Wild Iris Ridge (Hope's Crossing) (23 page)

Right now he was safe, on a spot where the hillside flattened out into a sort of wide plateau, but just below that was a rocky talus slope that cut at least two hundred feet down the mountain.

She was afraid that if the puppy tried too hard to climb up, he would end up falling into that dangerous rock field and would slide all the way down, where she wouldn’t be able to retrieve him.

With her heart pounding, she started toward him. By now, the rain was falling steadily, turning everything into a slick mess.

She made it perhaps ten feet down the steep slope by hanging on to shrubs and saplings to help her fight gravity. Grateful now for all those runs and the free weights she did on alternate days to tone, she thought she was strong enough to make it—until she grabbed hold of what she thought was a shrub and it turned out to be only a weed that she pulled out from the roots.

Just like that, she lost her purchase on the rain-slick slope, her feet slipped out from under her and she went tumbling down and down and down.

She hit her head hard during her fall on a rock or a stump, she wasn’t sure, but even then she might have been fine except that momentum carried her just past the wide plateau where Max waited. The only thing stopping her was the huge boulder she slammed into, with most of the impact absorbed by her right foot.

Raw pain exploded up her leg and she thought she must have passed out—from the head injury or the leg pain, she wasn’t sure.

She only knew when she woke up, Max was licking her face, she was drenched and freezing and the mountainside had gone dark.

Worst of all, her phone must have fallen out of her pocket during her tumble and continued bouncing down the slope without her. She heard it ring several times from far below them, but she couldn’t see it and knew she couldn’t risk trying to find it in the dark when she didn’t know how far down it was or how steep the terrain.

Better to try scrambling back up to the trail, but that was much easier said than done. She had fallen at least two hours ago. In that time, she had tried to fashion a splint for her ankle out of branches and the straps of the backpack, which miraculously was still over her shoulder after the fall.

Clawing and scrambling, she had made it up about ten feet but the twenty more to the trail seemed impossible—not to mention the mile she would have to make it down the trail to her car.

Max licked at her face, and she realized she was crying again, salty tears to join the rain dripping down her face.

She didn’t want to die. She closed her eyes and pictured Brendan and the children. They would be shattered to lose her. Nothing else mattered.

If she curled up here and allowed herself to wallow in her pain and her fear, she would freeze to death. She had to just push past all of it and move forward. She didn’t have any other choice.

Yes. Another perfect metaphor for her life.

“Come on, Max. We can do this.” The dog yipped and she grabbed the backpack, now down to one strap. She pulled him out of her shirt and tucked him into the backpack so she could use both scraped and gouged hands to climb her way up.

It was hard, strenuous, painful work. She fell back down a few feet three different times but picturing Brendan, Faith and Carter helped spur her a little farther and then a little farther still.

She was roughly ten feet below the trail when she heard it, the sound of her name in a hoarse, frantic voice she knew well.

“Bren!” she called back, sobbing with relief and exhaustion. “Brendan! I’m here.”

“Where?” he yelled. “Keep yelling so I can find you.”

She could see a flashlight beam over her head, bright and beautiful through the rain.

“Here. Here. Below the overlook. M-Max is here.”

The dog helpfully yipped in excitement, and Lucy clawed her way up a few more feet, calling out every ten seconds or so, until he rushed down the slope, wrapped her in his arms and carried her the rest of the way up to the safety of the trail.

He didn’t let go of her, even when they were back on solid ground, just held her close, and she could feel tremors shake both of them. Were they from her, from Brendan or from Max? Probably all three of them.

“I thought I’d lost you, too,” he said, and the agony in his voice made more tears drip down her cheeks.

“I’m here. You didn’t l-lose me. I’m okay. So is Max.”

Heat radiated off him like a beacon and she wanted to burrow into him and never move again.

He carried her to the bench where the whole thing had started, sagged onto it with her still in his arms and pulled out his radio. She clung to him, completely exhausted while he reported their location in that same hoarse, raw voice and called for one of the search-and-rescue ATVs to come up to the scene.

“It will take them about ten minutes to get here,” he said. “I was supposed to wait for the rest of the team to assemble so we could start the grid, but when I saw your car at the trailhead, I couldn’t do it. I knew you had to be up here somewhere, hurt, cold. I figured I would hear you better without all that engine noise on the trail, anyway.”

She couldn’t muster any response past the bone-deep cold and this vast, sweet relief.

“I need to let go of you for a moment. Just for a moment, sweetheart. Hang on.”

She made a sound of protest as he pulled off his backpack. From inside, he pulled out several supplies—a survival blanket, a dry shirt, a rain poncho.

The rain seemed to have eased up to a drizzle as he pulled off her soaking T-shirt and slipped her into the dry shirt he pulled from the pack. He grabbed another dry shirt out of the bag and wrapped Max into it, then laid the puppy in her lap and pulled the poncho over all three of them to keep out the rain.

“Can you tell me what happened? Where are you hurt?”

“Ankle,” she muttered. “I think it’s broken or at least seriously sprained.”

“How?”

“Max wandered away. I should have been watching him, every second, but I wasn’t.”

She let out a little sob as the adrenaline rush that had pushed her to claw her way up that hillside began to subside. She would have felt so horrible if something had happened to the dog.

“He wandered down the slope or fell or something. I don’t know which. I j-just know when I tried to climb down to get him, I slipped in the mud and my ankle smashed into a r-rock. We’ve been trying to climb back up for hours. I’m so cold.”

“I know. I’ve got you now. You’re safe. You’ll warm up in a minute and the rescue team will be bringing more dry blankets.”

She could hear his heart pounding furiously beneath her ear, and the sound humbled her.

She
did
feel safe. Safe, sheltered. Loved.

“I knew you would find me,” she murmured. “I know that sounds like something out of a corny movie, but it’s true.”

He made a strangled sort of sound and pressed his mouth to hers. The kiss was deliciously warm, tender, etched with a desperate relief she completely echoed.

“By the way, I changed my mind,” she said against his mouth.

He shifted away from her, and she could barely see him, despite the glow of the flashlight he had left as a beacon to the rescuers. “About?”

“You. Us. I’ll wait for you, as long as it takes. I don’t care. A year, two years. Ten. The whole time I was down there, all I could think about was you. This. I knew you would find me. As I was lying there in the mud and rain and grit, I vowed that when you did, I had to tell you what you mean to me. I love you. I have loved you forever. You asked me to wait and I will. Take as long as necessary. I don’t care. I just...I need you.”

“Lucy.” He said her name like a hoarse prayer and then he kissed her again with fierce emotion, his big hands cupping her face.

“I love you,” he rasped. “From the moment I found you were missing, I’ve been sick with fear, thinking I was too late, that I was going to lose you, too, before I ever had the chance to tell you how very much I love you.”

The cold, the rain, the pain that still screeched up her leg every time she took a breath. None of it mattered compared to the sweet, healing joy of hearing those words she had never expected from him.

She gave a laugh that was a sob, too, and tightened her arms around him.

From below them on the trail, she could hear the roar of engines, several of them. Headlights cut through the dark and the rain, and rescuers called out to each other and to Brendan.

As they worked around her—bundling her in blankets, splinting her ankle more adequately than her makeshift effort, tucking her into an all-terrain vehicle that held four people then driving down to the trailhead—he stayed close to her.

She held Max closely, wondering how she could shift in only a few moments from the depths of fear and sorrow to this brilliant, incandescent joy.

She was safe and loved. What more could she possibly need?

* * *

H
E
HAD
ALMOST
lost her.

As Brendan rode with Lucy down to the waiting ambulance at the trailhead, that truth kept rumbling through his brain.

If she had tumbled a little farther down the slope, if he hadn’t found her, if she had struck her head on that rock a little harder, this situation could have gone far differently.

He couldn’t bear thinking about it. It seemed a rare and precious gift, somehow, that they were here together, that she held his hand as they bumped along in the back of the little four-seater Ranger all-terrain vehicle.

Some part of him was still shaking inside, consumed with memories of that nightmare time after Jessie’s death. How could he do this to himself again? Open himself up to that kind of soul-crushing pain again?

The rest of him realized he had no choice. He loved her too much. Pop was right. He couldn’t give up a future filled with joy and love because he was afraid something might happen to her.

The love would just have to be stronger than the fear.

He closed his eyes and let it wash over him, all his relief that she was okay and the sweet peace he found sitting beside her.

At the parking lot, the guys brought over a stretcher and he lifted her into it, which was totally against protocol but he didn’t care.

“I’m riding in the ambulance,” he said.

Since he was the fire chief, nobody argued with him. Sometimes a little authority came in handy.

“What about the dog?” Mike Chen, who was driving the ambulance, asked him.

Lucy cuddled Max closer. He thought about letting her keep the dog, but he would only get in the way at the hospital.

“He’ll be okay. I’ll have somebody take him to Iris House. Crystal’s going to be out of her head with worry for you and for him.”

“Take care of him. He’s a good, brave puppy,” she said, obviously already feeling the effects of the pain medication his guys had given her first thing.

“So what happens now?” she asked after they were on their way and he had relayed her vitals to the waiting emergency department.

“You’re probably going to have to stay overnight,” he said as he cleaned up some of the scrapes on her hands she had earned climbing up that slope, an image that chilled his blood. “I’m going to take a guess here and say you probably broke your ankle. You might be looking at surgery, but that will be up to the ortho doc. I would recommend Jeff Bradford. He can be a bit of a jerk but he’s the best bone guy in town.”

“Thanks. But I meant with us.”

That trace of insecurity in her voice tugged at his heart. He brought one of her battered hands to his mouth. “You’re flying high from the pain meds right now. You will be for a while. Maybe we should wait to talk about this.”

“I don’t want to wait. I’ve waited long enough.”

So much had happened that day, his head was spinning as if
he
were the one who had taken the pain meds. “We’ll have to figure that out. In the short-term, I imagine we’ll do a lot of flying back and forth. In the long term, I suppose they need firefighters in Portland, too.”

She twisted around to stare at him, and after a moment her eyes began to fill. “You...you would leave Hope’s Crossing for me? Your family, your life, Faith and Carter’s whole world?”

He smoothed back her hair, careful not to touch the ugly bruise blooming just to the left of her temple. “Not their
whole
world. You’re a huge part of that. They love you as much as I do.”

She sobbed out a ragged-sounding laugh, sniffling so hard now she ended up using the corner of the sheet as a handkerchief.

“Everything okay back there?” Chen called.

“Yeah,” he growled. “Keep driving.”

Brendan picked up her hand again. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. You’re not in any shape to talk about this now. We have all the time in the world.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t want to go to Portland,” she admitted. “I never did. I just knew I couldn’t stay here, the way things were between us.”

That set him back a bit. “What do you want?”

“To stay here with you and Carter and Faith,” she said softly, almost shyly. “I want to stay in Hope’s Crossing and make Iris House the most amazing bed and breakfast in Colorado.”

“What about your career?”

“I loved my career and I was good at it. I used to love the challenge of it, but lately something has been missing. I never had the kind of peace I’ve found here these last few weeks.”

She sniffled again. “I don’t know. I don’t want to throw all my experience away. Maybe I can open a consulting business on the side.”

“Aidan’s going to be pissed,” he warned. “He likes getting his own way. Always has.”

“Must be a family trait,” she answered with a loopy sort of smile as the pain meds continued to be metabolized.

“Must be.”

“I like Aidan,” she said, “but I’m not sure I could have worked for him, anyway. One Caine brother is enough for me, I think.”

“This one’s yours,” he said solemnly.

She gave him a soft, tender smile, and he almost had to close his eyes again as the wonder of second chances seemed to seep through him, healing all the shattered pieces of his heart.

For a long time, he didn’t think he could ever be happy again. But here he was, tangled up in love for this smart, beautiful, amazing woman.