Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2) (15 page)

Scott was a strong man, and he’d done his fair share of hoisting this woman over his shoulder and tossing her to the bed, but he’d never before tried carrying her when she was fighting back with every muscle she possessed. She kicked and flailed, hollered at him to stop acting like a barbarian, and did her level best to ensure he never walked again. But he managed to make it all the way to his tent before depositing her on the ground, his breathing heavy and his anger so high he wasn’t sure it registered on a physical scale anymore.

“Now that you’ve wasted a good fifteen minutes of my search, I’m taking Jenga back out there. Alone.”

She looked up at him with murder in her eyes, her own breathing heavy and her hat askew. She’d never looked more beautiful, but he wouldn’t be swayed. He couldn’t afford to.

“Do you want to know the real reason why Newman put me in charge of this?” she asked as he prepared to turn away.

Goddammit. She was doing it again. She was
winning
.

“A hint: it’s not because I’m willing to break the rules.”

“Mara is out there right now,” he begged. “Alone. Lost. Waiting for me. Please let me go.”

“It’s because I make good decisions.” She waited just long enough for her words to register. “That’s right—
good
decisions. I said it.”

He felt himself drawn into her game. “Fine. Name one.”

“I saved that woman’s life by taking a medevac helicopter out against company policy.”

He grunted his incredulity. If that wasn’t evidence of her recklessness, he didn’t know what else was.

“I weighed the risks. I gauged my abilities as a pilot. I knew the potential cost to my career, and I decided her life was worth it.” She gave up her pretense of a lady in distress and picked herself up off the ground, facing him dead-on. “That was a good decision, and I stand by it.”

“Forgive me if I don’t agree.”

“I also made the decision to come out here and help your sorry ass.” She stepped closer, trapping him. “I knew it meant the end to my career. I was aware from the start that it would be a long shot. But I decided that your happiness—that Mara’s life—was worth it. I stand by that one, too, in case you were wondering.”

“Carrie.”

“But you heading out into an isolated forest without a support team or a radio, following the trail of a dog about to pass out from exhaustion, with only an injured woman alone at base camp aware of where you’ve gone or why—no. It’s not a good decision. It’s a bad one, and you know it.”

He felt himself cracking.

“I know it goes against all your pigheaded logic to trust me. I know you’d rather assume I have no idea what I’m doing and that my actions are driven by nothing but luck and chance. But I’m asking you to have confidence in me. For once in your goddamned life, please believe I know what I’m doing.”

“I can’t—”

“No.” Her voice rang through the forest, cracking an echo up into the air. He could have sworn all of nature stopped to heed her command. “For the next few hours, you’re going to sit your ass down and wait for backup. That’s final.”

It wasn’t final. It was just the start. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

Kissing her was probably the wrong reaction to this situation—his reactions were always the wrong ones—but it was the only thing he could think of that would make the next two hours of his life bearable.

She was the only person he’d ever known who made anything bearable. That was the problem. As his mouth moved over hers, reveling in the cold of her lips and the heat of her tongue, the two polar opposites that typified every one of their interactions, he knew there would never be any other way to kiss her. It would always be fraught with extremes. It would always require his complete participation.

“You can’t kiss me and assume it’ll make everything okay,” she said, her words pressed into his lips, her mouth never once leaving his. She ripped the hat from his head and tossed it aside, giving her a better grip on his hair.

“I know.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her flush against him. There were too layers between them for his liking, and he began tugging at her zippers, his zippers, so many different ways to get in and under and closer together.

“And you don’t get to erase all the things you’ve done by forcing me into your tent and having your wicked way with me.”

Given the current wind chill factor nipping at their newly exposed skin, forcing her into his tent seemed like a good idea. He pulled away long enough to secure Jenga inside her well-lined crate before grabbing Carrie and hoisting her—with much less flailing this time—into his tent.

Because it was designed for extreme conditions, his tent was small and dark, barely large enough for one person, let alone two. The air was still and close, and he swore he could hear the rhythm of Carrie’s heart in here. He made a move to kiss her again, but she placed a hand flat on his chest, stopping him before he made contact.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Kissing you? I should have thought that was obvious by now.”

Her laugh brought the temperature of the tent up about five degrees. “I mean it. What’s the end goal here? Are we just killing time until the team gets back?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” He groaned and passed a hand over his eyes. The second the kissing stopped, everything else came rushing back. “Would you believe me if I said it’s because I love you?”

She recoiled as if he’d struck her. “That’s not funny.”

No. It really wasn’t. This was the second time he’d declared his love only to be greeted by incredulity and horror.

He sighed and slumped against the slippery wall of his tent, feeling as though an avalanche had fallen onto his shoulders and decided to take up residence there. None of this was going the way he’d expected. Breaking up with Carrie was supposed to free him from his emotions, not multiply them. Coming out here to save Mara was supposed to make him feel whole again, not as though he’d been hollowed out.

Carrie was right. He made bad decisions. He pushed away when he should be holding on for dear life. He made it impossible for anyone to love him. But for some godforsaken reason, Carrie had at least
tried
.

Well, he could try, too, dammit. Maybe it was too late for the two of them and maybe he’d never be able to make up for what he’d done, but until he took that risk, he was just a brokenhearted little boy too afraid to cry.

“Do you know why I sold Mara in the first place?” he asked, his throat raw.

“Because it’s your job?”

He released a soft, bitter laugh. “That’s what I’ve always told myself, but I’m not under contract. I have no obligations to anyone. I could have kept her and brought her out on our own rescue missions. Or I could have placed her with someone local, someone like Ace or Max, so she’d always be close.”

“But you didn’t.”

“But I didn’t,” he agreed. “I loved her too much to keep her, and now she’s the one paying the price.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that.”

Yes, he could. He
should
.

Carrie drew closer, shifting the air around him, filling him with a buzzing sensation like electrical sparks about to fly. She took his hands and held them in her lap, and he wanted to pull back, but it was too late. He didn’t know how to escape anymore.

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “It’s not just Mara I loved too much to keep. It’s all the dogs, all the people, everything in my life that’s even halfway decent. You were right that night at poker, you know.”

“I was?” She coughed. “I mean, of course I was.”

He smiled softly at her, grateful that even now, in the midst of a confession that was ripping his chest open like a decimated voodoo doll, she was able to make everything seem okay. “What you said about me not caring very much about my friends’ personal lives—it was true, but only partially so. I did care. I
do
care. So much that I’ve spent most of my life making sure they don’t know how much.”

“Oh, Scott. They know.”

He nodded, picturing his two best friends and one complete stranger out there on his behalf, asking nothing, giving all.

“They’re not the only ones I’ve let down, the only ones I’ve pushed out into the cold.” He took a deep breath and pressed Carrie’s fingers so tightly she was probably losing circulation. “It’s
you
. It’s always been you. You’re the one I loved too much to keep.”

A strange sound escaped Carrie’s throat, almost a sob, maybe a shout.

“I know I abandoned you after you got in that accident, and it was the worst possible thing I could have done, but you have to understand—I got a taste of what life would be like without you that day, and it was awful.” He frowned, determined to get this part right. She deserved nothing but the raw, honest emotions she’d elicited from him since the very start. “No—that’s not it.
Awful
isn’t the right word. It was the end of me.”

She squeezed his hands. “I was fine.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that. For all I knew, you were dead or dying, and I was never going to hold you in my arms again.” He felt a choking sob rise to his throat. “I’ve seen what that kind of thing can do to a man. My dad’s entire life fell apart after my mom left—he stopped caring about work and his friends and even his own twelve-year-old son.”

He could see Carrie’s eyes fill with tears at the pain of a boy she never knew, at the desperation of the man that boy had become, and felt the familiar pang of fear hit him. She was such a good person, and he’d done nothing but drive her away.

He lifted a hand to her cheek, reveling in the warm curve of her skin against his palm. “All those cruel things I said to you, all those terrible accusations…they weren’t about you. If you walk away with nothing else after this, please at least know that much. They were about me, and how fucking scared it makes me to imagine a world without you in it.”

“Oh, Scott.” She leaned forward to kiss him, her lips parted and soft, her breath filling him with a kind of buoyancy and hope he hadn’t expected. “Did it occur to you that maybe my life would fall apart without you in it, too? Did you stop and think that I might be just as scared as you are?”

Her kiss became greedier, her hands everywhere at once. On his face and in his hair, leaving no part of him untouched.

“But you’re not scared of anything,” he said. Not like him, hiding behind superstition and luck, refusing to live for fear of the pain.

She stopped kissing him long enough to laugh. “Are you kidding? I’m terrified. Of everything—all the time. Of flying. Of being in charge. Of having no job and no future. Of losing the people I care about. But I push through. I live anyway.”

“How?”

“It’s easy. I weigh the risks. I make good decisions.” She smiled against his lips. “I told you there’s a reason Newman put me in charge. It turns out I’m a genius at this kind of thing. All you have to do is ask yourself if it’s worth it.”

Scott’s entire adult life had built on the idea that love was never worth it—neither the highs nor the lows, the pleasure or the pain. But everything changed when he heard her say the words out loud, a softly sighed, “You have to decide. Are you willing to trust me, knowing there are no guarantees, knowing I hold your happiness in the palm of my hand? Is loving me worth the pain?”

It was so simple, yet somehow the most important question he’d ever been asked.

“Yes,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, his heart one hundred percent sure. “It’s worth it.
You’re
worth it, Carrie.”

When he kissed her this time, it was with none of his earlier sense of urgency. Gone was the urge to drive out his fears over Mara. No more was there a need to feel something—
anything
—to avoid thinking about the inevitable.

He was scared as hell. About being with Carrie, about his favorite dog lost somewhere out there in the forest, about what was going to happen tomorrow and the day after that and all the days after. And that was okay. That was how it worked. That was what it meant to be alive.

He took his time savoring the taste of Carrie, the feel of her, the way the two of them fit perfectly inside the tent once they managed to get horizontal. Horizontal was something that had always come rather easily to them in the past, but they were slow, almost clumsy as they navigated through this new kind of interaction.

It was hard to toss a woman to the ground and fuck her silly when you couldn’t stop breathing life into her kiss. It was hard to tear off your clothes and get to the good part when your hands couldn’t leave the soft curves of her body.

“So many goddamned layers,” he muttered as he struggled with the zipper of—what else?—his red vest. He was seriously burning that thing if they made it home alive. “Remind me why we don’t do rescues in the tropics instead?”

“Spiders.”

“Ah. Yes.” That would do it.

“Here. You’re wrecking it.” She reached up and deftly maneuvered the zipper. He was happy to get out of the damn vest, a reminder of old habits and stupid mistakes, but she was almost reverent as she set it carefully to the side. “I’ve grown fond of that old thing.”

“You can have it,” he said.

“Gee, thanks. Your crusty bad luck castoffs have been my goal this whole time. How’d you know?”

He laughed and leaned down to kiss her again, grateful that he
could
laugh at a time like this, and it wasn’t too much longer before they managed to get the rest of the way out of their clothes. On a rescue like this one, Carrie skipped the expensive lingerie for more serviceable underwear, but Scott didn’t care. There was no need for her to lift her perfectly formed breasts with padding and underwire, no call for straps and lace when the body underneath was everything a man could want.

And she was everything to him—he knew that now. He ran his fingers along the slope of her clavicle and down her side, watching with rapt attention as her nipples hardened in anticipation of his touch. He gloried in her neck and laved at her breasts. He opened her thighs and knew, without needing to slip a finger inside her, that she would be wet and ready to receive him.