A Matter of Trust(58)

“Ty! It’s Gage calling in.”

Ty turned off the heat on the stove while Brette slid off her stool and followed the rest of the team over to the radio.

“PEAK HQ, PEAK HQ, this is Watson, come in, over,” came the voice again.

“Watson, this is PEAK HQ. What’s your position? Over,” Sierra said.

The noise brought Chet out of his office, where he must have spent the night.

“We’re still on the face of Heaven’s Peak. We didn’t make it to the snow cave, but we’re okay. Heading down the face this morning, and we’ll keep you posted. Over.”

“Roger. No sign of the boys?” Sierra asked, voicing Brette’s question.

“No,” Gage said. “But we’ll find them.”

Brette glanced at Ty then. The sunlight illuminated his profile—strong, with an intensity about it that slid under her skin and into her heart.

Yeah, she very much liked cowboys.

He nodded in the wake of Gage’s words, as if agreeing. Then he turned, met her gaze, and held it.

And Brette forgot all about the mysterious Jess Tagg.





11


ELLA HAD AWOKEN TO GAGE’S VOICE as he finished his call to headquarters.

“They know we’re alive?”

“Yeah. We need to get going.”

Dawn crested into the tent. The wind still rattled the poles, but no more torrential gusts, the kind that could blow them right off the mountainside.

For a second, she simply stayed tucked into her sleeping bag, her gaze on Gage as he pulled his hair back and scratched his fingers through his dark whiskers.

She had the urge to do the same, feel his whiskers between her fingers as she ran her hand along his jawline.

His earlier words caught in her head. “No one in trouble should be worried about whether they deserve help. They need help, and that’s the point.”

But see, it wasn’t that easy. It seemed, to her, there needed to be some sort of payment, some penance, some reason for him to want to help her.

He stretched, moving his arms side to side, then behind his back, and she watched with a greedy eye, a little mesmerized at those snowboarder muscles.

But she averted her eyes when he looked at her. “Are you getting up?”

“My muscles are sludge,” she muttered.

He gave her a tight smile. “C’mon. Let’s see if I can dig us out. By tonight, you and your brother will be back at your resort, drinking cocoa.”

“Oh, I know you’re just trying to make me feel better, but when I find him, I’m going to kill him with my bare hands. Right after I weep with joy.”

“How about if I make you coffee?”

“I’ll trade it for my birthright.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“That was a Jacob-Esau joke my mother used to say.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry.”

He laughed and reached for the pack. “So, your parents are Christians? I mean, the Blairs?”

“Oh yeah. Mansfield and Marjorie never missed a Sunday or Wednesday night at church. And my parents too—Jozef and Alena Laska. I still have my father’s Bible. And my mother’s prayer covering. She was Orthodox until she married my Protestant father—quite the uproar.”

Gage had pulled out the stove, and now he cleared a space for it, then opened the back door. Snow had piled up against it, and he took the shovel, knocked it away. “It’s just a drift. We’re not snowed in.” He leaned out then, and for a second she thought he was getting snow for the container. Then, “C’mere, Ella, you have to see this.”

He came back inside, the finest frosting on his hair, his eyelashes.

He had such pretty dark brown eyes. They bore flecks of gold near the center in the early morning. A new day, fresh starts.

Oh no. Because that thought found her heart. Nope—forgiveness was one thing. Romance, a different story.

They couldn’t go back there. But they could be friends, and she leaned up toward the door in response to his request. He scooted out of the way and she looked out.

A glorious sunrise just barely tipped the eastern ridges, gilding the fresh snow on the peaks an impossible molten gold while striations of deep crimson and fiery orange burned into the deep indigo sky.

“Gorgeous,” she said.

“I know.”

Farther down, in the valley, ragged magenta shadows draped over the crisp white snow, so thick and fluffy it seemed the world had been frosted with one giant dollop of heavenly meringue. Perfect. Unblemished. And probably lethal.

“Can you get us safely down?” she asked as she slid back into the tent.

“Yeah. I got this.” His eyes sparked, just for a second. “As long as . . .”

“I follow you and don’t fly off a cliff.”