Anger washed over Dolly. For once it made her reckless. “There’s no danger of that happening,” she said tartly. Then she struggled to her feet and began the agonizingly slow march to the shelter.

  She had to stop to rest three times.

  To the good, it was the second stop that hit pay dirt. There were a couple of pine cones laying on the ground. She stared at them for several moments, trying to recall why it was a good thing that she’d found them, and then it hit her.

  Pine nuts.

  They were edible—not especially tasty—but food. And even better, the cone was very flammable because, like pine trees, the sap was combustible/could be processed into kerosene. She gathered up the driest she could find using the tail of her shirt as a basket—not that she was able to travel far or gather much. When she got back into the shelter, she was in so much pain, and so exhausted that she took a couple of her pain killers and fell asleep.

  Chance woke her up a while later by burrowing into the cocoon Dolly had made with the wardrobe she’d packed.

  He was cold as a frog and shivering to the point that his teeth were nearly clacking together.

  Inside of five seconds, Dolly was freezing, as well, and wide awake.

  “God! It feels good next to you. I thought I was gonna freeze my ass clean off.” He was silent for a moment. “I may have lost Rusty for good. I had to piss.”

  Dolly uttered a snorting laugh. “You’re just trying to frighten me,” she retorted.

  “How’s that?”

  “You keep telling me you lost wonder boy.”

  He chuckled. “I’m dead serious …. This time.”

  “Trying to lull me into a false sense of security.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then can I warm my hands between your thighs?”

  “My hooha will get lockjaw.”

  He chuckled. “Stop it! I’ll cum and I’m already freezing to death.”

  Dolly snickered, but she lifted her hands and tried to rub some warmth into his arms.

  “That’s only going to work if I get naked. And, believe it or not, I really don’t want to get naked right now.”

  Dolly’s amusement nose dived. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have stayed out so long.”

  “Somebody had to. We’ve got nothing to eat. We aren’t going to last long on just water—as lucky as we are to have that much.”

  Dolly wrestled with herself. “I’ve got a little bit stashed for emergencies,” she admitted.

  “That’s yours,” he said, his voice laced with anger.

  Dolly was silent for several moments, struggling with admitting something that would probably totally unsettle him and send him running—because there was no way to say it without making it sound like a commitment. “I’m not going to make it without you. It’s ours.”

  He lifted up to study her face then, seemed to wrestle with it. “It’s not an emergency … yet.”

  She couldn’t help but notice he hadn’t agreed to share with her because of her need for him. She nodded. “Ok. You’re right. We can do with just water for a little bit. I found something we can eat, though. Probably tastes like shit, but it’s something to put in our stomachs.”

  “What?”

  “Pine nuts. They get kerosene from pines so the cones are very flammable, too. It’ll help with building a fire, at least.”

  He sat up and stared at her. “You’re the most amazing woman, Dolly. I’m starving. Let’s try the nuts.”

  “I couldn’t really get many,” she said apologetically, digging out the handful of nuts she’d gotten and dividing it between them.

  Chance threw his whole palm full into his mouth at once.

  Then he made a face that made her laugh, grinned at her, and chewed them up. “Not too bad,” he said when he’d swallowed them. “Not something I’d choose if I had options, but not bad.”

  He took the pieces of the cones she’d left in a pile and tossed them into their ‘fire pit’ and then broke some of the twigs they’d gathered up and carefully placed those. Then he dug a lighter out of his pocket and flicked it until it caught. The cones, to Dolly’s relief, caught pretty quickly.

  Chance studied the fuel in the lighter grim faced. “This isn’t going to last us much longer. I think we need to gather up fuel for the fire and try to keep it going.”

  Dolly nodded. “Good idea. Small fires. Maybe they’ll see the smoke? When they come looking for us, I mean.”

  She could see from his expression that he had doubts about any rescue any time soon—if at all.

  “Yeah. Maybe. It would probably be better to build a huge bonfire by the plane, but that’s not going to happen.”

  “Sadly, no.”

  He smiled faintly. “You’re better than any bonfire. Just be ready to warm me up when I get back.”

  “Oh joy!” Dolly said, chuckling.

  His eyes gleamed, then he turned and left.

  Sighing, Dolly settled back and dragged her cocoon closer.

  He was nothing if not a man of his word, she thought with a mixture of amusement and dread. He was going to dive in with her just as sure as hell when he came back a snowman.

  It wasn’t quite as thrilling the second time around, but it wasn’t as if he could take a hot shower and warm up in front of a roaring fire.

  She had managed to keep the fire going, thankfully, by feeding it little bits along and along and it had actually warmed up the igloo to where it was just uncomfortably cool instead of barely warmer than outside.

  But the rest of the crew fixed that. When they piled in they brought snow with them and let out most of the trapped heat.

  In retrospect Chance wasn’t even close to being as annoying.

  She didn’t even have much warmth to share with him when he got back, but he worked on the fire before he did anything else, smashing the pine cones, getting the pine nuts and then tossing the cone on the fire. Naturally enough, that caught everybody’s attention. He shared the spoils.

  “Thanks, man!” Bill and Homer said almost in sync.

  “Don’t thank me till you’ve tasted,” Chance said wryly. “They’re filling—not good. Anyway, you should thank Dolly. She’s the one that told me about them. I’ve never heard of pine nuts, and if I had, I wouldn’t have figured out they were from the pine cones.”

  They gave her a nod and tossed back the nuts.

  Liz was the only one that made a big deal about how bad they tasted—no surprise there.

  “I still feel better with something in my belly,” Jeff said pointedly. “Maybe we’ll luck out and get something with the snares if our ride doesn’t show up tomorrow.”

  Everyone looked and listened harder when they left the shelter the following morning.

  Spirits drooped when there wasn’t any sign of the cavalry.

  “Anybody hear anything last night?” Chance asked.

  Everyone exchanged a look and shook their head.

  “It’s probably way too early to expect anything,” Dolly said. “I mean you have to think about everything it takes to put together a search.”

  “I’m thinking they ain’t lookin’ where we are—not that nobody’s lookin’,” Jeff said.

  Dolly suspected that, too, but she hadn’t seen any point in voicing it out loud. She shrugged. “Even if you’re right they’re going to widen the search.”

  Jeff studied her for a long moment. “We need to consider whether we want to keep waiting or try to get ourselves out of this.”

  Chance stiffened and flicked a glance at Dolly. “Dolly isn’t up to it yet, and even if she was, I’ve always heard its best to stay with the crash. It’ll be a lot easier to see than people on the ground.”

  “I don’t know how long we’re gonna survive on pine nuts,” Jeff said tightly. “If we stay too long we’ll be too weak to have a chance of making it.”

  “We’re near the tree line, Jeff. You know it’s at least a mile just to get down the mountain—straight down. And that depends on where we are in the range. It could be twice that.”

  “The ice and the snow are going to make it treacherous, too—until and unless you get below it,” Chance pointed out.

  Jeff nodded. “This is day three. If we haven’t at least seen some sign that somebody’s looking for us by day six, I’m heading down.”

  * * * *

  Jeff’s deadline wasn’t unreasonable.

  Dolly acknowledged that even while it made her struggle with fear.

  Her leg wasn’t getting better that she could tell.

  She’d managed to find and test a makeshift stabilizer, but she couldn’t see that it helped with the pain level that much or the walking, no matter how hard she worked to ignore the pain and try to ‘work out’ what was wrong.

  She was going to get left.

  Nobody had to tell her that the same desperation that had inspired Jeff to decide to take on the trek down the mountain—that had pretty much everybody siding with him—guaranteed they wouldn’t take her, wouldn’t allow her to go.

  Their best chance was to leave her.

  And, try though she might to convince herself otherwise, she knew she didn’t have much hope of survival if she was left to her own devices. She had her brain. She’d spent her entire life in the pursuit of knowledge, purely for the joy of knowing, but she wasn’t going to be physically able to implement what she needed to live.

  Chance hadn’t said a thing, but he was a smart man. He had to know it was going to be his best possibility to survive, too.

  She didn’t want to be left alone in the worse way—because, beyond the fear of dying itself, she was afraid of how she might die.

  A pack of wolves had been drawn to them—or maybe just happened upon them.

  They hadn’t actually approached close enough to be a real threat but once—four days in. Jeff had killed two and the others had taken off.

  Dolly suspected she wasn’t the only one that felt like puking when Jeff took the animals to gut them and dress them. And, really, she’d gotten past the stomach growling, gnawing hunger by that time.

  But she partook like everyone else when she got the chance.

  Because she wanted to live.

  And she tried not to think about the fact that she was probably going to end up wolf food when they left her.

  Then the morning came when Jeff—and the others—began to gather up stuff to leave.

  “You need to rethink this, Jeff,” Chance said tightly. “You’re not just risking your own neck. You’ve convinced these people that you can lead them to safety and you know damned well your prospects aren’t good.”

  “Fuck you, Mr. Malone!” Jeff responded. “This ain’t one of your damned movies where somebody is going to yell ‘cut! That’s a wrap!’ and then everybody goes back to the break trailer to warm up with coffee and donuts! If we stay, we’re one hundred percent gonna die. If we take our chances going down, we at least have a possibility of being found. I’m thinking two or three days and we’ll at least be low enough we’ll have a chance of running across a homeowner.”

  “This is the Rockies,” Chance said tightly. “You know there could be miles between ranches on the mountain.”

  Jeff eyed him resentfully. “I’m damned if I see your reasoning. You so wrapped up in that piece of tail you can’t see anything else?”

  Chance punched him—right in the mouth. He flew back and hit the ground. “Look! I’m sorry man, but don’t talk about her like that.”

  Jeff pulled his gun and aimed it at Chance and Dolly came out of her shock induced de-animation sufficiently to feel like she was going to have a heart attack.

  “Fuck you!” Jeff snarled. “Everybody got their shit? ‘Cause I’m leavin’.”

  The shock from the violence on both sides that had held everyone frozen in place, released them and the entire camp, except for Chance, hustled over to Jeff with everything they could gather up bundled in their arms.

  And that included absolutely everything they’d found to help keep them alive, Dolly saw with terror—including the meat remains from the wolves—except her suitcase.

  She discovered Jeff was looking right at her.

  “Grab her bag, Liz,” Jeff growled.

  Liz whipped a look at him and then at Dolly.

  Then she surged toward Dolly’s suitcase and grabbed the handle.

  Chance made a dive to stop her.

  Jeff fired his gun.

  Everyone froze, staring at Chance and waiting for him to fall.

  Thankfully, the bastard had fired a warning shot into the air.

  “Let it go!” Dolly said hoarsely. “It isn’t worth getting killed for.”

  Chance’s expression turned grimmer, but he didn’t say anything else and he didn’t move.

  Dolly watched Liz haul her bag away, wondering why the hell Liz seemed to hate her when she’d never done anything to her, never uttered a harsh word to her.

  But then Liz flicked a look at Chance and she knew.

  She supposed she would’ve figured it out more quickly if she hadn’t been totally bewitched by Chance herself.

  Liz was another ‘conquest’—at least in the sense that she was obsessed with Chance. Maybe he’d encouraged her and taken advantage by sleeping with her and maybe not.

  He hadn’t slept with her and she was obsessed so she could certainly attest that intimacy wasn’t necessary. Fantasies were enough—maybe even better than the real thing.

  Probably.

  Liz’s hate wasn’t logical or reasonable. She had certainly never been any kind of competition for Chance’s ‘affection’ in whatever form.

  She supposed Liz just didn’t want another woman looking at him covetously.

  It also made more sense, she realized, that Chance had focused on her, if she allowed herself to consider he’d already breached that citadel.

  Some men just didn’t like reruns.

  Been there, done that.

  He might have focused on Carly if she hadn’t been killed.

  Or Carly might already have succumbed to his charms, she thought glumly.

  She met Liz’s gaze, wondering if she should at least try to talk her out of going off with three men, one of whom was certainly off his rocker.

  Liz sneered at her. “You’re the fucking idiot,” she said, almost as if she’d read Dolly’s mind. “You mean nothing to him. He’ll fuck you and toss you back like he does all the women that fawn on him.”

  Chance struggled with his fury and his manners. “I never touched you,” he managed finally from between gritted teeth that showed how furious she’d made him.

  She sent him a triumphant grin and scurried around Jeff, joining Homer and Bill on the trail the plane had made.

  Dolly felt like crying. She swallowed against the knot in her throat. “You should go with them, Chance,” she said quietly.

  He whipped a sharp look at her. “You don’t believe that … bullshit?”

  Dolly shook her head. “I want you to live. It’s your best chance.”

  Chance’s lips thinned. “There’s where you’re wrong, Dolly. And if every lie that’s ever been told about me was the absolute truth, I still wouldn’t go. It isn’t right to leave you and I won’t.”

  Jeff backed slowly away, keeping his pistol trained on Chance until he was far enough he decided Chance wouldn’t try to jump him—or couldn’t. Then he turned and joined the others headed down the mountain.

  Chapter Five

  Dolly could see the tension ease from Chance when the group disappeared. He turned to study her for a long moment, his expression carefully devoid of emotion although his eyes were tumultuous with a mixture of things—anger, certainly.

  She thought hurt, too, but she wasn’t as sure of that.

  “Do you believe her?” he asked tightly.

  Dolly stared at him unhappily.

  It wasn’t that she believed Liz. She’d thought all of those things Liz had said herself.

  He looked away, turned away, and Dolly felt like her heart was breaking. “I know you’re a good man, Frank Mallory.”

  Chance halted in his tracks and swiveled around to look at her as if he was seeing her for the first time. He hesitated for a long moment and finally turned and left.

  Dolly really just wanted to lie down on her pallet and cry her eyes out, but she took herself to task and moved to the closest tree to help pull herself up and then began a search for a ‘walking stick’. Unfortunately, the forest at that point seemed to be almost entirely pine and although they were the type that had some lower branches, the branches weren’t sturdy enough to hold even part of her weight.

  Chance had disappeared by the time she decided to check the wreckage for something to help her get around.

  She thought she was going to lose it then, but she knew she couldn’t afford to unless she just wanted to sit down and wait to die. Sniffing back the urge to cry, she searched until she found something that was sturdy enough to hold her weight, but not so heavy she couldn’t drag it around. She found that, in conjunction with her effort to stabilize the injury, the makeshift walking stick made it possible to cover far more ground than she’d managed since the crash.

  She managed to find the food staple/fuel they’d been relying on—pinecones—loaded up as many as she could and headed back.

  Chance met up with her before she made it back to the shelter. She had a moment to see that he was white faced with fear, to feel a jolt of terror that something horrible was right behind him, and then he almost seemed to run full tilt into her. She bounced back, dropping her load of pinecones, but he caught her tightly with the arms he’d thrown around her.

  “I couldn’t find you,” he said in a voice muffled against her jacket. “I thought …. Baby! You scared me half to death!”

  He was afraid because he thought something had happened to her, she thought blankly?

  And yet—every time he called her baby she had this bizarre sense that he’d confused her with someone else, that what seemed to be happening between them was just some sort of … illusion, something her mind had cooked up because of her crazy crush.

  She loved it. It made her feel special to him when he called her that, but she was pretty sure he probably called all females that—not even just the ones he was sleeping with.

 

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