A Matter of Trust

by Susan May Warren

  She knew from looking at the map and his video that the first fall was nearly forty feet.

  “Why are you stopping?”

  “There’s another chute, a little further down the ridge. It’s wider, and longer, and no jump.”

  She glanced at him, wished she could read his eyes through his goggles. “Won’t that take us off course?”

  His mouth tightened in an affirmative nonverbal.

  “Why would we do that?”

  He looked at her then, a little bit of “really?” in his expression.

  And that just added a swirl of heat to her chest. “No. I can do this, Gage. Don’t go slower, don’t pull back because of me.”

  His mouth tightened in a tight bud of frustration. “Fine. We’ll stop right above the ledge, just ski under control.”

  “In your line,” she said.

  His jaw clenched, but he edged forward, the tip of his board over the edge, into air. Seemed to consider his route.

  She held her breath. It felt a little like waiting for the needle in a doctor’s office.

  With a hop, he lifted off the edge and into the chute.

  She watched him go, powder curling up behind his turns like a wave. He moved as if he were dancing, smooth, no hesitation as he caught air off a rise, circling his arms for balance, then landed in a graceful puff of snow. He continued down, and she couldn’t move, caught in the sight of him.

  Gage Watson belonged to freeriding. Or rather, freeriding belonged to him. He flew down angles most men—and women—would cling to, terrified.

  He caught another jump and this time tucked for a second, and she knew he’d let a part of himself hearken back to the days before the fame. Back to the time when he simply rode powder for the fun of it.

  He stopped above the ledge, a tiny prick of gray against the vast white.

  She still didn’t move. Because although he’d carved a wide, easy route—probably the easiest through the chute’s jagged rocks—all of a sudden, the what-ifs paralyzed her.

  Not unlike the moment when she saw Gage sitting in the hearing and she knew that someone’s life was about to be dismantled. But by then it had gone too far for her to step away.

  Please, God, don’t let anyone get hurt.

  With a cry that echoed through the chambers of the mountain, she eased forward and launched herself into the white.

  He’d made a nice wide arc down the mountain, but she adjusted a little too late, took her leading turn too wide. The next, a countering turn, she anticipated too early, cut it shallow.

  Following a line meant staying in the safe zone. Especially on a mountain like Heaven’s Peak that obscured drop-offs and crevasses. And Gage was an artist when it came to creating a line. He looked for ridges and rises, the flow of the snow around landmarks, the chutes that led to air. And air led to flair.

  But today, his art was all about staying in the safety zone, and she adjusted her speed as she came up to the first jump. She made the turn, shifted her weight back, then centered it above the board as she lifted off.

  Her stomach stayed, but her body soared, and she held her arms out for balance. She hit too soon, surprising herself that she stayed up, found her balance, and curved into the next turn.

  She didn’t look at Gage, simply the thick, beautiful line he’d created for her to follow. She squatted into the next turn, rising fast to unweight herself, and turned. His familiar technique rushed back to her. Easy carving in the heavy powder, with pumping turns in the tighter, rolling sections of the run, a quick dart up to a jump, air, and then a sweet, tufted landing.

  She took the next jump, and for the fun of it tucked a second before setting down on the thick powder.

  She didn’t want to stop when she met Gage. Her breaths caught in puffs of air as she leaned over, grabbed her knees.

  “Having fun or something?” Gage said, and she looked up to see his mouth twitch on one side.

  “Last time I skied this hard, I was . . .” Oh. With you.

  She stood up, tried to find something to fill in her gap. “It’s just been a while since I lost myself like this. I don’t know why, but snowboarding makes me center into the moment, forget about everything else but the powder. It’s distracting. And relaxing, even though I haven’t forgotten why we’re here. But maybe I remember the urge that pulled my brother in.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Out here, you can feel so small and yet sort of invincible. And that’s how people get in over their heads.” His smile fell, and she could hear in his words the echoes from the past.

  She imagined that it might be hard for him to ski without the shadow of his mistakes following him down the mountain.

  He pointed toward the cliff’s edge. “I think if you take off the left edge, it’s a little less steep, the drop shorter.”

  “Which one did you take last time?”

  He pointed to the right.

  “Then that’s what we should take. Ollie will want to do everything you did.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” Gage said quietly.

  She felt for him, the fact that his fame caused others to follow in his footsteps, get hurt. “Gage, this isn’t your fault. Not in the least. My brother makes his own decisions, and you’re not to blame if people get in over their heads and get hurt.”

  He stared at her. “What?”

  “I’m just saying, you’re not to blame—’’

  “Are you kidding me? You took me to court precisely because you blamed me for Dylan’s death.”

  His words bruised.

  “I’ve had a little distance since then.”

  He drew in a breath, and his jaw tightened. He looked away. “That must be nice. I can’t seem to put it behind me.”

  Her mouth opened then, but he pushed off, heading for the left side.

  He looked back at her. “It’s easier over here!”

  “Gage, stop protecting me! I don’t want to go the easy way. I can do this—watch!”

  She pushed off toward the edge, the jagged wall on the right side that dropped forty feet into steep, thick, dense powder.

  She didn’t stop. She took a breath and sailed right off the edge into the clear, bright air.

  Then she looked down, the world so far she thought it had fallen away.

  She began to scream.

  9

  ELLA’S SCREAM AS SHE WENT OVER THE EDGE found Gage’s bones and turned them to liquid. He stood at the edge of the cliff as she disappeared, and couldn’t move.

  For a second he was caught inside the memory of watching Dylan simply miss the turn and fly off the cliff, soaring over the jagged edge of the mountain. Then falling more than two hundred feet below into a catastrophe of broken bones and crushed vertebrae.

  “Ella!” Gage bounced himself forward and went straight over the edge, dropping fast and landing in a poof of snow. If he’d had more momentum going over the cliff, he might have remained aloft, but his body weight implanted him in the powder and he found himself stuck, having to wiggle himself free. He rolled out of the hole his body made in the deep powder, unbuckled his boots from his board, and scrambled to Ella’s crash site, a tumult of snow and fine dust still caught in the wind. “Ella!”

  She lay in the hole, her board just peeking out of the crevasse, with just the orange arms of her jacket and her gray helmet showing. She waved at him, trying to wiggle out of the hole.

  He dropped to his knees beside her. “Are you okay?”

  “Not much of a graceful landing, but—yeah.” She even smiled at him, as if her scream hadn’t ripped him open, baring something he’d been trying to ignore for the past two days.

  He missed her. Missed the straight-shooter, no-nonsense way she didn’t dance around her words, said the truth as she saw it.

  Or, he hoped it was the truth.

  “You’re a good guy, Gage. I’ve always known that.” Her words had stuck around, latching on, growing inside him, casting forth too many memories. Like the way she could keep up with him on a moun
tain. And that time, after their first night of skiing, she’d talked him into singing karaoke with her. I got you, babe. He could still hear her pitiful impression of Cher. Feel his chest expanding with unnamed emotion, a little off balance with the sense that he didn’t have to impress her.

  But he’d wanted to. And as he knelt down beside her now, unsnapping her boots from her board to free her, he realized he still wanted to.

  And that gnawed at him. Because he couldn’t get past the fact that she’d destroyed his life and still she’d managed to crawl under his skin. Seeing her again had awakened him to the fact that no, he’d never forgotten Ella Blair. He should have been furious with her. Instead, he could barely catch his breath with the relief that she’d survived.

  She’d never been nothing or just a date.

  He’d loved her. Or wanted to.

  He put his arms around her and tugged, pulling her free of her landing hole. She tumbled over into his arms, her helmet bumping against his.

  It wasn’t hard to remember how perfectly she’d fit into his arms.

  To make it worse, she held on, her gloves fisted into his jacket.

  He’d never forgotten, either, how pretty she was. The kind of pretty that slid into a man, that deepened more inside him a little each day. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, the way her blue-gray eyes shone, the way her deep copper hair curled from the back of her helmet.

  He held on to her just a second longer than necessary, perhaps, until she pushed herself off him and rolled onto her back.

  Only then did he realize, with a painful start, that he was in very real danger of Ella Blair carving her way into his life again.

  She was staring at the sky. “I thought I left my stomach up on that ridge.”

  “You pretty much scared the life out of me when you screamed.”

  “Sorry I screamed—it was just a reflex. But wow, that was fun.”

  “It is fun. I feel like screaming sometimes too.” He looked over at her, gave her a smile.

  But she must have related his comment to something in their past because she sat up, pulled her goggles up, and looked at him with so much raw pain in her eyes that he longed to grab back his words.

  “I know it must tear you apart. You had so much, and then . . . but you’ve become a rescue skier. That’s so . . . heroic.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  “I’m trying too hard, aren’t I?” She made a face. “I just can’t stop talking, can’t stop trying to figure out how to . . . I don’t know, maybe make things better.”

  He sat up. “Why don’t we just forget the past and ride? Dropping off a cliff into chin-deep powder is amazing and worthy of a scream.”

  Slowly she smiled, and for a moment all the anger, all the hurt he’d stewed in for the last three years drained away, leaving only one brilliant thought.

  He was on a mountain again with beautiful Ella Blair. Surrounded by champagne powder and the delicious smile of a girl who once thought he hung the moon.

  Maybe she still did.

  “We’re going to find your brother, Ella. I promise.”

  She nodded, as if blinking back tears, and he had the urge to reach up, touch her cheek.

  “Oh!” she said. “Did you see—I wasn’t the only one who made a dent in the hill.” She pointed to two more landing zones, disturbances in the snow not far away. And from them led tracks, now half-swept with snow. “Ollie and Bradley were here.”

  If they’d taken his way, they would have missed the trail.

  “Good job, Ella,” Gage said, a little chagrined. “But we’d better hurry.” He pointed to the swell of dark storm clouds closing in on the park. More, the wind had whipped up, stirring the snow into whirlwinds of crystalline white. Overhead, too, the cloud cover had thickened, stretching long shadows over the mountain.

  He could smell storm in the air, the makings of a blizzard.

  “We need to find them before this storm hits and get us all off the mountain,” he said. “You promise that you really didn’t hurt anything?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good—so I promise, no more taking the slow route. But no more going off cliffs before I do, okay?”

  She nodded and reached for her board.

  He hiked back to his, strapped it on, and slid back to her. It seemed that Oliver knew his trail well, which meant he’d continue down this bowl for the rest of the day, hopefully stopping tonight above Angel’s Wings and Cathedral Canyon.

  “Stay right in my path. If they’re below us, we don’t want to set off an avalanche.”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  He didn’t know why her words filled him up with heat, but it charged through him as he leaned into the slope.

  It could be that it wasn’t only Oliver and Bradley who were in over their heads.

  Brette had landed in the middle of a journalist’s jackpot. Pure gold surrounded her; every one of the members of the PEAK team was heroic to the bone, evidenced by the team’s current conversation about heading into Glacier National Park to look for missing Oliver, Bradley, and now Gage and Ella.

  No one had been able to rouse them on the radio, and apparently that had chopper pilot Kacey Fairing and her boss, Chet King, worried.

  The two stood in front of a computer, watching the weather map refresh every few seconds as the low pressure front from the west closed in on the mountains. Kacey, tall, lean, and pretty with her long auburn hair, looked every inch the former military pilot Ty had described on their drive over.

  Chet, maybe in his early sixties, leaned on a cane, his body still strong despite what Ty said were two new hips after a chopper accident. She made a mental note to add Chet to her list of heroes. The boss greeted her with a firm handshake and a crooked smile. Reminded her a little of Harrison Ford.

  Kacey and the chopper hadn’t returned by the time Ty pulled up to the PEAK ranch, an actual former ranch with the old house reconstructed for their headquarters, including bunk rooms, a kitchen, an office, and a main meeting area. It didn’t take long, however, for Kacey to arrive and land the blue and white rescue chopper on the pad outside, in front of a two-story white barn that had the words PEAK Rescue written in red on the front.

  Ty had given Brette a quick tour of that too, in his explanation of the PEAK resources and activities. “We do everything from search and rescue in the park, including climbing rescues and swift water rescues, to emergency medical evacuations, and we even help with avalanche control for the nearby ski areas, as well as the backcountry.”

  He’d pointed out their wilderness ambulance, a Land Rover converted into a medivac unit. “We have a 4Runner and a couple Polaris snowmobiles for off-road needs. And of course, the dual-engine Bell 429 chopper.” He’d said it with such warmth in his voice she couldn’t help but remember his words.

  “I’m the backup chopper pilot. I was the main pilot before Kacey got here.”

  Interesting.

  Ty had brought her in the house then, and introduced her to the team, at least the ones at the base. Chet, of course, then Sierra Rose, the team administrator. Petite, with short dark hair and hazel-green eyes, she greeted Brette by inviting her to grab a piece of leftover pizza, some soup, or one of the cookies in the jar in the kitchen. What had Ty said—the big sister of the team?

  Sierra had assembled an hour-by-hour weather forecast for Heaven’s Peak, as well as satellite images of the area, and spread them out on a massive table in front of a map of the park affixed to the wall. A flat-screen against the back wall played the local weather and news.

  Brette nearly fell over when country singer Ben King appeared from some back office and greeted Kacey Fairing with a quick kiss. She must have been staring because Ben turned to her, held out his hand. “Ben King.”

  His album covers and posters didn’t do him justice. With blue eyes that she could lose herself in, just like his songs, he wore a baseball cap backward, faded jeans, and cowboy boots.

  And, here he was, a b
ona fide hero, working on a rescue team. Blow her socks off.

  “Brette Arnold. I’m a friend of Senator Ella Blair. She’s out with Gage on Heaven’s Peak, trying to track down her brother and his friend.”

  “Right,” Ben said and glanced at Kacey.

  And now she felt a little silly, because he probably knew all that.

  “It’s an honor to meet you. I have all your albums . . .” Please, now she must sound like a rabid fan.

  Which she was—at least a mildly rabid fan. Not the kind to stalk him to Montana.

  “Thanks,” he said, a warmth in his smile that made her disbelieve everything his former bandmate Holly Montgomery had said about him in her interview about their breakup. Cold and difficult to work with.

  That’s what bad journalism did—showed only the one-sided perspective. She liked to dig inside a person’s life, find the truth, show the world the full person, good and bad.

  Let the public decide.

  “I’m sure Gage will find them,” Ben said. “If anyone knows how to handle a mountain, it’s Gage. He’ll get them all down safely.”

  Brette nodded, believing every word that came from his golden, mountain-twangy voice.

  “The weather is closing in fast,” Kacey had said, giving her a smile, then headed over to Chet, where she huddled up, strategizing.

  Meanwhile, Brette helped herself to a cookie. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Now, her stomach was starting to curl into a fist over the emptiness. She actually felt a little nauseated.

  Ty must have noticed, because he pulled out a container of vegetable soup, ladled some into a bowl, and heated it in the microwave.

  “Sit,” he said, putting the bowl on the counter and setting a spoon next to it.

  She slid onto a high-top stool. “Thanks.”

  Ty washed his hands, then grabbed a towel, turning to her. “It’ll be a long night, I’m guessing. And they’ll probably have to spend the night on the mountain.”

  “Why?”

  He parked the towel over his shoulder and reached in a nearby bread bin for a half loaf of French bread. Pulled out a knife. “The storm is rolling in. Even if they find Ollie and Bradley, Kacey can’t fly them off the mountain in this weather.”