“I’m okay. The boot’s helping a lot.” The snug lacing and the elastic bandage provided much-needed support, helping stabilize her ankle.
“Are you hurting?”
“It’s kind of a dull ache, that’s all. I’m good.”
Dare kept the pace slow, his eagle eye measuring her progress and the amount of effort she was making. Angie just walked, not making any effort to camouflage her limp; if she had, he’d have known and that would have concerned him more. She was deeply appreciative of the walking stick, which gave her support over the uneven footing and took a lion’s share of strain off her ankle. Tomorrow her arm and shoulder might be sore from the effort, but big deal.
In an ideal situation, she would be sitting on a sofa or recliner with a pillow under her foot and an ice pack on the joint, but “ideal” was dreamland, and reality was that she had to walk. If they’d been moving across flat ground she wouldn’t have had much of a problem, but they weren’t. Downhill, uphill—the angles put a lot of stress on her ankle. Dare tried to mitigate that by moving at a diagonal as much as possible, but the hard reality was that they had to go down.
The mountains weren’t completely tree-covered; there were thick stands of trees, but there were also meadows, rock formations, outcrops, and steep drops. The meadows looked as if they would be the easiest to navigate, but they were so rocky that every step was uneven and her pace slowed to a crawl. They reached one section where there simply was no secure place for her to step. Dare held up his hand. “Wait right there.” He laid his rifle and the saddlebags aside, then returned to grasp her waist. Without noticeable effort he lifted her and swung her over the treacherous part to more solid footing.
She didn’t analyze the moment, she simply put her arms around his neck and kissed him. His size and strength made her feel more feminine than she’d ever felt before in her life, but that paled in comparison to the way he made her feel … treasured. Without hesitation he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in tight, hungrily taking her mouth, kissing her as deeply and thoroughly as if they had all day, as if his plans included pulling off their clothes right there and pushing inside her. Even if that was what he wanted, she didn’t know that she’d object. Her body knew him now, knew his taste and touch and scent, the weight and heft of him, the sounds he made when he came, and she responded to him on what felt like a molecular level, a calling of like to like.
But then he lifted his head and his narrowed blue eyes glinted down at her. “Not that I’m complaining, but what was that for?”
She had to swallow, hard, but she said honestly, “For treating me as if I matter.”
He lifted her off the ground, holding her so their gazes were almost level. His voice went even more gravelly than usual. “You matter to me; you matter a hell of a lot.”
“You matter a hell of a lot to me, too,” she said, and kissed him again, reveling in the moment.
After a minute he pulled his head back, sucking air, his hands kneading her butt cheeks as he worked her back and forth against his erection. “We either stop now, or you’re going to be feeling the wind on your bare ass.”
“If my ass gets bare, yours does, too,” she teased, then rested her face against his and sighed. “But I suppose we’d better keep going. I’m sorry I’m so slow; at this rate, we won’t make it to Lattimore’s before dark.”
“If we don’t, we don’t,” he replied, unperturbed.
Being the cause of their slow pace bothered her, though. At a brisk pace, a person could walk a mile roughly every fifteen minutes; she had no doubt Dare could handle that speed without breaking a sweat if the terrain hadn’t been so rough. She estimated they were moving no faster than a quarter of a mile every fifteen minutes, probably less than that, so not counting any stops to rest or eat they were traveling at less than one mile an hour. What would have been about a four- or five-hour trek for Dare, traveling alone, would take them eight to ten hours because of her, and that wasn’t taking into account any rest stops. There would be places where she could increase her speed, but in the end that wouldn’t be enough to make much difference, especially if they had to take any detours that cost them a lot of time and distance.
They set out again. Determined not to hold him back any more than necessary, Angie did the same thing she’d done when she’d first injured her ankle and was crawling down the mountain: She put the time and distance out of her mind, and concentrated on simply moving. She concentrated on the rhythm of step, walking stick, step; she’d read somewhere that when you were using a single crutch or a cane you held it on your strong side, but that didn’t make sense to her, so she held the walking stick in her right hand and used her upper body strength to take pressure off her ankle. Whether or not her system was as stable as holding the walking stick in her left hand, she couldn’t say, but her object was to keep her ankle from swelling up more than necessary.
Step, walking stick, step. She didn’t let herself flag, didn’t falter. Step, walking stick, step. She kept moving.
If he could have, Dare would have carried her. Did she have any idea how she looked, with her dark eyes so focused and intent, yet at the same time the expression in them was so faraway he doubted she’d hear him if he spoke? She wasn’t going to stop, she wasn’t going to give up.
This was how she’d come down the mountain during the storm, with everything else pushed to the side except what she needed to do; at least this time she was walking instead of crawling. She soldiered on, regardless, with the kind of resolve that the most hardened soldier would be proud to have.