The Family You Make (Sunrise Cove #1)(2)

“Oh my God.” Her head jerked up, hitting him with some seriously green eyes. “Why would you tell me that?”

“Sometimes, if you’re afraid of something like heights, knowing all the facts helps.”

She stared at him as if he’d grown a second head, but her spine snapped ramrod straight. “Do I look like I’m afraid of heights?” she asked, just as the gondola jerked so hard that she gasped and grabbed for the oh-holy-shit bars on the side closest to her.

“You’re right,” Levi said. “You’re clearly not afraid of heights at all.”

She tightened her grip on the bar and glared at him. “Hey. For your information, it’s not heights that get me. It’s tight, enclosed spaces. Especially tight, enclosed spaces that are swinging five and a half stories above ground.”

“Shift to the middle of the bench,” he said. “Away from the windows. You’ll feel better.”

This got him a vehement shake of her head that had her hair flying about her face. “I’ve got to be at the window so I don’t miss the crash.” She grimaced. “Don’t even try to make sense of that, or me for that matter—you’ll just hurt yourself.”

The next gust hit hard. Everything in the gondola flew to one side, including his companion. He caught her and pulled her down onto the bench at his side, keeping ahold of her for a minute. “You okay?”

“No! Not even close! We’re an inch from falling and dying, and I don’t know about you, but I had things to do today. Like live.”

“A gondola fall is extremely unlikely,” he said. “Maybe one in a million.”

They rocked again and she drew a deep, shaky breath. “You know what I need? Silence. So if you could just stop talking, that’d be great.”

He laughed, because having come from a family of talkers, he was often mocked for being the silent one.

“I don’t see how this is funny—” She broke off with a startled scream as the next gust hit violently, knocking them both off the bench and into each other on the floor. On their knees, swinging wildly, they turned in unison to look out the window just in time to see . . .

The gondola in front of them appear to drop a few feet and then fall, vanishing from view.

She gasped in horror. “Oh my God! Did that gondola just . . . ?”

“Yeah. Hold on,” he said grimly. As he said this, their gondola came to a sudden stuttering halt, leaving them swinging wildly back and forth, flinging both of them and all their stuff far and wide. Levi went with the momentum and ended up face-planted against the window, kissing the cold glass.

Something hit him in the back.

His pack.

And then a softer something. His companion. She hurriedly scrambled clear of him to stare out the window at the gaping chasm where the previous gondola used to be. “Ohmigod,” she whispered, her nose to the window, as if that could help her see past the thick, swirling, all-encompassing snow. “Was anyone in it?”

“The lift operator told me that the three cars in front of us were empty.”

She leveled him with those amazing eyes, narrowed now. “So much for a gondola fall being one in a million!” She yanked out her phone and stared down at it. “Dammit. I forgot it’s dead.”

“Don’t worry. They’ll know what happened at base. They’ll come for us.”

She let out a slow exhale, looking pale and shaky.

“We’re still on the cable,” he said, looking out the window in front of them. “It didn’t break. That gondola in front of us snagged on something on the track, or there was a malfunction in the grip—”

She let out a distressed sound and squeezed her eyes shut. “You know what really gets me? I put on mascara today. A waste of five minutes that I could’ve used to stop for a breakfast burrito. I mean, that’s what a girl needs on the day she’s going to die, a solid breakfast burrito to hold her over to the ever after.”

“I like breakfast burritos,” he said. He didn’t offer any empty platitudes because the truth was her fears were valid. Their gondola wasn’t moving now, no forward or reverse motion at all, nothing except the relentless swinging in the wind. He didn’t know what had caused the gondola in front of them to fall, but if theirs did the same, the odds of them walking away were slim to none. First up was getting them to stop swinging so freely, and he began to calculate the balance and weight needed to stabilize the car. “Hey, do you think you can get all the way into that back corner there?”

She blinked, but didn’t question him, just did as he asked, crawling to where he pointed while he moved into the opposite corner.

“You do realize this only works if we weigh the same,” she said.

“We’ll use our gear to even things out.” His backpack was at his feet. “What have you got with you?”

She lifted her hands out to her sides. “Just what you see.”

“You came up on the mountain with nothing on you—no snacks, no water, no emergency gear or equipment?”

“Didn’t say that. And judgy much?” She emptied out her many pockets. Steel water bottle, a single-serving bag of beef jerky, a pack of gum, and . . . a small first aid kit, which she held up for Levi to see. “Safety first, right?” she murmured, irony heavy in her tone.