Page 48 of Lucky Charm

“You warm enough.” He rubbed a hand on her leg, flooded with concern and guilt.

She leaned in to put her mouth closer to Hunt’s ear. “Yes. How far now?”

The snow top was crunching under their feet again indicating a temperature drop. The day had darkened to the gray of a naval battleship.

“We’re an hour. Give me a number, Doc. How bad?”

“Four out of ten. Don’t stop. I can tough it out.” Her shaking voice made her a liar.

“Are you going to do to me what you did last night?” Even in a whisper, the question was sharper than he intended.

“No.” Now she was answering in one word.

Tommy came to Hunt’s side. “LT, we may have company. There’s a group moving parallel to us.”

“How? They on a trail?”

“No, they’re climbing over the denser cliff faces. Which is crazy in this weather, but they may have had lines in place. They don’t seem care if we hear them.”

Hunt went quiet for a minute. “Keep moving. We’ll roll with it and do whatever we gotta do.”

He spoke into his mic. “We may have company. Let’s get to the LZ and in the chopper. Quaid first, Doc second and then we do what we gotta do.”

“Aren’t you coming on the helicopter with me?” Cait’s soft voice was only for his ears. He noted the panic in the way she tightened her hold.

“Honey, we’re going to try.” He spoke quietly. “But not if it means they can’t take off. We’ll provide cover and get you and Quaid off the ground.”

He swore in his head. He hadn’t adequately prepared her. In her mind, she thought they’d all go together like some Hollywood rescue scenario that had nothing to do with reality.

You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.

He opened his mouth to tell her that and then snapped his lips shut. That would not make her feel better.

∞∞∞∞∞

It was fully Hunt’s intention to get them all on the chopper. But staring at the long expanse of flat rock where the helicopter would swoop in, he didn’t need his gut when his years of experience took over.

Shit.

Open hunting season. For them.

Deer in the headlights. For us.

Craptastic. He lived a life where the shit hitting the fan wasn’t unfamiliar. Superior problem-solvingcapabilities was why they paid him top dollar and gave him the big guns to back it up.

Doc being out of harm’s way was all he could think about, and if he ran one more scenario in his head, his brain would flash a disk space full warning. Carter had shifted Quaid to Doogie, but he’d refused to pass off Cait when K-Rock offered. He should have passed her off and reset his focus.

His heart was still in his throat. That little fucker had touched her. Whether he’d killed the man or Cait had, it didn’t matter. The bastard deserved to die, deserved to be attacked by the woman he was kidnapping, deserved the bullet to the back of the head. Somewhere along this mission, he’d lost it: lost his focus, lost his cool, lost his clear-headed thinking, lost his damn heart. In this minute, right here, every decision revolved around protecting what was his.

And that big open space looked like an ambush waiting to happen.

If he had a choice, he’d beam her to the middle of a cornfield in Iowa and put a fence around her. Even after seeing her dedication to caring for the troops, he didn’t care. She wasn’t safe right here right now.

Baxter shifted from his forward position in line and dropped back to him. “Our ride is holding. What do you want me to tell them?”

The sun was dropping rapidly. They were fifteen minutes down the incline into the open.

“Tell them we’re fifteen minutes from the new pickup and to hold. We’ll signal. We’re going to waituntil the last second to pop the flare. Hopefully, our hiking buddies will be offsides when we do so.”