by Zoe Chant
Charmian took a deep breath, her plans for the evening sliding away, while the professional side of her asserted itself. "I'll get my kit together and come out immediately. Since this isn't your first, it's probably going to be fast. Do you have someone there to watch the kids?"
"Yes, my husband is home and my mother is staying with us, as well. Actually, Charmian, I think I would probably be all right if you can't make it out. Mom was there for the last two kids, if you remember. She knows what to do. And the roads are really bad. You know how awful the road leading out to our place can be in the winter."
Charmian tried not to think about it. The Lamberts were another of the mountain ranch families, and their road was even worse than Alec's. In this weather, it would be a nightmare. "No," she said firmly. "I don't like the idea of you being isolated out there in case something goes wrong. It's no big deal. I can arrange for a neighbor to come over and feed Bucket in case I can't get back to town for a day or two."
"Our road could be really bad, though," Mary protested. "Bill hasn't had a chance to plow, with all the bad weather. He's been busy with the stock. And nobody's been over it in a few days. You might have trouble."
"If I run into problems, I can turn around and go back. I'm not comfortable having you unable to get to help in this kind of weather."
Mary gasped, and they both waited out a contraction. Mary laughed weakly when it was done. "Okay, I'll consider that a point in your favor. I still think I'll be okay if you can't make it, so please don't push yourself past any of the really bad parts of the road. You've been up here enough to know what it's like. I'd rather have you in town to talk me through it over the phone, if it comes to that. Especially if the alternative is being stranded alongside the road."
"Fair enough," Charmian agreed. "Let me get my kit together, and I'll head out your way as soon as I can."
After hanging up, she blew out her breath and went to make her preparations. She called the neighbor who usually watched Bucket when she had to go away; their family had dogs as well, so they had a longstanding reciprocal agreement of petsitting when either household was away. Then she collected her emergency labor kit, tucking things into her soft-sided travel duffle with the speed of long practice.
She was so focused on the issue at hand that she'd forgotten all about Alec until she came out of the house, locked the door, and turned around to find his truck pulling into the driveway behind her Jeep. Snow was already coming down so heavily that she could barely see across the road.
Crap.
Alec was stepping down from the truck now, and his face lit up with a welcoming smile.
"Alec, I'm so sorry," she said over her shoulder, loading the kit into the back of the Jeep. "I wish you hadn't driven all the way down here, just to have to turn around and go home. I've had an emergency come up with one of my clients. She's in labor, and she's at home on an isolated, rural farm. I was just about to drive out there."
"In this?" Alec asked, gesturing to indicate the falling snow.
Not this again. "I know how to drive in snow, Alec. I think we established that."
"I know, I just—" He stopped. She could see him clench his teeth and rework the shape of the words; then he said, "I'd like to come with you, if you don't mind."
He wasn't offering to drive her. Only to accompany her. And, Charmian thought, as she stifled her initial flare of independence, it was actually a good idea not to travel alone down some of these back roads. At the very least, if she had a flat tire, he could probably change it in no time at all.
"Are you sure you don't mind?"
Alec shook his head. "Not at all. I came prepared to spend time with you. This isn't what I had in mind, but I can roll with it."
"I'm going to be assisting a woman giving birth. It's not going to be a hot date."
There was maybe the slightest flinch, but he rallied. "Well, that's not exactly something I'd be good at, but there's got to be other things I can do to help."
He was probably right. In a three-kid household (soon to be four), on a cattle ranch, there would always be something to do. Mary's husband would probably love to have an extra set of hands around the place for the evening, or however long it took them to make it back to town.
"And will your place be okay if we're stranded out there overnight? Because that might happen."
"We will," he said. "I'll call the house and leave a message on the machine telling them I might not be back tonight. There's enough of 'em up there, it won't be a problem."
"In that case ..." She smiled at him. "I'd love to have you come with me."
It was worth the slight hit to her pride, because she got one of those genuine, million-watt smiles in return. She would never get tired of seeing him smile.
Chapter Nine
They took Charmian's Jeep, because her stuff was in it, and she was used to driving it. Alec's truck was left parked in her driveway.
The falling snow was bad enough, but the wind had picked up again, whipping it across the road. And it would be getting dark soon. It went against all Alec's protective instincts to let his mate go out in this. But after a few miles of having to do all but sit on his hands to keep from interfering, he began to see that she actually was a very good driver. She'd clearly had a lot of experience at driving in difficult winter conditions. She knew exactly when to speed up and slow down, when to brake and when not to brake. Normally Alec had a lot of trouble being the passenger in someone else's vehicle; it was even more nerve-wracking for him than actually driving in bad weather. But with Charmian, it was somehow less difficult than usual.
"I'm sorry it turned out like this," Charmian said, glancing sideways at him. "I had a nice evening all planned for us. A movie on the DVD player, and—oh, no, I left steaks thawing in the fridge. Well, they'll be okay for a couple of days, if it takes us awhile to get back."
"I would have liked that. But I understand about life getting in the way. It's like that on the ranch, too."
"Yeah, I bet."
One of her small hands left the steering wheel and settled on his thigh, at least until she needed both hands for steering again.
"Charmian ..." he said, after they'd driven in silence for a little while more. "There's something I want to ... explain, I guess."
Her posture indicated attentiveness.
"About the other day. About you leaving the ranch." Alec had to resist the temptation to chew his lower lip, a bad habit from childhood that his father had tried hard to break him of. He could still feel the sting of a backhand blow from his father's fist whenever he started to do it. His father had hated it because it made him look indecisive. Weak. Not alpha-like.
But that had been his father's idea of what being an alpha was supposed to be. As Alec was slowly coming to realize as an adult, being an alpha wasn't about overt displays of strength. You had to be strong, and you had to be willing to take charge. But it wasn't about beating respect into people. You got respect by showing yourself to be a person worthy of it.
And sometimes that meant being willing to show weakness, when you could trust someone else not to take advantage of it.
"It's really more about me than you," he said quietly, staring straight ahead out the windshield, where snow was collecting almost faster than the wipers could sweep it away.
"I'm listening," she said, when he paused.
"It's a dangerous road. It's ..." Could he say this? He'd never admitted it to anyone, even to the rest of his clan. Especially to the rest of his clan. "I'm afraid to drive that road," he said, forcing the words out past his pride, past a lifetime's habits. "It scares the hell out of me."
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Charmian giving him a soft look. "I can't imagine you being afraid of anything."
He almost laughed. Do you want me to make a list? Commitment. Apologizing. Opening up to people. "I hate driving in the winter. If you want the truth, I think you're better at it than I am. I think I trust you more behind the wheel than I trust myself.
"
"But you're certainly not bad at it," she protested. "I've seen how hard your road is to drive. Heck, if you drive that thing every day, or at least whenever you come to town, you must kick ass at it by now."
"I drive it as rarely as I can get away with," he admitted. "And the reason ... Charmian, my parents died, driving that road."
To her credit, her hands remained steady on the wheel. The car didn't change speed. But he felt the change in her position, and when she was able to take her eyes off the road to look at him, they were filled with sympathy.
"On that big curve?"
He nodded. "They must have lost control. My dad was never afraid of anything, and he was always reckless, driving that road. I think he must have figured he could win any fight, against anything. But you can't win against gravity. We, uh ... they didn't come home one night, and we found the car down in the canyon."
"How old were you?" she asked softly.
"Nineteen. As the eldest, I took over as alpha then. And the ranch was mine to run, as well."
"Oh, Alec," she whispered. "You were so young."
"Old enough to be a man."
"But still a kid, really, in all the ways that count." She reached out again, resting a hand on his leg to give him a reassuring squeeze. "So that's why you were so freaked out about me driving that road in the dark. It wasn't that you were trying to be controlling. It's because you really did believe I was putting myself in terrible danger. I didn't know, Alec."
"You're half right, though," he admitted. "I was being controlling. I'm an alpha. I don't know any other way to be."
Charmian gave a quiet laugh. "Yeah, I don't know anything about that."
They were off the main road now, onto a smaller side road. She put on the brakes and pulled to a stop in the middle of the road; the shoulders were too heaped with snow to pull over. There were no vehicles coming, in any case. Charmian put on the parking brake and then leaned across the space between them to put her arms around him.
She smelled so good. All woman, and all her. He had thought he would feel embarrassed and ashamed for opening up like that, but instead he felt oddly better, as if he'd purged some kind of poison he'd been holding inside for a long time.
"I was afraid I might've run you off forever," he murmured into her hair.
"No, you didn't run me off. I'm too stubborn for that. I guess the main thing is, I wasn't expecting that level of commitment so soon."
"We don't go slow when it comes to relationships, us shifters. It's all or nothing with us."
"So I'm gathering."
"But," he added, "I will back off, if you want me to. We can go exactly as fast as you want."
"Thank you. I ... I'll try to let you know how fast is too fast. I'm not that great at communicating that kind of thing either. At least not without yelling."
He laughed a little. "We can try to keep the yelling to a minimum."
"No yelling. Fair enough."
"We're a pair, aren't we?"
"We probably deserve each other. But thank you for telling me about your parents. Her breath whispered across his neck as she spoke. "I know it must have been hard. And thank you for trusting me, with your story and behind the wheel, too."
"Like I said, I think I trust you to drive more than I trust me."
She kissed his neck lightly, sending a shiver through him. "I know how much that means, coming from you."
They stayed that way for another moment or two, until Charmian took a bracing breath and carefully unwound herself. "Mary Lambert's baby isn't going to wait much longer, I'm afraid."
"Charmian." Alec placed his hand on her face, tipping her head back, and brought his lips to hers. It was a slow kiss at first, deepening and heating up as he plied her mouth with his tongue.
When he pulled back, her lips were parted and wet, and her eyes were dazed.
"Okay," he said with a grin, and right at that moment, he felt better than he had in years. "That's the reaction I was looking for."
Charmian's answering smile was impish. "You might regret this if we're stuck, buddy, because you're the one who has to get out and push."
But she got the Jeep moving again, rocking back and forth and then crawling along the unplowed road. The snow was piling up badly.
"Chains?" she asked, braking again.
"It'd probably be a good idea."
They both got out and he helped her put the chains on. The two of them worked smoothly in tandem, as if they'd been doing it for years. No words were necessary.
We really do make a good team, he thought.
The chains made a noticeable difference. The Jeep was no longer swimming around on the snowy road, but pulled smoothly and steadily forward.
Charmian slowed and stopped at a turn-off marked with a mailbox. It was clear that no one had been down the Lamberts' driveway in days. Alec could barely even tell there was a driveway there, as opposed to a open space between the trees.
"This may be the moment of no return," Charmian said. "I don't think we can turn around; the road's too narrow. If we get stuck, we'll have to back all the way out to the main road." She took out her cell phone, and shook her head. "No service. I can't call and see how Mary's doing."
"You really feel strongly about this, don't you?" Alec asked.
"I do. She says she'll be fine on her own, and she may be right. This is her fourth baby, and she has her mother to help her. But I can't just leave her like that. If anything goes wrong, there's no way an ambulance is going to be able to get up this road."
"You gotta do what you gotta do," Alec said. "I understand. And I'll be there, doing it with you. Let's go."
She gave him a smile that lit him all the way down to his toes. Putting the Jeep in gear, she crept forward onto the unplowed driveway.
It was all right at first. The Jeep had a high enough ground clearance not to get stuck on the mounds of snow, and the chains gave them good traction.
Things started to get more nerve-wracking as the driveway got steeper. Now they were going up a series of ever-steepening hills. Alec forced himself to stay calm and not clutch at the seat. This road was just similar enough to the Circle B road to make incipient panic crawl in the pit of his stomach.
We're going to be fine. All she has to do is keep it pointed forward.
And he really did trust Charmian as a driver. She was good at it. She never once allowed the Jeep to come to a stop on any of the hills, but neither did she gun the engine and risk the tires spinning out in the loose snow. She just kept it crawling forward, feathering the gas and the clutch, shifting back and forth between the first and second gears.
"Gotta love a manual transmission," she said, relaxing somewhat as they topped another hill. "I learned to drive on a stick shift, and it's been an absolute must for me with every new car I've bought since. You just can't do some of this in an automatic."
"You're good at it," Alec said.
She flashed him another smile and crawled carefully into another hollow, then up the other side.
Everything was going fine until she was near the top. Then something big and dark loomed suddenly out of the storm, right in the middle of the road.
Charmian yelped. It was a stray cow. With this many ranchers in the area, many of them with hundreds or thousands of cattle on their property, strays weren't uncommon. It looked like this one had wandered out onto the road because it was easier than walking through the deep snow in the woods.
But the damage was done. The Jeep had started to slide. Charmian fought for control of the steering wheel, and Alec struggled with the split-second decision of whether to reach out and help her, or not. He was stronger, but trying to grip the wheel as Charmian wrestled with it stood a real chance of flipping the vehicle.
Then it didn't matter anymore, because the rear of the Jeep swung around and slid off the road. There was no shoulder, only a plunging hill. The entire vehicle tipped and fell over the edge.
At least it wasn't as much of a drop as
it was from the Circle B's steep driveway. There, a skid or a mistimed turn could send a vehicle plunging down a lethal hundred-foot drop into the canyon. Here, the road bordered a snow-covered hillside sloping down into a mess of young willows and alders.
The Jeep flipped and rolled, tumbling until it fetched up in a tangle of broken brush and trees, upside down with its headlights spearing into the swirling snowflakes in the oncoming dusk.
Chapter Ten
Charmian didn't quite lose consciousness, but she was dazed. Full awareness returned with a sharp sensation of cold, and the sound of Alec's voice saying her name desperately. A hand patted her cheek.
"I'm up, I'm up," she mumbled, brushing at him and trying to push him away.
She opened her eyes. For a moment she could make no sense of her surroundings, and then she understood that she was hanging upside down from her seat belt. The Jeep was not quite flat on its roof, but canted at a steep angle, with her driver-side door on the uphill side. Several of the windows had been broken out and cold wind was sweeping into the car, along with snowflakes and the broken ends of branches jabbing through the matrix of shattered glass. The driver-side air bag was pressing into her face and chest, making it difficult to see anything.
"Alec," she gasped. "Are you—"
"—all right?"
They'd both asked the question at the same time, in the same tone of desperate worry.
"I ... I think so," Charmian said.
The engine had died, but the ignition was turned on, the headlights stabbing out into the falling snow. Vaguely remembering a safety lecture from somewhere back in her teenage driving history, she turned the ignition off to make sure the electrical system wasn't live, in case there was spilled gasoline from the accident that might be ignited by a spark. She reached for the headlights to turn them off, too, and then decided to leave them on. Down here in the ravine, no one was going to notice the Jeep without them.