LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      Saturday, June 7

      Lazy S Ranch.

      Dr. Karen Sloane was used to working under pressure. In med school, she’d found out she was a wimp when it came to dealing with the suffering of others and she’d trained herself to remain absolutely steady, her mind clear, her reflexes lightning quick. But now, standing alone near the makeshift canteen just beyond the glaring spotlights that bathed the side of Devil Butte in brilliant light, she was close to shattering.

      Silhouetted by the harsh glow, rescue workers in protective clothing and miners’ helmets struggled to reach the spot below a thick slab of red rock where her eight-year-old daughter, Victoria, was trapped in the entrance of an unknown cave. Torrential rains had tumbled tons of rock and earth from the face of the butte, exposing the dark pit.

      In the past ten hours since her arrival, she’d experienced shock, disbelief, terror, and finally a numb misery that increased minute by minute. Only one thing remained constant. Vicki was alone in that pit—and time was running out.

      Karen had been on duty at Vanderbilt Memorial when Cassidy had called around ten that morning, and told her to come home. She could still hear the raw note in her husband’s distinctively husky voice, the stark undertones of desperation. The unspoken plea for help.

      Somehow she’d managed to get through the roadblocks and detours set up by the state police, and she’d reached the site to the west of the main house shortly after Lieutenant Brendan Gallagher and the fire department’s mountain rescue unit had begun on the rescue shaft now angled down toward her little girl.

      Cassidy had been like a crazy man, shouting at Bren to let him help, threatening his poker buddy with castration and worse if Bren didn’t give him something to do. Something. anything. If he had to, he’d claw his way to his daughter with his bare hands.

      Catching sight of Karen half running, half stumbling down the mud-scoured slope, Bren had silently pleaded with her for help. She’d put aside her questions long enough to coax Cassidy away from the knot of grim-faced, dedicated men. A shiver transited her spine at the wild suffering she saw in his eyes. For an instant she wasn’t sure he even knew who she was. And then his arms crushed her to him, his need a living thing.

      Between hard shudders, he told her about Vicki’s trip to the butte with her dog, Rags, and her regular baby-sitter, Wanda June, to watch the clouds. About the tons of mud that had torn down the hill. Of their little girl’s sudden disappearance and Wanda’s frantic search of the area before she’d run across the storm-ravaged pastures to find Cassidy.

      It had been Rags who’d led him to the raw gash in the granite.

      The torn flesh of Cassidy’s face and hands bore testimony to his attempts to reach their child. But his shoulders had been too broad to allow him to reach into the black pit where Vicki had been trapped.

      Knowing her husband’s almost irrational fear for his daughter’s safety, Karen had a good idea how terribly he’d been suffering when he’d all but ridden a gelding into the ground in order to call for help. She suspected, too, that leaving Vicki with only Wanda and Rags to guard the site had almost torn him apart.

      But when Karen tried to comfort him, he suddenly stiffened, as though jerked out of a terrible nightmare. His face twisted, his head snapped up. The arms that had bruised her flesh, so tightly had they held her, relaxed.

      Suddenly he was in control again, his gaze steely, his emotions shuttered safely, as he jerked his hat from his head, placed it on hers and ordered her into taking his slicker, all the while castigating her for not wearing a jacket, for driving too fast, for a half dozen things she no longer remembered.

      It was Cassidy’s way. Reaming her out while at the same time making her breakfast after she’d worked a late shift the night before. Growling orders at her as though she were one of his wranglers even as he put in endless hours helping her paint Vicki’s room or till the garden plot.

      Maybe he never said he loved her in so many words, but a woman knew when she was loved. For all his firmly rooted beliefs and sometimes inexplicable opinions on the way of things, Cassidy was a gentle man at heart.

      Karen was sure of it.

      With

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