Cold Ridge Read online

  Hankwhistled."Iwonderwhothehelltheseguysare."

  Manny Carrera emerged from behind a half-dead white pine. He couldn't have been that far behind them, but Carine hadn't heard a thing. He was another PJ, a dark-haired, dark-eyed bull of a Texan.

  "Good," Ty said. "That wasn't you blowing up. The shack?"

  "That's my guess." Manny spoke calmly, explosions and shots fired in the woods apparently not enough to ruffle him—or North and Callahan. "There are two shooters, at least one back at the shack. I couldn't get close enough to any of them for a good description."

  "I have binoculars you could have borrowed," Carine said.

  He grinned at her. "But they were shooting at you, kiddo."

  "Not necessarily at me—"

  "Yes. At you. They just didn't want you dead. Scared, paralyzed, maybe. Otherwise, they wouldn't have missed, not that many times. They were using scoped, semiautomatic rifles." His tone was objective, just stating the facts, but his eyes settled on her, his gaze softening slightly. "Sorry. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't target practice gone awry. They didn't mistake you for a deer."

  "I get it." She tried to be as clinical about her near-death experience as the three men were, but she kept seeing herself crouched behind the boulder, hearing the shots, feeling the rock shard hit her head. The bullets had been flying at her, not them. "Maybe they saw me taking pictures, but—" she took a breath "—to me it was just a hunting shack."

  "That's enough for now," Ty said. "We can speculate later. You have a cell phone on you?"

  Carinenodded."Idoubtthere'sanycoverageouthere."

  She took her day pack from him and dug out her phone, but she was totally spent from dodging bullets, diving behind trees and boulders, charging through the woods with two military types, all after tramping around on her own with her camera. She hit the wrong button and almost threw the phone onto the ground.

  North quietly took it and shook his head. "No service. Hank and Manny, you take my truck. I'll go with Carine." He turned to her, eyeing her pragmatically. "Can you drive, or do you want me to?"

  "I can do it."

  There was no cell coverage—there were no houses— until they came to a small lake on the notch road north of the village of Cold Ridge. Even then, Ty barely got the words out to the dispatcher before service dropped out on him.

  He clicked off the phone and looked over at Carine. "I'm serious," he said. "Why haven't we ever dated?"

  She managed a smile. "Because I've always hated you."

  He grinned at her. "No, you haven't."

  And she was lost. Then and there.

  * * *

  By the time state and local police arrived on scene, the shack was burned to the ground and the shooters were gone. According to various law enforcement officers, Carine had likely stumbled on to a smuggling operation they'd had their eye on but couldn't pinpoint. They smuggled drugs, weapons and people into and out of Canada and were, without a doubt, very dangerous.

  Everyone agreed she was lucky indeed she hadn't been killed.

  Even if the pictures she took of the shack were the reason the shooters came after her, they didn't tell her anything. She'd printed them out in her tiny log cabin while she and her military trio had waited for the police to get there.They'd been and gone, taking the memory disk with them. She still had the prints. A shack in the woods with a crooked metal chimney. It looked innocent enough to her.

  Ty cleaned and treated the cut on her forehead. She kept avoiding his eye, aware of her reaction to him, aware that, somehow, everything had changed between them. She'd known him forever. He'd always been a thorn in her side. He'd pushed her out of trees. He'd cut the rope on her tire swing. Now, he was making her tingle. It had to be adrenaline—a post-traumatic reaction of some sort, she decided.

  Hank and Manny built a fire in her woodstove. Hank, she learned, was a newly announced, dark horse candidate to become the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He was a former air force rescue helicopter pilot, a retired major who'd received national attention on his last mission a year ago to recover fishermen whose boat had capsized.

  As unflappable as he'd been in the woods, Hank Callahan was rendered virtually speechless when Antonia Winter walked into her sister's cabin. It made Carine smile. Her sister was a trauma physician in Boston, but she'd been drawn to Cold Ridge for the thirtieth anniversary of the deaths of their parents. She was a couple of inches shorter than Carine, her auburn hair a tone lighter, but Gus said both his nieces had their mother's blue eyes.

  Antonia inspected Ty's medical handiwork, pronouncing it satisfactory. Ty just rolled his eyes. She was focused, hardworking and brilliant, but if she noticed Hank's reaction to her, she gave no indication of it.

  Gus arrived a few minutes later and shooed out all the air force guys, glowering when North winked at Carine and promised he'd see her later. Gus let Antonia stay.

  Their uncle was fifty, his dark hair mostly gray now, but he was as rangy and fit as ever. In addition to outfitting and leading hiking trips into the White Mountains, he conducted workshops in mountaineering, winter camping and mountain rescue. His goal, Carine knew, was to reduce the chances that anyone would ever again die the way his brother and sister-in-law had. But they did. People died in the mountains almost every year.

  He brought in more wood for the woodstove and insisted Carine sit in front of the fire and tell him and her sister everything.

  She did, except for the part about Ty saying she had pretty eyes.

  Gus wanted her to head back to town with him, but Antonia offered to stay with Carine in her small cabin. Their brother, a U.S. marshal in New York, called and agreed with the general assessment that the shooters hadn't "missed" her. If they'd wanted her dead, she'd be dead. "Lay low for a few days, will you?"

  Out of Antonia's earshot, Carine asked Nate what he'd think if she dated Tyler North.

  "Has he asked you out?"

  "No."

  "Thank God for small favors."

  The next day, Ty and his friends ended up rescuing a Massachusetts couple who got trapped on Cold Ridge. Sterling and Jodie Rancourt had recently bought a house off the notch road and set out on their first hike on the ridge, for what they'd intended to be a simple afternoon excursion. Instead, they encountered higher winds, colder temperatures and rougher terrain than they'd anticipated. Ty, Hank and Manny, prepared for the conditions, helped transport them below the treeline, where they were met by a local volunteer rescue team.

  Jodie Rancourt had sprained her ankle, and both she and her husband were in the early stages of hypothermia, in danger of spending the night on the ridge. Given their lack of experience and the harsh conditions, they could easily have died if the three air force guys hadn't come along when they had.

  An eventful weekend in the White Mountains.

  After Manny went back to his air force base and Hank to his senate campaign, Ty and Carine were alone on their quiet road in the shadows of Cold Ridge.

  Gus sensed what was happening and stopped by to tell Carine she'd be out of her damn mind to get involved with Tyler North.

  She didn't listen.

  Her uncle's warning was too late. Way too late. She was in love.

  She and Ty set their wedding date for Valentine's Day.

  A week before she was to walk down the aisle, he showed up at her cabin and called it off. He couldn't go through with it.

  Enter Tyler North into her life.

  Exit Tyler North.

  As quick as that.

  One

  For the first time in weeks, Carine didn't spend her lunch hour thinking about photographing wild turkeys in the meadow outside her log cabin in Cold Ridge. She wandered through Boston Public Garden, eating the tuna sandwich she'd made and packed that morning. Every dime was critical to her ability to afford both her cabin in New Hampshire and her apartment in the city. Not that it was much of an apartment. Not that she could ever live in her cabin again.

  The last of
the leaves, even in Boston, had changed color, and many had fallen to the ground, a temptation on a sunny, mild November afternoon. Carine remembered raking huge piles of leaves as a kid with her brother and sister—and Tyler North—and diving into them, hiding, wrestling.

  Ty almost suffocated her once. Unfortunately, she hadn't thought of it as a premonition. It was just Ty being Ty, pushing the limits.

  But the nine months since their canceled wedding had taught her not to dwell on thoughts of her one-time fiancé and what might have been. She dashed across busy Arlington Street to a French café, splurging on a latte that she took back outside with her. Of course, it was true that she could be photographing wild turkeys in Cold Ridge—or red-tailed hawks, mountain sunsets, waterfalls, rock formations, alpine grasses. She was still a nature photographer, never mind that she'd been in Boston for six months and had just accepted a long-term assignment photographing house renovations.

  Not just any house renovations, she thought. Sterling and Jodie Rancourt had hired her to photograph the painstaking restoration and renovation of their historic Victorian mansion on Commonwealth Avenue.

  Carine sighed, sipping her latte as she peered in the display windows of the upscale shops and salons on trendy Newbury Street. But Ty kept creeping into her thoughts. Even when she'd chased him with a rake at six, spitting bits of leaves out of her mouth, she'd known not to get involved with him, ever. The six-year-old inside her, who knew better than to trust anything he said, must have been screaming bloody murder when she'd fallen in love with him last winter.

  The man could jump out of a helicopter to rescue a downed aircrew—it didn't matter where. Behind enemy lines, on a mountaintop, in a desert or a jungle or an ocean, in snow or heat or rain. In combat or peacetime.

  He had a job to do. Getting cold feet wasn't an option.

  Not so when it'd come to marrying her.

  Carine hadn't spoken to him since he'd knocked on her cabin door and said he couldn't go through with their wedding. He'd disappeared into the mountains for a few days of solo winter camping, lived through it, then returned to his base. She'd heard he'd been deployed overseas and participated in dangerous combat search and rescues. CSARs. He'd also performed humanitarian missions, one to treat injured women and children in an isolated area. Carine appreciated the work he did, and gradually, her anger at him had worn off, along with her shock. They were easy emotions to deal with in comparison to the hurt and embarrassment that had followed him walking out on her, the palpable grief of losing a man she'd come to regard in those few short months, maybe over her lifetime, as her soul mate.

  Even when he was away, there were reminders of him everywhere in Cold Ridge. And, of course, when he was on leave, when he could get away for a couple of days, he was there.

  By early summer, Carine knew she had to pick up the pieces of her life and make some changes, explore new options, expand her horizons—not that it always felt that way. Sometimes, even now, it felt as if she were still licking her wounds, still running from herself and the life she wanted to lead.

  But not today—today was a gorgeous late autumn day, perfect for not thinking about Cold Ridge and Tyler North. As far as she was concerned, he was back to being the thorn in her side he'd always been. She'd trust him with her life—who wouldn't? But she'd never again make the mistake of trusting him with her heart.

  That was what Gus had tried to tell her after the shooting incident in the woods last November. "You can trust him with your life, Carine, but—damn it, he'll break your heart in the end."

  She'd thought her uncle was just worrying about her. People tended to worry about her. She wasn't a tough

  U.S. marshal like her brother or a physician who'd seen everything like her sister—people saw her as the sensitive soul of her family, a nature photographer who'd never really left home.

  Well, now she had.

  She finished her latte and decided to head back to Commonwealth Avenue and the Rancourt house, although she wasn't under any time constraints. The Rancourts hadn't just hired her out of the blue. They weren't part of her horizon-expanding. They'd hired her, Carine knew, because she was from Cold Ridge, friends with the three men who rescued them the year before. Hank Callahan and Antonia had started dating in Boston after that first meeting in Carine's cabin. He was now her brother-in-law. As of a week ago, the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had made him their junior senator-elect. Since he was friends with Ty and Antonia was a fiercely loyal sister, their relationship had suffered after Carine's aborted wedding. Then Antonia found herself trapped on an island off Cape Cod with a violent stalker and with a hurricane about to blow on shore; Hank had come after her, ending any doubts either of them had. The media—and voters—lapped up the story. But it was clear to everyone that Hank hadn't been thinking about their opinion when he'd headed to the Shelter Island.

  No, Carine thought, she had no illusions. As much as she liked them, Sterling and Jodie Rancourt had their own reasons for asking her to do the job.

  She walked slowly, in no hurry. Her hair was pulled back neatly, and she wore jeans, a black turtleneck, her barn coat and waterproof ankle boots, comfortable clothes that permitted her to go up and down ladders, trek over drop cloths and stacks of building supplies and tools, do whatever she had to do to get the particular picture she wanted. She was used to climbing mountains and edging across rock ledges to get the right light, the right color, the right composition. Negotiating house renovations didn't seem that daunting to her. It had been a quiet morning—she hadn't even taken her camera out of its bag and had left it at the Rancourt house while she was at lunch. She was using her digital camera today, at Jodie Rancourt's request—Jodie wanted to get a better idea of the technical differences between digital and film.

  A shiny black sports car pulled alongside her, and Louis Sanborn, also newly employed by the Rancourts, rolled down his window and flashed his killer smile at her. "Hey, Ms. Photographer, need a ride over to the big house?"

  Carine laughed. "Thanks for the offer, Mr. Security Man." Louis was tall and, despite his prematurely gray, scrub-brush hair, younger than he looked, probably just a year or two older than she was. The Rancourts had hired him two weeks ago as the assistant to their chief of security. "I don't mind walking. We won't get many more days like today. It's beautiful out."

  "Only according to you granite-head types."

  "It's in the fifties!"

  "That's what I'm saying. Having a good lunch hour?"

  "An excellent lunch hour."

  "Me, too. See you over on Comm. Ave."

  His car merged back into the Newbury Street traffic. Carine continued on up to Exeter Street, then cut down it to Commonwealth Avenue. With its center mall and stately Victorian buildings, it was the quintessential street of Boston's Back Bay, all of which was on reclaimed land that used to be under water—hence its name.

  Still in no hurry, she sat on a bench on the mall, famous for its early springtime pink magnolias, now long gone. A toddler ran after a flutter of pigeons, and Carine tried not to think about the babies she'd meant to have with Ty, but, nonetheless, felt a momentary pang of regret. The toddler's mother scooped him up and swung him in the brisk November air, then set him back in his stroller. He was ticked off and started to kick and scream. He wanted to chase more pigeons. Two months ago—a month ago—the scene would have made Carine cry, but now she smiled. Progress, she thought.

  She walked across the westbound lane to the historic brick-front mansion the Rancourts had snapped up when it came onto the market eighteen months ago. It was a rare find. Its longtime owner, now dead, had never carved it up into apartments, in fact, had done few renovations—many of the house's original features were still intact. Hardwood floors, ornate moldings, marble fireplaces, chandeliers, wainscoting, fixtures. It had taken most of the past eighteen months for the team of architects, preservationists, designers and contractors just to come up with the right plans for what to do.

 
Carine's job photographing the renovations could easily take her through the winter, while still leaving room for her to pursue other projects. She'd been at it for six weeks. Work would happen in a frenzy for a few days, the place crawling with people. Then everyone would vanish, and nothing would happen for a morning, an afternoon, even a week. That left her with spurts of time she could put to use doing something more productive than drinking lattes and window shopping.

  She noticed Louis Sanborn's car parked out front and smiled, shaking her head. Leave Louis to find a convenient parking space—she never could, and almost always walked or took public transportation in the city.

  Since she'd left for lunch, someone had set out a pot of yellowmums on the front stoop; the wrought-ironrail was cool to the touch as she mounted the steps to the massive dark wood door. It was open a crack, and she pushed it with her shoulder and went in, immediately tossing her latte cup into an ugly green plastic trash bin just inside the door. Sweeping, graceful stairs rose up to the second floor of the five-story house. She'd never been in any place like it. Not one inch of it reminded her of her little log cabin with its rustic ladder up to the loft.

  "Hello?" she called. "Anyone here?"

  Her footsteps echoed on the age-darkened cherry floor of the center hall. To her left was a formal drawing room with a marble fireplace and a crystal chandelier, then a smaller room and the library. There was even an elegant ballroom on the second floor. The Rancourts had promised to invite Carine the first time they used it, teasing her that they wanted to see her in sequins.

  She retrieved her camera from a cold, old-fashioned radiator in the hall. There had to be someone around. Nobody would leave the door open with the place empty.

  "Louis? Are you here? It's me, Carine."

  He could be upstairs, she thought, slinging her camera bag over her shoulder. She'd assumed workers would be in this afternoon, but she didn't keep close track of their comings and goings. As she turned to head back to the front entry, something caught her eye in the library. She wasn't sure what—something out of place. Wrong.