The possibility that she might actually try to kill him splashed cold water all over his libido.
He locked her wrists with his hands to keep her still until he could clear his mind enough to think logically. Except he slowly realized she wasn’t moving after all. Her whole body was stock-still, her eyes wide as she gawked past his shoulder. Her confusion had turned to something that looked a helluva lot like horror as she kept her eyes averted, staring down. Yeah, he was pretty upset at himself too.
Except something about the way she peered downward made him want to look too. Was this another trick? He firmed his hold on her wrists. Warily, he tracked her gaze to the patch of slushy earth beside his boot.
A dead face stared back at him through the ice.
Chapter 4
Sunny screamed.
Horror raked up her throat as dead eyes peered at her through a thin sheet of ice and snow. Not just any eyes. Madison’s eyes. The woman she’d escorted through the pass just yesterday.
She clasped her throat, right where the gash gaped across Madison’s severed carotid. The dead woman’s blonde hair fanned around her. The fatal wound was outlined in crystallized drops of frozen blood, as if rusty red tears wept from her neck.
The screams kept coming and she couldn’t make them stop even as each panicked wheeze froze in her lungs. Wade clamped a hand over her mouth just as he’d covered her lips with his moments ago in that unwise, out-of-control kiss.
Oh God, they’d been kissing beside a dead body. Nausea gagged her.
“Careful,” he said softly, urgently. “Too much noise could cause an avalanche.”
His whispered warning launched hysteria at the possibility of being buried alive—with Madison.
What had happened? Where was Ted? And the sheriff’s deputy? Questions dog-piled inside her, shredding through her already raw emotions with vicious teeth.
Her brain went into hyperdrive. Ted and Madison must have been caught in the storm too. Although very clearly she’d been murdered. By whom? A squatter? And where were Ted and the deputy?
God, if she’d thought to look for Ted and Madison the minute the storm started, maybe she would have found her before this.
Or she could be right there under the ice, waxy and dead just like her friend.
Hysteria bubbled until her cries gurgled, much like Madison must have choked on her own blood.
“Sunny? It’s okay,” he continued softly, sliding his arm around her shoulders. “It’s all right. I know the first time you see a dead body it’s scary as hell. I wish I could say it gets better, but it doesn’t. You just learn to hold back the reaction until the crisis passes. And we need to do that now. We need to function so we can get out of here.”
She forced herself to take slow, even breaths, to push cold oxygen and reason to her stunned brain. “Okay. I hear you.”
“Good, now we have to get out of here and make our way to a better pickup zone so my team can bring us in. Then we can notify the authorities about this person so they can work on an ID and notifying the family.”
He didn’t realize she knew Madison. Her secret was safe for a while longer… Except she needed to know about Ted and the deputy, no matter the cost. “What if there’s someone with her? Shouldn’t we look around?”
“On the off chance? Even though a rescue team could get us out of here, it’s a volatile place to hang out.” He looked at the frozen face, then around the narrow crevasse about twenty feet from the edge above. “She was probably with the original group we rescued. They were so disoriented when we rescued them we never could get a solid count as to whether it was four climbers and a guide, or four people total.”
He squinted up toward the horizon, his face alert. “And if that’s the case, then we need to be careful, because there’s a murderer out there somewhere.”
Her teeth started to chatter from the cold and fear. The fall too, maybe. But her body was definitely going into shock.
He squeezed her shoulder. For comfort? More likely to make sure she couldn’t get away. “Come on. She’s not going anywhere, and we need to think smart.”
She couldn’t hide or play word games anymore. Not with Ted’s life at stake. “I know her. She’s not with the other team, and she must have been murdered recently. Sometime after yesterday morning.” She swallowed hard. “I do guide work and I was out helping her meet up with another, uh, guide today. She had a partner, Ted.”
Her voice cracked with emotion. Damn it, she was stronger than this. But the exhaustion, the horror of seeing Madison, thinking of her friend’s dream to attend college, remembering how she’d always made homemade granola for the whole community at Christmas… It was all too much.
Wade stared into her eyes for four toe-numbing seconds—deciding if she was a party to this horror?—before shaking his head. “Right. You’re good at making crap up, but I’m not letting you run again. If there’s someone else out there, then my team can track him.”
“But what about Ted? The deputy?”
“My first priority is to get you out of here alive. Now let’s go.” He pulled a knife from his boot and began carving a toehold out of the ice.