A Hero To Hold

Images of the rescue flooded her mind. Snow. Cold. Blinding pain. A vague sense of terror she couldn’t shake even now, as she lay safe and alive in this unfamiliar bed. But she clearly remembered this man with the incredible blue eyes and devil’s grin. He’d swooped down out of the sky and plucked her from the rocks and snow. As she took in his steady expression and canny gaze, she remembered vividly how safe she’d felt in his arms, the solid feel of his body against hers, the softness of his voice, the whisper of his breath against her cheek when he’d murmured gentle words and eased her terror.

“You saved my life,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Linda Castillo will cast a spell over readers, enthralling them with…A Hero To Hold.”

—Patricia Rouse, Romantic Times Magazine

Dear Reader,

There’s so much great reading in store for you this month that it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with bestselling author and reader favorite Fiona Brand. She’s back with another of her irresistible Alpha heroes in Marrying McCabe. There’s something about those Aussie men that a reader just can’t resist—and heroine Roma Lombard is in the same boat when she meets Ben McCabe. He’s got trouble—and passion—written all over him.

Our FIRSTBORN SONS continuity continues with Born To Protect, by Virginia Kantra. Follow ex-Navy SEAL Jack Dalton to Montana, where his princess (and I mean that literally) awaits. A new book by Ingrid Weaver is always a treat, so save some reading time for Fugitive Hearts, a perfect mix of suspense and romance. Round out the month with new novels by Linda Castillo, who offers A Hero To Hold (and trust me, you’ll definitely want to hold this guy!); Barbara Ankrum, who proves the truth of her title, This Perfect Stranger; and Vickie Taylor, with The Renegade Steals a Lady (and also, I promise, your heart).

And if that weren’t enough excitement for one month, don’t forget to enter our Silhouette Makes You a Star contest. Details are in every book.

Enjoy!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

A Hero to Hold

Linda Castillo

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Ernest, my hero

LINDA CASTILLO

grew up in a small farming community in western Ohio. She knew from a very early age that she wanted to be a writer—and penned her first novel at the age of thirteen during one of those long Ohio winters. Her dream of becoming a published author came true the day Silhouette called and wanted to buy one of her books!

Romance is at the heart of all her stories. She loves the idea of two fallible people falling in love amid danger and against their better judgment—or so they think. She enjoys watching them struggle through their problems, realize their weaknesses and strengths along the way and, ultimately, fall head over heels in love.

She is the winner of numerous writing awards, including the prestigious Maggie Award for Excellence. In 1999, she was a triple Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist, and her first Silhouette release, Remember the Night, took first place in the romantic suspense division.

Linda spins her tales of love and intrigue from her home in Dallas, Texas, where she lives with her husband and three lovable dogs. You can contact her at P.O. Box 670501, Dallas, Texas 75367-0501.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Prologue

He was going to kill her this time.

The realization stunned her. Terror and disbelief and an odd sense of incredulity tangled in her chest. She couldn’t believe it had come to this, couldn’t bear to think everything she’d been through in the last two years had culminated in this single, horrifying moment.

The icy wind buffeted her as she sprinted through the darkness. Rocks and frozen earth cut her bare feet, but she hardly felt the pain. Swirling snow blinded her, but she didn’t slow down. Clutching the pistol, she picked up speed and ran blindly, barely negotiating the curve in the road through the darkness and driving snow. Her breaths puffed out in white clouds of vapor as she gave herself over to the flight instinct and pushed her body to the limit.

Headlights sliced through the darkness behind her, the sight bringing a fresh rise of terror. She heard the whine of the engine over the howl of the wind, over the wild beat of her own heart. A scream hovered in her throat, but she knew better than to waste precious energy on something that hopeless. No one would hear her up here in the middle of the night. No one would rescue her. If she was going to get out of this alive, she was going to have to rely on herself.

Too bad she just happened to be fresh out of ideas.

Another turn in the road and the headlights were upon her. A dozen feet away. Too close for escape. Fear and adrenaline twisted inside her as she stumbled to a halt at the side of the road. Cold air burned her lungs as she gasped for breath. Behind her, the vehicle’s engine dropped to idle. Vertigo gripped her when she looked down at the jagged rocks of the ravine before her. Heart drumming, she turned and faced her pursuer.

She thought she’d been prepared for this final confrontation, but the sight of him terrified her anew—and made her question whether she had the guts to call his bluff one last time.

She raised the gun, trying in vain to still the quiver in her arms. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Put the gun down, angel.”

“Stay away from me!”

“I can’t,” he said, starting toward her. “You’ve left me no choice.”

Struggling to remain calm, she stared at his dark form silhouetted against the glare of the headlights, realizing for the first time that if she died tonight no one would ever know the truth.

“Stop!” Her finger curled around the trigger. “I’ll do it!”

“You don’t have the guts.” Never taking his eyes from her, he treaded steadily closer.

She squeezed the trigger. The gun exploded, kicking hard in her hand. The sound of her own scream deafened her.

But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even flinch. She’d missed, she realized, just as he’d known she would. He knew her too well, knew she wasn’t a killer.

Just as she knew he was.

Heart raging, she gathered the broken pieces of her resolve and turned toward the ravine. There was only one way to save herself, and as surely as she heard him moving ever closer, she knew she didn’t have a choice but to do the unthinkable. Pressing her hand to her abdomen, she whispered a prayer and started down the steep incline.

His shout rose over the roar of the wind, but she couldn’t make out the words, and she didn’t stop. She’d only descended a few feet when the loose rock beneath her crumbled. Reaching out, she tried to break her fall, but there was nothing there except cold air and ice-slicked granite. An instant later the ground rushed up and punched her like a giant fist. She began to tumble, pain stunning her as rock and broken saplings battered her body.

The inevitability of death shouldn’t have shocked her; she’d known she wouldn’t get out of this mess unscathed. Still, her mind rebelled against the idea of her life ending this way. With so much left undone, so many dreams unfulfilled.

Fragments of her life, the places she’d been and the people she loved flashed in her mind’s eye in brilliant hues. But the mountain was relentless, and the steep incline sucked her down, tumbling her like a seashell battered by a frozen, turbulent sea. One by one, her senses shut down until she knew only darkness and the bitter taste of betrayal. As she plummeted deeper into the abyss, the pain slowly relinquished its grip. The darkness embraced her with murky arms and the promise of warmth and truth.

And, at last, she was free.

Chapter 1

“I’ve got a visual. Female subject. Two o’clock. She’s up and moving.”

Search-and-rescue medic John Maitland jerked the strap of his helmet tightly against his chin, stepped over to the chopper’s open door and looked down. Sure enough, a woman huddled against an outcropping of rock on the side of the mountain seventy-five feet below.

“What the hell is she doing up here?” he muttered, mostly to himself.

“Waiting for you to harness up and move your butt!” came the pilot’s voice from the cockpit.

“Just get me closer, Flyboy,” John shouted over the roar of the Bell 412’s twin Pratt and Whitney engines and the rush of wind through the door. “Sometime this week, if you don’t mind.”

“Not in this wind. We’re already at forty knots. Gusts to fifty-five.” The pilot, Tony “Flyboy” Colorosa, shot him a cocky look. “Don’t tell me you can’t do an extraction from a measly seventy-five feet up in a little breeze.”

John met the other man’s expression in kind. “You just fly this sardine can—I’ll take care of the tough stuff,” he said. Then he added under his breath, “The wind might make it a little more interesting.”

“Subject is standing. No visual trauma.” Team leader Buzz Malone lowered his binoculars and scowled at John. “Skip the litter,” he said, referring to the portable stretcher. “We’re going to swoop and scoop. Harness her, and I’ll winch her up with you.”

“What about spinal movement?” John asked.

“If we don’t get her up in the next five minutes, we’re going to abort. It will take us too long to reach her on foot. She’ll die of hypothermia. Take your pick.”

As much as he hated the idea of manipulating a possible trauma patient without the benefit of spinal support, John knew with heavy weather moving in, the situation had boiled down to a quick extraction—and saving her life. There was only so much they could do during an airlift. They’d deal with possible injuries later. “Roger that,” he said.

He started toward the door, but Buzz stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “If it were anyone but you going down there, I’d abort this mission in a New York minute.”

“Good thing we’re not in New York.” Reaching the launch point at the door, John turned to face the other man, his hands moving expertly over his harness as he prepared to drop. “I’ve never missed an extraction, Buzz. I don’t plan to start now.”

“Watch those trees.” The team leader gave him a thumbs-up. “You get one attempt, then I’m bringing you in.”

Giving him a mock salute, John shoved off into space. Cold air slapped him like icy palms. The rat-tat-tat of the chopper’s rotor blades deafened him, but both were discomforts he’d come to love despite the dangers of jumping out of a helicopter with nothing more than a cable and his own skill separating him from certain death.

He wasn’t worried about missing contact on the first go-round. In the six years he’d been a search-and-rescue medic, he’d never missed an extraction. Besides, high winds or not, there wasn’t a man alive who could fly the Bell 412 better than Flyboy. As for aborting the mission, John simply knew better. Buzz Malone might be tough-talking when it came to keeping his crew safe, but John had worked with the older man long enough to know there was no way in hell the team would abort the mission and let that woman die.

Twenty feet down from the chopper, the wind began to twirl him like a yo-yo. Accustomed to the action, John rode with it, maintaining his equilibrium by keeping his eyes on the huddled form below. He wondered how she’d gotten there. Even from a distance of some fifty feet, he could tell from her lack of attire and equipment that she wasn’t a hiker who’d lost her way in the storm. She wasn’t even wearing a coat, for God’s sake. What on earth was a woman clad in little more than street clothes doing at nine thousand feet in the middle of January?

A cross-country skier had reported her stranded on the side of the steep ravine just an hour earlier. The call out to Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue had come in from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department twenty minutes ago. The team had been ready to go in less than four minutes.

John didn’t know how long she’d been there and had to assume she was hypothermic. If she’d fallen, God only knew what other injuries she’d sustained. For now, the most serious threat was the weather, so he had no choice but to lift her out, then assess her injuries once they got her onboard the chopper.

He scanned the area with a practiced eye. There was no evidence of a vehicle, so he wasn’t dealing with motorvehicle trauma. There was no sign of a wrecked snowmobile, either. No tent in sight. No sign of other people.

Something bothered him about the entire scenario.

The mystery moved to the back of his mind when the cable jerked with a sudden gust of wind, whipping him perilously close to an outcropping of rock. “You want to keep it steady, Flyboy?” John said into his helmet mike. “If it’s not too much trouble, that is.”

“Just want to make sure you’re awake,” came the pilot’s voice.

Smiling, enjoying the adrenaline rush that came with the added danger of high winds, John concentrated on the swiftly approaching ground and prepared to touch down. The terrain consisted mostly of jagged rock and ice. Twenty feet away, a stand of spindly pines shivered in the wind from the chopper’s blades.

John’s feet hit the ground hard, but he was prepared and bent his knees to absorb the impact. In an instant, he jerked the patient’s harness from his flight suit and started toward the subject, praying Flyboy could keep the chopper steady enough to prevent him from getting jerked off his feet and slammed into a rock or dragged through tree branches. He could do without a broken arm—or God forbid—a broken neck.

He made eye contact with the woman as he approached her. Dark, frightened eyes, glazed with the effects of hypothermia and wide with terror, met his as she stumbled toward him. Full, colorless lips moved to speak, but she didn’t make a sound. He saw the will to live in its rawest form in the depths of her eyes, and an acute sense of urgency overwhelmed him. Hell or high water, he was going to get her out of this.

But it was the beauty of the face staring back at him that nearly stopped him in his tracks. Dark, pretty eyes and a delicate cut of jaw dominated her features. A slash of high cheekbones beneath pale flesh tinged pink from the cold. Wavy hair the color of an alpine sunset and wild as a mountain gale tangled over slender shoulders. Even as dirty and bruised as she was, he could plainly see her body was lush in all the right places. If it hadn’t been for his medical training and the fact that the chopper was hovering seventy-five feet overhead in forty-knot winds, he would have taken a moment just to appreciate the view.

John was accustomed to all sorts of rescues, from the severe trauma of a mountain motor-vehicle accident, to the tourist who’d called out the team for nothing more than a bee sting, to the Boy Scout who’d lost his way during a hike last summer. But the sight of this particular subject hit him like the business end of a shovel and went deep.

“Hey, gorgeous.” He started toward her, offering up his best relax-everything’s-going-to-be-all-right grin. “I’m a medic. My name’s John. My team and I are going to airlift you out of here and transport you to the hospital. Do you understand?”

Her eyes were glassy, her flesh as pale as the snow being kicked up by the rotor blades. But she was alive. He figured they both had cause to be thankful for that. John had lost patients before, but he damn well didn’t like it. One thing he’d learned about himself over the years was that he was a consummate sore loser when it came to the Grim Reaper coming out ahead. It was the one aspect of his job he took personally.

He reached her just in time to keep her from sinking to the frozen earth. Even through his thick gloves, he could feel her shivering. “Easy,” he said. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

“Please…no.” Surprising him, she twisted in his arms. “Get…away…from me…bastard.”

“Easy—”

The gun came out of nowhere. A big, ugly beast capable of killing him with a single shot and aimed right at this face. Releasing her, John lurched back, swearing richly. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’ll kill you,” she choked. “I swear. I won’t let you get away with this.”

“Whoa! I’m cool.” He raised his hands above his head, aware of the sharp stab of fear in his chest. “Look, my hands are up, Red. Now put the damn gun down before someone gets hurt.”

He knew hypothermia could cause mental confusion. One of his Coast Guard buddies had told him about a water extraction off the Alaskan Coast during which the subject had fought so hard, they hadn’t been able to get him in the cage. The subject had ended up drowning.

What in God’s name was she doing with a gun?

John knew he could handle her if it came down to a physical confrontation. She was small and fatigued and severely hypothermic. All he had to do was get the gun away from her. Considering she could barely hold the damn thing upright told him that wasn’t going to be too difficult. But he wasn’t a big enough fool not to take the situation seriously.

“Easy, Red. You’re hurt and confused. Put the gun down, and let me help you.”

She swayed. “Stay away. Just…stay—”

He rushed her. She yelped and swung at him, but was so weakened, John easily dodged the blow. He grabbed for the gun, but before he could get his fingers around it, she lost her grip. He watched it tumble down the ravine and disappear into a stand of juniper twenty feet below.

“What the hell were you doing with a gun?” he snapped, giving her a small shake.

She blinked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “I thought—I thought…Richard…”

His concentration wavered as a wave of damp, cinnamon-colored hair washed over his arm. Simultaneously the sweet scent of columbine in spring titillated his senses. Turning her toward him, he got his first up-close look at her face. Her alabaster skin was as flawless as virgin snowfall. He winced at the purple bruise above her left temple and the cut on her chin. Even her nose was skinned. But the underlying beauty struck him, and John felt the impact of her all the way through his flight suit and into his bones.

He stared at her, realizing with a stark sense of dismay that she had the most incredible brown eyes he’d ever seen. “What’s your name?” he shouted above the roar of wind and engines, watching her carefully to gauge her lucidity.

“I…” Her brows furrowed, then she blinked at him. “I—I’m…”

She was pale and confused; both were symptoms of hypothermia. The condition was assumed in all cold-weather situations. Judging from her state of mind, he suspected she’d been hypothermic for quite some time. Snow-damp jeans and a sweater were no protection against subfreezing temperatures and windchills hovering around zero. Her hair was damp. He looked down at her feet and cursed. She wasn’t even wearing shoes. Frostbite would be an issue, as well, he realized, and another wave of urgency surged through him.

“Is anyone with you?” he asked.

Her body jolted, and he saw fresh terror leap into her eyes. “I…I don’t know.”

“Come on, sweetheart, stay with me.” Holding her face between his hands, he made eye contact. “Are you alone?” he pressed. “I need to know if there’s anyone else down here. I’ll need to get them in the chopper.”

“I’m…not sure.” She looked over her shoulder uneasily. “I think I’m alone.”

“Good girl.” Using his left arm to steady her, he quickly secured the patient’s harness around her, trying not to notice the way that sweater clung to curves he had no business noticing at a moment like this. “How did you get here?”

“He was…chasing me.” Her gaze snapped to his, her eyes widened with what might have been recognition. “Oh, no. Oh, God! Richard, please, don’t—”

“Calm down,” he said firmly. “Just stay calm—”

“I won’t let you—”

“Stop it!” An alarm trilled in John’s head, and he gave her a little shake. The last thing he needed was for her to go ballistic on him while they dangled seventy-five feet over terrain not fit for a mountain goat. “Look at me.”

When her gaze met his, he saw vividly the terror in her eyes and felt the hairs at his nape stand on end. Something—or someone—had this woman spooked in a major way. “My name is John. I’m not going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you. You’re safe. Do you understand?”

Her lids fluttered, her eyes rolling back. Simultaneously her knees buckled. John caught her an instant before she fell.

“Terrific,” he muttered. Easing her to arm’s length, he drew her harness tight and clipped it to his, so that her limp body was flush against him. “We’re going up, sweetheart. Just relax and enjoy the ride.”

She stirred. “I can’t…feel my hands,” she whispered. “They’re numb. I can’t hold on.”

“You don’t have to hold on. I’ve got you.” He took her hands in his. Even through his thick gloves, he could feel the tremors wracking her body.

“Don’t…let me go,” she said.

Setting her palms against his chest, he put his arms around her shoulders. “I’m not going to let you go. I promise.”

Dark, shimmering eyes met his. He’d intended to give her a reassuring smile to keep her calm, like he had with a hundred other subjects during a hundred other rescues. But the power behind her gaze stopped him cold. For a split second the flying snow and the roar of the wind faded until his focus narrowed to the feel of her against him, the smell of her hair and the frightened, striking eyes staring back at him.

“Come on, Maitland, what are you doing? Picnicking down there?” Buzz’s voice crackled through his helmet communication gear with all the finesse of a chain saw. “Get it in gear!”

Shaking off his reaction to the woman, John forced himself to take a mental step back and signaled for the other man to winch them up. An instant later, the rope drew taut. She gasped as they were jerked off their feet.

“Damn winch operator has the mentality of a gorilla,” he grumbled, more to calm her than to complain because he knew there wasn’t a man alive who could operate a winch better than Buzz Malone.

In only a few seconds, John’s thoughts strayed from the operation at hand to the woman pressed against him—and how that closeness was affecting his body. He tried to keep his thoughts on IV fluids, the possibility of frostbite and the radio call he would be making to Lake County Hospital, but the fact that this beautiful, frightened woman was pressed flush against him with her head on his chest was doing a number on his concentration. Her arms were around his waist, and she clung to him as if he were her lifeline. Even through the bulk of his flight suit, he was aware of her body. Small-boned. Soft. Curvy as a mountain back road—and undoubtedly just as dangerous. Her fragrant hair was loose and blowing in his face.

He shouldn’t have acknowledged, even to himself, how good she felt wrapped around him like that—she was a trauma patient. He was an in-flight medic. She’d shoved a gun in his face just two minutes earlier, for crying out loud! God only knew what kind of a person she was.

All that aside, even under the best of circumstances, John figured he was the last man on earth who had the right to indulge in this woman’s vulnerability.