Page 46 of Shielded Hearts

She believed in Colt. He’d know what to do. He’d find her and rescue her.

The need to start screaming burned in her lungs, but she battled against the urge.

A rough noise came from someplace to her right. She slowly turned her head.

A softthunk, thunk, thunkcontinued to fill her ears, growing louder by the minute.

He was digging her out!

How had he found her so fast? The man was even more amazing than she thought.

The color of the snow changed from dark gray to light as more and more of it was removed from over her head. When a hole appeared, she tipped her head up, a smile of joy and relief stretching over her face.

The smile froze.

It wasn’t Colt.

She stared at the man’s face harder. Her scrambled mind tried to place him.

Oh god. She did recognize him. What washedoing here? He was a friend or relative of Vivian. He was at her friend’s funeral.

Disjointed pieces clicked into place.

It was Vivian’s nephew. Aspen had met him a few times before.

She cast around for his name, but she couldn’t grasp hold of it. Gary? Grant?

“Gideon!”

He jerked his arm back. He held a shovel.

“Gideon, what are you doing here?”

He reached into the snow, tough hands digging into her underarms as he hauled her out of the deep drift.

“Gideon!”

“Shut up, dammit.”

The tone of his voice made it clear: this wasn’t a rescue.

As soon as her head cleared the surface, she sucked in deep gulps of oxygen. Was she imagining her friend’s nephew was here? Her brain must be oxygen-deprived if she was seeing people.

She searched the blinding white landscape for Colt, but her gaze landed time and time again on Gideon. She hadn’t seen him since the reading of the will.

He glared down at her, eyes fixed on her face and a twisting snarl on his lips.

She opened her mouth to scream for Colt, but pain rocketed through her skull, wiping out the whole world.

Aspen had no sense of time or place. She only knew that her clothes were wet, and she was shivering from the cold. Her eyelids felt as if they were weighted down by tons of snow and uprooted trees and whatever else that avalanche had torn off the mountainside.

She peeled her eyelids open. They immediately snapped shut. She tried one more time.

This time they stayed propped open. Her vision cleared and she focused on a seat right in front of her.

An airplane.

Herairplane.

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