He needed reason and plans in his life. She was all about the unexpected, flying by gut and instinct while he plotted the odds and targets.
Josh sat up beside her, dropped a quick kiss on her mouth before standing. "We should get dressed. The storm's easing and we'll need to start moving again. My guess is that this Quonset is near the river. We shouldn't have far to go."
He stepped back into his boxers and unhooked his flight suit from the clothesline. His snow pants and parka swayed like ghostly apparitions, reminding him of those chem-gear suits hanging in the cave. More than their own lives depended on them returning to base in one piece.
Leaning back against the wall, he rolled on his socks. Sounds of Alicia dressing tormented the hell out of him. He could wade through quantum physics without hesitation, but he didn't have a clue how to ease the awkwardness between them. Whatever happened to reveling in the afterglow of great sex?
Incredible sex.
Alicia padded to a stop beside him, her reindeer toe socks making a perfect Alicia-contrast to the military precision of her flight suit. "We should have dated longer."
The cross-Atlantic relationship had frustrated the hell out of both of them while they spiked long distance bills to rival the national debt. Sure they had leave time, but scheduling it to coincide was nearly impossible. Getting married was the only way to guarantee a joint assignment. And even that had taken six months to shake down before they'd both made it to Alaska—two people so much in love, married and virtual strangers even after eighteen months.
Add the stress of a move and high-pressure military jobs and was it any wonder they'd crashed and burned on the relationship front? So logical he should have seen it coming, but he hadn't stopped hoping for a different outcome all the way to the ground.
He tugged the zipper up on her flight suit until his knuckles rested against her delicate collarbone. The buzz in his head predicted failure if he didn't get his act together. "Yes, we should have. But we didn't have that luxury."
She reached to clasp his hand in hers. "Have we already done too much damage to our relationship?"
To our love? The rest of her sentence stayed unspoken but was clear as the spirals of light playing through the window. The echo of her softly spoken words rattled around inside his head along with the buzz in his brain.
"I don't know."
The drone increased. Built. Until he realized it wasn't in his head at all.
A vehicle was approaching the Quonset hut.
Chapter 8
Josh yanked Alicia by the arm, jerking her away from the small window inset in the door. He shut down emotions until his brain focused only on processing information. "Someone's out there. Snowmobiles, I
think. Sounds like two."
She scooped her mukluks as he dragged her toward the woodstove. "Let's hope it's a rescue."
Sure, he hoped. His gut told him otherwise. He jammed his feet into his boots. "We'll know soon enough."
Military rescue forces would call out first. Of course someone from the mining operation might try calling out with a bluff, but he was damned good at detecting bluffs. Either way, he wouldn't let the past replay again into some kind of twisted holiday massacre, most definitely not with Alicia playing any part.
Where to go? He considered standing to the side of the door and simply ambushing whoever came through. Answers could come afterward.
He started a step in that direction—then stopped. Frowning, he studied their tin-can shelter. Serious intruders would shoot first, enter later, and the thin metal of the rusting Quonset hut would barely slow a bullet, much less stop it.
"Between the stacks of wood, lie flat," he ordered. Not much of a hiding place, but it would provide protection with the stove beside them as well.
He couldn't allow himself to look at Alicia with her blond hair still tousled from making love. Crouching, he scooped his survival vest and tossed Alicia's to her, as well. He tucked behind the stacked logs with her, shrugged into his vest, drew his flare gun.
Headlights swooped across the Plexiglas window, no stealthy approach. A good sign.
Low voices permeated through, but nothing overly loud or specific to discern - which meant bad news.
This wasn't a military rescue or they would have announced themselves. Still, he could only see two figures. Could there be more lurking?
Alicia held up two fingers in the dimly lit corner, a question puckering her brow. "Only two guys on the snowmobiles?" she whispered.
"Seems so." With some luck, these were only a couple of hunters.
Hunting on Christmas Eve? Yeah, right.