Second Chance Summer(93)

Breakfast of champions, and in three minutes when he hit the top of Cedar Ridge, he’d have the adrenaline rush to go with it. He only had time for one run before this morning’s board meeting, aka fight with his siblings, and he was going to make it Devil’s Face, the most challenging on the mountain.

Go big or go home, that was the Kincaid way.

Danger, excitement, and adrenaline rushes were par for the course for all of them and Hud, head of Ski Patrol at Cedar Ridge Resort, was no exception. The antics that happened on their Colorado mountain, combined with all he saw as a cop in the off-season … well, it was safe to say that not much surprised him anymore.

Just yesterday, two hormone-driven twenty-year-olds had decided to have sex on one of the ski lifts. Because they were also idiots, they had the safety bar up so that when a gust of wind came along, it swept the poor pantsless girl off the lift, down thirty feet to a—luckily—soft berm of snow. She’d lived, though she’d do so with frostbite in some pretty private places. Her boyfriend, of course, hadn’t fallen, had retained his pants, and had reportedly dumped her in the hospital due to the humiliation.

The story made the news, but sex on a ski lift, stupid as it was, continued to happen at least once a season. And that wasn’t even close to the most dangerous thing to have happened this week. Yesterday he’d caught a shift at the station, covering for a fellow officer who’d been out with the flu. A burglary call had come in. An eighty-year-old man said someone was in his kitchen eating his brand new raspberry tarts. And he’d been right. There’d been someone in his kitchen eating his raspberry tarts—a 350-pound bear, roughly the size of a VW Bug, had been sitting at the guy’s bar calm as you please.

Call him jaded, but Hud usually operated from the place where he was pretty sure nothing could surprise him.

So when he skied off the lift and found a girl sitting just off-center at the top, her skis haphazardly stuck into the snow at her side, he didn’t even blink.

Or at least he assumed she was a girl. Her down jacket was sunshine yellow, her helmet cherry red. She sat with her legs pulled up to her chest, her chin on her knees, her ski boots as neon green as neon green could get, staring contemplatively at the admittedly heart-stopping view in front of her.

Hud stopped a few feet away.

She didn’t budge.

He looked around. Sharp, majestic snow-covered peaks in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista. They were on top of the world.

And quite alone.

Not smart on her part. The weather had been particularly volatile lately. Right now it was clear as a bell and thirty degrees, but that could change in a blink. High winds were forecasted, as was another foot of snow by midnight. But even if a storm wasn’t due to move in, no one should ski alone. And especially no one should ski alone on Devil’s Face, a 2,800-foot vertical run that required technical expertise and nerves of steel. There was a low margin for error.

As in no margin for error. One little mistake was a guaranteed trip to the ER. As skilled as he was, even Hud made sure his brothers knew where he was and that his radio was in good working order.

“Hey,” he called out to the girl. “You okay?”

Nothing.

He glided on his skis the last few feet between them and touched her shoulder.

She jerked and craned her neck, staring at him for a beat. Then she pulled off her helmet and dark lenses, and yanked earbuds from her ears. Tinny music burst out from them so loud that he wondered if she could still hear anything at all.

“Sorry,” she said. “Did you say something?”

“I asked if you’re okay.”

She flashed a smile like the question was silly. “Of course.”

Of course. She wore a tight ski cap beneath her helmet, also cherry red, with no hair visible and enough layers that she was utterly shapeless, but he could see now that she wasn’t a girl at all. A woman, maybe mid-twenties. Dark eyes. Sweet, contagious smile.

Pretty.

But he’d been a cop for long enough that he could read people, often before they said a word about themselves. It was all in the posture, in the little tells, he’d learned.

Such as the layers she wore.

Yes it was winter and yes it was the Rocky Mountains, but thirty degrees was downright balmy compared to last week’s mid-teens. Most likely she wasn’t from around here or the mountains at all.

Then there was the slightly unsure look in her eyes, a vulnerability that said she was at least a little bit out of her element and knew it. Her utter lack of wariness told him something else, too, that probably wherever she’d come from, it hadn’t been a big city.

None of which explained why she was sitting alone on top of one of the toughest mountains in the country. Dumped by a boyfriend after a fight on the lift? Separated from a pack of girlfriends and taking a break? Hell, despite appearances, maybe she was a daredevil out here on a whim.

Or it could be that she was simply a nut job. Nut jobs came in all shapes and sizes, even mysterious cuties with vulnerability in their eyes that suddenly made him feel extra protective. “You sure you’re okay?”

She narrowed her eyes a little. “Why, don’t I look okay?”

He knew a trick question when he heard one. Knowing better than to touch that one with a ten-foot pole, he swept his gaze over her. No visible injuries. But then again, he couldn’t see much given her layers. “So you’re not hurt.”