Cold Pursuit by Carla Neggers

Author:Carla Neggers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781426823626
Publisher: Mira
Published: 2008-11-15T23:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

Elijah noted three chickadees darting among the spruce trees just below the falls but didn’t pause to enjoy them. He’d done the hike up from where he’d just located Devin’s beat-up truck in forty minutes. Normally it took an hour. The trail was steep, rough and rocky. He hadn’t taken the time to enjoy the view. He figured Jo was down there, though, and decided he should have just wrestled her gun off her and thrown her in his truck with him.

She was a capable, experienced federal agent. He liked the idea of knowing where she was.

Devin had pulled onto an old lane and left his truck hidden among pine trees. Elijah had found it because he was looking for it, and because he’d been trying to think like an eighteen-year-old kid butting heads with his family and friends over a girl he couldn’t have.

It wasn’t that hard to do.

The falls trail started closer to the lodge, which allowed guests to get to it on foot without a long trek along the ridge road. The lane where Devin had parked was farther down the road, but the trail up to the falls was shorter. Also more difficult, though Elijah didn’t mind that part.

The chickadees danced off into the wilderness as he came to the falls trail. He followed it around a level curve, hearing the water rushing down off the mountain.

The air wasn’t that cold. He was warm enough in his fleece without resorting to the extra layers in his pack.

He ducked under the low branches of a red oak and made his way to a ledge above the falls. Water swirled below him in an endless cascade that smoothed and shaped the wall of gray granite.

He remembered holding hands with Jo under this same oak as she told him she wanted to marry him at the falls. It was just like her not to wait to be asked. She’d been so full of dreams, so eager to leave Vermont and their small hometown. He’d been clueless about anything beyond his desire to get Jo Harper into bed.

“Some things don’t change,” he muttered, and warned himself to focus on the task at hand.

Find Devin, find Nora. Go from there.

In his winter-camping class, Nora Asher had been dedicated and self-conscious—a perfectionist who didn’t want to be the yahoo Ivy Leaguer who got lost in the woods and had to be rescued. She hated, she’d said during their afternoon break, the idea of a bunch of Vermonters searching for her and thinking here was another dumb-assed flatlander in a self-inflicted mess.

Not that anyone would think that, but that was how Nora saw the world.

She’d also wanted to prove she was tough. In Elijah’s experience, that was as sure a way into trouble as being an idiot was. But it didn’t matter.

“Forget your pride if you get in a jam and ask for help,” he’d told her. “Just get home alive.”

She’d given him the sort of look that he’d become accustomed to—the one

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