“Ella, do you think you can cut a line down this?”
He glanced at her, and she let go of the rope, unbuckled one boot, and skated up next to him. Stared over.
He said nothing, but he hoped she read in his words exactly what he meant.
I trust you.
To cut a line, yeah, but also to help him figure out tomorrow. How to be the guy who made the right choices and didn’t let his mistakes take him down, but turned them over to God.
Maybe even to trust God, believe that he had something good for Gage.
So he let his question hang in the air.
She turned to him, finally. “I think so. Why?”
“We’re going to go down this backward. I’ll turn him around, go behind you. You guide us down.”
A flare of panic, or perhaps just doubt, flashed in her eyes. But she turned again to the slope. “Okay, let’s do this.”
And right then, all the residual anger broke away. Ella might have been the woman who’d stood against him three years ago, but she’d done it because she’d been trapped, just like him.
It was time to set them both free.
“You can do this, Ella. And this time, I’ll be right behind you.”
She blinked at him, then nodded and gave him a whisper of a smile. Then she knelt beside Oliver. “I am believing you can hear me, Ollie. You’re going to be okay. Just hang on.” Then she pressed a kiss to his forehead.
He frowned, began to squirm.
“Oliver?” Gage knelt beside him, too, raised an eyelid.
Pupils reactive to the light. Oliver groaned. “Leave me alone.”
“Not quite, pal,” Gage said.
Oliver opened his eyes, looked around, clearly confused.
Ella leaned into his line of vision. “Ollie, it’s okay. You had a seizure. But we nearly have you down the mountain—just hang on, okay?”
He frowned again, fear in his eyes.
“You’re in good hands,” Gage said, meaning Ella, but she nodded.
“Gage will get you down.”
He looked over at her, then back to Oliver. “No, we will get you down.”
Oliver swallowed, and his eyes fluttered closed.
Gage stepped in front of the stretcher, turned, and grabbed the stretcher in a dead lift. Wow, Oliver had gained ten pounds in the last five minutes.
Ella took the front end line.
“Big, sweeping turns, okay?”
She nodded. Then with a smile she said, “Try and stay in my line.”
No problem.
Just go slow. Ella kept the words in her head, turning them over and over as she slid down Bishops Cap. Steeper than it looked in the pictures online, the face was more a spoon, dropping fast into a long run at the bottom.
She just had to make it down the face. She gripped the line, guiding the stretcher on the thin board, glancing back now and again at Gage, who braked with everything he possessed, trying not to run her over. He had to be in agony, his legs on fire.
And it was up to her to guide them home. “No, we will get you down,” he’d said to Ollie.
It was the first time he’d said that—we, together, like a team.
She didn’t know what to do with the confusion stirring inside her.
The wind whipped off the edge of the bowl, and it caught her, threw her off balance. She held out her arms, fighting for control, her legs shaking. If she went over the edge of the lip, she’d fall into the next bowl.
And that one boasted a cornice just waiting to collapse.
She made her turn, wide and gentle, brought the makeshift sled around, and traversed her way across the bowl, the other direction, toward the ridge.
“You’re doing great!”
Gage’s voice carried on the wind, and she glanced back at him. He held up the sled as if he’d been lifting weights his entire life. Nodded at her. “But keep your eye on the slope!”
Right. She skidded toward the next turn, took it easy and wide. Gage followed her.
See, this wasn’t so hard. Just one turn at a time, not unlike how she’d slarved Angel’s Wings.
And maybe that was the key to figuring out how to get Gage to trust her again, to prove to him that she wouldn’t betray him.
Just go slow. Keep it easy. Except nothing felt slow or easy with Gage. Theirs had been a whirlwind romance from the beginning. Sure, he hadn’t actually asked her out until the third day, but by then they’d spent nearly every waking hour together.
She had already given away her heart to Gage Watson by the time he walked away from their table.
So maybe she couldn’t go slow . . . but she wouldn’t pressure him. Wouldn’t make him feel as if he was stuck with her, just because he’d rescued her brother.
At the bottom, still a few hundred feet down, she spied a couple of snowmobiles emerge from the thick forest. They angled up toward the snowfield at the base of their bowl.