“You okay? Jake?”
Calm down. “Yeah.” He swallowed away the voices, the sirens, and forced a smile. “Gotta love the animal barns.”
“Maybe we can go when we get off the mountain.”
His mouth opened.
Silence dropped between them. Uh . . .
“Sorry—I . . .” She held up her hand, looked away. “I . . .”
“I’d love to see you again after we get off this mountain, Aria.” His words emerged without his permission, but once they were out, the balloon in his chest deflated.
“Yeah, well, I work a lot, and you probably do too, running that food cart.” She looked away.
Huh. “Yeah, right.”
“And all your parasailing classes, and—what else do you do?”
He stared at her. “Aria—”
She put her hand to her neck. “You know, it’s funny that I’ve never seen you around GoSports. I mean, I work out there all the time—” Her hand stopped. She pressed her palm to her chest, then searched her neck. “My necklace. It’s gone.”
She patted her body—she wore her fleece jacket, a thermal shirt under it. “I don’t have it.” Her voice wavered. “Oh—please, no—” She began to pat her sleeping bag, lifting up the layers, searching.
“What necklace?” He leaned up, searching for it.
“It’s just a silly little cheap gold necklace. One of those half-heart necklaces you give to a friend—oh . . .” One hand went to her mouth, her breathing quickening.
“Calm down. We’ll find it. Maybe you dropped it when you were helping Sasha.” He began to search around Sasha’s bag, under her jacket and overpants that were bunched under her head, then peeked around Sasha’s sleeping form.
Aria had gotten up, making tiny noises of pain as she jostled her fat ankle.
“Hey—hey. Sit down. I’ll find it.”
He climbed over Sasha and in a second was in front of Aria, kneeling on either side of her legs. He grabbed her shoulders. “Aria. Take a breath. We’ll find it.”
His voice must have arrested her because she looked at him.
Oh wow, tears glistened in her eyes. Her jaw tightened as if she were fighting all-out weeping. “I . . . I can’t lose—”
“It’s right here.” He swept up a tangle of gold chain that lay behind her, just out of her sight. Probably, it had fallen off in her sleep. He held it out to her. “It looks like it might have gotten snagged on something. The chain is broken.”
She picked it up out of his hand, pressed her other hand over it. Closed her eyes.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing.” She opened her eyes, let out a breath.
“It’s something, Houlihan.” He searched for her gaze. Raised an eyebrow.
“It’s just a trinket my sister gave me when we were kids.”
Her sister. Her dead sister.
“Oh. Well then, we’d better keep it safe. I’ve got a tin in my pack that I keep odds and ends in—it’ll be safe there.” He held out his hand.
She nodded and dropped it back into his safekeeping. He ran his thumb over the edges of the broken heart.
He was moving outside to put it in his pack when she stopped him, grabbing his fleece.
“Jake, are we going to get out of here?”
He turned back to her. Settled his gaze in hers. “Yes. And you know why? Because my buddy Ham is out there. And he’s not just a former SEAL, he was a Senior Chief. The leader of Team Three, and the guy has ‘never quit’ inside him.”
He dropped the necklace into his zippered jacket pocket, then knelt next to her sleeping bag. “Let’s get you tucked back in.”
She didn’t give him a snarky comeback, which had him a little worried. “Ham and I served together for about ten years. In all that time, there was one promise he didn’t keep. One mission that he didn’t complete.” He eased her fattened ankle in, trying to ignore the low moan she emitted. Yeah, there was no way she was walking off this mountain.
“We were, um, doing some training in an undisclosed Eastern European country about ten years ago, maybe more, and this guerrilla group took over a local aid hospital. We deployed to rescue the US workers there, and one of them was taken captive. A woman. Problem was, Ham knew her. She vanished . . . She was killed before he could rescue her.”
She was listening. “With the woman.”
He nodded. “Ham wasn’t good for a long time after that. He wasn’t a leader at that time, so he found his way back and eventually took over Team Three, but I don’t think . . . I don’t think it ever really left him. And it certainly put the never quit inside him.” He zipped up her bag. “Ham will get us off this mountain.”
She offered the tiniest of smiles, nodded. “I believe you.”
And with everything inside him he wanted to lean down and press his lips to that smile.
Maybe just to help him believe his words, too.
She closed her eyes, and he swallowed away the urge. “Get some rest, Houlihan.”
He climbed out of the tent, trembling a little.
After finding his pack, parked under the vestibule of their tent, he drew out an old shoe polish tin. He put her necklace next to his military identification tags and capped it. Shoved it back into his pack.
Then he drew in a deep breath as he stared out at the horizon. A lenticular cloud was forming over Mount Hunter, blue skies all around. The wind skimmed up a layer of snow, brushed it over the snowpack. He shivered—the temperature was dropping.
He didn’t have to be a meteorologist to sense the stirring of a storm.
Never quit.
Please, Ham, don’t let me down. Because he didn’t want to have to choose which woman to carry off this mountain.
And which woman would die.
CHAPTER TEN
RUN!”
The mountain had unlatched and was rumbling down in massive ice chunks directly toward them.
Jenny had experienced avalanches before—seen them from afar, and once ran from one on Rainier, but nothing like this torrent of destruction. The slide ripped seracs off their moorings, slew ice chunks the size of Volkswagens into its path, and sent forth a cloud of ice shards and freezing snow.
Their only chance was to get out of its path. Ham was already running over the top of the dome he’d climbed to radio for help.
She ran hard to follow him as the monster roared.
Her last glimpse of Orion showed him fleeing the torrent also, ice axe in hand. “Run!”
Her breath razed hard in her throat. Please let her not get swept away, end up upside down in some icy tomb, suffocating.
“Get down! Get down!” Ham vanished behind a wall of blue ice, across a valley of unblemished snow.
She turned, searching for Orion, and spotted him just outside the cloud of snow.
The avalanche was pummeling the hillside with golf-ball-sized rocks. The ground beneath her feet began to shake.
She fell behind a thick serac the size of a backstop, hit her knees, and had the presence of mind to grab her axe and shove it in. She dug her crampons in and hunkered down, trying not to scream.
God, please, please—
Because probably, most likely, she’d jinxed the mountain with her stupid, fate-daring statement. “Sometimes I think I’m just . . . I’m doomed.”