by Cindy Gerard
"Oh, my God," she whispered, a sick knot forming in the pit of her stomach. "They did it. They actually left us here." Unspoken was the other obvious conclusion. They were matchmaking. After witnessing a lifetime of verbal combat and zealous competition, those two hopeless romantics actually thought there was some capacity for them to kiss and make up. More like kiss and "make out," she thought with a flutter in her stomach.
She closed her eyes and fought the urge to throw up.
"They left us here," she repeated inanely, almost as if saying it aloud would make it not so.
"You're a real quick study, Brannigan," Clay grumbled, then added under his breath, "Expectant father or not, when I get my hands on my brother, I'm going to rearrange his face but good."
Still stunned by what they'd done, and by the prospect of spending seven days and nights alone with Clay, Maddie balled up the paper in her hand. Damn them! Damn their well-intentioned, matchmaking hides.
"You can have a go at it after I get through with him," she sputtered, then turned on her heel and headed for the cabin, making a decision on the spot.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I'm going after them."
He hooted with laughter. It was not a sound of amusement. "After them? Lady, you're screwier than I thought if you think you can find your way out of these mountains on foot. Not to mention, after your long hike, you've still got to find a way back to Jackson—and that's if you actually manage to locate the road."
Driven by a stark, undefinable certainty that she could survive the elements before she could survive a week in Clay James's presence, she trotted determinedly up the porch steps and jerked open the door. "I don't have to find my way back to Jackson. I only have to catch up with Emma and Garrett. They can't have gotten that far."
Besides, she told herself, she'd found her way back to the cabin just now, hadn't she? Maybe her instincts weren't as bad as she'd thought. And right now every instinct she owned was screaming at her to get as far away from this man as fast as her size sixes would take her.
"If you think they're just idling their way over the mountain, forget it. From the looks of those hoof prints, they're making fast tracks to make sure we don't try to trail them. Besides, you couldn't find your way out of a paper bag, let alone pick up Garrett's trail when he's of a mind to hide it."
"Thanks so much for the vote of confidence," she flung over her shoulder as the screen door slammed behind her, "but I think I can handle it."
Taking the loft stairs two at a time, she flew to her duffel bag, found her walking shoes and plunked down on the bed. She was lacing the last shoe tight when she heard the weight of footsteps on the loft stairs.
"You're not going anywhere." Arrogant anger spiked every word.
She didn't have to look up to know that he was standing at the top of the loft stairs glaring at her—or that his scowl was as black as midnight.
"Last I knew, you didn't run my life, James." Snagging her jacket from the duffel, she shouldered past him, trotted down the stairs and back outside.
The hard slam of the screen door told her he'd barreled right after her. The harsh grip of his hand on her upper arm was her first clue that he'd caught up with her.
"I know this is a novel idea," he growled, spinning her around to face him, "but try using your head for a change. Look," he demanded, stabbing a finger toward the sky. "In about an hour it's going to be raining pitchforks and hammer handles, and the wind's going to be whipping like a blender. Like it or not, you're not going anywhere."
She raised her face to the storm brewing in the sky, then lowered it to the one brewing in his eyes. The choice was simple.
"I'll take my chances on the weather."
Then she pulled away from his grip and started hiking as fast as she could, needing as much distance between them as possible.
Behind her, she heard his crude, graphic oath. "You are really beginning to tick me off, Matilda."
"Good and mad are you, Clayton?" she retorted without turning around. "If so, then my work here is done."
She broke into a jog, headed across the valley and aimed for the trail she prayed Emma and Garrett had taken.
"Fine," he shouted, his voice reaching her from a growing distance. "Go. Go get yourself lost. I don't give a damn. If you're not any smarter than that, then you deserve whatever happens to you.
"You need a keeper, you know that?" he added, when his diatribe failed to slow her down. "Well, it's sure as hell not going to be me."
Without turning around or slowing her stride, she flipped a hand gesture over her shoulder to let him know exactly what she thought of his opinions.
"Okay. That's it," he yelled, his tone as much as his words telling her he was washing his hands of her. "You're on your own, Brannigan. Don't say I didn't warn you. And don't expect me to come looking for you to save your sorry hide. And one more thing—when you come dragging back here, wet and cold and humble, and I will expect humility, don't plan on me feeling sorry for you, either!"
That was the last she heard from him.
And that's the last thought she gave to going back. It was a point of honor now. She would find Emma and Garrett if it killed her. She would not give him the satisfaction of getting lost.
For all her professed reasons for making her way out of the valley, though, the one that truly propelled her was of a far more intimidating nature. No way, no chance, no how was she going to spend seven nights in a cabin with that man. Not when she despised him the way she did. Not with the way he managed to anger her and humiliate her and … and … and make her melt with one look from those bedroom blue eyes.
* * *
"Damn woman. Damn fool woman," Clay muttered as he glared through the rain-streaked panes of the cabin window.
For a man who was not prone to profanity, he sure seemed to be spouting his share lately. He had Maddie Brannigan to thank for that. And for this roiling in his gut every time he thought of her out there alone in the mountains in this storm.
He checked his watch, raked his hands through his hair. Two hours. It had been two hours since he'd watched that trim little butt bounce off into the sunset and out of sight.
"The stubborn little fool," he uttered under his breath as guilt and worry battled for top billing.
It would be dark in another fifteen or twenty minutes. She should have been back by now. With her tail tucked between her legs. With humility oozing from every pore. With an apology for doubting his advice about the storm and defying his orders to stay put.
Yeah, right. Fat chance she'd come back. He'd seen to that. He'd goaded her and dared her and for good measure he'd made sure she knew he thought she didn't have a raindrop's chance in a forest fire of finding Garrett and Emma. Maddie come back? There was no way her sassy, stubborn pride would allow her to turn around and face his barrage of I told you sos.
He swore again. There was a fool on the mountain all right. But it was him, not her. And she might be in big trouble because of it.
He couldn't stand it any longer. Snagging his jacket from the rack by the door, he shrugged into it. Slamming his Stetson tight and low, he barreled out into the wind and rain…
She may be stubborn, and she may be as infuriating as sandpaper on a blister, but he couldn't leave her out there in this weather and to her own pitifully inadequate devices any longer.
As he ducked his head and set off at a jog across the valley, he told himself he was going to take supreme, unmitigated pleasure in spanking her like a recalcitrant five-year-old when he got his hands on her.
If he got his hands on her.
That thought above all others weighed on him like a boulder. He didn't want her hurt. For all the grief she gave him, for all the guff he put up with, the thought of a mild, uncomplicated life without her there to mess it up was oddly, uncomfortably unappealing.
With a renewed sense of urgency and an unreasonable curl of anxiety clutching at his chest, he picked up the pace. Then, for the fir
st of what would be too many times before this night was finally over, he called out her name.
* * *
Chapter 5
« ^ »
Maddie came to her senses slowly. The pain was quick to follow. It was sharp and stark and as acute as the lightning strike that sliced the sky in jagged halves. As demanding as the thunder that dogged its heels and rumbled through the mountains like the roar of a runaway train.
In the next moment came silence. With it was an instinctive awareness that she was in danger of the highest degree.
She was down, clinging to moss-covered rock. Her right arm was hooked over something … a branch or a tree root, she realized at the same time she remembered the fall.
"Oh, God," she whispered to a night grown black and the hard driving rain, and prayed she wasn't in as much trouble as it seemed.
Some prayers, she'd learned long ago, went unanswered. She accepted that this was destined to be one of them when she realized that the ground on which she lay was a precariously narrow ledge jutting from the side of the mountain.
A scream of sheer terror welled up in her throat. She fought it down along with a helpless, clawing panic and made herself assess the situation.
Above her was a good twelve feet of sheer, vertical rock wall. Below her was a good twelve-hundred-foot drop, and she was sprawled on a tiny ledge.
"Stay calm," she ordered through lips numbed by rain and cold. "For Pete's sake, stay calm."
But the breath she drew to steady herself lanced pain through her left side and broke to splinters the fragile framework of her pact to settle herself down.
It all came back to her then. She'd fallen, all right. She'd done exactly what Clay had predicted she'd do. She'd gotten lost. Then she'd panicked, and after hours of wandering around in the rain trying to get her bearings, she'd slipped and tumbled head over haunches down the steep path.
The rocks, she remembered well. So did her right knee. When she tried to bend it, pain stabbed behind her kneecap, another violation to the calm that was quickly slipping further away from her grasp.
Battling a terror filled with both what she did know and what she didn't, she shifted her weight for better purchase. Exquisite pain reminded her that her right hip had connected with something good and hard, as well. When it eased, the exact moment just before she'd run out of trail came back as clear and detailed as etched glass.
In her mind she heard the serrated sound of her own scream, relived the runaway fall off the side of the mountain. Her stomach roiled at the vivid memory and then at reality as she looked up and above her into the steep, rain-slicked side of the cliff face.
She clung tighter to the tree root and refused to let herself think about what would happen if either she or it let go.
Thunder rumbled, ricocheting like kettle drums off the rock canyon walls.
Rain pelted her in the face, blurring her vision and sending a chill bone deep.
And terror, creeping, cloying, vicious in its magnitude, demanded that she let it take control.
* * *
Clay was wet to the skin. As grouchy as a grizzly. And scared out of his mind.
Where the hell was she? Each step higher into the mountain led him farther away from the cabin and her farther away from safety. Though he wasn't more than a mile from where he'd started, he'd been searching for over three hours, tracking where he could, going on blind hunches when he couldn't.
"Maddie!" For what seemed like the hundredth time he forced her name against the screaming wind. Listened. Waited. Swore when she didn't respond.
And then he heard it. A drifting sound. A far-away whimper that filtered out of the storm like a kitten mewling in the dark.
"Maddie!" he roared above the crack of thunder and the relentless wail of violently whipping tree limbs. "Maddie! Say something! For God's sake, let me know where you are."
"Clay…"
The sound of his name came as a breath of hope on a desperately floundering wind.
He cocked his head, gauged the distance, pinpointed the direction, then sprinted like hell toward the sound.
"Clay … I'm … down here."
Relief and a gut-twisting fear rumbled along his nerve endings like twin engines, building speed, storing steam as he followed the sound of her voice to the precarious edge of a killer drop-off.
His heart slamming against his ribs, he dropped to all fours. Wiping the rain from his face, he peered over the edge.
"Sweet Jesus," he murmured when he spotted her. It was as much a prayer of gratitude as a plea for help. She looked so small, so battered and so impossibly far from his grasp.
For an interminable moment a sickening sense of helplessness paralyzed him. She was dangerously close to being lost to the mountain. A moment was as long as the sensation lasted, before the innate qualities that made him a man and made him a James took over and he got down to the business of saving her life.
When he had her safe—only when he had her safe—would he let himself sort out this dark need that gripped him, a need that was tightly interwoven with fear and crowded with another emotion so intense he didn't know how to define it.
"Hey, hotshot," he said, borrowing from a miserly store of calm to defuse the panic they were both feeling. "Hang around this spot often?"
Bless her, she accepted the gesture for what it was and in a withering voice that she tried valiantly to keep from breaking, managed to say, "Actually n-no. Th-this is the f-first t-time I've d-dropped by."
Her voice was weak, but not her spirit. It was her spirit he needed to pull her through this.
"Kind of a dive," he said, whipping off his Stetson as he calculated the exact distance and the danger. He shrugged hurriedly out of his jacket. "How about we blow this pop stand and find someplace with a little less atmosphere?"
Her unsteady, "Fine by me," was long in coming. The tears in her voice were so thick he felt them like a punch in his gut. Urgency worked hard to undercut his own bid for control.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, all business suddenly as he prepared for the worst and prayed for better.
"Some. A little," she admitted and this time he heard the pain as well as the panic.
"Will you be able to help me when I reach you?"
More silence then a determined, "Yes."
"Good girl. How much maneuvering room have you got down there?"
"I … I don't know. Not much. This ledge … it's maybe a yard wide … less deep. It's … it's… Oh, God, Clay…" A short, unintentional, and utterly heartbreaking sound escaped her before she found her voice again. "It's c-crumbling!"
"Easy. Just go easy," he coaxed softly. "I can't have you bailing out on me now, Matilda." His prompting was gentle but firm as he hurried to wrestle off his heavy denim shirt and knot a sleeve to the sleeve of his jacket. "Just hang in and hang on and I'll get you out of there in no time. Now, can you get up on your knees?"
In answer, he heard the catch of her breath, then the catch of his own above the din of the storm—all to the ominous, ringing echo of falling stone.
"It's letting loose. Clay … please. Get me out of here!"
"I will, sweetheart. I will, just hang on and look above you." Slowly he lowered the makeshift denim rope over the edge. "Do you see my jacket?"
"Y-yes."
"Can you reach it?"
In answer, he felt the slight pressure as she grabbed and hung tight. The relief that rolled through him was tempered by anxiety. They still had a long way to go.
"Atta girl. How good a hold can you get on it?"
"I … not good."
"Can you use it for leverage to help you stand?"
Another protracted silence, this one wrought with her fear and indecision was magnified by the sounds of the storm.
Again he prompted her with gentle firmness. "The ledge will hold, Maddie. Trust it and trust me. Just stick close in. Use the jacket and anything else you can latch on to, to lever yourself to your feet. Once you're up, get a good grip
on it, tell me when you're ready, and I'll ease you up."
The sound of her shifting and the clatter of falling rock stopped his heart.
"I can't do it!" she cried, so close to slipping over another kind of edge, he had to steel himself from climbing down and losing them both.
"You can," he ordered in a hard voice. "You will. You can do this. We can do this. Now get a good hold of that jacket and ease to a stand."
Later he would remember a moment of fear so quelling, so pregnant with doubt that it would nearly bring him to his knees. Now he only waited with clogged breath and clammy palms and counted on her grit to get her through.
Finally he felt the tug of her weight, heard the scramble and shift of stone beneath her feet. Then, at long last, a breathless, "I'm up."
"Good. Good going, hotshot. You doing okay?"
Her hastily uttered, "Yeah," held little conviction and less confidence. Her labored breaths, rising up and over the cliff face, were wrought with exertion and pain.
He blocked the helplessness of the sound, knowing he had to keep pressing. Her greatest test was yet to come.
"That's fine. Just fine. Now hang on and climb, and I'll do the rest."
A weak, frantic, "Oh, God," had him pinching his eyes shut.
"It'll be okay." He willed his voice to be steady, confident. "You've got strong hands, Maddie. Potter's hands. Use them. Just hang on to the jacket and know that I'm holding on, too."
When her only reaction was no reaction, and he was afraid she was freezing up on him, he kept up a steady, reassuring monologue. "Did I ever tell you I aced knot tying as a Boy Scout? First one in the troop to earn that particular badge," he rambled on in a soothing tone, giving her precious time to gather her composure, laying the ground work for the confidence she'd need to make the climb.
"Remember that time I tied you to that old oak tree in your backyard? Took your old man and mine and a Swiss Army knife to set you free. I'm still that good, little girl. It's one thing I never forgot how to do. So, count on those knots to hold. And count on me, Maddie. Count on this ol' Boy Scout up here. Put your feet to the rock face and let me pull you on up where you can give me hell again for that stunt I pulled all those years ago."