“I’ve spent the last year training for it. I’ve done Denali, the Alps, even headed down to South America to make sure I’m ready for this,” I assured her. “I just need a few days at altitude and then it will be manageable.”

Sure, being at sea level for three months hadn’t done me any favors, but—

“I’m not going to advanced camp. I’ll come back down with Leah and Penna.”

Oh, hell no. “What? No. You’d kill to be in on something like this, even if it’s navigating from camp. I know you can’t board it, but this is the stuff you thrive on.” I needed her there, watching, supporting, keeping my ass in check.

“The last thing you need is me up there distracting you. One stroke of bad luck—”

“No.” I cradled her face, needing contact even though I knew she was likely to shove me away. “You are not bad luck, and no matter the shit we’ve been through—I want you there.”

“Landon.” She closed her eyes and shut me out.

I stroked her cheeks with my thumbs until our gazes met. “Besides, I’ll do better if I’m showing off for a pretty girl. I can’t exactly let myself fall on my ass in front of you.”

She let her breath go on a ragged exhale. Her shoulders fell, but I knew better than to think she was defeated. “Fine.”

The battle was won—for now. No doubt we’d have the same argument up until the moment I hiked up that ridge. “Good.”

Alex cleared his throat, and I became more than aware that we were having a private moment in public. I released her soft skin at the same second she pulled away.

“Okay, final mission brief?” Pax asked, sliding over the file I’d spent the last six months compiling. “This is your show now.”

Damn straight, it was.

This ridgeline was everything I’d been training for, and it was finally time for the plan to fall into place. Sure, there were ten thousand things that could go wrong. But I had Rachel with me, and that was one hell of a right.

Chapter Thirteen

Rachel

Lukla, Nepal

“Switch with me?” Landon asked Little John after we’d gained our cruising altitude, which, when I thought about it, was going to be our normal altitude the day after tomorrow.

Little John shot me a look, and though I rolled my eyes, I nodded. The plane was only big enough for the ten of us, one on each side down the length, and with Pax and Leah at the front, all the way to Bobby and another cameraman at the back, we were full.

“Sure thing,” Little John answered, vacating the precious territory.

So much for peace.

Landon sat down and buckled in. I turned toward the window and looked over the scenery below. Nepal was heading into winter, but the fields at this altitude were still green, terraced in places and thick vegetation in others. Where we were headed, vegetation couldn’t survive.

Then again, humans weren’t meant to, either.

“Are you seriously going to try to ignore me?” he asked.

Exactly when was my heart going to stop stuttering in response to his voice? “Just taking in the view. You should, too. It’s not something you see every day.”

“Neither are you.”

Ugh. Like that response. The one where my chest tightened and those stupid, naive butterflies danced in my stomach. I tried to kill the butterflies and turned to Landon. “It’s Nepal. How often do you plan on coming back?”

He shrugged. “I can fly here any time, grab another flight, and watch the ground roll by underneath us. You…well, I have no control over where you are or when I get to see you. So I choose you.”

But you didn’t. I shut down the thought. It wasn’t going to do us any good to hash out the same stuff again and again.

“You know how impossible this is, right?” I asked him across the aisle.

“What? Me talking to you?”

I almost snorted. “No. You trying to ride this ridge. We have, what? A week?”

“Six days left,” he answered. His eyes looked blue against the gray beanie he wore, and there wasn’t a trace of worry to be found.

“Right. We lucked out that the visibility was good enough for us to make this flight. What are we going to do when we can’t get up to base camp the day after tomorrow?”

“Take another day to acclimate to altitude. Lukla is at nine thousand feet—the extra day won’t hurt.”

“Right, and what happens when the helicopters can’t make it to Pangboche? When they can’t make the flight to base camp? Then to advanced camp? What happens when we can’t see the ridge and the weather rolls in?”

“Rach, I can’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist yet.”

I shook my head. “You have too many variables, and on a trip like this, you can’t afford them.”

“I can’t afford not to try. We’re here. The timing coincided with the week the program gave us for optional excursions. What would you have rather I done?” He looked so relaxed, so at ease with the fact that he was putting his life on the line.

“Oh, I don’t know…maybe come back when you could have devoted all the time you needed to a trip like this, instead of working it in while we happen to be docked in India? This isn’t something to take lightly.”

Twenty-one thousand feet meant that one bad choice, one slip, one second would end him—and any chance, no matter how slim, of us healing the rift in our past. Twenty-one thousand feet meant help couldn’t come, and I couldn’t even deliver his body to his mother…if she so much as knew who I was.