Running Wild (Wild 3)

The barn is nothing more than a shadow in the darkness when I reach the house, but the door is propped open, and a dark silhouette stands within it.

Tyler.

My blood pounds in my ears as I hop out of my truck and into the frigid night.

“How bad is it this time?” Humor laces his voice as he walks toward me.

“It’s still hanging on by the hinges. The chain snapped.” Kind of like me—clinging to hope, unwilling to let go. I trudge through the deep snow, my pace picking up the closer I get until I’m running. Running toward Tyler and whatever this is between us, unable to get to him fast enough.

But I’m not the only one this time, as he rushes my way.

We collide somewhere in the middle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

March

I pull the cowl of my coat tighter around my face. It’s three a.m., minus ten degrees Fahrenheit, and my nose hairs are clinging together, but the growing cheers as Tyler approaches the Burled Arch for his second Iditarod win give me the warmth I need.

“They look good,” Reed says, and I know his big brown eyes are on Nymeria, trotting alongside Tank, their mouths parted as they pant. He never experienced this last year, but Tero and Anja Rask came in from Finland again, and stayed at the kennel to care for Nala and the puppies. Jonah reluctantly agreed to leave Calla and two-week-old Wren at home to fly Reed up to Nome.

I give the dogs a quick glance as they close in and then my attention shifts to the man coasting in behind them. I haven’t seen Tyler in six days, not since his twenty-four-hour rest at the Ophir checkpoint where I was working. It’s the longest I’ve gone without seeing him, even during his lengthy training runs, preparing for this. He looks exhausted and cold and in need of a long, hot shower that I will gladly join him for back at the inn.

“Come on.” With a hand against Reed’s back, together we weave through the crowd to where the sled and team have come to a stop. By the time we reach it, Tyler is handing out frozen treats for the dogs and officials are rooting through his sled.

The dogs start howling at Reed who gives Tyler a brief hug before dismissing him entirely and dropping to the snow-covered ground to greet his canine companions.

Tyler dives for me, collecting me in his arms while simultaneously leaning into me as if for support. “God, I missed your face. It’s all I’ve pictured for the last two hundred miles.”

I ignore the reality that there are cameras on us and kiss him. “You did it. Again.”

His forehead presses against mine. Ice pellets cling to his short but scruffy beard. “Reed can take them next year.”

I chuckle. “I’ll believe that when I see it.” Tyler may have started this adventure in honor of Mila, but there’s an innate drive in him. I’ve watched him for months now, dedicated to this journey he began after she died—day after day of abandoning a warm bed with me in it for a regimented day of conditioning himself and the dogs, leaving for days and sleeping on straw alongside them on the winter highway between Cantwell and Paxson.

He always returns to me with an unwavering heart.

“So?” He pulls away far enough to meet my eyes, eagerness in his. I see his burning question, begging for an answer.

I’ve learned that same drive laces through every facet of Tyler’s life, the same determination to succeed. He once said that when he’s in, he’s all in, and that wasn’t an exaggeration.

I think we both had intentions of wading into this relationship slowly when we reunited.

And we both figured out quickly—within five minutes of stepping into an empty paddock in the barn—that it would be impossible.

Since then, I’ve grown comfortable in Tyler’s home, spending every night there when he wasn’t out training and I didn’t have an overnight patient, and even some nights when he was away. I’ve discovered Reed’s competitive streak with the help of his PlayStation, and there have been several late nights of trash-talk while he pulverizes me at his video game of choice.

My little cabin in the woods beside the clinic has grown lonely over the months.

But it won’t be lonely for much longer.

It’s been a month since I sat my father down at the table with an apple pie and two bottles of beer and told him that it’s time to sell. Tyler was on a training run, and Liz had just given birth to her third daughter, so my mother was at their place with the older girls. It was just the two of us.

He didn’t argue.

Too much.

We have work ahead of us to get the property ready for the market in the spring. And I have a lot to figure out with how best to continue helping all the animals I’ve come to know and love, including Harry Hatchett’s kennel. But what I do know, without a shadow of doubt, is that there’s no one else I would rather make these decisions with than the man before me, as I begin this next chapter of my life.