Rescued (Navy SEALS Romance Book 1) Read online

  If they weren't already. The sun was definitely going away behind the smoke. She couldn't pretend it was cloud cover. It was smoke coming from the fire she knew was burning down in one of the valleys. If planes went up to fight it, maybe she'd get their attention, but it seemed unlikely they'd make wide enough circles to come near her, and she couldn't bring herself to wish the fire closer just so the people would be closer too. She dropped to her knees and dug in her pack, looking for anything reflective she might use to signal. Her phone might work. It wasn't like she was carrying a compact or mirror on her hike.

  "Help!" The fire was the last straw. She could feel stupid later about the whole getting lost on a straight path thing. "Jason! Jessie! Robert! Danny! Barb! Tess! Up here! Help! It's Taylor! I'm up here! Shout so I can hear you."

  Only they couldn't hear her, it seemed. Because there was no returned shout. No sound of anyone coming. No sound of voices, raised or otherwise.

  She wasn't carrying a flare and she'd be afraid to use it if she was. There was already one fire. If she had anything reflective she might try flashing a signal, but she didn't, and there wasn't much sunlight. Just smoke.

  In a panic, she started shouting again, ranging around the clearing on panicky legs, searching for her own footsteps in the bone dry dirt. It was supposed to rain more often on Mount Palomar than in other parts of the region, but it hadn't rained in weeks from the look of it. She came to an abrupt stop and ran both hands over her face, breathing hard, the leash still clutched in one hand. Monster leaned close against her legs and whined, feeling her tension.

  What if they didn't find her? What if they weren't looking? What if they assumed that old strike-out-on-her-own Taylor had already gone back down to the trucks and they'd just missed her somehow and she was surely there by now. They'd go down to find her only she wouldn't be there and then would they know how far back up to go to look?

  How long would all that take? What if the late September sun went down and left her in the dark, with predators all around? What if there were lions as well as coyotes?

  What about the fire?

  She tried to calm her breathing and forced herself to drink a mouthful of water and give another to Monster. They weren't low on water. She was just panicking about everything. Because if she was here at nightfall, her friends would definitely have sent for help and wasn't she always hearing on the news that searches for lost hikers (she always found herself thinking lost idiots) had been called off at sundown and would be continued the next day?

  Who would come looking for her, anyway? There was a fire burning. Would there even be anyone for her friends to contact?

  And contact how? Her heart began to bang loudly against her ribs again. If her phone didn't work, did anyone else's?

  Monster whined again, then stood up and put his paws on her shoulders and licked her face.

  Which made her give a watery and unconvincing laugh but that was better than breaking into tears and she'd been halfway there. When Zach left, after they'd had three years together, lived together, she'd wanted revenge. She'd wanted to find someone ten times more fabulous than an English major going back to his hometown to teach. Fuck, he'd been pretty, blond and tan and lean and hard in all the right places with pale green eyes and long fingered hands that managed to reach all the right places. She'd wanted to come up with someone more beautiful, more rugged, more intelligent, with more money and more of whatever it took to make Zach realize he'd lost someone he couldn't replace, especially with whatever skanky no good bitch he'd gone back to. But a year had passed and there was hardly anyone in her life.

  Except the Labrador standing with his paws on her shoulders, giving her a good long wet kiss, making her sputter and laugh and wipe her mouth. On his hind legs he would probably be taller than her five-two if he didn't have to lean his paws on her shoulders. Tall, dark and handsome – he fit the requirements to a T.

  If only he came when called.

  That made her giggle at the unintended double entendre. And that made her worry about sanity.

  She started shouting again and didn't stop until she was hoarse.

  There was no answer.

  Chapter Three

  Tanner Davis stood in the offices of SEArch & Rescue, staring out at the perfect Southern California day. The offices were actually a tiny little beach house the five of them that made up the new business had rented. They'd relocate to a modern office building somewhere in the city if the business took off.

  That would be a shame. Not the business taking off, Tanner thought, but leaving the beach house. It had everything a modern office needed – the wiring had been upgraded to more than a match for technology, and the place was close to the water, perfect for going for runs. There were a lot of S&R jobs on the Pacific and just as many inland, so no way to know where to position themselves for that. The beach house had personality. A modern office building wouldn't.

  But they were waiting. SEAL Team Eleven had been upgraded or downgraded or decommissioned or something he still wasn't clear on because Tanner didn't think there'd ever been another time in the history of the Navy SEALs that a Team had been changed to standby the way Team Eleven was after having been an active team. They were reserves now, all but civilians, because of the events that had happened in –

  Nope. Not going there. They'd all been trained for it, they'd all known what might happen went then went in on an antiterrorism mission, into Syria past the coast and interior, inland.

  "Stop thinking," he growled at himself.

  Hard not to, though. He'd been part of an 16-man strike team and one of the eight to come back from that mission. He'd heard all the psychobabble from the shrinks about healing on the inside and survivor's guilt and though no one had said anything so stupid, about getting back in the saddle again. And he'd heard about the outside stuff, too, and knew he had PT in front of him still though he had most of the range of motion back in his shoulder a year later and his buddies said they couldn't remember which shoulder it had been, that he'd built it back up to the same size, even as their eyes lingered on the left shoulder.

  The one with the Special Forces tattoo.

  What the hell was wrong with him? Beautiful day and he couldn't stop thinking all this crap. Shit happens. Roll with it.

  He needed a run. A run or a girl. Something physical. Something to take his mind off. But today Angel and Jake were in Vegas, looking at an inner city casino that fell victim to the last economic downturn. Investors had bought the property and needed the old building demolished. Nothing like the resident demolitions expert Angel and the weapons geek Jake to take that on. Meanwhile Knox – John Knox – was breaking up with some unsuspecting girl, Jake was using Vegas to avoid another bout of dance with the ex and figure out visitation and Michael Hancock was just plain MIA which was par for the course with Mikey nine times out of ten.

  That left Tanner on his own. Which was fine. His fellow SEALs were from his team, all quit after the hot team had been taken down. When Tanner suggested the Search & Rescue business, they'd all fallen in.

  Tanner was just –

  Bored.

  He didn't have to be in the office. He could access whatever information he needed from his phone. Not like the old top secret days on the team when he had to find his information in more covert ways. He could probably even go home, though he lived some distance into Swan Canyon and whatever his carrier might say, reception there was sometimes tricky.

  He'd be just as bored there.

  Finally in desperation he went out into the bright sunlight and folded his six-foot-two bodybuilder frame into the Jeep that waited there. He'd drive to the beach, run his ass off, see if that didn't do the trick. And if it didn't, he'd head for the gym and pump iron until his arms and legs fell off. And if that didn't work –

  He'd be screwed. He didn't even have an ex he could go to for make up sex.

  Or he could study. Man, that didn't appeal on this sunny September day, even with an exam coming up i
n anatomy. He'd taken the role of medic on the team, and taken full advantage of the opportunity to take the Army Special Forces medic training course while still active. Once he'd gotten out he considered EMT training but that was less strenuous and probably less info than he'd already gotten from the Army course, so WTF, why bother? He didn't want to be an EMT anyway. S&R allowed him to go find people either alive or dead and he had the training to try to forestall the latter if he found them in a condition of the former – i.e., he could usually stop people from winding up dead if they didn't have to when they were found alive. EMTs, they didn't have the S&R part.

  He'd miss that.

  He liked to help.

  Tanner headed into the back, the locker room they'd turned one of the bedrooms into. He'd change, run, maybe study, figure it out. Tomorrow night Angel and Jake would be back and they'd have a Sunday night strategy session about the upcoming work.

  Pulling his t-shirt over his head, he caught sight of himself in the mirror and stopped to look at his left shoulder. Truth be told, it didn't look that different anymore, except for the scarring where the shrapnel had hit. Probably much as he hated it, the shrink was right to the extent that the injury was mostly resolved; Tanner just wasn't comfortable with the arm anymore. As if it had let him down by being injured. As if it were the arm's fault.

  "Oh, but it was your fault?" The shrink had been a girl that time. Woman. Whatever. She was young and pretty and he supposed somebody somewhere thought that would do something to increase his chances of healing from the inside out. Certainly the fucking gorgeous physical therapist on Coronado had been meant for that. Neither worked. He had yet to meet a woman beautiful enough to make him work harder than he automatically worked for himself and his team. Injured was injured. The Tanner Davis code meant injured was vulnerable and vulnerable put other people at risk. Not acceptable.

  Then again, the male shrink had said the same thing. He'd gone to that guy longer, and clocked out the minute they told him he could.

  He'd deal with it his own way. In his own time.

  The shirt popped over his buzz cut blue black hair. His surprisingly blue eyes met themselves in the depths of the mirror. The shirt dropped over the sculpted pecs, the biceps and triceps that popped from nothing more than getting dressed, and covered the eight pack. He pulled his jeans off over his long lean corded legs, pulled on a brief pair of running shorts, slipped his feet into his socks and then shoes and had his keys in hand, cell on his arm in its band, and was just about to forward the land line to himself when it rang.

  He didn't know whether or not to laugh.

  Probably just Angel, calling in. But he answered with the business name and his own and heard a confused squabble and someone saying something frantic to someone else. He'd be tempted at any other business to hang up on any group so uncoordinated they didn't even say what they wanted when they placed a call but there was a sound of frantic consultation and real fear.

  "Hello?" he bellowed into the phone.

  "Tanner? It's Danny Duncan."

  Tanner ran the name through his mind and came up with a former Marine he'd met at some function on Coronado. Nice guy but not cut out to be career. Duncan had served his time; the guy had served his enlistment contract and gone civilian, working in IT.

  "Duncan? What's up?"

  Another brief pause and Duncan said, "Got it," apparently to someone he was with and then, "I'm on Mount Palomar and I need help."

  Tanner turned to the desk, hit the speaker on his phone, touched the computer to wake it and brought up Palomar, Cleveland National Forest, ranger stations.

  And a current alert.

  Duncan was just starting to speak when Tanner said, "Are you in the fire zone?"

  Relief flooded Duncan's voice. "Not yet. But it's coming our way and moving fast."

  "Rangers?"

  "On it. That's the problem. I'm here with a group and one girl got separated before the fire had gone out of control. We can't find her and she's not responding to calls. My phone's working, but reception's not great and we're several hours up the trail – not close to ranger stations."

  Tanner's training kicked in instantly. The next few minutes he got all the information he could from Duncan, pinpointed where he thought the call would be coming from, poured over maps on the screen, asked about the girl, asked that all the contact numbers be texted to his cell, and fought the running shirt back off. He'd need to change, grab his fire retardant jacket and pants, get the chopper. If he pushed it, including prep time, he could be there in about 35 minutes.

  He gave Duncan the only instructions he could think of – to get his party out if the fire changed course and came at them, to keep calling for the girl, to call him if they found her, to keep in contact.

  None of it meant anything. It was to stop them panicking and maybe keep them safe by stopping them running about in a panic. The chopper could move fast. It couldn't move that fast. He was more than 60 miles away from them.

  Tanner changed, gathered his gear, did a systems check on a helicopter he knew was ready, texted everybody on the team, and cleared for takeoff.

  The sky was bright when the chopper got up into it. Tanner checked his settings, radioed his path and took off. Air traffic over San Diego was normal weekend heavy. By Saturday most people had already arrived at their destinations. The sky was fairly clear.

  He headed toward Palomar. Midway there he got a call from Knox who for obvious reasons felt heading to a search for a missing girl would be preferable to spending another minute in his soon to be ex-girlfriend's company.

  "Too late," Tanner said. "I'm already airborne and en route."

  Knox didn't make the obvious "You're not airborne, you're SEALs" joke which meant negations with the ex must be going particularly poorly. "Man, help a brother out," Knox said and Tanner just laughed and hung up. Knox could figure out his own exit strategy, no way Tanner was turning the bird around.

  No word from Angel and Jake. He hadn't expected there would be. They were in Vegas. They weren't going to make it for this particular party. No sense filling up the airwaves with chatter.

  Still no word from Mike and no idea why. Mike could go dark with the best of them, prone to depression and worse since they'd been put out to pasture at the tender age of 20-something for each and every one of them.

  He was on his own.

  Just the way he liked it.

  Friends said Tanner Davis was happier by himself than he ever was with anyone else. He didn't think that was necessarily true.

  He just wasn't unhappier without people around him.

  The chopper made good time. The September day wasn't windy. In 31 minutes he found himself approaching Mount Palomar. From a couple miles out he could see the black smoke of the fire rising into the air, and another minute and he could see the flames. The fire was still burning on the valley floor and if her friends were right, then Miss Taylor Adams was probably still all right. The fire was just starting to edge toward the mountainside.

  He triggered the phone, told it to dial the last incoming call.

  "Tanner?" Duncan's voice and Tanner identified why the man hadn't been cut out for Marines. There was fear in that voice. Fear came later. It couldn't be present while you were doing the job. First sign and you threw out whatever was causing it.

  He couldn't land but he could circle. "Any contact?" He'd told Duncan to get his people off the mountain and to call if the girl showed up. Didn't seem like either of those things had happened.

  "Nothing from Taylor. Her phone's not going through. I'm not even getting voice mail." He started to give coordinates of where they were and where they'd last seen Taylor. Tanner let the info wash over him. He'd sort it out later provided the usual didn't happen: instant appearance of sheepish lost/stolen/strayed/silly hiker and resolution of everything in less time than it took to fly to the scene.

  Only that didn't happen. A full six minutes of making a circuit across the area she'd last been seen, then wi
dening the search to see if she'd gone up or down, and there was nothing. No sign of her.

  "Why are your people still on the mountain?" he demanded of Duncan when he stopped processing.

  Must have sounded random. He hadn't spoken for a minute or two but they should both still be on task.

  "Because it took us several hours to get up here. Going to take a while to get back down. That's why we didn't want to go to the ranger station. Too far away and we didn't want to split up."

  From a civilian point of view, he understood that. From his own, they should have sent someone. Taylor Adams had now been missing, without contact, for more than an hour.

  Chapter Four

  Taylor hadn't noticed the time when she took off after Monster. She hadn't even paid attention to it when she was trying to make her phone work. It wasn't until she'd started to panic that Taylor had set the stopwatch on her phone, hoping it would keep her centered. Subjectively it felt like hours and lifetimes had gone by since she'd become lost. Objectively, looking at her phone, she'd only been missing for 45 minutes.

  Quite long enough. One thing she'd noticed over the years was that being lost made her queasy. She knew, in the grand scheme of things, where she was. She was on the top of Mount Palomar. She was scared because she was disoriented and that was making her dizzy and sick. Didn't make any sense, but not knowing which way she was supposed to go did that to her. So now she didn't know where she was, didn't know where her friends were, and she felt sick and dizzy.

  She also knew circles made her dizzy. When she went to malls or libraries or anywhere else based on a wheel, spokes being corridors that led out, she got lost. Give her a straight square or rectangular or even L-shaped mall and she found her way just fine, usually to shoe stores. Give her a circle no matter how small and she wandered around miserably reading you are here signs and not believing them.