Andi squeezed his arm supportively. “So you did it. You saved yourself.”
“I guess so, but I can’t remember the accident, Andi. I can’t remember driving a motorcycle or being a passenger on a motorcycle. I don’t even have any memory of Lars picking me up or my first night at the cabin. Nothing—except for that dream.”
She moved her hand to the middle of his back and rubbed it, much like a mother might do to a child. “I wish I hadn’t said anything. Me and my big mouth. I’m sorry.”
He straightened. He didn’t deserve her sympathy. The fact that he’d blocked the possibility that someone else might have been hurt from his mind didn’t say much about his character.
“No. You’re right.” His words were clipped, his throat tight with emotion. “I told myself that searching for my bike was a hopeless cause. But maybe I was just trying to postpone the inevitable.”
“Harley, it can wait. We don’t have to…”
“Yes. We do. I do. I can’t put it off any longer.” He gripped her hand—for luck. For strength. For hope. “Let’s go get that damn bike.”
AFTER PULLING OUT a variety of clamps, fittings, hooks and who knew what from her backpack, Andi stepped back to survey the mess. Her smile held a distinct air of satisfaction. Harley felt as useful as a cowboy at a quilting bee.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and waited for her cue.
She lifted her chin and looked at him. “You know, there’s something we neglected to get straight.”
“What?”
“My finder’s fee.” The impish look in her eyes told him she was kidding. “I mean, what if you turn out to be the guy who invented Velcro?”
His bark of laughter echoed in the trees. He would have given anything to kiss her. Right there. Middle of the road. No future, no past involved. But he took control of his emotions. He didn’t want to leave Gold Creek with even more regrets. If this turned out to be his motorcycle, he knew it would be only a matter of time before he was yanked back into his old life.
“Somehow I doubt I’m a big money man. I didn’t have one thin dime on me when Lars found me.”
“Says Lars.” Her eyes sparkled sassily. “What if next week he shows up in town claiming to have hit the mother lode? Uh-huh. Sure. We’ll know where it really came from, won’t we?”
Harley laughed outright. “Like I said, I kinda doubt it.”
She put her hands on her hips and faced him. “Okay. Here’s the plan.”
Harley liked the way she described each step in the process, making certain he understood her. He listened carefully, but nothing she said about the rappelling process rang even the slightest bell in his memory. He knew he had to trust her experience and expertise to accomplish this.
She drew his attention to a break in the mound of gravel at the edge of the road. “That could be where you went off the road.” She’d dropped to a squat and appeared to be studying the ground as if it were a book with a story to tell. “I think you must have been going back down the hill. There’s no way you could have gone off at that angle if you were climbing. Is any of this coming back to you?”
He tried to picture himself on a motorcycle, but aside from a throbbing sensation just behind his eyes, nothing else appeared. “No.”
He followed her to the edge of the road. The hillside at their feet fell away at a sixty-degree incline and disappeared into underbrush so thick it was impossible to follow it more than twenty feet from where they were standing.
“Look at that broken branch,” she said, pointing. “And there’s another. Deeper in. My gut says this is the place, but I can’t see a thing. I’m going down for a closer look.”
Harley looked over the ledge and was hit by a sudden wave of panic. Raw, stomach-turning panic. His skin turned clammy, his respiration shallow, his vision blurred.
“No. I can’t let you do it. Let’s just mark the spot. I’ll hire a crew to recover the bike and whatever else is left. Even if—God forbid—there is someone else down there, a few days won’t make any difference.”
Andi spun around. “Harley, this is my find. I don’t want to hand it over to somebody else.”
“But it’s my bike,” he shouted. He needed to get away from the ledge, and he wasn’t going without Andi.
He grabbed her arm.
She yanked back. Harley’s grip faltered, and she seemed to lose her balance. Her right foot stepped backward…into space. Her expression went from anger to consternation, as if she didn’t have time for a bothersome little tumble down the side of a cliff.
“Andi.” Ignoring the rush of fear that deafened him to the sound of his own cry, Harley reached for her. His fingers felt numb but reflex made them clamp on the material bunched at her waist. This kept her upright long enough for his other arm to swoop behind her shoulders and haul her close.
Bodies in motion—they fell backward to what he knew was safe, level ground. They hit hard, his left shoulder taking the brunt of the impact. Small stones pierced his skin, but Harley didn’t care. Pain meant they were alive. Andi was safe.
Neither moved as the dust settled. Harley ignored the screaming fury in his shoulder. The weight resting on his chest more than made up for any ache. She was awkwardly clasped against him, but she felt wonderful—and smelled of fresh air and herbal shampoo.
Andi lifted her head then braced one hand on the ground beside his jaw to push up. “What the hell was that?”
Harley opened his mouth, but it took several seconds to produce the necessary mental state to speak. It didn’t help that her midsection was resting squarely against his own. “I thought you were going to fall.”
“So?” She arched her neck as if working out a kink. Her breasts—just a few inches from his face—rose with her breath. The movement added to Harley’s problems.
“You could have been killed,” he said, his tone husky.
Her lips flattened then gave way to a grin. “You were trying to save my life?”
Harley didn’t like her condescending tone. “I did save you. At no small cost to my own body, I might add.”
She rolled to her hip and sprang into a squat beside him so fast Harley barely had time to blink. “You’re hurt? I’m sorry. I thought you were goofing around because you didn’t want me to go after the bike.”
It bothered him that she seemed totally unaffected by the sexual overtones of their encounter. He sat up stiffly, trying not to wince. “I’m fine, but I’m not letting you go down into that ravine.”
She rocked back. “You’re not.”
It wasn’t a question. “No.”
He didn’t try getting to his feet. His vision blurred, and he felt a bit queasy. Not another damn concussion, he silently muttered. Andi would probably want to carry him to the car—on her back.
“This has nothing to do with finding your past, does it?” she said, her tone frosty. “You’re turning all macho because you think this is too dangerous for a girl.”
He didn’t like her tone—or the direct hit.
“Harley, I’m an experienced climber. I spent two summers working in Tuolumne Meadows, and I did 5.11 face climbs and 5.10 crack climbs. This isn’t even a challenge. Trust me.”
He didn’t understand the jargon, but he believed her.
“I’ll just drop into the gully and snap a couple of pictures. It might not even be your bike, and you would have wasted all that time and money on nothing.”
“Fearless Andi Sullivan. Tell me, are you afraid of anything?” He moved cautiously so as not to aggravate the pain in his back. Finally he was sitting.
Andi sat, too—after adding a few inches between them. “Sure. Most social situations make me jittery. Put me in front of a crowd and my brain freezes solid.”
He didn’t believe her, but before he could say so she went on, “And I’m afraid of losing my aunt’s business.” Her gaze dropped, and she tucked in the hunk of shirt that he’d pulled loose.
Were Ida’s financial woes really that bad?
“Do you want to sell?” The idea made him uneasy, but he couldn’t say why. What did the demise of a run-down old building matter to him?
“Of course not. It’s our home. But then I realized it’s not my call to make. Ida Jane’s name is on the deed. Maybe everything I’m doing is for nothing.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
Andi shook her head. “Not yet. I called a local realtor. His wife is a friend of Ida Jane’s. He said there’s big money moving into the area, but not to do anything until he’d investigated the company.”
“Sound advice,” Harley said, surprised by the sense of relief he felt.
Andi rose. “Why are we talking about me? This is your show,” she said. “Are we doing it or not?”
Harley took a deep breath. He couldn’t put it off forever. “Okay,” he said, reaching around to massage his aching shoulder. “But nothing fancy. No shinning up the tree to perform some kind of inverted Evil Knievel trick.”
Her quick peck on his cheek made it tough to stay focused, but that, he promised himself, would be his goal. Maybe his unconscious mind was afraid of heights. Maybe his past was about to catch up to him. Maybe he was falling for a woman who was twice the man he was, but he refused to think about any of it. Focus on keeping Andi safe, he told himself. That’s all.
TWENTY LONG MINUTES LATER, Andi had two half-inch braided ropes secured to the trunk of a pine as thick as a watermelon. “I’d rather use an oak tree—their roots go all the way to China,” she explained, hoping to dispel some of Harley’s obvious unease, “but this guy will have to do.”
Harley didn’t say anything, but he gave the tree a stern look.
“I’ll be back in a flash,” she said, securing a bright purple anodized clip to her guide rope. She used her teeth to pull on a pair of leather gloves then started walking backward toward the ravine. “All you need to do is keep an eye on my line so it doesn’t get twisted. I’ll holler if I need anything.”
Her pulse was charged, nerves primed. She hadn’t been climbing in months, and she had to admit it was fun to show off for a nonclimber. With a jaunty wave, she hopped out and back, dropping a quick three feet over the precipice. Her boots landed cleanly, knees bent to absorb the impact. Once she made certain her lines were clear of debris, she slowly eased downward. Her boots sank into layers of decayed leaves, sending up a moldy smell that reminded her of the bordello’s basement. A cluster of bristly, grayish-green bushes grabbed at the long-sleeved, heavy canvas shirt she’d pulled on to protect her arms. The bright-orange garment was left over from her Search-and-Rescue days. She’d dug it out of the closet at Ida Jane’s.
“What do you see?” Harley called from above.
She knew he was embarrassed about his acrophobia, but it was a common fear. Jenny and Josh had been avid hikers, but Josh had hated heights. When the three of them hiked to the top of Half Dome, Andi had walked right to the edge of Yosemite’s famous landmark. The nearly-five-thousand-foot drop to the valley floor was scary but exhilarating, too. Jenny and Josh had snapped pictures from the safety of the football field–size center plateau.
“Lots of broken branches,” she called. “Tons of poison oak. Stay put.”
Andi heard a noise above her. A river of shale rained downward. “And keep away from the edge.”
“Sorry,” he called out, his chagrin obvious.
She liked him way more than was smart. Too bad the future looked even less stable than the ground under her feet.
Almost simultaneous with that thought, the earth gave way and she had to hop, skip and jump the remaining thirty feet to avoid twisting an ankle. Breathless, with adrenaline pumping, Andi took a moment to calm her nerves. As she did, she glanced around.
A debris field—twenty feet ahead and about the same distance in diameter—reminded Andi of a hastily abandoned picnic. Scraps of faded and torn cloth adorned bushes. Small piles of paper and personal items created pockets in the bright-green grass. She tilted her chin and looked skyward at the source of the refuse.
The picture seemed even more impossible from this angle. The massive bull pine consisted of two trees that had grown together at the base and parted at a point about twenty-five feet in the air forming a Y. The branches crisscrossed like a net. A net that had snagged the motorcycle.
“The bike looks like a giant Christmas-tree ornament,” she called out.
Harley’s reply came a moment later. “Is it new?”
Andi moved closer. Dusty, streaked with grime and pine tar, the bike seemed in amazing shape, given its precarious position. “Brand spankin’—give or take a wrecked fender, two flat tires and a nasty dent in the gas tank. Looks like it’s deep burgundy, but it’s hard to tell with all the shadows. Gonna take a helluva winch to get it out.”
“Can you see the license plate?” They’d discussed the possibility of tracing the bike, if moving it was problematic.
“Not yet.” She shook out more line and stepped clear of her ropes. “I need to get right under it.”
“Be careful,” Harley shouted. “Don’t risk it.”
“Don’t worry,” she called out. “This baby isn’t coming down without help. Looks like you had a couple of leather saddlebags on the back. There’s stuff all over the ground.”
Andi walked with care amongst the remains of Harley’s past. She felt like a crime scene investigator—although thankfully, she could report that no body was in view. She looked upward. “A second helmet is still attached to the bike, Harley. You couldn’t have had a passenger.”
She didn’t hear his response, but she felt his relief. As she moved directly under the bike, she spotted a small brown hunk of leather. A wallet.
Kneeling, she picked it up. Stiff and discolored from the weather, it was fairly well preserved. Her hands shook as she flipped it open. The tiny photo on the Missouri driver’s license made her breath catch in her throat. She told herself she was being silly. Foolish. Of course this was Harley’s bike. Harley’s wallet.
She used her thumb to clean off the condensation on the plastic frame that held the license. Same face, different name.
“Find anything?” Harley called.
Andi heard the edge of worry in his voice. Stifling her inner disquiet, she stuffed the billfold in a pocket in the leg of her pants and buttoned it for safekeeping.
“There’s a mangled laptop,” she said, moving on. Water seeped from its insides. “It’s toast.”
Keeping a running commentary, she shouted out her finds. “Clothes are everywhere.” She used a stick to poke at a mound of mildew-splotched briefs. “All rags now.” She picked up a long-sleeved blue oxford button-down, faded and torn, but serviceable for her purpose. “Pretty ritzy labels. You didn’t buy this at a thrift store.”
“What?” Harley called. “I can’t hear you.”
She quickly scanned the area for anything personal. Under a clump of soaproot shoots, she found a leather-bound book. A journal, she thought. Without peeking inside, she tossed it on top of the shirt.
A little more poking turned up a platinum-encased TAG Heuer watch. A ruined cell phone and a couple of electronic gizmos Andi couldn’t identify. “He’s not as poor as he thinks he is,” she mumbled under her breath. “Unless the bike was stolen, of course.”
When she kicked over a clump of mushy newsprint, she unearthed what at one time had been an elegant black velvet jeweler’s box. Her fingers were trembling—from the dampness—as she pried open the rusted hinge. An engagement ring. A big, flashy diamond surrounded by six smaller jewels. While obviously expensive, the rock didn’t appeal to Andi’s taste, but she knew women who’d swoon at the sight of it.
“Oh, great,” she muttered. “He was on his way to propose to some woman.”
She made the snarling noise her sisters called the bad sound, then tossed the rest of her discoveries onto the blue shi
rt and tied the arms together to form a knapsack. With a spare clip, she hooked it to her belt.
“Coming up,” she said after snapping a few pictures of the bike and the scene below it.
Instead of the thrill of victory she’d been expecting, Andi felt let down. She’d accomplished her mission, but now what? Like so many other times in her life, she’d leaped without looking. Actually, she had looked ahead—just not far enough. She’d done the smart thing, the right thing, but now she was going to lose a man she’d come to care about.
And he would go—just as soon as he remembered the beautiful blonde and the two adorable kids in the photo in his wallet.
CHAPTER SIX
SNAPPING BRANCHES and several muttered curses heralded Andi’s ascent, but Harley kept his distance. Just peeking over the top of the ridge was enough to make the pressure build behind his eyes. He chose to pretend that sitting beneath the pine tree watching the tension on her rope amounted to helping her.
A minute later she scrambled over the hump of loose gravel at the side of the road, dusting off leaves, bark and dirt from her pants and shirt. “Made it,” she said with a grin. “And I’ve got a present for you.”
He barely heard her words because he was trying to talk himself out of kissing her.
She stepped free of the ropes, then peeled off her gloves, dropping them to the pile of gear. “Look at this,” she said, handing him an object from the top pocket near her thigh. A wallet.
Harley’s stomach turned over. “Mine?” he croaked. The weight of possibilities pressed on his chest, making it hard to draw a breath. That little leather square in his hand might tell him everything. Was he ready?
“It was lying near some clothes and books and a mangled laptop. Most of the stuff was beyond saving, but I brought up what I could carry,” she said, unclipping a funny-shaped cloth bag suspended from her belt. “Animals got everything, I suppose. And weather. This whole area probably spent a couple of months under snow.”
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