He turned to face her, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees as he studied her face, reading the utter exhaustion there. Reaching out, he took her hand. “I’ll gather more wood, but I’m not up to building a shelter. It’s warmer here, without the wind. We’ll cuddle by the fire tonight.”
“Okay. I can handle cuddling.” She looked wistful. “I don’t guess there was any way to tell them our names, so they can notify our families?”
Cam shook his head. “I haven’t let myself think about my family,” he said after a minute. “I know they’re going through hell, but concentrating on staying alive seemed more important. They’re probably at the search headquarters, wherever the hell that is, because there weren’t any searches anywhere near us.” He paused, then said roughly, “I need to see them.”
She had thought about Logan and Peaches, she realized, about how they must be feeling, how worried they must be, but she honestly hadn’t thought for even a moment that any of the others, even her parents, would bestir themselves out of concern for her. Her mother might shed a tear or two, use her tale of woe to drum up sympathy, but wait at the search headquarters for her daughter’s body to be found? Not going to happen. Her father wouldn’t even waste a tear. He’d made it plain years ago that his first three children were pretty much off his radar. Cam was lucky in his family, in knowing without hesitation that they would be there waiting for him.
“For your mother’s sake,” she told him, “I hope you have a chance to clean up before she sees you. You also need some clothes. And a bandage over that cut, because, trust me, she needs to know for certain you’re all right before she sees it.” She examined him in the brightly flickering light from the fires. His five-day beard was scruffy, and the deep bruises under his eyes were fading to an ugly purplish-yellow. All the various scrapes were scabbed over and healing. That god-awful cut across his forehead; she couldn’t decide if her clumsy stitches were an improvement over how he would have looked without them, or not. She began to snicker. “You look awful.”
He grinned in quick response. “You look pretty bad yourself,” he said with a teasing note in his deep voice. “Like you were in a plane crash and have been living in the wild for five days. The black eye is the crowning touch, though. At least you know for certain I didn’t fall in love with you because of how you look.”
Bailey nearly jumped out of her skin. How could he throw things like that at her, without giving her advance warning so she could prepare herself—though how she could have prepared herself for that, she didn’t know. Before she could react, he cradled her hand against his cheek once more. “If I ask you to marry me, will you run screaming down the mountain?”
Shock on top of shock. She hadn’t been able to react to one before he hit her with another. The end result was that she sat there, immobilized by the impossibility of choosing which sentence to address first. Finally she managed to squeak, “I might,” and left it to him to figure out which one she meant.
He kissed her palm, and she felt his lips twitch as he fought a smile. “Then I won’t ask,” he said gravely. “Not yet, anyway. I know you need time to get used to the idea. We should let our lives settle down, see each other under normal circumstances. There’s also the problem of Seth trying to kill you, and that has to be handled before anything else. I’m thinking nine months to a year before we get married. How does that sound to you?”
For someone who wasn’t asking her to marry him, he was laying a lot of groundwork, she thought. Her heart was skipping beats, but when she looked at him she wondered how she could go the rest of her life without seeing that grin, or hearing the dryness of his tone when he was making some pithy comment, or sleeping in his arms. She didn’t know if she could sleep at all without him.
She cleared her throat. “Actually…I’m okay with the marriage part.”
“It’s just the love part that scares the hell out of you, huh?”
“I’m…doing better than I’d have thought with that, too.”
“You’re not panicking at the idea that I love you?”
“That part’s okay, too,” she said seriously. “It’s the loving you in return that scares me so much.”
She saw the gleam of triumph in his eyes. He didn’t look down to hide it, either; he let her see everything he was feeling. “Are you saying you’re afraid to love me, or you’re afraid because you love me?”
She drew a deep breath. “I think we need to be careful and not rush into anything.”
His lips twitched again. “Now, why am I not surprised you said that? And you haven’t answered my other question.”
There it was, the cool, relentless determination she’d seen when he was coaxing the plane to stay in the air for the precious seconds they needed to hit the tree line instead of the bare rocky summit. She could feel safe with him, she thought. He didn’t give up; he didn’t cut and run. He wouldn’t cheat on her, and if they had children he would never leave them high and dry.
“I do love you,” she admitted. The words were shaky, but she got them out, though she immediately hedged, “Or I think I do. And I’m scared. This has been an unusual situation, and we need to make sure we still feel the same after we get back to the real world, so I definitely agree with you there.”
“I didn’t say we needed to make sure we feel the same. I know how I feel. I said I understood why you needed time to get used to the idea.”