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and I promised I’d be back tonight, before they went home.”

      He looked confused. “I thought you said you weren’t married.”

      “I’m not. They’re the kids at The Family Center. I told them that I would be back today. I made a calendar and put it up. Today is circled and they’re watching for me. “I can’t let them down. They’ve had too much disappointment in their lives already.”

      “So that’s what’s so urgent that you had to hitchhike to get back on time?”

      She almost said an automatic, “Yes, that’s why,” but something else hit her out of the blue. Something she realized she’d known all along, but hadn’t acknowledged. She simply wanted to get home as soon as possible. She needed to get back where she felt she belonged. “Partly,” she conceded, but didn’t elaborate.

      “I suspect they’d be just fine if you hadn’t found a way to get back,” he said, but his tone had become almost distracted. “Kids are adaptable.”

      The tension in her grew even more. “Maybe. If they hadn’t been thrown into lives that they either don’t fully understand or can’t cope with, maybe things would be different.”

      “Maybe they need to learn to cope,” he said, tapping the screen right in front of him. She’d thought he was talking to keep her distracted, to make sure she didn’t freak out, but his almost absentminded comment bothered her.

      “Tell them that they need to suck it up and get over it?”

      The edge in her voice finally caught his attention. “No, that’s not what I’m saying,” he countered. “I just meant—”

      “Your reason for going to Wolf Lake is valid, and mine isn’t?”

      He held up a palm toward her. “Okay, okay, this has gotten off track. Let’s get back to what I meant, not what you heard.”

      That made her snort. “Oh, a case of ‘what are you going to believe, me or your lying ears?’ Is that it?”

      He stared at her, and then burst out laughing. She watched him, finally finding the humor in what she’d said, but she didn’t laugh. The best she could do was offer an apology. “Peace?”

      “Yes,” he said, and she felt the plane turn slightly to her left, dipping into the snow streaked grayness around them.

      “What are you doing? I thought we were managing to get toward the edges of this storm?”

      “We are,” he said, but without a lot of conviction in his voice.

      “Then why are you looking concerned?” she prodded as the plane dipped even more. “Come on, you can tell me. I won’t get upset, just tell me the plain, honest truth.”

      He hesitated, which didn’t bode well for what he was going to say if he did what she asked. She braced herself and the howling wind was almost drowning out the sound of the motors. “Okay, we should be breaking out of this, at least, we should have broken out of it by now, but we haven’t, and the mountains are there, far too close. So, I have to maneuver a bit, and it might make the plane roll.”

      “Roll?” She envisioned going head over heels in the plane as it did a giant loop in the sky.

      “Shouldn’t have said that. I mean I’m going to have to angle more than normal, and you might feel a shifting of center. But I have to do it.”

      “Okay, okay, I can understand that,” she said quickly. “Sure, that makes sense. Go ahead and do it.”

      Gage cast her a glance and said, “Thank you, I will.” Then he focused his full attention on the controls.

      Things seemed to be just what he said, that dipping, then leveling, then dipping again, mostly on his side, then she heard a muttered oath under his breath. He pressed something on his earpiece.

      “What’s happening?” she asked, but he wasn’t talking to her.

      He was back on the radio, speaking rapidly, but this time she could tell he was trying to make a connection. He said his call letters over and over again, waited, then tapped the screen several times before he started to talk again. A mishmash of unintelligible words to her. He must have made contact, but as far as she could tell, none of what he was saying was good.

      When she thought he was finished trying the radio, she asked, “How bad is it?”

      He shook his head as if to silence her, then he was speaking into the radio again. “Roger, roger!” He had made contact, listened, then shook his head. “Negative on that.” He listened as he fought to keep the plane level again. “The edge?” he asked. “Temps dropped, too low.”

      Merry turned from him, wishing he was smiling now and enjoying this, despite how much that had annoyed her earlier. He was grim, intent on the words coming into his ears from the headset and the readings on the panel.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      GAGE FELT RESISTANCE in the controls that had little to do with the fierce wind and the snow sticking to the windows. He could see the temperature outside had dropped twenty degrees in less than a minute, and he knew what was happening. He switched radio channels to one he hoped to never see on any gages in a plane he was flying, 121.5 MHz—the international aeronautical emergency frequency.

      “Mayday, mayday, mayday!” he repeated, followed by his call sign and his coordinates. “Extreme temperatures, engine involvement.”

      A voice from a tower two hundred miles north of their location spoke in his ear. “Roger that,” the voice said, stating what he’d just told the person. “Got you. Can you maintain altitude?”

      “Negative,” Gage sent back. “Going down.” He heard Merry gasp, but he couldn’t even look at her right then as the voice said, “I read you five by five.”

      “Starting now,” he said into the radio and eased back on the rudder, cutting his speed so the nose slipped lower. “Now!”

      “Roger that. Assistance is on the way.”

      * * *

      MERRY HUGGED HERSELF AGAIN, but she couldn’t make herself close her eyes and imagine the meadow and the bubbles. She stared at the icy snow hitting the window, and the way the light was all but gone. Mountains? Had he said mountains? And they’re going down? An image of a huge peak coming at them shook her, the visibility cut so drastically that she wasn’t sure they’d see anything before they got to it.

      She said a quick, silent prayer for both of them, and for the children. She looked at Gage. “Are we going to crash?”

      “Not if I can help it.”

      “But you said—”

      “I know what I said. I have to cover all eventualities.”

      She remembered something her father had mentioned years ago. “A couple of those Carson boys are big risk takers, going to be hard to control when they get older.” He’d explained that there was no other reason why Gage and Adam ended up at the lake one night, hanging from an outcropping like two puppets, just because they’d wanted to climb the face of the cliff right after a rainstorm.

      At the time, she hadn’t given her dad’s remark much thought, and couldn’t recall anything other than he had been called out for the rescue party by the boys’ grandfather, old Jackson Wolf. “You climbed the cliff at the lake and dangled there with your brother Adam until your grandfather found you, didn’t you?”

      He cast her a sharp glance. “What made you think of that? Adam and I missed the route we planned on the climb and got stranded. My grandpa found us. He said he had a vision or a hunch, but he came and got us down.”

      “I bet you enjoyed it until you realized how far you’d gone, didn’t you?”

      His expression got quizzical. “When you’re

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