Chapter Two #2
He recognized the voice and the traditional Navajo greeting. His shoulders sagged in relief. The muscles of his back eased. His lip cracked again as his mouth split wide in a grin and he raised his hand in return. “Aoo’ yá’át’ééh!” he called.
Sassy, decked out in a desert-brown button-up and cargo pants, her long braids climbing down her shoulders, beamed as she scratched Riot’s back.
The flash of her bright white teeth caused a weak sensation around the joints of his knees.
She broke into a run, her backpack bouncing noisily against her spine and Riot fast on her heels, skipping in all his excitement.
Nick let her come, fighting the urge to sink to his knees in gratitude.
“Where have you been, Nick Malone?” she asked, close enough that he could see the square points of her jaw and the perfect round apples of her high cheeks. “Never mind.” She threw herself at him.
“Oomph!” The impact of her body meeting his set him back a full step. When she wrapped him in a bear hug, he responded readily.
He’d needed to see her. He’d needed the sight of her like water.
“You said you’d be back yesterday.” Her voice sounded muffled against his shoulder.
“I did say that,” he acknowledged, unwilling to release her. Still, he set her back on her heels so she wouldn’t feel the slight quaver in the muscles of his arms. “We got hung up at the ruins.”
“Something bad?” she asked, her impossibly dark eyes clouding with apprehension.
He shook his head. “I lost track of time.”
Her brows came together as she zeroed in on his upper lip. “What happened there? Boxing match with a coyote?”
Before she could reach up to where blood stained the skin beneath his nose, he raised the dirty handkerchief again and swiped. “Nothing. Minor nosebleed.”
“Nick,” she said, gripping his shoulders as her gaze trekked across his face. “Are you okay? You look…”
“Fine,” he finished. “I’m fine.” He dismissed his headache, allowing a smile to play again across his lips. “You came looking for me?”
“You’re over twenty-four hours behind schedule. What else was I supposed to do?”
“You set out late,” he pointed out. “What if I was further up the trail? What if you lost the way? That’s easy, even with a map.”
“I would’ve found you,” she said stubbornly.
Dammit, she would have. “You should have waited till morning,” he advised.
“I brought a tent.”
“I didn’t know you had a tent,” he said, amused. “Can you pitch it?”
“I would’ve figured it out,” she claimed.
He didn’t give voice to his doubt. Seeing her silhouette pop over the hill had been like witnessing a miracle.
Her frown grew. She dug in her pocket, producing a clean handkerchief. “You’re a mess,” she said as she brought the cloth up to his nose.
He didn’t wave her away. Normally, the break from the real world did him well.
As a paramedic, he rarely had any free time.
While he loved his job and valued the relationships he’d built with coworkers, the firefighters who worked out of the same station, the medical personnel and the people he and his team had helped through the years, sometimes he longed for the solace of nature—for forest, mountain, desert terrain…
He was an adventurer at heart, just like his father.
This year, however, something was different.
He hadn’t realized how much until he’d seen her.
While she wiped his skin clean, he tried not to breathe her scent too deep.
He tried not to dwell on the beauty mark near the corner of her left eye or the silver chain that disappeared underneath the unbuttoned vee of her shirt.
Even in nature, Haseya Colton liked a little shine.
The flash of metal stood out against her dusky skin. He saw the faint dewy tinge of perspiration at the hollow of her throat and tried to ignore the stir beneath his navel he’d managed to mute for the better part of their friendship.
“There,” she said, satisfied, pocketing the handkerchief once more. She tilted her head, narrowing her eyes in an intuitive manner so like her mother, Bly Colton, it was striking. “Something’s wrong.”
He attempted to swallow. The muscles of his throat refused to work again. “Got any water?”
Her eyes widened. “You ran out of water?”
Embarrassment flustered him. He shrugged his pack off his shoulders, letting it slide to the ground.
Never mind his advanced hiker status. He was a medic.
He knew what the human body required and what happened when it lacked proper fluids.
More, he knew Dark Canyon Wilderness. He knew it almost as well as the pattern of spots on Riot’s hide.
Its long stretches without water were no stranger to him.
He should’ve known he wasn’t packing enough for him and Riot. “I’ve got some left.” Not enough.
She, too, shrugged off her pack and pulled out her thermos. “Here.”
He wrapped his fingers around it, dipping his head gratefully to her. “Ahéhee,” he said—“thank you” in her mother’s native tongue.
Concern puckered the corners of her mouth. The rarely seen divot in the middle of her chin appeared. She saved it exclusively for times of true turmoil.
He drank, lifting his face to the tufty clouds gone neon bright in the late afternoon, and closed his eyes as the water hit his parched throat. The water tasted clean. It felt cool. Cold enough, he almost couldn’t stand it. He drank, drank, drank, making his Adam’s apple work in fast reps.
When he came up for air, his lungs shoveled air in and out and he couldn’t fight the loose smile on his face or the worry hanging around her mouth.
He knelt down next to Riot, poured enough water into the cap to fill it and offered it to him.
The dog lapped lightly at the cool drink, his thin, pointed tail stuck in a happy windshield-wiper motion.
“How long?” she asked as Nick came to his feet.
“How long what?” he countered, handing the thermos back to her.
She took it. “How long have you two been out of water?”
He ignored the pounding behind his temples. “We’re good now.”
“Nick,” she said pointedly.
He made a noise in the back of his throat. “Since this morning.”
She cursed under her breath. “You have a radio. You could’ve signaled a park ranger.”
“It was only a few miles back to the truck,” he told her. “We have extra water there. We would’ve been okay.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked, incisive.
“Sassy,” he said, trying to broaden his smile into a lie he couldn’t even fool himself with. He’d always found lying to her difficult. They’d known each other since grade school. Since before that fateful spring when his father had passed.
They’d bonded over the fact that they were both only children, they were both wild about buffalo wings and they both dreaded Mr. Sarcowski’s algebra class.
They’d had to study with the same tutor after school.
They were both invited to all the same birthday parties, since she was a Colton and he’d been good friends with Ryan.
The house he grew up in had been down the street from hers. They’d spent their summers helping out her father in his veterinary practice until she went off to New York for art school.
The separation had felt strange. How do you live without someone you saw every day for years on end?
Whom you’d learned to lean on—who leaned on you in return during the hard days.
She’d gone a long way toward helping him overcome those years after his father’s passing, the worst years of his life.
She’d been there for his mother, too. She’d gotten her whole family involved in regular check-ins.
They’d brought him and his mother into the Colton fold, making Nick and Margot feel like they belonged to the clan, too.
After art school, Sassy had returned to the Coltons and Nick in Dark Canyon. He often wondered why she’d left the New York art scene she’d once thought so exciting and intriguing. What kept her coming back to Dark Canyon?
He’d felt incomplete while she was away…though he’d needed a break from her, because he’d been lying to her about the very real feelings he’d been hiding for her beyond their friendship.
He’d needed the separation to get his head on straight. To erase all that. So he could feel normal around her again.
When she’d returned, he’d been able to convince himself that the mission had been a success. They’d gone back to being friends…just friends, with no underlying weirdness on his part.
He reached out and gripped her shoulder, leveling with her.
“We would’ve made it back to the truck. If I thought for a moment we wouldn’t have, I’d have radioed for help.
” The idea that he would have risked putting his mother through more heartbreak…
or left Sassy in that position… It hadn’t been all that long ago since her aunt Kate had died.
And with everything happening around their hometown, including Ava Colton’s kidnapping, she didn’t need more turbulence in her life.
He’d stopped pushing his odds right around the time he’d come to understand that his mother wouldn’t be able to take care of herself much longer. These yearly hikes weren’t about pitting himself against nature or risking his life. It was about reconnecting with his dad.
He eyed her pack, desperate to shift her worries away from him. “Are there any wings in there?”
She scoffed at him, but the grin that took over the lower half of her face made it sound like she was holding back a laugh. Barbecued wings had been another long-standing birthday tradition. One of their own. “You wish.”
He picked up his pack once again and slung it around his shoulders. “Do we still have that reservation at the Sauce Spot?”
“You know it.”
“Don’t want to miss that.” He felt sapped, but the promise of wings and Sassy’s company galvanized him.
She planted a hand against his chest and gave him a good-natured shove. “After you shower. You smell like Riot.”
Riot let out a chorus of barks at the sound of his name, pleased at the attention. He trotted off, leading the way as Nick’s and Sassy’s laughter chased him.