Nadia Nichols - A Soldier's Pledge

Before he could rise to his feet she spotted him, and he caught the flash of a smile. “Good morning!” Her cheerful greeting floated loud and clear over the rush of the river and the patter of rain. “Fancy meeting you here!”

She ferried the canoe across the strong, swift current like a voyageur, paddling with short strokes from the waist and using her upper body for leverage. It was pretty obvious she knew what she was doing in a canoe. She came toward him at a good clip, and was almost to shore when the canoe fetched up hard against a hidden rock, swung broadside to the current, spun backward in a tight arc around the submerged rock, backed hard into the downstream eddy and pitched sideways, spilling her into the river with a loud, undignified squawk.

To her credit she came up swiftly, paddle in hand. She flung the paddle onto the riverbank, grabbed the nose of the canoe and began hauling it ashore. The river swept her along, but within ten yards she got her footing and lurched backward out of the water, both hands clamped to a snub line fastened to the nose of the canoe. By the time he reached her, she had things pretty much under control, but the canoe had taken on water and was heavily loaded with gear, securely lashed in place or it would have been floating down the river. She was having trouble finding a spot to haul the canoe out. She had her heels braced against the pull of the river, and tossed the slack coils of rope to him when he came near.

“Tie her off to something, anything,” she ordered. “And hurry, this current’s strong.” She struggled to keep it from ripping the canoe out of her grasp.

He plowed through the dense tangle of alder and willow with the rope, hauled himself up the bank, found a black spruce that looked up to the task and snubbed off to it. When he returned to the river, she was watching for him over her shoulder.

“Okay?” she said.

“Okay.”

She relaxed her grip on the rope, and the canoe remained obediently tethered to shore. She was soaking wet from her swim and out of breath from the struggle to hold the canoe. Her hands flew to her head, then she stood staring downriver, stricken with shock.

“You all right?” he asked from the riverbank. “Did you hit your head?”

“I lost my Snowy River hat. I loved that hat.” She stared downriver through a veil of rain, as if it might be floating just out of reach or stuck on an overhanging branch. Her shoulders slumped, she dropped her hands and looked back at him. “I didn’t see that rock. I was too busy looking at you. Stupid of me. Now I’ll have to unload the canoe and bail it out.”

“When you’re done bailing, my camp’s just a few yards upriver. Coffee’s on.”

Her expression brightened. “Thanks,” she said.

He made his way back to the camp. The coffee was boiling over. He shut off the little multi-fuel stove and poured himself a cup. A part of him felt guilty not staying to help with the job of unloading the canoe, but he was equally annoyed that she’d invaded his morning and literally crashed his party uninvited. What was she doing here? It obviously had something to do with him, and he didn’t like that one bit.

Forty minutes later she tramped into his campsite. Her hair had come loose from the ponytail and was dripping with river and rainwater. She crawled into his tiny tent on her hands and knees, and took the insulated cup he offered with a grateful smile. She sat cross-legged and inhaled the steam.

“Thanks. This smells like real cowboy coffee.”

“It’ll float a spoon,” he said.

“Just how I like it.” She took a sip. “Perfect.” Her eyes were as dark as her hair, fringed with thick lashes. Her face was slender, cheekbones high, lips curved in a smile. In the dim confines of the tent, after that plunge in the icy river and the mighty struggle with the canoe, she should have looked like a scrawny wet rat, not a sexy Abercrombie and Fitch fashion model.

“Why are you here?” he said, blunt and to the point.

She shook her head, took another swallow of coffee. “My boss dropped me off up at the lake so I could canoe downriver and deliver a message from your sister.” She ran the fingers of one hand through her wet shoulder-length hair, sweeping it back from her face, and gazed at him frankly. “She’s very worried about you. I spoke with her by phone yesterday. She told me what happened to your dog, and she feels bad about it.”

He made no comment. He had nothing to say about his dog or his sister. His life was none of her business.

“She wanted me to tell you how sorry she was that she didn’t tell you right away, when she got back from the canoe trip last summer, and she wanted me to try to make you understand that the reason she didn’t tell you when you were in Afghanistan was because she was afraid you’d be upset by the bad news, and you’d get hurt because you were distracted.”

He pulled his pack toward him and began stuffing his sleeping bag into the bottom compartment.

“I mean, I can understand how bad your sister feels,” she continued. “And I can tell you, she was genuinely upset on the phone. She wanted me to find you and bring you out by canoe. She also said to tell you that your mother is really sick, and you need to come home right away.”

“My mother’s fine. I talked to her on the phone every day while I was at Walter Reed. I talked to her the day before you flew me out here, and she was fine. She’d have come to visit me herself when I was in the hospital, but she’s afraid of flying. My sister just told you to tell me she was real sick to get me to quit looking for a dog she thinks is dead. She feels guilty about leaving Ky out here, and she should. How much did my sister’s rich banker husband of hers offer you to find me?” he asked, not pausing in his work.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cameron said.

“Sure you do,” he said. “You’ve wasted your time, and now you’re wasting mine.”

She finished the coffee in the mug and sat dripping quietly onto his tent floor. “I figured that’s what you’d say, but I promised her I’d try.” She watched him in silence for a few moments. “Listen, I could help you look for the dog. We could travel downriver until noon, beach the canoe, then I could walk back to this campsite, looking for tracks while you set up camp. We’d cover a lot more ground that way.”

“Tracks?” His flinty gaze locked with hers. “You know as well as I do there’s no tracking anything along this shoreline. Right now this journey is all about leaving my scent and hoping Ky gets downwind of it.”

“Well, leaving a scent trail won’t work worth a damn until it stops raining,” she said. Her eyes dropped from his, and after a brief pause she scrambled out the door and went down to the river. He watched her crouch there and wash the metal mug. His guts were churning. His sister shouldn’t have put either of them in this awkward position. It wasn’t the young pilot’s fault that she’d been sent on an impossible mission. He shouldn’t take his anger out on her. He finished packing his gear. The only thing left to do was pack up the tent, lash it to his pack and keep walking.

* * *

CAMERON TOOK HER time washing the mug, reflecting on her next move. His hostile response to her arrival hadn’t been unexpected. What she hadn’t anticipated was ramming the canoe into that submerged rock, getting all her gear wet and making a fool of herself, but that wasn’t altogether a bad thing. At least she’d found him, and rather easily, in fact. The rest of her job would be much simpler. It was just a matter of wearing him down, and the rough country would do that for her.

By the time she returned to the campsite, he’d taken down and packed up the soggy tent, donned his rain gear, shouldered his pack and picked up his rifle. They faced each other, separated by five feet of steady rainfall. “Thanks for the coffee,” she said, handing him his mug. “I’ll be heading downriver as soon as I get the canoe repacked.”