Brace For Impact

Can she trust a stranger?

The sole survivor of a deliberate plane crash, Maddy Kane has gone from protected witness to roaming target. Badly injured and lost in the wilderness, Maddy is forced to trust the stranger who came to her aid. No mere hiker, Will Gannon is former Delta Force. The battle-scarred medic knows he is Maddy’s only hope in a desperate situation. With survival a long shot, can the two become allies, and maybe more—before it’s too late?

An author of more than ninety books for children and adults with more than seventy-five for Mills & Boon, JANICE KAY JOHNSON writes about love and family, and pens books of gripping romantic suspense. A USA TODAY bestselling author and an eight-time finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA® Award, she won a RITA® Award in 2008. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small town north of Seattle, Washington.

Also by Janice Kay Johnson

Hide the Child

Trusting the Sheriff

Within Range

From This Day On

One Frosty Night

More Than Neighbors

Because of a Girl

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Brace for Impact

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90483-8

BRACE FOR IMPACT

© 2019 Janice Kay Johnson

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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In memory of my dad, a noted Northwest mountain

climber with many first ascents who shared his love of

the mountains and wilderness with his children.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

About the Publisher

Chapter One

“This?” Maddy Kane balked like a horse that had gotten a good look at the rattlesnake coiled in the middle of the trail. Her feet said, uh-uh. No way. The rest of her was in complete agreement. “We’re flying to the other side of the state in this?”

She’d vaguely noticed the airfield when she drove by and realized it was puny. Somehow she hadn’t translated that into puny airplane.

Having lived in the small and remote town of Republic in eastern Washington the past year, she hadn’t expected to board a Boeing 767 here, with only the one short runway and a few hangars by Lake Curlew. But considering she’d never flown in anything smaller than a 737—she thought that was the Boeing company’s smallest plane—this Cessna didn’t look much bigger than the really terrifying ultralight she’d seen once buzzing over a tulip field, the pilot sitting in what looked like a lawn chair beneath the wings.

Okay, this plane did have a cabin. Still.

The man next to her laughed, the skin beside his eyes crinkling. A United States marshal, Scott Rankin had been her handler throughout her ordeal. Really, her anchor. As horrific as witnessing the murder had been, thinking the killer would see her huddled only a few feet away, she’d never imagined the fallout after calling 911 and telling the detective everything she’d seen and heard. It had now been twelve months since she’d talked to her parents or sister or friends or the man she’d been dating. Supposedly, her law firm was saving her job, but she had to wonder. A year shouldn’t seem so long, but she’d increasingly felt a kinship with Rip Van Winkle. In all these months she’d clung to the knowledge that Rankin was there, a telephone call away.

Graying but still broad-shouldered and strong in his fifties, he had shown her pictures of his wife, adult children and a new granddaughter. He’d been really kind to her. In turn, she’d cooperated with his arrangements. Until now.

How could he think this was the safest way to get her to Seattle, where she was scheduled to testify in a major trial that would begin ten days from now? Safe being a relative concept. So okay, flying commercial wasn’t an option from this part of the state, but until he knocked on her door this morning, she’d assumed they would drive.

That was the moment he’d said cheerfully, “Nope, we’re catching a flight.”

Maddy had envisioned at least the kind of twin-engine passenger plane that carried twenty or thirty people. For one thing...there was a mountain range separating eastern and western Washington. A tall one.

She was already toting her bag when Rankin started across the pavement toward the little plane. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder, “this’ll be fun.”

Oh, Lord. For a minute she stood there breathing too fast, until she realized she didn’t have an option.

Reluctantly, she trailed him.

Another man had been circling the Cessna, doing what she assumed was a flight check, which ought to reassure her. That meant he was safety conscious, right?

“I don’t really like heights,” she mumbled to Marshal Rankin’s back.

The tall, lanky man doing the flight check straightened and, beaming at them, extended his hand. “Couldn’t get better weather for the flight!” he assured Maddy and Rankin.

Sure. By the first day of July in this part of the state, every day was sunny and hot. Didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a lightning storm over the Cascades. A white-hot bolt from on high, and that little tin can would be zapped.

“You’ll be able to get a good look at the Cascades,” the pilot enthused as if he hadn’t noticed her severe case of doubt. “Bird’s-eye view.”

Maddy squared her shoulders. This was happening, whether she liked it or not. And really, what did she have to fear, compared to the ten minutes when she’d had only a half-open bathroom door between her and a hit man who’d just murdered her new client? This was nothing; people flew in small planes all the time. A lot of people enjoyed it.

The pilot looked familiar, as most locals did. She didn’t remember ever hearing his name, though.

When they shook, he introduced himself. “Bill Potter. You must be Cassie Davis. I know I’ve seen you around. And Mr. Rankin, I assume?”

“That’s right,” the man at her side agreed. “As I told you, Cassie is my niece. You’ll have to excuse her anxiety. I saved the news that we were flying to be a surprise. A drive over one of the passes just isn’t the same.”

Until she stepped into that courtroom, she would remain Cassie Davis, divorced bookkeeper, instead of Madeline Kane, never-married attorney-at-law. Supposedly, she and “Uncle” Scott were heading for a family reunion in Everett, a city only half an hour north of Seattle. She hadn’t asked where she’d be staying. All she knew was that Rankin intended to keep her away from the courthouse until she absolutely had to show. She’d made it through the year in hiding; now she had to remain alive the last few days until she could testify.

The pilot lowered the big door on the hangar and locked it, loaded the two duffel bags in the rear of the plane, then asked her to sit in the back, Rankin in front beside him. “Got to balance our weight,” he explained. Either he was really good at faking it, or he suffered from chronic good humor.

Or, heck, he loved to fly this plane and was brimming with excitement.

And she was being a crank.

So she smiled at him before she crawled over the front seat and buckled herself in, per instructions.

“This is a Cessna Skyhawk,” Bill told her. “One of the safest planes you could fly in.” He had been teaching lessons for something like the past thirty years in this and an earlier model of the Skyhawk, he added, while also offering charter flights.

She held on tight to the seat belt with one hand and the seat itself with the other as he taxied down the runway and the plane lifted into the air. He banked over Republic so she could get a good look at it, he told her over his shoulder.

Despite her queasiness, Maddy did gaze through the window at the town. People had been good to her here. It wasn’t their fault she’d felt incredibly isolated. Living under an assumed name, she could never be honest with anyone about who she was or what life she’d actually lived. That meant being friendly without ever really making a friend. Still...as time passed, she’d felt safe.

Stepping into that courtroom, on the other hand, would be the equivalent of confronting a wounded grizzly.

“You okay back there?” Rankin swiveled in his seat beside the pilot and still had to raise his voice to be heard over the engine noise.

She summoned another smile. “I’m good.” And...maybe it was even true, because as the plane leveled off, her anxiety lowered. If she didn’t look out the window, she could pretend she was on a bus, say. That worked.

As a result she spent the first half hour brooding about the upcoming trial—and then the gap of time between the two trials. Rankin hadn’t said anything about those weeks, except that she wouldn’t be returning to Republic. Of course, she also couldn’t resume her real life until both the hit man and the Superior Court judge who’d hired him had been convicted.

First thing to face was being “prepared” by the prosecutors. As if she hadn’t prepped her share of witnesses for trial. Of course, her perspective as a defense attorney wasn’t quite the same.

The buzz of the engine at last lulled her into letting go of the troubles that still lay ahead. The pilot yelled over his shoulder to tell her they were flying over the Okanogan National Forest, and would shortly cross the Pasayten Wilderness. She vaguely knew that it took in a swath of the drier eastern side of the Cascade Mountain range. Now she did look out the small window, seeing that sagebrush and juniper hills had been replaced with what she thought were lodgepole and ponderosa pine forest.

She gaped when she set eyes on the first pointy, white-topped mountains ahead.

Bill called out the names as they neared: Mount Carru, Blackcap Peak, Robinson Mountain. Maddy pressed her nose to the small window to see better. She was astonished by the amount of snow, given that this was July. Her awe grew as the snowcapped peaks became increasingly jagged, gleaming white in the sunlight. She could just make out deep cuts clothed in dark green between mountains. A long body of water had to be Ross Lake behind its dam. They flew low enough she could see the oddly opaque turquoise color of the water.

She flattened a hand on the cold window and stared in fascination. Ahead lay a range of mountains that made her think of a shark’s teeth. And yes, in the distance was Mount Baker, a conical volcano like Mount Rainier, and Glacier, another volcano. How could she have grown up as close as Seattle and never visited these wonders? Even Washington’s most famous volcano, Mount Rainier, seemed mostly unreal, floating in sight of Seattle. She’d never once taken a sunny summer day to drive up to Paradise and see the avalanche lilies in bloom.

She glanced at the marshal to see that he was watching her and smiling.

“This really is something, isn’t it?”

“Yes!” It occurred to her belatedly that he might genuinely have been trying to give her a treat.

Oh, and the skinny lake below was called Diablo, according to the pilot, formed by a dam on the Skagit River. It, too, was that startling turquoise color. Over his shoulder, the pilot told her the coloration was the result of the powder from boulders that glaciers ground down. Ultimately, the glacial “flour” washed down the many creeks into the lakes.

They went right over the top of a mountain that was impressive enough, if not jagged like the ones ahead. Those made up the Picket Range, he told her, mountains that had names like Terror, Fury and Challenger, and for a good reason, from the looks of them. The deep valleys between had precipitous drops from the heights, trees clinging to the rocky walls. It was a wilderness that looked as forbidding as the Himalayas or the dense Amazon jungle.

Trying to drink in the beauty not so far below them, Maddy heard the murmur of the two men’s voices but didn’t try to make out what they were saying. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes off those particularly daunting peaks ahead.

A sudden hard bang made the whole airplane shudder. Fear electrified her nerve endings. It felt like a huge rock had struck them, but that couldn’t be what had happened.

Clenching her seat belt and the edge of the seat, Maddy looked at the pilot, hoping to be reassured. In her oblique view, he radiated tension. But it wasn’t he who riveted her horrified gaze. No, she fixated on the propeller as its blurring speed slowed, slowed...until it quit spinning altogether.

Before that moment of sudden silence, Maddy had never actually heard the thunder of her heartbeat before.

WILL GANNON HAD reached the summit a good ten minutes before, and still he turned in a slow circle to take in the most incredible panorama he’d ever seen. The Picket Range felt close enough to touch and menacing at the same time. One ice-and glacier-crusted spire after another. Mount Baker beyond, and was that a glimpse of Mount Shuksan? Mount Challenger to the north, Eldorado and Mount Logan to the southeast. Rocky ridges, plunging chasms, a sky so blue it hurt his eyes. And quiet. Most of all, he drank in the quiet and the solitude.

He’d chosen Elephant Butte to climb not because it was the best known of North Cascade peaks, or a mountaineering challenge, but rather because most climbers bypassed it. Even on a weekend like this, he could be alone. Later in the summer he might try to find someone who’d like to join him tackling a couple of the more impressive mountains, the ones he’d be foolish to climb alone, but right now what he needed was to pull himself together. After being severely wounded in an ambush in Afghanistan, he’d been shipped back to the States. Being a stubborn bastard, he’d been able to rehab physically. The crap he felt, that was something else. But this...this was what he’d needed. Peace and quiet. The vast beauty of nature.

He shook himself and returned to his pack, where he dug out the makings for the simplest of lunches: peanuts, beef jerky and a candy bar, all washed down with treated water. As pure as the sparkling streams looked and tasted, the water wasn’t safe to drink without being purified.

He let his mind empty as the sun warmed his up-turned face. Nights when he had trouble sleeping he could remember this. Replace ugly memories of gushing blood, missing arms or legs, sharp pieces of metal thrust like knives into bellies and chests and even faces or throats.

And crap, there he went again. He discovered that he’d closed his eyes, but he opened them again, looked at the spectacular scenery, heard the shrill whistle of what he thought might be a pika, a small mammal that lived among the rocks. It was answered by another, and Will blew out a breath. He was okay. This climb had been a good idea. He’d get out in the wilderness often until snow closed it to him, unless he wanted to learn to snowshoe.

Hey, maybe.

The time had come for him to decide whether to go back the way he’d come, the standard route along Stetattle ridge, or try a different and probably more difficult route. Will leaned toward the different route out of the backcountry. He wasn’t in any hurry. He’d brought plenty of food if he ended up taking an extra day or even two, and if he hadn’t, he could fill himself with the sweet blueberries ripe on low-growing shrubs at a certain altitude.

Reluctantly, he heaved his pack onto his back and adjusted the weight. Ice ax in hand, he started to pick his way across a patch of snow that began the slow descent. Far below amid a subalpine area of stunted trees and a bright patch of blooming heather, movement caught his eye and he paused. Was he about to have company? Damn, he hoped not. He wanted this day, this mountain, to himself.

Then he identified the patch of cinnamon-brown as a black bear, probably dining on blueberries, too. Not alone. He shifted his binoculars to see her cub. Smiling, he watched for a few minutes, glad his path wouldn’t lead him too near to them. Getting between mama and her cub wouldn’t be smart.

He’d let the binoculars fall and started forward again when he heard a faint sound that had him turning his head. A growl...no, a hum? It took him a minute to spot the small plane that must have come over Ross Lake and now passed north of Sourdough Lake. In fact, it was heading pretty well directly toward him, which disturbed him on a subliminal level—made him want to sprint to take cover.

He saw the moment the bear swung her head, too, in search of the source of that alien noise. A sudden sharp bang, although muted by distance, shot adrenaline through his body. What in hell...? Will lifted his binoculars again, this time to the plane, adjusting until he could all but see the pilot’s face. Had the guy dropped some kind of load? Not the best country for retrieval, if so.

Frowning, he cocked his head and listened hard. No more irritating buzz. Oh, crap. The engine had shut down; the propeller no longer turned. The nose dropped. That plane was heading down. He watched in horror as it descended precipitously toward the steep, forested slopes beneath him.

“Start the damn engine. There’s still time. Start it!” he shouted.

Following along with his binoculars, he saw the moment the plane hit the first treetops. Cartwheeled. Tore apart.

It might not be safe or smart, but the next thing he knew, he was running.

TAT-A-TAT, TAT-A-TAT, TAT-A-TAT.

Maddy tried to understand the staccato series of rapping sounds followed by silence, then a repeat. Strangely reluctant to open her eyes, she listened hard.

A harsh call. A trilling.

Something brushed her face. She jerked, and pain racked her body.

Have to see, have to see. Somehow she knew she really didn’t want to know what had happened, but...even aside from the pain, so diffused she wasn’t sure what the source of it was, her head felt weird. So she slitted her eyes.

And let out a shocked cry. She was hanging upside down. And looking at a completely unfamiliar landscape. Ground that was tilted. Rocks, the rough boles of trees and feathery sweeps of green branches.

Wanting to retreat into darkness again, she squeezed her eyes shut, but a stern inner voice refused to let her go back into hiding. Figure out what’s wrong. Like why I’m hanging upside down like a bat settling for a snooze. She’d have giggled if she hadn’t known instinctively how much that would hurt.

All right, all right.

This time when she opened her eyes, she lifted her chin to look upward. It took her way longer than it should have to comprehend. A belt across her lap and shoulder held her in a seat anchored to torn metal. Not a car seat, she thought, puzzled. Was that...? It was... A wing—an airplane wing—was attached, stabbing toward the ground amidst the greenery.

Airplane seat belt, not car. It was all that held her from falling. A flicker of memory and she knew. That’s why I’m alive, she thought in shock, trying to imagine the force that had torn the plane into pieces.

The Cessna. In a flood of renewed fear, she listened for voices, cries, anything to indicate one or both of the men were alive.

“Scott!” she called. “Bill!” Her “Anyone?” trailed off weakly.

She heard something; she just didn’t know what.

Getting down had to come before anything else.

She could open the seat belt, but would drop what had to be eight or ten feet onto her head. Even fuzzy-minded as she was, she knew that wouldn’t be smart.

She tried to pull herself upward, grabbing a piece of the wreckage. Metal groaned, shifted, and Maddy froze. Her head swam, and she looked to see bright red blood running down her arm. She must have sliced her palm open. In the greater scheme of things, it didn’t seem important. Being fuzzy insulated her. She found a more solid handhold—the side of the cabin, minus the window—took a deep breath and unsnapped the belt.

Her bloody hand slipped from the wreckage and she fell sooner than she’d planned, twisting to land hard on her butt and side. She skidded, bumping to a stop against a boulder. Pain engulfed her and she gritted her teeth against the need to scream.

When she was finally able to move, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t lost consciousness again. From the angle of the sun through the trees, it hadn’t been long, though. Unless she’d lost an entire day? No, the blood on her hand and arm still looked fresh.