at the male-oriented Great Outdoors.
“Why are you calling me?” As she talked, she searched in her desk drawer for a nail file. “I already have a job. And I don’t have time to freelance.”
“I already okayed this with your boss. You can work on this assignment and still draw your salary from Cherché.”
“What kind of assignment?” Her beat was gossip, glamour and women’s issues. Great Outdoors specialized in testosterone, grit and gear.
“It’s a human interest story. Right up your alley. Top pay and all expenses.”
“There has to be a catch.”
“Yeah, that’s where the favor comes in. This is the kind of story that could make my career—and you’re the only one who can write it for me.”
She gave up her search for the file and resisted the urge to gnaw the ragged nail instead. The uneasy quaking in her stomach increased with each word from Mark. “What’s the story?”
“I’ve landed an interview with Paul Teasdale. But he’ll only talk to you.”
Paul Teasdale—a name she’d heard far too often these past few days. “No.”
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Mark continued, as if he hadn’t heard her refusal. “But Teasdale isn’t talking to anyone. Rumor is he’s angling for a big book contract. My editor already struck out trying to get a story from him, so I took a big chance and offered him you.”
“What am I, the sacrificial virgin?”
“You’re Victor Winston’s daughter.”
As if that wasn’t a sacrifice of a different kind. Sierra had refused to think of her father for years, and then Paul Teasdale had carried his body down from a mountain and for the past week she hadn’t been able to turn on the television or pass a newsstand without seeing or hearing his name. The headlines screamed at her in stark black letters: Famed Mountain Climber’s Body Discovered Twelve Years After His Death! Or Twelve Years On Mount McKinley—Body Of America’s Most Famous Climber Recovered.
Dead more than a decade, Victor Winston was still a celebrity. No doubt, he would have loved all the attention. Other mountaineers may have been more technically proficient, but no one was better than Victor at playing to the press. Even freezing to death in a blizzard at nineteen thousand feet, he’d radioed details to all the major wire services.
Never mind Sierra and her mother, sitting at home glued to the television and waiting for news. By then, it had been years since fourteen-year-old Sierra had felt close to her father, but the memories of those times were still fresh—days when public acclaim and the allure of summiting the next peak hadn’t meant more to him than spending time with his family. In those last few anxious days of his life, she’d listened to the increasingly desperate dispatches from Mount McKinley, hoping for some sign that he was thinking of her, but it never came.
When the transmissions ceased and it was assumed Victor Winston had died, what little love she’d had left for him had died, too. She’d followed her mother’s example, presenting a stoic face at the public memorial service after he was declared legally dead, boxing away the pain like old clothes that didn’t fit anymore.
Now Mark was asking her to take out those old garments and try them on again.
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” he said again quietly. “But it’s the big break I’ve been waiting for.”
Promotions at Davis Partners Publishing were tough to come by, especially on the testosterone side of the company. The editors of the hot rod, hunting, fishing and other male-targeted publications tended to stay on the job until they suffered heart attacks at their desks. The only way for an assistant like Mark to score a better position was to do something earth-shaking.
An exclusive from Paul Teasdale probably qualified. Mark was one of Sierra’s dearest friends, but could she do this, even for him? “What would I have to do?” she asked. Maybe a phone call or two wouldn’t be so bad …
“He lives in some little town in Colorado—Ouray. We’d fly you out there and you’d hang out for a few days, get an idea of what he’s like. And I want your personal touch on the story—emotions, opinions, whatever comes to mind.”
In other words, he was asking her to bare her soul.
“I’d have to go there and meet him?” She’d avoided looking at any pictures of Teasdale, but she knew what he’d be like—wiry and ruggedly handsome.
It was enough to make her gag.
“Come on, Sierra. Aren’t you a little bit curious?” Mark asked. “Don’t you think this would help you, too?”
She stiffened. “Help me how?”
“I don’t know—answer some questions about your dad. Bring you some closure.”
“I don’t need any closure, Mark.”
“Right. Of course you don’t. So interviewing this guy should be no big deal. Think of it as a free vacation to the mountains.”
She knew Mark; he wasn’t going to let this go. She took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll go out there and talk to him. But not only do you owe me that big fat paycheck, when I get home I want dinner at Jean-Georges.” The exclusive Central Park restaurant was a favorite of well-heeled foodies.
“Dinner, with champagne and all the chocolate you can eat. And thank you! I’ll send down the travel documents as soon as they’re ready.”
So here she was in Ouray, Colorado, hiking uphill in high heels and fighting a queasiness in her stomach that had nothing to do with the altitude. She’d lied to Mark when she told him she wasn’t curious about her father. She didn’t have any questions about how he died—the details had been played over and over in the news the past few days. But since he and her mother had separated when Sierra was ten, she did want to fill in the blanks of his life between then and when he’d died four years later.
What had driven him to risk his life in such hazardous conditions, to spend months away from home and family and suffer all manner of hardships?
What had he found in the mountains that he couldn’t find with his wife and child?
Why had he played the part of the devoted father for the first ten years of her life then left her, taking with him a piece of her heart she’d never been able to get back?
Those questions had been enough to override her better judgment and persuade her to leave Manhattan for the wilds of middle-of-nowhere Colorado. She hoped that in talking to Paul Teasdale she could somehow solve the mystery of her father and discover what had driven him to the mountains—and away from her.
PAUL TEASDALE SAW the woman long before she spotted him. He’d climbed onto the roof of his duplex to replace some damaged shingles and had scarcely driven the first nail when he glanced down the hill and saw a vision in short skirt and crazy high heels doggedly hiking toward him. She stopped every half block to catch her breath, giving him the opportunity to study her. Her brown, shoulder-length hair, her narrow black skirt and crisp white blouse, though simple, screamed designer pedigree.
He
