Chapter One
Deputy Aaron Ames stood on the edge of the Colorado state highway and stared into the canyon below, his chest tight with dread. A small white sedan was wedged, nose first, between boulders at the bottom of the canyon. A passing motorist had spotted the glint of sun off the taillights and called to report the accident. Aaron squinted, trying to detect any movement in the car. Surely no one could survive a plunge like that. The canyon had to be at least two hundred feet deep at this point.
“Search and rescue are on the way.” Jake Gwynn joined Aaron. The young deputy was close to Aaron’s age—thirty—with dark curly hair and the deep tan of an outdoorsman. “The highway department is sending a team to block off this lane. We’ll help with traffic control.”
Aaron turned his back to the canyon and studied the roadway. This time of morning on a Sunday, there wasn’t much traffic. Two lanes of pavement wound between rocky spires, sun glinting off the red granite peaks. This stretch of the highway was fairly straight, without the hairpin curves in other sections. “We haven’t had any rain lately,” he said. “I wonder what sent the driver off the side?”
“No skid marks,” Jake pointed out. “I don’t see any signs of another driver or an animal or anything.” He glanced back intothe canyon. “Unfortunately, some people choose to end things this way.”
Aaron grimaced, but any reply he might have made was cut off by a siren. Seconds later, a large orange Jeep pulled in ahead of his sheriff’s department SUV. The siren’s wail still echoed off the canyon walls as half a dozen volunteers piled out of the vehicle and began unloading equipment. His sister, Bethany, waved. His two brothers, twins Carter and Dalton, were also search and rescue volunteers, but they must have been working when this call came in. Sundays were a busy time for the family’s Jeep tour business.
SAR Captain Danny Irwin, a tall, lanky man in tactical pants and a blue Eagle Mountain Search and Rescue windbreaker, strode toward them. “Hey, Aaron, Jake.”
The men shook hands, then looked down into the canyon. “I haven’t seen any movement down there,” Aaron said.
“Any idea when this happened?” Danny asked.
“No telling,” Jake said. “No one’s reported anyone missing. It’s pure luck a passing motorist saw the wreck.”
Danny looked down at the pavement. “No skid marks.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “So maybe we’ve got a suicide.”
“We’ll get down there and see what we can find.” Danny turned back toward the other volunteers.
“Get a plate number for us and we’ll call it in,” Jake said.
The highway department crew arrived to set up cones to close the lane to traffic, and Aaron went to help. By the time he returned to the accident site, the SAR volunteers had staged on the narrow shoulder. A man and a woman in climbing harnesses and helmets were beginning their descent into the canyon while other volunteers lined the roadside, watching. An aluminum-framed litter waited at the ready.
Aaron started to join the volunteers, then stopped as his gaze fixed on one young woman, petite and slender, hair in a longblond braid down her back. Recognition jolted him—a knowing deep in his gut, more instinct than conscious knowledge.
“Kat?”
He hadn’t realized he had spoken out loud until she turned. The same cool blond beauty—pale skin, blue eyes, delicate features that still haunted him. But the look on her face—surprise, followed by such raw hurt—hit him like a kick in the gut. It had always been like that with Kat—the very first time he had seen her he had felt the connection to his core. He had fallen so hard, and the impact when they had parted still hurt.
She quickly masked her own pain with a cold disdain he remembered from their last encounters. But instead of turning her back to him, she moved away from her friends, coming to stand beside him. “Don’t call me Kat. My name is Willa Reynolds now.” She spoke softly, so that he had to lean toward her to hear, and caught the soft scent of her hair, a sensory memory imprinted on his DNA.
But her words confused him. “You changed your name? Why?”
“I had to.” She spoke in a clipped, angry tone. “Gareth changed his, too. He’s just Gary now. Gary Reynolds. It makes it harder for the media and other people who want to harass us to find us.”
Her words pained him. He knew things had been tough for her, but not that desperate. “I’m sorry you felt you had to do that,” he said.
“Are you?” She glared at him and moved away once more.
He wanted to pull her back, to tell her how much he missed her. How sorry he was for the way things had ended between them. But what could he say? He had done the only thing he could under the circumstances, what he still believed was the right thing. Why couldn’t she respect that?
He had so many questions he would probably never know the answers to. What was she doing here in Eagle Mountain, Colorado, anyway? Surely she hadn’t known he was here. But it was so unexpected, that they had each moved so far from their hometown and ended up in the same small town.
She returned, not to where she had been standing, but farther away, where another volunteer was doing something with ropes and the litter. She moved in to help him, her back to Aaron. She bent over, and he had a view of her shapely backside. He forced himself to look away, not wanting to be caught ogling her.
Jake soon joined him. “I saw you talking to Willa,” Jake said, and nodded toward where Kat and a young man were moving the litter closer to the edge of the canyon.
Aaron would have to get used to thinking of her with her new name. “How long has she been with search and rescue?” he asked.
Bethany or one of his brothers hadn’t mentioned that Kat Delaney was with the group. Surely one of them would have recognized her, whatever name she went by now. Maybe not Bethany—she had moved to Eagle Mountain before things got really serious between Kat and Aaron. But surely the twins would have remembered a woman who was so striking.
“She’s brand-new,” Jake said. “When Hannah went on maternity leave she recruited Willa to fill in for her. I’m pretty sure today is her first call.”
