Piggyback rides had been a lot more fun when she was a kid. To be fair, though, she’d never had an hour-long piggyback ride before. Ellie shifted slightly, searching for a more comfortable position but not wanting to throw off George’s balance.
George slowed to a walk. He’d been switching off between jogging and walking, running until his breath was heavy and ragged, and then slowing to rest. She tried to help as much as she could by holding on with her arms and legs, but her own body was working against her, exhaustion pulling at her until she caught her chin drifting toward George’s shoulder several times.
“Let me walk,” she pleaded, but he ignored her as he had the past ten times she’d asked. “Please, George. I think it would keep me warmer.” The only reason she said that was for manipulation purposes. With George at her front and the afternoon sun on her back, she wasn’t cold in the least. She did feel guilty, though, hating the feeling of literally not pulling her own weight.
Under her arms, his shoulders dipped in a sigh. “Just for a little while.” He stopped and let her slide off his back. When her feet hit the ground, her knees threatened to buckle, and Ellie grabbed the back of his coat to keep herself upright. Throwing a worried look at her over his shoulder, he started to crouch, as if to pick her up again, but she took a step back, shaking her head.
“No, I’m okay. My legs were just asleep, that’s all.” To prove she was ambulatory, she started walking. The snow was looser there, without the frozen top crust, and her boots sank almost a foot with each step.
“Wait.” Bending to loosen the bindings, he stepped out of the snowshoes and motioned her toward him. “Wear these.”
She reluctantly agreed, mainly because she knew they were only as fast as the slowest person, which was most definitely her. If snowshoes would give her a little more speed, they would arrive at the cabin that much sooner.
George adjusted the bindings to grip her boots and then stood, rubbing at his head under his lavender cap.
“Head hurt?” she asked, reminded that a bullet had creased his scalp just a day earlier.
“No.” When she looked at him skeptically, he gave her a smile. “Itches. Headache’s gone, though.”
“Uh-huh.” Despite his innocent expression, she didn’t believe him. For him to be unconscious like he had been, it had to have been a pretty serious concussion. She was no doctor, but it made sense that his head would hurt for a while after something like that. Ellie let it go, though. “Ready?”
He shook his head and reached for the buckles on the backpack.
“I can carry it,” she protested, knowing it almost certainly wouldn’t change his mind. Sure enough, he didn’t even answer her as he removed the pack from her shoulders and swung it onto his own back.
“Tell me if you get tired,” he ordered with a stern look.
She didn’t mention that she was already tired—almost unbearably tired. Instead, she just followed him as he plowed through the snow. As she suspected, George without snowshoes was just as fast as she was with snowshoes, so they continued at a steady pace.
“Where’s the cabin?” she asked, puffing slightly. They were crossing a wide, mostly treeless valley, so they were able to walk side by side. Everything looked a little dreamlike and off-kilter, as if she’d had a couple of cocktails. She hoped it was just exhaustion and not brain damage caused by the avalanche. Her head didn’t hurt, at least. Every muscle in her body did, but her brain seemed to have escaped damage.
He pointed in front of them and slightly to the right. “We’ll circle around the base of that slope. It’s in a clearing just beyond that.”
The spot he indicated looked really far away to Ellie, but she caught herself before she whined. Since he’d just carried her butt for over an hour, the least she could do was keep her complaining to herself. Talking helped, though. Silence just made her concentrate on how hard it was to take each step.
“Why don’t you do this more?”
“What?”
She flung out a hand to indicate the surrounding scenery. The movement made the ground tilt in an odd way, so she dropped her arm to her side. “The guide thing. I bet people would pay a lot of money for you to take them camping.” Especially if he let the women sleep in his mummy bag with him. Even though she didn’t say it out loud, the thought of those hypothetical women made her innards squirm with annoyance.
George looked like he’d just tasted something gross. “Not my thing.”
“Why not? You’re really good at it. I mean, I’m clueless, and you’ve kept me alive so far.” When he turned to look at her with a worried frown, she wished she hadn’t added the “so far.”
“You’re easy,” he finally said after finishing his glowering inspection.
That made her laugh. She could tell the second he realized what he’d implied, because he actually blushed. Ellie loved that, judging by the frequency of George’s blushes, she could make him just as flustered as she was around him.
“Not like that.” His cheeks burned even more brightly above his beard. “Most tourists want…things. Like talking.”
With a mock gasp, she rounded her eyes and stared at him. His form went blurry, her eyes not wanting to focus correctly. She didn’t want to mention her vision issues and end up being carried again, so she joked instead. “Not talking! The horror!”
His frown didn’t lighten. “It is for me. I’d rather not be a guide and just skip buying the extras. I don’t really need another rifle. The money isn’t worth it.”
“Another rifle?” she repeated. “How many do you have?”
He was quiet for a while, possibly doing a mental count, and then answered, “Twelve.”
That made her choke a little. When she could speak again, she said, “Yeah, that’s probably enough rifles.”
His grin was back.
“What about hunting groups?” The mention of guns made her remember Joseph’s side job. As she waited for George to answer, she carefully placed each snowshoe-clad step. The horizon was rocking again, tilting her like a canoe on an ocean.
Although his frown wasn’t as severe as when he’d been talking about demanding tourists, it was still present. “They don’t listen.” He shook his head and amended, “Most of them do. Usually, there’s just one or two in each group.”
“The know-it-alls?” she asked sympathetically. “Yeah, I imagine that could be tough, especially when they’re all armed.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, and Ellie started counting her painful, rocking steps again, so she racked her brain for another conversational topic.
“Have you ever been married?” she blurted, and then wanted to suck back the words when he gave her a startled glance. “None of my business, sorry.” A horrible thought occurred to her. What if he was married, like, currently? An image of an outdoorsy, tall woman, with a blond ponytail and the ability to gut a deer and start a fire without matches, filled her head. Jealousy sent a sharp pain through her stomach at this imaginary woman who’d probably still been tucked up in her and George’s oversized bed when Ellie had been at his house.
“No.”
Ripped out of her homicidal thoughts about a made-up woman, she stared at him blankly. “What?”
He focused straight ahead, but his cheeks were red again. “I haven’t been married.”
“Good.” Slapping a gloved hand over her mouth, she sent him a sideways glance and saw he was grinning. “I mean, that’s nice. Oh, fudge, I mean…never mind.”
His smile grew at her mumbled babbling.
“Can I just start over again so we can forget the question and everything that followed?” By his amused expression, she knew he wouldn’t be forgetting.
After another few minutes of silence, during which Ellie couldn’t stop replaying her embarrassing moment in her head, George asked, “Have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Been married.”
“Oh God, no.” She shook her head and then stopped quickly when the motion made her dizzy. “I haven’t even come close.”
After he grunted an acknowledgment, he went quiet again. His grin had returned, though, and Ellie wasn’t sure why. She opened her mouth to ask another question, and the ground tilted again but didn’t correct itself that time. Blinking, she looked at George’s concerned face. It was at a strange angle, and it took her a few moments to realize she was lying on her back in the snow.
“That was weird,” she said.
After stripping off the snowshoes, he helped her to her feet, brushing the snow from her coat. His face grim, George didn’t answer, but just switched the backpack to her shoulders and strapped the snowshoes onto his own feet. Turning away from her, he crouched, waiting.
Resigning herself to being a literal burden once again, she climbed onto his back.
* * *
Time went a little strange after that.
“El!”
She jerked, her arms and legs tightening around George convulsively.
“Stay awake.”
She was trying, but the blackness kept falling over her, despite her best efforts. “Sorry.” Even to her own ears, her voice sounded slurred. Her body bounced with George’s running strides. It was hard to tell when she kept going unconscious, but she was pretty sure he was jogging more than he was walking. His breathing was jagged, and his arms shook where they supported the backs of her thighs.
“We close?” She needed to talk to keep herself awake, but each word was a huge effort.
“Yeah,” he panted. “There…soon.”
Her head sagged forward until it rested on George’s shoulder. The motion jarred her forehead, but her neck didn’t feel strong enough to support it. “I can walk.”
His snort came out more like a gasp. “You…can’t…walk. You…can hardly…talk.”
“Look who’s talking!” she said, although her garbled words kind of proved his point. Forcing her head to lift, she cracked open her eyes. The sun was mostly gone, and everything looked gray in the twilight. There was a shape, though, crouching in the snow some distance in front of them. “That it?”
“That’s…it.” Despite his heaving breaths, George increased his speed.
“Made it.” Dropping her head back onto his shoulder, she fell back into the darkness.