twelve years he’d been with RMSAR, he’d searched this rugged landscape for everything from lost Boy Scouts to Alzheimer’s patients. He knew enough about this vast wilderness to admire the tenacity of a person who could travel for six hours and not tire or panic. For a woman without hiking gear or backcountry know-how, she’d covered some rough terrain and made damn good time doing so. He wondered if she had a destination in mind; wondered what she’d expected to accomplish out here in the middle of nowhere.
The ground leveled at the top of the rise, and he urged the mare into an extended trot. Brandywine was a seasoned trail horse and as surefooted as a mountain goat. She was raw-boned and well muscled, possessing more sense than most of his friends and a heart that rivaled the size of Pikes Peak. He’d ridden her under some brutal conditions, both terrain and weather-wise, and the mare had always kept her head and come through for him. He trusted her with his life—and a good bit more than most people.
The leather saddle beneath him creaked softly as he took the horse down yet another steep incline. Behind him his mule Rebel Yell followed, his steel shoes clanking against the rocky ground.
The wind had picked up and was now coming from the west at a brisk clip. Jake figured he had another hour before heavy weather set in. November in the Colorado Rockies was unpredictable at best, particularly in the higher elevations. He’d gone on many a call-out, looking for weekend warriors who’d left eighty-degree temperatures in Denver wearing T-shirts and sneakers, hiked into the backcountry, and got caught in a snow storm without winter gear. Damn tourists. A little common sense went a long way in the mountains.
He traveled another fifty yards before realizing he’d lost the trail. Puzzled, he pulled up on the reins and backtracked. It wasn’t like him to miss something like that. Jake had been tracking since he was old enough to ride a horse—which was shortly after he’d learned to walk. From a long generation of horse and cattle ranchers, he was as comfortable on horseback as most folks were in their cars.
Fifty yards back, he picked up the tracks again. A sneaker imprint in moist soil. A trampled tuft of buffalo grass. A broken twig where the subject had brushed against it. Then suddenly nothing.
What the hell?
Remembering the corrections official’s warning that the subject could be armed, Jake scanned the immediate area, listening. It was so quiet he could hear the wind whisper through the pines. Beneath him, Brandywine grew restless, her bridle jangling as she tossed her head. The hairs on his nape prickled. It was too quiet. Why weren’t the birds chattering?
“Whoa, girl.” Wondering if his subject had doubled back, he realized he’d just made a rookie’s mistake. Damn.
Tugging on the reins, he nudged the mare’s sides with his heels, sending her quickly backward. Simultaneously he slid the Heckler & Koch .45 from his holster and swung it upward. Adrenaline cut through his gut when he saw a pair of dirty sneakers dangling from the branch of a lodgepole pine ten feet up.
“I’m a police officer.” He backed Brandywine to a safer distance. “Show me your hands.”
Two hands emerged, dirt-streaked but empty nonetheless.
“Come on down out of that tree, ma’am.”
Barely visible from the ground, she was perched precariously on a branch. Jake craned his neck to get a better look at her, hoping to gauge her frame of mind. The instant he made eye contact, the blood stalled in his veins. He’d never seen eyes that color. An intriguing mix of violet and midnight spun into velvet as soft as the mountain sky. Her hair was a jumble of brown streaked with blond. It fell in disarray over her shoulders, each strand curling as tight as a spring, too wild and unusual to be anything but natural.
Jake upheld his earlier opinion that she didn’t look like an escaped convict. The photograph the D.O.C. official had shown them that morning didn’t begin to do this lovely creature justice. From all appearances, neither did the psychological profile. She looked more rational than some people he’d run into in these parts. She even seemed a tad embarrassed at having been caught up in that tree. But, of course, she was the only blonde in prison grays around. Sitting ten feet above the ground on the branch of a lodgepole pine, she fit the bill.
“Ma’am, I’m a deputy sheriff with the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Department. I’d like for you to climb down before you get hurt,” he said. “Right now.”
“How do I know you’re really a cop?”
Her voice drifted down to him like smoke. Her accent held a hint of Appalachia. Jake wondered how in the world this lovely young woman had gotten herself into such terrible trouble with the law.
Unclipping his badge from his belt, he held it up for her to see. “Jake Madigan, Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office. Come on down. Now.”
He heard her sigh, then watched as she slid her feet along the branch, and moved toward the main trunk. “Okay. I’m coming. Just…wait a second. And put that gun away, will you? They make me nervous, especially when they’re pointed at me.”
Jake held the gun steady. “Be careful,” he said.
“Like you care.”
He arched a brow. “Well, I’d hate to have to haul you all the way back to Buena Vista with you screaming your head off because you broke your ankle jumping out of a gosh-darned tree.”
“Believe me, mister, at this point in my life a broken ankle would be the least of my problems.”
He wasn’t going to argue with that; she was definitely in serious trouble. Jake dismounted and ground-tied Brandywine. He looked up to see the woman set both feet on a lower branch. The branch would have been strong enough to support her weight—if it hadn’t been pecked full of holes by a persistent woodpecker. “Ma’am, you don’t want to put your weight on that branch.”
“Don’t tell me how to climb, cowboy. I’ve been climbing trees since I was three years old.”
“That may be true, ma’am, but—”
“I know what I’m do—”
The branch snapped with an audible crack! The woman yelped once, then crashed through a dozen smaller branches on her way down. Jake barely had time to holster his sidearm when a blur of blond hair and prison grays tumbled down and hit the ground with a thud hard enough to make his own spine ache.
“Easy,” he said, approaching her. “Just be still a moment.”
Lying sprawled on her side, she made an inaudible sound that sounded suspiciously like a curse, but she didn’t move.
Oh, hell. Just what he needed—an injured, obstinate and pretty-as-sin prisoner to haul down the mountain. What the hell was he doing volunteering for this stuff when he could be at home shoveling horse manure?
Jake knelt, set his hands firmly against her shoulder, trying not to notice when a mass of curly blond hair swept over his hand. “You all right?”
A grunt emanated from beneath that mass of hair. “Just let me…catch my…breath.”
“Can you move your toes for me?”
He looked down a stretch of leg that seemed to go on forever, saw her toes move beneath the canvas of her sneaker. “Yeah,” she said.
“What
