Page 22 of Finding Chaos

Chapter 10

Walker

What the hell was I doing?I wasn’t a sharer and God forbid my one lapse be with a reporter. There was just something about Destiny. She was easy to talk to. Easy to understand. She’d threw open the door on her skeletons, leaving herself emotionally vulnerable. Had I told her about my brother just to ease her pain?

The woods were responsible. Being cooped up in a cabin surrounded by cold and snowbound for days was hard for most men and for me, it had only been a few hours. But Destiny had the opposite effect. She was making me want to get warm. Being alone was easy.This…this was testing my resolve in more ways than one.

I moved to a chair across the room, watching embers burn in the fireplace. Destiny had risen from her spot. “I don’t suppose… Could I borrow another shirt? I need to wash mine again.”

“Yeah.” I grabbed my bag. I pulled out a warm flannel shirt and handed it to her. Our fingers touched in a delicate caress, and her breath caught as she stared up at me, holding my gaze.

“That should keep you warm.”

As her soft touch momentarily lingered, a blush crept up her cheeks.

She was beautiful in a way that had me eager to see how much more I could turn up that heat.

She slipped the shirt free of my grasp, clearing her throat. She stepped back. “Thank you.”

* * *

Night had comeand gone but the regret that came with dredging up my past lingered. Especially since I didn’t want to be her next story. I’d made a pallet next to the fire and had given her the bed again. Sleeping in the chair the night before had left a crick in my neck.

I was up with the sun and had made coffee. I huddled into my jacket and took my coffee out onto the porch just as the sun crested the trees. The world stood out in stark white, green and blue, giving me better visibility. I inhaled the clean, crisp mountain air and watched my breath dance like smoke rings. I sipped my coffee and walked around the cabin once again, this time looking for any signs of our late-night guest.

Nothing again.

There were no new tracks. No footprints on the porch. Nothing.

I sipped and let my gaze search the trees surrounding the cabin. Taking a moment to enjoy the majestic beauty of these woods because shortly we’d begin a longer, more grueling hike than yesterday’s.

Minutes later, the door opened behind me. Destiny stepped out, all bundled up with a cup of coffee in her hands. “It’s colder today.”

“Yeah, it is. Probably even colder tomorrow.”

Destiny lifted her chin and closed her eyes, letting the morning sun warm her face. “It’s pretty here but very isolated. I’ll be glad when we find Putnam and get off this rock.”

“Speaking of…finish your coffee, and we’ll get going. We’re going to need the entire day to get to the next cave and get back.”

She nodded and disappeared while I took a long gulp of the caffeine I would need to sustain me and headed back inside.

“How do we know he didn’t already go back down?” she asked.

“We don’t,” I answered honestly. “We’ll check all four caves, and if I can’t find him, I’m taking you down and we’ll coordinate a search party with more people to cover more terrain.”

The idea of losing a soul on this mountain wasn’t a thought I’d had to worry about often. They moved like ants over my skin. I could always pinpoint a general direction of where a person might be, but telling the difference between a living person or a lingering soul was hard. They both felt the same.

No way could I tell Destiny that we were either going to find her friend or that we were chasing a ghost.

---