The worst part was knowing this was all her fault, not Max’s at all.
The evening had started out fine. Okay, as fine as possible, considering her heart felt scoured raw by the events of the day.
On her drive back down the canyon from helping to decorate the ballroom, the sun shone directly into her eyes and she realized she didn’t have her sunglasses. The last time she clearly remembered having them had been while she and Brendan cleaned up the Wild Iris Ridge trail.
She must have left them somewhere up there. Yes, it was a small disaster in a day filled with much bigger problems but she loved those sunglasses. They were the best pair she had ever owned and fit her face perfectly. Finding an adequate replacement would be a challenge, especially since she had purchased them on a trip to Japan just before Annabelle died.
This, at least, was something within her control to fix.
She decided to go look for them, especially after she returned to Iris House and found Max looking bored in his outdoor play area.
A little exercise would be just the thing for him and would also provide the much-needed bonus of distracting her from the deep ache in her heart—or so she thought.
The evening had been lovely, though after only a few moments, she had been wishing she had thought to bring along a jacket. In town, it was sometimes easy to forget how quickly the temperatures could drop in the higher elevations as soon as the sun started to set.
She had been moving at a good clip, though, and that helped keep her warmer. As she expected, the puppy’s energy had started to lag when they were only halfway to their destination. He was just a tiny slip of a thing and had to take about eight steps to every one of hers.
While she hadn’t brought a jacket, she did have the foresight to bring along the padded backpack carrier Crystal bought for Max that even had a little hole for him to stick his face out and look at his surroundings.
Lucy had plopped him into it and continued on her way, figuring she still had another hour of daylight—which should have been plenty of time to reach her destination and still make it back to the car before dark.
Finally she reached the glacier-carved boulder where she and Brendan had taken their break and had shared that devastating final kiss. She smoothed a hand over the stone, cool now that the sun had slipped behind the trees.
On some level, she hadn’t really expected to find the sunglasses. As she scanned the area, though, she suddenly spotted a flash of light in the tall meadow grasses—the dying sun reflecting off one of the lenses.
Though she didn’t remember doing it, she must have taken them off and set them down on the rock while they were talking. Somehow during that kiss, the sunglasses had slipped into the grass.
She picked them up now and discovered the frame was a little bent, the lenses dirty—both things she could fix. The small victory was one tiny bright spot in a day filled with sorrow and pain.
That should have been the end of it.
Now, as she huddled with the little dog whimpering against her skin and her ankle howling with pain, she wished with all her heart that she had just tossed the glasses in the pack and headed back down the trail.
If she had, she would have been home now, soaking in that claw-foot tub with a glass of wine and her broken heart.
What stupid instinct had compelled her to go up the trail a little bit higher? She remembered thinking it was going to be a spectacular sunset, especially with the clouds that had started rolling in.
She was leaving Hope’s Crossing, probably for good. How many more chances would she have to watch the sunset over the town from such a spectacular vantage point as the Wild Iris Ridge overlook?
The town had been lovely, glowing in the pale peach light, like something out of a postcard. The tidy downtown, the pretty houses rising up into the foothills and the magnificent mountains that seemed to embrace the little valley.
Someone had placed a redwood bench at the overlook, angled down for the perfect viewpoint into the valley. Perhaps it was even a project from a previous Giving Hope Day.
With the wind rustling the pale green aspen leaves and moaning in the tops of the tall pines, she sank down onto the bench. Max yipped to be let out of his backpack carrier so she unzipped it and set him down to sniff around the bench.
She sat there watching the spectacular show and listening to the wind as all the emotions she had been shoving down all afternoon seemed to bubble to the surface.
This was why she wanted to come up here, she realized, the tears beginning to slide down her face. The sunglasses had only provided the excuse. She had needed the space and the privacy to mourn for the future she could never have with Brendan.
They could have made it work. She could have worked for Aidan long-distance from Hope’s Crossing or she could have considered being a marketing consultant for other tech companies. She could picture the whole perfect thing with startling clarity—entwining her life with his, sharing her successes, embracing his, raising the children they both loved together.
She wanted that future fiercely but knew it was impossible for them. He might say he had feelings for her, but he wouldn’t let himself completely love her, for a hundred different reasons. She had to accept it and move on, as painfully difficult as that would likely prove.
She indulged in the tears for only a few moments, figuring she had earned them. After this she would wipe her eyes, square her shoulders and go back to rebuilding her life.
When she looked around, however, she discovered she was alone there on the bench, with no Max in sight.
“It’s not your fault, little guy,” she said now to the puppy whose small body trembled against her. “I’m the only one to blame. I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off you for a second. I’m sorry. I should have been watching.”
The puppy licked her chin in complete forgiveness, adding yet another layer to her guilt. So many things could have happened to a fragile five-pound dog. This area was thick with red-tailed hawks, snakes, wildcats, anything that might decide a warm, wriggly puppy would make a delicious dinner on a rainy night.
She had been grossly negligent to let him out of the carrier pack for even a second. And she had been too absorbed, first in her own heartache and then her fear and frantic searching for Max to pay any attention to how those gathering clouds had begun to turn stormy.
She felt the first raindrop just about the time she heard a little yip from below her somewhere.
“Max!” she called and strained her ears until she heard it again.
It was a minor miracle that she heard it at all—and another that she finally located him by isolating the sound. He was downslope from the trail, roughly twenty-five feet down the steep mountainside.
She had no idea how he had made it that far, whether he had just wandered down the hill or had fallen, like a child rolling end over end down a hill.
She suspected the latter. When he saw her, he tried to scramble up and ended up sliding back down, unable to gain purchase to make it up the steep slope.
“Don’t move. I’ll come get you,” she had called to him. It was a stupid thing to say, since she knew perfectly well he couldn’t understand her, but she had to say something.
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 work
ed 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?
* * *
HE 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.”
Wild Iris Ridge (Hope's Crossing) Page 27
