Page 40 of Burnin' For You
Ho-kay. He’d just let that ride for a minute or two. It weighed nearly a hundred pounds, so probably she’d let it drop sooner than later.
He retrieved the equipment box, undamaged in the crash, opened it, and found water, MREs, and a first aid kit. He brought the supplies over to Kate. Looked at Hannah. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.” And indeed, she looked better, less white and, despite the fattened lip, her eyes had cleared, brightened with determination. She grabbed a bottle of water from the box and headed back to CJ.
“If we get going now, we can bring help back by tonight,” Gilly said, ahurry upin her voice.
But Reuben hesitated. He couldn’t help but crouch before Kate, take her hands in his, hold them. Meet her eyes.
“We’ll be back. I promise.”
She refused to slow him down.
Still, Gilly couldn’t tell if Reuben was favoring her or if this was simply his normal pace. Because to her mind, they should have reached the river by now. With the sun past the apex—she could at least figure that out—daylight had a countdown not in their favor.
“You can go faster,” she said, catching a tree branch Reuben held for her. “And you don’t have to wait for me—I can keep up.”
He hadn’t said much the first couple of hours. Could be that he was more injured than he let on…or maybe it took all his energy to climb the first ridge and descend. She ached to her core, her knee screaming as they slipped and spilled their way down the ridge. The man seemed to possess an inner Magellan that pointed due east.
Except, maybe he did, or at least understood how the forest worked, because he stopped every once in a while to sniff the air, check the trees, orient himself to the sun. Listen.
Apparently, she’d trekked into the woods with Daniel Boone. Or maybe this was Lewis…which left her as Clark? Or Sacajawea.
Whatever the case, she wasn’t here as a tagalong.
But it had taken all her energy.
A slight frown creased his face as he glanced over his shoulder, catching another tree branch out of his way. “I’m moving as fast as is prudent,” he said. “We don’t want to get off course. Besides, the ground is rutted, and if we turn an ankle or get hurt, that won’t help Jed or CJ.”
He waited until she grabbed the branch then turned back to bushwhacking.
What he left out, of course, was the fact that she’d started limping—even she could admit it—over the last hour. Her knee burned, and she thought it might be swelling.
She didn’t remember hitting the yoke, but anything could have happened during the blinding seconds they’d careened and tumbled through the rocky creek bed and out over the cliff.
It still felt surreal—everything from the tanks sputtering out to the glide into the trees, to crashing, and even CJ and Jed fighting for their lives.
Cliff, dead where he fell.
The deep breathing she’d done to help CJ get out of his hyperventilation hadn’t just been for him. She’d had to gather her bearings, let the truth sink in.
Somehow she’d screwed up. Despite her extensive preflight check, she’d missed something. How could she have left the base with only half-full tanks of fuel?
She’d killed Cliff, put the rest of her team in jeopardy.
Reuben stood on a balding boulder in a tiny clearing and Gilly climbed up to join him. The forest fell around them, with shaggy, thin black spruce, peeling white paper birch, lush cedar and hemlock, and towering high above, black cottonwood. Despite the heat of the day, the forest shade had cooled her skin, now simmering under the eye of the sun.
“The river, according to my memory, should be about a half mile from here. Listen for it,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
Gilly shaded her eyes, searched for the spiral of smoke, and found it to the west, a thin wisp. The air didn’t quite smell like fire yet, heady instead with the redolence of pine, cedar, and the loam of decaying needles.
“I have a photographic memory.”
“Really?”
He pointed to a tiny blip on the horizon to the northeast. “There’s the lookout tower.”