by Linda Turner
They might have stood there locked in each other’s arms, for seconds, or it might have been an eternity—later, she could never be sure. From the clinic parking lot, several of the guests called good-night to each other, car doors slammed and motors revved to life. Before it even occurred to Rocky that cars were pulling onto the road and turning in their direction, Lucas put her away from him. By the time the headlights picked them out of the night like spotlights, they were a good three feet apart and not even touching.
His eyes as black as midnight and fierce with something that set her heart somersaulting in her breast, he said roughly, “Where’re your keys?”
Dazed, she looked up at him blankly. “What?”
The corner of his mouth twitched, then slowly curled into a crooked smile. “Your keys, honey. Where’re your keys?”
It was the amusement lacing his words that snapped her back to reality. Suddenly realizing that she was staring up at him like a teenager with a bad case of hero worship, she jerked her eyes down to her hand and the set of truck keys she held. She had no idea how they’d gotten there. Without a word, she handed them to him.
Ten seconds later, he had the door unlocked and her safely installed behind the wheel. As far as Luke was concerned, that was ten seconds too long. What the hell had possessed him to kiss her? He had to get out of there and think, dammit! But after he handed her back her keys, walking away from her wasn’t nearly as easy as he’d have liked. In fact, it was damn near impossible. One hand on the roof of the pickup and the other braced on the open door, he frowned down at her. “Are you all right?”
The dazed look had faded quickly from her eyes, or at least he thought it had. She wouldn’t quite look at him. Jamming the key into the ignition, she said with a forced lightness, “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Lucas could think of a whole host of reasons, not the least of which was this crazy chemistry between the two of them, which didn’t seem to thrill her any more than it did him. Dammit, where the hell had it come from? And why couldn’t he control it? He’d never had any trouble keeping a tight rein on his emotions before, but with her, he was like a randy kid who’d just discovered what all the fuss about sex was about. He couldn’t get enough of her.
But he had no intention of telling her that. If she wanted to pretend that the ground hadn’t shifted beneath their feet during that kiss, he was damn well going to let her. Because if he didn’t, he’d have no choice but to pull her out of that car and into his arms again and show her just exactly why she couldn’t possibly be as all right as she claimed. And then he just might not be able to let her go.
Stepping quickly back, his jaw rigid, he said tightly, “No reason. Thanks for coming. Drive carefully.” He shut the door before she could even thank him for inviting her. Seconds later, she drove off, heading for town. Long after her taillights disappeared from view, though, he stared after her, the taste of her still on his tongue. It was, he knew, one he could become addicted to if he wasn’t damn careful.
Rocky’s first emergency call came in four days later—an injured hunter, Sam Katz, trapped in the mountains with a broken leg and possible spinal injuries. And there was no time to lose. He’d contacted his family with his cellular phone, so weak he could give his wife nothing but vague directions before he passed out. Frantic, Brenda Katz had called Rocky immediately, begging her for help. Rocky had quickly assured her she’d find her husband, but privately the spinal injuries had her worried. That wasn’t something she felt comfortable handling alone, not when one wrong move on her part could lead to a lifetime of paralysis for Sam Katz.
So she called around town, trying to find a doctor to go with her, but Clear Springs wasn’t exactly overflowing with M.D.s. Three were in surgery, a fourth was out of town at a convention, and a fifth was an OB-GYN who had a patient who was in labor four months early, and he couldn’t leave her. That left Lucas.
She didn’t want to call him. Not after that kiss at his Christmas party. She’d gone out of her way to avoid him whenever she caught sight of his Bronco in town, and she’d even called Allie to tell her that the man was quietly driving her out of her mind. Far from sympathetic, her sister, blissfully in love with Rafe Stone, had been delighted that she was finally getting over Greg. She’d cheerfully assured her that being crazy about a man wasn’t half bad when it was the right man—Rocky should try it some time.
But Rocky had no intention of doing any such thing. If her relationship with Greg had taught her anything, it was that she was a sap when it came to caring about a man. She gave her heart and soul and had nothing left for herself. And that scared her more than she’d admitted to anyone, even Allie. She wouldn’t, couldn’t chance losing herself again, so she’d deliberately steered clear of Lucas. She had not laid eyes on him since she’d left him standing on the side of the road, and that was just fine with her.
But she needed a doctor, and he was the only one available.
Frustrated, cursing the fickle, irritating whims of fate, she was left with no choice but to call him. All business, she gave him the details as soon as he came on the line, then added, “I don’t want to take any chances with a spinal injury, so I need an M.D. to go with me. I know this is short notice, but no one else is available. Can you go?”
If he noticed that she’d asked every other doctor in town before getting around to him, he didn’t, thankfully, comment on it. Instead, he asked her what supplies she had on hand, then said, “Give me five minutes to get some things together, and I’ll be right there.”
He was as good as his word, arriving five minutes later just as Rocky was warming up the chopper. There hadn’t been time to go home to change into clothes appropriate for the mountains, so he’d had to content himself with waterproof boots, a down jacket and a ski cap.
“Glad to have you on board, Dr. Greywolf!” Charlie yelled over the roar of the rotors as he took Luke’s bag and set it with the thermal blankets, tents and other gear in the back before sliding the cargo door shut. “I don’t like the idea of Rocky going up in those mountains all by herself.” Glancing past him to Rocky, who couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the rotors, he grinned. “But if you tell her I said that, I’ll flat-out deny it. In you go, Doctor. Don’t forget to buckle up. It’s probably going to be a wild ride.”
Wild didn’t begin to describe the flight that followed. Within seconds of strapping into the seat next to Rocky, he learned that everything he’d heard about the little daredevil was true. The cockpit door was slammed, she looked to Charlie for a thumbs-up signal and took off at a speed that left Lucas’s stomach back on the ground. He half expected her to laugh, but she didn’t even spare him a glance. Her expression more somber than he’d ever seen it, she cut sharply toward the snow-covered mountains in the distance, her eyes on the horizon as she held out a pair of earphones to him that were identical to the ones she was wearing.
“From what I could make out from Mrs. Katz, Sam’s somewhere on the eastern slope, near the tree line,” she said as he tugged the headgear into place. “There’re binoculars under your seat. Keep an eye out for a splash of orange. Sam took an orange hunting vest with him, but his wife wasn’t sure if he was wearing it when he fell.”
Immediately reaching for the binoculars, Luke followed her gaze to the horizon and the mountains they were racing toward. Shrouded in dark blue-gray clouds, the peaks lost to view, they looked cold and forbidding and dangerous. “What’s the forecast?” he asked, frowning. “Isn’t there another front coming through?”
She nodded, her hands easy on the controls. “It wasn’t supposed to get here until in the morning, but the weather service updated the forecast right before we took off and now expect it well before midnight. That looks like the leading edge of it.”
She didn’t have to say that the cold front’s early arrival made the situation ten times worse—they both knew it. An injured, vulnerable man, separated from his companions and alone in the mountains with no one to help him was
prey not only to whatever wild animal came along, but also to the weather itself. If he was out in the open, exposed to the wind and the snow, the below-freezing temperatures that were sure to come with the advancing of night could spell disaster. If they were going to find him—and save him—they had to do it soon. His face grim, Lucas brought the binoculars to his eyes and studied the tree line for a flash of color.
It was like looking for a needle in a haystack from a swing. Rocky kept the helicopter as steady as possible in the winds that whipped around the mountains’ higher elevations, but as she swept up and down the tree line, the sensation was a lot like swinging. Then it began to snow.
Rocky swore at the fat wet flakes that swirled around them, obscuring the rocky, jagged mountain below, and threw Lucas a quick glance before bringing her attention to the white scene spread out in front of the windshield. “I’m going to have to take it down to the treetops, or we’re not going to be able to see squat. Hang on.”
In the time it took to blink, they dropped two hundred feet, until they were just a stone’s throw from the top of the pines that stubbornly clung to the steep terrain. Through the thick white clouds of blowing snow, they could just make out the sharp, jagged rocks below, the thinning trees, and very little else. Aside from the pines, there wasn’t a spot of color anywhere. Or a single sign of life.
“I don’t see a damn thing,” Lucas growled into the mike attached to his headphones. “Are you sure the wife said he was on the eastern slope of the range?”
Rocky nodded, her eyes, like Lucas’s, locked on the cold, barren scene below. “She said he always hunts around Bighorn Lake every year, so we’re in the right spot. He’s got to be around here somewhere.”
“A hunter can cover a lot of territory. He could have wandered miles from the lake without realizing it before he fell, especially if it was snowing this hard. It’s damn near white-out conditions, and all the landmarks look alike. Even someone familiar with these mountains could get disoriented—it happens nearly every hunting season. Let’s try farther north.”
A simple movement of her hand on the control stick took them deeper into the mountains, and for long, endless moments there was nothing but the sound of the rotors overhead beating the silence as they scoured the countryside with unblinking eyes. Nothing moved, however, except the whirling snow.
And with every passing second, the odds were growing against their finding Sam Katz. They were running out of daylight, and the storm was intensifying, destroying what little visibility there was. If they didn’t find Katz damn soon, they were going to have to call it quits for the day and try again tomorrow. And by then it would probably be too late.
“There!” Lucas suddenly exclaimed, pointing to a spot off to the east. “Near the base of that rockslide. I thought I saw something.”
Afraid to hope, Rocky swung sharply to the right and raced toward the slide, which was a deep, snow-covered gouge in the earth. Hovering as close as she dared, she frantically searched below them. “Where? I don’t see anything but rocks—”
Leaning forward in growing excitement, Lucas pointed a hundred yards in front of them. “There, by that fallen pine. There’s something orange under the branches. See? And it’s moving! That’s him! He’s waving at us!”
It was a weak wave, but it was definitely a wave. Relieved, Rocky let out the breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding, tears, just for an instant, stinging her eyes before she hastily blinked them back. “Thank God, thank God! Hang on while I find a place to set her down. I’ve got a winch, but in this wind, I don’t want to chance it.”
Finding a place to land, however, proved to be easier said than done. The terrain was steep and rocky and dotted with trees. “I can’t do it,” she said, muttering curses under her breath. “Not here. It’s too risky. We’ll have to go to a lower elevation to find a meadow, then hike back.”
“That could take a while, and I don’t like the looks of this storm,” Lucas said with a frown. “Is there a way I could throw some food and blankets down to him?”
“Yeah, there’s a hatch in the floor, halfway back. Hang on while I get in position.”
It only took her seconds to align the helicopter directly over the fallen tree that Sam Katz had managed to crawl under for shelter. At her shout that she was ready, Lucas opened the hatch and threw down three thermal blankets and enough bags of dried fruit and nuts to hold the injured man over until they could get to him. Anticipating the pull of the wind, he’d bundled everything together, weighted it with several cans of evaporated milk Rocky had included with the food items and tied it all together with a piece of rope he found in a storage compartment. Stretched out on his stomach, he watched as the bundle fell like a rock and landed within two feet of the fallen pine.
“Bull’s-eye!” Rocky crowed as Sam Katz flashed them a thumbs-up signal and grabbed the supplies. “Nice shot, Doc. Now let’s find that landing sight.”
Finding a high-country meadow big enough to land the chopper in wasn’t that difficult—but making the hike back up the mountain to where they’d had to leave Sam was. It was almost straight up, and the footing was treacherous and icy as the last light of day began to fade. Taking time only to call Charlie on the radio and apprise him of the situation, they started climbing. Loaded down with backpacks, medical supplies and a stretcher, they couldn’t move nearly as fast as they needed to.
His lungs burning from the altitude and the strain of the climb, Lucas cast a quick glance over his shoulder to Rocky. Flushed and huffing, she was two steps behind him and showed no signs of slowing down, in spite of the fact that the muscles in her legs, like his, had to be knotted and aching. She had guts, he silently acknowledged. She carried her share of the load and didn’t complain. And as much as he hated to admit it, he found that damn attractive.
Seeing his eyes on her, she gasped, “How much farther?”
“Another quarter of a mile. You gonna make it?”
She could hardly draw breath to speak, but she still managed to shoot him a cocky grin. “What do you think?”
Chuckling, he faced forward and continued up the mountain.
They reached Sam Katz ten minutes later. His bearded face pale as death and etched with deep furrows of pain, he lay at an awkward angle under the shelter of the fallen pine, wrapped in the blankets Lucas had dropped to him nearly an hour earlier. The heavily falling snow all but covered him.
“You f-found m-me,” he whispered in a voice so faint it hardly carried over the low moan of the wind. “I was beginning to think no one w-would.”
“You’re going to be just fine, Sam,” Lucas assured him as he crawled under the tree with him and unobtrusively took his pulse while he introduced himself and Rocky. “I understand from your wife that you’ve got a broken leg and possible spinal injuries, so you just lie still and let us take care of you. We’ll have you warm and dry and feeling better in no time.”
“Tell me what you need,” Rocky told Lucas quietly as she turned on a small but powerful fluorescent lantern and positioned it under the tree near where he knelt next to the injured Sam. In the sudden bright light, the hunter barely had the strength to lift his arm and cover his eyes.
“My bag, the backboard and the stretcher,” Lucas murmured. “I need to get that leg set and immobilize him before we see what we can do about this damn tree.”
“You just take care of him,” Rocky replied as she retrieved the things he’d asked for. “I’ll deal with the tree.”
Lucas didn’t believe for a second that she could move it by herself, but his more immediate problem was his patient. Besides his more obvious injuries, he was suffering from exposure and dehydration and shock. If they didn’t soon get him out of the weather and get some fluids in him, Sam Katz was going to be in more trouble than he already was. Cursing the snow that continued to fall at an alarming rate, Lucas went to work.
When he glanced up again, it was to discover that Rocky had brought along a small hatchet and choppe
d enough of the dead tree away to allow him to slide Sam out from under it on the stretcher. The corners of his mouth twitching, he murmured, “You never cease to amaze me, Ms. Fortune. Next time I need some firewood, remind me to call you.”
He expected her to grin and toss back a saucy remark, but she didn’t so much as crack a smile. “We’ve got a problem,” she said in a low voice. “There’s no way in hell we’re going to get off the side of this mountain tonight…not with the way things have started to ice up the last fifteen minutes. It’s just too dangerous. Even if we could make it back to the chopper in the dark without falling and breaking all our necks—and that’s a big if—flying would be a real crapshoot.”
Glancing around, Lucas had to admit she was right. He’d been so wrapped up in his patient that he hadn’t noticed the worsening weather conditions. The snow that had been falling at a steady rate for well over an hour was now mixed with sleet that was quickly coating everything with a gradually thickening layer of ice.
“Damn! Then we’d better leave Sam right where he is until we get some type of shelter put together—”
“Camp,” the other man said hoarsely, struggling up out of the light doze he’d slipped into. “I’ve got a camp set up…j-just over there.” His neck encased in a neck brace, he glanced to the trees off to the left, the last of his energy flagging as he whispered, “Couldn’t m-make it…”
Pulling another flashlight from her pack, Rocky said, “I’ll check it out,” and slipped off into the dark. Within seconds, she was back, her smile relieved. “It must be our lucky night. He’s got a tent and a down sleeping bag just waiting for him about a hundred yards into those trees.”
“Then let’s get him moved,” Lucas said as he moved to the head of the stretcher and began to push it clear of the few branches that Rocky hadn’t hacked away. “Easy. That’s it. We need to carry him if possible—I don’t want to jostle him by sliding the stretcher all the way to his camp if I can help it. Think you can handle his feet?”
