Something in Wendy’s face changed. “Billy Joe—oh, he’d kill me if he heard me call him that to someone else—”
“Why?”
“He’s just never liked his given name. He prefers everyone to call him Yuma.”
“I can do that.”
Wendy smiled. “I’m sure you can.” “You were going to say?”
“Yuma lived up here in these mountains for a few years after he got back from the war. Post-traumatic stress. He knows how to survive these mountains in the winter.”
“That’s good to know. That he’s experienced, I mean, not the other.” “I understood.”
“How did you two meet? Were you just neighbors?”
Wendy smiled again. “Oh, it’s a much more interesting story than that. Billy Joe was a medevac pilot in Vietnam. The experience left him with a lot of nightmares, so for years he lived up in these mountains with some other vets. They just couldn’t handle the bustling world at times. So they kind of built their own hermitage.”
Rory nodded. “That must have been rough.”
“Oh, it was. Anyway, my dad was a Vietnam vet, too, and when Billy Joe got well enough to try to return to life, Dad got him hired as our medevac pilot. Our first one, actually.”
“That was nice of your dad.”
“He lived to regret it.” Wendy laughed quietly, letting Rory know it wasn’t a bad thing. “Anyway, I had a crush on Yuma from the time I was sixteen. He was so much older and so aware of his flaws that he ran from me like a scared rabbit. And finally my dad told me to stop torturing the man.”
“Ouch. That must have hurt.”
“It did at first. But, you know, it finally got through my thick head that my dad was right. I was too young, too inexperienced, and Billy Joe had every reason to avoid me, and not just because I was a kid.”
“So what happened?”
“I went off to nursing school, then worked in a bigcity hospital for a few years until I practically had my own PTSD. When I came back here it was to become the flight nurse with the Emergency Response Team.” She gave a little laugh. “You could say I wasn’t exactly welcome on that helicopter.”
“But something must have changed.”
Wendy nodded, her gaze becoming faraway for a few minutes. “It was rough, but here we are now … together forever as Yuma likes to tease me.” She turned a bit. “Is that water heating?”
Rory looked back. “I see a bit of steam on the surface.”
“Good, we’ll make it yet.”
Even the little bit that Wendy had told her had given her an inkling of what her husband had suffered. And some of it, at least, had to be replaying in her heart and mind.
Rory sighed, realizing she wasn’t the only person on this plane who had serious concerns. Yes, Cait’s life hung in the balance, but surely Wendy must be worrying about Yuma and whether this would affect him.
Yet Wendy soldiered cheerfully on, confident that things would work out. Rory found herself wondering, for the first time, when she had started to lose hope for Cait. Because that’s what was going on here: the loss of hope.
Not just the threat of being stranded, but the loss of hope. Did she really think nothing could save Cait now?
The thought appalled her. She shook it away, mentally stomped it into some dark place she couldn’t afford to look at. Not now.
Twenty minutes later the four of them were sitting in the passenger lounge savoring hot cups of coffee. Cait still slept, but Wendy and Rory had agreed that their next task would be making soup for her.
“The way I see it,” Chase said, “we need to get a fire going outside for at least a little while. We can’t keep that door open too long or we’ll freeze. And cooking with candles is not only slow but could be deadly.”
Rory nodded agreement. No argument with him on that score.
“The wind is a beast, though, so it won’t be easy. We’ll need to cook, and cook fast before the fire gets buried in snow.”
Rory glanced toward one of the few windows still not covered by snow, and could see nothing but white. “It’s that bad?”
“Oh, yeah,” he answered her. “I don’t want to burn any more candles than we absolutely must because of fire danger, but we’re going to have to burn some, obviously. We’ve got protection against the wind, our body heat will help in a space this small, but it’s still going to get pretty cold.”
Rory couldn’t help but glance back at the tiny bedroom where her sister slept. “I hope she can handle it.”
“She’s my top priority,” Chase said flatly. “Cancer?”
Rory nodded. “Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. NHL for short. She hasn’t got a lot of reserves left.”
“I can see that. We’ll keep her warm and fed if I have to light a fire in the aisle, okay?”
“I’m not sure going that far would help anyone.” But for the first time she met his gaze, truly met it, and felt a pleasant, astonishing shock. It wasn’t because those gunmetal eyes for the first time looked gentle, though. No, it was something else, something that heated places she was ashamed to even be aware of at such a time.
A sexual reaction at a time like this? She almost wanted to hang her head until a quiet voice in the back of her mind reminded her that adrenaline, shock and danger did funny things to a person. Life asserted itself in the most primitive way imaginable.
Plus, she was dependent on this guy. It was probably a cavewoman response, nothing more. At the same time, it felt good, shocking though it was, so she just let it be. Something in her life needed to feel good.
But it also put her on guard. She couldn’t afford to lose her mental footing now—most especially now—and not to a primitive impulse to forget all sense and escape into a few moments of hot pleasure.
“What do you do?” Chase’s question shocked her out of her internal dissection.
“What? Why?”
“I’m just wondering if you bring any additional skills to the table here. Yuma and I are trained in survival, and he’s a huge advantage for us in that he lived in these mountains during weather like this, without so much as a cabin. Wendy’s a nurse and can help take care of your sister. So what do you do?”
For the first time in her life, Rory was embarrassed to admit the truth. “I’m a petroleum geologist. I know about finding oil, and I know about drilling for it. The closest I’ve ever come to survival conditions was when I told the men working for me to stop drilling because they were going to hit a pocket of natural gas, and they didn’t listen. And it wasn’t my survival that was at stake.”
