Courage Dares by Nancy Radke

Author:Nancy Radke [Nancy Radke]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B008JA86NG
Publisher: Bedrock Distribution LLC
Published: 2012-07-08T14:00:00+00:00

19

Connor shifted in his sleeping bag so that Mary could reach the aching muscles in his neck. "We need to start thinking of ways to escape,” he said. “You have any ideas?”

"Not really."

He felt her hands stop moving, then resume, the pressure rougher, more determined. The tension eased in his neck. She worked for a few more minutes, then moved aside to check the snow melting in the pan. The filtered light within the tent cast a soft light over her, emphasizing her beauty.

He peered out through a spot where the flaps didn't quite touch. The other two tents formed a triangle with this one, each leg about twenty feet apart. As long as they kept their voices low, Judd and his loudly talking men wouldn’t hear them.

"If we stay out long enough,” she said, “they're bound to get careless. Once we get your pack down to size, we can pick up the pace again, maybe wear them out. People do irrational things when they get overtired.”

“Like me.” When Ramone challenged them, he had stopped thinking and just acted. Almost got himself killed.

“Or hypothermic. They’d be helpless—"

"And then you'd want to rescue them," he added, feeling sarcastic.

"Oh." She paused. "I didn't think about that. I don't know...." She sat back and stared down at the pan. "Maybe you could go for help."

"I'm not leaving you, Mary. Besides, I'd get lost," he said, meaning it as a joke, but knowing it could easily be true once they got further into the Cascades. At this point he could simply follow their tracks out. Piece of cake.

"How much hiking have you done?" she asked, glancing over at him, her lovely gray eyes full of interest.

"Day hikes, mainly. We had some survival training, for deserts and mountains and jungles.”

“That’s good.”

“I know how to use a sheet of plastic to condense water, but I don't think that’d work out here."

She smiled, a slight twitch of her lips. “Why do you need jungle survival when you're on a ship?"

"I don't exactly stay on the ship. I fly off it—"

"You're a pilot?"

"Yes. Flying is my life. I’d never give it up. Once you've driven a jet, you never want to do anything else."

"I see."

She looked sad and he wondered why.

"You know, there's a hot spring several miles from here,” she said, dropping two food pouches into the pan of boiling water to cook.

“There is?”

“If we made camp close to it, we could walk to the spring after dark. I wouldn't actually be barefoot— I've got insulated booties in my pack to use around the tent. You could wear all three pairs of socks. We wouldn't be able to—"

"They'd follow our tracks the next morning, in the snow."

"Not if more snow happened to fall."

"You're wishing."

"I know."

"We can't depend on wishes."

"I know that, too," she said, sighing.

"But it’s an idea. Let's say we got our snow and made it to the springs. Can we get back to civilization?"

"No." She turned off the stove. "We could build three signal fires and hope someone found us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.