Joey paused only once to glance back at Val Cache as the protective forest closed around it, veiled it from the world Outside. Her words were so soft, he knew he had not been meant to hear them. “Good-bye. I wish…” And then she turned again and filled the new day with idle chatter that rivaled the birds and eased the void in his soul.
They crossed the valley floor during the course of the morning and, after a noon break, began the ascent up the first of the slopes that marked the foot of the mountain range among which Miller’s Peak stood. When they reached a meadow that provided a clear view of their goal, Luke pointed it out to Joey, watching her face change as she gazed at it, the stubborn determination that settled there. It served to remind him what she valued most, what truly mattered to her—what she had to do before they could both be at peace.
He told her, then, what the villagers had confirmed that a plane had gone down there among those mountains years before, lost in a late-spring snowstorm. They had even sent men out to look, but they had found nothing, for the softened snows had buried whatever might have remained to be found. He saw the hope in Joey’s eyes.
She was quiet after that, all her concentration focused on reaching the source of a year’s worth of hopes and dreams. Luke did not welcome the silence. He could not fill it as she did with idle conversation, light comments to pass the time, it was not his way. But the silence became a terrible burden as it had never been before. It left him free to be fully aware of her—the rich female scent of her, the sound of her breath and the steady beat of her heart—the gleam of sunlight on her hair, the perfect curves of her body, made to fit his.
It was all he could do to erect the barriers one by one, keeping the awareness so deeply buried that he felt bereft of his senses, blind and deaf, unable to feel at all. The kilometers passed by in a fog, only instinct kept him to the right course, and even so he stumbled and lost the rhythm of his stride again and again, clumsy with the need to stay tightly locked within himself.
Once, Joey touched him. It was no more than a brush of her hand, an inquiry or expression of concern—he never registered her expression. Within an instant he had rounded on her, snarling, nearly knocking her backward with the force of his turn. He did see her face then, frozen in astonishment, a flash of fear in her eyes before she disguised it with anger. She backed away from him, searching his eyes, what she read there set her expression into lines of utter coldness. After that she kept a careful distance.
So they continued with the wall firmly back in place between them. Luke felt it like the bars of a cage that he could never hope to escape.
Moving slowly and steadily up the slope, they began to pass into the realm of the hardier trees that ruled the higher elevations, leaving the protection of the valley behind. At the top of the ridge that lay between Val Cache and Miller’s Peak, Luke stopped to survey the last portion of their journey.
Another valley stretched below them, the deep green of forest giving way to the brilliant blue of a lake that lay at the foot of Millers Peak The mountain itself rose steeply, a stony giant knee-deep in water and clad to the waist in a garment woven of fir and pine.
Joey came up beside him, and he heard the hiss of her indrawn breath.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she whispered. She wriggled free of her pack and set it down on a bare patch of rock, raising a hand to shade her eyes.
“Yes.” Luke kept his eyes from Joey’s face and silently calculated the distance around the near side of the lake and to the foot of the mountain. “There,” he said, pointing to the sheer cut of the mountain’s face, ridged and striated and touched with the crystal fire of sun-struck glaciers. “You said the plane had been coming from the east. In a bad storm that portion of the mountain could be a deadly obstacle. A plane hitting anywhere on this side—”