Taming Alaska (So Not Prince Charming Book 1) (22 page)

Screaming and crashing through the trees echo through the gorge as Loki scrambles down to the river. Shane pops off another shot, and Loki cries out before ducking back into the cover of the trees.

Oh
mi madre
. I hide behind the tree, the blood throbbing in my temple.

“I’m going to kill you, Shane,” Loki yells.

“Like you weren’t planning on that already?”

Shane fires another round, and Loki’s curse travels across the water.

“I don’t plan on giving you the chance to kill me, Loki. How’s your arm doing? That must hurt like hell.”

“You mother fucker, Shane. I’m coming for you.”

“I’ll be waiting.” His voice is dead calm.

“Shane, if you give us the girl, we’ll leave you be,” Red says. “We’ll have plenty of time to get away. Come on, she’s just a piece of tail, and I know you’ve got plenty of it chasing you with all that money.”

I feel my ankle to see if it’s broken. It feels sprained.

I can’t stay here. I have to move farther into the cover of the trees. Electricity fires in every nerve, driving me to my feet. Seeing McKenna’s corpse on the ground and Julian floating downstream give me renewed energy.

“Well, she’s mine right now.” Shane shimmies down the other side of the rocks, exposed and vulnerable. A few bullets ping off the rocks, but he manages to get down safely.

“You okay?” he asks, pulling me into him.

“A sprained ankle.”

His face pinches with concern. “Can you walk on it?”

I nod, shouldering my pack. Leaning on Shane, I hobble through the trees, and when we come to a clearing, mountains rise up to the north of us. My body is shaking, and the tears fall freely.

“They’re going to kill us,” I cry, my sanity slipping away.

Shane sits and pulls me onto his lap. “Shhh. It’s okay. We’re going to be fine.”

“We’re not.” If Red and Loki don’t kill us, the animals will. They’ll take us in our sleep. They almost did last night.

Shane strokes my hair, pressing his nose into it. “We have to keep going.”

“I can’t,” I repeat over and over, the sobs overwhelming me. “Red tried to kill me.”

“Actually no. My brother doesn’t miss at that close range.” He lifts my chin up to kiss away my tears.

My lips tighten, keeping me from racking sobs. “I don’t think I can make it any further. The wolves tore your friend apart. It was horrible.”

“Under the circumstances, you’re doing great. If we get over that mountain, I promise to let you sleep.”

A smile almost breaks out, though my body is crying in pain.

He undoes my boot to study my ankle. “It’s a sprain.” He tugs out tape and wraps it around my ankle.

“Thank you,” I whimper while I watch dark puffy clouds scud over the white peaks, most of them hidden.

“We’re going to climb over that,” Shane says, licking his parched lips. “It’ll save us almost 20 miles. The pass is around twelve to thirteen thousand feet, and we need to get over it before the storm breaks.”

Snow covers the peaks, and dark clouds now shadow and cover the tallest ones. “It doesn’t look that bad.” I can do this. Maybe. “Why didn’t we take it before?”

“It’s cold and windy at the summit, and I only have enough winter gear for one of us. The other problem is that ridgeline is famous for avalanches, and there’s already a lot of snow on it. When that storm breaks, we’re screwed.”

Shane digs through his pack to pull out gloves and a hat. “Put on your long underwear and wool.”

I strip down to my panties and socks and tug on the silk long underwear Shane told me to buy. He stares admiringly at my nearly bare butt.

He lets out a breath, his hand gliding over it. “If we get out of this alive, I will fuck you hard.”

I shrug on the wool sweater over my flannel shirt before pulling on my down jacket and shell. “If I wasn’t so terrified, I’d look forward to that.”

“Being frightened will help keep you alive.” He grins. “I can’t wait to put you to bed.”

I wish I had his confidence because mine has been stripped away.

Shane lets me keep his waterproof pants while he tugs on a pair of jeans and his Carhartt pants over his long underwear. We both don gloves and hats.

He detaches the snowshoes bungeed to my pack that I insisted we bring from his campsite. “Put these on.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll manage.”

“You weigh more than me.”

“Put them on.” His voice is stern, like he’s dealing with an insolent child.

In my fatigued state, I almost snap at him, but there’s no point arguing with him. I don’t know what I’m doing, and he does.

Near the base, the snow is light, but as we ascend, it deepens, and Shane sinks sometimes up to his thighs. The dark clouds rumble over the mountain. I’ve never seen snow and thunder, and this sends an unwanted thrill into my chest.

After three hours, we near the summit of the pass. My breathing becomes labored, and the exhaustion catches up to me. I’ve been hiking at this altitude in the summer, but I’ve never had to climb up it. I stop and drink water and so does Shane.

“This will put us a day ahead of Red and Loki. There are cabins over these mountains we can stay in for the night, then it’s only another ten miles to Tonakwa.”

I climb to the top to look over it. “We’re that close?” Excitement rises in my voice.

“Yes.” He points to a long ledge of overhanging snow. “We need to move past that, and it’s unstable. I’ll go first across the channel.”

“Can’t we cause it to collapse before we head down to the other side?” I swallow back the fear of the countless feet of snow curled over the ridge, the wind whipping off a fine mist of crystals.

“No. Sound doesn’t usually cause it to let loose. It’s the temperature and/or weight of the snow.”

“Why not go down over there?”

“The snow has covered the cliff, and we’d have to walk through several feet of snow and hope we don’t fall off it.”

I nod and quietly follow Shane. So far the cold hasn’t leaked through my shell, but my surge of energy has long since left me. I’m running on empty.

Shane attaches a rope to him and me. “I’ll go across. When I tug hard on the rope, then you come. Okay?”

I nod while watching him tread cautiously beside the massive wall of snow, its lip curling over him.

While just standing there and waiting, I try to catch my breath, but it’s hard. As I slog through the snow, my head lightens and dizziness takes over. Large plump snowflakes float in the wind and soon the wind picks up and tosses the flurries around us. I don’t feel good. My head sways back and forth, and so does the mountain.

My eyes blink behind my sunglasses. I wish I had goggles on. Shane does.

I lose Shane in the flurry of snow blinding me. Pain stabs my head, and I stumble to my knees. The air is squeezed from my lungs, and I topple over.

Chapter Twenty

Shane

The faint sound of Cyn falling in the snow catches on the wind. I spin around to barely see her face first in the snow. I hurry back to her with one eye on the ledge of snow curled a hundred feet above me. For now, it’s holding.

Her face is cool to the touch, and she’s out cold. The dark smudges under her eyes appear like bruises in the afternoon sky. I pull one of the heat packs out from my backpack, activate it, and place it under her shirt. I don’t know if it’s the cold or exhaustion that she has succumbed to. If it’s hypothermia, I need to get her off this mountain.

I don’t want to lose her. I swallow down the fear suffocating me. “Don’t die on me, Princess.” I kiss her cheek.

I turn her over so she’s no longer face down in the snow. The strain from the past few days twitches in her brows. Her shoulders tremble, shaking off the cold.

After unbinding the snowshoes from her boots, I pull off her pack and bind it to her chest. I also bind my rifle to her, just in case we are separated. My arms wrap around her incredibly sexy body bundled up like the Michelin man. She lies limply in my grasp, causing the muscles in my shoulders to coil into hard knots.

The wind whips off the mountain in jagged shards of cold piercing through my pants. We can’t stay here, or we’ll freeze to death.

I cover her face with a scarf. Once I cross over the channel where the snow could bury us, I’ll drag her across. I’ve lugged a carved up caribou down this mountain before, so she should be no problem. I put on the snowshoes and trudge across. With the way the snow is falling, it’ll be much deeper soon. The bottom of my pants is soaked all the way through, chilling my calves.

The strong gusts push me along, the snow fiercely spiraling around me. On the north side of the mountain, the temperature has plummeted. A shiver snakes its way down my back. If we’re going to survive, we need shelter soon.

The tree line is about another hundred yards below us, and it’s another fifty or so feet across the channel where an avalanche could shoot its way down the mountain, carrying me with it. Once I reach the trees, they’ll help block the storm. I stay above them, so I can pull Cyn down. Before I even get twenty feet across, whiteout conditions blind me. With my compass in hand, I move in the general direction of the trees while crossing the channel.

The firs soon border me on the downhill slope. The wind whips through them, swirling the snow at my feet. I can barely see the trees, so I keep my compass out. If an avalanche occurs, I’ll have to rely on my ears because I can no longer see more than a few feet ahead of me.

My beard ices over while I trudge through the snow. I can hike for miles every day, but I’ve never done this trek at the break-neck pace we’ve kept up for the past week. If my leg muscles are sore, I cannot imagine how Cyn has held up this long.

A large dark mass flashes in the flying snow, skulking quietly downhill from me, thankfully moving away from either of us. It makes me think of McKenna. He didn’t deserve to die, and I hope my bullet found Loki for shooting him. Right now, Red is an accomplice to two murders, and I have no idea how much prison time that means, but I do know I would commit far worse crimes to protect my family.

As I slog through the deep drifts, killing Julian nags at me, even though I had no choice in shooting him. He’s one less hunter tracking us that I have to worry about.

Sweat had dripped into my eyes when Julian entered my crosshairs and I squeezed the trigger. Julian had tumbled over the rock face, his head and limbs snapping off like twigs on the hard granite. Though the shot could’ve instantly killed him, the fall would’ve finished the job. He splashed into the water, the current carrying his body downstream. I cannot get the sickening images out of my mind. I’ve never had any inclination to kill anybody. It gives me great respect for Red who was a sniper and is a decorated soldier.

What if it comes down to living or killing Red? I don’t think I could shoot him, but I sure as hell am not handing Cyn over to him.

Every step I fight the wind, the snowshoes keeping me atop of the heavy, wet snow.

I second-guess my decision to tackle the mountain instead of crossing through the gorge. It’s hard to judge who shot McKenna. It was a good shot, and it probably was meant for Cyn. If that’s true, then this isn’t a kidnapping but murder. With Blake out of the way, who would gain the money—her family? Her dad?

The roar of thunder from above explodes in my ear. There’s too much wind and snow for me to see the trees, so I haul ass out of the channel. There’s plenty of rope so that Cyn shouldn’t be caught in the avalanche. Most of the firs don’t have low hanging branches for me to climb, so I kick off my snowshoes and wrap my arms around a tree, praying Cyn doesn’t get buried.

The roar and whoosh of snow draws nearer and then slams into me. Wave after wave crashes into me before knocking me off. The flow of snow sweeps me up, and I slip, slide, and bang into tree trunks.

The rush of snow finally slows. When it tumbles to a stop, one arm is above my head. The other arm inclines away from me. I can’t move my fingers on that one. The weight of the snow crushes me, like concrete, and squeezes the air from my lungs. I’m screwed.

Chapter Twenty-one

Cyn

Waves crash in my head. He took me to the beach—finally. A smile upturns my lips. That’s so thoughtful of Shane.

No. That’s not it. Snow sparkles and dances around me. Lying on my back, I slide downward, bumping into a tree—an especially scraggly one with a jagged black scar splitting it open, like lightning struck it.

The rope tied around my waist brings me back to the present. Shane was crossing the channel underneath that huge snow wall. He’s tugging on the line for me to follow, but…

The crashing comes above me. Where is Shane? Snow flows underneath me, hurtling me down the mountain, crashing me into trees, dragging me into the channel.

Avalanche.

Panic roars through me, like a wildfire, consuming me with dread. I half think about unleashing myself from the rope, but then I’ll lose Shane.

Whiteness blankets me, so I blow out puffs of sparkling flakes in the late day sun. I dig my heels into the snow to slow me, grasping branches and trunks. My heart races, my blood pounding in my skull. I keep shoving my boots into the snow to slow down. Finally my arms wrap around a sapling, so that I come to a stop.

Snow still spills down the mountain into the cut of the mountain, like a fast moving river, bending trees and plowing over them.

“Shane,” I cry out. The rope. I can follow the rope to him.

The snow in the channel finally slows, leaving a deep blanket of powder that I worry I’ll sink in as I traverse across it.

I try to sit up, but my backpack is harnessed to my chest. I fumble for its bindings—stretchy cords—bungees, so I unhook them, suddenly noticing that Shane left his rifle attached to me. Why?

After standing up, I stare up through the snowy mist. “Shane,” I yell, shouldering the pack and the rifle.

Pulling on the rope, I slog through the drifts. “Shane,” I yell again.

The scraggly tree scorched by lightning leans downhill ahead of me. I keep a mental log of the trees to find my way back out of the channel.