Chapter 23
Noelle gasped for air as the icy lake stole her breath.
A thousand needles pricked her as she kicked her legs, struggling with the weight of her saturated coat and clothes.
She forced herself not to think about how painful the cold water was or what was happening with Eli and Scott.
She had to focus instead on reaching Grace.
The sooner she got Grace out of the lake, the sooner they could both get warm and dry.
Forcibly shutting out the drone of the seaplane’s engine, she goggled at how hard it was to move in the freezing water.
Her limbs were leaden. She seemed to be swimming through sludge.
With numb fingers, she tugged at her zipper and peeled off her coat.
Once free of the encumbering weight, she kicked her feet and stroked her arms as best she could to reach Grace.
The panicked woman’s eyes found Noelle’s as Grace sank under the surface again.
Noelle slid her arm under Grace’s and kicked harder, struggling under the burden of Grace’s weight dragging them both down.
Noelle was finding it harder and harder to breathe, the icy chill sapping her energy. Just get her to shore…
Turning her head toward land, Noelle estimated the distance to be no more than fifty feet.
As she swam, increasingly more of a flail than a productive stroke, she began to realize the distance might as well have been a mile.
She wasn’t making fast enough progress, and both she and Grace were becoming still and stiff as the cold lake chilled their cores.
Fight. She heard Eli’s voice in her head as if he were standing on shore shouting to her. Don’t quit. Survive. Live for me.
The pain that wrenched inside her now came from a longing for a future with Eli.
Here, splashing helplessly in this freezing Alaskan lake, the yearning crystalized for her.
She’d wasted years on foolish fears. Eli was nothing like her mother and father.
Sasha’s party had demonstrated that Eli’s family was the complete opposite of the one that had rejected her.
Pushing him away had been the biggest mistake of her life and had caused her more pain than it had spared her.
Regret and frustration churned inside her.
But rather than draining her, her new understanding mobilized her.
She clenched her teeth, determined not to fail Eli again.
Not to fail Grace, or herself, in this moment.
No matter the pain in her arms and legs, no matter the effort, she would get out of that water and bring Grace with her.
Grunting with the strain, she hauled Grace up until the other woman’s head was above water and shouted, “Kick, Grace! With everything you have, kick!”
The woman’s feeble effort was enough to keep Grace’s head up as Noelle rolled to her side and did the best sidestroke she could under the circumstances. But they were moving, drifting closer to shore. Slowly, inch by inch.
Eli was far from shore, and every kick as he tried to swim to shore told him he’d wrenched his ankle when he hit the water. The numbing cold stung so fiercely he found it hard to draw air in his lungs, but he kept moving, kept stroking his arms toward land.
When a droning sound reached his ears, he checked the sky for Scott’s plane. Had the bastard circled around to come back and shoot him? Instead, the low rumble was at ground level.
Eli blinked as he attempted to wipe icy water from his eyes. Hetty! Thank heavens!
Hetty pulled alongside him and tossed him a line to grab. With her help, he climbed from the water onto the floatplane, then moved stiffly onto the copilot’s seat.
“Kinda cold today for swimming, isn’t it, Eli?” Hetty quipped.
“Much, much too c-cold,” he replied, his teeth starting to chatter.
“I saw the flare and was on my way back to pick you up when I saw your acrobatics…or whatever you call that derring-do you just performed.” Hetty sent him a worried look as she drove the plane back toward the cabin.
Eli squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “I call it a failure. Montgomery got away.”
He heard Hetty grunt. “You’re lucky to be alive! I call that a success. I’ve radioed local authorities and given our location—Montgomery’s location and aircraft ID number—to the ABI. At last report, a team from Fairbanks is thirty minutes out.”
“Good.” He returned his gaze out the window, his body shivering and his nerves strung tight as he strained to see ahead of them. “Can we go any faster?”
He’d left Noelle in the water to rescue Grace by herself.
But as he learned himself moments ago, the frigid lake could hamper normal capabilities surprisingly fast. When they finally reached the dock by Scott’s cabin, he found Noelle and Grace mostly back on shore but still lying in shallow, ice-crusted water.
He stumbled out of the floatplane as soon as it was near enough the dock for him to make the leap.
When his foot landed, a sharp pain in his ankle reminded him he’d not survived his drop into the lake unscathed.
But an ankle ache was not going to stop him from getting Noelle and Grace inside the cabin to warm up.
Once Hetty secured her plane, she was right behind him, racing down the dock to wade into the shallows.
Noelle raised her beautiful brown eyes to him as he approached, and, her chin quivering with cold, she stuttered, “S-Scott-t-t?”
He squatted beside her, shaking his head. “He got away.” He hooked his arms under hers. “Can you stand?”
“T-t-try.”
Working together, Eli and Hetty dragged, supported and carried the women into Scott’s cabin.
A fire still smoldered in the grate, and though his hands were shaking from his own hypothermia, Eli fed the embers and stoked a blaze. Glancing at Hetty, who was helping the women strip out of their wet clothes, he called, “See if you can find anything hot for them to drink.”
He shucked his own wet coat and shirt as he turned up the cabin thermostat and went in search of blankets, towels and dry clothes.
He found enough of the first two, but no clothes.
Scott hadn’t prepared for his trip north, clearly.
But the cabin had a washer and dryer, and while Eli, Noelle and Grace wrapped themselves in blankets, Hetty started a load of wet clothes in the drier.
As they huddled by the fireplace, catching their breath and towel drying their hair, Grace burst into tears.
Hetty, the most mobile of the group, hurried to put an arm around the frightened woman. “Hey, you’re safe now. You’re going to be okay.”
“H-he said h-he was going to k-kill me. He was w-waiting for someone named K-Kansas.” Grace swiped her face with a cold-reddened hand. “Someone h-has to warn h-her! K-Kansas…”
Hetty sent Eli a wide-eyed look of horror.
Eli gave the trembling woman a nod. “We know. Kansas knows.” He paused as a shudder raced through him. “That rat bastard won’t get anywhere near her if I have anything to say about it.”
“How d-do we find him now?” Noelle asked, her voice thin as she shivered. “It seems un-l-likely he’ll come back h-here now that he knows w-we know about it.”
“His fuel tank was leaking fuel. He’ll have to land somewhere soon.” Eli looked to Hetty. “Any guesses how far he could make it?”
Hetty gave him a withering frown. “Hardly. Too many unknown factors. How much fuel did he have to start with? How fast is the fuel leaking? What sort of tailwinds or headwinds will he encounter? Did he—?”
“Okay,” Eli said lifting a hand. “I get it.” He scrubbed a hand over his head, mussing his hair. “Damn it! We were so close to bringing him in!”
Noelle ducked her head. “It’s m-my fault he got away. Isn’t it?”
Eli’s pulse jolted, and he cut a sharp look toward her. “What?”
“No!” Hetty said. “Don’t you dare take this on yourself.”
“If I had stayed in the plane like Eli wanted—”
“You wouldn’t have been there to save Grace from the lake,” Eli finished for her.
Grace nodded, her movements still stiff and choppy as she sniffled. “You s-saved my life. You all did. Th-thank you so m-m—” The young woman dissolved in sobs again, and Hetty rubbed her back.
Noelle wouldn’t meet his eyes, and Eli said, “Hey. Noelle, look at me.”
She angled a dubious look at him. “I thought I could do more to help. I wanted to stall him…or distract him…or—”
Eli moved to squat right in front of her, his ankle protesting.
But Noelle mattered more than the throb in his ankle.
In a low voice meant only for her, he said, “Listen to me. If you’d stayed in the plane, Scott would still have used Grace as a human shield.
I still wouldn’t have had a clear shot of him.
He would still have gotten to his plane.
He might have still pushed Grace in the water, or he might have taken her with him.
We don’t know. But what you did, tampering with his plane, distracted him enough that I got close enough to at least make an effort to stop him.
” He pressed his lips in a frown of frustration at the reminder of Montgomery’s escape.
“If you’d been at the other end of the lake with Hetty, though, you couldn’t have gone in after Grace. ”
“But you would have,” she said, correctly. “You’d already started to.”
He sighed, scowling as he acknowledged a hard truth. “And either way, Scott still escapes. So you—”
“I was still too stubborn,” she said, her voice stronger now as she cut him off. Tears bloomed in her eyes. “I was too determined to do things my way, thinking I somehow knew better. But I was wrong. Again. Like I was in college. I should have listened to you. I—I should have trusted you more!”
Eli flinched. “In college? What are you saying?”
She drew a long, slow breath and cupped his face with hands that were at the same time freezing cold and a balm to his heart. “I’m saying I made a mistake. I should never have left you. Should never have shut you out.”
Eli furrowed his brow, startled by her change of topic. His pulse pounded so loud in his ears, he could barely hear his own voice asking, “A mistake?”
When the women’s heads all lifted, their gazes darting toward the cabin door, Eli realized the thrum in his ears had drowned out another noise. Someone was outside the cabin.