Even in the middle of one of the worst storms the area had seen in years, Max couldn’t spend all of his time shoveling.

A snowshoeing trip with Tina took up the bulk of the following morning, which helped to keep him distracted and away from Elena. So too did a visit to Ione to pick up supplies and call Quinn to let her know that everyone was alive and, if not well, at least close enough to it to count. After that, he had to take the plow out again, which meant it was well past Tina’s bedtime when he returned to the ranger’s cabin for the night.

In a moment of pure cowardice, he didn’t go inside right away. There was a chance that Elena was already asleep by now, bundled up in prim pajamas on the futon, snoring in a way that would forever dampen any and all sexual feelings he had for her, but he doubted it. Based on his observations from all the previous nights, she slept in an oversized T-shirt and shorts that, while modest compared to some of the other articles of clothing he’d feared—and hoped—she’d wear to bed, still showcased more skin than he was comfortable with. And she didn’t snore, not even a little. She made gentle snuffling sounds that offered nothing but comfort and warmth.

The company of snow and icicles was infinitely preferable to that. At least he knew he could withstand the cold.

Unfortunately, he doubted that Elena would go to sleep until she knew he was alive and the mountain wasn’t going to collapse on them all. Which meant, of course, that she was probably lying in wait for him.

He almost laughed at the thought. Elena might fear a Yeti attack, but Max feared a twenty-four-year-old clinical psychologist in her pajamas. Guess which one of them was the real coward?

The night was frosted in a way he found exhilarating, the air entering his lungs like a shock of freezing water. He lowered himself to the wooden steps leading to the front door, basking in the chill of it. Few people got to enjoy the world like this—the heavy silence of stillness broken only by the sounds of snow brushing against treetops. It was one of his favorite things about climbing, actually. The thrill of it was exhilarating, yes, but it was those quiet moments when the world seemed to stop spinning around him that hit the hardest.

“Hey. Mind if I join you?”

Max didn’t turn to look up at Elena. He didn’t need to. This was the moment he’d been dreading all day.

“It’s cold,” he warned and shifted to his right, taking a moment to push away the pile of snow next to him.

She laughed softly. “I noticed, thanks. I came prepared.”

The scent of freshly brewed coffee hit his nose, incredibly welcome. It had been a long few hours out there moving snow piles, and he was exhausted. Normally, he wouldn’t have minded the extra work—after all, that was what he’d come up here to do, and he’d never been one to shirk his duties. But with every inch of snowfall, he couldn’t help thinking about how it must be affecting Elena.

It’s happening again. He was losing himself in a beautiful woman’s anxieties, pushing aside his own life for the sake of someone else’s fears. And the worst part was, he didn’t know how to stop it. It was like watching a train zooming down the tracks, heading straight for him. But he couldn’t get out of the goddamned way.

She held out a mug as she settled onto the step, so close her hips brushed his. He expected her to start peppering him with questions about the weather conditions, but all she did was wrap a knitted shawl more firmly around her and sip her own cup of coffee.

“It’s decaf,” she said by way of breaking the silence. “It’s too late for the real deal, but I thought you might want something warm when you got back.”

He nodded and sipped. Something warm was exactly what he wanted. A warm body. A warm mouth. The slide of Elena’s naked limbs entangling with his.

Unfortunately, he didn’t think the coffee was going to cut it.

“Tina fell asleep about two hours ago,” she added. It was the usual babysitter-to-parent chat at the end of the day, and Max couldn’t help but be grateful at how normal Elena was making this—like she was a regular person with a shared interest in his child’s well-being, not a sexually charged millennial who saw imminent death at every turn. “The snowshoe trip wore her out, poor thing. But she wanted me to tell you that she would like to build a snowman army tomorrow, so you can’t eat any of the carrots in the kitchen.”

He chuckled softly. “Noted.”

“She’s a good kid.”

He nodded and took another sip of his coffee, grateful for the distraction it provided. Elena wasn’t making this any easier on him. Whenever he used to get back from a rescue mission or a climb, Quinn hadn’t offered him warm drinks and cool chitchat. All she’d had for him were lectures and complaints, demands that he recognize just how dangerous his lifestyle was for a husband and father.

One misstep out there and Tina is half an orphan had been her favorite way of phrasing it. As if he didn’t know that already. As if it didn’t kill him to know that living the only life he knew—the only life he loved—had the potential to hurt the person he cared about most in the world.

“She’s really proud of you, you know,” Elena added softly.

He glanced over at her, the movement so sudden it caused half of his coffee to spill. He’d regret it in a few minutes, when the liquid cooled and turned to ice on his thighs, but for the moment, he could only stare.

“Who? Tina?”

Elena nodded. Even though there were no lights on outside the cabin, and the moon was nowhere to be seen in the swirl of snow, the world around them was bright. That was one of the things about snow like this—each flake picked up any hint of light it could find, reflected it a thousand-fold.

You didn’t need batteries out here. Nature was enough.

And Elena, illuminated in snowlight, was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. Her soft profile was at peace with its surroundings, the tilt of her nose and long-lashed eyelids unmoving. He wanted to kiss the tip of that nose, press his lips against those eyelids. He wanted to kiss other parts of her, too.

All the parts of her—those delicate crooks where arms and legs hinged, the soft curve of belly and thigh.

“We spent most of the afternoon trying to decide which superhero you were most like. She eventually settled on Spiderman, but it was a close thing between him and Kristoff from Frozen.” Elena laughed. “I’m not sure she understands exactly what constitutes a superhero, but I wasn’t about to contradict her. Kristoff is awfully dreamy.”

“Elena—” he began, his voice thick.

“I know, I know. You don’t want to hear it from me.” She made the motion of a zipper over her lips, but that didn’t stop her from continuing. “I just thought you should know in case you were worried about her picking up on my anxiety when you leave. She doesn’t. I’m careful to make sure she knows the snow stuff is my problem, not hers.”

“But you are scared.” He didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Every second of every day.”

“You’re not scared now.”

She glanced over at him, her eyes bright. “That’s because you’re here.”

Her words hit him like a blow to the gut. No, that wasn’t true. They weren’t a blow. They were a caress. A soft, tempting, tender caress that made him want to howl in frustration. That wasn’t how this worked—that wasn’t how any of this was supposed to work. He wasn’t the answer to Elena’s problems; he wasn’t the answer to anyone’s. He was barely holding onto his own shit as it was.

He looked away, staring out into the snow. It didn’t look nearly as pretty now. It still sparkled and shone in the distance, but instead of promise, he saw only desolation.

“Do you know why things didn’t work out between me and Quinn?” he asked, his voice matching that of his surroundings. Cold. Bleak. “Why I only got every-other-weekend custody, and why it took me years to get even that?”

Any other woman would have demurred, murmured a noncommittal response and tried to change the subject. Not Elena. She shrugged and answered with complete honesty. “Quinn doesn’t like your work.”

His laugh was bitter. That was the understatement of the century. Quinn didn’t like his work the way Spiderman didn’t like Doctor Octopus.

“We didn’t mean to get pregnant,” he said, not bothering to segue into it. If Elena was going to keep pushing this—pushing him—it was better to get it all out in the open now. “We’d only been dating a few weeks when it happened. I think we’d both started to realize by then that we weren’t meant to be together, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Get married, raise the kid, do our best to make a family out of what we’d been given.”

She nodded. “The noble thing. That sounds like something you’d do.”

He had to hold back a growl. It wasn’t the least bit like something he’d do, and if Elena would take off her Stephen-Colbert-colored glasses for five goddamned seconds, she’d see that for herself. He’d behaved about as dishonorably as a man could. He’d run away to Argentina to climb Mt. Aconcagua.

“I left,” he said flatly. “Went to South America. Climbed a mountain.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly.” He gave another short laugh. “My first act as a responsible adult man faced with impending fatherhood was to leave the woman I’d impregnated behind to worry about whether or not I’d come back alive.”

“But you did.”

He had. Running away hadn’t been his most virtuous act, but he’d found something approaching clarity at twenty-two thousand feet. As much as he loved climbing and leading expeditions, he loved the idea of being a father more. And at thirty-one years of age, it had seemed like the responsible thing to do. Grow up. Stop playing around. Become the man Quinn needed him to be.

“We made a deal, Quinn and I,” he said, remembering with such clarity he could almost feel the walls closing in on him all over again. “She’d forgive me for abandoning her during the first half of her pregnancy, but I had to give it up. Not the search and rescue stuff—even she can see the value in my rescue work—but the dangerous climbs, the mountaineering, the trips that took me to the four corners of the globe.”

He glanced at Elena, expecting her to have some kind of comment—an agreement with Quinn’s good sense—but she just nodded. Even though he was sure Elena would have done the same thing as Quinn in that situation, Max was surprised at how nice it felt to get all this out, to say the words that had been bottled up inside him for so long. Not even Ace knew how much this had been eating away at him.

“So I did it,” Max said. “I brought up Tina for the first two years of her life, took on all the stay-at-home dad stuff, playdates, the whole deal. And I liked it, too.”

“But…?”

“But it wasn’t enough, and Quinn knew it. I used to live for my rescue calls, for the chance to get outside and fucking breathe again. I never turned a single rescue down, even when it was inconvenient. I was always on edge, always sure it would be the last one, always waiting for the day Quinn said I had to give that up, too.”

“Oh, Max. I’m so sorry.”

Elena reached for his hand, stopping just before she made contact. His first reaction was to pull his hand away, a habit born of his overpowering desire to do the exact opposite. To make that contact with her—gladly, openly, willingly—was to go against everything he’d thought and believed for so long.

She’s too young. She’s too dangerous.

But he was so fucking tired of denying himself all the time. In the time he’d known Elena, she’d offered him both her body and her heart—and he’d said no, just like he was supposed to. This time, it was only her hand she was offering.

So he was saying yes.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he pulled her hand up, entwining their fingers together. She gasped, as if surprised he was capable of such a feat.

A raw lump caught in his throat. This woman had no idea what he was capable of where she was concerned. If he let himself, he’d do things to these fingers that would wipe all memories of late-night talk show hosts from her fantasies forever.

“We didn’t last much longer after Tina’s second birthday,” he said, his voice low as he rubbed his thumb along the inside of her palm. She didn’t have gloves on, but her hand was still warm, as if she couldn’t keep the innate heat of her from seeping out. “I thought things would get better after the divorce, that Quinn might relax once she was no longer forced to expend all her energy worrying about me, but the opposite happened. She wanted more. No climbs. Fewer rescues. A job with no risks and great insurance. I had to beg to spend any time with Tina at all. It’s only now, five years later, that she’s showing any sign of relaxation.”

“You’re a good dad,” Elena said, and with such certainty he believed her. Elena was, after all, a master’s-level psychologist. And a woman whose opinion I value.

But it wasn’t enough.

“Thank you.” He turned her hand over, laying it palm-facing-up on his thigh. He didn’t know a thing about palm reading, but he traced the lines carefully, following each one. Only when he’d finished making a survey of her hand did he stop and pull away. “But you see now why things would never work out between us.”

He’d thought it was obvious where this conversation was going, the message he meant to convey, but the sharp gasp of her surprise indicated he was wrong.

“What are you talking about?”

He blinked. “You and Me. Tina. Quinn.”

It was as though his words had no effect on her. “But you said it yourself last night,” Elena said, confused. “She has nothing to do with this situation.”

“She has everything to do with it.” He jerked to his feet, casting off Elena’s hand as though it had burned him. Which, to some extent, was true. The longer it sat there on his leg, comforting him, warming him, the more painful this was becoming. “Don’t you understand? I like you, Elena, I really do. You’re funny and warm and so fucking gorgeous it takes my breath away. I can’t walk into a room that you’re in without picturing what it would be like to have you underneath me. After this trip, I’m even starting to think that the age stuff isn’t insurmountable. But there’s no way I can do that again.”

“Do what?” she asked, her voice calm. Dangerously calm. When he didn’t reply right away, she repeated, “What can’t you do, Max?”

If he hadn’t looked at her, he might have been able to say it with kindness. He cared about Elena far too much to hurt her, might even say he was coming to appreciate her in ways that would have been unthinkable last week. But the moment he glanced down at her, her face set against him, he broke.

Elena Villanova was afraid of almost everything in the world. She had to develop coping mechanisms for every situation, quaked and quavered and cowered at things no other person even noticed.

Except, it seemed, for him. He was the one thing she stood up to time and time again, the one person who held no power over her. She wanted him and she didn’t care who knew it.

And he, Lord help him, wanted her back so badly, he wasn’t sure he could fight it much longer.

So he stopped trying.

Max hadn’t been in so many relationships in his life that he had a clear method of kissing a woman for the first time. Most of the time, it was an awkward affair, a will-they-won’t-they dance at the end of a date. It usually got better from there, thankfully, with a lot less head bobbing and a lot more tongue. But there was nothing awkward or hesitant about the way he yanked Elena to her feet, pulling her flush against him. The coffee cup in her hand flew out into the snow, but Max didn’t care. For the first time since his daughter had been born, he wasn’t listening to anything but the demands of his body.

To climb. To claim. To conquer.

“You know damn well what would happen if we gave in to this,” he said gruffly. Even though she had no outerwear except that damned shawl, her skin was searing. “Nothing would matter. Nothing would stand in the way. Fuck, Elena. Can’t you see? You’d bury me before we even left base camp.”

He crashed his mouth down onto hers. She tasted of coffee and toothpaste, an ordinary combination that should have brought him barreling back down to earth. Unfortunately, it didn’t. If anything, the familiar comfort of it only fueled his anger even more.

She was just an ordinary girl, after all. Pretty but flawed. Desirable but human.

Or so he’d always assumed. But the way her body notched into his, the way her mouth opened to let him in, robbed him of all common sense. There was only one thing he could think of as he ran his fingers up through glossy hair and down over decadent curves: I’d give it all up for her.

And in that moment, he would have, too. The whistling winds of Lhotse were nothing compared to the whimper that escaped her throat as his tongue warred with hers. The satisfaction of surviving Kangchenjunga would never compare with the way she begged him not to stop. Not even the silken feel of nylon runner cords slipping through his fingers could match the way her skin moved under his touch.

No.

He yanked himself away just as the kiss began reaching dangerous levels. The heat of her mouth was slowly overwhelming him, absorbing him, and he could feel himself slipping even further under her spell. That was how hypothermia happened. Not all at once, and not with a dramatic drop of temperature. It was a slowly creeping numbness, an acceptance of fate that lulled the unsuspecting into sleep.

“I won’t go back to sleep,” he said aloud.

There was no way for Elena to know what he was talking about, but she didn’t even blink at the sound of his voice. She didn’t untangle her arms from around his neck, either, which wasn’t helping matters any. Her breasts—those too-young, too-scared, too-tempting breasts—were pressed against his chest, reminding him off all the things he wanted and all the things he couldn’t have. They also reminded him of the temperature out here. Soft and gentle her breasts might be, but the nipples he could see carefully outlined against her cotton shirt were not.

“You’re cold,” he said and stepped back before he lost all control and took one of those nipples in his mouth.

Not that it helped any. The distance between them gave him a chance to see her full expression, which was one of dazed satisfaction, almost of triumph. He knew that look. He loved that look. It was the same one he and his teammates wore whenever they overcame insurmountable obstacles to reach the top of the world.

It was also the same one he’d never wear again, if Elena had her way. And if he allowed his dick to do any more of the thinking for the both of them. He might be harder than he’d ever been in his life, but nothing had changed in the past twenty-four hours.

Except me.

The sudden realization stole his breath and turned his voice rough. “You should go back inside,” he said, almost a growl. “Isn’t frostbite one of the many things you’re afraid of?”

It worked. Her arms dropped and her expression fell. The moment was lost. But that didn’t mean she bowed out gracefully. With the tenacity and honesty he was coming to expect from her, she inclined her head in a nod.

“Yes, Max,” she said, her voice as cold as the air around them. “Frostbite, bear attacks, heartbreak—I’m scared of it all. I’m weak and I’m soft. But I’m still here, aren’t I? I’m still trying. That’s more than I can say for some people.”

He couldn’t disagree with her. He also couldn’t keep looking at her in the snowlight, soft and supple and…shivering.

“Goddammit,” he said as he gathered up their lost coffee cups. “The last thing we need is for you to catch pneumonia out here. You should be inside and in bed.” He didn’t add what he was thinking: in my bed.

At the mention of a fresh hazard to worry about, Elena finally gave in, but not in the manner of a woman scared—oh, no. She was a woman scorned. Considering the way her last bout of fury had caused him to lose control and kiss her, he couldn’t decide if that was better or worse.

Worse, he thought as he watched her turn on her heel and stalk away, her long hair streaming behind her. Considering how much he wanted to bury himself in that hair—and in her—there was only one way to view it.

Definitely worse.