincerely that Colton rumbled a laugh. Then he crouched, she mounted, and they were off, soaring over the glacier.