Sajit had showed her a picture on his phone of his newborn baby. A tiny person he’d never met. Maybe he’d survived, and he would go home to his girlfriend and meet that baby.
Maybe.
“Everything’s going to move fast once we hit the ground,” Doctor Doom said. “It helps to know where you’re headed.”
“Sure.”
Sajit. Katix. Katix had a daughter, too, younger than Rosemary’s. Katix was from Alaska. Katix made the best coffee, and Rosemary didn’t know if she’d died in a hurricane of cold, her breath stolen right from her lungs. If she’d suffered or for how long. She didn’t know.
“Do you have a plan?”
First Everest in May. Denali in July. Elbrus in August. Rosemary had a plan, and she wanted him
to stop annoying her with questions so she looked up, the angle too abrupt with his arm around her, his face and neck close, his warmth, the square shapes of his chin and jawline.
A skull under there. Muscles, organs, blood, bone.
She didn’t want to die on a mountain.
“I don’t think so.”
His arm tightened, drew her close, pushed the wool of his knit cap into her forehead, hard. She felt his breath against her face. “You’re okay.”
She wasn’t.
“Everything’s okay.”
It wasn’t.
“It will be.”
It wouldn’t.
She closed her eyes, pressed her head against his head, her skin into his skin, her coat into his coat, because it never would, again.
It never would be the same, and it never would be okay.
“We’ll figure it out. I promise.”
Rosemary didn’t believe him. But all the way to Lukla, she clung to his promise, clung to his coat like his body was the rock she’d wrecked her ship against.
She didn’t let go until the helicopter landed and the world fell silent.
Chapter 3
With a tray balanced on his left palm and a bottle of wine dangling from his right hand, Kal Beckett rapped his knuckles against the door.
It was a thick door. So thick, he wondered if she could even hear him in there.
She had to be able to hear him, though. If she couldn’t, how would the lodge staff ever manage to rouse its trekker clientele to accept room service, or kick them out the morning after a bender?
He rapped on the door again.
She opened it, and his whole field of vision went suddenly white and pink, wet hair sending runnels of water down her—
Naked.
Holy shit, she was stark naked. She was—