by Linda Turner
But the knock she waited for never came. Instead, she heard a thud near the back porch, then another. Puzzled, she headed for the kitchen and opened the back door just as another thud shook the back porch. Blowing snow swirled inside on a brisk north wind, hitting her in the face, momentarily blinding her, but not before she saw Lucas unloading a cord of firewood into the woodbox on her back porch.
Stunned, she quickly wiped the snow from her eyes and stared, a slow smile starting to curl the corners of her mouth. He was still more than a little miffed with her—she could see it in the rock-hard set of his jaw—but that hadn’t stopped him making sure she stayed warm in what promised to be the first blizzard of the season. Some men brought roses, others jewelry. Lucas brought firewood, even when he wanted to throttle her. And she loved him for it.
He glanced up and saw her then, saw her smile, and his jaw relaxed slightly. “Go on back inside before you catch cold,” he said gruffly. “I’ll be in as soon as I finish this.”
It didn’t take him long—maybe fifteen minutes—but by the time he stepped through the back door into the kitchen, he was covered with snow. She took one look at him and hurried to the bathroom for some towels. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said as she brushed the snow off his head and shoulders. “Especially during a blizzard. Are you okay?”
He shook himself like a giant bear, sending the last flakes clinging to his hair and coat flying. “Yeah. Just a little damp around the edges. I brought you something.”
“Yes, I know, and I appreciate it, but—”
“Not the firewood,” he cut in. “This.” Holding up a familiar white paper bag, he waited expectantly for her reaction. He didn’t have to wait long.
Her eyes wide, she looked at the sack as if it held the treasures of the pyramids. “You brought me doughnuts from Pop’s?”
“Yep. I heard you liked the double-dipped chocolate ones.”
She didn’t have to ask where he’d heard it. Pop’s Bakery was an institution in Clear Springs that Rocky had discovered soon after she moved there. Jim Stanwick, known to everyone as Pop, made every conceivable kind of doughnut known to man, each one guaranteed to melt in your mouth. But it was the double-dipped chocolate ones that Rocky just might have sold her soul for. And Pop knew it.
Grinning, Rocky started to reach for the bag, only to jerk her hand back as if she’d been burned. Suddenly suspicious, she eyed him warily. “This is a bribe, isn’t it? You give me the doughnuts and I’m supposed to agree to stay home today, right?”
“It’s a peace offering, honey. Nothing more. God knows I’d feel better if you wouldn’t go anywhere today, but I’m not holding my breath. Charlie already caught a ride to my place and drove your car over to the airfield for you. I’ll take you there when you’re ready to go.”
Unable to believe he was serious, she searched his face for some sign that this was a trick, but she’d never seen him more serious. A lesser woman would have gloated over the victory, but something warm and sweet expanded like hot air in her heart, and suddenly she couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Peaking inside the bag of doughnuts, she lifted impish eyes to his. “All of these are for me?”
“Well, I was sort of hoping you’d share a few with the father of your baby. But if you really feel you can’t spare any, I’ve got another bag out in the car.”
She burst out laughing. “You dog! You’ll take mine and keep yours for yourself?”
“You’re damn right,” he said, grinning. “A man’s got to look out for himself. So am I invited for breakfast or not?”
It would serve him right if she sent him away, the rogue, but she didn’t have the heart. She’d had a miserable night last night, and she hated the angry words they’d traded. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe he’d changed his mind about her continuing to fly, but he’d obviously accepted the fact that he couldn’t change the situation, and for that she could have kissed him. Instead, she asked teasingly, “Would you like to stay for breakfast, Doc? I seem to have more doughnuts than I can possibly eat.”
Grinning, he shrugged out of his coat and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. “I thought you’d never ask. Have you got any coffee?”
The day went downhill from there. Lucas gave her a ride to the airfield, as promised, only to get an emergency call just as he pulled up before the hangar. Giving her a swift kiss, he promised to call her later, then drove away as fast as the hazardous road conditions would allow. Two hours later, she heard from him. He’d been flooded with calls from patients who couldn’t make it into the office, so he was going to spend the rest of the day making house calls. Staring out her office window, Rocky told herself that he’d grown up here—he could no doubt handle whatever Mother Nature threw at him. But as the hours passed and the storm continued to worsen, she couldn’t help but worry.
By late afternoon, an unnaturally early twilight had fallen. The snow hadn’t let up for a minute, and the roads were impassable. Nothing short of a four-wheel-drive vehicle was going anywhere without a tow truck. And more snow was expected throughout the night.
Rocky had been waiting all day, pacing restlessly, for some sort of emergency call. It came at a quarter to five, just when she was giving serious consideration to locking up shop and going home. “Fortune Flying Service,” she said into the phone, after snatching it up on the first ring. “May I help you?”
“I certainly hope so,” Sheriff Alan Nighthawk growled. Identifying himself, he said, “I just got a call on three hikers lost on the south rim of the mountains. I need you to help find them.”
It wasn’t a request, but a demand, one that Rocky didn’t even consider bucking. Not when three people were stuck on the side of a mountain somewhere and didn’t have a chance of surviving the night without her help. “Are any of them injured? Where were they last reported to be? How familiar are they with the area?”
She threw one question after another at him, and the answers he gave her weren’t good. The hikers were teenagers and new to the area. They’d started out right after breakfast for Devil’s Canyon, one of the most dangerous areas on the south face of the nearby mountains, and hadn’t taken anything but a lunch and their down jackets. They should have been home hours ago. When they hadn’t shown up within a reasonable time, their families had gone looking for them, but without success. Worried sick, they’d called the sheriff. Not only was it getting dark, but one of the boys had asthma and had forgotten to take his inhaler with him.
It couldn’t, Rocky decided, have been much worse. “Give me ten minutes to fuel up the chopper and get some supplies together, and I’ll be on my way,” she told the sheriff. “I’ll keep in touch through the radio.”
Before she’d even hung up, she was yelling for Charlie. Hurriedly explaining the situation to him, she grabbed blankets and food and enough first-aid supplies to take care of an army. “There’s no time to lose,” she yelled over the whistling moan of the wind as he rolled open the hangar door and she got a good look at the sky. “It’ll be dark in an hour, and if we don’t find them before then, there won’t be much point in looking for those kids until spring. You got her all gassed up?”
“Yeah, but I don’t like the looks of that sky,” he hollered back as the skullcap he wore went flying. “Things start icing up and you could be in real trouble. Maybe you should tell the sheriff to find somebody else.”
“There is no one else,” she reminded him. “Not unless he can get someone from Jackson, and even then, it would be dark before they could get here. I’ve got to go, Charlie. Those kids are depending on me.”
He didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much fault he could find with her reasoning. “All right, dammit to hell, but you be careful! You hear me? If anything happens to you, the doc’ll string me up by my toes and leave me to dry. Get on with you, before it gets any darker.”
Grinning, she gave him a thumbs-up signal and helped him get the chopper out of the hangar. Seconds later, she was preparing for takeoff when the pas
senger door was suddenly jerked open and she looked over to find Lucas scowling at her with eyes that were nearly black with fury. “Lucas, what—?”
“Have you lost your mind?” he thundered. “Shut that thing down right now, or so help me, God, I’ll shut it down myself.”
“I can’t. Dammit, Lucas, don’t you dare come in here and tell me how to run my business at a time like this! I’ve got three kids lost in the mountains, and if I don’t find them within the hour, they’ll have to spend the night up there. I don’t have to tell you what their chances are of making it until morning. So either get in or out, but do something. I’ve got to go.”
He got in, but only because he wasn’t going to take a chance on letting her fly out of there before he could talk some sense into her. He’d been halfway across the county when he heard about the kids on the radio, and every instinct he had had warned him the sheriff would call her in on the rescue effort. He’d broken all speed records getting to her. When he drove up and saw her already in the cockpit and revving the motor, his heart had stopped in his chest.
“Let Charlie go,” he said tersely. “I’ll go with him, and you can stay here. Dammit, Rocky, you’re pregnant!”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me or the baby,” she assured him. “Believe me, if Charlie could do this for me, I’d let him, but he can’t. He doesn’t have the training for mountain rescues. It’s either me or nobody.” Her eyes, dark and earnest, locked with his. “Lucas, those are somebody’s kids. What if one of them was ours?”
It was a low blow, one that came out of nowhere to tug at his heartstrings. Their baby, nearly grown up, a teenager full of sass and suddenly in trouble. The images that played before his mind’s eye left his throat dry and his heart pounding. He couldn’t even imagine how he would feel if there was only one person who could help his child and that one person refused. Rocky was right—she had to go.
Frustrated, wanting to throw something, he spit out a curse and reached for the seat belt. This was madness, pure insanity. He was needed at the hospital to help handle the emergencies that were flooding in, but there were other doctors in town who could take his place. There was no way in hell he was letting Rocky fly off in a blizzard alone. “Let’s go.”
Buckled up, their headphones in place so that they could communicate with each other over the roar of the rotors, they took off seconds later and headed straight for the mountains in the distance. Or at least where they knew the mountains to be. With the steadily falling snow and the thick gray clouds that clung to the peaks, concealing them from view, it was nearly impossible to see the rocky range in the gathering gloom until they were almost upon it. And then what they saw was hardly encouraging.
The south face of the mountains looked like an arctic wasteland. There was nothing but wind and snow and ice. Drifts had covered craggy canyons and concealed sudden drop-offs. Rocky stared through the blowing snow where she knew a particularly hazardous hiking trail to be and felt her stomach fall away at the thought of a bunch of unwary kids coming that way. They wouldn’t stand a chance.
“See anything?” Lucas asked over the sudden sick thudding of her heart.
“No, but the visibility stinks. I’m going to go in closer.”
“Just be careful,” he growled, never taking his eyes from the snow-covered ground below. “This wind’s a bitch.”
Her jaw clenching until it ached, she slowly took the chopper as low as she dared, her gaze, like Lucas’s, trained on the icy terrain below. There was no sign of life anywhere. “Maybe they didn’t make it this high up the mountain,” she said hopefully. “Once they saw how bad it was, they might have found shelter at the campground at Spring Lake. There’s no one there this time of year, but there’s an old cabin nearby. Let’s check it out.”
It took only a few minutes to fly to the lower elevation and find the frozen lake which was a favorite hangout for teenagers in the summer, but it quickly became apparent that if the three boys had headed there, they’d never made it. The lake was frozen and deserted, the campground empty. The cabin, nearly lost in the drifts that had piled up around it, wouldn’t be much use to anyone in the near future. Snow had piled up on the roof and caved it in.
Hovering over it, staring down at the broken timbers that poked up through the snow, Rocky searched the immediate area for tracks, but there weren’t any. “They’re not in there,” she said firmly, not sure who she was trying to convince—Lucas or herself. “They can’t be. They would have tried to light a fire. And there would have been tracks….”
Tracks that would have long since been covered up by the blowing snow, Lucas thought privately, examining the scene below for any sign that anyone had been there recently. But there was none. Like Rocky, he had to believe that if the boys were there, they would have at least started a fire to keep from freezing to death.
“They might not have even come this way,” he replied. “The hiking trail splits halfway up. The east fork leads to the lake, the west to Eagle’s Nest Canyon. There’s a cave there.”
Without a word, Rocky headed west, just skimming the treetops as the already poor light began to fade. Tension, hot and needling, clawed at her nerve endings as she felt time slipping through her fingers. If the boys weren’t at the cave, they wouldn’t be found tonight. There just wasn’t enough time to look anywhere else before it became completely dark and flying conditions worsened.
But the cave, they soon discovered, like the cabin, was completely deserted.
“They’re not here, Rocky,” Luke said grimly, breaking the tense silence. “If they were, they would have come running the second they heard the chopper. The weather’s getting worse. We need to head back.”
“No!” She knew he was right, but all she could think of was that she and Lucas were those three boys’ last hope of being found alive. If they gave up on them, they would have no one. “Just a few more minutes,” she pleaded. “It’s not completely dark yet.”
If the situation had been the least bit humorous, Lucas would have laughed at that. It was so dark that he had to strain just to see her in the light from the instrument panel. Unless the boys had flares, which they had no reason to believe they did, picking them off the side of the mountain in the dark would be nearly impossible.
“I don’t like giving up on them, either, honey,” he said gruffly. “But the wind’s picking up. And that looks like ice on the windshield. We’ve got to get the hell out of here while we still can.”
The radio crackled to life then, startling them both. Snatching up the transmitter, Rocky said, “This is Fortune One. Come in, Sheriff.”
“We found them, Rocky. On the other side of the mountain. They just called in. They’re all safe—just a little shook up and worried about what their parents are going to do to them.”
At his chuckle, Rocky grinned. “If they were mine, I’d ground them for life. Thanks for the call, Sheriff. We’re heading back now. Over and out.”
“Thank God!” Lucas sighed. “Now we can get the hell out of here. I don’t like flying so close to the trees.”
Considering the conditions, Rocky wasn’t too fond of it herself, and she immediately tried to increase altitude, but the chopper only lurched and threatened to stall out. Her heart stumbling in her breast, she tightened her grip on the throttle. “Damn! Ice must have built up on the rotors. Maybe I can shake it loose.”
She tried, but it quickly became apparent that she was fighting a losing battle in the quickly deteriorating weather conditions. The snow that had been falling all day was now mixed with sleet, icing everything in sight as the temperature steadily dropped. The rotor blades couldn’t take much more and still keep them in the air.
“I’m going to have to find a place to set her down,” she said around the lump of sick panic that lodged in her throat. “Now!”
The words were hardly out of her mouth when they suddenly ran out of time. The rotor blades slowed, causing the chopper to lurch sideways. Then they were falling, crashin
g through the trees, breaking them. Someone screamed—Rocky never recognized the sound as coming from her own throat—and then the gnarled limb of an old pine shattered the windshield and slammed into her like the jagged edge of a rusty knife. She gasped, struggling to hold on to consciousness, but darkness descend with terrifying swiftness. Before she could do anything but whimper, she was swallowed whole by the night.
Seconds, an eternity, after they started to lose altitude, the chopper slid to a bone-jarring stop at the base of an old pine. From high in its lofty limbs, snow shook loose and tumbled down onto the wreckage, spilling into the cockpit through the shattered windshield in a nearly soundless puff. The wreckage settled and groaned, and then there was nothing. Nothing but silence and the mournful sound of the wind.
Lucas came to to find himself slumped against the passenger door, his teeth clamped on an oath and his hands clutching at the sides of his seat as if it were a lifeline. Dazed, he realized he must have hit his head and blacked out for a few seconds, but he had no memory of it. In fact, the last thing he remembered was the tree crashing through the windshield and Rocky’s soft moan—
“Oh, God! Rocky? Sweetheart?” Jerking upright, he turned toward her and stopped dead at the sight of her pinned to her seat by a broken tree limb that pierced her side. Barely breathing, as white as the snow that filtered through the broken windshield, she was unconscious and covered in her own blood.
For a split second, he couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but freeze as the past rose up like a specter in front of him. With agonizing clarity, he saw Jan lying broken and bleeding on the rocks at the bottom of the sheer cliff she’d fallen from, dying before his eyes. “No!”
Later, he didn’t remember fighting his way out of his seatbelt or cursing the tree limbs that filled the front of the cockpit as he struggled to reach her. Once again, the life of the woman he loved was in his hands, only this time, dear God, he wasn’t going to lose her. “Hang on, honey,” he told her in a choked voice, feeling for her pulse. “You hear me? Just hang on.”