Free Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2) by Tamara Morgan Page A

want to be soft around this man. She wanted to be hard and unfeeling, to treat him with the same callous indifference he showed her.
    “—it’s about Mara.”
    Her eyes flew open again to find that the veneer of gruff, irritated, exasperated Scott had melted away to leave only the man behind. He was boyish and unsure, in agony over the loss of his dog, and he was reaching for her as though she were the only thing in the world that mattered.
    This was the man who’d sliced his way into her heart, the man who tried so hard to pretend he didn’t exist. Her throat constricted painfully.
    “I know I have no right to ask this of you, and I know I’ve done so many things wrong in our relationship, but I need you, Carrie. I can’t do this without you.”
    She was done for. Without questioning the wisdom of her actions, she pulled him into her arms and held on tight, the pain of the past few weeks slipping away around them. All the other stuff—the vest and the bad luck, the crash and the banishment from her job, the feeling that in losing Scott she was losing everything—disappeared. He needed her. He wanted her.
    His arms came up around her back, and he buried his head against her neck, their hearts beating against their ribcages, their bodies twining into one. This was going to be okay. They were going to be okay.
    “Oh, Scott.” She curled her fingers in the hair at his nape. “Of course I’m here for you. Whatever you need, whatever it takes to get you through this. You know you can count on me.”
    His relieved sigh was a warm caress on her skin. “Thank you. I hate to ask this of you so soon after the last time, but I didn’t know where else to turn.”
    Her grip on his hair twisted.
    “I’ve already asked Steady Pete, and he won’t do it.”
    No. No, no, no. This wasn’t happening. She must have misunderstood, the sexual pulse between them rendering her hearing obsolete. Scott was asking for her help—not because she’d been raised as a pilot instead of a daughter, but because he needed her. As a lover, as a human, as his friend . “What do you mean, Steady Pete won’t do it?”
    “I just talked to Newman.” His voice broke and his arms constricted around her, taking away even her freedom to breathe. “There’s a chance Mara is still alive, all alone out there and waiting for me. I need you to fly into the storm to go get her.”
    # # #
    Carrie hadn’t spoken in over ten minutes.
    Based on past experience, Scott should have found this unprecedented lapse into silence a welcome change of pace from her normal routine of pushing and prodding and pulling out his entrails to perform a divination ritual. Unfortunately, he knew her much too well for that.
    Carrie didn’t like the quiet. In fact, she did everything humanly possible to avoid it—even if it meant picking fights with perfectly complaisant boyfriends or cranking up her music before a man had a chance to drink his morning coffee. It had something to do with the way she’d grown up, military-strict and mostly on her own. She needed constant noise in order to be happy.
    She wasn’t happy now.
    She wasn’t happy now, and it was his fault.
    “The mission isn’t as much of a long shot as it seems,” he explained. Maybe if he kept talking, she’d eventually join him. “Newman’s been in contact with the SAR team in Colville already. One of the rangers who was on the original search is willing to come along and show us the way. Mara’s handler declined, though, which says quite a bit about what went wrong in the first place, if you ask me.”
    Nothing. Not even a twitch. He was speaking to nothing more than dead air and Carrie’s back, to the load of dishes she was scrubbing with unwarranted force.
    “And I think I can pull together the rest of an emergency team at the meeting Newman called for tonight. You know how willing our guys are to pitch in when things get rough.”
    A spray of water and bubbles over the sink was his only