Carla Neggers: Cold Ridge

Hank Callahan shifted. "I don't know about you, but I'd like to put some serious mileage between me and the guys with guns."

Carine steadied her breathing. "What about your other friend Manny-"

"Don't worry about Carrera," Ty said. "He can take care of himself. What's the best route out of here?"

"We could follow the stone wall. There's an old logging road not far from the shack-"

He shook his head. "If the shooters are using the shack, that's the road they'd take. They'll have vehicles."

She thought a moment. "Then we should follow the stream. It's not as direct, but it'll take us to where we parked."

"How exposed will we be?"

"From a shooter's perspective? I can't make that judgment. I just know it's the fastest route out of here."

"Fast is good," Callahan said.

Ty nodded, then winked at Carine. "Okay, babe, we'll go your way."

She didn't remember him ever having called her "babe" before today.

Thirty minutes later, as they came to the gravel parking area, they heard an explosion back in the woods, from the direction of the shack and the shooters. Black smoke rose up over the trees.

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.