Up Close and Dangerous Read online

  She stopped where she was, to give him a moment of privacy. That little bit of exertion had completely exhausted her and she closed her eyes. The realization of how sick she was swept through her—not deathly sick, but enough so that she felt frail, and that was unsettling. Between the fever, the cold, the altitude, and the lack of food and water, she wasn’t capable of doing a lot today. It was a damn good thing she didn’t need to do a lot. They could eat another candy bar, melt some more snow to drink, and rest in the shelter while they waited for a rescue team to locate them.

  Justice was better than he’d been yesterday. He’d managed to take a few steps under his own steam, but he still looked terrible, with that huge bandage covering the top half of his head, two black eyes that were almost swollen shut, and all the other scrapes and bruises he’d sustained. His physical capability didn’t run to much more than lying in the shelter either.

  She was a little indignant at the injustice of her having the fever when he was the one with the nasty cut on his head, a concussion, and the recipient of some inexperienced field doctoring, while all she had was a small puncture wound. Where was the logic in that? In retrospect, though, she should have poured some of that mouthwash on her arm, too.

  “You can open your eyes now,” Justice said, and slowly she did so.

  He was leaning against the tree for support, his posture telling her that even that much effort had wrung him out. White vapor formed in front of his face with every breath he puffed out, and he was visibly shivering. His only shoes were the black lace-ups, and they did nothing to keep out snow. His pants were his suit trousers. He didn’t even have a T-shirt to layer under his white dress shirt. He had wrapped a couple of her shirts around his shoulders and neck for extra warmth, but there wasn’t much more that he could do to protect himself from the elements. Seeing him merely reminded her that she was the one who’d have to take care of their needs.

  Slowly, cautiously, she made her way on rubbery legs down the slope to him and pulled his arm around her shoulder while she put her arm around his waist and grasped his belt to hold him in case he began toppling over. “Let’s get you back in the shelter. How’s the head?”

  “It hurts. How’s yours?”

  “About the same. Are you seeing double, feeling nauseated?”

  “No, nothing like that.” Using her for support on one side, and bracing his other hand against trees as he came to them, he labored to take each step. Sometimes he wavered and she had to grab him, hold him until he could get his legs steady again, but overall the process wasn’t nearly as exhausting or time-consuming as it had been the day before.

  He stopped once, lifted his head to survey the mountains around them. She could tell he was listening for something, but she heard nothing other than what she’d heard from the beginning: the wind whistling through the silent mountains. “Do you hear anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  She caught the grim note in his voice. “We should hear helicopters or something by now, shouldn’t we?”

  “I hoped we would, but not necessarily. The weather could have delayed them. We know it snowed up here, so there was some sort of weather system moving through. A more realistic guess would be around noon, at the earliest.” He shivered, his entire body tensing against the cold, then he said prosaically, “There’s no sense in standing out here freezing our asses off when there’s nothing we can do.”

  Bailey agreed wholeheartedly with that and helped him the few remaining feet to the shelter. As he half crawled, half dragged himself inside, she said, “Give me the bottle and I’ll fill it with snow again. Are you ready for breakfast?”

  “What are we having?” Swollen and blackened as they were, his gray eyes still glinted with humor as he held the mouthwash bottle out to her.

  “The same thing we had for dinner: a candy bar. I actually have three more, so we can each have a whole one if you want.”

  He paused, the humor fading from his expression. “We’d better ration them,” he finally said. “Just in case.”

  Just in case they weren’t rescued today, he meant. The idea was almost overwhelming. Another night on the mountain, in the dark and the cold? The darkness hadn’t been absolute, but they’d used her little book light sparingly. Not knowing how long it would take a rescue team to reach them was unnerving. What if no one came tomorrow either?

  Silently she took the bottle and moved to a clean patch of snow. She wore a pair of socks on her hands now, which made scraping snow into the bottle with the poker card a little clumsy, but no way did she want to let herself get as cold as she had the day before.

  The task was a small one, a minuscule one compared to the herculean labors she’d faced the day before, but it was almost more than she could handle. Wearily she crawled back into the shelter, welcoming the protection from the wind. The air inside the shelter definitely felt warmer than that outside, whether just from the absence of the wind or from their body heat it really was making a difference. She didn’t care what made it feel warmer, just that it did.

  Light crept through tiny crevices; the interior was dim, but not dark. There was no need to turn on the book light in order to find where she’d put the candy bars. She was starving, but when she began chewing the first bite off her half of the bar, her appetite suddenly fled and the candy began growing in her mouth. She fought back the nausea and managed to swallow it, but folded the paper around the remainder of the candy and put it back in the plastic zip bag.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked, frowning at her.

  “I was, until I started eating. I’ll take another bite in a little while.” Her mouth felt grungy, so she rooted around until she found the pack of disposable foam toothbrushes. She took two from the pack, stuck one in her mouth, and extended one to him. “Here.”

  “What is this?” he asked, frowning at the pink circle of cut foam as if it were alive.

  “A disposable toothbrush. It doesn’t need water. This shelter’s too small for morning breath on top of yesterday’s and last night’s breath, so take it and brush.”

  His mouth quirked in a smile as he took the small stick and began swabbing the foam around in his mouth. Bailey was pleasantly surprised by the minty taste, and by how much cleaner her mouth felt when she finished. Now if she could just have a nice, hot shower…

  Dream on, she told herself as she relaxed her aching body on the cushions and dragged a pile of clothing over herself. The clothes would cover them better if the garments were straightened out and layered, but she was too tired and felt too sick to deal with it just now. Justice stretched out behind her, then he pulled her close and rearranged the pieces of clothing so nothing was between them except what they wore.

  How odd it was, she thought, that in just one night they’d already established a sort of routine. They already knew, and automatically sought, the positions where they fit best together and were most comfortable. He was a good six inches taller than she, maybe more, so with her back to him they spooned together almost perfectly. His arm draped over her waist, and his hand slipped up under her shirt for warmth, so his hand was resting on her stomach. It was odd, she thought, how fast the situation had forged a sense of familiarity, even intimacy, with him, but she supposed that was a survival mechanism. Together they had a better chance of making it off this mountain alive than they would have alone.

  “We could play cards, I guess,” she said, thinking of the hours ahead of them.

  “Or we could just lie here,” he countered.

  “Sounds good.” Just lying there was honestly all she felt like doing. After another moment of silence, she felt herself drifting to sleep.

  CAM DIDN’T THINK Bailey’s fever was any higher than it had been before, but she was obviously sick. When she woke, he would check her arm to see if red streaks had begun radiating out from the wound. He hoped the antibiotic salve and her fever were doing the job, though, because if sepsis had begun then their situation had gone from serious to critical. In the