Heartbreaker

by Karen Robards

  It seemed to take eons to reach solid ground. When her feet at last touched down on the puddle-pocked hardscrabble, Lynn found to her surprise that her knees would not support her.

  With a wordless murmur of dismay she started to crumple. Jess, behind her, caught her with an arm around her waist.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “I … can’t stand up.”

  “You’ve had a big day.” He kept one arm around her while he sawed through the rope that still bound them together, back to chest. When it was cut, Lynn sank to her knees. Only his arm around her kept her from keeling over onto her face.

  “Please get Rory.” Supporting her upper body with her hands, Lynn turned her head to look up at her daughter, who at that distance was no more than a dot of vivid pink against the dark-green splash of evergreens punctuating the cliff.

  “I’ll get her, don’t worry.”

  Jess, Lynn saw, was bent over, his hands resting on his knees as he breathed deeply in and out.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Never better.” He straightened. “Better give me back my gloves.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Lynn tugged the leather gloves from her hands and passed them to him. He pulled them on and turned back toward the sheer rock wall, adjusting his makeshift harness, tugging on the rope that was still connected to the top of the cliff to make certain it remained secure. Then, with an ease and grace that impressed Lynn, he started to climb the mountain, finding toeholds where she would have sworn there were none, clinging to impossibly small outcroppings of rock as he pulled himself up.

  Watching his deft ascent, Lynn was surprised at how certain she felt that he would succeed in rescuing Rory.

  And he did. Rory appeared unconscious when Jess reached the ground with her. As Jess traversed the last few yards Lynn got to her feet and reached for her daughter, steadying her as Jess cut through the rope that held them chest to chest. Lynn quickly pulled off her own poncho and spread it on the ground. Meanwhile, Jess lifted Rory’s bound wrists over his head and lowered her onto the neon-yellow plastic. Taking in those bound wrists, Lynn realized that climbing down with Rory’s deadweight tied to his body must have been even hairier than their own descent.

  “Oh, her poor head!” Lynn crouched beside Rory’s supine form. She smoothed back her daughter’s bangs and the long tendrils of blond hair that had escaped from her ponytail, gazing in horror at the deep scrapes and bruising that marred the left side of her forehead from her brow to her hairline.

  “She must have brushed a rock on the way down. Or maybe a falling one hit her.” Sinking to one knee, Jess cut through the rope around Rory’s wrists, then sat as he began freeing himself from his jury-rigged climbing harness. He was breathing hard, and sweat beaded his brow. For the moment, though, Lynn had no time or sympathy to spare.

  “Rory!” Lynn’s attention was all on her daughter. She chafed Rory’s cold hands, laid a palm on her forehead, her cheek. The bright pink poncho was badly torn and stained. Ripping it the rest of the way off seemed the easiest way to remove it, so Lynn did.

  “Let me check her.” Without waiting for permission Jess knelt beside Rory and ran his hands along the teen’s arms and legs, over her rib cage, down her spine, and finally used his fingers to mold her skull. He glanced at Lynn. “I don’t think anything’s broken. Probably she just caught a really good clout on the head.”

  Under the circumstances Lynn recognized that her earlier admonition to Jess to keep his hands off her daughter no longer applied. In fact, she welcomed any rudimentary medical knowledge he might have.

  “She’s so cold.” Fear thinned Lynn’s voice. Like herself, Rory was wearing a simple cotton turtleneck, jeans, and boots. Thanks to the torn poncho the outfit was wet through. “She needs dry clothes.”

  The temperature on the ground seemed warmer than had the air whooshing up and down the cliff, but still it couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees. Too cold for an injured child to lie around wet.

  Lynn felt her own turtleneck. It was damp in spots, particularly around the throat and cuffs, but not nearly as soggy as Rory’s. The same could be said for her jeans.

  “Turn your back,” Lynn said to Jess.

  He looked at her, started to say something, didn’t, and obliged. After a momentary undignified struggle with her boots, Lynn managed to strip down to her undies. Then, shivering, she performed the same service for her daughter. Rory was trembling visibly, Lynn saw with distress as she lifted her child’s head to put on the turtleneck. Goose bumps roughened every bit of Rory’s flesh not covered by her pink cotton bra and panties.

  “Mommy.” Rory’s lids fluttered up. The achingly familiar form of address stabbed Lynn through to the heart.

  “It’s all right, baby. You’re safe. Mommy’s here.” Lynn bent over her daughter, temporarily abandoning the turtleneck as she crooned reassurance.

  “My head hurts.” Rory’s eyes closed again. “And I’m cold.”

  “Rory!”

  Rory didn’t answer, but it seemed to Lynn that her daughter’s shivering grew more pronounced. Frightened, she snatched up the turtleneck again. She had to get Rory warm and fast. It occurred to Lynn that her wet, cold, and injured daughter could go into shock.

  “Put this on her. It’s dry.”

  Jess dropped his flannel shirt on Rory’s stomach. Glancing up, Lynn saw that he was wearing a short-sleeved white T-shirt that looked like it had originated with Hanes or Fruit of the Loom. Though his back was nominally turned it was obvious that he hadn’t missed a thing.

  “She needs a doctor,” Lynn said.

  “The first thing to do is get her warm.”

  Jess abandoned any pretense of keeping his back turned and dropped to one knee beside Rory.

  “That goes for you too,” he added, his gaze flicking over the amount of shivering skin left exposed by Lynn’s ice-blue nylon-and-lace scanties. Though she was at least as well covered as she would have been if she were wearing a bikini—more so if one counted her brightly patterned trouser socks—Lynn felt acutely self-conscious under that look.

  “Do you mind?” she demanded, bristling.

  “For Christ’s sake, don’t you think I’ve seen women in their underwear before?” Jess asked, impatient, reaching for the shirt he had dropped. “I’ll put this on her. You get dressed yourself. You’re turning blue around the gills.”

  Lynn hesitated, then nodded reluctant agreement. She was freezing—and Rory looked even colder. The emergency in which they found themselves took precedence over all other concerns, including modesty and Jess’s intentions toward her daughter. In any case the man’s behavior had been above reproach since their fall, Lynn had to admit. He had saved their lives, at no little risk to his own. He had been resourceful, reassuring, a complete gentleman and a brave man. So he had ogled her in her underwear; at least he hadn’t ogled Rory.

  And now he had given up his shirt, which was made of thick brushed-cotton flannel. It was dry and warm from his body, and she was thankful to have it for her daughter.

  Pulling on her own turtleneck again, Lynn watched as Jess eased Rory into the garment, then pulled it closed over her chest. As he began doing up the buttons, Lynn struggled into Rory’s wet jeans. Fortunately, the kids all favored baggy clothes or Lynn would never have been able to get them on at all. Slim though Lynn was, her backside was two sizes larger than Rory’s.

  Jess had the flannel shirt buttoned almost up to Rory’s neck when Lynn took over. She brushed his hands aside, finished the task, then turned up the shirt’s collar for extra warmth and pulled the too-long sleeves down to cover the child’s icy hands. The tails reached past her knees. Rory’s socks were dry—her boots were apparently more effective than Lynn’s at repelling water—so Lynn left them alone and wrestled her own jeans up her daughter’s legs.

  “All done?” A slightly ironic note underlay the question.

  Lynn glanced up to encounter Jess’s gaze again. He was standing, look
ing down at the pair of them, his hands thrust into the pocket of his jeans and his arms held close to his body as if he were attempting to ward off the cold.

  “Thanks for the shirt,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  While Lynn covered Rory with the remains of the torn poncho to keep out the wind, Jess moved about twenty feet away from the cliff, then turned to face the vertical rock wall, looking toward the precipice as he waved his arms. Lynn realized that he was trying to signal the group on the top of the cliff.

  “Do you think they can see you?”

  Sitting beside Rory, she was pulling her boots back on over damp socks as she spoke.

  “Yeah. At least, I’m pretty sure they can. Though Owen will be careful to keep everybody well back from the edge this time.”

  “Too bad he didn’t think about that earlier.” Lynn’s rejoinder was more than a shade caustic.

  “Yeah, well, I guess we made the mistake of putting too much faith in our guests’ common sense. Live and learn. Ah, there’s Owen.”

  The look Lynn sent his way was withering.

  “You don’t happen to have a pen on you, do you?” He was patting the pockets of his jeans as he spoke.

  “A pen?”

  “Or a pencil. Something to write with.”

  “Why?” Lynn was mystified.

  “I want to send Owen a note.” He indicated the rope that still snaked down from the top of the cliff.

  “Oh.” She patted her own pockets—Rory’s, actually—and felt a lump. Digging, she came up with a slim blue-plastic lipstick case. “What about this?”

  “That’ll do,” he said, accepting it.

  Jess dropped to one knee, pulled out his knife, hacked off a piece of Rory’s torn poncho, and used the lipstick to scribble something on the rough white lining.

  “I assume you’re telling Owen to come and get us?”

  Jess paused and glanced at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not really.”

  “Look around you, babe.” He went back to his writing.

  “Don’t call me babe.” Lynn objected automatically—sensitized from years of battling sexism in the newsroom—while following Jess’s advice to look around.

  Though the area where they had fetched up was relatively flat, about thirty feet away the ground began sloping toward the pine forest, the edge of which was about a quarter of a mile distant. With the sheer rise of the cliff behind them, down was the only way to go. Climbing back up was not an option.

  “Maybe the whole group can’t get down here”—Lynn was willing to recognize the truth of that—“but the Jeep can, can’t it? I mean, drive around or something? Rory needs to be seen by a doctor.”

  Jess gave her a wry smile. “There are some places even a Jeep can’t go, and I’m afraid this is one of them. We’re going to have to walk out. Luckily, I know where we are. There’s a gravel road about a day’s hike from here where the Jeep can pick us up. That’s where I’m telling Owen to meet us.”

  “But Rory needs a doctor!”

  “There’s nothing I can do about it right now. Anyway, I don’t think she’s badly hurt. She was talking, and she looks to be getting a little of her color back. She’ll be all right.”

  “And what if she’s not?”

  “Listen, you ought to be thanking your lucky stars you’re both still alive.”

  Lynn ignored that to focus on her more immediate concern. “You mean you don’t have some kind of contingency plan in case something like this happens? A helicopter or something that can reach inaccessible places to take injured people to the hospital?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nope?” Annoyance at the nonchalance of his single-syllable reply lent a shrill note to Lynn’s voice.

  Jess met her look with a level gaze of his own. “We’re in a federally designated High Wilderness Area, in case you hadn’t noticed. The land is wild and primitive and largely inaccessible to any kind of machine. That’s the attraction of it. Presumably that’s one of the reasons your group decided to sign up for this trip. Or did you think this was some kind of Disneyland adventure, where everything’s fake?”

  That last bit of sarcasm on top of her fear for her daughter brought all her near-forgotten antipathy for this Marlboro Man wanna-be flooding back.

  “Not everything, just the cowboys,” she said nastily.

  Jess stopped writing again to stare at her, “What?”

  “You. And your brother. And the rest of your crew. Fakes, every one of you, with your stupid cowboy hats and your stupid cowboy boots and your stupid cowboy horses.”

  “I managed to save your ass, lady.”

  There was an edge to Jess’s voice. That and the reminder that she and Rory owed him her life put the crowning touch on Lynn’s outrage. She hated to be beholden to anyone, especially a too-handsome fake cowboy.

  “Well, you better figure out some way to get my daughter to a doctor, pronto, or I’ll sue your ass, buddy. And you can bet your sweet life I won’t do it halfway!”

  11

  SO HE WAS a sucker for tough broads, Jess thought ruefully, staring at Lynn as she spat threats at him. In Grease he’d preferred Rizzo to saccharine-sweet Sandy. He liked Madonna. He liked Sharon Stone. Right from the start, when he and Owen had met this latest group of tourists at the airport, he’d zeroed in on that quality in Lynn.

  Attitude, that was what she had, in spades. And it turned him on. To quote Owen: Little brother likes babes with balls.

  Beautiful babes with balls. To be strictly accurate, his first thought upon setting eyes on Lynn when she had come striding down that airline ramp had been, whoa, Babe-raham Lincoln.

  His appraisal had started with her feet in their sexy spike heels, swept up over a pair of breathtaking legs in sheer hose, approved a slim black skirt that ended at midthigh, and noted with interest the other assets imperfectly concealed by her businesslike blazer and silk blouse.

  She’d had discreet gold hoops in her ears, a no-nonsense mouth rendered kissable by pale-pink lipstick, big blue eyes with thick brushes of lashes, and an elegant upswept hairdo the color of daffodils.

  And a go-to-hell look on her face when he’d smiled at her.

  As Owen had said out of the side of his mouth as they’d gathered up the group’s luggage, that one was Jess’s type of woman.

  A bitch.

  That bit of brotherly candor unfortunately had proved all too true.

  Now the babe with balls was turning her bitchery on him. After he had just saved her life yet. And her daughter’s too.

  Talk about ingratitude!

  He wasn’t in the mood for it: He was bone-tired, he was freezing to death, he had rope burns on his hands, he had the mother of all cricks in his neck, and he still had to face the headache of getting her and her kid back to civilization in one piece.

  And she was threatening to sue him? And Owen, and Adventure, Inc.? He should have left her hanging in that tree.

  Too late now.

  “I guess that’s why we have liability insurance,” Jess said mildly, and stood up, note in hand.

  Heading toward the cliff, he could feel her fury rising behind him, silent but palpable. The muscles in his back tensed. In his experience babes with balls were inclined to throw things at the object of their ire.

  Which in this case meant him. As it usually did.

  But she didn’t.

  “By the way, you’re welcome,” Jess said over his shoulder as he sent his note snaking up the cliff. “I’d be glad to save your life again anytime. Babe.”

  12

  SHE NEEDED A CIGARETTE. Trudging behind Jess, tromping through a primeval alpine forest along a barely discernible trail between stands of moss-covered undergrowth so thick and high it could have hidden a baker’s dozen grizzlies, stumbling over rocks and roots and sliding on slippery things she preferred not to try to identify, that was the thought uppermost in Lynn’s mind: She needed a cigarette.

  She was maroo
ned in this wilderness hell with a grumpy fake cowboy, an injured teenage daughter with the hots for said cowboy, a thirty-pound pack that felt ten times heavier, and no cigarettes.

  Adventure, Inc.’s literature had promised: You’ll get in touch with your body in a whole new way.

  They were right: She’d never before experienced a nicotine fit the magnitude of the one she could feel coming on. By the time they got back to civilization she would not have smoked a cigarette in two whole days!

  And that was the best-case scenario. Given the track record of the trip so far, there was about as much chance of things going as planned as there was of spotting a hospital around the next bend.

  Scanning an old mountain-goat trail for discarded butts was obviously a waste of time, but Lynn found herself doing it anyway on the off-chance that they were following in the footsteps of a nanny goat with a tobacco habit. It was hopeless, of course, just as discovering a stray cigarette on her person or those of her companions was hopeless. She’d turned her own clothes inside out, and Rory’s too, out of pure desperation, though her daughter was an avid anti-smoker.

  Jess had no cigarettes. She’d already broken her seething silence long enough to ask him. He’d given her a superior smirk as he informed her that he didn’t smoke.

  Lynn hated that kind of smug nonsmoker.

  There were no cigarettes in either of the packs Owen had sent down the cliff. Lynn had already torn them apart, checking.

  Her own cigarettes were tucked away in a saddlebag, left behind with that stupid horse. Of course, she couldn’t really blame herself for that. Though she was a planner by nature, it was a little too much to ask to plan to fall off a cliff.

  She needed a cigarette.

  To distract herself Lynn dwelt on the growing discomfort at the backs of her heels. The farther she walked, the worse the pain grew. Obviously, the combination of damp socks and new boots was giving her blisters.