by Claire King
What had begun as nothing more than an inconvenience was fast becoming something of a situation, Grace decided. She was now stuck overnight in a spring snowstorm with at least a sprained ankle and no one around for twenty miles. Very poor planning, Dr. McKenna, she chided herself. Very poor planning.
She shifted to her hands and knees, ignoring the howl of distress her ankle put up. With the blanket clenched in her hand—the water was something she’d think about in the morning—she crawled the few feet to the cab. It took her several minutes to haul herself inside and once she was in she lay prone on the seat, her feet sticking out into the cold, trying to catch her breath, trying to overcome the dizzying pain in her ankle. Maybe not a sprain, she diagnosed with a strange sort of clinical detachment. Maybe worse.
Finally, and only because she understood she had to, she shifted in the seat, brought herself to a sitting position and closed the door. She was wet from head to foot, and her rear end felt numb from where she’d sat in the snow. With frozen fingers, she wrapped the thin, silver emergency blanket around her and lifted her ankle onto the seat. It was already swelling inside her boot.
And the instant she thought again about starting the truck, she realized she no longer had the keys to it in her hand.
Chapter 12
He was wild to get to her. Every minute that went by, he went a little crazier. He was going to kill his brother for letting her come out here in this damn storm. He was going to kill Grace when he got to her. What the hell had she been thinking?
He could hear the faint drone of Frank’s ATV behind him. They’d never have gotten this far in a pickup, and a horse would have taken forever and provided no light to track her.
He could see her tracks in the snow, barely, in the narrow tunnel of light the headlights of the four-wheeler provided. They were almost filled over with new snow, but he’d spent his life tracking stubborn cows through thick spring storms and he was confident those slight depressions were hers. They had to be.
The sick feeling in the pit of his stomach negated any thoughts of invincibility he’d talked himself into during the last few weeks. There were some things he didn’t think he could live through. Finding Grace McKenna frozen to death on this godforsaken desert was one of them.
He was cold despite his heavy coat and his insulated coveralls and the long underwear he’d been wearing all day. His hands, encased in thick gloves, were half frozen around the handlebars and his face, though protected by a length of wool scarf, stung from the chill wind. He ignored the discomfort and wiped blowing snow from his goggles. His brother pulled up beside him, teeth chattering, as Daniel slowed to a crawl beside the disappearing tracks.
“It’s getting pretty bad out here,” Frank screamed over the sound of wind and machine. “Can you still see her tracks?”
“Barely,” Daniel shouted back. Without another word, he pulled ahead again. He registered dimly that he was probably kicking up a face full of snow on Frank every time he went on ahead, but they both knew it was important not to ride together and risk crossing Grace’s faint tire tracks.
Daniel had no idea how long they’d been searching when he finally saw the indistinct outline of Grace’s truck through the dense snowfall. They were nearly upon it, in fact, before either of them noticed it. Daniel shot forward, gunning his ATV to full speed and sliding to a stop next to the truck. His heart was hammering, his mouth was dry.
The door was frozen shut and when he couldn’t open it, he began shouting her name. There was no answer and the clubbing inside his chest increased tenfold. “Grace,” he bellowed over the sound of the wind.
Daniel began to kick at the door to loosen the ice that stuck it to the frame. His boot left great indentations in the metal but he didn’t notice. He was mad now with the need to get to her. If he hadn’t been afraid of hurting her, he would have jumped onto the hood of the truck and kicked in the front windshield. The fact that she hadn’t answered them, hadn’t shouted back when he yelled for her, set a vast, nauseating dread turning in his gut.
No, he told himself. She wasn’t frozen to death. Impossible. A smaller woman, perhaps. A weaker, frailer, less consequential woman. But not Grace. Not Grace with her long legs and her strong heart. Not Grace.
The door came open with a crack of ice and she spilled backward into his arms. Her lips were blue, her eyes closed, the fine veins of her eyelids showing faintly in contrast to her dark brows and lashes. Her face was as pale as the snow and Daniel felt rather than heard the moan that twisted out of him.
Frank shouldered up next to him. “Check her pulse, for crying out loud,” he yelled.
Daniel held out his hand and Frank yanked the glove from it. His hand was cold, but it was warmer than Grace’s skin.
Daniel dug frantically past the silver emergency blanket, the light spring jacket and the thin, useless blouse Grace wore. He nearly wept with the relief of finding her pulse.
“She’s alive,” he said
“Thank god,” Frank breathed. “How do you want to do this?”
“We’ll take her out in the truck. You drive, get the heater going. I’ll go ahead on my four-wheeler. Follow my tail-lights.”
Frank nodded in agreement, but when Daniel began to rip at the outer snaps of his coat, he stayed his hand.
“Don’t be stupid, Danny.”
“I’ve got to get her warm.”
“You’ll freeze to death without your coat, you moron.”
Daniel held his brother’s gaze for a moment. Then he eased Grace into a sitting position on the seat, her head lolling against the back window. When her feet hit the floor of the cab, she whimpered quietly, sending twin shafts of alarm and hope through Daniel, but she did not awaken.
“Get in,” Daniel snapped at his brother, “get the truck started. Crank up the heat.”
“You go with her in the truck. I’ll lead you home.”
“No. I know this mountain better than you do, Frank. I can get us home faster.”
It was, in fact, an entirely correct argument, and Daniel had just enough wildness in his eyes to keep Frank from arguing with him.
“Let’s get going, then.”
Daniel nodded, but was reluctant to let go of Grace’s shoulder long enough to let his brother scoot in beside her. “See if you can get her to wake up,” he ordered unnecessarily. Frank was already crooning softly to her, though Daniel could not hear what he was saying over the sound of the wind and his own ragged breathing. “Wrap your coat—” Frank was twisting out of his jacket. “Good. Now your hat. Okay, follow as close as you can.”
“Daniel!”
“What?”
“No keys.”
They stared at one another for a moment, then began a mad scramble for the lost keys. They searched for them while snow piled around them, obscuring the tracks they’d made as they’d come in. Every minute they lost, both of them understood perfectly, brought closer the possibility that none of them would get off the mountain that night.
“Where the hell—”
“Get out.” Daniel yelled.
Frank scooted out of the truck, stood with his arms wrapped around him and watched his brother dig his hands between the cushions of the bench seat. Daniel was muttering a string of swearwords that would have made even the lowest of the lowlifes his brother had met in the past three years widen their eyes.
When he couldn’t find the keys after another minute of searching, Daniel crawled into the truck, heedless of the snow that fell from his clothes to dampen the upholstery. He gathered Grace into his arms and slapped gently at her pale cheeks. That she hadn’t awakened during all the shouting and cursing worried him.
“Grace, honey, wake up. Grace.”
She didn’t respond.
“Grace, we need to get you off the mountain. Honey, wake up. Where are the keys to the truck? Grace!”
“She’s not going to wake up until her body temperature comes up, Daniel.”
“I know, dammit!” He took Frank
’s coat from her, and his hat, and flung them carelessly out the door to his brother. He took the glove he had tucked under his arm and pulled it onto Grace’s bare hand; yanked the other one off his hand and repeated the process. He ripped his wool cap off and tugged it over her short, dark curls. Then he pushed an arm under her knees and cradled her in his lap.
“Oh, hell.” He shuddered as her bottom nestled into his lap. Her clothes were wet. He made a decision in an instant and began to claw at the clasp of her thin slacks.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Her clothes are wet.”
“We’ve got to get her out of here!”
Daniel struggled to peel the wet fabric down Grace’s long legs. “You might want to stop stating the obvious, Frankie,” he grunted, “before I come out there and pound the crap out of you.”
“Sorry.” Frank buttoned his coat as quickly as his gloved hands would allow. “I’ll go back down, get help.”
“Go.”
A moment later Frank was off into the night on his ATV. Daniel sent up a prayer that he’d make it down and back before morning, but he wasn’t optimistic.
“Okay, honey,” Daniel murmured, maneuvering Grace’s limp, cool form so he could pull off her boots. His breath came out in white gusts, worrying him; but at least in here they were out of the wind and relatively dry. “Let’s get you warmed up.”
He dragged off her right boot and slid her pant leg over her—thankfully—dry sock. But when he tugged at the other boot, she cried out, stopping his thundering heart in his chest.
He palpated her foot, her ankle, through her boot, watched her mouth drop open, a sobbing, unconscious breath wrenched from her as he touched the slight swell at the crease of her boot.
He swore viciously under his breath. Her ankle was obviously sprained, or broken, and if he took the boot off it would swell further, causing her even greater pain. No matter how cold, how unresponsive she appeared to be, the grimace on her face was enough to make him reluctant to do anything more to hurt her.
“Okay, Doc. Okay. We won’t do that.” He left the boot on and dug into the front pocket of his coveralls for the knife every cattleman worth the name carried at all times.
“I won’t hurt you, sweetheart. I won’t hurt you anymore.” He muttered softly, reassuring her, reassuring himself, while he slit her trousers at the inside seam and wrestled them from her damp legs. Grace was a tall, unconscious woman and they were in a small, frozen pickup cab, but he finally managed to drag off the rest of her clothes, leaving her naked on his lap except for his coat, which he’d awkwardly kept wrapped around her. He then tore at the long front zipper of his wet coveralls, inching them to his hips. He took off his scratchy wool shirt and pulled it around her shoulders. He whipped his long underwear shirt off and dried her legs with it, then tucked it around her lower legs. He pressed her against his chest then, gathered as much of her long body inside the warm circle of his arms as he could, and wrapped the blanket around them both, tucking it close against her bare thighs. Her breasts were cold, her nipples beaded against his bare chest. He pressed kisses on the top of her head, and prayed and cursed and waited.
After a minute or two, she began to shiver again. Violently. He could barely hold her in his lap as she regained enough warmth that her body began to react to the cold. She shook in his arms; he had to clench his freezing fingers around the coat and blanket to keep them on her, and her teeth chattered until he thought they might chip. He held on, rubbed whatever spot on her body he could reach, and prayed Frank would make it home, would come back for her soon.
“Grace,” he said, his own teeth clenched against the cold. “Grace.”
It registered somewhere that she could hear his voice, that she’d been listening to it rumble at her ear for some time. His body was like a furnace; it was burning her and as the fire hit her extremities, the fingers and toes and arms and legs that had been blissfully numb, she whimpered.
Everything hurt. One foot was freezing, the other felt as though someone was banging on it with a hammer. Her fingers stung as they warmed from the inside out, a million pins and needles poking at her from within her own skin. The shivering, furious and unstoppable, made her bones ache. Even her lips, pressed against his warm neck, throbbed as they thawed.
Her arms came slowly around him, clutched desperately, her hands meeting at his back.
“Hold me,” she said, her mouth barely able to form the words. She tasted blood, and realized she’d bitten through the tip of her tongue with her clattering teeth.
He tightened his grip on her. “I am holding you.”
“Closer.”
He couldn’t get any closer, but he tried anyway. Her shivery little voice made him want to cry. “I’m holding you, sweetheart. You’ll be all right now.”
“The keys—”
“Where are they, Grace?” He didn’t want to loosen his grasp on her, so he tilted his head back so he could look at her face. Condensation from the back window dripped down his hair onto his neck. “Where are they?”
Her eyes were still closed, but tightly now, as if she were fighting against consciousness. He couldn’t blame her.
“Grace,” he spoke sharply, and watched her eyelids twitch. “Grace, where are the keys?”
“’Side. Dropped ’em.”
“Can you feel your extremities?” He shook her, which was rather redundant, considering how hard she was trembling in his arms. “Can you feel your fingers. Toes?”
She nodded, buried her nose back into his throat, like a mole burrowing into warm ground. “Yes,” she answered, though between her swelling tongue and the chill that threatened to consume her, it sounded more like “yeth.”
“Good.” He wanted to keep her awake, keep her talking. The shivering was a good sign; it meant her body was struggling to warm itself. “Are the keys near the door?”
She managed to nod her head again, no easy task. The shivering, along with the heat from Daniel’s big, healthy body, had warmed her, but it had also sapped whatever had been left of her strength.
“Don’t fall asleep, honey.”
“Have to.”
“No. Listen, I’m going to look for the keys. Don’t fall asleep.” He reached up a hand and Grace winced at the chill of it against her face, heated now from his body. “Promise me, Grace. Don’t fall asleep.”
She opened her eyes finally, looked into his. “I promise.”
He unwrapped her arms from around him, tucked them into the wool shirt and buttoned it. He then shoved her arms into the coat, as well, and zippered it.
He slid out from beneath her, left her sitting sideways across the bench seat. She instinctively rolled to her side in a fetal position, tried to tuck her bare legs to her chest. Pain washed over her, making the cold superfluous for a moment. She bit down on her lip to keep from crying out.
Daniel wriggled clumsily back into his coveralls, zipping them over his bare chest, and kicked open the re-frozen door. He dropped to his knees in the snow, slamming the door shut behind him. It was a terrible risk, looking for the keys, he knew. The snow had nearly stopped, but only because it was now too cold now for any sort of precipitation. He felt that cold in every breath he took. The air froze in his lungs, snapped the moisture in his nostrils to ice, immediately numbed his hands.
He smoothed deadened fingers across the crisp surface of the snow, working his way outward. He knew he had just minutes more before the cold overcame him and he succumbed to the hypothermia he already felt wearying him. He would, as Grace had done, slowly slip into unconsciousness, escaping the cold in a kind of imagined, paralyzing warmth. Only there would be no one to help him, and as a consequence, no one to save Grace.
He didn’t feel the sharp points of her keys under his anesthetized hands so much as understand there was something there. He grasped the keys clumsily and stumbled to his feet, wrenched open the door and fell face-first into the truck. After a moment he managed to drag himself the rest of t
he way up into the seat. He forced his fingers to unclamp from around the frozen keys and shoved the ignition key into its slot.
The sturdy, Detroit-built pickup started on the first turn. Frigid air shot out of the vents, making him swear, but after a minute or two fiddling with the controls and gunning the engine, a faint warmth flowed over them. Daniel turned, found Grace’s naked bottom at his hip. She was asleep.
She was in his bed. Daniel was stretched out, on his belly, next to her. His head was turned to her, and one of his tree-trunk arms was slung protectively across her waist. Naked, both of them. Grace could almost laugh at the irony of being naked in bed once more with the gorgeous Daniel Cash. Almost.
She still had her left boot on, against the swelling she surmised correctly. The events of the night came back to her, and she remembered the sound of Frank’s voice through the snow and wind. It was not quite dawn, and she wondered whether Frank had made it back, as well. She gazed at the rugged, ragged-looking, beautiful giant snoring softly beside her. Of course he had. Daniel would never have allowed himself to sleep if Frank hadn’t been safe and warm in his own bed.
Daniel. He had to stop coming to her rescue, Grace thought, watching him sleep. It broke her, made getting over him impossible. She needed to return to the place in her life where she could count on no one but herself.
But first. Oh, Daniel, first… Her hand hovered over him for a moment before she gave in to the unreasonable longing to touch him. She smoothed back the hair from his forehead, lightly traced those thick, mobile brows, that strong nose and chin. She took a last look down his long, lovely body. She needed to remember everything about him for the time when she was old, and alone, and yearning for him still.
When she made it back up to his face, she found him watching her.
“How do you feel?” His low voice was a growl, his vocal cords strained from cold and shouting. She looked so sad, so beautiful. Daniel felt every cell in his body react to her, wondered if it would always be this way between them.