Barely Breathing (Colorado High Country #1)

by Pamela Clare

  With Megs, there was no cutting corners. It made her a pain in the ass to work with at times, but it had also saved lives.

  “Mitch Ahearn. Chaska Belcourt. Harrison Conrad. Sasha Dillon. Dave Hatfield. Eric Hawke. Creed Herrera … is in Yosemite. Jesse Moretti?”

  “Behind you getting coffee.” Moretti, a former Army Ranger, had come to Colorado on a vacation to get his head straight after multiple deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d fallen in love with the mountains and stayed.

  “Malachi O’Brien. Isaac Rogers. Gabe Rossiter … still on leave.”

  Rossiter wasn’t really on leave. He’d had a catastrophic fall a few years back while saving his wife’s life and had lost a leg. He still climbed, but his priority these days was his wife and their kids. One of the best free solo climbers in the world, he was a tenured member, which meant he had a spot on the Team whether he showed up for meetings or not.

  “Jack Sullivan. Nicole Turner. Austin Taylor.” Megs raised her head, looked at Austin. “Hey, did you know Lexi Jewell’s back in town?”

  Austin bit back a stream of profanity.

  Eric answered for him. “She was the RP on a call we got this morning involving a stranded dog, so, yeah, he knows.”

  Megs pointed with her pen. “You all know Police Chief Jim McNalley.”

  “Hey.” McNalley stood off to the side, coffee cup in hand.

  His presence at the meeting wasn’t unusual. Rocky Mountain SAR partnered with every law enforcement agency in the county. But the fact that no provisional or supporting Team members had been called in meant that something was up. Even so, when Megs finally spilled the beans, Austin was taken by surprise.

  “Ted Breece has been stealing from us.”

  Silence.

  “What do you mean ‘stealing?’” Austin asked.

  There were hundreds of thousands of dollars of gear in The Cave—climbing gear, search and rescue gear, medical supplies.

  “I mean ‘taking that which is not his.’” Megs always had to be a smartass. “He’s been embezzling. We have John at the bank to thank for alerting us.”

  “How much did the bastard take?” Moretti asked.

  Megs shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Twenty grand?”

  Someone gave a little whistle.

  “Holy shit.” Austin met Hawke’s gaze, shook his head.

  “Well, that explains the cash-flow problems,” Nicole said.

  Twenty grand might be nothing to a bank or Wall Street investors, but for an independent, all-volunteer nonprofit like Rocky Mountain SAR, it was a damned fortune.

  “I spent the weekend going over the books. You know I used to keep them myself. I tried to make sense of it, but he covered his tracks like a pro.”

  “You’re going to need a forensic accountant, someone who knows all the tricks and can help build a case against him,” said McNalley. “I’ve called in the FBI. We’ll need their investigative muscle to find out what Breece did with the money. If I had to make a guess, I’d say it’s gone. He has a gambling habit and owes a lot of money to the casinos in Blackhawk and Central City.”

  “Where is the son of a bitch now?” Conrad looked like he wanted to hunt the bastard down and break his neck, and he could do it, too. At six-foot-five, he was the tallest guy on the team and made of iron.

  “I know this will come as a shock, but he’s skipped town,” Megs said.

  McNalley drew out a chair and sat. “We just put a BOLO out on him and hope to bring him in for questioning.”

  “Are we broke? Is it time for bake sales?” At twenty-two, Sasha Dillon was the youngest member of the team—and the most famous. Blonde and petite, she looked fragile—until you watched her climb. She’d won two national sports climbing championships and had the corporate sponsorships to show for it.

  “There’s money in the bank, but not nearly as much as there should be.” Megs let out a frustrated breath. “It’s my fault. I should have stayed on top of it and not trusted him to manage it all by himself.”

  “Don’t go blaming yourself.” Ahearn had been with the Team longer than anyone other than Megs and was a climbing legend in his own right. He was also Megs’ partner. “It’s not fair to you and doesn’t solve anything.”

  “Come on, Megs,” Moretti said. “Cut yourself a break. How could you know the guy would turn out to be a lying bag of dicks?”

  McNalley nodded. “The only person to blame here is Breece. An organization like yours depends on trust. You guys can’t do the high-risk work you do if you don’t trust one another. He knew that, and he took advantage of that trust.”

  Belcourt looked up from the brake plate in his hands. “I never did like that guy.”

  Enough wallowing already.

  Austin wanted action. “Where do we go from here?”

  “We need to find a forensic accountant willing to work his—or her—ass off for next to nothing,” Megs answered. “I’ve already checked around town, and nobody has experience with this kind of thing.”

  For some reason, Megs kept looking at Austin. Was she volunteering him?

  He was okay with that. “I’ll make a few calls, contact some Denver CPA firms, see if any of them would like to earn some nice Rocky Mountain SAR T-shirts.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Megs arched a brow. “What about Lexi Jewell? She’s a CPA.”

  Austin had forgotten that.

  “Feel free to ask her yourself.” No way in hell was he going to ask Lexi for anything. “I’ll check around, see what I can find in Boulder or Denver.”

  Kendra leaned in, tears in her cat-like eyes, which were a dazzling green tonight thanks to colored contact lenses. “You know how they say a leopard can’t change its spots? Well, that man is going to have to change his spots before I come back—every last one of them.”

  If her father looked older, Kendra looked fantastic. Time off from being his wife had obviously done her some good, her shoulder-length brown hair sleek and shiny, her makeup impeccable, designer jeans and a V-neck tank top making the most of her figure. Lexi might have believed Kendra was better off alone except for one thing.

  She’d never seen Kendra cry.

  She took a sip of her pinot noir. “Have you told him that in those words?”

  Kendra leaned back in the booth and looked away, wiping the tears from her cheeks, her fingertips smearing mascara beneath her eyes. “He knows why I left. We had a big fight one night over hiring someone to help clean. I packed and left. I’m tired of being treated like an employee. I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for him and that inn without so much as a ‘thank you.’”

  If anyone could understand that, it was Lexi.

  “Sometimes I think he married me so he wouldn’t have to pay someone to do your mom’s share of the work—and so that you and Britta would have someone to take care of you. We all know how that worked out, don’t we?”

  Lexi wasn’t used to this kind of honesty from Kendra, and for a moment she didn’t know what to say, her stepmother’s words hitting a tender spot inside her, stirring old resentments and hurts. She took another, deeper drink of wine. “My dad isn’t good at showing his feelings.”

  “Oh, he’s plenty good at showing emotion when he’s pissed off. It’s the other feelings he can’t seem to handle.”

  Lexi knew that only too well. “Have you tried counseling?”

  Kendra’s head whipped around, her gaze sharp. “Do you really think your dad would sit down and share his feelings with a fricking therapist?”

  “Stupid question.”

  Kendra took a drink of her beer, seeming to swallow her emotions along with the brew. “Enough about this. How are things in Chicago? You must have made partner at that big firm by now.”

  Lexi had rehearsed this moment in her mind. “I left Price and Crane. The organization had some serious ethical problems, so I quit.”

  Kendra seemed to measure her, her lips curving in a smile. “You didn’t make partner after all.�
��

  Lexi had known Kendra would gloat. She’d always seemed to take pleasure in every mistake Lexi made, every slip, every disappointment. But this time, it hadn’t been Lexi’s fault. “I resigned.”

  “Huh.” Kendra’s smiled disappeared, her eyes narrowing to slits as if she were trying to see through Lexi. “I guess the other big firms must have thrown their doors wide open for a person with your skill and training. Where are you working now?”

  “Right now, I’m weighing all my options.”

  Kendra’s lips curved in a cold smile. “You don’t even have a job.”

  Lexi smiled, too, keeping her voice cheerful. “I left with a great compensation package and am taking the time to make sure I end up with the right company. I’m considering opening a firm of my own.”

  It was the truth, though not the whole truth. But then she had never spoken in whole truths with Kendra.

  “You got laid off?”

  “What? No! I told you I resigned.”

  “They give nice compensation packages to people who quit?”

  “They do when you take them to court.” Lexi blurted out the words. She hadn’t planned on going into the details, but she couldn’t let Kendra walk away believing she’d been fired or laid off. She hadn’t done anything wrong. None of it had been her fault.

  Kendra’s eyebrows rose. “You sued them. Why?”

  She would have to ask.

  “Sexual harassment. My case was rock solid, so they settled out of court.”

  For the first time since Lexi had known her, Kendra looked impressed by something she’d done. She raised her beer. “Good for you. Take the bastards for all they’re worth. That’s what I’ll do to your father if he doesn’t wise up.”

  “I’m really hoping it won’t come to that.”

  “I put twenty-five years of my life into that inn.” Kendra had left a lucrative marketing job with a ski resort to marry Lexi’s father, something she’d never let any of them forget. “I’m not walking away from this marriage with nothing more than gray hair and wrinkles.”

  Lexi had spoken with a Denver divorce attorney this afternoon. Even without a prenup, Kendra wouldn’t be able to take the property away from her father because he’d owned it outright before he’d married her. But she could argue in court that a fat piece of the inn’s current worth as a business was a result of her contributions and hard work over twenty-five years. If her father couldn’t come up with the money or make adequate payments, he might be forced to sell the inn.

  Kendra smiled to herself, looked away. “So now you’ve come all this way to help your father and me when you could be hanging out on a Caribbean beach holding an umbrella drink. Why the sudden concern?”

  Lexi side-stepped that thorny question. “You said Dad had been caught shoplifting. It seemed pretty serious.”

  Kendra took another drink. “He stole a pair of mittens and a can of chew from Food Mart. He had money in his wallet, but he took them anyway, stuffed them under his coat and tried to walk out the door. He didn’t need them. He doesn’t even use tobacco. Chief McNalley called me to come get him and let him off with a warning. I told your dad they could’ve thrown his bony butt in jail, but he didn’t seem to care.”

  “I think it was a cry for help.”

  Kendra gave a snort. “It was a cry for help, all right, but not the kind that’s going to do him any good. If he would just call me, tell me he misses me, say something nice, maybe we could talk.”

  “He hasn’t called you?” Lexi wasn’t sure why this surprised her.

  He never called her or Britta, either.

  “Oh, sure, he’s called. The first time, he told me to quit messing around and get back home because we had four rooms to clean. I hung up on him. The second time, he called to say the dryer was broken and there were a bunch of wet sheets in the washer. I told him to call Dave’s Repair Shop and gave him detailed directions to the clothesline in the backyard.”

  Lexi laughed despite herself. “I’m guessing he wasn’t grateful.”

  “No.” Kendra grinned, but then her face crumpled. “I miss him. Deep down beneath that thick hide of his, there’s a good man. I’ve known him since before you were born. Something inside him died right along with your mother. I thought I could bring him back to life, and God knows I’ve tried. But he doesn’t care about me anymore.”

  Lexi didn’t want to talk about her mother’s death and wasn’t sure what she thought about the new, more vulnerable Kendra.

  She changed the subject. “Where have you been staying?”

  Lexi closed her bedroom door, stretched out on her bed, and called Vic. Chicago was an hour ahead of Colorado, but Vic wasn’t the early-to-bed type and answered on the second ring.

  “Hey, how does it feel to be home?”

  “This isn’t my home.” Vic knew that. “But, yeah, it feels strange.”

  Lexi told Vic about her day starting with finding her dad watering flowers in his underwear. By the time she’d finished, she wondered if she’d been out of her mind. “I never should have come back.”

  “Isn’t that what I said before you left? The next best thing to not having gone there in the first place is not staying. Feel free to drive home tomorrow. You can live with me until you’ve sorted everything out.”

  “Thanks, Vic, but I need to see this through. I need to get the two of them back together, or Britta and I are going to end up with a big mess on our hands. If my dad goes off the deep end like this over Kendra leaving, what will happen if she divorces him and he loses the inn?”

  The joking tone left Vic’s voice. “You sound genuinely worried.”

  She was. “My dad and I might not be close, but he’s still my dad.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure.” She talked through the possibilities with Vic, trying to decide whether she should just tell her father exactly what Kendra had told her or find some way to soften it for the sake of his pride. “I wish I could just bring them together and make them talk it out.”

  “With your dad acting bat-shit crazy and Kendra talking divorce? That has a high probability of turning into a disaster.”

  “The last thing I want to do is make things worse.” There was a little good news.

  “I spent a few hours after supper going over the books. The inn is in the black and doing well. There is no reason my father can’t hire a housekeeper.”

  “That would make your stepmother happy. Will your dad do it?”

  “I’m not going to ask him. I’ve already written up a classified ad for the Scarlet Gazette. I’ll call the paper in the morning.”

  “Devious! I love it.”

  “I’m just looking ahead. Even if Kendra comes back, the two of them won’t be able to handle this place on their own much longer. Kendra is sixty, and my father is seventy-two going on ninety. They need help.”

  Once her father understood Kendra wouldn’t come back until this was resolved, he would get over himself. He’d damned well better.

  “Hey, have you seen him yet?”

  “Him who?” Lexi knew perfectly well whom Vic meant.

  “The bastard who broke your heart.”

  “As it happens, he was the second person I ran into.” She told Vic about finding the stranded dog and Austin showing up in full uniform.

  “How was it seeing him again?”

  “It was no big deal, really. He did his job and drove off. It’s been a long time since high school.”

  “Hmm.” Vic clearly didn’t buy it.

  They talked for a while about Vic’s recent promotion and the hot date with her brother’s rugby buddy that she had lined up for Friday night, then said goodnight.

  As Lexi drifted off to sleep, her last thought wasn’t about her father, Kendra or the inn, but Austin. He thought she was an ogre.

  Jerk.

  For Austin, Tuesdays marked the start of what was usually a three-day weekend—the upside of working four ten-hour days. He’d
traded Thursday for Saturday so he could be part of Saturday’s Team training, which meant he had only two consecutive days off this week.

  Oh, the sacrifices he made.

  He spent his morning cleaning his two-story log home, washing his uniforms, and shopping for groceries, then made himself a sandwich and sat down with his laptop and cell phone to call CPA firms.

  His search led him to the Colorado Society of Certified Public Accountants, which gave him a few leads to firms that were known for doing pro-bono work for nonprofits. He called all of them. The first had closed its doors. He left a voice mail with the second. The CEO of the third took the time to speak with Austin but said his company was too small to take on an embezzlement case.

  “The pro-bono work we’ve done in the past has been simple accounting, tax preparation, that sort of thing. You’re talking about dozens of hours of forensic work, perhaps followed by testifying in court. I can’t afford to devote a staff member to what could turn into weeks of non-billable hours.”

  The man had no recommendations for him either.

  “There just aren’t a lot of CPA firms around here that are willing to do forensic work pro bono,” he said. “I hope it works out for you.”

  Frustrated, Austin clipped his pager to the waistband of his running pants, leashed Mack, his nine-month-old black lab puppy, and headed out for a five-mile trail run. “Come on, buddy.”

  The mountains had always been his church, his escape, his therapy, and he quickly fell into a rhythm, his lungs filling with fresh mountain air, Mack bounding enthusiastically along beside him. The sun shone from a cloudless sky, a cool breeze whispering through the pines and shaking the light green leaves of the aspen. A red-tailed hawk wheeled against a backdrop of blue, hunting for a meal. Golden banner, penstemon, and larkspur dotted the sun-warmed slopes with yellow, purple, and blue, patches of blue-and-white columbine blooming in the shade. Slowly, the tension that had been with him since yesterday began to fade.

  By the time he reached home, he’d managed to convince himself that asking Lexi for help would be no big deal. He’d give her a call at the inn, explain the situation, and see if she could spare the time. If she could, Megs would take it from there. If not, then Austin would have done his part to help the Team resolve this crisis.