Page 67 of Colton's Second Chance
Fight.She heard Eli’s voice in her head as if he were standing on shore shouting to her.Don’t quit. Survive. Live for me.
The pain that wrenched inside her now came from a longing for a future with Eli. Here, splashing helplessly in this freezing Alaskan lake, the yearning crystalized for her. She’d wasted years on foolish fears. Eli was nothing like her mother and father. Sasha’s party had demonstrated that Eli’s family was the complete opposite of the one that had rejected her. Pushing him away had been the biggest mistake of her life and had caused her more pain than it had spared her.
Regret and frustration churned inside her. But rather than draining her, her new understanding mobilized her. She clenched her teeth, determined not to fail Eli again. Not to fail Grace, or herself, in this moment. No matter the pain in her arms and legs, no matter the effort, shewouldget out of that water and bring Grace with her.
Grunting with the strain, she hauled Grace up until the other woman’s head was above water and shouted, “Kick, Grace! With everything you have, kick!”
The woman’s feeble effort was enough to keep Grace’s head up as Noelle rolled to her side and did the best sidestroke she could under the circumstances. But they were moving, drifting closer to shore. Slowly, inch by inch.
Eli was far from shore, and every kick as he tried to swim to shore told him he’d wrenched his ankle when he hit the water. The numbing cold stung so fiercely he found it hard to draw air in his lungs, but he kept moving, kept stroking his arms toward land.
When a droning sound reached his ears, he checked the sky for Scott’s plane. Had the bastard circled around to come back and shoot him? Instead, the low rumble was at ground level.
Eli blinked as he attempted to wipe icy water from his eyes.Hetty! Thank heavens!
Hetty pulled alongside him and tossed him a line to grab. With her help, he climbed from the water onto the floatplane, then moved stiffly onto the copilot’s seat.
“Kinda cold today for swimming, isn’t it, Eli?” Hetty quipped.
“Much, much too c-cold,” he replied, his teeth starting to chatter.
“I saw the flare and was on my way back to pick you up when I saw your acrobatics…or whatever you call that derring-do you just performed.” Hetty sent him a worried look as she drove the plane back toward the cabin.
Eli squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “I call it a failure. Montgomery got away.”
He heard Hetty grunt. “You’re lucky to be alive! I call that a success. I’ve radioed local authorities and given our location—Montgomery’s location and aircraft ID number—to the ABI. At last report, a team from Fairbanks is thirty minutes out.”
“Good.” He returned his gaze out the window, his body shivering and his nerves strung tight as he strained to see ahead of them. “Can we go any faster?”
He’d left Noelle in the water to rescue Grace by herself. But as he learned himself moments ago, the frigid lake could hamper normal capabilities surprisingly fast. When they finally reached the dock by Scott’s cabin, he found Noelle and Grace mostly back on shore but still lying in shallow, ice-crusted water.
He stumbled out of the floatplane as soon as it was near enough the dock for him to make the leap. When his foot landed, a sharp pain in his ankle reminded him he’d not survived his drop into the lake unscathed. But an ankle ache was not going to stop him from getting Noelle and Grace inside the cabin to warm up.
Once Hetty secured her plane, she was right behind him, racing down the dock to wade into the shallows.
Noelle raised her beautiful brown eyes to him as he approached, and, her chin quivering with cold, she stuttered, “S-Scott-t-t?”
He squatted beside her, shaking his head. “He got away.” He hooked his arms under hers. “Can you stand?”
“T-t-try.”
Working together, Eli and Hetty dragged, supported and carried the women into Scott’s cabin.
A fire still smoldered in the grate, and though his hands were shaking from his own hypothermia, Eli fed the embers and stoked a blaze. Glancing at Hetty, who was helping the women strip out of their wet clothes, he called, “See if you can find anything hot for them to drink.”
He shucked his own wet coat and shirt as he turned up the cabin thermostat and went in search of blankets, towels and dry clothes. He found enough of the first two, but no clothes. Scott hadn’t prepared for his trip north, clearly. But the cabin had a washer and dryer, and while Eli, Noelle and Grace wrapped themselves in blankets, Hetty started a load of wet clothes in the drier.
As they huddled by the fireplace, catching their breath and towel drying their hair, Grace burst into tears.
Hetty, the most mobile of the group, hurried to put an arm around the frightened woman. “Hey, you’re safe now. You’re going to be okay.”
“H-he said h-he was going to k-kill me. He was w-waiting for someone named K-Kansas.” Grace swiped her face with a cold-reddened hand. “Someone h-has to warn h-her! K-Kansas…”
Hetty sent Eli a wide-eyed look of horror.
Eli gave the trembling woman a nod. “We know. Kansas knows.” He paused as a shudder raced through him. “That ratbastard won’t get anywhere near her if I have anything to say about it.”
“How d-do we find him now?” Noelle asked, her voice thin as she shivered. “It seems un-l-likely he’ll come back h-here now that he knows w-we know about it.”
