WILD RIVALS

One Tent

The storm didn't announce itself so much as arrive all at once, the way bad weather does above nine thousand feet — one minute a bruised sky, the next a wall of wind that flattened the tall grass and sent the Hendersons scrambling for jackets they should've had zipped an hour ago.

"Camp now," Mara said. Not a suggestion.

Jonah didn't argue. That alone told her how bad it looked from where he was standing.

They got the group into a loose staging line at the flat clearing that passed for a campsite, and for the next twenty minutes there wasn't room for rivalry, only work — stakes into hard ground, guy lines double-checked, gear bags lashed down before the wind could take them. Mara had run drills like this a dozen times, but never with someone matching her pace step for step, anticipating the next thing before she asked for it. He handed her a stake before she reached for it. She passed him a mallet without looking, and he was already there to catch it.

It should have annoyed her. It didn't, and that annoyed her more.

By the time the last tent was up — four two-person tents for eight clients, staked in a rough circle — the rain had started in earnest, cold and sideways, the kind that found its way under a hood no matter how well you'd sealed it.

Which was when Mara did the count and felt her stomach drop for the second time that day.

Four tents. Eight clients. Her tent, packed for a solo guide.

Jonah's tent — also packed for a solo guide, except that when she found him crouched over his gear a minute later, water running off his jacket in sheets, he was holding up the collapsed frame of what used to be a rainfly and looking at it like it had personally betrayed him.

"Tell me that's not what I think it is," she said.

"Pole snapped. Probably in the fall today, when I went down that slope." He turned it over, useless, one aluminum joint bent at an angle it wasn't built for. "It's not fixing itself out here."

"So you don't have a tent."

"I don't have a tent."

She looked at her own, small and single-occupant and currently the only dry thing on the mountain, and did the math she really did not want to be doing.

"Absolutely not," she said, before he'd even asked.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to."

"I was about to ask if you had a spare tarp, actually, but sure, jump straight to the worst-case scenario." He wiped rain out of his eyes, and under the joking there was something more tired than she was used to seeing on him — the day catching up, probably, same as it was catching up to her. "I can rig something with a tarp and some rope. I don't need your tent, Vance."

She believed him, mostly. She also knew what a tarp shelter looked like in forty-mile-an-hour wind, and she knew what happened to guides who got hypothermic on night one of a four-day trip, and she knew — this was the part she liked least — that if he went down out here, it would be on her watch too, whether she wanted the responsibility or not.

"It's a two-person tent," she said, like the words cost her something. Which they did. "Barely. It'll be tight."

Jonah went still in a way she hadn't seen from him all day.

"You sure?"

"I'm offering once."

"Then yes. Obviously yes." A flicker of the usual grin, but softer around the edges, less performance in it than she was used to. "Try not to get too used to me being nice to sleep next to."

"Don't flatter yourself. You're sleeping next to my emergency kit and a satellite phone. That's the appeal."

"Devastating."

They got the tent up in the last of the daylight, rain hammering the fly, wind testing every stake she'd driven. Inside, the space was exactly as small as she'd remembered — two sleeping pads that had to overlap slightly at the edges, gear stuffed into every corner that wasn't already occupied by a body. Jonah folded himself into it with the careful economy of someone used to small spaces, boots off, jacket hung to drip by the door flap, doing his best impression of a man taking up as little room as physically possible.

It didn't help much. The tent was the tent. Their shoulders were maybe eight inches apart, close enough that she could hear every breath he took over the sound of rain hitting nylon, close enough that when he shifted to get comfortable, his arm brushed hers and neither of them said anything about it.

"This is a first," he said quietly, into the dark.

"What is?"

"Being in a tent with you and not actively wanting to strangle you."

She almost laughed. Almost. "Give it time."

Outside, the storm settled into the kind of steady, relentless rhythm that meant it wasn't going anywhere before morning, and somewhere in the dark eight feet away, four other tents held four couples who'd paid good money for an anniversary trip and were currently getting a very different story than the one they'd booked.

Mara lay still, listening to Jonah's breathing even out beside her, and thought — with a specific kind of dread she didn't examine too closely — that she did not hate this nearly as much as she should.