Although his profile photos showed a megahot thirty-nine-year-old guy. Photos of Brett standing beside a Cessna. Brett holding up a string of fish with his parka open to reveal a broad chest. Brett in a suit, holding his niece during her baptism.

The images came together for an athletic, sensitive man with a sexy groomed beard. She couldn’t believe she’d found him online. He said he worked long hours as an airplane mechanic. Couple that with the higher male-to-female ratio in Alaska, and he’d decided to give online dating at try.

Brett: Feels like I know you already. Can’t wait to hear your voice.

Her hand flew to her throat, a nervous habit she’d picked up around four years ago. She chewed her bottom lip, deciding what to say next.

Misty: Sorry it’s taken me so long. Can’t be helped. Leaving my hometown is… complicated.

Brett: Alaska is a big state. We’ll work it out.

No kidding. Alaska had a landmass the size of Texas, California, and Montana combined. Sometimes she felt absorbed by the vastness of it all.

As much as she wished to be from somewhere else, she’d been up-front with Brett about living in America’s last frontier, telling him their remote town had post office box numbers for emergencies. This wasn’t a cult with freaky rituals, just a group of people committed to living off the land as much as possible.

Actually, she looked forward to carrying a lot of that knowledge and mind-set with her out into the world. Not that she was rejecting her hometown, merely embracing a new one because there were limitations to living here. She forced her hand away from her neck and back to the keyboard.

Misty: What if you’re disappointed by me?

Brett: Not possible.

Misty: You don’t know all the problems that come with being with someone like me.

The cursor blink, blink, blinked so long, her heart sped faster. A message popped up.>Except something about the way she peered downward made him want to look too. Was this another trick? He firmed his hold on her wrists. Warily, he tracked her gaze to the patch of slushy earth beside his boot.

A dead face stared back at him through the ice.

Chapter 4

Sunny screamed.

Horror raked up her throat as dead eyes peered at her through a thin sheet of ice and snow. Not just any eyes. Madison’s eyes. The woman she’d escorted through the pass just yesterday.

She clasped her throat, right where the gash gaped across Madison’s severed carotid. The dead woman’s blonde hair fanned around her. The fatal wound was outlined in crystallized drops of frozen blood, as if rusty red tears wept from her neck.

The screams kept coming and she couldn’t make them stop even as each panicked wheeze froze in her lungs. Wade clamped a hand over her mouth just as he’d covered her lips with his moments ago in that unwise, out-of-control kiss.

Oh God, they’d been kissing beside a dead body. Nausea gagged her.

“Careful,” he said softly, urgently. “Too much noise could cause an avalanche.”

His whispered warning launched hysteria at the possibility of being buried alive—with Madison.

What had happened? Where was Ted? And the sheriff’s deputy? Questions dog-piled inside her, shredding through her already raw emotions with vicious teeth.

Her brain went into hyperdrive. Ted and Madison must have been caught in the storm too. Although very clearly she’d been murdered. By whom? A squatter? And where were Ted and the deputy?

God, if she’d thought to look for Ted and Madison the minute the storm started, maybe she would have found her before this.

Or she could be right there under the ice, waxy and dead just like her friend.

Hysteria bubbled until her cries gurgled, much like Madison must have choked on her own blood.

“Sunny? It’s okay,” he continued softly, sliding his arm around her shoulders. “It’s all right. I know the first time you see a dead body it’s scary as hell. I wish I could say it gets better, but it doesn’t. You just learn to hold back the reaction until the crisis passes. And we need to do that now. We need to function so we can get out of here.”

She forced herself to take slow, even breaths, to push cold oxygen and reason to her stunned brain. “Okay. I hear you.”

“Good, now we have to get out of here and make our way to a better pickup zone so my team can bring us in. Then we can notify the authorities about this person so they can work on an ID and notifying the family.”

Tags: Catherine Mann Elite Force Suspense
Source: readsnovelonline.net