… I lay my head back. Aksel is shaking me. “Are you—”
“I’m fine,” I murmur. “You?”
“Yeah,” he answers, sounding relieved.
I blink, adjusting my eyes. It is dark except for the piercing beam of a flashlight in Aksel’s hand. In the artificial light, I observe the Defender’s interior: leather seats and a grooved rubber floor are scattered with skis, boots, and miscellaneous alpine wilderness equipment.
To my right, the window is intact, but a hairline fracture bisects the glass; centimeters away is granite. To my left, snow is packed against Aksel’s window. The windshield, the rear window—white.
I stare up through the sunroof, relieved to see it isn’t covered in snow too.
Fuzzy noise fills the car. Aksel checks the stations on a small CB radio cradled in his palm. Nothing but static.
The right side of my forehead is tender. It stings when I touch it. Wincing under my breath, I look down at my wet fingertips. Seriously?
“You’re bleeding,” Aksel says sharply, looking over at me. “Let me see.”
“It’s a scrape,” I object, wiping my fingertips on my shorts.
Aksel sets aside the radio, extends his forearm across my lap, and opens the glove compartment. With his right sleeve pushed up, I can see his arm, hard and strong. It hovers above my leg, inches from my bare thigh.
He takes out a metal case with a red cross on it and puts it in his lap. Leaning forward he snaps the glove compartment shut; his forearm brushes against my skin, and I suck in sharply.
“If you’ll turn toward me, I can check it out.” His voice is composed, courteous. Reluctantly, I face him. Up close, I can see every detail of his face: his chiseled bone structure, his clear skin, flushing in the cold.
Readjusting the flashlight, Aksel touches his finger gingerly to my forehead. His eyelashes flicker over his crystalline eyes as he inspects the cut.
“A nice gash to replace your bruise.” He glances at my thigh where only a faded mustard residue remains. “I don’t think you’ll need stitches,” he assures me in a deep voice.
“You can tell?”
“I can guess”—he pauses—“I watched my dad stitch up half my friends on our kitchen counter.”
“What kind of doctor is he?”
“Neurosurgeon,” he says softly.
I try to take normal breaths. However, with Aksel’s hand on my skin, every nerve in my face is kindled.
My father has always taught me to control my heart rate—lower my beats per minute, breathe in slowly, hold, exhale—but lowering my heart rate while sitting alone in a car with Aksel Fredricksen is like trying to snorkel in a typhoon.
Aksel digs into the first aid kit and removes a cloth, bandage, alcohol swabs, and disinfectant cream. When he looks back at me, I blush all over again.
“If you keep still, I’ll clean it. It might sting.” His voice is sultry in the confined space.
Now, Aksel’s hand is on my face again, checking the wound; the other is reaching onto the floor of the passenger seat to grab a water bottle. His arm brushes my leg again. My heart skips a beat. Was that intentional? No, of course not. Aksel is like a military medic in the field—all business.
“Will I have a scar?” I ask.
“Do you want a scar?”
“Undecided.”
He eyes my blond braid draping over my shoulder. “If you end up with one, you’ll resemble a Viking warrior.”
“Shieldmaiden,” I say.
“Next Halloween,” he says with a slight smile. His teeth are even and straight; when the corners of his flawless lips turn upward, my stomach does a little flip. “But no,” he murmurs, looking closely, “I don’t think you’ll have a scar.”
He unscrews the lid to the water bottle and pours a few drops onto the cloth.
“So … how exactly are we wedged underneath Eagle Peak?” I ask, attempting to distract myself from the feeling of Aksel’s fingers on my face.
He brushes hair off my temple, sending tingles down the side of my cheek.
“Avalanches are unpredictable,” he says in a steady, restrained voice, as if he doesn’t want to frighten me. He opens the cellophane around the bandage with a PenBlade.
“We didn’t have time to drive away, because you can never tell how wide they are, and those woods descend into a sheer ravine two hundred feet down. I figured the best option was to get the Defender under Eagle Peak”—he points upward, toward a tapered shaft of grayish light—“and hope the avalanche would pass over us.”
Wetting the cloth, he presses it against my face. His motion is smooth and gentle and only takes a second,