Next steps. Focus on next steps. That’s what they’d drummed into him during his training. What if she needed a stretcher of some kind? Or a splint? He needed wood. Grabbing the tools he’d thrown into a bag, he ran down the trail to a few spindly pines trying to push their way up through the rocky landscape. Using a small hatchet, he hacked at their trunks one by one until they fell. It took a few more minutes to strip away the branches. Then it was back to the rope, and he tied them on. He added the second set of saddlebags and the backpack with the first-aid supplies. And lowered them down to wherever the hell Lori was. He wished he could see her.
“Lori, can you pull the rope again?”
Silence. Oh, damn, silence. “Lori?” He called again. Nothing. Had she blacked out? Was she hurt a lot worse than he’d realized?
Working quickly, he tied his end of the rope around the base of a big tree across the trail so the supplies he’d sent down wouldn’t tumble farther down the cliff. Then he pulled another coil of rope off his saddle. He needed to get down there fast.
He spotted Snack, sitting quietly where he’d been tied, watching his every move. He couldn’t leave the dog here or he really would be a snack. He untied him, leaving the rope attached to his collar like a leash, and scooped him up. “It’s a good thing you’re so small, little guy.” Unzipping his parka, Wade loaded the terrier inside and zipped it back up again so just the dog’s head was peeking out. “Gonna need you to stay really calm,” he told him. “No wiggling or freaking out. I haven’t done this in a while. And I’ve never done it with a dog stuffed in my clothes.”
There was nothing more to do but get himself and Snack down the cliff. He tied one end of his rope to the tree, then emptied his mind of everything but his basic training. Step over the rope. Bring it behind the leg, across the hip, over the opposite shoulder. Down across the back. Don’t think, just do it.
He backed over the edge of the scree slope, leaning back, forcing himself to let the rope take his weight. It was counterintuitive and damn, he’d forgotten how much it hurt. The parka helped pad his back where the rope carried a lot of his weight. But his braking hand was gonna get some serious rope burn.
One step, then another down the treacherous scree, not trusting his feet on the sliding surface, trusting the rope, trusting his skill, trusting the hours of training and his experience. His heart pounded, but he kept up a steady dialogue with himself, just like his counselor had taught him. Yeah, it was scary, but he’d done this before. And bonus—it wasn’t even dark yet. He had to keep it in perspective. This was easy. People did this for fun all the time.
Under his feet, the scree slope was turning into sheer cliff, and he winced. Lori had gone over this. He could see her now, lying crumpled on her side on a ledge. Thank God for that ledge. Otherwise she’d be at the bottom of the gorge below, dead for sure.
His heart hammered against the walls of his chest, and panic started to rise. Sweat coated his back, his stomach, and the wide skies around him seemed to close in. Snack shifted in his coat and whined. He didn’t want to go over this cliff, either.
“Steady, Snack,” Wade cautioned. The dog was picking up on his anxiety. He had to keep it under control or the little guy might squirm right out of Wade’s jacket. He took a deep breath and let it out. Do what’s in front of you. The rest is just noise. Just anxiety. Push it back slowly, calmly. It’s unnecessary. Unimportant. Just noise.
His breathing calmed. His feet found purchase on the cliff edge, and he lowered himself easily. Butt down, boots on rock, brake hand searing hot and throbbing, but he was doing it. For Lori. For her ridiculous dog. He could be strong for them.
His feet hit solid rock below. He was on the ledge, wanting to kiss it with gratitude. He’d done it, PTSD and all. He’d stayed in control.
Making sure he had his balance, he unwound the rope from his body and unloaded Snack, tying the dog’s rope to his belt loop so the excited animal wouldn’t go too close to the edge. The terrier ran for his mistress, straight for her face as if checking for her breathing. When she didn’t respond, he brought a paw up in consternation, looking back at Wade with wide eyes as if saying, “Do something.”
Wade scrambled to get the first aid backpack untied from the rope he’d lowered it on, then went down next to Lori, registering the cool, pale skin, the shallow breathing—the first signs of shock. Grabbing the blanket from under the pile of supplies he’d lowered down first, he covered her, then unrolled a sleeping bag and threw that over her, too.
He brushed the dirt off her face and searched through her matted hair for the wound there. It wasn’t bleeding much now. He pulled out a neck brace, slid it under her and poured a little of his water over the wound. It ran red for a moment, but at least it took some of the dirt with it and allowed him to see that the cut wasn’t bone deep. Good. Now to pray that there was no fracture under there.
She opened her eyes, looking up at him hazily. “Wade? You’re here.”
“I sure am. Listen to me. You’ve had a bad fall. You’ve got a bump on your head. Don’t move.”
One of her hands went up to feel the neck brace. “I’m okay. I can move. I already did, to get out of the way of all that stuff you dropped on me.”
“Sorry about that. I couldn’t see where you were from up top.”
“It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re here.”
Snack whined and came around Wade to snuffle her face. “Snack? Did you fall, too?”
“He was up top when I got here,” Wade explained. “Waiting for you to come back up that cliff, I think. I had to bring him down in my jacket so he wouldn’t be alone up there all night.”
She smiled as the little dog licked her cheek. “Thank you.”
The wind was picking up, and gray clouds were rolling in low. He had to get moving. It was dusk already and would be full dark soon. He lifted up the blanket and scanned down her body. No blood pooling anywhere. “What hurts?”
“My right ankle. And my other wrist. And I think I have some scrapes and bruises.”
Pain was good. Her spine was intact. “We’ll start with your head and work our way down.”
“Sounds nice.” She gave him a half smile.
“Dirty jokes at a time like this?” He couldn’t help but smile back.
“Hey, we might be out here for the night. Might as well have some humor.”
She tried to push herself up to sitting and grimaced.
He eased her back down. “No moving until I say so. You probably have a concussion.”
He cleaned her head wound a little more and placed a gauze bandage over it, wrapping more gauze around like a headband to hold it in place. Then he moved to her wrist. Broken, clearly, but no bones sticking out. He cut a few branches from the saplings he’d lowered and made her a splint. Her face glowed white in the dusk and she bit her lip, but she took the splinting like a champ. Man, she was tough.
And then the ankle. Sprained badly, as far as he could tell, though there could be a chipped bone in there somewhere. He wrapped it in an elastic bandage and made a splint to hold it steady, avoiding her ankle bone just in case.
At least she was more awake now. He rummaged in the first aid kit for the packet of drink mix he’d seen earlier and added it to one of the water bottles, shaking it up. He put the duffel bag against the rocks behind her and helped her lean on it to sit up. Her ribs were bruised for sure, but they didn’t feel broken. “Drink this.” He put the water bottle in her good hand.
She drank deep. Then swallowed down the painkillers he offered. “Thank you. For coming. For bringing all this stuff. For climbing down here to hang out with me.”
“Hang out.” He grinned. “Literally. I have the rope burns to prove it.”
She reached for his hand and turned it over, palm up. And winced. “Ouch.”
“It was fun. It’s been
a while since I rappelled down a cliff.”
“How long since you climbed back up one?” she asked.
“About as long.” The light was almost gone. “We definitely have to sleep here tonight. I can’t get you up the cliff and back down the mountain in the dark.”
“How did you get all this stuff up here?”
“JM. And I hauled a bunch of stuff on Teton, too. Both horses are loose at the top of the cliff. I figure either they’ll stay here or head back to the ranch tonight, or JM will revert to his formerly wild ways and take Teton with him.”
“Sounds about right.” She smiled at him, and it was the most reassuring thing he’d seen.
“I have some food that Mandy packed. She’s let the sheriff know to send up a rescue in the morning, so this cliff dwelling of yours isn’t a permanent thing.”
“Oh, good. I thought it might suit, but the driveway was a little treacherous.”
He smiled. “Just a little.” He knew what she was doing. Joking to keep her fear away. And he appreciated it, because he wasn’t much looking forward to spending the night on a cliff, either. Especially with the temperature dropping and the sky clouding up.
“I think we’ll get some snow.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Lori studied the sky. “You know, I think you’re right.”
“I’m gonna rig us a shelter with a few of these tarps.”
“You’re a useful guy to have around, aren’t you?”
He laughed bitterly. “It depends on what you want done. Build you a shelter on a cliff? A no-brainer. Take you on a date to the local bar? Not so useful.”
“Good thing I don’t like bars much.”
“Good thing,” he agreed. He pulled out one of the tarps he’d brought and then grabbed rope and started threading it through the grommets. Soon he had the tarp tied to outcroppings in the cliff above them and anchored with rocks on the ledge. It was just a lean-to, but it should keep them fairly dry if it started snowing.
He felt something light and cold on his face. Correction: when it started snowing. As in now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WADE HAD MADE them a nest. He piled up sleeping bags and blankets for them to sit on and burrow under, and he’d helped her put on so many clothes she felt like she was in her own personal cocoon. Snack was nestled down in the blankets, and it was snowing outside.
It wasn’t a perfect setup. Every once in a while, Wade had to get up and flap the tarp of their lean-to so the snow wouldn’t build up and take the whole fragile shelter down with it. But they were warm enough and mostly dry, and they had Mandy’s food and even flashlights. Lori was pretty sure that falling off a cliff in the wilderness had never been so luxurious.
Wade opened another of Mandy’s saddlebags. Sandwiches, muffins and fruit spilled out. “Have I told you how much I love your sister?” Wade asked, staring in awe at the loot.
“I swear she is the angel of food,” Lori breathed, reaching for a sandwich with her good hand.
Wade helped her with the wrapper. The painkillers he’d provided had taken the edge off, but her broken wrist still throbbed enough to make her eyes water. That was fine. Because she was alive. She was going to be okay.
“I just can’t believe that you’re here,” she said. “That you came to my rescue.”
She could feel him smile in the darkness. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I haven’t actually rescued you yet.”
“It’s a good start, though. So much better than it could have been.”
They were both quiet for a moment. The horror of just how bad it could have been was so big, Lori couldn’t even think about it without panic clogging her throat. She could easily have died, and she was glad she hadn’t.
Better not to think and just focus on the present. She nibbled on her sandwich, taking small bites because of her sore jaw.
“Are you going to tell me what you were doing out here?” Wade asked.
“I went to see where my mom died. I know it sounds morbid, but I just felt like I needed to. Like I never really had closure.”
“Did it help?”
She flushed in the darkness. “It helped a lot. I came to a big decision.”
“What’s that?”
She took a moment to sort it out in her thoughts. “I guess what I realized is that I haven’t been brave enough to reach for the life I want. Except for ranching. I made that happen. But all the other things that make life rich—friends, fun, really celebrating holidays—I think I’ve missed out on a lot of that.”
“So your decision is to have more of the good stuff?”
“Yup,” she said. “I want all the good stuff.” Including you, she wanted to add, but didn’t. It would be too awkward if he rejected her again, and they had to spend the night on the cliff together afterward.
“When I was in Afghanistan,” he said quietly, “I think I had a lot of similar thoughts. All I wanted was to come home and build this brand-new life for myself, full of all the things I missed so much. It seemed so simple back then, but when I got to the ranch and saw the mess there, and figured out that my brain wasn’t really working too well...it just got way more complicated.”
“Tell me something about when you were at war,” Lori said. “If you don’t mind.”
Wade was silent for a moment, and she worried that she’d been too intrusive. She was just about to tell him not to answer when he spoke.
“My squadron went on a mission up in the mountains. We parachuted in. Our orders were to clear out a small group of Taliban fighters.”
It sounded terrifying, and he was only on the first sentence. He paused. Lori set her sandwich down on the blanket, reaching out to touch his arm with her good hand.
His big, warm hand covered hers. “I was second in command. Our leader was killed on the way down. A sniper picked him off. Turned out they’d been expecting us. A few more guys in my unit were shot. My best friend was one of them. We hit the ground and hauled him into a cave. We hid there for hours. He died in my arms.”
Her heart ached for him. So much pain and fear in his curt sentences. “I’m sorry, Wade. That must have been devastating. How did you get away?”
“We waited until dark, then left the cave, and I radioed for a helicopter to pick us up. But it couldn’t come to our location or the Taliban would open fire, so we agreed to meet on the other side of the mountain. We slid on our bellies from rock to rock, up and over the mountain in the dark. And the whole time I was crawling, I was pretty sure I’d be shot any minute. So I decided I wanted to die thinking about the things I loved most. I thought of these mountains. The way they look in the early morning when that pink light comes over the valley floor and slowly hits the granite peaks. How the air smells like the pines. How great it feels to jump into one of the lakes in summer or snowboard down the slopes in winter. And I realized that this area—Benson, Marker Ranch, all these peaks and valleys—is my home. And that whatever happened to me growing up on my family’s ranch, whatever bad experiences I endured, they at least made me strong enough, and stubborn enough, to crawl up that Afghan mountain range.”
“You were brave,” she murmured. He’d been through so much horror. No wonder he was having such troubles.
“But it wasn’t just the mountains I wanted to come home to. It was you.”
“Me?” Lori’s thoughts whirled even faster. “Why me?”
“I was in love with you, Lori. All through high school. And I never forgot our night together.”
Her cheeks went hot. “Oh, that.”
“Remember how it came about? The way you found me so upset? I was hitchhiking out from town, remember? Right at the end of the school year. And I’d just found out that I was expelled, and I wasn’t going to get a diploma because I hadn’t passed enough classes. And you drove up, an
d I stuck out my thumb.”
She laughed softly. “I remember that. Of course I do.”
“You made me laugh and feel better about everything.”
“And then I agreed to meet you,” she said, wondering at her teenage self. How blithely she’d walked into that night, with no idea how it would change everything.
His grip on her hand tightened. “And you gave me the most amazing night. You were loving, generous. And even though I was a complete jerk when it came time to say goodbye, I cherished that night. Crawling through those mountains, convinced that I was going to die any second, that is what I thought about the most. Your beauty, your generosity, and what it was like to hold you and laugh with you. I wanted those to be my last thoughts.”
She was silent, trying to take it in. All those years, she’d hated him for leaving her, while he’d clung to what had been good between them. “I’m glad they weren’t,” she finally said.
He laughed. “Trust me, I’m glad, too. And by the time I got to that helicopter, I knew I was going to come back here and find a way to make this place my home. And somehow, I’d find a way to see you again.”
“But you didn’t see me. You got home, and you never told me you were here.”
“That’s what I meant when I said the reality of coming back was a lot more complicated. I must have driven up to your driveway a dozen times when I first got home. But my anxiety was bad, and I just couldn’t face you all shaking and nervous like that. I’d had this idea that I’d come home this confident soldier. That’s how I wanted you to see me. Every time I tried to visit, I realized I wasn’t that guy, and I just turned around and went back home.”
They sat in silence. It was so quiet Lori swore she could hear the snow falling on the rocks around them. If she ignored her wounds and the fact that somehow she was going to have to climb up a terrifying snowy cliff tomorrow, it was really peaceful. “If you had such a crush on me in high school, how come you never did anything about it?”
“You were gorgeous, smart, kind, talented Lori Allen. And I was Wade Hoffman, the local drug dealer’s son. I never felt good enough for you. Or imagined you would care about me.”
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