Chest pumping quick bursts of vapor, Josh inched closer to the trunk. Finally, he sagged back against the frosted bark. The howling dogs continued to snarl and jump at the trunk, but their growls didn't sound so loud to her ears now that Josh was safe.
He turned his head to look sideways up at her on a bough six or more inches above and over. White clouds from his mouth wafted around her. "Thank you."
"Thank you for the leg-up first." Relief coursed through her, cooling the adrenaline-induced sweat on her body. Minutes whispered by uncounted while she allowed herself to soak in the vitality of Joshua. Alive. Nothing else mattered at the moment.
"Are you okay?" His gaze raked her.
"Me? I'm not the one who had a wolf hanging off my leg by his teeth. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. The snow pants kept him from actually biting me. Now, how are you, damn it?"
"Just winded." Scared, relieved, scared all over again. "Screw this saving ourselves crap. Arctic Survival School has concluded for us now. We need to report in about what we found in the cave. God, I can't believe anyone would be brash enough to mine uranium right in the backyard of a training area. Scares the hell out of me to think where they might be shipping it. Josh?" Why wasn't he talking? "Don't you agree?"
Cloudy breaths with no words continued to fill the night.
"Are you ready to call in a rescue?"
"Look down."
Fishing her flashlight out of her pocket and scared all over again because she couldn't even remember putting it there, she arced the light down. Had she really climbed that high? How in the world had she reached to pull him up? The reality of how close they'd come to dying prickled over her, leaving her a little dizzy until the tundra below jiggled.
Alicia jerked her gaze up again. "I'd really rather not. It's a helluva long way down, and it's not like I have vertigo or anything, I mean, jeez, I'm a pilot, right? But I really prefer to have a parachute strapped to my back anytime I'm up high." Oh, God, already she was growing loopy from the cold and they still had at least a couple of hours until dawn. "What was that about looking down, anyway?" Suck it up, Renshaw.
Rosen?
Ah, hell. Whatever her name was.
Securing her grip on the pine, she looked down again. A trio of wolves remained in sight, one nuzzling the limp carcass of the impaled beast. Blood stained the white perfection of fur and snow.
She swallowed hard, scanned the other animals busy prowling, circling the base of the tree. All but one. A lone wolf stared up with the survival radio clamped firmly in its jaws, bits of torn snow pants hanging from his teeth.
No wonder Josh had wanted her to look down.
"Ah, hell." She sagged back against the sturdy trunk that still swayed under the force of the stormy winds.
Arctic Survival School was definitely over. Time to put their teaching to the test for real.
* * *
"DE-E-ECK THE HALLS WITH BOUGHS OF HOLLY…"
Alicia's warbly carol drifted around the tree, working better than a mega-jolt of caffeine to keep Josh awake.
His wife couldn't sing for crap. Her voice—a questionable contralto—carried on the tearing night wind. He figured any safety benefits to shushing her were outweighed by the need to keep her awake.
Keep him awake, as well.
Luckily the storm that had sent them into the cave in the first place was likely keeping the bad guys away for now. He and Alicia sat with backs against the trunk, legs stretched out on the limb to evenly distribute weight.
The branches seemed sturdy enough. But too easily he could envision the effortless snap of breaking off frozen wood for the fire earlier outside the cave.
Only another hour till sunrise and he could scatter the wolves, climb down. Too risky in the dark, though, where the wolves could lurk behind a tree under the cover of darkness.
Brief flashes of the stars overhead helped him gain his bearings again after their off-course run. How he could see the North Star so clearly through the storm clouds, he didn't know. And he didn't intend to question.
A miracle? Maybe. All love of science aside, he would take help any way he could tonight. He would do anything to keep Alicia alive. No way in hell would he let her be the victim of a holiday siege.
Like before.
He'd only been fifteen years old, that growth spurt no-damned-where in sight. With the gunman waving his AK-47 and extra ammo around, Josh couldn't do a thing but sit at his desk with a half-completed final exam for Advanced Incompressible Aerodynamics in front of him.
After twelve hours of tense negotiations, the masked gunman had opened fire. Josh had thrown himself across the aisle, toward his classmate who had a houseful of kids at home. His chin still ached from cracking on the floor.
Seven students had died before the gunman turned his weapon on himself. Still Josh had sprawled over the silent woman who'd been dead before she hit the ground. Memories focused in on only the blood dripping off desks and splattered on the wall, crimson against white like the dead wolf in the snow below.
The next day, he'd marched into the ROTC office to discuss joining up once he was old enough. His goal had shifted. Working for NASA after graduation had become his intermediary job until flight training.
Red as a holiday color carried a whole different meaning for him.
"Fa-la-la-la-la," Alicia rounded off the holiday classic, "La-la-la-laaa."
"Bravo." He clapped his gloved hands together in the bitter cold. Even his damned nose hairs were frozen together. "You should take your show on the road."
"Sure hope Carnegie Hall leaves a message on my voice mail. Oh, or what about a USO tour? My sister could haul me around in her cargo plane to perform for the troops. Ah, but there's just that matter of my job. Got my own plane to fly. Too bad we can't harness those hounds like reindeer and pilot us out on Santa's sleigh. And oh, man, am I getting loopy."
"You're doing great. Just hang on and keep singing if you need to."
"You pick the next s-s-song." Her teeth chattered. "What kind of holiday tunes did you sing growing up?"
Amazing how they'd fought about everything except their differing faiths. "Nah, you go ahead with your next riff."
With memories still clogging his head like an oncoming sinus infection, he didn't want to be funny. He glanced down his stretched legs to his squadron scarf tied around a leg of his survival pants to cinch where the wolf had torn the fabric—jarring loose his radio. Frustration kicked through him again.
"Alicia? More serenades?"
"I've pretty much caroled through the whole Renshaw canon of Christmas tunes."
He scrambled for a new topic that would launch her into a lengthy explanation. They really didn't know much about each other's holiday traditions since they'd been apart last December for different deployments. "What did your family do for the holidays?"
"Regular stuff, the tree, church, Santa, presents. Lots of fruitcake and peppermint hot chocolate. Ah, man, what I wouldn't give for hot chocolate." Her voice went dreamy. "Sometimes we celebrated on a different day than the twenty-fifth…like the year Dad shipped out before Desert Storm cranked into gear."
"Sort of like how Hanukkah dates float from year to year."
"Never thought about it that way, but yeah. It was all about being together for us anyhow because we never knew for sure when Dad would fly out again."
She shifted on her branch, rustling pine needles to the ground in a shower that brought a yip from below. "This one year movers lost a box of my mother's Christmas decorations."
"I imagine she'd collected things from all over."
"Sure, but those weren't the ones lost. The missing box had the decorations we'd made in school. There was a star with my picture in the middle. And some from when we painted ceramic Twelve Days of Christmas. Hank Jr. and I whipped through eleven days in ten minutes. Darcy worked on her lords-a-leaping for an hour, then realized she'd forgotten to paint the back."
"Ah, man, that bites." An on
ly child, he had different memories. Not bad, just lonely sometimes, which had more to do with being so many grades ahead of everyone else. Probably part of the reason he wanted lots of kids.
He wondered, not for the first freaking time, if she'd wanted kids with that other guy who'd left such a mark on her life she wouldn't even talk about him to her husband.
So why didn't he just ask? Easy answer. Because it was one thing to think she still loved the poor dead bastard and another altogether to hear her say it.
"Actually, Mom told Darcy to leave the half-painted ornament just like it was. She wanted us to remember that we are a work in progress and to keep improving." Her sigh wrapped around the tree, around him. "So that year, she put up all the pretty ornaments. It was a gorgeous tree, no question. But when Mama went to an Officer's Wives Club Christmas tea one night, Daddy brought us construction paper and glue and glitter and popcorn string. We worked for two hours straight to junk up Mama's tree."
"I bet she loved it." His head thunked back against the trunk.
"She really did. It was a perfect Christmas with snow. A couple of weeks later, she died from a fluky aneurysm."
Ice chilled inside him colder than outside. He'd known her mother died, just not when. Which proved how little talking of any importance he and Alicia had done over the past year and a half.
How ironic that the view in front of him—trees, snow, a star streaking through the darkness—resembled a picture-perfect scene worthy of any Christmas card, and yet it carried such deadly undertones. Just as that year had for her, only she'd been unaware of the lurking tragedy, something they shared in common after all.
He reached around the tree trunk to rest a hand on her arm. She probably couldn't feel the gesture through the layers of winter gear, but he couldn't keep his distance.
"The first Christmas without her was hard. I knew there was no way I could make things better for Dad, but I really wanted little Hank and Darcy to grow up with holiday memories, too. Maybe not as cool as the ones Mom would have made with us, but they would have their stories to tell."
"What did you do?"
"I had Dad take all three of us to a big Christmas mall. We shopped for hours trying to pick out a crèche. Except I'd like the Mary in one, but the lambs were goofy. Darcy wanted a certain angel, but thought the Wise Men looked creepy. Then I remembered Mom crying over that perfect tree because she wanted her hodgepodge one back. So, we just played mix and match. We bought our favorite piece from each set to create a whole new set that was uniquely our own."
He could see her, so young herself but taking charge while recognizing the beauty of their individual tastes. How could this woman tempt him in the middle of a blizzard when he couldn't even see one inch of her luscious body?
Josh cleared his throat, if not his thoughts, that were tumbling faster than a plane in a barrel roll. "So that explains your clothes."
"Huh?"
"No matched sets."
"Oh. No." Her laugh floated round, packing more of a punch than her sigh. "Actually, I just don't have any fashion flair since there wasn't anyone around to teach me. Hey, scratch that last part. It sounds un-PC and totally ungrateful to my dad. But he wore his uniform all the time and didn't have a clue about clothes. A couple of the other squadron wives tried to help, but, uh, you may have noticed I'm a bit prickly in the pride department."
"No? Really?"
"Smart-ass," she answered, but her tone was lighter, and damned if those two words didn't sound a little affectionate. "I knew they meant well. Maybe I didn't want to shop without Mom. Who knows? But those pity looks really bugged me. So next time we went somewhere, I deliberately mismatched. I found I liked it better than 'normal,' anyway. Now, after wearing a uniform all day, playing with colors is fun."
Fun. That described Alicia well. Dating her had been a wild ride, full of the unexpected. Like the time she'd called and insisted he put on his mess dress uniform before she arrived. She'd been wearing a hot-pink formal gown with ridiculous ruffles. Since he'd never had a senior prom, she'd planned to treat him to the whole experience…a few years late.
At the first sign of resistance from him, she'd threatened to make him wear a tux with a fuchsia cummerbund and bow tie to match her dress.
He'd relented—and had an uninhibited blast.
Ah, shit. He didn't want to remember falling in love with her. He needed distance from Alicia, a damned tough proposition considering they were stuck in a tree. "So back to your cotton panties. What color are you wearing under all those uniform layers right now?"
* * *
GOD, HER HUSBAND COULD BE SUCH AN ASS sometimes. And right after being so sweet listening to her sappy childhood stories and distracting her from her numb toes.
Nothing to do but ignore him and his obnoxious question, try to forget the steady comfort of his hand on her arm while she'd talked about her mother.
Wind whistled through the trees even though the storm had eased. Thank heaven they weren't out in the open and only had to wait a few hours until daylight. Still, her hands shook from the cold. She ached all the way to her bones from sitting still so long.
She tapped her thumb against her pinkie in a quick check to make sure her fingers still worked. Which made her worry about Josh. While she wouldn't see her siblings for Christmas since they were all stationed at different Air Force bases, at least she had siblings to call, unlike Josh.
Sympathy tweaked harder than the bite of bark pressing through her protective clothing. "What holiday memories do you have?"
"More traditional ones, I guess. My mother collected menorahs, some really fancy like your mother's perfect tree and others that would probably fit in with your more eclectic tastes."
"Which one was your favorite?" The classic beauty or the eclectic surprise? And now, wasn't that fishing for a flipping reinforcement that maybe she'd been at least partially right for him during their short-lived, messed-up marriage?
"This one my nonni has that looks like a moose."
A moose?
Eclectic, sure, but not quite the complementary analogy she'd been seeking. Still, his quirky answer warmed her frostbitten feet that just happened to be sporting quirky reindeer-patterned toe socks under all the other layers of socks. "A moose? How so? I'm having trouble picturing it."
"With candles on each antler."
"Ah. Okay, now I can envision it." Why had they never taken the time for this before when she could have fully enjoyed it, when she wasn't a frozen ice sculpture? Drawing her knees up to her chest, she tucked her face down, arms inside. The bough held. "Sounds like something a boy would enjoy. What else?"
"I had a dreidel to play with, but, man, did I ever want to play with Nonni's old one up on the mantel. Mother said no, but Nonni said I could if I helped her make potato latkes."
"You in an apron? Now, there's an image."
"Hey—" his deep bass growled from the other side of the pine "—I make a mighty damned good potato latke."
"I'll trade you some for my grandma's fruitcake recipe." She tried for lighthearted, except she knew better. They would never swap squat again, and the knowledge wedged itself in her throat like dried-out leftovers. "It's about time to climb down, isn't it?"
"Soon," he agreed, his voice sobering. "We need to make tracks the minute daylight breaks. We have to put space between us and whoever sicced these Cujo spawn on us. If we stay in the woods, covering our tracks should be easier. Of course, that also makes it tough as hell for anyone to rescue us."
"Well, don't those options all suck."
"Pretty much. Someone will have stayed at the pickup point. We'll just keep trying to make our way there."
"How far off do you think we ran?"
He stayed silent. Not good.
All right, then. One problem at a time. She pointed down at Fluffy still sharpening his fangs on their radio. "Do you have any ideas on how to make the big guy there abandon his favorite new chew toy?"
"I've been praying fo
r another killer icicle for the past hour. Doesn't seem to be working."
Her low laugh spiraled out into the horizon glowing orange and purple with a cresting sun. Not how she'd planned to spend the dark hours with him, and oddly somehow as intimate as sleeping in his arms.
And now their last night together had ended. "Any ideas on how to get them to scatter?"
"I've been thinking about it. We could use the gyro-jet flare gun on them, but that could also signal whoever set them loose in the first place."
"Flare gun, last resort."
"Yeah, which takes me to plan B. How about break off one of those branches to your left. The less snow and more pine needles the better."
She heard him rustling on his branch. Clumps of snow thudded, rousing Fluffy and Cujo to glare up with ice-blue eyes. "Uh, okay, but do you mind if I ask what you have planned?"
"Flaming branches."
"Should work and won't be nearly as visible as launching a flare. But how do you plan to kindle a spark up here in the tree? And without burning us out?"
His arm extended with a Bic lighter in his fist.
Shock stunned her silent. But only for a second. "You had this all the time even though we're in an official training course?"
"Duh. What are you? New?"
So he was back to being an ass, sensitivity long gone, probably only generated to keep her occupied, anyway. "You snuck a lighter into survival school? Omigod. I can't believe you did that. What other contraband have you stuffed in your pockets?"
"Hey, back off. I checked the rules and nowhere did it say I couldn't bring one."
"Well, the rules don't say I can't have a pup tent, but you don't see me shoving one up my parka."
"Somebody's mighty cranky without her morning coffee."
At least he wasn't talking about her underwear anymore. "Damn it, Rose-Bud—"
"Do you want out of this tree or not?"
"Light the damned branch." Lack of coffee? More like frustration from hanging out with the tender, funny Josh all night until even smart-ass Josh couldn't erase the warm glow swelling inside her.
"Yes, ma'am."
Rustling sounded behind her, followed by the flick, flick, flick as he worked the lighter. Alicia scanned the endless horizon, hazy purples and blues banding the skyline like one of her mismatched outfits that somehow went together. So many cold miles they had left to walk, and they were undoubtedly more than one degree off their original plan. If they even hit the river in one piece, would they turn right or left?
A Soldier's Christmas Page 17