Wild Iris Ridge (Hope's Crossing) (22 page)

“Miss Lucy Drake. That’s the woman you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

“I’m not looking for Lucy,” he lied. “I was just checking out the crowd, following my firm instructions from Claire McKnight. I wouldn’t want to miss the signs of somebody suffering from heat exhaustion or anything.”

Dermot snorted, not believing him for a second. Brendan didn’t know why he bothered trying. His father had a built-in lie detector, probably from raising seven children who had each been very imaginative at trying to get out of trouble.

Before Dermot could call him on the fast-talking, Brendan cut him off by changing the subject.

“Where’s your date?” he asked.

Dermot opened and closed his mouth abruptly, color flaring across his weathered face. He turned his attention to the lovely Katherine Thorne, wearing a silvery blue dress and deep in conversation with another woman.

Yes, a minor miracle had visited Hope’s Crossing, more interesting than the still-secret identity of the town’s Angel of Hope, someone who went around anonymously doing good deeds like paying people’s bills or delivering toys to needy children.

After all these years of hemming and hawing and dragging his feet, Dermot had actually asked Katherine Thorne to be his date to the Giving Hope gala.

Brendan didn’t think he was the only one who thought the two were completely adorable together.

Dermot cleared his throat and held up the flutes in his hands. “She’s over speaking with Sarah Colville about her newest exhibition. I only left her side to fetch drinks for the ladies.”

“Champagne. Are you toasting something special?”

“Only good times and wonderful company. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

The question was a pointed one, as if Dermot was asking permission for something. Despite the turmoil of his emotions all day over Lucy, he felt a soft little tug at his heart for his father.

“Absolutely not,” he said quietly. “No problem at all on this front. I hope you know that. I say it’s about time.”

Dermot gave him an arrested sort of look. “Do you?”

“Katherine is great, Pop. I’ve always liked her. I like her even more because she obviously makes you happy.”

Dermot sent the woman in question a rather goofy smile that sent a sharp twinge of envy through Brendan.

“I only have one question,” he said after a moment.

“And that would be?”

“What took you so bloody long?”

Dermot sighed. When he spoke, the Irish brogue he had left behind on the shores of County Galway when he was a lad of six glimmered through his voice, as it tended to do when his emotions were high.

“Sometimes a man can’t see past his own fear. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. I loved your mother so. She was my world, you see, along with you boys and Charlotte. She was everything to me. I didn’t see how I could ever care for another. My heart couldn’t possibly stretch to find room to let someone else inside.”

“What changed?” Brendan asked.

The music swirled around them, some kind of romantic ballad, heavy on the strings, and Dermot sent Katherine another goofy smile. She looked up from her conversation and everything about her lovely, lined features softened as she looked at Brendan’s father.

“I’ve spent far too much time coming up with excuses. The truth is, I was afraid to let myself care for someone else again. Of all my children, you can understand that best, can’t you, son?”

A lump rose in his throat at the love and compassion in his father’s blue eyes, just like his own. For a moment, Jess’s image shimmered in front of him, soft and pretty.

He had been a good husband and had loved her with all her heart. But she was gone. As Pop just said, the heart could stretch and grow to make room for someone else, something he never would have believed until Lucy came to town.

“Yes,” he finally answered his father. “I get it.”

“I waited far too long,” Dermot said. “I almost let this chance slip away from me. When Katherine told me she was thinking of moving to Arizona for most of the year, I knew the time for dragging my feet was over. I had to do something, yes? There comes a certain moment in a man’s life when he realizes nothing else matters but having a certain someone in his life, no matter how much courage it takes for him to make that first step into the unknown.”

The words seemed to slide through him, right to his core.

“A date to the gala is a good first step,” he managed.

“A fellow has to start somewhere, doesn’t he, when he decides the time has come to let go of the past.”

“Indeed.”

Dermot glanced at Katherine again then back at him with a sort of purposeful air.

“I don’t think Lucy’s coming tonight. It’s a shame, that. I thought she would surely be here, if nothing else to say goodbye to us all.”

His heart seemed to stop. “Goodbye?”

“Yes. Our Aidan tells me he’s stealing her away from us. He’s hired her to work for him at a new company he’s opening in Portland. She’s starting week after next, from what I understand. Surely she mentioned it to you.”

He had been tackled on the football field more times than he could count. Once he’d been knocked completely out of his cleats.

That’s exactly how he felt right now. He could swear his ears were even ringing.

“No,” he managed through lips that suddenly felt frozen. “No, she hasn’t shared that with me.”

“Aidan was always a smart one. He knows a good thing when he sees it.”

There was that pointed tone again, the implication that Brendan
wasn’t
the smart one.

He was beginning to figure that out. He was the dumb football player jock. Everybody knew that, right? Even Lucy had said so.

Lucy and Aidan.

They would be perfect for each other. Aidan was brilliant, driven, ambitious, just like she was.

And if his brother turned all that brilliant geeky ambition Lucy’s way and decided to add her to one of his collections, Brendan just might have to strangle him with his wussy little glasses.

“I guess I had better deliver this champagne. Enjoy your night, son,” Dermot said.

He walked away, leaving Brendan reeling.

Leaving. She was really leaving?

How could he bear it?

Why should he be surprised? He had always known she wouldn’t stay in Hope’s Crossing. Lucy’s dreams were always bigger than a little town like this. She might stay for a while but he had known from the beginning she would leave them all behind eventually.

Wasn’t that the reason he had ignored the connection between them all those years ago? Because the paths they each wanted to take led to very different destinations?

He let out a breath that seemed to burn in his chest. Damn her. Damn her for thawing all those cold and empty places inside him and then walking away and leaving him raw and exposed.

His phone suddenly rang and he recognized the dispatch ringtone.

“Yeah,” he growled.

“Chief, we’ve got a situation you might want to know about.”

He didn’t want to deal with this right now, but he knew his duty to the people of Hope’s Crossing. “Hang on. Let me go somewhere I can hear you.”

He walked outside the ballroom and was surprised to see it had started raining, steady drops that plunked noisily on the roof. That was spring and early summer in Hope’s Crossing. You could have lovely weather all day and then a blizzard by nightfall.

“Chief, we’ve got a possible missing person situation,” Peggy Taylor said. “Somebody went for a hike this afternoon and hasn’t come back. She was supposed to be back three hours ago.”

A little early to be too alarmed, but the rain would complicate the situation.

“Does Chief McKnight know?”

In Hope’s Crossing, search-and-rescue operations were jointly run through the police department, county sheriff and fire department.

“Not yet. The person who called it in asked specifically for you. She says the missing person is a friend of yours. I figured you might want to take point on this.”

One problem with being the fire chief in a small town was that most people considered themselves his friend.

“What’s the story? You got a name?”

“Yeah. I don’t know her, though. Girl who called it in is a Crystal Drake. She said the missing person is her sister, Lucy.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

H
E
PROBABLY
BROKE
about a thousand traffic laws on his way to Iris House. Not that he gave a single damn.

At the house, he raced up the front porch steps like he was running away from the entire Broncos defensive line.

Crystal opened the door before he could bang it down.

“Brendan! You’re here!”

She burst into noisy tears and just about collapsed to the wood planks of the front porch.

“Okay, okay.” Impatience burned through him as he helped her up and into the house. She was a mess, with mascara dripping down her face and her skin red and blotchy from crying. She looked scared out of her wits.

That, more than anything, ratcheted up his own anxiety.

“Take a deep breath, Crystal,” a familiar female voice said, and he turned with shock to see his niece Ava—Andrew’s daughter—come forward and place a comforting arm around Lucy’s sister. “You have to calm down or you won’t be able to help Uncle Brendan find her.”

“Ava! What are you doing here?”

“We came over to watch a movie during the gala,” she answered. “We were going to watch at our place, but—”

“But Lucy just had the den turned into a surround-sound theater room for the B&B and we thought it would be way more cool here,” Crystal said, wiping at her eyes with a mangled tissue. “I called Lucy to see if it was okay and she said it was because she was going to be home soon.”

“Do you remember what time you talked to her?”

The two teens looked at each other and shrugged. “Maybe six or so. Was it before we went to McDonald’s or after?” Crystal asked.

Ava shrugged. “Wasn’t it just when we were going inside? Because, remember, you were on the phone when that jerk in the Rockies hat bumped you on the way out.”

He just wanted a timeline, not every freaking detail. “So six, you think?”

“Yes. Around six or six-thirty.”

More than three hours ago. Again, not a terribly long time, except for the rain.

“And what did she say in the phone call? Where was she going?”

“She said she left her sunglasses somewhere. She thought she knew where they might be. She was going to take Max for a little walk to see if she could find them. It wasn’t far, she said, and she would be back before we got here. But she’s not here. Neither is Max, and now it’s raining. He hates the rain. Do you think they’ll be okay?”

A hazard of his job: he could think of a hundred things that could have happened to her, none of them details he wanted to share with Crystal yet.

“She didn’t tell you where she was going to look for the sunglasses?”

Crystal frowned. “No. But she said she lost them this afternoon. Where was she this afternoon?”

With him. In his arms on a sun-warmed rock in the mountains. He closed his eyes, trying to remember if she had been wearing sunglasses. He remembered her having them that morning when they started work on the trail. She certainly hadn’t been wearing them when he kissed her. He could clearly picture those lovely green eyes going murky and dark with need....

He jerked his mind back to the situation at hand. Had she left her sunglasses on the trail somewhere? At least this could give him a possible place to start.

“I think I know where she might be.”

“You do?” Crystal exclaimed.

“I’ll start there, see if her car is at the trailhead. If it’s not, we’ll start over.”

“You have to find her. Please, Brendan. And Maxie, too. He’s so little.”

He hugged her and then Ava, too, grateful Crystal wasn’t alone here. His niece had brains and common sense, huge assets in this situation.

“I want you both to stay here, in case she comes back. Ava, I’m going to call your mom to come stay with you two. She didn’t go to the gala, did she?”

His niece shook her head. “She has a cold. Since Dad had to go to a conference in Denver, she decided to stay home and rest.”

“Okay. Well, she can sneeze here just as well as at home. Ava, you’ve got my cell number. I want you to call me if you hear something. Anything at all, got it?”

He had to change out of the suit and dress shoes he had worn for the party or he would be of no use on a rain-slicked trail. He would run to his house for five minutes and at least grab his rescue pack and his hiking boots.

He was already taking off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt as he trotted down the stairs.

“She’s going to be okay, isn’t she? You’ll find her and everything will be fine, won’t it?”

He turned around to face Crystal standing on the porch, twisting her hands. He didn’t have time to pat her head and give her empty platitudes. Lucy was out there somewhere, cold, possibly hurt, and he had to find her.

He
would
find her. He refused to consider any other alternative.

All those dark, ugly possibilities pressed in on him, just about making his knees crumple. He knew all the things that could happen to somebody unprepared in the backcountry. Rock slides, falls, drowning—not to mention the danger of exposure whenever the temperature dropped.

Please God. Not again. He had done this once already. He couldn’t survive it again.

Somehow he found the strength to give Crystal a small, tight, completely bullshit smile.

“I’ll find her,” he promised. “I swear I will. I know it’s tough but try not to worry.”

“Thank you.”

He nodded and hurried to his SUV, knowing he wouldn’t be able to heed his own advice. He was sick with worry and wouldn’t be able to breathe again until she was safe and sound and back where she belonged.

In his arms.

* * *

“T
HIS
IS
ANOTHER
fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Maxie.”

The dog who had started the whole trouble just gave a tiny yip, his whole body vibrating with his shivers. Or maybe those were her own. At this point, after three hours in the cold, wet wind with an ankle that screamed at her every time she moved, she didn’t know.

Lucy tucked him back inside her T-shirt, all the protection either of them had against the cold. He added another layer of wet and cold to her general misery.

They were in serious trouble, and she didn’t have the first idea how she could possibly extricate them both from it.

The panic attack that had been prowling around the perimeter of her consciousness like a voracious mountain lion growled suddenly, and she was so very tempted to give in to it.

For once, she had something to be panicked about.

She couldn’t, though. Max was depending on her for his very survival, and she wouldn’t do either of them any good if she freaked out even more.

Brendan would find them. She just had to hang on and continue trying to climb out on her own until he did—though maybe he wouldn’t want to come look for her, after the mess she had made of everything.

Yeah, this was going down in the record books as the worst possible day of her life.

The worst part was knowing this was all her fault, not Max’s at all.

The evening had started out fine. Okay, as fine as possible, considering her heart felt scoured raw by the events of the day.

On her drive back down the canyon from helping to decorate the ballroom, the sun shone directly into her eyes and she realized she didn’t have her sunglasses. The last time she clearly remembered having them had been while she and Brendan cleaned up the Wild Iris Ridge trail.

She must have left them somewhere up there. Yes, it was a small disaster in a day filled with much bigger problems but she loved those sunglasses. They were the best pair she had ever owned and fit her face perfectly. Finding an adequate replacement would be a challenge, especially since she had purchased them on a trip to Japan just before Annabelle died.

This, at least, was something within her control to fix.

She decided to go look for them, especially after she returned to Iris House and found Max looking bored in his outdoor play area.

A little exercise would be just the thing for him and would also provide the much-needed bonus of distracting her from the deep ache in her heart—or so she thought.

The evening had been lovely, though after only a few moments, she had been wishing she had thought to bring along a jacket. In town, it was sometimes easy to forget how quickly the temperatures could drop in the higher elevations as soon as the sun started to set.

She had been moving at a good clip, though, and that helped keep her warmer. As she expected, the puppy’s energy had started to lag when they were only halfway to their destination. He was just a tiny slip of a thing and had to take about eight steps to every one of hers.

While she hadn’t brought a jacket, she
did
have the foresight to bring along the padded backpack carrier Crystal bought for Max that even had a little hole for him to stick his face out and look at his surroundings.

Lucy had plopped him into it and continued on her way, figuring she still had another hour of daylight—which should have been plenty of time to reach her destination and still make it back to the car before dark.

Finally she reached the glacier-carved boulder where she and Brendan had taken their break and had shared that devastating final kiss. She smoothed a hand over the stone, cool now that the sun had slipped behind the trees.

On some level, she hadn’t really expected to find the sunglasses. As she scanned the area, though, she suddenly spotted a flash of light in the tall meadow grasses—the dying sun reflecting off one of the lenses.

Though she didn’t remember doing it, she must have taken them off and set them down on the rock while they were talking. Somehow during that kiss, the sunglasses had slipped into the grass.

She picked them up now and discovered the frame was a little bent, the lenses dirty—both things she could fix. The small victory was one tiny bright spot in a day filled with sorrow and pain.

That should have been the end of it.

Now, as she huddled with the little dog whimpering against her skin and her ankle howling with pain, she wished with all her heart that she had just tossed the glasses in the pack and headed back down the trail.

If she had, she would have been home now, soaking in that claw-foot tub with a glass of wine and her broken heart.

What stupid instinct had compelled her to go up the trail a little bit higher? She remembered thinking it was going to be a spectacular sunset, especially with the clouds that had started rolling in.

She was leaving Hope’s Crossing, probably for good. How many more chances would she have to watch the sunset over the town from such a spectacular vantage point as the Wild Iris Ridge overlook?

The town had been lovely, glowing in the pale peach light, like something out of a postcard. The tidy downtown, the pretty houses rising up into the foothills and the magnificent mountains that seemed to embrace the little valley.

Someone had placed a redwood bench at the overlook, angled down for the perfect viewpoint into the valley. Perhaps it was even a project from a previous Giving Hope Day.

With the wind rustling the pale green aspen leaves and moaning in the tops of the tall pines, she sank down onto the bench. Max yipped to be let out of his backpack carrier so she unzipped it and set him down to sniff around the bench.

She sat there watching the spectacular show and listening to the wind as all the emotions she had been shoving down all afternoon seemed to bubble to the surface.

This was why she wanted to come up here, she realized, the tears beginning to slide down her face. The sunglasses had only provided the excuse. She had needed the space and the privacy to mourn for the future she could never have with Brendan.

They could have made it work. She could have worked for Aidan long-distance from Hope’s Crossing or she could have considered being a marketing consultant for other tech companies. She could picture the whole perfect thing with startling clarity—entwining her life with his, sharing her successes, embracing his, raising the children they both loved together.

She wanted that future fiercely but knew it was impossible for them. He might say he had feelings for her, but he wouldn’t let himself completely love her, for a hundred different reasons. She had to accept it and move on, as painfully difficult as that would likely prove.

She indulged in the tears for only a few moments, figuring she had earned them. After this she would wipe her eyes, square her shoulders and go back to rebuilding her life.

When she looked around, however, she discovered she was alone there on the bench, with no Max in sight.

“It’s not your fault, little guy,” she said now to the puppy whose small body trembled against her. “I’m the only one to blame. I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off you for a second. I’m sorry. I should have been watching.”

The puppy licked her chin in complete forgiveness, adding yet another layer to her guilt. So many things could have happened to a fragile five-pound dog. This area was thick with red-tailed hawks, snakes, wildcats, anything that might decide a warm, wriggly puppy would make a delicious dinner on a rainy night.

She had been grossly negligent to let him out of the carrier pack for even a second. And she had been too absorbed, first in her own heartache and then her fear and frantic searching for Max to pay any attention to how those gathering clouds had begun to turn stormy.

She felt the first raindrop just about the time she heard a little yip from below her somewhere.

“Max!” she called and strained her ears until she heard it again.

It was a minor miracle that she heard it at all—and another that she finally located him by isolating the sound. He was downslope from the trail, roughly twenty-five feet down the steep mountainside.

She had no idea how he had made it that far, whether he had just wandered down the hill or had fallen, like a child rolling end over end down a hill.

She suspected the latter. When he saw her, he tried to scramble up and ended up sliding back down, unable to gain purchase to make it up the steep slope.

“Don’t move. I’ll come get you,” she had called to him. It was a stupid thing to say, since she knew perfectly well he couldn’t understand her, but she had to say
something.