She’d yelled at him that they would have been doing without a fire anyway. He’d said no, they weren’t, that when they got out of the snow and he could find dry wood, he could make a fire using friction, because he’d been a Boy Scout and knew how.
“Fine,” she said. “Then you can teach me, and we won’t need to drag a hundred-pound battery around! You have a concussion. You lost a lot of blood. You shouldn’t be exerting yourself this much!”
“It doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds,” he’d retorted, completely ignoring the rest of her comment—as well as the fact that the battery came damn close to weighing that much.
So he’d wrestled the thing onto the sled, and the weight had made the wooden runners dig into the snow. Seeing that she couldn’t dissuade him from taking the battery, she’d grabbed the traces and started pulling the sled herself, only to have him firmly move her out of the way and take over the job of sled dog.
“You can carry the backpack,” he’d said maddeningly, referring to his roll-aboard suitcase that he’d rigged with straps.
She was so angry she’d considered hitting him with a snowball, but she was afraid of what damage any chance blow to the head, no matter how slight, might do to him. She also didn’t want to get his clothes wet, not when she’d gone to so much effort to keep him as warm as possible. Smothering him in his sleep, though…that was a possibility.
The terrain was horrifyingly rugged, and unseen hazards lay under the snow. Sometimes the slope was so steep she had to hold the sled from behind to keep it from sliding past him and dragging him down the mountain. Sometimes there simply was no going down at all without ropes and mountain climbing equipment, so they had to trudge up and around until they discovered a less treacherous descent. After walking for what he said was three hours, she doubted they had managed to descend more than perhaps a hundred feet, but they had zigzagged for miles. And she was still angry.
The snowshoes were clumsy and required that she lift her knees with each step, as if she were marching in a band. Her muscles were burning from the effort. Maybe she didn’t lift her foot high enough, but the tip of her right snowshoe suddenly caught on something buried in the snow and catapulted her forward.
She managed to get her hands out to break her fall, going down on her right knee and then sort of rolling to a sitting position. Her hands and knee stung, but sharp pains shot through her right ankle. Muttering curses under her breath, she held her shin and gently rotated the ankle to see if she’d sustained any structural damage.
“Are you hurt?” Cam went to one knee beside her, his gray eyes worried above the strip of red flannel that covered his own nose and mouth.
“A sprain, but I think I can walk it off,” she said. Flexing the ankle hurt, but after the initial throb the pain seemed to lessen. She tried to get up, but was hampered by the snowshoes that remained securely tied to her feet. If the right one had come off when she fell, her ankle probably wouldn’t have suffered at all. “Help me up.”
Catching her hands, he tugged her to a standing position and held her while she gingerly put her weight on her foot. The first step was fairly painful, but the second one was less so. “I’m good,” she said, releasing his hands. “No serious damage.”
“You can ride on the sled if it’s bothering you,” he said, frowning as he studied her gait as intently as if she were a Thoroughbred.
Bailey stopped in her tracks, thunderstruck by what he’d just said. Did the man have no sense? “Are you crazy?” she yelped. “You can’t pull me all the way down this mountain.”
He glanced up, the expression in his eyes cool and determined. “I not only could, I’ll do whatever I have to do to get you home.”
For some reason, that simple statement rattled her. She shook her head. “You shouldn’t feel that way. It isn’t your fault we crashed. If anything, it’s mine.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Seth,” she said simply. “He made me angry, I threatened to decrease the amount he gets every month, and he retaliated. It’s my fault, all of it. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care what you said, that doesn’t justify him trying to kill two people.”
“I’m not justifying his actions. I’m saying I triggered them. So you have no reason to feel responsible—”
He tugged his face mask down. “I don’t feel responsible for the crash.”
“—or for me,” she finished doggedly.
“Things aren’t that simple. Sometimes blame has nothing to do with responsibility. When you treasure something, you want to take care of it.”
Treasure. The word arrowed through her, pinned her to the wall. He shouldn’t be saying things like that. Men didn’t say things like that, it was against their natures. “You can’t treasure me,” she said, automatically withdrawing from him, mentally if not physically. “You don’t know me.”
“Well, now, there we disagree. Do the math.”
The last sentence left her completely at sea. “What math? Are we talking about math?”
“We are now. Let’s take a break, and I’ll explain it to you.”
He tied the sled harness to a tree so it wouldn’t start sliding down the mountain, then they sat side by side on a rock, one that had absorbed a little heat from the bright sunlight. Bailey had on so many clothes she couldn’t really feel the heat, but at least a chill wasn’t seeping through the layers. She pulled her own face mask down and closed her eyes for a minute, pretending the sun was warm on her face.