On Thin Ice (Special Ops) (13 page)

He had been blessed with brain, not brawn. “I hope we hear from him soon. I can get the plane in the air.”

“If we don’t hear back from him soon we’ll pick a landing strip and then when Jet contacts me I’ll tell him where to head. I don’t want him to have to wait too long for transport. I find long waits leave too much room for a relatively good situation to sour.”

Aaron nodded as he wrapped his arm around Sakura. She was holding up on the outside, as she always did, but he could tell she was just as shattered on the inside as he was. Sakura hid her emotions well, but she couldn’t hide them from him. A subtle crease in her forehead, narrowing of her eyes, or the way she clasped her fingers together and rubbed her right index finger against the back of her hand, always told him when she was nervous, scared, sad, or angry. He could read her; maybe that’s why they were so perfect for each other. With him she didn’t have to pretend to be anybody; she could be herself. She had grown up and spent the greater part of her young adult life trying to please her family and be the woman they demanded her to be, but with him she didn’t have to do any of that. He wanted her. She still slipped, from time to time, back into her old ways of placating people, but he wouldn’t tolerate it. He wouldn’t allow her to raise their daughter that way either. He would have highly doubted anybody could tame that girl. She was born with a fire and spirit that neither he nor Sakura tried to squelch. Yet she possessed a fear and vulnerability very few people ever had a chance to see. She was stubborn and a fighter, which she got from him. She was graceful and beautiful which he would say she got from Sakura.

Akira looked up through the trees. She could see the rays of the sun filtering through the coverage of leaves and tree limbs. It was rather beautiful up here. If circumstances were different she could really enjoy this. She could envision that she and Jet were off on a secluded trip with each other. That he had taken her up on this mountain to experience nature with him. He clearly was skilled with hiking given his ability to navigate the terrain, plus he was prepared even though he hadn’t come to Alaska for a nature hiking trip.

She was so in love with the man it was crazy. She knew she would never be able to love another. All those months of emailing him had been amazing. He had written her back. She wasn’t sure he would, but that hadn’t stopped her from sneaking into her dad’s office and finding Jet’s email address. She found the phone number to the Squadron office, but she didn’t want to call him at work—of course part of that was playing chicken; email was just easier to do without making a fool of herself. She laughed internally. She had still made a fool of herself. Their emails were short, friendly, but each time she had learned a little more about him. He was guarded with his words and she figured that came from his years in the military. She assumed he had learned not to give too much information, not to divulge anything he didn’t want anybody to know, but his walls weren’t so high that he didn’t give her some glimpse into himself.

Those emails had been the highlight of her morning. She loved waking up to find his reply in her inbox. And when the reply wasn’t there she felt a hint of despair. She knew that was silly, maybe even stupid, but not seeing his name in her inbox in the morning dampened her day just as much as seeing his name there had given her a rush of excitement and happiness. It was like opening a beautifully wrapped package. It was like some mystery awaited her and she couldn’t wait to read his words.

She had been happy with the way things were but she had gone and mucked it up by sending him an instant message at work. He was logged in to his account and she saw that he was available for chats. She figured he had forgotten to sign out of the messenger section because never before had he been logged on while she was on. Or maybe he had been logged on and he was just hiding out in the invisibility mode. She couldn’t say for sure. She just knew that he was never available for instant messaging before that day and for some reason she felt the need to send him a message. She didn’t know if he would respond, or if he would even want to chat with her, but she tried it. For some crazy reason she decided to be bold and tell him that she had a dream about him. She had worked her bottom lip between her teeth waiting on a response from him and when she got it she felt her heartbeat increase as if it were trying to pound its way out of her chest. Maybe it was trying to pound some sense into her head. She clearly wasn’t listening because she went on and on about her dream, how he had come into the arena where she was practicing and taken her right there on the ice. She had told him in great detail how he had stripped her body naked, the words he had said to her that she would never repeat out loud because she would probably turn a dozen shades of red. Thinking about them made her blush, let alone saying them out loud. She had told him in great detail about her erotic dream and how she felt. She had told him in great detail the sensations she could feel when in her dream his hands caressed her body and his mouth explored hers, kissing her into some sexual haze of ecstasy. She had told him the things he made her feel and that for the first time in her life she had experienced an orgasm in her dreams. “You gave me that,” she had told him. “In my dreams you gave me that and I wanted it. I gave myself to you without hesitation. I just thought you should know that I’d willingly give my body to you in my waking world too.” She had lost her nervous shyness somewhere along the way. Very few people knew how shy she actually was. She faked being sociable when she had to be but being honest she would say large parties made her nervous. Skating and competitions weren’t the same as parties. Everybody backstage was too busy worrying about their own routine to worry about making idle chit chat. There were some moments of boisterous sociable activity, but it never looked strange for anybody to find a quiet corner to stretch out in and keep their muscles warmed up and ready to skate.

She hadn’t lied to Jet when she told him the places she felt safe was at home and on the ice. Those were the only places she felt safe, free, happy and completely without reservation. But she left out the fact that for the brief time they had emailed each other she felt safe with him. She felt comfortable telling him things she hadn’t told anybody else. Like when she told him about Jenny Ranger’s trainer taking great liberties with his hand on her butt at one of the competitions when she was fifteen. She hadn’t told anybody that before—not even her father. She had given the man a hard slap on his face though, and then she one upped that humiliation by doing exactly what he had said she couldn’t do—beat Jenny for the title.

She felt safe with Jet and maybe that’s why she had told him about her dream. Or maybe she told him because she was still thinking about it in her waking hours—longing for it so desperately that she hoped telling him about it would remind him that she is a woman. She wanted him to realize that she is a beautiful woman; maybe not perfectly gorgeous or model perfect, but beautiful and honest and smart, and perfect for him. Instead it had pushed him away and she had lost those emails, that friendship. Back then she ached for the friendship, for the emails, for him…she ached for him still.

She took a step back trying to see the eagle soaring overhead. The loops it did in the sky made her think of skating movements to try, as nature always had a way of doing. She didn’t realize she was so close to the edge of the hill until she took one more step back and felt the three-inch heel of her dress boot connect with nothing but air. She fell backwards on a loud cry. She didn’t know how far she would go because she hadn’t paid attention to the dip in the earth. She just knew she was rolling rapidly downward, trying desperately to grab on to branches, dirt, rocks, anything that would slow her fall, but the only thing that stopped her was the bottom—a hard impact with the ground that jolted her body and sent her world into darkness.

Jet had only stopped for a minute. He was taking the same way back that he had come up, which normally he didn’t do, but he didn’t have a choice this time. It was the quickest route and he hadn’t exactly had a chance to get to intimately know the map in a way that allowed him to adlib the exit strategy. He stopped because he needed some water. He figured she did too. He was digging around for a protein bar for her too because she needed to eat. That’s when he heard her scream, and with a sharp turn he caught sight of her just in time to see her disappear over the edge. His heart jumped inside his chest as he ran to the edge and caught sight of her rapidly descending. He thanked God that it wasn’t the sheer drop he had thought it might be, but the fall was a hard one even if the drop wasn’t straight down.

He quickly grabbed his bag and then found a safer way down, grabbing on to smaller trees to keep from losing his footing and suffering the same kind of fall. When he reached her she was face down on the ground and unconscious. He checked her pulse. She had a heartbeat which was the most important thing to him. He checked her body for breaks, but without her conscious he couldn’t be sure that something on the inside wasn’t fractured. At least there weren’t any jagged bones sticking out of her skin. He rolled her over onto her back and looked at the dirt that marred her face, her body and her hands. She had struggled to try to get a grip as she fell and the small cuts and scrapes, along with the dirt, was evidence of that.

They couldn’t stay there. It was too open from the front. Anybody, mainly the bad guys, with an off road vehicle could easily spot them. He hoisted her into his arms and carried her off into the sparse forest area at the bottom of the dangerous slope. He wouldn’t be able to get back up there carrying her. In fact, he doubted he would be able to get back up there without some spikes or a rope. How he made it down was a mystery. The only thing he could chalk it up to was that he was a man on a mission and his fear and concern for Akira had propelled him downward with caution, but looking at the upward slope, there was no way he was going to be able to get her up there…he probably wouldn’t even be able to get himself back up there. He was going to have to find another way.

He carried her as far in as he could. Up there they had an abundance of tree coverage while down here there were huge gaps in between and if those guys had awakened, which he was sure they had by now, and realized Akira was gone he was sure they were using that vehicle he thought he saw. They would know this area intimately and would have no trouble navigating it. He wasn’t sure how much of a lead they still had, but he was sure that he couldn’t continue onward with her unconscious. Carrying the pack on his back and her in his arms, with the higher elevation and the thinner air wasn’t exactly going to leave a lot of energy for hours of movement at this pace. He was a man who hiked in nature, did climbs in dangerous terrains and had been higher in the mountains than this, but he wasn’t carrying one hundred five pounds of woman in his arms when he did it either.

When he found an area where he could safely situate them he put her down on the ground and stroked her hair back out of her face. Loose strands fell freely from the ponytail she had worn. “Woman, I swear you’re going to drive me crazy with worry for you,” he said lightly. He worried about her far too often. Even when he saw her skating on a live televised skating program and he knew she was preparing to do a jump he had this moment of heart in throat feeling until after she safely executed the jump. On the few occasions when he saw her fall he had found himself edging closer to the television, holding his breath while waiting to see if she had injured herself. She always got back up, and she always had a smile on her face when she did—when it wasn’t a competition that is. He had seen some of her earlier competitions and when she didn’t execute the jump, even if she didn’t fall, but if a triple became a double, he could see the look of disappointment in her eyes. Her facial expression didn’t give her disappointment away, but her eyes did. He had studied her that much. He had learned so much about her that he knew the look even if the others didn’t. For some reason, every time one of the commentators felt the need to keep harping on the fact that she was supposed to do a triple he felt the sudden urge to punch one of them.

He didn’t know how she did it really, standing there watching the numbers come in and being judged. Even when she delivered a flawless program there were times when a judge felt the need to give a lower score just to give one. Some people, he had said, just liked to try to tear people down. He would love to see that judge get out on the ice and try to do even a fraction of the things she could do.

He used the first aid kit to clean up her scrapes on the palms of her hand. He cleaned the dirt off her face and made sure there weren’t any injuries there—other than the ones she already had from the bastard who hit her.

He looked down at her, feeling the need to touch her once more he brushed the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “I’m right here. You’re okay,” he spoke softly trying to reassure her. He didn’t know if she could hear him and understand him, but he wanted her to know she was okay and that he was here. He wouldn’t leave her behind.