For the past three weeks.
He wanted to give up. Should give up. Clearly, whatever he’d said hadn’t been enough.
But he couldn’t purge the words from his head. Against medical advice.
What advice? But no amount of cajoling with her doctor revealed the reason.
Brette was out there, possibly sick, and there wasn’t a thing Ty could do about it.
No, he didn’t feel like celebrating.
A knock came at his window and he jerked, painfully aware that he’d just been sitting there, lost in misery.
Ian Shaw stood in the crisp night, the collar on his leather jacket turned up. Ty rolled the window down. “Hey, Ian.”
“Are you going in?” Ian gestured to the club.
“I don’t . . . maybe not.”
Ian glanced at the Pony. “Awful lot of country love songs going on in there.”
As if to confirm his words, the door opened and out drifted the heartbreaking tune of a local crooner.
Can’t get you off my mind
remembering too well the time
when I held you in my arms
When you said you’d be mine . . .
Ty nodded. “Maybe too much for me.” He hung his arm out the window. “How’s the search going for Sofia d’Cruze?” Apparently, Ella had recognized the face of Ian’s missing person, a woman she roomed with in college.
The thought stopped him. A woman Brette had also roomed with.
Brette’s sudden, silent disappearance didn’t have anything to do with the missing Sofia, did it?
“We got ahold of her family,” Ian said. “She hadn’t returned to Spain, and they filed a missing persons’ report on her over a year ago, but it never made it out this far.”
“Any leads?”
“I have hundreds of leads—people who called in from the show. It just takes time to track them all down.”
Ty glanced at the Pony. Through the big glass window, he saw that Sierra had gotten up, was trying her hand at darts.
He looked back at Ian. “Need some help?”
But Ian was watching Sierra. She laughed as she clearly missed her target.
Ian sighed, then looked back at Ty, offered a grim smile. “Let’s get started.”
NO ONE GOT LEFT BEHIND. Not on Sierra’s watch.
“Jess, this is PEAK. Come in.”
Sierra sat at the dispatcher desk of PEAK HQ, her voice raw, stripped, and not a little wrung out from praying. The sun hung low, long shadows pressing into the room, and the smell of burned cookies saturated the air. Silence except for the static of the radio.
She wasn’t a rescuer, didn’t know the tactics, strategies, and methods of the trained EMTs and mountain rescue specialists of PEAK Rescue.
But even Sierra knew Jess Tagg could die on that charred mountain if the team didn’t find her, soon.
“Jess, if you can’t answer, just know we’re not giving up. We’ll find you. I promise.”
Sierra leaned back, running her hands down her face.
“Anything?”
The voice made her turn. Chet had come into the office, looking as exhausted as she felt. He wore a PEAK team gimme cap and a blue windbreaker, lines of worry aging his face. Now, he ran his hand over a layer of white whiskers even as he bent over the giant topographical map in the center of the room. “The fire has cut off the Ranger Creek trail. Gage and Ty have to pull out. They’re closing Going-to-the-Sun Road.”
Oh no. After a year as the team’s administrative assistant, and even before, as billionaire Ian Shaw’s executive assistant during his search for his missing niece, Sierra possessed a thorough knowledge of the terrain of Glacier National Park.
Of course, the daily weather reports, the giant map plastered to the wall, and the numerous callouts that brought PEAK Rescue to all four corners of Glacier National Park helped.
Going-to-the-Sun Road traversed the park, east to west. “If they close the road, how will Jess get out?” she asked.
“How far has the fire progressed?”
She glanced up at the radar and the fire display Pete had procured for them to track the wildfires in the Park. Sierra had constructed the scene in her mind’s eye, not to mention the Google Maps view of the terrain.
“The fire is heading toward Goat Mountain,” she answered, her voice taut.
Chet stood up, gave her a grave nod.
Don’t cry.
Because rescuers didn’t give up. At least the PEAK team didn’t, and right now, she wanted to be just as brave, just as smart, just as dependable as Gage, Ty, Jess, Ben, Kacey, and Sam.
“Keep trying,” Chet said.
She nodded and turned back to the radio, keeping her voice even, calm, just like Chet King, her boss, had taught her. “Jess Tagg, come in.”
She should have guessed that the routine call would turn south.