She dug in her poles, pushed hard and picked up speed, trying to outrun the fall, go perpendicular to it, get out of its way. To God knew what. But someone had skied this way earlier today. The trail led somewhere besides over the edge of an abyss. She hoped.
Snow pelted her head and shoulders, slid down, obliterated her path. There was nowhere to go but over the edge, where the descending rush of snow would take her anyway if it didn’t cover and smother her here.
Instinctively, Cate tucked her poles beneath her arms, squatted down and fell sideways. She snapped off her skis, scrambled for the cliff’s edge and looked over for a safe way down. A rolling crush of white shoved her from behind and took her with it.
As white blanked out the blue of the sky, Cate fought panic. She struggled to stay on the surface. Couldn’t let it bury her. The heat from her body would encase her in ice in less than half an hour. If the oxygen trapped with her lasted that long and the weight of the snow didn’t crush her.
Then she hit something really hard that broke her slide and she began to tumble head over heels.
She wanted to scream, but her mouth wouldn’t move. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, knowing it could be full of snow and the last one she would ever take.
Chapter 1
Martigny Hospital, Valais, Switzerland—November 27th
Nick Sandro swore under his breath. He knew what he had to do. His parents had put it to him like an order. Look after Cate. Friendship demanded it. He had no excuse not to. He had done it reluctantly during the greater parts of their childhood and adolescence. He would have to do it now.
Bracing himself, he pushed open the door of her hospital room. “Hi, Catie,” he said softly. “You awake?”
Her smile looked as forced as his felt. “Hey, Nick. They told me you were here. It was good of you to come.”
“Glad to,” he said with a shrug. “Besides, Mom and Dad would have my head if I didn’t come and see about you.”
“Like old times, huh? Trying to match us up.” Tears leaked from her right eye, but the smile stayed in place.
She looked frail. Her long, straight hair had been snipped close to her scalp in the area around her incision. The rest lay lank and lifeless around her pale, striking features. She had wide, dark-lashed eyes of the deepest blue imaginable, a straight no-nonsense nose and a luscious mouth that begged kissing. Even after all this time, he could still recall the feel of those lips and the taste of her as she’d kissed him. The sensation still raised guilt. He had been twenty. She had been jailbait.
“How are they?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, keeping his voice bright. “Dad’s in London at a seminar. Mom went along. They’ll stay for a vacation and return home in a few weeks.”
“Yeah, they sent me a card. Picture of the horse guards,” Cate said with a chuckle. “Inside, it said Giddyup.”
Nick laughed with her, losing a little of the wariness he felt. “Serious get-well wish.”
“Karen? How’s she?”
“Pregnant. Divorced again. She should have known better than to marry another doctor.” He grimaced automatically, but added a small laugh to show he wasn’t carrying a torch for his ex-wife.
Cate smiled at him. “She’s a real dunce, that girl.”
He nodded, smiling. “It was a mistake. We’re both wiser.”
She sighed heavily. Her smile remained, wistful but sincere. Nick wondered if Cate ever regretted passing on marriage. As far as he knew she had never shown the slightest interest in it. He had kept pretty close tabs over the years through their parents. “How about this Austrian you were with on the slopes? Important?”
The smile crooked a bit. “Mostly to himself. But he did save my bacon when he called for the rescue.”
“But the bastard didn’t try to dig you out. I’d like to break his neck.”
“Judging by the tracks, they think he did try after he called in. One of his skis was found near where I was buried. Apparently, he fell on the way or was caught in a secondary slide. They probably won’t find him until spring thaw.”
“So he wasn’t involved in trying to kill you.”
“Somebody probably paid him to ski that particular slope. He was pretty insistent we do that one. Jack said Werner made a cash deposit in his account the day before, but it wasn’t enough to hire someone to conspire in a murder. True, Werner was a little vain, but I know he was no killer.”
Nick saw a tear trickle down her cheek, but she didn’t seem to be really grieving over the man, just sad that he’d been lost.
Even without makeup, hair a mess and dressed in a wrinkled, faded hospital gown, Cate was the most beautiful woman he knew. She was tall, nearly six feet; her body was angular, yet very graceful. He noted her nails were clipped to the quick with no polish, making her supple, long-fingered hands look smaller than he remembered.
The need to hold and reassure her hit him like a fist every time he looked at her. He hadn’t worried enough about his own reactions before taking this on. Maybe he should have examined his reasons a little more carefully. No way could he let them seclude her in some safe house without the kind of help she would need, though, no matter how hard this got for him. The government might furnish doctors to check on her, but who was to say what sort and whether they would be concerned about anything other than her vital signs.
Cate was observing him closely. “You’re looking good, Nick. Still plundering around in people’s gray matter?” she asked as a brave attempt at being chipper.
He looked away from her direct blue gaze. “I’m taking some time off.”
“Knocking around Florence, Jack says. Working vacation?”
“Sort of. I came over a few months ago. Attending some seminars at the Johns Hopkins campus there.”
“Teaching them how to cut?” she asked, blunt as ever.
“No, not teaching.” So she didn’t know what had happened. Hadn’t heard. What had proved a life-changing event for him hadn’t even warranted a paragraph in the local paper. No one had died, after all. He hadn’t really been on duty when it had happened, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. His parents would not have mentioned the incident to her except to relate how lucky he was to have escaped death.
No, he was the only one who felt the full impact of his injury. He could no longer operate. His career was over. No reason Cate should have heard about it. Oddly enough, she was probably the only one who would fully understand. Eventually she would, but he couldn’t dump that on her now. She had enough problems of her own.
“Odd that you’d choose Florence,” she said. “I would have thought Rome. Isn’t that where your grandparents were from?”
He nodded. Her parents came in just then and he turned to greet them. “See you later,” he said to Cate. “I’ll leave you to your visit.”
Jack Mercier, Cate’s boss, was waiting for Nick in the lounge across the hall. “Did you tell her?” he asked, frowning.
“Not yet,” Nick said. “I’m still not sure…”
“She’ll be safe with you in Florence. Safer than anywhere else she could go. I’ll station eyes there in case you run into trouble.”
Eyes? Agents that surveilled, no doubt. That whole business was foreign to him, the terminology as strange as medical terms would be to Cate. Yet another barrier between them. Good. He could use more of those.
Mercier headed up the elite counter-terrorist organization Cate had been working as an undercover operative for these past couple of