Operation Mountain Recovery Read online

  “You might be happier if you didn’t. It helps,” Quinn added with a wry smile, “when you don’t have to worry about it standing up in court.”

  “Normally I’d protest that. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  “I’d say the concept is, but it doesn’t always work, because people aren’t perfect.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Foxworth tries to help with those times when it malfunctions.”

  “All right. No questions. For now.” Quinn nodded as if he’d expected nothing less.

  A while later, coincidentally—or perhaps not—when the snow had stopped, Cutter showed in his polite way that he needed outside. Brady, who had been restlessly pacing again—this violating his oath had him on edge—quickly offered to take him.

  He hadn’t expected Ashley to jump to her feet and say she’d go with them, that she wanted to go out in the fresh snow. A glance outside at the now solid three feet told him she was unlikely to try to take off, so he merely nodded. And pondered the fact that she sounded...different. He wasn’t sure what it was, but her voice, her tone, seemed different. Maybe just relief at this respite from her troubles, he decided.

  They’d been using the back door for the dog, since it opened onto a covered patio that was sheltered from the snow. Still, the flakes had drifted up along the sides, practically enclosing the space in pristine white walls. Cutter plowed forward, undaunted, and disappeared behind a particularly tall drift.

  Brady was just thinking that it wasn’t nearly as cold as he’d expected when Ashley said, “It’s practically warm out here. This must be how igloos work.”

  Startled, he looked around at the surrounding snow. “I think you must be right. It’s acting as both windbreak and insulation.”

  “Do you think we could sit out here for a few minutes?”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “Cabin fever?”

  “More a case of giving Quinn and Hayley some alone time,” she said. “It is their anniversary trip, and I feel guilty about intruding on their celebration.”

  “Hayley said every day’s a celebration for them,” Brady said.

  She gave him that smile that made it so hard to believe there was anything seriously wrong with her. “I believe it. They’re amazing together, aren’t they? Especially given how they started out.”

  They sat down on a bench he brushed clear of the snow that had made it through onto the patio. “Hayley told you, huh? About him kidnapping her and Cutter?”

  She grinned then. The doubts her smile instilled were nothing compared to the crazy tumble his insides took at that grin. For a moment he couldn’t even breathe. “Yes. With the proverbial unmarked black helicopter.”

  His mouth quirked. Quinn had left out that part when he’d told him how he and Hayley had met. “That’s when I first realized Foxworth is a lot more than I ever imagined.”

  “I think they are, too.”

  He realized then what he was hearing in her voice, what that different, new note was.

  Hope.

  He felt a sudden qualm. What if they were building that up in her and it turned out that it was false hope? Wouldn’t that make it all even more devastating? It seemed she had reached, if not peace, at least acceptance, of her condition, before.

  So much that she was ready to die to end it.

  The memory of that heart-stopping moment when he’d seen her teetering on the edge at the lookout slammed into him, and he knew anything that forestalled that was worth it.

  Even false hope.

  “Do you ski?”

  The unexpected question snapped him out of the unaccustomed emotional turmoil. “What?”

  She looked at him, her green eyes looking as serene as he’d ever seen them. “I just thought since you grew up here in the mountains, maybe you skied.”

  “I do. Not as much as I used to, but I try to get out a couple of times a season.”

  She nodded. “My dad skied.”

  Brady went still. Tried to remember if she’d ever brought the man up on her own, without referring to the mental illness that had stolen him from her.

  “Did he?” he said carefully.

  “He was going to teach me, starting on my tenth birthday.”

  A birthday the man hadn’t lived to see.

  He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to disrupt the normalcy of this, the way she sounded like nothing more than someone missing their dead father. He tried to think of something...neutral.

  “So he was a good skier?”

  “Very. He thought about competing for a while, when he was young, but decided it might take the joy out of it for him.”

  “I get that,” Brady said, but he was frowning inwardly. That didn’t sound like a guy with a messed-up brain, any more than she did. But she’d said that came on later.

  “He was a wonderful man. Strong. Kind. Loving.” She gave a faint smile then. And he could almost feel it all creeping back in on her. “I adored him and thought he adored me.”

  “I’m sure he did,” he told her, thinking it rather lame even as he said it.

  “I always believed that. That’s why I couldn’t believe for years, and never, ever understood why he committed suicide. Until the other night.”

  He couldn’t stop himself from grabbing her hands. Her bare fingers were cold despite what she’d said about the temperature out here. “Ashley,” he began, but stopped when she turned on the bench to look at him straight on.

  “It’s all right,” she assured him, as if she were the steady one. And at the moment he wasn’t sure she wasn’t right. “I won’t try that again. I don’t feel so alone anymore.”

  He wrapped his fingers around hers, trying to warm them. She curled her hands in turn, as if she welcomed the feel of his. That gut-level part of him responded as if hers was the touch of a lover, something that had been lacking in his life for a long time. He tried to quash it, because what he’d thought earlier still held; he had no right to take advantage of the situation. The problem was, the more time he spent with her, the harder it was to suppress his response to her.

  Afterward, he wasn’t sure how it had happened. He didn’t think he’d done it, but how else had she ended up in his arms? And the way she clung to him, how the hell was he supposed to push her away?

  He told himself it was her fragile state of mind that kept him from doing just that, but deep down he knew he hadn’t because it felt so damned good. Not only good, having her warmth pressed against him, it felt right. Very, very right.

  And when she looked up at him, something in those green eyes made him want...everything. Everything that was possible between a man and a woman. He wanted to start with a taste of those sweet, tempting lips, but he knew if he did, he would not want to stop there.

  You’re an ass, Crenshaw. Three days ago she was on the verge of suicide.

  He was not—was not—going to take advantage of the situation, even if it did seem she wanted the same thing he wanted. Because right now she couldn’t possibly be sure what she really wanted. Maybe that hunger in her eyes was simply because she hadn’t taken that jump, because she was still alive. Maybe it was all just reaction to that.

  The only thing he wanted more than what she seemed to be offering was to never see regret aimed at him in those vivid eyes. Not that that made it any easier to tamp down his body’s response to her closeness, to that heated gaze. He had to get past this. He had to quit watching her, sneaking looks at her and most of all wishing the situation was different. That she was well and could make rational, fully aware decisions about what she wanted.

  And that she’d decide she wanted him.

  None of which was reality. And being snowbound here with her was no help at all.

  Chapter 17

  Ashley awoke the next morning feeling better yet a
gain. As she had been every day. Underlying was the lingering, niggling fear that the only reason she was feeling better was that she hadn’t been taking her meds. They were still sitting at home, where they’d been, untaken, since the crash. She’d left them there that night, since she obviously wouldn’t be needing them any longer after...

  She calculated the timing. Ten days. Ten days since she’d stopped her regular pill. Minus the days of utter fog on the pain pills, when she’d felt so ill from them that even the pain was better. But once that had cleared...there wasn’t a moment missing since. She remembered it all, clearly.

  But are you remembering it right?

  What her mother had apparently claimed had happened that night with the knife was so different from what she remembered. Yet the memory was so clear to her. It had to be her that was mistaken, her confused brain that was responsible. Didn’t it? And yet...

  Brady hadn’t taken her in. It had been three days since that bulletin naming her as a suspect in an assault she would swear hadn’t happened, and he hadn’t yet arrested her. Even knowing her mind was damaged, and the official version quite possibly true.

  Quite possibly? Don’t you mean probably? Definitely?

  How could it not be true? She was the one with the befuddled brain, not her mother. But could she really have manufactured such a clear memory? She must have. Her mother would never make up such a thing.

  But perhaps somehow she had, as Brady had said, misinterpreted what had happened.

  Because she’d been through it before. Had probably been expecting it.

  Ashley couldn’t think of anything more grim that watching, waiting for someone you loved to go over the same edge that had cost you someone else you loved.

  A polite tap on the door made her finish dressing quickly. It had to be Hayley; Brady’s knock was decidedly more...male. And when she opened the door, it indeed was Hayley.

  “I brought coffee,” she said, holding out a steaming mug.

  “Bless you,” Ashley said fervently, taking it.

  “Thought you might need it before you sit down with Dr. Sebastian.”

  She nodded. When they had first suggested an online session with yet another friend of theirs, a psychiatrist, she’d been wary. But Brady had done some research on the woman, and everything he’d found indicated her reputation was stellar. She was on the board of two major hospitals and three mental health organizations and had spent several years on the faculty of a prominent university.

  They went into the kitchen, where Brady was working on his own coffee, and to her surprise Quinn was busy fixing up something that smelled luscious.

  “Well, that’s unfair,” she said.

  Brady gave her a puzzled look, but Hayley laughed. “It is, isn’t it? No man who looks like that should be able to cook, too.”

  Ashley grinned at her and once more savored something that had been missing from her life for months now—the ease of simple, uncomplicated interaction, especially with another woman.

  “Hey,” Brady protested, “that’s sexist. Or something.”

  She looked at him, saw one corner of his mouth twitching. “If you tell me you can cook, too, then I may have to change my assumptions.”

  “I’ll have you know I make a great beef stew, better garlic chicken and a truly wicked barbecue sauce.”

  She raised her brows at him. “Consider my assumptions changed, then.”

  The twitch became a grin. “Might want to hold off on that. They’re also the only things I can make.”

  “Just means your looks have to carry more of the load,” Hayley teased.

  “Not a problem for him,” Ashley quipped, then looked away quickly before she could see his reaction to her words.

  After the breakfast that tasted as good as it had smelled, Quinn led her into the media room, where he’d set up his laptop and mirrored it on the flat-screen television on the wall.

  “We’ll run a test when we first connect, make sure everything’s working right, then leave you in private,” he said.

  “How do you know her?” she asked as she tried to ignore the fact that Brady had been sleeping in here. There was a small stack of freshly washed clothes on one end, the shirt the Foxworths had bought on top, and that brought on more imagining, like how her pulse had kicked up the first time she’d seen him in civilian clothes. Those jeans, just snug enough...

  “We helped her with a family situation,” Quinn said. “Something she needed closure on.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ready?” Hayley asked gently.

  Ashley suppressed a shiver. They had warned her some of the questions Dr. Sebastian might ask could be uncomfortable, and that she would probably ask about her father.

  Brady’s words echoed in her head. If there’s even a chance...you have to take it. You can’t give up until you do.

  She drew in a deep breath to steady herself. She had already signed a waiver allowing the doctor to share all information before starting this. She’d decided if she was going to do this, if she trusted Foxworth—and Brady—enough to do it, she wasn’t going to hold back. And so she said firmly, “Yes.”

  Quinn reached out and tapped some keys on the laptop. A moment later, the flat screen flashed to life. And Ashley braced herself for the first question.

  * * *

  “What’s bothering you the most?” Brady stopped his pacing to look at Hayley, who held out his refilled mug of coffee and...a cookie. She smiled at his expression. “I bake when I’m restless. Quinn cleans. You, apparently, pace.”

  “Kind of useless by comparison,” he said as he took both items.

  “We’re in one of those stages of a case where it’s up to someone else,” she said, “and at that point, it’s whatever gets you through.”

  He bit into the cookie. It was soft, sweet, delicious and still warm. “Wow. That’s really good.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. So what is it? That we’re on hold for the moment? Or that you’re afraid it’s all really true?”

  “All of that,” he agreed, “but...what’s really bugging me at the moment is that text exchange. I mean, I get that her mother’s worried, but it seemed a little...”

  He trailed off, unsure of how to describe what was nagging at him.

  “Hasn’t settled into words yet?”

  “Exactly,” he said, a little relieved she understood. He finished the cookie, took a swallow of coffee.

  “I did wonder why her first question wasn’t if she was all right, but where she is,” Quinn said as he joined them, sipping from his own mug of coffee after popping an entire cookie into his mouth and chewing it with obvious enjoyment.

  Brady nodded. “That’s part of it. Although if she’s really afraid of her, I guess that would make sense. But why the need to constantly remind her...of the mental issue? Ashley obviously isn’t so far gone she’d forget that.”

  “Impartiality would say that perhaps we haven’t seen her at her worst, but her mother has.”

  Brady’s grip on his mug tightened. “But even as bad as she was that day I saw her after the crash, she knew.” It still ate at him, her flat, dull acceptance. I’m going insane. Just like my father.

  “I think we should let that rest until we have Dr. Sebastian’s assessment,” Hayley said.

  Brady drew in a deep breath and relaxed his hand. Then nodded. And managed not to glance yet again toward the closed door of the media room.

  The room where he’d been sleeping on the foldout couch, now that it seemed clear Ashley was not going anywhere. Not that she could, through all the snow.

  So in essence, she was in his bedroom. The bedroom he’d claimed, leaving empty the actual third bedroom in the place, because it was the next room beyond where Ashley was sleeping. And no amount of telling himself he’d done it because she’d have to go past the media room door to get out
of the house, so he would likely hear her, was really working.

  He was glad when Quinn spoke and yanked his brain off that path. “But dealing strictly with physical observations, I would have thought that if it happened the way her mother said, she’d have had more blood on her.”

  Brady looked up to meet Quinn’s steady gaze. “Yes,” he said, the same thought having occurred to him the moment he’d heard the description of the altercation. “The physical evidence that we know of supports her story.”

  “Then that, combined with her obvious stability right now, gives us inconsistencies that need looking into, explaining.”

  Brady nodded. “Although it could well be she dodged the blood somehow and there was a puddle on their kitchen floor,” he said, feeling grimly obligated to point that out. “The report wasn’t final yet, so I didn’t get all the details.”

  “And I think you calling back for more wouldn’t be advisable just yet,” Quinn said.

  “Kind of like running up a flag to announce I know something,” he agreed sourly.

  Quinn gave him a steady but empathetic look. “I realize this goes against the grain.”

  “It goes,” Brady said flatly, “against everything I believe in.”

  “I know.” Quinn said it like someone who had walked the same path.

  Brady rubbed at his eyes. “I’d never even consider it, if I hadn’t...if I didn’t...”

  “Think there was more to this?” Hayley said quietly.

  He nodded, slowly. “My gut’s yelling there is, no matter what my brain says.”

  Quinn smiled then. “Welcome to Foxworth. Sometimes that’s all we have to go on.”

  “But it’s not what a deputy sheriff in Eagle County is supposed to rely on.”

  Quinn nodded. “If it comes down to you needing a defense to keep your job, we’ve got a guy.”

  “It well may, so I hope he’s good.” Even as he said it, a memory jabbed at him, from the stories about the aftermath of the downfall of the governor last year. His gaze narrowed. “Hold on. You’re not talking about Gavin de Marco, are you?”