Nobody But You Read online

  No, Aidan’s older brother had not told him a thing, which raised the question.

  Why?

  “How did you hear?” Aidan asked.

  “Lenny. He caught the gossip at the resort. Your family runs the place. How did you not hear this?”

  Lenny had gone to high school with them and now worked at the Kincaid resort as a big-equipment driver. Aidan stared at Mitch, unable to process that everyone had known before him.

  Lily Danville…Damn. Turning, he started to walk away.

  “It’s no big deal,” Mitch said. “It’s not like you’re seeing Shelly anymore, right? You’re a free agent, so if you want to try to get Lily back…Hey, wait up.”

  Aidan didn’t wait. And it was true he wasn’t seeing Shelly anymore. Technically, they’d never been “seeing” each other. They’d had a satisfying physical relationship whenever they both felt like it, and neither of them had felt like it in more than a month now. He hadn’t thought about her once since.

  But Lily Danville…

  He hadn’t seen her in forever, and yet he still thought about her way too often.

  “Hold up,” Mitch called out. “Your half of the gear’s still—” He broke off when Aidan kept walking. “Seriously?” And when Aidan didn’t so much as look back, Mitch swore and worked to gather the load, making some of the newbies help. He was quiet on the ride back to the station but only because they weren’t alone and also he was playing a game on his phone.

  Aidan reached over and swiped his finger across Mitch’s screen.

  Mitch swore, nearly lost the phone out the window, and then turned to glare at Aidan. “You owe me a Candy Crush life.”

  “Tell me more about Lily being back.”

  “Oh, now you want to talk? You done pouting then?”

  When Aidan just gave him the I-can-kick-your-ass gaze, Mitch grinned. “You know you were.”

  “It’s all over Facebook,” one of the guys said from the back. “The news about Lily.”

  “Aidan forgot his password,” Mitch said. “A year ago.”

  Aidan ignored him, mostly because his brain was on overload. Lily. Back in town…

  He’d long ago convinced himself that whatever he’d felt for her all those years ago had been just a stupid teenage boy thing.

  Seemed he was going to get a chance to test out that theory, ready or not.

  As a cop and head of ski patrol at the Cedar Ridge Resort, Hudson Kincaid has seen everything. But a pretty, dark-eyed novice skier stuck at the top of the mountain’s most dangerous run is about to rock his world in ways he never expected…

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  My Kind of Wonderful

  Chapter 1

  The wind whistled through the high Colorado Rocky Mountain peaks, stirring up a dusting of snow as light as the powdered sugar on the donut that Hudson Kincaid was stuffing into his face as he rode the ski lift.

  Breakfast of champions, and in three minutes when he hit the top of Cedar Ridge, he’d have the adrenaline rush to go with it. As head of ski patrol, he’d already had his daily before-the-asscrack-of-dawn debriefing with his crew. They’d set up the fencing and ropes to keep skiers safe and in the proper runs. They’d checked all the sleds to make sure their equipment was in working order.

  Now he had time for one quick run before they ran rescue drills for a few hours, and then he was on to a board meeting—aka fight with his siblings. One run, ten glorious minutes to himself, and he was going to make it Devil’s Face, the most challenging on the mountain.

  Go big or go home. That was the Kincaid way.

  Just then the radio at his hip chirped news about a report of someone in trouble at the top of Devil’s Face, and Hud shook his head.

  So much for a few minutes to himself.

  Ah, well, it was the life, his life, and he’d chosen it. At the top of the lift, he hit the snow at a fast clip. He’d seen a lot here on their mountain and even more on his monthly shifts as a cop in town. It was safe to say that not much surprised him anymore.

  So when three minutes later he found a girl sitting just off-center at the top of Devil’s Face, her skis haphazardly stuck into the snow at her side, he didn’t even blink.

  Her down jacket was sunshine yellow, her helmet cherry red. She sat with her legs pulled up to her chest, her chin on her knees, wearing ski boots as neon green as neon green could get and staring contemplatively at the heart-stopping view in front of her.

  Hud stopped a few feet away so as to not startle her, but she didn’t budge. He looked around to make sure this was the person of interest. Sharp, majestic snow-covered peaks in a three-hundred-sixty-degree vista. Pine-scented air so pure that at this altitude it hurt to breathe. There was no one else up here. They were on top of the world.

  Not smart on her part. The weather had been particularly volatile lately. Right now it was clear as a bell and a crisp thirty degrees, but that could change in a blink. High winds were forecasted, as was another foot of snow by midnight. But even if a storm wasn’t due to move in, no one should ski alone. And especially no one should ski alone on Devil’s Face, a thirty-five-hundred-foot vertical run that required a great deal of skill and in return promised dizzying speeds. There was a low margin for error up here, where one little mistake could mean a trip to the ER.

  Even Hud didn’t ski alone. He had staff all over this place—a few of them at the ski patrol outpost only a few hundred yards away, another group at the ski lift he’d just left, even more patrolling the resort boundaries—all of them connected to each other by constant radio contact.

  “Hey,” he called out. “You okay?”

  Nothing.

  Hud glided on his skis the last few feet between them and touched her shoulder.

  She jerked and craned her neck, at the same time pulling off her helmet and yanking out her earbuds. Tinny music burst out from them loud enough to make him wonder if she still had any hearing at all.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Did you say something?”

  Not a girl but a woman, and without her helmet, Hud realized he’d actually seen her before. Earlier that morning she’d been in the parking lot, sitting on the back bumper of her car and pulling on her ski boots, all while singing along with the radio to the new Ed Sheeran song. He couldn’t tell now behind her dark sunglasses, but he knew she had eyes the color of today’s azure sky and that she shouldn’t give up her day job to become a singer because she couldn’t hold a tune. “I asked if you’re okay,” he said.

  She removed her sunglasses and gave him a sassy look that said the question was ridiculous.

  She’d worn a tight ski cap beneath her helmet, also cherry red, with no hair visible and enough layers of clothing that she was utterly shapeless. But that didn’t matter. Her bright eyes sparkled with something that looked a whole lot like the best kind of trouble.

  He’d been running ski patrol for years now and had been a cop for long enough that he was good at reading people, often before they said a word. It was all in the posture, in the little tells, he’d learned.

  Such as all the layers she wore. Yes, it was winter, and yes, it was the Rocky Mountains, but thirty degrees was downright balmy compared with last week’s mid-teens. Most likely she wasn’t from around here.

  And then there was the slightly unsure posture that said she was at least a little bit out of her element and knew it. Her utter lack of wariness told him something else, too, that probably wherever she’d come from, it hadn’t been a big city.

  None of which explained why she was sitting alone on one of the toughest mountains in the country. Maybe…dumped by a boyfriend after a fight on the lift? Separated from a pack of girlfriends and just taking a quick break? Hell, despite appearances, maybe she was some kind of a daredevil out here on a bet or a whim.

  Or maybe she was simply a nut job. As he knew, nut jobs came in all shapes and sizes, even mysterious cuties with heart-stopping eyes. “So are you?” he asked. �€