A small plane crashes in the Rockies, and the only two survivors, Jack and Sophie, help each other live until rescue arrives, seven days later. Only Sophie goes on to pick up the pieces of her life, which has now been irrevocably changed by big, gentle Jack’s love…and death.

But Sophie learns that Jack’s death didn’t close that chapter of her life, after all.
A drifter called Martin holds the key to her heart, alongside a deadly secret. Combined with a corrupt and desperate police chief and her pressure-cooker life as a single mother in a small town, they plunge her head-deep into the after-shocks caused by those seven days in the mountains. The consequences will reach out to rock state governors, district attorneys, and one of the deadliest crime lords in the land, and all of them have reason to react. For Sophie, life is about to change again…for the worse.

Excerpt

In ninety minutes, he had stripped the plane of hundreds of yards of electrical wiring, which sat in a stiff spaghetti nest to one side. The sun was up high now, bathing him with unrelenting light. At this altitude there was little bite in it. The day was barely warm but he was sweating anyway and his heart was pounding as it worked to compensate for the altitude. He went back to the gouge in the ravine and called down, “You okay?”
“Thirsty.”
“Not long now,” he assured her.
On his way back to the wreck, he checked out the distance of the nearest tree to the edge, estimating he’d need thirteen extra feet.
For the next two hours, he wound strands of wire around each other, braiding himself a rope half the thickness of his forearm and the twenty-five feet long he needed to get to the ledge, plus thirteen extra feet. By the time the wire rope was long enough, he’d run out of collected wire and gone looking for extra, digging through smaller pieces of fuselage and ripping up a seat or two for the wiring inside.
Finally, he was ready. He picked up his rope and dragged it to the cliff edge. Damn but that sucker was heavy.
Fifteen minutes later, he finally reached the ledge and saw her for the first time.
Absurdly, happiness touched him as she lifted her head to look at him.
She lay on the damp ground, half-in and half-out of the sun. Even if she hadn’t told him, he would have guessed her leg was broken by the odd way she tried to sit up, as if her leg was glued to the ground.
Jack crouched down beside her. For a moment, he stared at her, too pleased to be face to face with someone else to be able to speak words of concern or comfort. Then, he saw blood matting her red-gold hair and shivers racking her frame.
“Here.” He offered her a sealed bottle of Evian, which he’d salvaged.
“You remembered.” Her voice was croak.
After cracking the seal, he gave it to her. “Drink up. We can get more. Water isn’t going to be one of our problems.”
She drank, very nearly draining the bottle with two or three deep swallows. Jack studied her while she sipped the last inch in the bottle, wetting her lips and clearing her throat, coughing, water dripping onto the white silky shirt. Sensible trekking gear, it was not.
He’d seen her come aboard the little aircraft at Vegas. She was all legs and pedigree and the smart business suit she wore told him more plainly than words that she was as far removed from his world as a woman could get. The impossible-to-bridge gap allowed him to watch her with a detached interest as she pushed a heavy briefcase and day-old L.A. newspaper beneath the seat in front of her and buckled her seat belt.
She hadn’t given him so much as a glance. Instead, she sank into her seat and turned her head to stare out the window into the night. One row ahead, he could see a sliver of her profile between the seats. Her chin was sharp, with that little outward thrust that most people took for stubborn assertiveness.
He was well acquainted with aggressive females. Isobel had it in spades. It made him uncomfortable—the constant need to be on guard.
He’d given a mental shrug, dismissing the redhead. The endless legs weren’t worth the price.
But, her calm acceptance of his long delay getting down to her didn’t seem to fit his first assessment of her. He’d actually thought it had been the one other woman on the plane—a middle-aged woman, who had settled down to read a two-inch thick paperback as soon as she was seated and hadn’t looked up once throughout the taxiing, take-off and steep ascent to cruising height.
This woman before him put the empty bottle on the ground beside her. “Aahhh, that was good.” She smiled. “I think my leg’s busted in a couple of places and it hurts like hell. So does my head. But for the last couple of hours, all I could think about was water. Crazy, huh?”
He considered this. “No. It’s just your survival instinct at work. Priorities first. Water is the critical one.”
“You know something about this stuff, then. Thank god.” She grimaced. “Wilderness survival doesn’t seem like all that big a deal when you live in the middle of L.A. but I’ve been lying here most of the night wishing like crazy that I’d read at least one book about it.”
Jack moved, so he could study the angle of her leg. “Well, I’ve read zero law books in my life, so we’re even.” It was a tiny lie, a drop in the bucket, comparatively.
“How did you know?”
“That you’re in the legal profession?” He shrugged. “Lucky guess. The suit and the big heavy briefcase you lugged on board helped.”
“And the expensive, useless look?” she asked, with another small smile. “I’ve heard all the jokes about lawyers at least twice over.”
He felt a twinge. Even though she was being cynical about her profession, it was a paraphrasing of the conclusions he’d drawn about her personality when they’d been taking off.
“What’s the S.K. stand for?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject.
“Of course, my briefcase. Sophie Kingston.”
He nodded. “I’ll have to straighten out your leg, Sophie.”
She grimaced. “I would have done it myself but every time I tried to move it, it hurt so much I quit.”
“I’m just going to feel for the bone, first,” he warned her as he reached for it.
Her lips compressed as he probed gently, feeling the angle of the leg through the soft fabric of her trousers.
“I think you’re right. Two places at least,” he said. “Ready?”
Gently, he straightened her leg. Her steadiness was another surprise. All she did was chew her lip and, once, suck in her breath, whistling it through her teeth, although, he knew damn well that the pain was enough to make her want to scream. She turned chalk white and for a moment he thought she was going to pass out but she only blinked for a few seconds.
“Thanks.” Her voice was husky. She tilted her head back, exposing a long column of throat, looking back up the cliff.
“Not a hope,” Jack said quietly.
She didn’t pretend to not understand. “I won’t last long on this shelf…just getting through the last few hours of the night since the crash was bad enough.” She bit her lip. “The plane didn’t catch fire, did it? There might be food, warm clothing…”
He looked back up the cliff himself, then back at her. There was no entreaty in her eyes or irresolute hope. Just steady determination.
He realized then that he’d been wrong. Sophie wasn’t aggressive. She wasn’t out there claiming victories for womanhood, racking up a tally of smaller souls destroyed in her wake. No, she was serenely getting on with her life, going her own way. There was a quietness about her that he’d overlooked until now. A sense of wisdom. Maybe, old hurts buried deep. All good roots for strength of character that had nothing to do with aggressiveness and everything to do with purpose and resolve.
For the first time since the plane had lurched without warning to one side and begun its long sideways slip down through the night sky, Jack felt his guilt lighten a little. This woman was a born survivor. A fighter. He’d promised himself he’d get her out of this but now he knew she would be doing her best to make sure it happened too.
Abruptly, he felt their fledging relationship shift from rescuer and victim into something warm and comfortable. Partners.
“We’ll just have to bring it down to you, won’t we?” he said.
The climb back up nearly finished killing him. He’d slipped three or four times, only to lunge for the wire just in time to hold himself up. Each little fall jerked on his ribs in a way that sent hot pokers of agony through him and made his vision swim. But after his sight cleared, he doggedly carried on, aware of the woman sitting below him, watching and listening to every move he made.
By the time he climbed back onto on the edge of the cliff, his whole body trembled and his muscles and sinews shrieked white agony.
For a very short moment, he rested on the edge, while his heart settled back into something that could be called a rhythm and his head stopped throbbing from the thick rush of blood. The throbbing underscored a sore spot at the back of his skull. With careful fingers, he probed under his hair and found a place so tender he jerked his fingers away. But there was no broken skin—the thick thatch of his hair would have helped prevent that—and his fingers were clean, so no blood. He couldn’t even remember being hit.
Considering the others, he’d been lucky.
He grimaced but before he could drift off into that black pool of guilt again, he got to his feet and strode to the broken fuselage. Sophie was waiting for him to return.
He let the memory of those startling, sea-green eyes swim into his mind, the eyes with the ancient, wise soul staring out of them. The quiet determination he’d felt emanating from her when he’d looked into her eyes washed over him now like a calming tonic. His mind floated in that serene pool, while he worked at scavenging through the wreckage, stripping it of anything that would aid their survival.
He had been speaking a simple truth when he’d told her water would be the least of their problems.
Now he realized that the arrival of a rescue party would not be quick.
Given the circumstances, rescue wasn’t even guaranteed.