A Matter of Trust(44)
But he’d wanted to. And as he knelt down beside her now, unsnapping her boots from her board to free her, he realized he still wanted to.
And that gnawed at him. Because he couldn’t get past the fact that she’d destroyed his life and still she’d managed to crawl under his skin. Seeing her again had awakened him to the fact that no, he’d never forgotten Ella Blair. He should have been furious with her. Instead, he could barely catch his breath with the relief that she’d survived.
She’d never been nothing or just a date.
He’d loved her. Or wanted to.
He put his arms around her and tugged, pulling her free of her landing hole. She tumbled over into his arms, her helmet bumping against his.
It wasn’t hard to remember how perfectly she’d fit into his arms.
To make it worse, she held on, her gloves fisted into his jacket.
He’d never forgotten, either, how pretty she was. The kind of pretty that slid into a man, that deepened more inside him a little each day. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, the way her blue-gray eyes shone, the way her deep copper hair curled from the back of her helmet.
He held on to her just a second longer than necessary, perhaps, until she pushed herself off him and rolled onto her back.
Only then did he realize, with a painful start, that he was in very real danger of Ella Blair carving her way into his life again.
She was staring at the sky. “I thought I left my stomach up on that ridge.”
“You pretty much scared the life out of me when you screamed.”
“Sorry I screamed—it was just a reflex. But wow, that was fun.”
“It is fun. I feel like screaming sometimes too.” He looked over at her, gave her a smile.
But she must have related his comment to something in their past because she sat up, pulled her goggles up, and looked at him with so much raw pain in her eyes that he longed to grab back his words.
“I know it must tear you apart. You had so much, and then . . . but you’ve become a rescue skier. That’s so . . . heroic.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“I’m trying too hard, aren’t I?” She made a face. “I just can’t stop talking, can’t stop trying to figure out how to . . . I don’t know, maybe make things better.”
He sat up. “Why don’t we just forget the past and ride? Dropping off a cliff into chin-deep powder is amazing and worthy of a scream.”
Slowly she smiled, and for a moment all the anger, all the hurt he’d stewed in for the last three years drained away, leaving only one brilliant thought.
He was on a mountain again with beautiful Ella Blair. Surrounded by champagne powder and the delicious smile of a girl who once thought he hung the moon.
Maybe she still did.
“We’re going to find your brother, Ella. I promise.”
She nodded, as if blinking back tears, and he had the urge to reach up, touch her cheek.
“Oh!” she said. “Did you see—I wasn’t the only one who made a dent in the hill.” She pointed to two more landing zones, disturbances in the snow not far away. And from them led tracks, now half-swept with snow. “Ollie and Bradley were here.”
If they’d taken his way, they would have missed the trail.
“Good job, Ella,” Gage said, a little chagrined. “But we’d better hurry.” He pointed to the swell of dark storm clouds closing in on the park. More, the wind had whipped up, stirring the snow into whirlwinds of crystalline white. Overhead, too, the cloud cover had thickened, stretching long shadows over the mountain.
He could smell storm in the air, the makings of a blizzard.
“We need to find them before this storm hits and get us all off the mountain,” he said. “You promise that you really didn’t hurt anything?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good—so I promise, no more taking the slow route. But no more going off cliffs before I do, okay?”
She nodded and reached for her board.
He hiked back to his, strapped it on, and slid back to her. It seemed that Oliver knew his trail well, which meant he’d continue down this bowl for the rest of the day, hopefully stopping tonight above Angel’s Wings and Cathedral Canyon.
“Stay right in my path. If they’re below us, we don’t want to set off an avalanche.”
“I’m right behind you.”
He didn’t know why her words filled him up with heat, but it charged through him as he leaned into the slope.
It could be that it wasn’t only Oliver and Bradley who were in over their heads.
Brette had landed in the middle of a journalist’s jackpot. Pure gold surrounded her; every one of the members of the PEAK team was heroic to the bone, evidenced by the team’s current conversation about heading into Glacier National Park to look for missing Oliver, Bradley, and now Gage and Ella.