Page 17 of A Winter Wedding Adventure (Adventure Weddings #2)

Kira looked alarmed at his admission, sending his stomach dropping rapidly into the valley as it became clear that his crush on her was one-sided. If she felt any attraction to him, she wasn’t interested in dwelling on it, whereas he could barely think of anything else.

He liked the way she moved: more practical than graceful and always with purpose. He liked that she rarely smiled, making those occasions all the more arresting. He wanted to trust her and lean on her and let her tend all of his wounds.

But she was pushing him back to Carla.

The gondola shuddered into the next station and he scrambled to follow her, groping for her arm and finding her hand.

For a single, startling moment, he held her rough one in his and his mind raced with images of that simple action: holding hers under the table while she struggled through dinner conversation; Kira clutching his before an audition; strolling hand in hand along the lungomare in Naples as the sun set.

She pulled her hand back as they walked out into the stunning sunshine, dissolving the images in his brain. Mattia threw his forearm over his eyes at the sudden glare. ‘Ah, this place is violent !’

‘I don’t think that’s a description I’ve heard before.’

He peeked to find her looking up at something.

When he followed her gaze, he was confronted with a landscape he could never have imagined.

Protrusions of jagged rock erupted from the pillowy cushion of snow.

Directly before him, the ground zoomed up, impossibly steep, to distant peaks he could barely see.

Carefree skiers zigzagged down the slopes, giving him heart failure just watching.

She ushered him to the next station and through the turnstiles as he cricked his neck and bobbed his head to keep his eyes fixed on the mind-altering, high altitude environment.

Taking a seat in the gondola – Kira only scooting closer when someone else piled onto the bench after them – she avoided his gaze, but he wasn’t sensible enough to take her hint.

‘Are you going to ask me why I was looking for you?’

The gondola whooshed off at that moment, making his stomach swoop for what felt like the fiftieth time that day. The pressure in his ears built and he rummaged for his lozenges.

‘These are usually for my voice, but they’re working well for my ears today,’ he commented, hoping to disarm her again. ‘I noticed something was bothering you at dinner.’

Her nostrils flared and that was all he needed to confirm his suspicion that she was upset about something – something to do with the groomsman who seemed to know her. He waited for her to deny it.

When she didn’t respond, he proceeded cautiously. ‘After you saved me from a fridge and patched me up after the icicle incident, I’m the last person who’ll judge you. Let me help, if I can.’

A flicker of dismay was her only discernible reaction. ‘You can’t help,’ she insisted. ‘And I wouldn’t want you to anyway.’

He released a slow breath. Her answer couldn’t have been clearer. He should leave her alone, forget about this bubble he imagined forming around them when they were together.

His mind raced for a way to stop her slipping away, but he was distracted by his own disappointment, by the confounding strength of his desire to be close to her.

Perhaps he was starved for affection, but he’d have to have a screw loose to look for it with her.

Except… deep down, he suspected she was starved for affection too – even more profoundly than he was.

‘All right,’ he said gently – a strategic retreat, for now at least. ‘I just wondered whether it might help to talk about it.’

She glanced at him, unsettled, a blue strand of hair on her cheek.

After a few intense minutes of seeing nothing but her turbulent eyes and crooked lips, the gondola rattled over a pylon with a clunk-clunk, making him jump. The cabin, swinging through the air above the ski slopes, came back into focus.

He glanced out of the window to his right and choked. ‘C-cavolo. Oh my fucking God.’

They were hanging over a deep void on one side, a jagged wall of rock and on the other: nothing. Everything. The whole world. The ground slipped away – far, far away – beneath them as they dangled from the wires.

The pylons they’d just passed were bolted precariously below one rocky peak and the rapidly approaching station perched at the edge of the drop. One false move and…

Right at that moment, the cable car jerked and came to a standstill.

Although it wasn’t still; residual momentum rocked the gondola back and forth on the cables.

His gaze locked in horror on the impossible drop, his ears filled with the muted whistle of the wind and the thick silence, his throat closed until he wasn’t sure he could breathe.

Kira’s shoulder connected with his chest, hard enough to wind him – and then force him to inhale deeply.

Opening his mouth to protest her rough action, he stalled when she didn’t move away again.

She didn’t meet his gaze. Her arms were crossed.

But she leaned . Tight. He sat stock-still, eyes up, and let her press him into the corner of the gondola, wedged safely amidst the violent beauty of the landscape and the terrifying silence.

‘You could look away if it’s making you panic,’ Kira pointed out softly.

‘No, I can’t. It’s powerful… Don’t you feel it? You have to feel it.’

Her breath slipped from her mouth on a soft sigh. ‘You feel everything. It’s exhausting.’ She mumbled the last part, but he heard every word.

‘It’s not as exhausting as pretending I don’t.’

* * *

When the cable car started moving again and they finally got out at the top, making their way to where the others were waiting, Kira’s heart was pounding as though she’d just climbed a new crag at her highest level of difficulty. Riding a gondola with Mattia Bentivoglio was an extreme sport.

How a person could be so jolly after a head injury, while slipping backwards down a snow-covered slope in a pair of silly shoes, Kira had no idea.

‘I am so glad you’re here,’ Ginny mumbled out of the side of her mouth as she tramped after the rest of the group. ‘I can’t imagine being responsible for all of this. I’m starting to think we should always have adventure guides with us!’

Kira swallowed a sharp retort about not being allowed to do her job because she had to play nice instead.

She felt out of her depth and was infinitely annoyed about it.

She couldn’t stop Mattia bumbling into disaster, she couldn’t get him to keep a lid on his feelings – for her sake or anyone else’s – and every conversation seemed to skim topics she didn’t want to touch on.

She wished she’d been able to come up with an excuse for her behaviour at dinner last night.

Mattia might have accepted it and left her alone.

Rav himself might stumble into a taboo topic at any moment and that would be the kind of disaster she couldn’t prepare for. Physical danger would have been preferable, but they were only touring an ice cave on prepared paths and she didn’t even have any risks to keep her mind busy.

The biggest disaster she could picture was her friend Rhys, the photographer, finding out about that time in her past that Rav had been part of.

The team at Great Heart Adventures was her family, but they wouldn’t recognise the idiot she’d been twelve years ago and she didn’t want the embarrassment of them finding out.

At least Ginny kept Rhys busy with unnecessary instructions.

He might never usually photograph people, but this was an ice cave and he was incredibly talented at landscapes.

From the harsh sunlight and blinding snowdrifts above ground, their group of ten – plus the two wedding planners and Rhys – followed their tour guide through a narrow gap in the snow, down wooden steps dug into the ice and into the dim, blue world thirty metres below the ski slopes.

Kira had seen crevasses before – and seracs, ancient ice shaped into fantastical structures by physics and the passage of time.

But she’s never actually been inside a glacier.

On an expedition, it was too dangerous. She didn’t want to imagine the long list of safety measures this place would have to implement to keep the environment stable.

As she shuffled slowly through the warren of tunnels with the group, her mood and her sceptical tendencies led her to lament the taming of this great glacier – for all of five minutes.

Between the ice walls that held millions of cubic metres of water, the air was hushed and still, but heavy with the immensity of the structure.

She couldn’t help asking Mattia, ‘What do you hear?’

He cocked his head like a bird, which was an interesting simile. He’d be one of those colourful males with fancy plumage. ‘Scratching, groaning – lots of echoes. It’s enormous .’

‘Really?’ Kira strained her ears, but all she got were the muted footsteps all around her.

A frown etched onto his brow. ‘I feel like I can hear it moving – a long way away. But this part is still.’

‘That’s right!’ their tour guide piped up.

‘Glaciers are ice rivers, constantly moving, but here it is static, frozen solid to the rocks. It’s unusual, but we wouldn’t be able to visit if this weren’t the case.

You can hear the ice cracking in summer, even though the terminus is nearly four kilometres away. ’

Mattia stayed close to her as they ambled through the tunnels.

‘Did you know sound travels faster in ice than in water? And faster in water than in air?’ he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets.

‘I learned about that when I was a teenager. My mother thought I was making things up.’ How he managed to say that with a fond smile, Kira didn’t know.

‘I could hear things, particularly if I put my ear to it. I told her our neighbours wanted to divorce and when she found out it was true, she was worried I had some supernatural gift. I had to research the speed of sound in different substances to convince her.’

‘So you really can hear four kilometres away in here?’

‘If the icicles would stop dripping, I might hear more. There are cracks everywhere. Instabilities. It’s quite terrifying,’ he finished with a wary glance around him.

There was no adrenaline kick here, no physical challenge, but Kira’s heart beat loudly anyway. What did the mountain care whether she lived or died – whether Mattia held her hand or not? Whether Rav said something that poked the scars on her heart? In here, her life was like a drip of water.

As they waited to descend a ladder, she hung back and tugged off her glove, smoothing her fingers over the wall of ice.

At the entrance, the tunnel had been white: névé and firn, the two stages of transition from snow to ice.

But here, it was a deep blue, the lamplight showing up the colour as it penetrated a few feet.

Air bubbles were trapped in the ice, along with particles of rock and dirt.

Spreading her fingers over the frozen surface, she felt it.

Quickly checking that no one was looking, she pressed her ear to the ice – and heard an immediate pop that sounded close enough to make her jump.

Distant white noise, like waves, created a background symphony, punctuated regularly by clatters and creaks, and Kira suspected she would think differently every time she visited a glacier in the future.

She felt a little light-headed, which made her uneasy.

‘Kira? You coming?’

She jerked her head away from the ice wall at Ginny’s summons, giving her cold ear a vigorous rub. Hurrying down the ladder, she tried to clear her head, but Mattia had waited for her and followed close behind her once they reached flat ground again and her wobbly emotions were all his fault.

‘Is it warmer in here than out there?’ he asked, his brow knit.

She nodded. ‘If there’s ice melting, it must be around zero. You’d survive in here, if you got stranded overnight.’

He shuddered. ‘I don’t know what would be left of me with this incessant drip.

You’d have to talk to me all night.’ He winked and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

He had no right to flirt with her when she was out of her depth.

He especially had no right to look so adorable while he did so.

After the first crevasse, they climbed the ladder again and the path opened out on one side with lights illuminating a shimmering, rippling surface.

‘Is that water?’ Mattia gripped the rope strung along the side and leaned out, his jaw hanging open.

Kira’s lips twitched in amusement. ‘What do you think is all around us?’

He eyed her and even that was cute. ‘All around us is ice, while that is liquid. It’s some kind of miracle.’

‘Don’t call your saints too quickly. It’s thermodynamics.’

‘It’s amazing ,’ he said softly.

Her chest full and tight with pressure – and not the kind of pressure that kept the water a liquid rather than a solid – Kira grinned, a laugh rising from her stomach. ‘It is amazing,’ she agreed.

A group of tourists in a rubber boat floated past and waved, the flash of a camera penetrating the eerie thickness of the ice.

He bit his lip thoughtfully. ‘You feel it,’ he said, a hint of I told you so in his tone. ‘The power of this place.’

‘Unfortunately,’ she quipped.

Moving slowly, as though he didn’t want to alarm her, Mattia came close enough to whisper in her ear, ‘Don’t worry. Your feelings are safe with me.’

With a dazzling smile that was far too cocky for someone who’d slipped while trying to grab an icicle, he inclined his head in an invitation to continue after the others. Kira realised with a start that they’d dropped behind and that was all his fault too.

Up ahead, Alessandra’s exclamations of wonder and delight reached a new crescendo and Kira hurried to catch up with Mattia, peering around his tall frame when he slowed his steps. Her heart rate kicked up again.

She felt his deep gasp at the same time as her own breath caught.