He put up a hand. “It’s a lot to process, for both of us.”
He sat back, tapping his fingers on the table, studying her face. “The thing is, Piper, as much as this weekend has been better than a dream come true, I don’t want to end up hurting you again. I don’t. I’m the same guy I was seven years ago. I’m still chasing the high, I’m still traveling the world, I’m still parking my backpack for a month at a time, never quite settling down. That hasn’t changed. And seven years ago, that guy wasn’t right for you.”
She took a deep breath as her eggs gave up and built a tiny gangplank. “Is there any chance it ever could? Change? I mean, is this what you picture life looking like for you? Forever?”
He shrugged slowly, like he hadn’t really paused to consider any alternative. “I don’t know it any other way.”
“Then how can you know it’s the best way for you? Don’t you ever get lonely? Don’t you ever wish there was someone to come home to at night?”
She swallowed hard. How the hell did she know whether he’d ever had someone to come home to, since her? Maybe he had a someone in every place he’d ever been.
He looked at her, long and hard, then closed his eyes like it hurt.
“I never wanted anyone to come home to you but you, Piper.”
* * *
An hour later, the silence in the truck cab stretched thin between them. The same impasse that had separated them the first time looked like it might just do so again this time, and Piper closed her eyes, trying to block the visions of Noah’s kisses from her head.
Suddenly, he braked and swerved to the side of the road, then punched the truck into reverse.
She sat up straight, peering out the side window. “What’s the matter?”
“I saw tracks.” He pointed out her window, where a small patch of flat land quickly headed over what looked like a huge cliff.
She put her hand to her throat when she saw the tracks. They ended at the edge. Oh, God.
He parked the truck and jumped out, grabbing a big black bag from the bed of the truck before sprinting toward where the tracks disappeared. Piper was only two steps behind him, and he put a stiff arm out to catch her when she reached him.
Below them—far, far below them—she could see the hood of a red SUV, almost covered with snow. Beside it, the Abenaki River ran fast, even in the dead of winter, and she couldn’t see any footprints emerging from any side of the car.
“Oh, God, Noah.”
“I know.” He looked around, assessing the landscape with his eyes while he unzipped his bag. “I’m going down there.”
She put a hand on his chest. “How? It’s a cliff! You can’t!”
He pulled a neatly coiled set of ropes out of the bag and started tying one around a huge maple, using complicated knots. She pulled out her phone to call 911, but there was no service. Freaking mountains.
“I’m roping in. I’ll be safe.” He tied the other end of the rope around his body as Piper peered over the cliff’s edge. There was no sign of life below, and she was desperately afraid of what he’d find when he got to the car. “Flag somebody down if you can. They can call 911 when they get down the mountain.”
He yanked on the rope, which held fast, and before she had time to think about the possibilities, his head disappeared over the edge. She watched him descend, bouncing his feet lightly against the rock as he let out the rope, and in twenty seconds, he’d landed on the bottom and she let out the breath she’d been holding the entire time.
He went to the driver’s door first, yanking it open and reaching inside. Then he tried the back doors, closing them quickly once he saw what was inside. Piper’s stomach clenched as she wondered what he was finding. He wasn’t helping … anybody. Did that mean there wasn’t anybody who could be helped?
He sprinted back to the rope and climbed up, hand over hand, until he reached the top. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, then faced her. He put his hands on her shoulders, and her panicky feeling went straight to dread.
“I’m going to need your help, Piper.”
“Okay?”
“There are two kids in that car. My guess is they’ve been there for at least a couple of hours. They’re hypothermic. We don’t have time to wait for paramedics.”
“What do we do? Why didn’t you get them out? What about the driver?”
“Because I can’t get them up this cliff.” He paused, drilling his eyes into hers, not answering her question about the driver. “But you can.”
“What?” She backed up. “No. I can’t! What are you talking about?”
He removed the ropes from his body and held them toward her. “I’ll lower you down, and when you get to the bottom, grab one of them, hold on tight, and I’ll lift you back up here. Then we’ll get the second one.”
“Noah—” Her voice was tight with fear. Her head prickled, and she was afraid she might pass out. “I don’t think I can. You don’t understand. I’ll do anything else. There has to be another way.”
“The car is stuck between a cliff and a river. The only way we’re going to get them out of there is to bring them back up. We can’t cross the river, and even if we could, I have no idea how far we’d have to walk before we found a house. Miles, Piper.”
She closed her eyes, and visions of her parents made her draw in a shaky, scared breath. They’d fallen from a rock wall just like this one.
She’d been at the bottom.
Chapter 7
“What if I help pull you back up?” Piper took another step backward. “Between you and me, we could do it. You’re, like, crazy strong.”
“Not strong enough. And there’s no way you can pull me back up here. Somebody would get hurt.”
“Oh, God.” She looked over the edge again. The car was so far down there. And the cliff was so damn steep.
“I know you’re afraid, Piper. But we don’t have a choice. Those kids could die. You have to do this.”
“Of course I do. I know. I will. Oh, God.” She lifted her arms so he could tie the rope around her, but she was shaking so hard that he actually had to steady her when he was finished.
“Honey, you can do this.”
A strangled sob sneaked out of her mouth, and she clapped a hand over it. He had no idea—no idea at all of the pictures and sounds that were flipping through her head right now. The screams, the frayed rope landing in her lap, the helicopter racing away with her parents on board.
“Piper?” His eyes went wide, and he looked over the cliff. She knew he’d assessed the kids like a seasoned climber would know how to do. She knew he had a pretty damn good idea of how quickly they needed to move. And she knew he was wondering why the hell she couldn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation here.
She had to tell him. She’d never done it years ago, but there was no way she couldn’t do it now.
She took a deep breath, but her voice still came out in a whisper. “This is how my parents died.”
“What?” He spun toward her, eyes even wider.
“This.” She pointed vaguely at the cliff’s edge. “They were climbing.”
“God, Piper.” He stood poised with ropes in his hand, like he had no idea how to react. “How did you never—Jesus.” He swept a gloved hand through his hair, looking down again. “Jesus.”
“I’m sorry.” She took another deep breath. She had to do this. They didn’t have any choice, and two kids’ lives were at stake. “I’ll do it.”
He looked back at her, a million questions in his eyes, but didn’t argue. “You sure?”
“Yes. Let’s do it. Now. Before I freak completely out … more than I already have.”
“Okay.” He gave her knots a good yank, then put his hands on her shoulders. He looked into her eyes and squeezed. “I’ve got you, Piper. I won’t let anything happen to you. I’ll take care of you. I promise.”
“Okay, okay.” She breathed through her mouth, trying to get her heart rate under control as she took a few s
teps toward the cliff.
He positioned her hands on the rope and turned her so she had to step backward off the edge. “I’ve got you, Pipes. Trust me. Please just trust me.”
His voice was soothing as he let out the rope, slowly, evenly. Her boots touched the rock face of the cliff, and for a brief second she looked down, then clutched the rope even harder, freezing in fear.
“Don’t look down, honey. Look at me. Look at my eyes. I’ve got you.”
She caught her breath and lifted her eyes to his, locking them there as he lowered her down, and a strange sort of peace slid through the terror. He did have her. He wouldn’t let her go. She knew that, like she’d never known anything else.
In thirty seconds, her boots touched the snow at the bottom of the cliff, and she raced to the car, wrenching open the back door. She inhaled sharply as she caught sight of two car seats with tiny children in them. The little boy looked to be around four years old, and his baby sister was probably two. Both were sleeping, their dark lashes stark against their ice-white skin.
Piper didn’t look into the front seat—didn’t think she could handle seeing anything besides these two desperate, sleeping babies.
But they weren’t … sleeping, Piper knew. She had to get them up the cliff before it was too late. She fumbled with the car seat buckles and pulled the little boy free. His body was floppy as she hauled him to her shoulder and held tight, running back to the bottom of the cliff. She yanked three times on the rope and braced herself, balancing his weight against hers as Noah pulled them slowly, painfully up the rocks.
When they reached the top, Piper handed the boy to Noah, who had somehow produced a sleeping bag from his truck while she’d been down at the bottom of the cliff. He bundled the boy into the bag, then turned to her.
“You ready to go get the other one?”
She nodded, heading back toward the edge before she could process what she’d just done and get too scared to do it again. “Ready.”
When she got to the bottom of the cliff this time, she ran to the other side of the car and pulled out the little girl, bundling her inside her own coat before she ran back and yanked on the rope again. This time, Noah was able to pull them up faster, and when they reached the top, he picked up the little boy and they both sprinted for the truck.
“What about the driver? What do we do?” Piper looked back at the tracks heading over the cliff’s edge.
“I put a heat blanket on her. We can’t haul her up without a backboard. We’ll hurt her worse than she already is. We need to get down the mountain and send EMS her way. Stat.”
He started the truck, and as they raced down the road, Piper held the two children in her arms, praying they’d be all right.
* * *
Half an hour later, they sat in Noah’s truck outside a fire station, both of them quiet. One ambulance had whisked the kids off to the hospital, and the other had raced back up the mountain to assist the mountain rescue crew that had been called out as soon as Piper and Noah had pulled into the parking lot. After the flurry of activity, Piper’s heart was racing, but Noah seemed as cool as a cucumber.
“Do you think they’ll be okay?” Piper’s voice was small as it came out, and she cleared her throat. “Do you think we got there in time?”
“I hope so.” Noah’s voice was stiff as he stared out the front window, and Piper wasn’t sure if he was still processing the rescue … or if he was upset about something else.
Thirty seconds later, she got her answer.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about your parents, Piper?” His voice was soft, pained.
She sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, how could I, really, without making you feel like I was passing judgment on the kind of lifestyle you were choosing?”
“Well, it certainly would have made a lot of things clearer, right from the start. I just thought you were cautious … a little timid. I had no idea—this was why.”
She looked out her window. “This … is only part of it. I spent my entire childhood getting dragged from mountain to river to ski slope to cave. My parents spent hours trying to convince me to love what they did, but I hated it. Always hated it. By the time I was fifteen, they’d stopped trying. I went along sometimes, but I was always the one with feet firmly planted on the ground.”
“Were you with them … when it happened?”
“Yes.” She looked down at her fingers, but they quickly grew blurry. “Two feet on the ground, 911 at the ready. As usual. Mom had asked Dad to replace the ropes. She was worried they had too many miles on them, but he convinced her they were fine.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t speak.
Piper shrugged slowly. “It was bound to happen, right? I mean, the way they lived isn’t normal. They flew in the face of the rules all the time—thought they were smarter than nature, more experienced than the professionals who tried to give them advice. You play roulette enough times, and eventually you’re going to lose. They … lost.”
Her breath caught as another realization—one that had been crystal clear seven years ago—crept back in.
And so will you, Noah. So will you.
“Is this why you never used to be able to sleep?”
She nodded, closing her eyes. “I couldn’t get the movie of that day out of my head. It took years.”
“I wish you’d told me.”
“Would it have changed anything, Noah? Would you have done anything differently? Really?”
He turned toward her. “Of course I would have. I never knew why you were scared. I could have helped you, if I’d known.”
“Helped me how?”
“I don’t know.” He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “I don’t know. But I never had the chance to figure it out. And then you assumed I’d suffer the same fate, so…”
“Well, the similarities were a little hard to ignore.”
“Piper, when a rope is done, it’s done. And if you even think it might be done, you assume it’s done. You don’t mess around with that. I don’t know your parents, and I don’t know how careful they were normally, but if your mom thought that rope needed replacing, then they never ever should have used it.”
He reached for her hand, and she let him take it. “I’m not being critical. Maybe it was a freak accident. Maybe the rope was fine and something weird happened. I get that. But Pipes, what I do isn’t the same as what they were doing. This business isn’t about risking my life. It’s not just about chasing adrenaline. It’s about challenging myself and pushing my own boundaries—and helping other people do the same. It’s fun, but it’s the kind of fun that comes with a risk, and you mitigate that risk with equipment and experience and common sense.”
“Well … they were zero for three, I guess.”
He nodded. “And unfortunately, it’s three for three or you’re done.”
“I know. Obviously I know.”
“I’m sorry.” He sighed, looking out his window. “I know they were your parents, and I’m sure you loved them like crazy, but honestly, it pisses me off that they would take chances like that when they had a child to take care of. It’s selfish and irresponsible, and I can’t believe they did it to you.”
“Well, they didn’t really mean to, in their defense. They just … didn’t think they’d lose.” She fumbled with her gloves. “I know you’re not the same. I know you never were. But I didn’t know how not to be afraid, Noah. It’s all I knew.” She took a shaky breath. “I still don’t know.”
Noah lifted his hand and slid it along her jawline, lifting her chin so she was looking into his eyes.
“You did great up there, Pipes. Really great. I know you were petrified, but you kept your shit together, and you got those kids to safety. It was huge, and I’m really proud of you.”
“Thanks,” she whispered.
“I mean it. You could have completely flipped out, with good reason, but you didn’t.”
“I totally did, actually.”
He pa
used, pressing his lips together, then spoke again. “This isn’t what it’s like, you know—what I do. It’s not scary and intense and life-threatening.”
She nodded slowly. “I feel like you should add a usually to the end of that sentence … if you’re really being honest here.”
He put up a hand like he was going to argue, then shook his head. “Usually.”
“Thank you.” She pulled her hand from hers, and it hurt like hell to do it. “Because that one word is the one that scares me the most. I’m sure you’re careful, and I know you’re smart, and I know you probably have the best equipment they make, but there’s always going to be that element of danger you can’t predict, and one of these days … it might not go your way.”
“Piper, stepping out your door in the morning carries risk. Hell, sitting on your couch carries risk. Stuff can happen anywhere. You can’t walk around bubble-wrapped against the universe, or you’ll never see the universe.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I happen to like bubble wrap.” He rolled his eyes in frustration. “Noah, I know a meteor could come crashing into my living room. I know a rabid skunk could bite my ankles when I step onto my porch. I know a car could mow me down in the grocery store parking lot. I know. But those are normal risks. Those are calculable, and they’re freakishly rare. What you do? Not so much.”
“Not that you’re passing judgment.”
“I’m not.” She put her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. “I’m just—God, I don’t know! When I saw you at the Snowflake Ball, the years just melted away. When you kissed me, I felt the same fire we used to have. And dammit, when you held me, it felt like I was … home. Being with you made me forget what tore us apart in the first place … but it’s still there, Noah. You’re still you, and I’m still me, and we’re still the same people we were.”
She swallowed, but it was hard. “I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours being stupid, but the reality is … nothing’s changed, really.”
“Not true.”
She looked at him, and his jaw was set hard as he stared out the front window. “It is true, Noah. I’m never going to be the girl who’ll follow you around the world, and you’re never going to be the guy who can be content living in a small town in Vermont. It’s just not how we’re wired.”
Snowflake Wishes Page 6