Breaking Her No-Dating Rule

by Amalie Berlin

  Even Ellory knew she was grasping at straws, but aside from grilling Frank—which would no doubt be the next step if she didn’t find anything in the overhang—it was the only idea she had that might help her help him.

  The slope Anson had crashed on in his childhood wasn’t marked for guests to find easily these days, and she really didn’t know if that had always been the case or if it was something that Mr. Dupris had done after the accident. It was maintained and usable—if you knew what you were doing and how to get there. But all signs led to other slopes.

  She knew she’d found it when she started seeing the warning signs.

  Stopping the snowmobile at the top of the slope, Ellory surveyed the way down, trying to decide whether there was a safe route to the bottom or not.

  With the machine idling in low gear, she heard some short staccato sound echoing through the pass.

  She killed the engine and immediately realized what it was: frantic barking. Max...it was Max. But the echo made it impossible to follow.

  If Max was barking like that, then something was really wrong. Anson should be calming him down.

  Her heart skipped. If Anson wasn’t calming him down...

  This rugged part of the pass was the most remote, the most dangerous... Her instinct told her that down the crazy run was the direction to go.

  The cold air suddenly felt suffocating. Adjusting the face mask and goggles, she started the machine again and took a chance with the machine in the trees. If she went slowly, she could make it down that way. And it couldn’t get out of control and end up rolling too far if there were trees in the way. She’d just crash into one, and hopefully not be going that fast when it happened.

  Now wasn’t the time to stop trusting her gut.

  As carefully as she could with any speed, Ellory wove between the trees in a wide zigzag down the slope. The further down she went, the louder the barking got.

  About halfway down she realized the barking was getting quieter again.

  She’d passed them.

  She turned the beast hard toward the cleared slope and worked her way to the tree line.

  About a hundred yards up the slope she saw a snowdrift and the black dog in stark relief against it. He was barking at the snow between periods of frantic digging.

  Avalanche dog.

  She scrambled off the machine and up the slope as hard and fast as she could. “Anson!”

  When Max saw her, he barked more frantically and ran to meet her, grabbing her sleeve and half dragging her toward the snow she clawed her way up and over.

  If he was in there...as long as the barking had been going on... God, she knew someone died in avalanches every couple years. They’d already lost one in a slip this season.

  Rounding the drift to where Max dragged her, she saw a hole dug into the bank and Anson’s head. Max had got to his head.

  “Anson!” She strangled on his name, a barely controlled sob almost choking her.

  His head turned and he looked at her. Alive. Alive and awake. No neck injury...he could move his neck.

  “We’ll get you out.” She began pushing the snow off the mound holding him down. Max joined in again, digging beside her.

  “It wasn’t a real slide...there was a weird cornice...”

  She didn’t have time to look around and figure out what the hell he was talking about. The only thing she could think of was getting through the heavy wet volume of snow and pulling him free.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know.” He sounded tired. She knew he was tired.

  Her goggles fogged from the tears streaming from her eyes, so she tore them off and used the cup like a shovel. She should have had a shovel...

  “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

  “The snow is heavy,” he said, but as she dug through several feet and lessened the load on his chest, he began to breathe more easily.

  When his hands were free, he held them up to her. “Pull.”

  Taking both his hands, she leaned back as hard as she could, putting all her weight into the pull. Max pulled too, grabbing Anson’s hood and giving quick powerful tugs that made her worry about his spine.

  He slid free enough to use his legs, and soon he was out with her and Ellory grabbed for his hands, tearing through the buckles to get his gloves off and inspect his fingers. Red. Still red.

  She fell at his feet, and shoved his still wobbly body back into the snow so she could rip one of his boots off. The foot with the most toes had red toes. She checked the other. Two red toes, red feet.

  “I’m okay,” he said, but he still didn’t sound okay. She didn’t believe him, not one bit. But she couldn’t leave him with his boots off, so she shook the sock to make sure no snow had gotten on it, and helped get his boots back on before she even tried to look him in the eye.

  “We’re going to the hospital.” She looked up now, at the cornice that had fallen on him. “Is your snowmobile under there?”

  He nodded. The fact that he wasn’t arguing with her about going to the hospital actually did worry her.

  “Max will just have to walk with us. I have one, down the slope a way. We’ll go slowly.”

  “How did you know to come?”

  “I heard Max.”

  “You were out already?”

  “I was...looking. For something.” She wasn’t going to tell him precisely what she’d been looking for, and she wasn’t going to ask why Anson had gone looking for Jude on this slope. She had the idea that they were headed in the same direction, but neither of them was emotionally ready to talk about it yet.

  He moved stiffly and slowly, but when she took his arm again to get it over her shoulder, she realized he was shaking again. Really shaking. The kind of intense shivering the body did to warm itself. Hypothermia...and more than a mild case.

  “It’s not far.” She held him as best she could and they wove a sliding path for the machine, Max keeping pace with them.

  When she got him on the machine, she dug into the back and pulled out an insulated jug of hot tea. “It’s ginseng and honey for energy.” She didn’t drink the preservative-laden cocoa, and was trying to get herself back to the habits that had had to be abandoned when things had gotten hairy during the blizzard. “It will warm you some.”

  Anson took the tea and drank. First a few sips, then more deeply.

  When it was half-gone he handed it back. She capped it back up and stowed it in the back compartment.

  Max looked around for his cage...but since it was on the buried ATV she said, “Come, Max.” Hoping he’d follow them.

  “Track,” Anson said, wrapping his arms around her middle. The tea helped a little. He wasn’t shaking so hard now that she thought he would lose his seat on the machine.

  Even so, as a precaution she took a moment and cross-buckled the straps on his gloves, securing them together with his arms around her waist, in case Anson passed out while they rode. The last thing he needed was to fall off and add head trauma to his hypothermia...

  Max barked once, she repeated the command, “Track, Max. Track.” And then fired her rental to life and started back the long way she’d come.

  Too many hurdles had been thrown at her in the past month, she couldn’t keep up or even keep track of what she was supposed to be worrying about from moment to moment. Jude. Anson’s emotional state. Her carbon footprint. Whether the dog would keep up with them. And now whether Anson had frostbite. Again. Never mind how she was going to cope when she had to go...

  She and the universe were going to have to have a long talk after this was over.

  *

  Anson had never actually been covered by snow before, not to that extent. Had the situation been any different, had it not been for Max, had Ellory not been mysteriously out on the mountain on a machine she hated...

  He’d have to ask her about that later.

  Right now, sitting in the examination room at his emergency department, waiting for X-ray results to be read, he was
glad he’d banished her to the waiting room.

  If he had, in fact, broken ribs, as he suspected he had, then she couldn’t know. She’d try to use it to keep him off the mountain, and that couldn’t happen.

  Technically, the doctor checking him out—a colleague he worked with during his six months of the year when he wasn’t on winter duty—was supposed to report his injury to Frank, who would then suspend him from duty. But Anson had gotten hurt while on his own time, since he’d been ordered off the search and had been actively disobeying. And he could ride around the mountains on his snowmobile without much physical exertion. When he found Jude, he’d just have to call for someone else to recover the body.

  He owed it to Chelsea and the rest of the group to find the man. He’d looked her in the eye and told her he’d bring Jude home. He’d bring the man home. And on the way out, when this exam was over, he’d stop by Chelsea’s room to let her know he wasn’t giving up.

  *

  Twenty minutes later, having been given a lecture he could’ve done without, Anson had been zipped back into his suit and in a wheelchair, being wheeled back out to the waiting area. Hospital policy, blah-blah-blah. He could walk, but considering he was getting by without being officially reported to superiors he decided not to push his luck.

  Ellory stood as soon as he was wheeled out and came over to take over the pushing. “Are you ready to go?”

  “I want to see Chelsea first. But I have to ride there in this chair...stay in it until I have officially left the hospital after being seen.”

  She wheeled him through the sliding doors toward the elevators. “I know where it is.”

  “How do you know where it is?”

  “I checked while you were being treated. I had a couple of hours to do it.” She waited until they were alone in the elevator to ask him more questions. “What did they say is wrong?”

  “They said I’m all right. It wasn’t the best thing in the world to have happen, and I’m very sore, but it’s not going to kill me. They said to make sure and force a cough once an hour, which is what I expected.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when your ribs are hurt, you don’t want to breathe deeply. That can cause some people to get pneumonia. But if you keep coughing regularly, it keeps your lungs clear.”

  The elevator dinged and she pushed him out and to the left, not mentioning to him that she’d actually gone to check in on Chelsea once while waiting for him and going nuts with worry about him. Mira was watching Max, so Ellory hadn’t even had her furry support system with her to distract her for her wait. Rescue dogs, while service animals, aren’t in the same class as personal service dogs—like seeing-eye dogs—who can go anywhere.

  She didn’t even feel bad about not telling him that she’d gone to see Chelsea. He wasn’t telling her everything, and he’d not let her go into the examination room with him. Because this wasn’t a relationship. This wasn’t a relationship. This wasn’t a relationship.

  Maybe repeating the words again and again would make them finally sink in. She was not his girlfriend. He didn’t love her, he couldn’t love her. It was never going to happen. This was not a relationship.

  As she pushed him into Chelsea’s room the woman sat up in her bed, eyes wide and round as she looked at him.

  “You look like hell,” she informed him. “Looks like this search is wearing everyone to the bone. Maybe you should let someone else do the searching for a while.”

  He shook his head then commandeered the wheels of his chair to wheel right up to Chelsea’s bed, where he could reach over and take his patient’s hand. “I’m all right. Max the wonder dog and Ellory got me out of my little accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “On the back side of the pass there’s a place about midway down the slope, a geographical oddity where there’s flat ground beneath a short, slanted overhang...short in terms of mountains. I stopped the snowmobile there because it was flat and Max needed to water some trees... It was a dumb place to stop. The mantel slid and dumped snow on me, knocking me down but not sweeping me away. It wasn’t enough for that. Not even a proper avalanche, more like all the five feet thick blanket of snow off a big slanted roof dropping on you unexpectedly.”

  “You were lucky,” Chelsea said, her expression soft. Ellory wished she could see inside Anson’s head and read the emotions there as easily as she could read Chelsea’s. She felt guilty that he was still out there.

  Anson shook his head. “Max dug the snow out before I suffocated and then barked loud enough for Ellory to find us.”

  Ellory didn’t know what to do or say. He wouldn’t want her comfort here in front of people, and she didn’t really know what to say or do for him right now to help.

  Chelsea settled her gaze on Anson, still in his chair. “When the storm passed your crew were the only ones who could search for Jude, but they came to visit the other day, and told me how there was no way he could have survived in the snow this long. That it was turning into a recovery mission.”

  Something else Ellory didn’t know was how Chelsea managed to speak so steadily. Now that Ellory knew what it meant to love a man, and remembering the panic she’d felt when she’d realized Anson was under the snow...

  “It doesn’t matter if you find him today or in two weeks now. It’s not worth dying over. They said I’ll be here for a few more weeks at least, maybe even until spring arrives and the snow melts... If there’s no chance that he’s alive...” Chelsea’s throat finally closed, stopping her words.

  There was absolutely nothing she could do or say to help either of them. She opened her mouth to say something, though she had no idea what would help, when a knock behind her had her turning and stepping away from the door.

  Sheriff, a deputy, and Frank.

  Her stomach bottomed out. The presence of three officials together...

  They must have found him.

  *

  “Jude Wyndham has been found.”

  Anson heard the voice, heard the words, and carefully turned the wheelchair he’d been confined to so he could face the doorway and whoever had walked into Chelsea’s hospital room.

  Sheriff Leonard. Deputy Gates. Frank.

  “Where was he?” Anson asked, even though he knew that they’d come to tell Chelsea. One look at her face confirmed for Anson that she wasn’t able to ask the questions she’d later need the answers to.

  “Montana.”

  Montana. He searched his mind for the name of different peaks and valleys in the area, and came up with nothing. “Where is that? I don’t think I’m familiar...”

  He noticed Frank looking at him. Frank, his boss, who didn’t know he’d been hurt today. Not like it mattered now that Jude had been found.

  Frank kept the censure Anson knew he was due out of his voice and his words at least. “The state.”

  “Montana,” Anson repeated, and then again, this time in unison with Chelsea and Ellory, “Montana?”

  “How did he get so far away?” Ellory asked.

  He couldn’t have walked that far during the storm or after without someone noticing. Only an idiot wouldn’t walk west or east to get out of the mountains if he was lost. The area was developed well enough that he’d have stumbled over a road and gotten help before he made it all the freaking way to Montana.

  “I don’t understand. How did he get to Montana?” Chelsea repeated the sentiment.

  “By car. He and a woman were picked up in a bank, trying to cash a stolen check they’d tried and failed to cash in Canada,” Sheriff Leonard said.

  “A woman?” Chelsea asked, her voice rising in pitch.

  “Maybe we should speak about this further in private,” the sheriff said gently to Chelsea, but Anson didn’t need further explanation. He got it.

  A look at Ellory confirmed that she was still as confused as Chelsea was.

  “Elle?” He said her name softly, getting her attention. “Let’s leave them to speak with Chelsea.” He tilted hi
s head toward the wheelchair handles, silently asking her to push him out of the room.

  She stepped behind him, and after giving Chelsea’s hand a supportive squeeze wheeled Anson out of the room. Once out of earshot of those still inside the room she stopped and crouched beside him to whisper, “What were they trying to say to her?”

  “That he was never lost in the pass.” He said the words gently. “The stolen check he and some woman were trying to cash? They were probably Chelsea’s.”

  “He planned it? He abandoned them out there in the cold and...stole from them and left?” Her voice rose, much as Chelsea’s had done. Not only was she shocked that someone would do that, she was angry. Anson could recognize the emotion, even if right now he was surprised to find he didn’t share it. He didn’t actually feel anything.

  “Looks like it. Let’s get out of here.” He nodded in the way they’d come.

  “They could’ve died...” She continued to speak quietly as she pushed him out of the hospital and on to Mira’s car, which she’d borrowed to bring him to the hospital, listing the man’s offenses as they occurred to her.

  She left him sitting at the patient pick-up and drop-off area to get the car, and Anson took his chance to cough and clear his lungs. It hurt. And she’d insist on staying with him tonight to take care of him if she knew what was going on with him.

  *

  A half an hour later, following Anson’s directions, she pulled off the highway onto a one-lane road that had recently been plowed. “What do I do if we meet someone?”

  “We won’t meet anyone. My house is the only one out here,” Anson mumbled, “but I have a service to come plow the lane for the big snows.”

  The road wound through trees on either side, thick enough that Ellory wasn’t sure whether or not there was a ledge anywhere in sight. She drove slowly, afraid of sliding into a ravine in the dark.

  It didn’t take long to break through the trees to a blanket of barely disturbed whiteness. The lane, which she now realized was more of a long driveway, sloped down and back up, following a gently undulating terrain toward a very small house.

  Really small.

  “Anson, is part of your house underground?”