Читать книгу Daredevil's Run - Kathleen Creighton - Страница 9

Alex spent a restless night in the company of dreams that weren’t quite awful enough to be called nightmares, but close.

First, she was back on the Mojave Desert where she’d spent her childhood. She, the grown-up Alex, was climbing the tree that stood beside their mobile home. It was an old tree shaped by decades of desert wind so that it seemed to hover with its limbs spread protectively over the trailer, sheltering it from the relentless desert sun. Down below, her mother was yelling at her to come down from there before she fell and broke her neck. Alex smiled and kept climbing. And then she fell.

Except, instead of the tree, it was a rocky cliff she was falling from, and as she was falling she looked up and saw a face peering down at her from a ledge up above. Matt’s face. He was yelling at her, something she couldn’t hear because of the wind rushing past her ears, and he was holding out his hand for her to grab hold of. But she wouldn’t. She scowled at him and kept falling, and just before she hit the ground, she woke up.

She was drenched in sweat, so she threw aside all her covers and pulled off the oversized T-shirt she’d worn to bed, flipped the pillow to a dry side and went back to sleep.

And she was right back on that cliff, still falling. Only now she was naked, and Matt was still peering down at her, holding out his hand for her to grab on to, and instead of yelling at her, he was smiling. Smiling that beautiful Matt Callahan smile that could melt her heart like vanilla ice cream in the Mojave sun. She watched the smile get smaller and farther away as she fell, and fell, and fell, and again, just before she hit the ground, she woke up.

The ringing telephone woke Matt in the darkness. He groped for the handset, squinted at the time in the lighted window. Jeez, was that…4:00 a.m.? He thumbed it on, swearing under his breath. “Who the hell is this?”

“Are you insane?”

“Alex?” He jerked himself half upright, got himself propped on one elbow and his throat cleared, stalling for time, waiting for his heart rate to get back to normal. When it didn’t appear it was going to anytime soon, he tried instead for the lazy Clint Eastwood drawl he sometimes adopted with the kids when he wanted to appear cool. “Nice of you to call. Haven’t heard from you in a while. What’s it been, five years?”

“You’re the one who broke up with me, remember?” He heard some heavy nasal breathing, and then, “The Forks, Callahan? Have you lost your mind?”

His scalp prickled in a familiar way, and instead of confessing to her that the whole river trip had been his brother’s idea and he’d only insisted on the Forks of the Kern run and its Class V rapids to scare Cory off the notion, he dropped the temperature of his tone a couple more degrees and said, “No, don’t think I have.”

“Okay, then, you can’t be serious.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, for—” There was a long pause, filled with some more of that breathing. “You’re going to make me say it? Okay, I’ll say it. You can’t do a Class V run. Not the Forks.”