"You pick the next s-s-song." Her teeth chattered. "What kind of holiday tunes did you sing growing up?"
Amazing how they'd fought about everything except their differing faiths. "Nah, you go ahead with your next riff."
With memories still clogging his head like an oncoming sinus infection, he didn't want to be funny. He glanced down his stretched legs to his squadron scarf tied around a leg of his survival pants to cinch where the wolf had torn the fabric—jarring loose his radio. Frustration kicked through him again.
"Alicia? More serenades?"
"I've pretty much caroled through the whole Renshaw canon of Christmas tunes."
He scrambled for a new topic that would launch her into a lengthy explanation. They really didn't know much about each other's holiday traditions since they'd been apart last December for different deployments. "What did your family do for the holidays?"
"Regular stuff, the tree, church, Santa, presents. Lots of fruitcake and peppermint hot chocolate. Ah, man, what I wouldn't give for hot chocolate." Her voice went dreamy. "Sometimes we celebrated on a different day than the twenty-fifth...like the year Dad shipped out before Desert Storm cranked into gear."
"Sort of like how Hanukkah dates float from year to year."
"Never thought about it that way, but yeah. It was all about being together for us anyhow because we never knew for sure when Dad would fly out again."
She shifted on her branch, rustling pine needles to the ground in a shower that brought a yip from below.
"This one year movers lost a box of my mother's Christmas decorations."
"I imagine she'd collected things from all over."
"Sure, but those weren't the ones lost. The missing box had the decorations we'd made in school. There was a star with my picture in the middle. And some from when we painted ceramic Twelve Days of Christmas. Hank Jr. and I whipped through eleven days in ten minutes. Darcy worked on her lords-a-leaping for an hour, then realized she'd forgotten to paint the back."
"Ah, man, that bites." An only child, he had different memories. Not bad, just lonely sometimes, which had more to do with being so many grades ahead of everyone else. Probably part of the reason he wanted lots of kids.
He wondered, not for the first freaking time, if she'd wanted kids with that other guy who'd left such a mark on her life she wouldn't even talk about him to her husband.
So why didn't he just ask? Easy answer. Because it was one thing to think she still loved the poor dead bastard and another altogether to hear her say it.
"Actually, Mom told Darcy to leave the half-painted ornament just like it was. She wanted us to remember that we are a work in progress and to keep improving." Her sigh wrapped around the tree, around him. "So that year, she put up all the pretty ornaments. It was a gorgeous tree, no question. But when Mama went to an Officer's Wives Club Christmas tea one night, Daddy brought us construction paper and glue and glitter and popcorn string. We worked for two hours straight to junk up Mama's tree."
"I bet she loved it." His head thunked back against the trunk.
"She really did. It was a perfect Christmas with snow. A couple of weeks later, she died from a fluky aneurysm."
Ice chilled inside him colder than outside. He'd known her mother died, just not when. Which proved how little talking of any importance he and Alicia had done over the past year and a half. >Woof.
A bark. Another. Growls grew louder behind the walls, not the storm howling at all. Guard dogs or wolves? Either way, a death pack. Josh's hand convulsed around Alicia's.
"Shit," he bit out. "Run!"
Chapter 3
Alicia gripped Josh's hand.
She held tight, not from fear of the snarling reverberations chasing them through the cave. But out of a gut-sure sense that her husband would do something recklessly macho if he thought she was in danger.
Holding firm, she sprinted, her feet slipping along the slick rocks and frozen mud. The flashlight beam bounced ahead.
Josh's heat, sweat and intensity seared through their form-fitting flight gloves as they ran. Around a corner. Left or right? Josh shoved right.
Ten steps later, the mouth of the cave came into view.
"Gloves," she shouted. "Grab them."
Her hand sailed down to scoop up her discarded arctic mittens. No time to snag the snowshoes. Thank God they had their goggles dangling around their necks.