The words were heartfelt. So heartfelt it was Mikki’s turn to stare intently at Tama.
She had to clear her throat to break the new silence. ‘What did you blame yourself for, Tama?’
Tama dug the shovel into the snow forcefully and heaved the load upwards, grateful for a physically demanding task.
Dammit. That had been unbelievably careless. But how had Mikki picked up that he was talking about himself so easily? It was like she could see the part of him he’d been able to keep so well hidden for so many years.
‘I’m just saying,’ he muttered. ‘That’s what kids are like.’
He needed to direct the conversation back to safe ground. Why had he asked such a personal question in the first place? He knew perfectly well what level of determination this pint-sized woman possessed.
This had been a mistake. He’d got carried away back there when they’d been visiting Josh. Pushed the boundaries of the game thanks to the temptation that nurse’s comment had provoked. A threesome? No way. But the idea of being alone—just him and Mikki—had been irresistible. And so easy to arrange with no suspicions being raised.
But it had been a mistake. He needed to back off and get this excursion onto purely professional grounds.
‘We can start digging the tunnel now.’ Tama stepped away from the impressively large mound of snow. ‘We start out here and go down about a metre. We won’t come up until we’re well under the edge of the mound and then we’ll start hollowing out from the middle. I’ll shovel it behind me and you can scoop it up and get rid of it.’
The task was not difficult but it was time-consuming and they had to rest at intervals to conserve energy.
Verbal interaction was minimal because Mikki was out of sight and busy behind him. When there was an opportunity to say something, Tama kept right away from anything personal. He had a wealth of stories he could tell about how people dealt with survival in the wilderness. Plus any number of useful tips.
‘Don’t ever carry a butane lighter with your survival kit,’ he warned Mikki. ‘Too damn dangerous. Have an airtight, melt-proof container and keep waterproof matches or magnesium fire-starters in it.
‘Use your watch for a compass. Keep it flat and point the hour hand at the sun. Half the distance between the hour hand and twelve o’clock is due south.
‘You can make a decent fishing hook by bending a syringe needle. I’ll show you tomorrow when we get near the river.’
It worked for a while, even though it felt forced at best and a bit ridiculous at times. It wasn’t so easy to control his thoughts while he was alone in the centre of the mound, carving out the space they would share for the night. He kept thinking about the kind of darkness her words had skimmed. A darkness he could understand only too well.
Was that where her astonishing strength of character came from? That period of heading into adolescence, not only missing the person she needed most. But carrying the burden of guilt that her very existence might have contributed to her mother’s death?
He gave up trying to squash his curiosity when he emerged to share a drink of water and a muesli bar from Mikki’s pack.
‘At least your dad didn’t blame you,’ he found himself saying out of the blue. ‘Or he wouldn’t have been so over-protective.’
‘That came later,’ Mikki said. ‘After the car accident when I was sixteen.’
Ah, yes. That accident. He’d been curious about that when she’d mentioned it the day of that physical assessment. It had been so easy to stay away from stepping onto personal ground back then. Not so easy now.
‘You were hurt?’ The mental image of Mikki lying badly injured in the kind of scenes he often attended was disturbing enough to give him a kick in the gut.
‘Amazingly, no, but the other three teenagers in the car were hurt. One of them died. I was the front-seat passenger and … I got lucky, I guess.’
‘They were your friends?’
‘Yeah …’ She didn’t sound sure.
‘A boyfriend was one of them?’
‘No.’ Mikki’s tone told him it was time to stop prying. Clearly, she didn’t want to talk about it.
That was fine. Good, even. They could really get away from this personal stuff. He could dismiss his curiosity about those intervening years. The ones between her mother’s death and the accident that had made her father so over-protective. Had he not cared much until then? Been so focussed on a sick wife and then too broken-hearted to really notice his kid? She must have been incredibly lonely if that had been the case. Not that he was going to ask but he didn’t like the idea of her being a lonely child any more than being injured.
Mikki broke into his thoughts. ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Were you an only child?’
Maybe they couldn’t stay away from this personal stuff after all. He’d brought this on himself, though, hadn’t he?
‘Yes and no,’ Tama answered reluctantly. He pushed the top of his water bottle shut with a snap, shoved it back into the pack and turned to climb back into the tunnel. Then he caught Mikki watching him and sighed inwardly.
‘Yeah, OK. It’s just not something I tell people.’ Ever. So why did it feel like the time to break that ironclad rule? Because Mikki had experienced something that might give her insight into how it had really been? There was something there. A connection. A kind of force that pulled the words from his mouth. ‘Yes, I was an only child. I didn’t have a dad that I knew about. I got sent to live with my uncle and aunt and eleven cousins.’
Tama ducked his head into the tunnel. He’d said enough. Too much.
Mikki’s voice floated into the tunnel with him. ‘How old were you?’
‘About six,’ Tama growled. He wriggled further into the mound. This conversation was over.
Mikki crouched at the neck of the tunnel, ready to scoop the snow that came towards her and spread it away from the opening.
She had barely heard Tama’s muttered response to her question but it resonated in her head as loudly as if he’d shouted it.
He’d been six. A small child.
For whatever reason, his mother had given him up and sent him to live with relatives. To be one of a huge family where one more mouth to feed probably hadn’t been noticed. He might not have been noticed.
Just like her, he’d lost his mother.
And he’d blamed himself, hadn’t he? That was why those words had been so heartfelt.
As a little boy, Tama had felt unloved and possibly very lonely, and he’d believed it was his own fault. That somehow, unknowingly, he’d done something so wrong he’d had to be severely punished.
Mikki’s heart ached. For Tama. For herself. For the children they had been and for what had been taken from them. No wonder she felt so drawn to this man. Was it the similarity of their pasts that attracted them both to this kind of work? This unique combination of risking yourself to care for others?
Was the reason she felt Tama was a soulmate as simple as that?
Maybe.
Except that there was another factor in this attraction.
A very physical one.
The inside of the snow mound had a wide platform against one side and a narrower one against the other.
‘We sleep there,’ Tama explained, pointing to the wider platform. ‘And we cook on this