A Hero To Hold. Linda Castillo

she couldn’t make out the words, and she didn’t stop. She’d only descended a few feet when the loose rock beneath her crumbled. Reaching out, she tried to break her fall, but there was nothing there except cold air and ice-slicked granite. An instant later the ground rushed up and punched her like a giant fist. She began to tumble, pain stunning her as rock and broken saplings battered her body.

      The inevitability of death shouldn’t have shocked her; she’d known she wouldn’t get out of this mess unscathed. Still, her mind rebelled against the idea of her life ending this way. With so much left undone, so many dreams unfulfilled.

      Fragments of her life, the places she’d been and the people she loved flashed in her mind’s eye in brilliant hues. But the mountain was relentless, and the steep incline sucked her down, tumbling her like a seashell battered by a frozen, turbulent sea. One by one, her senses shut down until she knew only darkness and the bitter taste of betrayal. As she plummeted deeper into the abyss, the pain slowly relinquished its grip. The darkness embraced her with murky arms and the promise of warmth and truth.

      And, at last, she was free.

      Chapter 1

      “I’ve got a visual. Female subject. Two o’clock. She’s up and moving.”

      Search-and-rescue medic John Maitland jerked the strap of his helmet tightly against his chin, stepped over to the chopper’s open door and looked down. Sure enough, a woman huddled against an outcropping of rock on the side of the mountain seventy-five feet below.

      “What the hell is she doing up here?” he muttered, mostly to himself.

      “Waiting for you to harness up and move your butt!” came the pilot’s voice from the cockpit.

      “Just get me closer, Flyboy,” John shouted over the roar of the Bell 412’s twin Pratt and Whitney engines and the rush of wind through the door. “Sometime this week, if you don’t mind.”

      “Not in this wind. We’re already at forty knots. Gusts to fifty-five.” The pilot, Tony “Flyboy” Colorosa, shot him a cocky look. “Don’t tell me you can’t do an extraction from a measly seventy-five feet up in a little breeze.”

      John met the other man’s expression in kind. “You just fly this sardine can—I’ll take care of the tough stuff,” he said. Then he added under his breath, “The wind might make it a little more interesting.”

      “Subject is standing. No visual trauma.” Team leader Buzz Malone lowered his binoculars and scowled at John. “Skip the litter,” he said, referring to the portable stretcher. “We’re going to swoop and scoop. Harness her, and I’ll winch her up with you.”

      “What about spinal movement?” John asked.

      “If we don’t get her up in the next five minutes, we’re going to abort. It will take us too long to reach her on foot. She’ll die of hypothermia. Take your pick.”

      As much as he hated the idea of manipulating a possible trauma patient without the benefit of spinal support, John knew with heavy weather moving in, the situation had boiled down to a quick extraction—and saving her life. There was only so much they could do during an airlift. They’d deal with possible injuries later. “Roger that,” he said.

      He started toward the door, but Buzz stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “If it were anyone but you going down there, I’d abort this mission in a New York minute.”

      “Good thing we’re not in New York.” Reaching the launch point at the door, John turned to face the other man, his hands moving expertly over his harness as he prepared to drop. “I’ve never missed an extraction, Buzz. I don’t plan to start now.”

      “Watch those trees.” The team leader gave him a thumbs-up. “You get one attempt, then I’m bringing you in.”

      Giving him a mock salute, John shoved off into space. Cold air slapped him like icy palms. The rat-tat-tat of the chopper’s rotor blades deafened him, but both were discomforts he’d come to love despite the dangers of jumping out of a helicopter with nothing more than a cable and his own skill separating him from certain death.

      He wasn’t worried about missing contact on the first go-round. In the six years he’d been a search-and-rescue medic, he’d never missed an extraction. Besides, high winds or not, there wasn’t a man alive who could fly the Bell 412 better than Flyboy. As for aborting the mission, John simply knew better. Buzz Malone might be tough-talking when it came to keeping his crew safe, but John had worked with the older man long enough to know there was no way in hell the team would abort the mission and let that woman die.

      Twenty feet down from the chopper, the wind began to twirl him like a yo-yo. Accustomed to the action, John rode with it, maintaining his equilibrium by keeping his eyes on the huddled form below. He wondered how she’d gotten there. Even from a distance of some fifty feet, he could tell from her lack of attire and equipment that she wasn’t a hiker who’d lost her way in the storm. She wasn’t even wearing a coat, for God’s sake. What on earth was a woman clad in little more than street clothes doing at nine thousand feet in the middle of January?

      A cross-country skier had reported her stranded on the side of the steep ravine just an hour earlier. The call out to Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue had come in from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department twenty minutes ago. The team had been ready to go in less than four minutes.

      John didn’t know how long she’d been there and had to assume she was hypothermic. If she’d fallen, God only knew what other injuries she’d sustained. For now, the most serious threat was the weather, so he had no choice but to lift her out, then assess her injuries once they got her onboard the chopper.

      He scanned the area with a practiced eye. There was no evidence of a vehicle, so he wasn’t dealing with motorvehicle trauma. There was no sign of a wrecked snowmobile, either. No tent in sight. No sign of other people.

      Something bothered him about the entire scenario.

      The mystery moved to the back of his mind when the cable jerked with a sudden gust of wind, whipping him perilously close to an outcropping of rock. “You want to keep it steady, Flyboy?” John said into his helmet mike. “If it’s not too much trouble, that is.”

      “Just want to make sure you’re awake,” came the pilot’s voice.

      Smiling, enjoying the adrenaline rush that came with the added danger of high winds, John concentrated on the swiftly approaching ground and prepared to touch down. The terrain consisted mostly of jagged rock and ice. Twenty feet away, a stand of spindly pines shivered in the wind from the chopper’s blades.

      John’s feet hit the ground hard, but he was prepared and bent his knees to absorb the impact. In an instant, he jerked the patient’s harness from his flight suit and started toward the subject, praying Flyboy could keep the chopper steady enough to prevent him from getting jerked off his feet and slammed into a rock or dragged through tree branches. He could do without a broken arm—or God forbid—a broken neck.

      He made eye contact with the woman as he approached her. Dark, frightened eyes, glazed with the effects of hypothermia and wide with terror, met his as she stumbled toward him. Full, colorless lips moved to speak, but she didn’t make a sound. He saw the will to live in its rawest form in the depths of her eyes, and an acute sense of urgency overwhelmed him. Hell or high water, he was going to get her out of this.

      But it was the beauty of the face staring back at him that nearly stopped him in his tracks. Dark, pretty eyes and a delicate cut of jaw dominated her features. A slash of high cheekbones beneath pale flesh tinged pink from the cold. Wavy hair the color of an alpine sunset and wild as a mountain gale tangled over slender shoulders. Even as dirty and bruised as she was, he could plainly see her body was lush in all the right places. If it hadn’t been for his medical training and the fact that the chopper was hovering seventy-five feet overhead in forty-knot winds, he would have taken a moment just to appreciate the view.

      John was accustomed to all sorts of rescues, from the