Читать книгу The Doctor's Mission - Lyn Stone - Страница 9

Bernese Alps, Switzerland, November 6th

Sunlight sparkled off the perfectly powdered slope. Thin, crisp air added to the euphoria zinging through Cate Olin’s veins as she looked out over the awesome peaks surrounding her. “On top of the world,” she sighed.

Cate tossed her companion a smile. Werner looked almost as impressive as the scenery. Together, he and the Alps would make a terrific travel ad for winter fun and games. And she would spend no more time with him than she would with these mountains.

He had approached her in the bar last night and asked her to dance. They’d talked, laughed, danced some more and then he had suggested they ski together the next morning. So here she was, having some much-needed fun, her reward for a tough mission accomplished.

After a light breakfast at Le Chalet d’Adrien, they had caught a hop, then ridden the lift to the top of Col des Gentianes to ski off-piste. Werner said it was supposed to be a fun run. A friend of his had highly recommended it.

Werner adjusted his goggles, then his gloves. She would love to know what he was thinking right now, but telepathy did not work on this guy. That was okay, too. That skill required concentration and mental energy. Her last assignment had taken a lot out of her and she badly needed a couple of weeks of nothing but recreation.

He slid slowly to her side, their skis parallel as he leaned sideways to kiss her cheek. “Ready to rock and roll?”

His Austrian accent was cute and he knew it. Cate took a second simply to enjoy the way he looked. She toyed with the idea of sleeping with him later. She might. And she might not.

Sex without any deep emotional involvement would be a new experience for her and one she thought she might find more depressing than satisfying. She sensed Werner didn’t do deep.

“Give me a minute.” She adjusted the bright red cap she wore and determined not to worry about anything today.

Cate shook the tension out of her legs one at a time, lifting each ski as she relaxed her muscles. She shrugged her shoulders to loosen them, then set her poles and grinned at Werner. “Okay, let’s boogie!”

“Take the lead.” He gestured broadly for her to go ahead of him. “I would like to watch your derriere!”

Cate hesitated, then experienced one of those uh-oh moments when he gave her a playful shove and shouted, “Go, you little chicken!”

Laughing, she wanted to glance back, but had to gain her balance and keep it. The bright morning sun had paved the powder with a slick-as-glass surface.

Cate flew, unable to control her speed the way she wished. The slopes she had experienced before had been bumpy with the tracks of others, offering a bit of traction. And not this steep. She slalomed, attempting to brake, tried to snow-plow to no avail, then considered falling down, just to stop her rapid descent.

After a harrowing run, the trail leveled out a little where it edged against a steep incline on her right. Suddenly she heard a distinctive crack, then another. A rifle!

Ten feet to her left, the slope dropped off like a cliff’s edge. To her right, the snow-covered wall. Above, the rumble of an avalanche. No accident of nature.

She dug in her poles, pushed hard and picked up speed, trying to outrun the fall, go perpendicular to it, get out of its way. To God knew what. But someone had skied this way earlier today. The trail led somewhere besides over the edge of an abyss. She hoped.

Snow pelted her head and shoulders, slid down, obliterated her path. There was nowhere to go but over the edge, where the descending rush of snow would take her anyway if it didn’t cover and smother her here.

Instinctively, Cate tucked her poles beneath her arms, squatted down and fell sideways. She snapped off her skis, scrambled for the cliff’s edge and looked over for a safe way down. A rolling crush of white shoved her from behind and took her with it.

As white blanked out the blue of the sky, Cate fought panic. She struggled to stay on the surface. Couldn’t let it bury her. The heat from her body would encase her in ice in less than half an hour. If the oxygen trapped with her lasted that long and the weight of the snow didn’t crush her.

Then she hit something really hard that broke her slide and she began to tumble head over heels.

She wanted to scream, but her mouth wouldn’t move. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, knowing it could be full of snow and the last one she would ever take.