Flash Point - Savannah Kade Page 0,28

the same reply that he'd always given. He didn't expect people to take the kinds of risks he did, but Jo was having none of it.

“Why you, then? Why not me? Why do you think you're better than me?”

An odd phrasing, he thought, and he tilted his head at her. “I don't think I'm better than you. It’s just that this is a serious risk—”

“And you have more medical training than I do,” she countered.

He hated that she was making sense and that she was still going.

“I'm lighter. Therefore, you should anchor me and I should go down and rescue the kid. And when I bring him up, you'll be fresh to treat him.”

Leo was opening his mouth to say … something, but it didn’t matter. She beat him to the punch again. “And you don't trust me to belay your line.”

“That's not true!” But even as he said it, he felt the lie. The last time he had slipped, it had been at her hands. When he was being honest, he also admitted it was at Sebastian Kane's hands. And when he was being even more honest, he admitted that though he'd worked with Kane on rescues before, Kane had never held his belay line. Sebastian Kane was also zero for one.

But he didn't mistrust Kane. Maybe it was because Sebastian Kane's confidence was quiet and reassuring. Jo Huston's was almost demanding. She didn't wait to show you she was competent. Sometimes she just told you. There was something about her that rubbed him the wrong way.

It bothered him that she rubbed him at all. She was beautiful. If he'd met her in a bar, he would have been elbowing everyone else out of the way just for the opportunity to have her brush him off.

Maybe it was because she shut down sometimes when he asked her questions—which made him think she was hiding something. But her argument about the rescue was solid. She was smart and—in this case—correct. What he said to her was, “You're right, you're lighter, and I have more medical training.”

It didn't make sense for the lighter person to hold the rope for the heavier one. So he called down to Jason with instructions to stay put while Jo carefully put her harness on and double checked everything. The harness over their regular gear was cumbersome on any day. There was a reason climbers wore thin, tight clothing. None of that was going to fly now. Not only did Jo need gear against the cold, but also against the rain. And she had to carry a pack of medical supplies down with her to help Jason when she arrived at the bottom.

Leo didn’t like that—while they could call to the boy—he was stuck where they couldn’t see him. Jo was going in blind, or at least with only the information a pre-teen boy was feeding them.

According to Jason, he thought his arm was broken and his ankle twisted. But Jason was thirteen and Leo wasn't about to make any decisions based on that diagnosis.

When they stood at the top of the point they had chosen, Leo took another look and decided he liked it even less each time he checked the course. As Jo had pointed out, it was the best of a variety of bad options. The creek had cut its own path through the land, and was settled deep, maybe twenty feet below where they stood. Unlike a cliff, there was no rock and no clean edge to send Jo over or brace her line against. There was only mud, and the rain had ensured it was all slick. There was no safe place to walk out and peer over, so Leo had to stay far back.

As the newly appointed anchor, the worst thing he could do was lose his footing and slide down after her, leaving all three of them at the bottom of the ravine. Though he had anchored her rope on a tree, in hopes that if both of them went over, at least one of them might be able to find it and haul themselves back up, it was a last resort, not a plan.

He couldn't see Jason or the water below—though he could hear it—and Leo hated it. He held tight to the line, slowly letting out slack as Jo faced him and began tracing her way backward away from him. Being smart, she planted her feet flat, and at perpendicular angles to each other.

She knew all the