Читать книгу A Man of His Word - Merline Lovelace, Merline Lovelace - Страница 9

“H ey! You down there! Are you okay?”

The shout jerked Sydney’s head back. Never in her life had she heard anything as wonderful as that deep, gruff voice. Keeping a tight grip on the twisted piñon tree that had broken her slide into oblivion seven long hours ago, she shouted to the dark-haired cowboy peering cautiously over the edge of the rim.

“I’m okay. No broken bones that I can tell. Have you got a rope?”

“Yes. I’ll be right back. Don’t move!”

Don’t move. Right. As if she planned on releasing her death grip on the rough-barked trunk or shifting her body so much as a centimeter to either side of the narrow toehold she’d found in the canyon wall.

She leaned her forehead against the tree, almost giddy with relief. Then again, this dizzy sensation might have something to do with the fact that she’d just spent seven hours wedged between a tree root and a cliff face hundreds of feet above a narrow river gorge.

She’d been prepared to spend even longer. Sydney hadn’t expected Zack to roll out of bed before ten or eleven, much less organize a rescue for his missing boss. Her assistant was worth his 140 pounds in gold once he revved his motor, but getting him going some mornings could take a half-dozen calls that ran the gamut from wheedling to cajoling to outright threats of death and dismemberment. Thank God this was one of his rare self-starting days!

The thump of a rope hitting against the cliff face above her snapped her attention back to the rim. She looked up just in time to take the shower of small stones and dust dislodged by the rope full in her face. Wincing, Sydney spun her head sideways, which caused the tree to shake and its occupant to let out a small, terrified squeak.

“Dammit, don’t move!” her rescuer snapped. “I’ll work the rope over to you.”

Clinging to the tree trunk with both arms, she blew upward in a vain attempt to get the dust and straggling hair out of her eyes. Her Rams ball cap had gone the way of the Blazer during that three-second slide down the cliff face. Sydney only hoped the sacrifice of a hat and a four-wheel-drive vehicle had satisfied the canyon gods.

Her heart in her throat, she watched the thick rope hump and bump its way closer to her precarious perch. Only after it was within reach did she discover that her arms were numb from the shoulders down. She couldn’t seem to unlock their tight grip on the trunk.

“Take the rope.”

Swiping her tongue along dry lips, she tried again. Her left arm came unwrapped and dangled like over-cooked linguini at her side.

“I need a minute here,” she croaked to her rescuer. “I can’t seem to feel my arms.”

“All right, it’s all right.” The gruff voice above her gentled. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Sydney muttered to the piñon, her eyes on the rope a tantalizing few inches away. Suddenly it jounced up and out of sight.

“Hey!”

“Hang on, I’m coming down.”

He pulled off his hat and looped the rope around his waist. Within moments he was beside her. Black hair ruffled. Blue eyes steady and encouraging in a tanned face. Shoulders roped with reassuringly thick cords of muscle. Altogether he looked big, strong and wonderfully solid.

On second thought, Sydney wasn’t so sure big and solid were desirable characteristics in a man whose only connection to terra firma was a length of twisted hemp. Swallowing, she said a silent prayer for the sureness of his lifeline while he propped his boots against the canyon wall. With a cowboy’s one-handed ease, he shook out a loop in the length of rope he’d left dangling behind him.

“Bend your head. Let me slip this over you.” He spoke slowly, his deep voice calm, confident. “I’m going to lift one of your arms. Got a grip? Okay, now the other. Easy, easy.”

The noose tightened around her waist, cutting off most of her breath. The taut, muscled arm the stranger slid around her cut off the rest.

“I’ve got you. I’m going to swing you in front of me. We’ll walk up the cliff face together. Ready?”

Even with the rope and her rescuer’s muscled arm around her, it took a considerable leap of faith to let go of the sturdy little piñon. Swallowing hard, she let him lift her from the tree.

“I’ve got you. I won’t let go.”

She managed a shaky laugh. “Promise?”

“I’m a man of my word,” he assured her, his breath warm in her ear.

She hoped so. She certainly hoped so.

“Ready?”

She gulped. “Ready.”

They crab-walked up the cliff, her bottom nested against his stomach, his arms caging her ribs. Five steps, seven, eight, then a palm on her rear and a heaving shove.

Sydney went over the rim belly down. Panting, she crawled on hands and knees until the ground felt firm enough for her to turn and try to help her rescuer over the edge. Her arms were still so weak she gave up after the first useless tug.

Not that he appeared to need any assistance. With a smooth coordination of brawn and grace, he hauled himself up. Once safely away from the crumbled rim, he untied his lifeline and strode to the Jeep that had anchored it. Sydney gave a little croak of delight when he hunkered down beside her a moment later, a plastic bottle of spring water in his hand. She downed a half dozen greedy gulps before coming up for air. After another swallow or two, her throat had loosened enough to talk without croaking.

“Thanks…for the water and the rescue.”

“You’re welcome.” He picked up his hat and dusted it against his thigh before settling it on his head. “Sure you’re not hurt?”

“Just a little weak from hanging on to the tree all night. I collected a few dents and scrapes on my way down, but nothing that won’t heal or cover up.”

His blue eyes raked her over from the top of her dusty head to the toes of her dusty boots, performing their own assessment. Evidently he agreed with her diagnosis.

“I saw the wreckage at the bottom of the gorge. What happened?”

“There was a boulder in the road. With the rain, I didn’t see in time and swung too sharply. I got out of the Blazer before it went over, but the rim crumbled beneath me. I thought…I was sure…” She substituted a wobbly smile for the shudder she wanted to let rip. “The piñon broke my fall. How does that poem go, the one about never seeing anything as beautiful as a tree?”

“Beats me.” He studied her from under the brim of that beat-up hat, his expression noticeably less comforting and reassuring now that they were back on solid ground. “You’re a lucky woman.”

She started to point out that not everyone would classify someone who went over a cliff as lucky, but his next comment buried the thought.

“And damned stupid.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Most people would have more sense than to drive along a narrow canyon rim road late at night in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

Sydney had come to the same conclusion herself just before she went bungee jumping without a bungee, but she didn’t particularly enjoy hearing it from someone else. Still, he’d plucked her out of her eagle’s nest. She owed him, big-time.

Ordering her arms and legs to do their thing, she pushed herself to her feet. Her rescuer had to shoot out a hand and catch her before she whumped back down on her rear. Shaking off his hand, she tried to sound grateful.

“Thanks. Again. I’m Sydney Scott, by the way.”

“I know who you are.”

She flushed at the drawled response, feeling even more stupid than he’d implied earlier. If he was part of a search party, of course he’d know who he’d come looking for.

“And you are?”

“Reece Henderson.”

“Oh.” The straw Stetson that shaped his head as if made for it had led her to assume he was a local. “You’re the dam engineer.”

From the way his eyes narrowed, she must have put a little too much emphasis on dam. Either that, or their exchange of terse faxes had annoyed him as much as it had her.

“When you didn’t show for our meeting this morning,” he said curtly, “I called your assistant and woke him up.”

So much for the massive search-and-rescue effort Sydney had assumed Zack set in motion!

“The kid told me you’d driven out to the canyon. He seemed to think you might have fallen into an artistic trance and gotten lost.”

“I don’t fall into artistic trances,” she said with another smile, slightly strained but still trying hard for grateful.

One black brow lifted in patent disbelief.

“All right,” she admitted grudgingly, “I did leave a pot of red beans and rice on the stove a couple of months ago while I was working a treatment, but the fire didn’t do any real damage.”

When he only looked at her through those cool blue eyes, Sydney gave Zack a mental kick in the shins. How much had her assistant told this guy, anyway?

“Maybe I did start out for San Diego last week and didn’t realize I was going in the wrong direction until I passed Santa Barbara,” she said defensively, “but I was outlining a script in my mind and sort of got caught up in it.”

With a little snort that sounded suspiciously like disgust, her rescuer strolled back to the Jeep to untie the rope. “Is that what you were doing last night when you drove off a cliff?”

“I was not in any kind of a trance last night.”

Well, she amended silently, maybe she had let her imagination go for a while, particularly when the wind whistled eerily through the canyon and raised goose bumps all over her body. Henderson didn’t need to know that, though.

“As I told you, there was a boulder in the road, a chunk of sandstone. I swerved to avoid it.”

“If you say so, lady.”

Gratitude was getting harder and harder to hang on to. Sydney folded her arms across her now-scruffy yellow T-shirt.

“I do say so.”

He straightened, the rope half-looped in his hand, his eyes as sharp and slicing as lasers. “Then maybe you’ll also tell me why you were driving around in a restricted area without a permit? A permit that I had intended to issue at our meeting this morning, by the way.”

That “had intended” caught Sydney’s attention and shoved everything else out of her mind. The terror of sliding over a cliff, the long, frightening hours alone with only a piñon tree for company, the crab-walk up a sheer rock wall fell away. All that remained was her absolute determination to capture the magic of the ruins on videotape…for her dad, for herself, for the joys and tears they’d shared.

Every inch a professional now, she cut right to the heart of the issue. “I apologize for going around you, Mr. Henderson. I arrived in Chalo Canyon earlier than planned yesterday afternoon. I tried to contact you for permission to drive out to the site, but you were out of town. At a wedding, or so they told me.”

“So you drove out, anyway.”

“After I talked to one of your engineers. He said he thought it would be okay. I believe his name was Patrick Something.”

It would be Patrick, Reece thought in disgust. Young, breezy, overconfident of his brand-new civil engineering degree that hadn’t yet been tested by thousands of tons of wet concrete and millions of yards of rushing water. Reece finished looping the rope.

“Apology accepted this time, Ms. Scott. Just don’t go around me again. I’m chief engineer on this project. The responsibility for the safety of everyone involved, including you and your crew, rests with me.”

“It’s Sydney,” she returned, seething inside at the undeserved lecture, but determined to hammer out a working relationship with this bullheaded engineer.

“Sydney,” he acknowledged with a little nod. “Now we’d better get you back to town so you can have those scrapes and dents checked out. In the meantime, I’ll get hold of the county sheriff and let him know about the accident.”

“I’d prefer to conduct our planned discussion before I hitch a ride into town. If this sunlight holds and the rest of my crew arrives on time, I want to shoot some exterior footage this afternoon.”

Reece stared at her across the Jeep’s hood. For God’s sake, was she for real? She’d just spent the night perched in a tree. Her baggy fatigue pants and yellow T-shirt looked like they’d been worn by someone on the losing side of the last war. Her tangled, dark brown mane hung in rats’ tails on either side of her face…a face, he admitted reluctantly, made remarkable by wide green eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth a man could weave some pretty lurid fantasies around.

Not Reece. Not after all he’d heard about Sydney Scott. He’d make damned sure he didn’t weave fantasies of any kind about this particular package of trouble. That tug he felt low in his belly was grudging admiration for her sheer guts, nothing more.

“All right. We’ll drive back to the dam and go over schedules.” He reached into the Jeep and tossed her the mobile phone. “Here, you’d better call your assistant and let him know you’re okay while I block the road.”

With the rope looped over one arm, he rooted around in the back of the Jeep for the toolbox he never traveled without. Inside was a thick roll of electrical tape. It wasn’t red, but it would have to do as a hazard warning until he could get a crew out here to erect permanent barriers.

“Zack? It’s Sydney.”

Her voice carried to him at the rear of the Jeep, attractive enough now that most of the croak had disappeared.

“No, I didn’t get lost. I, er, drove off a cliff.”

She caught Reece’s sardonic look and turned her back.

“Yes, I’m fine. Really. Honest. I swear. Just get hold of the insurance company, okay? Make sure our on-location liability coverage extends to rented Blazers that now reside at the bottom of a river gorge. And arrange for another vehicle. I want to do some site shots this afternoon.”

Reece turned away, shaking his head. This was one single-minded female. He’d remember that in future dealings with her.

“It’s a long story,” she told her assistant, scooping her tangled hair back with one hand. “I’ll fill you in on the details later. What have you heard from Tish and the others? Noon? Good! Tell them to be ready to roll as soon as I get back. What time is it now?”

Her little screech of dismay followed Reece to the vertical outcropping a few yards away. Reddish limestone striated with yellow and green pushed upward. Hardened by nature, sculpted by time, it formed a wall of oddly shaped rock. Too often wind and rain toppled smaller segments of these formations and sent them tumbling down, which in turn caused bigger pieces to break off.

Pale gashes showed where the rock had broken loose last night. Reece fingered the marks, frowning, then surveyed what remained of the road at this point. The stone formations butted out, making it almost impossible to see around the curve. A driver couldn’t have chosen a worse point to go head-to-head with a fallen rock.

Edging past the narrow neck, he blocked the road off from the other side. He did the same on the Jeep side. His insides still were tight from the narrowness of her escape when he returned.

Sydney buried a sigh at the scowl on her rescuer’s face as he strode toward her. She had to work with this guy for the next few weeks. They were not, she decided, going to rank up there among the most enjoyable weeks of her life. With any luck, she and Henderson wouldn’t have to see each other again after today.

That hope sustained her during the short, silent ride to the Chalo River Dam. She’d seen the massive structure many times before, of course. During the years her father had served as fish and game warden for the state park that enclosed the reservoir, he’d taken her by boat and by car when he went to check water levels and shoot the breeze with the power plant operators.

And when the reservoir had been emptied ten years ago, leaving the dam naked and glistening in the sun, she’d attempted to capture its utilitarian starkness as well as the Anasazi ruins on film. Of course, she remembered with a wry twist of her lips, that was before her foolish infatuation with Jamie Chavez had blurred both her vision and her purpose.

She didn’t have that problem now. Now she saw the curved structure through an artist’s eye trained to recognize beauty in its most elemental state. The contrast of whitened concrete against reddish-yellow cliffs made her hands itch for a camera. The symmetry of the arch, with its gated spillways flanking each abutment, pleased her sense of proportion.

The air-conditioned chill of the administration building pleased her even more. Sydney took a moment for her eyes to adjust from dazzling sunlight to dim interior before accepting the mug Reece handed her.

“Thanks.”

“You’d better save your thanks until you taste what’s in it,” he commented dryly. “My guys swear they can use this stuff to patch the dam if we run short of concrete.”

The sludgelike coffee carried enough caffeine to make it worth the effort of swallowing.

“Speaking of patching,” Sydney hinted broadly, “when do you plan to start?”

He shot her another of those sardonic looks, and gestured to a government-issue metal chair beside an equally nondescript desk. She carried her coffee over with her, careful to keep it away from the charts and clipboards precisely aligned on the desktop.

Tossing his hat aside, Henderson forked his fingers through his pelt of black hair before pulling out one of the clipboards. The tanned skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled with concentration as he skimmed an acetate status sheet filled with grease-pencil markings.

“The water passed the halfway mark just after 6:00 a.m. this morning.”

Sydney attempted a quick a mental calculation. The village nestled in an opening in the cliff face fifty feet or so above the riverbed. If the waters had receded halfway down the cliff face already, they’d reach the ruins when? Eight tomorrow morning? Nine?

Hell! There was a reason she’d routinely cut her science and math classes in college and now carried a really good calculator in her purse at all times. The problem was that at this particular moment both purse and calculator rested amid the wreckage of the Blazer.

“When can I expect to see the ruins?”

“If we don’t get any more storms like last night’s, the reservoir should empty down to the river level by noon tomorrow. The cave that contains the ruins is some fifty feet above the riverbed. I calculate the village will start to emerge at approximately 9:24.”

“Nine twenty-four? Not 9:23, huh? I could probably use that extra minute.”

He didn’t appear to appreciate her feeble attempt at humor. “I’m an engineer. Precision ranks right up there with timeliness in our book. And safety.” He leveled her a sardonic look. “Try not to drive off any more cliffs, Ms. Scott.”

“Sydney,” she reminded him, shrugging off the sarcasm as her mind whirled. Thinking of the exterior scenes she wanted to shoot this afternoon and the sequencing for tomorrow’s all-important emergence, she only half absorbed Reece’s deep voice.

“We’ve detected a stress fracture on the right lower quadrant of the dam’s interior. Depending on my exterior damage assessment, we may have to blast some of the old section and pour new concrete. Check in with me each morning before you come out to the site, and I’ll let you know the status and whether I want you in the restricted area.”

That got her attention.

“Each morning?” she yelped. “What happened to your engineering precision here? I need a little more notice than that to plan my daily takes.”

“Call me the night before, then. That’s the best I can do until we complete the damage assessment.”

“Okay, okay. Give me your number. My little black book with all my contacts is at the bottom of the gorge right now.”

Along with all her working files. Thank goodness she always kept complete electronic records of her projects on her laptop, which she’d left back at the motel. She patted her pockets, searching for a pencil before borrowing one from the holder on the desk. Like all the others in the round holder, it was sharpened to a razor tip—another engineering quirk, she guessed.

“You can reach me at the office, on my mobile, or at the Lone Eagle Motel.”

Sydney scribbled down the numbers as he reeled them off. “That’s where we’re staying, too.”

“I know.”

The dry response brought her head up.

“Chalo Canyon’s a small town, Ms. Scott…Sydney. That’s the only motel in town.”

She was well aware of that fact. She was also aware, as well, of the slight chill in his voice. She had a good idea what had caused it.

“And?” she asked coolly.

His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “And people in small towns like to talk, even to strangers. I’ve been hearing about your return to the Chalo Canyon for several weeks now.”

“About my departure from said canyon ten years ago, you mean?”

He leaned back, his long legs sprawled under the desk. The chair squeaked with his weight as he regarded her through eyes framed by ridiculously thick black lashes.

“That, too.”

Sydney had come a long way from the hopelessly romantic nineteen-year-old. She wasn’t running away this time, from Sebastian or Jamie or herself. Nor, she decided grimly, from this chief engineer.

“Listen, Mr. Henderson…”

“Reece.”

“Listen, Reece. What happened ten years ago is, if you’ll excuse the lame pun, water over the dam. Something I’d like very much to forget.”

“Folks around here seem to want to remember it.”

“That’s their problem, not mine.” She leaned forward, jabbing the air with the pencil to emphasize her point. “And even though it’s none of your business, I’ll tell you that the only reason I came back to Chalo Canyon is to capture the ruins on videotape. I started the project a decade ago. This time I intend to finish it.”

He studied her through hooded eyes. “Why is this particular project so important to you that you’d spend ten years planning it?”

Sydney forced down the lump that tried to climb into her throat. Her father’s death was too recent, the scar still too raw, to talk about it with strangers.

“I’m a documentarian,” she said with a tight edge to her voice. “Like you, I take great pride in my work. By themselves, the ruins emerging from their long sleep make a good story. Supplemented with historical background material on the Anasazi and the legend of the Weeping Woman of Chalo Canyon, I can craft a good story into a great one.”

She pushed to her feet.

“Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to hitch a ride back to town. The rest of my crew is supposed to arrive around noon, and I want to be ready to roll as soon as they get here.”

It was, Reece decided as he watched her drive off with one of his underlings, an impressive performance.

He might even have believed her if he hadn’t been sitting front row, center stage when she made her grand entrance at the Lone Eagle Café some eight hours later.