Chapter 18
Jack
The snowmobile engines were loud and getting louder.
Jack didn’t know this terrain. That was the fact he kept returning to as they pushed through the trees, branches catching his face, snow collapsing under his feet without warning.
Steph knew the area. She’d trained here, run here, studied the landscape the way she studied everything that mattered to her. He stayed on her heels and trusted her to find something, because he had nothing to offer on that front.
The meadow was out. The moment those engines fired up, he knew they needed to hide. Out in the open, the spotlight would find them, and that would not end well.
Steph was angling through the timber, away from the meadow and away from the camp, moving fast but not recklessly, still reading the ground even in the dark and at speed. He matched her stride for stride, keeping his breathing controlled and his eyes forward.
The engine sounds changed. It took him a moment to understand the difference, but then he knew. They’d split. One machine was heading away from them, the noise fading slightly. Circling, maybe. Trying to find and follow the tracks.
The other engine was still loud, bearing down on them. Two snowmobiles. There’d been three in the camp. Did one of the men stay behind?
“Rock face,” Steph said, barely above a breath. “Fifty yards.”
He couldn’t see it yet. He trusted her anyway.
The trees thinned slightly, and then he saw it—a dark mass rising out of the snow, maybe twelve feet high, the base of it drifted with snow on the windward side and partially sheltered on the other. She went around the leeward side without slowing.
As they approached, he smiled. There was a narrow gap in the rock, where two faces of rock met at an angle and left a space between them.
It wasn’t a cave, not even close, but a compression of space, dark and sheltered. What he wasn’t sure of was whether it was deep enough. Could they both fit in there and avoid the spotlight beam? They had to try.
She went in sideways, and he went in after her, the rock pressing against his back and his chest. They were side by side, shoulders touching, both breathing hard.
“We should take our packs off,” she said, her voice low. “It’ll give us a little more room.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can. Besides, if we have to move fast . . . ” Jack’s voice faded away as the sound of the snowmobile increased.
“Let’s try to get farther back.” Steph inched into the crevice. When her arm no longer touched his, he noticed the absence immediately and moved to correct it. They gained maybe six inches. Six inches that might keep the spotlight from finding them.
The snowmobile was close. He could feel the engine noise in his chest, the vibration of it moving through the ground. The light swept through the trees near the outcropping, a blade of white cutting back and forth across the snow.
It was still dark in the rock crevice. He searched for Steph’s hand, and she grabbed on to him and squeezed.
The wind had found them while they ran, and it was working harder now, pushing through the trees with real intent, the roar amplified inside the crevice.
The temperature had dropped another degree or two in the last hour, the kind of drop that was gradual until it wasn’t. He was aware of Steph against him, the warmth of her, the way her breathing was returning to normal.
The spotlight swept again, closer this time.
She squeezed his hand again, not hard but enough.
The machine idled about thirty feet away.
“They’re going to see our tracks,” he said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. The snow wasn’t smooth where we passed, plus the wind is blowing and more snow is falling. And the rocks were clear of snow. We might have a chance.”
Jack released Steph’s hand and moved his own hand toward his chest, where the pistol lay under his jacket. The gun wasn’t a match against rifles, but if this guy found them, and he had the element of surprise, maybe it would give them time to get away. They could take the snowmobile and escape.
Steph had activated the personal beacon signal. Help would be on the way soon.
He eased the zipper down as a plan formed. Shoot the poacher. Steal the snowmobile. Hightail it back toward Silver Mane’s Lodge. The rescue team might even meet them around the same time.
The snowmobile engine revved once and moved. Jack tracked the sound carefully, the way he’d tracked wind direction on a shooting range, using it to read what was happening beyond his line of sight.
The machine moved parallel to the rock face, maybe twenty-five feet out, then angled away. The spotlight raked across the outcropping, and he leaned closer to Steph as the beam passed over the crevice opening without slowing.
Ten more seconds and the engine noise started to fade.
Not gone, not exactly, but circling. The sound rose and fell as the man worked through the trees, the spotlight still visible as he moved. The second machine was farther off, deeper in the woods.
He let out a slow breath.
“How long?” she asked. Her voice was barely there, just breath shaped into words.
“Should we sit here and wait here?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Awhile. At least until we can’t see the spotlight? Until the snowmobile moves farther away?”
She nodded against his shoulder—a single motion, accepting the information. She wasn’t falling apart.
He wasn’t surprised.
Steph Pierce had built a life of doing hard things.
From her choice of leisure activities and hobbies to the degree she pursued—a bachelor’s in recreation and park administration, plus a master’s in physical education with a focus on outdoor education, according to the college’s website, where she was the Associate Professor of Health, Outdoor, and Physical Education.
She’d spent years doing hard things and probably learned long ago not to fall apart.
They’d made a mistake when they left the meadow. He knew it, and he was sure she knew it too. Talking about it wouldn’t change anything, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what they should’ve done.
They should’ve packed up when they heard the snowmobile and hurried back to the lodge. He had known that from the beginning and should’ve insisted they not investigate.
But deep down, he knew Steph didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do, and getting her to leave the area was beyond him. Now they were here, and the mistake that weighed on him most was not the logistical one.
It was the part where he’d staged a parking lot coincidence and walked into the wilderness with a woman he had no business caring this much about, and now she was pressed against him in a crevice, with snowmobiles cutting through the trees and the temperature dropping and help a long way off.
He cared about keeping her safe. Not in the abstract way where he cared about anyone in danger. This was different. This was Steph.
The woman who carried dried mangoes under her jacket and willingly shared. Who remembered where the ice had been on a route she had run a year ago. Who looked at the road ahead the way other people looked at the things they loved.
The wind pushed through the gap in the rock, and she pulled her jacket tighter. He shifted slightly, putting more of his shoulder between her and the wind. It didn’t help much, but it was all he could do. He reached for her hand again.
She let him.
The snowmobile was circling back. He tracked the engine sound and watched the light move through the canopy above the tree line, calculating the pattern.
The operator was working in widening arcs from the camp systematically.
He suspected the man who spoke in a flat tone was the one on this machine.
That was the detail that concerned him the most. The man who’d given one order and produced a spotlight, who’d stood at the timber’s edge listening while his crew worked, who hadn’t raised his voice once—he was running a methodical search and would keep running it until he was satisfied. He was unlikely to give up.
Was Steph right about the snow not giving away their tracks? He didn’t know, but he hoped so. No way would this guy think shoe prints were elk tracks like the other one had suggested. Certainly, by now, he’d used the light and recognized shoe prints as opposed to hoof prints.
Jack looked at what he could see of the sky through the gap in the rock. The cloud cover was dense, the wind was up, and the temperature was dropping. Neither of those things helped the people with the snowmobiles, and both of them helped him and Steph.
He’d take it.
Steph turned her head slightly, and he felt more than saw her looking up at him in the dark. Her face was close. He could see her eyes, the steadiness in them, the focused look of someone who was managing their own fear by staying practical.
“They’ll give up when the conditions get bad enough,” she said. “They have product to move. They can’t stay out here forever.”
“Neither can we.”
“No,” she hesitated. “But we’ll stay as long as we need to.”
She said it like it was obvious, the way she said most things that were simply true, and he believed her. Steph wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t quit. Neither would he, not while she was depending on him.
The engine noise dropped off to the south. Farther now, moving back toward the camp.
He didn’t relax. Not yet. But he let himself register the shift.
The wind pushed through again, harder this time, and he could feel Steph’s coldness in the tension of her shoulder against his, the small involuntary adjustments her body made against the dropping temperature.
He leaned further into her, wishing there was enough room to put his arm around her. To pull her close. She settled against him as the rock pressed at their backs and the wind worked at the edges of the gap.