Just Try Me... Read online

  “We’ll find her,” Lily said, touching his arm. “We will.”

  Because not finding her wasn’t an option.

  Rock’s tent unzipped, but it was Rose’s head that stuck out of it. Her hair was wild, her makeup a little smeared, but she was wearing a broad grin that pretty much said exactly what she’d been doing. “Oh my,” she said at the sight of Jack, Lily and Jared staring at her. She laughed. “Well, it is a vacation, right?”

  Jack wished Michelle was still in his tent, that she looked as rumpled and sated as Rose did right now. And safe.

  “Michelle’s gone,” Lily told her. “She went to the bathroom and didn’t come back.”

  Rose gasped in shock.

  “I checked everywhere,” Jack told her. “The bathroom stop, the lake, the trail…”

  “Ohmigod,” Rose whispered. “She’s cracked. Probably went looking for the closest mall, poor baby.”

  “Everyone just stay here, okay?” Lily said. “I’m going to look around, but please, you must stay here.” She was looking right at Jack. “Don’t make it harder by going off and possibly getting lost yourselves.”

  Rock stuck his head out of his tent, right next to Rose. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Because we could all fan out—”

  “Not yet,” Lily said. “I’m going to check all the close places first before we panic. I’ll be right back—”

  “I’m coming with you,” Jack said.

  She took one look at his face and didn’t argue. “The rest of you stay here,” Lily said.

  Rose and Rock nodded, looking unhappy about the command, but not making trouble.

  Lily turned to Jared, who stood slightly away from them all, looking down at the PDA unit in his hand, which was equipped with that amazing heat-seeking GPS system. “Jared?”

  “A minute.” He was working the controls with his thumb, his brow furrowed in concentration.

  Lily turned to Jack. “You’re sure she said she was going to the bathroom? She didn’t say anything else, like maybe she’d had enough and was going to try to get out of here?”

  “We all know she’d had enough, but no.” He shook his head. “She didn’t say anything like that.” Not even good-bye. “But…”

  “But?”

  “But I was really asleep, you know?” Dread filled his gut. “And I sleep like the living dead. I wasn’t paying her much attention…Oh, God.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, then dropped them as he remembered. “Hang on.” He dove back into his tent and began going through her bag.

  “Jack?” he heard Lily say, speaking through the still flapping tent door. “What are you doing?”

  Hitting pay dirt, he found Michelle’s makeup bag. Relief flooding him, he stuck his head back out. “If she’d given up and decided to go back on her own, she’d have never left this.” But then the truth sank in and his relief abruptly deserted him, because if Michelle hadn’t left on purpose, then the situation was even worse.

  She was lost.

  LILY MOVED CLOSE to Jared to look at his small screen. “What do you have?”

  “Two possibilities,” he said, and everyone moved closer to huddle around him so that Lily had to get on her tiptoes to see the digital display of a satellite map of their area.

  Jared pointed to a heat spot. “Us,” he said, then widened the screen. A small dot of red appeared to the east, right next to a body of water.

  A lake, Lily knew. Not the one right here at camp, but the next alpine lake over, nearly three quarters of a mile away.

  Then Jared pointed westward, to the only other heat spot, which if Lily was reading the satellite correctly, was behind and above them. High above them on the rocks.

  Michelle wasn’t a climber. Hell, she was barely a hiker. “Jack and I’ll check out here,” she said, tapping the first red dot. “I think Michelle is more likely to be this one.”

  Jared nodded. “Okay, but I’ll check the other while you’re doing that, just to be sure.”

  “That’s pretty much straight up,” Lily said. She looked at Jared. “It could be anything, right? A deer, or raccoon?”

  He shrugged. “Or a bear, or a mountain cat—” At the collective shocked gasp from Rose, Rock and Jack, he trailed off. “Just saying.”

  “So basically, anything alive and breathing,” Rock said with an exaggerated gulp that under different circumstances, would have been funny on a guy built like he was.

  “Anything alive and breathing,” Jared agreed. “And emitting body heat, which is to say, not necessarily something we want to run into.”

  Lily met his gaze as her thoughts whirled. “Okay, so we’ve got two possibilities. One on a flat, easy-to-walk-to area, the other high up. It’s an easy decision, really.”

  “Oh my God, we have a bear or a mountain cat watching us,” Rose said. “Probably just figuring out which of us to eat first.” She slipped her hand into Rock’s and swallowed hard. “You know he’s going to want me.” She sucked her lower lip into her mouth. “My body fat ratio is the highest.”

  Rock slipped an arm around her and pulled her close. “Your body is perfect, and not going to be wild-animal bait, not today.”

  “No one’s going to be animal bait,” Lily said firmly. “Because you’re all going to stay here and wait while I run to the lake, to that first heat spot. Jack?”

  “Right with you. You know, maybe she headed there to wash her face. She loves to wash her face first thing in the morning.”

  “Why not go to the closer lake, the one that’s right here?” Rose asked, and gestured to the lake only several hundred yards away.

  “I don’t know. But it was dark, really dark, when she got up.” Looking exhausted, Jack rubbed his jaw. “And she has a lousy sense of direction. Last night, she asked me how to get to the water, if it was to the right or the left, and when I told her left, I could tell she wasn’t listening to me. Maybe she went right on the trail.” He looked at Lily. “It could have happened.”

  Lily agreed. “Let’s go right, all the way to the farther lake. If Michelle had kept at it long enough, she’d have indeed ended up there.”

  “Thing is,” Rose said. “She’s not one to keep at anything for long.”

  “Well, she’s somewhere,” Lily said, determinedly. “And wherever that is, we’ll find her.” She looked at everyone else. “Wait here. That’s the most important part, okay? Wait here. Just yell really loudly if she shows up.”

  Their camp was a rather secluded, woodsy site, and from the moment Lily and Jack took the trail, they could no longer see the others. The trail to the right was wide, but because they’d not had rain for weeks, the ground was dry and brittle. No noticeable footprints.

  “Michelle!” Jack called out from her side every few yards. “Michelle!”

  The trail climbed a bit, and Jack began to pant for breath. “Gotta tell ya, this one feels too hard. She’d have turned back.”

  “She’s tougher than you think,” Lily said. “Michelle! Michelle, can you hear us?”

  Nothing.

  They came to a small creek in a shady aspen grove. The water meandered slowly past them on the left, summer-shallow, and filled with sediment. They both looked at it. “No,” Lily said. “She’d not have stopped here to wash her face.”

  “Oh, no,” Jack agreed. “Too dirty. How much farther until the lake?”

  “Another quarter of a mile.”

  They sped up. Jack was panting pretty good at their near-running pace. It was the altitude and nerves, she knew, but he was holding her back. “I’m going ahead,” she told him. “Stay on the trail.”

  Without waiting for a response, she took off, making much better time, and soon enough the trail opened to a clearing, with tawny, undulating wild grass leading directly to a gorgeous beach.

  A deserted beach.

  The land was vast and rambling, open but not flat, beautiful in its emptiness. The morning light coated the ground with just enough dew to give depth to each i