Until I Found You (3 page)

Captain McAllister struck her as a “by the book” kind of man. Kate was a “by the book” kind of woman. Under normal circumstances she would have honored his advice, but today wasn’t normal. Ignoring her muddy clothes and foggy brain, she lifted her chin as if she were fighting for a promotion at Sutton. “I appreciate your concern, Captain McAllister. I really do, but I have to get my purse. If there’s any chance—”

Nick interrupted. “I’ll go.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but his offer stunned her into silence. Except for Leona, very few people had ever come to her rescue. She usually did the rescuing—first for her mom, later for college friends and boyfriends number one and two, but not Joel, who had left for New York with a casual,
“See you when I’m in town,”
as if they hadn’t been together for almost year, as if she hadn’t expected marriage. Kate took care of herself. She took charge in a crisis, but this wasn’t a jammed photocopier or a toothache. Her
life
was in this canyon—at least remnants of it—and she wanted to see it for herself.

She faced Nick. “I’d like to go with you.”

“No.” That voice again—pure authority. Chin down, he matched his gaze to hers. “I can work faster alone. And the captain’s right. You should take it easy.”

Kate didn’t like being told what to do, especially after being trapped and helpless. It was her nature to take charge, and that’s what she did. Under the scratchy blanket, she squared her shoulders. “It’s my car—”

Captain McAllister interrupted. “Both of you—stop.
No one
is going down there today. It’s a mess and it’s dangerous.
A hazmat crew needs to do some cleanup before anyone takes a hike.”

Kate told herself to go with the flow and roll with the punches, but a lump refused to budge from the back of her throat. “But my things—”

Nick gave her the same strong look that had stopped her from screaming in the canyon. “I’ll get them tomorrow.”

“I guess, but—” She chomped on her lip to keep from crying, but her knees still buckled. Defeated, she dropped down on the step.

Captain McAllister leaned back, assessing her. “Are you sure you don’t want to go the ER?”

“Positive.”

As if she’d told a joke, his gray eyes twinkled. “You’re as stubborn as Leona.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she replied.

“Oh, it is.” The fireman chuckled. “Everyone in Meadows knows Leona. Tell her Rob and the boys say hi.”

“I will.”

“But Kate? Don’t be too stubborn to accept help. Is there someone you can call? Someone to stay with you?”

Yes, there was. And she very much needed a friend who would listen while she talked about the condor, the fall, the rescue. “I’ll call Dody Thompson.” Dody was Leona’s best friend. Since the stroke, she’d become Kate’s friend, too.

“Good,” the captain replied. “I’ll drive you to Leona’s as soon as we’re done here. It won’t be long.”

“Thank you.”

He left to check on the men at the other end of the road-block, leaving her with Nick, the blanket, and a fresh attack of the shivers. “It’s not that cold,” she protested. “I’m just—”

“Rattled,” he finished for her.

“Yes.”

“Can you get in the house?” he asked.

A good question considering her keys were lost. “I should be fine. There’s a spare key in the garage—”

“Under the flowerpot.”

“You know about it?”

“Leona told me.”

“You must be good friends.”

“We are. I help out with the
Clarion
,” he explained. “Speaking of the paper, I’ll get pictures of the road.”

Kate was supposed to be looking after the paper for Leona, and she had overlooked the biggest news story of the year. Embarrassed, she stood straighter and took responsibility. “I should have thought of that.”

“You have other things on your mind.” Nick held up his phone. “I have it covered.”

“Thanks.” She seasoned the inadequate word with a smile, but nothing could convey to him what she felt. She was gloriously alive because he had shown up at the exact right time and was crazy enough to climb down a cliff. He’d risked his life for her. No one had ever done anything like that. Joel wouldn’t even help her paint her condo, though he was quick to want to spend the night. Suddenly her eyes burned with hot tears. She blinked them away, then raised her gaze to Nick’s angular face. “How can I ever thank you—”

“You already have.” He stared down at her, his gaze bright and his mouth relaxed. “Any man would have done what I did.” He studied her with a tenderness she rarely saw on male faces, then handed her a blue bandanna. “Here.”

She took it, wiped her eyes and succumbed to a wave of despair. Nick was wrong about
any man
coming to her aid. Joel had left her with a “see ya, babe” and a quick kiss. Her boss didn’t want to lay her off, but he’d do it in a blink to protect the bottom line. The threat of losing her job loomed
like the cliff that had nearly taken her life . . .
would
have taken her life if Nick hadn’t been passing by. She wiped her nose with the bandanna that smelled like leather and good cologne, refrained from thanking him again, but refused to give it back when he held out his hand.

“I’ll wash it for you,” she said.

“Keep it.” He tapped on the side of the truck and stepped back. “I’ll call you tomorrow about your things.”

“That would be nice.” Her gaze slipped from his face to his broad chest and shoulders, then to the leather jacket marked with mud and the imprint of her body, evidence he’d held her close and kept her safe. Her turquoise sweater had a matching smudge, and she vaguely thought of the condors and what she knew from her grandfather—that young birds imprinted off older ones to learn how to survive, and that they mated for life. Beneath the streaks of dirt, a blush warmed her cheeks. She had no business thinking about muddy imprints and the mating habits of condors. She was in Meadows temporarily and had no interest in a relationship. As for commitment, she took life a day at a time because what more did anyone really have?

Focusing her thoughts on the present, she indicated his jacket with a slight smile. “The mud looks like a Rorschach test.”

“So does your sweater.”

“What do you see?” she joked to lighten the mood.

His eyes dipped down, then back to her face. Silence hung a moment too long, then he said, “I see mud. What about you?”

“Not bats,” she said, a reference to the standard Rorschach reply. “I see a jacket that needs cleaning.”
And a
good-looking man.
Nick Sheridan had the posture of a soldier, the ease of a cowboy, and the daring of a pirate.

His mouth lifted into a half smile and stopped, as if he’d
stifled a reaction. Abruptly he directed his gaze to the peaks on the other side of the canyon. “I better take those pictures.”

She watched him trudge up the road and around the bend, pausing occasionally to photograph the broken pavement. A few minutes later a motorcycle rumbled around the hairpin, and she looked up. There was Nick in his jacket, gauntlets, and a silver helmet he wore like a crown. The crown made him a modern-day knight in shining armor, one mounted on a black Harley with a mile of chrome. She followed him with her eyes until he passed her with a dip of his chin and a wave. Her heart gave a little flutter, but she didn’t pay attention. Flutters came and went, and she’d long outgrown the childhood fantasy of being a damsel in distress. What mattered was helping Leona recover, keeping up with her career, and getting back to Los Angeles and the life she loved and already missed.

I
t didn’t take long for
news
of the road collapse to reach Meadows. Nick had just left Kate and was about to climb on the Harley when Maggie Alvarez, assistant editor of the
Clarion
, called his cell phone. She’d heard the sirens leaving Meadows and gleaned the news on the police scanner. Could he cover the story, she asked? He told her he was already on site, and he sent the pictures from his phone so she could update the website.

With Leona in the hospital, Maggie had stepped up to keep the paper going—a challenge for a woman with two children and a husband with a demanding career of his own. Nick helped her by covering hard news in addition to his free-lance work, and he assisted with production when a deadline loomed. Advertising still had to be sold, and that job belonged to Art Davis, a retiree with a gift for gab. Eileen Holbrook was a combo bookkeeper/receptionist. Between the four of them, the
Clarion
had managed to limp to press while Leona was in the hospital.

Nick had a soft spot for the old newspaper, a weekly tab that harkened back to simpler days and fit the small-town at
mosphere. After his night on Mount Abel, he had ridden into Meadows for breakfast, bought a copy of the
Clarion
, and spotted the ad for the half-finished log cabin he bought that afternoon. The living room, kitchen, and master bedroom were finished now, but the other bedrooms needed carpet and paint. Between his memoir, the
Clarion
, and
California Dreaming
, he’d been too busy to work on it.

He finished with Maggie, revved the bike, and rode close to the mountain as he passed the mudslide. When he saw Kate, he waved in the casual way motorcyclists acknowledge each other, then sped toward Meadows.

A fast ride forced him to concentrate on the road—not Kate and the Rorschach test on her sweater. Nick knew what he’d seen, what any man would see. Kate Darby had curves in all the right places. A man couldn’t help a first glance, nor could he control natural interest. It was the second look that mattered, the second thought that led to mistakes. Never again would he treat women and dating casually. As Nick and the captain of the
Titanic
both knew, accidents happen. He wouldn’t let Kate turn into an accident—emotionally or physically. Under normal circumstances, he’d avoid her. But these circumstances weren’t normal. She was Leona’s granddaughter, stranded without a car, traumatized, and . . .
admit it
 . . . beautiful in his favorite way. Common sense told him to keep his distance, but both common decency and his Christian faith demanded he reach out to her. In his mind he made a checklist.

1. Check the battery in Leona’s car.

2. Open the chimney flue.

3. Haul in firewood.

4. Make sure Kate had dinner.

No, not dinner. Dinner would count as a date, and Nick was dead set on keeping his one-year pledge. Other rules,
though, were meant to be broken, specifically Captain McAllister’s directive to stay out of the canyon. Nick saw no reason to wait until tomorrow to salvage Kate’s things. He needed a hot shower, but after he cleaned up, he’d trade the motorcycle for his truck and take the fire road to the scene of the crash. If her purse had bounced out of the car, he’d find it. At the very least, he could collect the things from the popped trunk and take them to Leona’s house. But no dinner invitation. No banter. Like a U.S. Navy Seal, he’d go in with a plan and get out fast.

Houses began to appear in the mountains above the two-lane highway. The homes were mostly log cabins, but a few cottages and old A-frames poked through the mix of pine and oak. The rustic charm gave way slowly, first to a gas station, then a convenience store with a sign shaped like a giant wagon wheel. The first time Nick cruised into Meadows, he thought he’d discovered a Hollywood set caught between a remake of
Heidi
and Clint Eastwood’s
Unforgiven
. The older buildings had an alpine look—steep roofs, gingerbread trim, and colorful shutters. They harkened to the 1980s, when Meadows was home to a Santa’s Village. The reindeer were gone and the buildings had lost their luster, but the Chamber of Commerce hadn’t given up. The newer buildings were western style with split-rail fences, and souvenir shops that sold cowboy hats, fool’s gold, and maps to a lost gold mine.

The small town appealed to Nick for all the best reasons. People took care of each other, but there were also fights over guardrails, local politics, and environmental issues—plenty of things to talk about with locals at the coffee shop, where he frequently ate, or with Hector, the mechanic who had Harleys in his blood. He could have done without the gossip about his marital status—and Chellie Valerio, a hairdresser who
boldly flirted with him. But otherwise people were friendly without being intrusive. Everyone knew he’d written a travel guide that pushed the boundaries of common sense, but no one knew about his daughter, and he wanted to keep it that way. In Meadows he was the new Nick, a better man, or at least he was trying to be.

He steered on to Falcon Drive, climbed the last three miles to his house, and pulled into the driveway. Helmet off, he blew out a breath to clear his lungs, then inhaled as deeply as he could. He was home, such as it was. A hot shower waited for him, then he’d head to San Miguel Canyon and search for Kate’s belongings. When he finished, he’d call her on Leona’s house phone. No dinner invitation, he reminded himself. As for working together at the Clarion, he expected Maggie to be a buffer. The friendly editor talked all the time, which meant Nick wouldn’t need to say much about the paper or anything else.

He’d be friendly, yes.

Charming, no.

Attracted to her?
Oh, yeah
.
He couldn’t help what he felt, but he didn’t have to act on it. Six months, he reminded himself. He had made a promise to God and himself, and he intended to keep it.

In typical mountain fashion, the earlier storm had knocked out power to parts of Meadows, including Leona’s house at the end of Quail Court. Kate could live without electricity for a few hours, but hot water was another matter. Fortunately the gas water heater was an old model with a pilot light. She lit it, waited an hour, and indulged in a long soak. Somewhat renewed, she put on ski pants and a moss green sweater she kept at Leona’s for winter visits. Her insides were
still quivering and probably would for a while, but her hands were steady when she used the house phone to call Dody.

As things turned out, Dody was visiting her daughter and grandkids in Fresno. “I’ll come back tomorrow if you need me,” she said after Kate told her the story.

“No, don’t come. I’m fine.”

“Honey, are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“If you need anything at all, call Nick. Did he give you his cell?”

“No.”

“Well, he should have,” Dody said with a hint of impatience. “If you need the number, it’s in the address book in the desk.”

Leona had used the same red book since moving to Meadows twenty-some years ago. It overflowed with scraps of paper, different colors of ink, and scribbled-out entries that marked changes of all kinds—moves, deaths, and friendships faded with time. Kate had moved so often she had an entire page. She wondered what Nick’s entry looked like and paused to consider his friendship with Leona, a woman more than twice his age.

“Dody?”

“Yes, honey?” Dody called everyone honey.

“It seems odd that Leona and Nick are such good friends. She’s seventy, and he’s . . . what? Thirty?”

“Thirty-one,” Dody confirmed. “He writes for the paper, which is how they met, but it wasn’t long before Leona adopted him. Nick’s a writer, so they have that in common. Plus he recognized your grandfather’s name.”

“That makes sense.” Nothing made Leona happier than remembering the glory days with Grandpa Alex, especially the years he spent covering the effort to save the California condor from extinction.

“Nick’s easy on the eyes,” Dody said with a smile in her voice. “With Joel out of the picture—”

Kate laughed. “Forget it.”

“Why?”

“Bad timing.” She liked Nick well enough, but she didn’t need the stress of a relationship, especially one destined to be temporary. In two months, she’d be back at Sutton, working on the new proposal for Eve Landon. Eve had loved Kate’s work on the first print campaign, and Kate reveled in the entire creative process. Matching images and words to convey concepts put order in her life and satisfied her in a deep, personal way.

Dody broke into her thoughts. “I have to go, but if you need anything call Nick.”

“I will.”

Dody offered another dollop of sympathy, then excused herself to change her granddaughter’s diaper. Someday Kate wanted to be a mother—not for a while, but sometimes she heard the tick of her biological clock, in part because of Julie. Her best friend was thirty-eight years old, married, and desperate for a baby. If the latest hormone treatments didn’t work, she and her husband planned to undergo in vitro fertilization. Kate worried about Julie, and Julie worried about her. Under normal circumstances, Kate would have already sent her a text announcing her safe arrival in Meadows. Instead she called Julie from Leona’s landline and left a voice mail her friend probably wouldn’t check until after work.

Eager to settle in, Kate borrowed Leona’s slippers and ambled down the stairs to the living room, which felt more like home than her own condo. The sliding glass door opened to a wide deck that looked up to Mount Abel, and the Ben Franklin stove looked brand-new in a fresh coat of black polish. The woodbox needed to be filled, and so did the kindling
bucket. In her mind, Kate began a list of things to do before Leona’s homecoming, then realized again that her own life was in the bottom of San Miguel Canyon, burnt to a crisp and mired in mud. The trembling in her middle rose like an ocean swell but mercifully receded without cresting. She couldn’t afford to break down, not now. She had things to do—like call her car insurance company.

Once again she used the old plug-in on the desk next to a bookshelf. Her grandmother kept the phone specifically for power outages, a wise decision considering the number of times a year Meadows lost electricity. The mountain climate took a toll on houses and cars, but with a year-round population of four thousand, Meadows had most of the conveniences of a big city—cable, a cell tower, a branch of the county library, even its own small school district. It was also in the middle of the Los Padres National Forest and one of the prettiest spots in Southern California, a pleasure that outweighed the inconveniences.

With that positive thought in mind, Kate called 4-1-1. A fake voice connected her to CalUSA Insurance. She pressed a few prompts, and another fake voice, male this time, assured her that her call was important to them and someone would be with her in—pause—Twenty. Eight. Minutes.

“I can’t believe it,” she muttered.

Tethered to the wall by the phone cord, she sat at the desk and wrote out a “to do” list—a task that took less than a minute. Between the peppy music and the periodic interruption of the mechanical man telling her that he cared about her, Kate was ready to pull her hair out. Instead, she popped to her feet and perused a bookcase holding an assortment of novels, mysteries, celebrity biographies, and local history.

She skimmed the titles until her eyes locked on
California for Real Men.
The “Real Men” books had become a cultural
phenomenon, and the publisher had launched a series that included New York, Florida, and Hawaii. The California book had made the rounds at Sutton about a year ago, but Kate didn’t pay much attention, in part because Joel mocked the “I came, I saw, I conquered” tone as retro and unsophisticated.

This wasn’t the kind of book she expected to find on her grandmother’s shelf, so she opened it. A handwritten inscription read
To Leona, Don’t read Chapter Fifteen—
All the best, Nick Sheridan

The same Nick who had just saved her life?

She glanced again at the cover, reread his name and flipped to the back, where the author’s photograph left no doubt of the connection. His hair was shorter now, but the daring grin was unmistakable. Mouth agape, she leafed through the pages. The book covered every inch of California from Eureka to San Diego, from the Sierra Nevada mountains to the Channel Islands. In a chapter called “For Daredevils Only,” he sang the praises of hang gliding at Big Sur and bull riding in Kern County. Other chapters were tamer, particularly “Golf Isn’t Just for Geezers” and “Bowling Alleys a Guy Hates to Love.”