He spread the sleeping bag out over her and the mattress; she moved restlessly, trying to adjust her foot so the weight of the down was pressing down on her toes, which made her ankle throb. Damn, this was going to be a pain in the ass, in more ways than one. “I hate being helpless,” she grumbled, then wished she hadn’t complained.
“Yeah, it sucks,” he said bluntly, not bothering with a pep talk or even sympathy, which was okay with her. He’d carried her on his back for hours, so she figured she should at least deal with the pain and inconvenience of a hurt ankle. He then moved on to the business at hand. “Okay, let’s figure out the best way to do this, considering your ankle. We can try the spoon position, with you on your left side.”
That sounded reasonable; she shifted onto her left side, curled into the smallest ball possible, and gingerly placed her right foot on top of her left one. Dare slid under the sleeping bag with her, tucked himself firmly against her and draped his right arm over her waist. They had spent so many hours in constant physical contact that she had felt a little adrift when they weren’t touching; now, feeling him all along her back, his thighs against her butt and legs, something deep inside her relaxed, as if a previously unrecognized need had been fed.
If only the cold would go away. Shivering, she pulled the sleeping bag almost to the top of her head again, hoping their shared body heat would soon begin to seep into her. If she had a hair dryer for her hair … but she didn’t, and having a damp head was making it even more difficult to get warm. Being so exhausted that all she wanted to do was sleep, and not being able to go to sleep because she was so cold, was miserable.
He gave a weary sigh and she felt his arm get heavier. Evidently he wasn’t having the same trouble going to sleep. Angie tried to hold herself still, so her shivering wouldn’t disturb him. She must not have been successful, because after a minute he muttered, “Go ahead and let your teeth chatter; it’ll warm you up faster.”
So she did. She let the bone-rattling shudders shake her from head to toe; her teeth clattered together like castanets. Wave after wave swept through her; she’d relax, thinking they were over, only to be seized by another. Dare held her through the quakes, and gradually the time between them lengthened as her body generated heat and Dare’s warmth began to create a snug haven under the down-filled sleeping bag. With the cold banished, heavy lassitude melted her bones and she felt herself sinking from consciousness.
Just before she went out, Dare’s rough, sleepy voice rumbled grumpily, “I’ll wake up with a hard-on, so don’t give me any shit about it.”
“That’s okay,” Angie mumbled. “It’s too little for me to worry about.” He’d said so, hadn’t he? Then she nestled her face against the mattress and went to sleep as suddenly and deeply as if she’d been dropped over a cliff.
Chad Krugman huddled miserably under the rocky overhang, watching the gray sheets of rain and wondering if it was ever going to stop. During the night the lightning storm had moved on and he’d begun to hope the storm was over, then another wave of thunder and lightning had arrived and the second was even worse than the first. He’d had to spend his time going from horse to horse, settling the bastards down, until that storm, too, had rolled on down the mountains.
That had been the pattern all night long. The thunderstorms just kept coming, and the rain never stopped. Now daylight had arrived, but the day didn’t seem a lot better than the night, other than the fact that he could at least see—but what he could see wasn’t pretty. All that water rushing downward had turned rivulets into torrents, creeks into boiling rivers, and the mountainsides into expanses of mud that he was afraid were going to start sliding, taking trees and rocks and everything else in the path along with it.
He was cold. He guessed it was a good thing that he had the horses, but spending all night in close quarters with four of them wasn’t a good thing. They pissed, they shit, they farted. Sometimes he’d felt as if the smell was burning the hair out of his nose, but whenever he tried to put some distance between himself and the animals, the cold drove him back to them. They stank, but they put off a lot of heat. Chad had a personal misery index that he kept informal track of, and this ranked pretty close to a ten. He liked to know who was causing him trouble, and how much, but he thought actually writing things like that down would edge too close to crazy, plus he never wrote down anything that might come back to bite him in the ass.
Together, Mitchell Davis and Angie Powell had caused him to have a miserable night, and he was feeling very resentful toward both of them, even though Davis was already dead. If he hadn’t had the bright idea of sitting on Angie’s front porch in the dark so he could access her wifi, he never would have been able to track down those financials, and Chad would have been able to kill both of them the way he’d planned. Neither of them would have known what was happening; Angie would be out of the equation and he wouldn’t have to worry about where she was. He still would have had to deal with the rain, but he could have spent the night snug in his tent; he’d have had food and water, and these fucking stupid horses would be in their corral, instead of nearly choking him with their farts.
From the way rain was still pouring down, it didn’t look as if the sun was going to come out anytime soon. That might be good, might be bad. The rain would make it impossible for Angie to walk off the mountain—if she was still alive, which he had to assume until he knew differently—but it also hampered his own progress. The mud was everywhere, footing was treacherous, and he might get hypothermia while riding back to the camp. To make things even worse, visibility was so poor even during daylight that he could ride within a hundred yards of the camp and not be able to see it, which wasn’t a good thing when he wasn’t completely certain where it was.