He laughed, because having come from a family of talkers, he was often mocked for being the silent one.
“I don’t see how this is funny—” She broke off with a startled scream as the next gust hit violently, knocking them both off the bench and into each other on the floor. On their knees, swinging wildly, they turned in unison to look out the window just in time to see . . .
The gondola in front of them appear to drop a few feet and then fall, vanishing from view.
She gasped in horror. “Oh my God! Did that gondola just . . . ?”
“Yeah. Hold on,” he said grimly. As he said this, their gondola came to a sudden stuttering halt, leaving them swinging wildly back and forth, flinging both of them and all their stuff far and wide. Levi went with the momentum and ended up face-planted against the window, kissing the cold glass.
Something hit him in the back.
His pack.
And then a softer something. His companion. She hurriedly scrambled clear of him to stare out the window at the gaping chasm where the previous gondola used to be. “Ohmigod,” she whispered, her nose to the window, as if that could help her see past the thick, swirling, all-encompassing snow. “Was anyone in it?”
“The lift operator told me that the three cars in front of us were empty.”
She leveled him with those amazing eyes, narrowed now. “So much for a gondola fall being one in a million!” She yanked out her phone and stared down at it. “Dammit. I forgot it’s dead.”
“Don’t worry. They’ll know what happened at base. They’ll come for us.”
She let out a slow exhale, looking pale and shaky.
“We’re still on the cable,” he said, looking out the window in front of them. “It didn’t break. That gondola in front of us snagged on something on the track, or there was a malfunction in the grip—”
She let out a distressed sound and squeezed her eyes shut. “You know what really gets me? I put on mascara today. A waste of five minutes that I could’ve used to stop for a breakfast burrito. I mean, that’s what a girl needs on the day she’s going to die, a solid breakfast burrito to hold her over to the ever after.”
“I like breakfast burritos,” he said. He didn’t offer any empty platitudes because the truth was her fears were valid. Their gondola wasn’t moving now, no forward or reverse motion at all, nothing except the relentless swinging in the wind. He didn’t know what had caused the gondola in front of them to fall, but if theirs did the same, the odds of them walking away were slim to none. First up was getting them to stop swinging so freely, and he began to calculate the balance and weight needed to stabilize the car. “Hey, do you think you can get all the way into that back corner there?”
She blinked, but didn’t question him, just did as he asked, crawling to where he pointed while he moved into the opposite corner.
“You do realize this only works if we weigh the same,” she said.
“We’ll use our gear to even things out.” His backpack was at his feet. “What have you got with you?”
She lifted her hands out to her sides. “Just what you see.”
“You came up on the mountain with nothing on you—no snacks, no water, no emergency gear or equipment?”
“Didn’t say that. And judgy much?” She emptied out her many pockets. Steel water bottle, a single-serving bag of beef jerky, a pack of gum, and . . . a small first aid kit, which she held up for Levi to see. “Safety first, right?” she murmured, irony heavy in her tone.
He’d noticed the medical patch across the back of her jacket. “Ski patrol?”
“RN,” she said. “I’m a traveling nurse, working a rotation at each of the five urgent care medical clinics in the North Shore area.” She once again waved her first aid kit. “I’m qualified to save people’s lives—even if I can’t manage to get my own together.”
He started to smile, but another hard gust of wind hit and they spun like a toy, so fast they just about went topsy-turvy. There was a sound of metal giving way—the shelf above his head for passenger belongings—and Levi lunged to shield her body with his.
Everything flew in the air like they were in orbit, and for a single long heartbeat, gravity seemed to vanish. Levi wrapped himself tight around his companion, her head tucked into his chest when something hit his head.
And then it was lights out.
Chapter 2
When the gondola finally stopped moving, Jane couldn’t breathe or see. Oh, God. She was dead.
Wait.
Her eyes were closed.
She blinked them open. Okay, whew, but either she was paralyzed or something was on top of her, something heavy.
No, not a something, a someone. The guy who’d been unfailingly steadfast in the face of her rising panic, and he was a dead weight. Carefully, she crawled out from beneath him, because while they hadn’t yet fallen to their deaths, it could still happen at any second. At the thought, she broke out into a cold sweat, despite the frigid temps. “Hey.” She leaned over the man with her and checked his pulse, nearly whimpering in relief when she felt it. Thready, but he was alive. “Can you hear me?”
Not so much as a twinge.
Mr. Talkative was out cold, leaking blood like a sieve from a dangerous-looking two-inch cut that sliced at an angle through his right eyebrow and along his temple. Normally she saved swearing for bad traffic, but as she looked around them, she let out a string of pretty impressive oaths, if she said so herself. Because now what?
It was still snowing like a mother, but the wind had calmed enough that the gondola was now swinging almost gently compared to the violence they’d just endured. The floor looked like a garage sale gone wrong, their stuff scattered everywhere. On top of everything lay the steel shelving rod that had broken loose, probably what had hit Mr. Talkative in the head.
This was bad. Very, very bad. “Come on, Sleeping Beauty, time to rise and shine.” The guy had lunged across the gondola to tuck her into him, saving her from getting hit. What was that? She was a perfect stranger. She checked his pulse again. Still faint, but steady.
She looked around for her phone before remembering it was dead. And anyway, who was she going to call? Not the clinic she’d just left; she’d been the last staff member out and had locked up herself. Logically, she knew that security at the base would figure out what had happened to the gondola in front of them—after all, someone had shut them down, right? Surely they’d be working their way toward them for extraction.
The man still hadn’t moved. Not good. She ran a hand along his body, checking for other injuries. Nothing obviously broken, but when she turned him onto his side, beneath his jacket she found his shirt sticky with blood. Shoving his layers up, she found two slashes across his back and shoulders, also bleeding freely.
Well, hell. “You had to play the hero.” She shrugged off her jacket to stuff it beneath his head as a makeshift pillow. “Isn’t that just like a man.” She stripped off her scrubs top and the thermal she had on beneath, using the former against the scratches on his back. The thermal she pressed carefully against his head wound to slow the bleeding. “Okay, seriously, if anyone’s going to nap, it should be me. I’ve just worked a long shift. So rise and shine, okay? No fair letting me be the only one awake when we die.”