missing little as he studied their surroundings. “Is something wrong?” he asked quietly.
Caught letting her imagination run away with her, she felt a blush sting her cheek. “I was imagining what it must have been like for the prince to find himself all alone up here,” she admitted with a grin. “Then I got to thinking about wolves and bears…”
“And suddenly you could hear one sneaking up behind you,” he guessed with a chuckle. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to be anyone’s dinner. Whatever bears are in the region are hibernating, and the wolves are probably just as scared of you as you are of them. They won’t bother you.”
Logically, she knew that. But when they started through the trees again, she made sure she was just a few steps behind Lorenzo.
They crossed the creek at its narrowest point, then began the slow climb up to Walnut Ridge. It was a fairly steep hike, but not as difficult as it would have been if they’d taken a path to either the east or west. And even though the prince had probably been hurt after the crash, there was no question that he could have made the climb if his injuries weren’t too severe.
“I don’t know how the hell he walked away from that crash,” Lorenzo said with a frown as they broke through the trees and reached the forest service road, “but he always was a lucky devil. I think he could have easily made it this far. But why didn’t he call home, dammit? Or at least call for help? He had his cell phone with him.”
“He must have been confused,” Eliza said, “and who can blame him? You saw what the crash did to his plane. He couldn’t have been thinking clearly.”
Lorenzo agreed. He could well understand Lucas’s muddled thinking after he’d plowed into the side of a mountain. But that didn’t explain his continued silence. It had been a year since the crash, dammit! Where was he? Was he still walking around in a daze or had he somehow fallen into the hands of someone who meant him harm and wouldn’t let him call his family?
Frustrated, the questions he had far outnumbering the few speculative answers he had, he said, “The answer has got to be here somewhere. C’mon. Let’s find the campsite.”
Given Willy’s oddities, Lorenzo hadn’t put much stock in the directions he’d given them, and with good reason. The man had refused to even look him in the eye! But when they headed due north, just as the old hermit had instructed, it wasn’t any time before they came to the stand of aspen he’d told them about. And there in the middle of the trees was a small circle of stones that could only be the remains of a campfire.
“This must be it!” Eliza said excitedly. “Listen! You can hear the creek.”
Cocking his head, Lorenzo caught the gurgle of a small creek in the distance. Eliza was right. This had to be the place where Willy had found the scarf. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, impressed. “I didn’t think the old geezer had it in him.”
“I knew he wasn’t lying,” she replied, then sighed in relief. Suddenly realizing that she’d given herself away, she grinned ruefully. “Okay, so maybe I had a few doubts. Sometimes it’s hard to know with Willy.”
Having now met the old man, Lorenzo could well understand that, but at least he appeared to have told the truth this time. And if they were lucky, there would be a clue somewhere in the vicinity that would tell them why Lucas had left and where he might have gone.
Surveying the area, however, he didn’t see signs of much life. It was a stark place for Lucas to take refuge. The aspen, naked of their leaves in the dead of winter, offered little protection from the weather, and the snow seemed to collect in unusually high drifts on the east side of trees. When the north wind blew, it was colder than hell.
“What was he doing here?” he murmured to himself as he began to inspect the campsite. “He apparently traveled five miles from where he crashed and stopped here long enough to at least make a firepit and start a fire. Why? Was he just too tired to go on or what?”
“Maybe it was getting dark and he didn’t have any choice,” Eliza suggested. “If he was going to survive the night, he had to have a fire.”
“Or some other kind of shelter,” he replied, his green eyes speculative as he slowly turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees and tried to imagine why Lucas had stopped here, of all places. Then his eyes landed on a dead tree that had fallen at an awkward angle at the base of a snow covered hill. Located just a matter of feet from the firepit, the tree should have lain flat at the base of the hill but it didn’t. And it was that, Lorenzo decided, that bothered him. What was under that tree?
“What are you doing?” Eliza asked when he suddenly grabbed a stick off the ground and poked through the branches of the fallen tree. When he met no resistance, he started to smile. “What?” Eliza said in confusion. “What’s so amusing?”
“The tree’s covering the entrance to some kind of small cave,” he told her, grinning, and proved it by pulling the decomposing tree away from where it lay. There, jutting out from the side of the hill, was a small rocky opening that appeared to be the entrance to a shallow cave.
“I knew it!” he said, pleased. “I bet the cave wasn’t covered when he found it, so he dragged the tree over the opening to conceal it so he’d be safe.”
Stepping closer, he knelt down at the opening and peered inside, only to feel his heart stop in midbeat when he saw the contents of the cave. There on the ground was a red thermal blanket that was identical to the ones carried on all of the king’s aircraft. The queen had insisted that all blankets be red in case there was ever a crash—the blankets would be nearly as effective as a flare when they were spread out on the ground to flag down rescue planes.
“What is it?” Eliza asked quietly when he turned to stone. “Did you find something?”
“This,” he said huskily, and pulled out the blanket. “It’s from Lucas’s plane. I’m sure of it.”
Protected from the weather all these months, it was clean and dry and neatly folded, as if the prince had just left it. And that made little, if no, sense. Glancing around, Eliza scowled. Damn, she hated it when things weren’t logical!
“It seems like he would have stayed here until help came for him,” she told Lorenzo with a frown. “The man had a blanket and cave to keep him safe from the elements, a firepit and plenty of firewood to warm him, not to mention water from the creek to drink. It was the middle of winter, he couldn’t have known where he was, but he still walked off and left the safest place he’d found. Why? What possessed him to do such a thing? The authorities had dogs and helicopters looking for him all over these mountains. You know he had to at least hear the helicopters. Why didn’t he spread the blanket out in the clearing? Somebody would have found him.”
He shrugged, worry darkening his eyes as he looked around. “I don’t know. Maybe he was so shaken from the crash that he wasn’t thinking clearly and didn’t realize anyone was looking for him.”
“Or something spooked him,” she said. “Think about it. Why else would he have left the blanket? He thought to dig it out of the wreckage of the plane, but then he walked off without it when he left here. I can’t think of any reason why he would do that unless he was scared and he left in a hurry.”
His brows knit in a frown, Lorenzo didn’t like the sound of that, but he had to agree that there was little other reason for Lucas to abandon the cave. Unless, he was out in the surrounding woods, searching for food, and wasn’t able to make
