Rescue Me(50)

He distinctly remembered stumbling around in the brutal cold, perfectly aware of the situation, but said nothing.

“We can’t go up,” she said then, speaking his thoughts.

She stared over the edge.

“And we can’t go down,” he finished.

“Maybe we wait for help,” suggested Maggy behind them. “My parents will know we’re missing.”

“I’m sure the PEAK team has already been alerted,” Sam said. “But . . .” He didn’t want to tell them about the fact that no one knew where they were.

Apparently, that wasn’t a problem for Willow. “Because we changed hikes, unfortunately no one knows where we went. Which is on me. I should have called the pastor and told him about our change of plans. I’m so sorry. Because now they think we’re at Huckleberry Mountain, which is about thirty miles from here. And that’s a lot of area to search.”

Except.

She looked at Sam as if hearing it too—the whump-whump of a chopper. High altitude, yes, but—

“Quinn, give me your jacket!” Willow said, and Quinn shucked off his red windbreaker.

The kid only wore a thermal shirt underneath. He wrapped his arms around himself as Willow took the jacket, began to wave it.

“Here,” Sam said and grabbed a broken tree limb from their life-saving pine. He took the jacket, wrapped it around the tip of the limb, then raised it over his head, began to wave it.

And that’s when he felt it—the pinch inside that went from a dull ache he’d barely noticed to a knife-edged pain.

“Oh!” He nearly dropped the tree limb to bend over and grab his side.

“What?” Willow grabbed the limb before it toppled over the edge. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” No, he wasn’t. And it only took a second for her to figure out he was lying, because she crouched in front of him, even as he slid to his knees. “I think I might have broken something.”

“Or maybe it was already broken, and saving my life made it worse.” She turned to Gus. “Wave this thing, see if you can get their attention.”

The hum of the chopper grew louder, and Gus picked up the branch.

But even as he waved the limb, the red jacket affixed to the top, even as Sam cupped his hand over his eyes, wincing with the shards of pain in his side, the chopper swept away from them, farther south into the park.

Gus lowered the tree limb. “Sorry, Deputy Brooks.”

“It’s okay, kid,” Sam said. “Give Quinn back his jacket.”

“But how are we going to get out of here?” Riley scooted up from where he’d been regrouping. “They didn’t see us!”

Sam pressed on his side, gritting his teeth.

“That really hurts, doesn’t it?” Willow said.

He shook his head.

“Okay, if that’s how we’re going to play it, then I should probably tell you that I’m going down there.”

It took Sam three—maybe five—complete seconds to wrap his brain around her words. He even uttered a confused, “What?”

“I’m going down the cliff. Listen, climbing down is the easy part—”

“No, it’s not. Not with your shoulder.”

“And you’re going to climb down when you can’t even stand up straight?” She put her hands on his shoulders, reasoning with him. “Listen, I don’t have to put any weight on my shoulder. I’ll go down—”

“And then climb back up?”

“I’ll rope up, use the cams to anchor me.” She met his eyes, a surety in them he hadn’t seen last night. “This, Sam, I know how to do. Let me.”

His jaw tightened, and he looked away. “If anything happens to you . . .”

“It won’t.”

He hadn’t quite realized just how amazing her eyes were. Hazel-blue, with shades of amber and gold flecks, and in the morning sun, nearly hypnotizing.

Someday, some guy would fall into the spell of her smile, those pretty eyes.

He groaned against a spasm inside, adding a growl to his words. “I hate this idea.”

“I know,” she said. “But you can’t be the only one doing the rescuing around here.”

Uh, yes, he could.

“Come back to me,” he said, his mouth a tight line.

“Promise.”



The all-fun, all-the-time guy who helped Jess repair her plumbing, all the while fighting with her over appropriate pizza toppings, vanished when he put on his PEAK jacket.

No, it had vanished late last night when she’d called him with the news that Willow and Sam, along with the youth group, hadn’t returned.

Pete had shown up at her house an hour later, freshly showered after a day working on her house, grim and wired.