In a small town like Topaz Falls, Colorado, the grocery store was the last place you’d want to go if you didn’t want to be noticed. But when your diet consisted mainly of Honey Nut Cheerios and you’d run out of milk, you had no choice but to show up at Frank’s Market in full disguise.
Jaden Alexander pulled his blue Colorado-flag stocking cap farther down his forehead so that it met the top of his Oakleys. Not that the sunglasses were inconspicuous. They were a custom design, made exclusively for him when the company had courted him for sponsorship six years ago after he’d made his Olympic debut. No one else would know that, though. To other people, he hoped he looked like just another ski bum who moonlighted as a bartender or waiter during the off-season. With any luck, no one in town would realize that J.J. Alexander—dubbed the Snowboarding Cowboy by the media—had come home.
The door still chimed when he walked in, the same way it had when he’d done the weekly grocery run for his grandma twelve years ago. In fact, it looked like Frank hadn’t changed much of anything. The same depressing fluorescent lights still hummed overhead, casting bright spots onto the dirty linoleum tiles. He passed by the three checkout stations, where two bored cashiers stood hunched behind their registers, fingers pecking away on their phones.
One of them looked familiar enough that a shot of panic hit Jaden in the chest. But the woman didn’t even look up as he slipped into the nearest aisle, so maybe he was just being paranoid. Death threats on Twitter would do that to a guy. Ever since the accident, going out in public wasn’t exactly his favorite thing to do. He’d been ambushed by photographers, reporters, and fans who’d written him off, and he was not in the mood to deal with any public showdowns tonight.
“J.J. Alexander? That you?”
Anyone else and he would’ve shaken his head and kept right on walking, but he knew the voice behind him. He’d never get away with walking on past without a word. He turned around, and right there at the end of the aisle stood Levi, Lance, and Lucas Cortez. Back in high school, Jaden had bummed around with Levi until Cash Greer passed away. After that, Levi had gone to Oklahoma to train as a bull rider, and Jaden had finally been accepted to train with the U.S. ski and snowboard team.
“Holy shit, man.” Levi sauntered over the way a bull rider would—all swagger. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”
“Hey, Levi.” Jaden forced his jaw to loosen and nodded at each of the brothers in turn. “Lucas. Lance.” Now, those three had changed in twelve years. They’d all cleaned up. Still cowboys in their ragged jeans and boots, but each of the brothers was clean-shaven and more groomed than he’d ever seen him. Wasn’t a coincidence that they all had rings on their left fingers now too. Jaden slipped his sunglasses onto his forehead, grateful the store seemed empty, so they shouldn’t attract too much attention.
“Actually, I’m not back.” His voice had changed since the accident. These days he had to fight for a conversational tenor instead of slipping into defensive mode. “Not permanently anyway. I’m only here to consult on the new terrain park at the resort.” The Wilder family had been looking to expand their ski hill outside of Topaz Falls for a few years now. He’d never been a fan of the Wilder family—no one in town was—but the job had offered him an opportunity to lie low for a while.
“Heard that’s gonna be quite the addition up there,” Levi said. “I also heard your grandma sold the ranch a few years back. You got a place to stay?”
“I rented a place on the mountain.” He didn’t acknowledge that bit about his grandma. Hated to think of her stuck in that facility in Denver. He hadn’t had a choice, though, once the dementia started. She’d taken care of him—raised him—seeing as how his dad had been a loser and his mom a free spirit who’d rather live the gypsy lifestyle than hang out with her kid.
Four years ago, the roles reversed, and he was the one taking care of Grams. Back then he couldn’t do much for her. He was too busy splitting his time between Park City and Alaska, chasing the snow so he could stay in shape. After she’d started wandering off, he’d moved her into the best facility in Denver and dropped in a couple of times a month to visit, even though she no longer knew him.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I need backup.” Lance moseyed over. As the eldest Cortez brother, he was serious and stern. He used to scare the shit out of Jaden when they were kids, but from the looks of things, he’d mellowed out. “Jessa didn’t tell me there were a thousand different kinds of tampons. I have no clue what to get. Any ideas?”
Uhhh…Jaden looked around, realizing for the first time they were in that aisle. The one he never stepped foot in. On purpose anyway.
“There’s regular, super, super-plus…” Lucas shook his head as he examined the products stacked on the shelves. “I thought we were buying tampons, not gasoline.”
The brothers laughed, and even with the anxiety squirming around his heart, Jaden cracked a smile. “So this is what happens when you get hitched, huh?” Oh how things had changed. Used to be, on a Friday night, he and Levi would drive up to the hot springs on the Cortez’s property, share a few beers, have a bonfire, and get to at least second base with whatever girl looked good that night. Now these three spent their Friday nights shopping for woman-stuff.
Levi glared at his eldest brother like he wanted to string him up by his toenails. “We were out for a beer when Lance’s wife called with an”—he raised his hands for air quotes—“emergency.”
“She was in tears,” Lance said defensively. “And quit bullshitting us. If Cass had called, you’d be doing the same thing right now.”
That seemed to shut Levi up.
Lucas looked at his brothers with humor in his eyes. “Naomi loves me too much to put me through that.”
“Yeah?” Levi shot Jaden a sly grin. “That why she sent you to the store for hemorrhoid cream after Char was born?”
And that was Jaden’s cue. There were some things you couldn’t unhear, and he definitely didn’t want to know anything about having babies and hemorrhoids. “Well, it was good to see you guys. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
He made a move to slip past and leave them all behind, but Levi walked with him. “Hold up. How’re things going?”
The familiar anxiety slipped those cold fingers around Jaden’s heart and squeezed. He’d been conditioned. Anytime someone looked at him like that—used that overly sympathetic tone of voice—he wanted to turn and bolt before they could bring up the accident. “Things are fine,” he lied. Things had fallen apart after that race. In his life and in his head. Three months later, he still didn’t know how to put it all back together.
“I saw the crash on TV.”
Yeah, Levi along with the rest of the world. If they hadn’t witnessed it during live coverage of the race, they’d seen it in the extensive news analysis afterward.
“You all healed up?”
Did it matter? “Pretty much. I’ve got a few pins in my arm, but who doesn’t?” The joke fell flat, and the anxiety squeezed harder, shrinking his heart in its suffocating grasp.
“Haven’t heard much about the other guy in a few months.” Questions lurked in Levi’s tone and in his eyes. Jaden could see them surfacing.
Had he done it on purpose? Had Jaden intentionally taken out his biggest competition on that last turn when it looked like he wasn’t going to win the gold? Everyone had already made up their own answers, so why did it matter what he said?
Breathe. Keep breathing. Never thought he’d have to remind himself to do things like that. “Beckett is still in a rehab facility.” Scarred and broken. Still trying to relearn how to walk…
“Damn. Sorry to hear it.”
Jaden already knew sorry wasn’t enough. Not for Kipp Beckett, not for the reporters, not for the officials. Not for fans of the sport. Not even for himself.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t think you did it on purpose.” Levi was trying to be supportive, but the fact that he said it at all meant he’d thought about the possibility. Same as everyone else.
“I didn’t,” Jaden said simply. “I wouldn’t.” In the replays, it might’ve looked like he’d lunged into Beckett—who’d been his rival in the snowboard-cross event since they’d both started out—but the truth was that he’d caught an edge and it had thrown off his balance. He couldn’t recover. He couldn’t stop the momentum that pitched him into Beckett, that sent them both careening through the barriers, cartwheeling and spinning until the world went silent. When the snow had settled, Jaden had gotten up, and Kipp Beckett hadn’t. His body lay twisted at an angle, and he was unconscious, maybe dead.
Shock had numbed Jaden to the fact that his arm was badly fractured. He’d fallen to his knees next to Beckett before officials had raced in and forced him away. The papers and news shows and magazines all said Jaden was sneering as the medics tended to him. He wasn’t. He was crying.
“I would’ve taken the silver.” If no one else believed him, maybe Levi would. “I didn’t care that much.” He didn’t value the gold more than someone’s life. Did he? God, the news reports had made him question himself.
Levi gave him a nod. “Looked to me like you caught an edge. Could’ve happened to anyone.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you stop over for a beer sometime? I just finished building my new house. Need to break it in.”
“Sure.” Jaden said it like he did that all the time—stopped by a friend’s house for a beer. But it had been months. Months since he’d had a real conversation with another human being. Months since someone had actually smiled at him. When he wasn’t working on the mountains, his days consisted of sitting silently on the back deck with his chocolate Lab Bella sprawled at his feet while he tried to figure out how everything had collapsed.
“What about tonight?” Levi shot a look toward his brothers. “Since my evening got interrupted and I’m now free.”
“I’ve gotta head back up the mountain tonight.” They were discussing the possibility of lighting the terrain park for night boarding. “But I’d definitely like to hang sometime. Let me know what else works.” Levi was the first person who’d actually heard him when he said he didn’t mean for any of it to happen.
Maybe he had one ally in a world full of enemies.
* * *
Up until this very moment, Kate Livingston thought the worst thing about camping was the bugs. No, wait. Actually, the mosquitos in Colorado weren’t nearly as bad as she had anticipated. So far she’d seen only one medium-sized spider, which wasn’t even hairy like the some of them in L.A. So, before this moment, maybe she would’ve said the worst thing about camping was the dirt. Yes, definitely the dirt. She could feel it sticking to her skin, grainy and disgusting as she lay swaddled like a baby in the brand-new sleeping bag that still smelled like synthetic fluff.
Another flash of light split the sky above her flimsy nylon tent. Which had cost about $450, by the way. And now the damn thing was sagging underneath the weight of a rain puddle that had collected right over her head. Waterproof my ass.
She squirmed to unearth her arms from the sleeping bag and typed in a note on her phone. Extreme Outdoors Lightweight Backpacker Tent—Sucks. Unsatisfied, she underlined, highlighted, and changed the word sucks to all caps.
When she’d landed the position as a senior editor for Adrenaline Junkie magazine, she had envisioned herself sitting in a corner office overlooking the hustle and bustle of Beverly Hills while she sipped frothy lattes and approved spreads and attended photo shoots with male models who cost upward of a thousand dollars for one hour of work.
But there had been some budget cuts recently, Gregor, her managing editor, had explained on her first day. They weren’t working with as many freelancers, and the editor who was supposed to do a gear-test backpacking trip on the Colorado Trail for the fall issue had suddenly quit, so…
Here she was, on an all-expenses-paid trip through hell.
The ceiling of the tent drooped even lower, inching toward her nose. A drop of rainwater plunked onto her right eyebrow right as a crack of earsplitting thunder shook the ground.
Now she knew. She knew that the worst thing about camping was not bugs or dirt but a thunderstorm in the mountains. In fact, she would probably die tonight. Either from getting skewered by a lightning bolt or from a heart attack, whichever came first.
“I went to Northwestern journalism school,” she lamented over the pattering rain. After she’d walked out of there with her master’s degree, she’d assumed she could have her pick of jobs. But nope. Anyone could call themselves a journalist these days. It didn’t matter if they had interned at the Chicago Tribune or if they knew AP style or even how to use a fucking comma. If they had fifty thousand followers on their blog, they were in.
Let’s just say respectable jobs in the world of journalism weren’t exactly knocking down her door. So when the opportunity at Adrenaline Junkie had come up, she’d done more than jump on it. She’d immersed herself in it. So what if she’d never actually camped? It wasn’t her fault her father was a yuppie attorney and her mother a neurologist. They didn’t believe in camping. But she could read all about it on the Internet.
Who cared that the one time she’d felt a surge of adrenaline in the great outdoors had come when she’d lost her Gucci sunglasses in a rogue wave on the beach? She’d never swam that fast in her life. It was a job—a senior-level job—and she could finally move out of her parents’ basement and away from her role as the butt of every family joke. Both her older sister and her younger brother had become doctors too. Just to make her look bad.
If only they could see her now.
Bringing the phone to her lips, she turned on the voice recorder. “Day one. The Extreme Outdoors Lightweight Backpacker Tent appears to be made out of toilet paper.” She wondered if she’d get away with making that an official quote in her four-page spread. “I’ve worn a rain poncho that repels water better than this piece of—”
A scratching sound near her feet cut her off. The walls of the tent trembled. Yes, that was definitely a scratching sound. A claw of some kind? “Mary mother of God.” The whisper fired up her throat. She wasn’t sure if it was the start of a prayer or a curse. She’d have to wait and see, depending on how things turned out.
Scrunching down farther into her sleeping bag, Kate held her breath and listened. There was a huffing sound. An animal sound. A bear? Yes, this definitely called for a prayer. “Oh, God, please don’t let it eat me.” She squirmed to the corner of the tent where she’d stashed her overstuffed backpack. Yes, she’d read all about how she was supposed to empty the food from her backpack and hang it from a tree in a bear-proof container, but she hadn’t actually had the time to find a bear-proof container before she left L.A. Surely bears didn’t like freeze-dried macaroni and cheese…did they?
Quickly and silently, Kate dug through the gear until she located her copy of The Idiot Guru’s Guide to Hiking and Camping. The binding was still crisp. She’d meant to open it on the plane, but she’d forgotten that she’d downloaded Sweet Home Alabama on her phone, and God she loved that movie. And Reese. She’d waved to Reese once, across the street on Rodeo Drive, and she’d actually waved back! Well, she might’ve waved back or she might’ve been pushing her hair out of her eyes. It had been kind of hard to tell.
But anyway. The bear…
Using her phone as a flashlight, Kate flipped through the pages in search of a chapter about bears while a dark shadow made its way slowly around the tent. “Come on, come on.” Hadn’t the Idiot Guru thought to inform other idiots what to do if they encountered a bear?
The shadow paused and swiped at the nylon wall.
“Oh God, sweet Jesus.” Kate ducked all the way into the sleeping bag, taking the book with her. If nothing else, maybe she could use it as a weapon to defend herself. It was thick enough to do some serious damage. Yet somehow there was no chapter on what to do when a bear was stalking you from outside your tent.
Okay. Think. When she’d first gotten this assignment, she’d read something on the Internet about animal encounters. Was she supposed to play dead? Make loud noises? She fired up the satellite phone again—waiting for what felt like five years for the Internet to load—and searched bear encounter.
Big. Mistake. Apparently, bears did eat people. There were pictures to prove it. Adrenaline spurted through her in painful pulses. How could anyone like this feeling? Adrenaline junkie? More like adrenaline-phobic. It made her toes curl in and her skin itch. Alternating between hot and cold, Kate crossed her legs so she wouldn’t pee in her only pair of long underwear. Lordy, she had to go so bad…
A whimper resonated somewhere nearby. Hold on a second. She hadn’t whimpered, had she? No. She was pretty sure her voice wouldn’t work right now. Did bears whimper? She wouldn’t know because the Idiot Guru had left out that critical chapter…
The creature outside her tent whimpered again, softly and sweetly. Kate peeked her head out of the sleeping bag. The shadow was gone, but the whimpering continued.
Holding the sleeping bag around her like a feeble bubble of protection, she squirmed over to the zippered flap that the company had touted as an airflow vent and inched it open until she could see. The rain had slowed some, but it still sprinkled her nose as she peered outside. The shadowy figure of an animal lay a few feet from the tent, still whimpering weakly. But it appeared to be much smaller than she’d originally thought. Way too small to be a bear. It looked more like…a dog.
“Oh no. Poor thing.” Kate fought with the sleeping bag until it finally released her. She unzipped the tent’s main flap. After slipping on her boots, she slogged through the mud and knelt next to the dog. It was a Lab. A chocolate Lab just like the ones she’d seen playing fetch on Venice Beach. “Are you lost?” she crooned, testing the dog’s temperament with a pat on the head. The dog licked her hand and then eased up to a sitting position so it could lick her face.
“You’re a sweetheart, aren’t you?” She ran her hand over the dog’s rain-slicked fur. The poor love shook hard, staring at her with wide, fearful eyes. “I’ll bet you don’t like the storm, do you?” she asked. “Well that makes two of us. Come on.” She coaxed the dog into the tent. “You can wait out the storm with me.” And…seeing as how she couldn’t stay out here harboring a fugitive dog… “First thing tomorrow morning, we can head into the nearest town so we can find your owner.”
Then she’d find herself a nice hot shower, a real meal that didn’t require boiling water on a camp stove, and a plush queen-sized bed where she could finally fall into a dry, peaceful sleep.