Jonas, page 3
If I should die…
Then she opened her eyes and knelt in front of the bomb.
She took out the book and again opened it to the right diagram. Checked it twice against the fuze and markings, then took a felt pen and drew on the fuze.
Then she picked up the hand drill.
She was a surgeon, her own life in her hands.
Keeping perfectly vertical, with just the right pressure to cut through the alloy head, she drilled slowly with continued pressure to the correct depth.
Then she blew out the metal shards to keep any litter from falling into the hole and withdrew the bit.
The screw-threaded hollow needle with a valve went next, creating an airtight seal in the gap. She pulled out the plastic tubing from her kit, along with a bottle of saline solution. This was the tricky bit—connecting the tubing to the needle, then using a bicycle pump to create a vacuum with one hand and with the other, flipping open the valve to release the saline into the fuze.
Then she had to pressurize it with the pump to neutralize the fuze.
The wind tumbled a few broken leaves down the road, lifted her braided hair from her neck, her breath steady, her work practiced.
In her exams, she’d completed this test with three minutes to spare.
But it wasn’t a race. Just a pass/fail.
And this time, she passed.
She let out a breath, finally, as she stepped back, packing her tools into her kit. Then she raised her hand.
Triumph. With the fuze immunized, the ordnance could be moved, the payload extracted, and the bomb destroyed.
No lives lost.
Now sweat trickled down her spine, but she unzipped her jacket and turned, lifting her radio. “All clear, Director.”
He was already on the move down the road, but he confirmed anyway.
She didn’t wait for them to arrive but headed back inside the house.
Nice place. Homey, with a compact dining table set into a banquette against the wall, and a massive, tiled stove in the corner, not unlike her grandfather’s place.
So, an older home, and probably it had a couple attic bedrooms and a living room, although children lived here—evident from the drawings taped to the refrigerator in the small kitchen.
Through the west-facing window, the snow-capped Mount Triglav rose in the distance.
“Keep your eyes on me, and you’ll be fine. I won’t let you get hurt.”
And there he was, Spidey, back in her head, still, after a month.
It would help if he hadn’t landed in her world like some kind of superhero. Made her feel, at least for a space of time, safe. As if she had a few more tomorrows ahead of her.
She could still see him running out as if to save her life—not in the storm but the next morning as she stood on the hillside, the air a glorious, unhindered blue, her sail on the hillside above her—
“What are you doing?”
He’d stood above her, and if she thought he was handsome in the dead of night, soaking wet, it had nothing on his brown hair tousled in the wind, a thicker layer of golden-brown whiskers, his blue eyes lighting with concern.
Maybe that’s why she’d sort of lost her brains. Again. “Would you like to go flying?”
For a second—a long, glorious second—she’d thought he might say yes. Because he took a step toward her.
Then, “What?” His gaze went to the cliff, the drop just thirty feet ahead of her, where she’d launch and…
Right. So maybe she’d misjudged the guy. Not the kind to dive off a cliff. Still, her mouth seemed not to have caught up— “Ina’s in good hands, and they’re arranging transport for her down the mountain. I’m going to the base to get help. But—I have an extra harness if you want to fly with me.”
“I…”
And she couldn’t help it. “C’mon. I promise, I won’t let you get hurt.”
Please. And for a second, she thought—
“Sorry. I—I think I prefer my feet on the ground.”
Of course he did. She was the crazy one here, clearly. “Thanks for getting my friend off the mountain! I’ll see you at the bottom.”
She hadn’t seen him at the bottom. Which was for the best, probably. She wasn’t a fool. She’d trained herself to live in a one-meter view of the world. She didn’t have the luxury of anything more.
“Ma’am?”
Sibba turned. Young Milovik came into the kitchen. “Yes, soldier?”
“Should I call the military for removal?”
“Yes. It’s safe to move.”
On the table beside him, where she’d set her kit, her phone buzzed. She picked it up and opened a text. Ina.
>>Not to worry you, but have you checked on your grandfather? According to mine, the derecho went right through Poče.>>
She’d called him two days ago but hadn’t gotten through, and then had been picked up by Milovik to attend to ordnances near Lake Bled.
So… She pocketed the phone and turned to Milovik. “I need to go. I need transport back to Cerkno.”
“I need to stay until the disposal team arrives.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take you, Sibba.” Director Vlasic.
She gathered her kit—left the Kevlar suit for the military to disinfect—put the gear into the boot of his car, then left them to dig up the past.
The drive back to Cerkno wasn’t far, but another unanswered call to her grandfather had her heart pumping.
“Everything okay?”
She liked Vlasic. Mid-sixties, he had a couple grandchildren and was liked, voted in for years in her town of two thousand.
“My grandfather lives in Poče.”
A beat. “They got hit. Electricity went down. Might still be down.”
Right. Could be why her call didn’t go through.
“I know your grandfather. He’s quiet. Keeps to himself.”
She said nothing.
“Good man, though. Wasn’t he mayor?”
“Four times.”
He gave a chuckle. “Did he ever take you back to the States?”
She shook her head, looked out the window. The effects of the storm still littered the ditches along the highway, branches down, water running across low patches in the road.
“Why not?”
“He had his reasons.”
Vlasic nodded. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s a survivor.”
A survivor. Yes. He’d had to be.
But one didn’t live through war, especially one like Vietnam, without scars. She hadn’t seen his PTSD rise to the surface in years, but after the storm last weekend…
And he never knew when the past might show up, either, and destroy everything.
She drew in a breath as the town of Cerkno came into view. Nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains, it was this storybook view of red-roofed homes, a white spire of a central church, and one quaint main street that drew tourists from nearby Ljubljana. That and, ten kilometers to the north, just out the driver’s window to the east, the glorious slopes of the Cerkno Ski Centre.
The last thing the tourist industry needed was the rumor of unexploded bombs littering these pine-soaked mountains.
Hence why, after everything, Sibba had found herself back here, forty kilometers from her hometown.
Safe.
Settled.
Living large, one day at a time.
Vlasic dropped her off at her townhome, near the center.
“Thanks.” She headed upstairs, dropped her kit, then grabbed the keys to her Citroen Berlingo, a jacket and her backpack, and headed out.
She called her grandfather again on the way up, but again, voice mail.
Really, she shouldn’t worry. He managed just fine alone on his farmland, rented it out to a neighbor mostly and lived on his bee money. But he missed her grandmother. And the storm…
She knew every curve, turned right at the V in the road and noticed the effects of the storm on the hay mounds as she drove past farmland.
Twenty minutes later, she spotted Poče. Just a village, a blink on the map, but she knew every storefront, every cobblestone drive, every face.
Her grandfather lived on a farm just outside the village, on a hill overlooking his kingdom. Or at least that’s sort of how she’d felt, being his granddaughter.
She cut right again, into his long drive. Ahead, his wooden barn still stood, and across the drive, the whitewashed stone home that had been built by her great-grandfather.
Before it was absorbed into the nightmare that was Yugoslavia.
Before, even, the first war that ravaged their land.
She pulled up alongside the barn and eyed her grandfather’s tractor sitting outside. A cat jumped from a high fender and scampered away.
She got out. “Dedi?” The air was colder here, touched with a breath of winter, although reaping the pine scent from the surrounding foothills.
She walked up alongside the barn and stood in the drive. The house seemed cold. Dark. Empty. “Dedi?”
Then, from behind her, a cry.
She whirled and froze. Zuma, his prized Drežnica goat, stood in the open door of the barn, bleating at her.
“Oh, you.”
It ran back into the barn.
“Dedi?” She headed to the barn.
And that’s when she grew cold.
Empty. The milking cow, Berta, gone.
His horse, Imbero, also gone, his stall open.
And his dog, the old mutt Lenard, hadn’t appeared to announce her.
She turned and headed to the house. As usual, the door was unlocked, and she walked in.
Her childhood rushed back to her in the familiar smell of oiled wooden floors, the old coal furnace in the corner of the main room, the drying dill and oregano from the small kitchen, and the scent of Dedi’s pipe. She missed the smell of Babička’s sourdough bread.
“Dedi?”
She climbed the open stairs to the two small attic bedrooms, her stomach tight.
Both beds were covered in fraying, comfortable quilts.
She stood there, in his empty bedroom, her gaze on his bureau, and her heart thumped.
His Bible was gone.
She pressed a hand to her stomach. He was fine. Probably.
Outside, a rumble thundered from the road, and she walked to the window.
Military transport trucks, two of them, kicked up dust as they lumbered toward the village of Poče.
And sure, it was crazy, but the old stories, the old whispers suddenly rose, consumed her thoughts, and all she could think as she stood there was Run, Dedi, run.
She had to be around here somewhere, Jonas just knew it.
“She” being weather balloon number four, aka, Frannie, who’d vanished off the radar four days ago near about the time a windstorm swept through northern Slovenia and took off roofs, upended trees, and generally left a wake of destruction akin to a derecho across the plains of the Midwest in America.
No wonder Frannie, and Trixie and Alice, had dropped from the sky, the latter two practically disintegrating in the air to drop into piles of metal and electronics scattered over farmland and wooded areas like Humpty Dumpty. Thankfully, the GPS locators on the black boxes remained intact, and he’d managed to retrieve the radiosondes inside.
Frannie, however, hid from him, her GPS on the fritz, her last known location some thirty klicks from Cerkno, in a valley under the shadow of Mt. Porezen, near a village called Poče.
Just a smudge on the map—maybe sixty inhabitants, total, but large enough to have experienced damage from the storm, not to mention a six-foot dirigible crashing through their main square.
Hopefully not catching fire, since the helium it contained to keep it aloft wasn’t flammable, but he’d seen crazy things happen, and the last thing he wanted was for his experiment to turn tragic.
He’d had enough blame to shoulder.
Now he drove along the rutted, two-wheel dirt road winding through foothills crisp with the October cold, the trees lush with reds and oranges, aflame with autumn, reminding him too much of his home state, Minnesota.
Or maybe that was just a byproduct of his recent conversation with his brother, Fraser.
At least, the conversation he’d had after Fraser had jumped him while Jonas had been busy breaking into his sister’s place in Lake Como, Italy. Okay, not exactly breaking in, because Iris kept the welcome mat out, but he’d forgotten his key. Which had necessitated a B&E trick his dad had taught him with the sliding glass door.
Jonas had never expected to get tackled right there in the living room, although he’d given himself some kudos for reacting fast and getting his brother—a former Navy SEAL, thank you—down on the ground.
And sure, Fraser’s fitness level may have been a little underdone, but still, big bro had skills, and Jonas was just a weatherman, so hoo-yah and a fist pump for him.
But the triumph had been short lived when he’d discovered that Fraser was in country because their kid brother, Creed, was on the lam with a princess he’d met in Geneva.
Way to go, Creed. Except Creed was apparently also a named witness to a murder, so…
Yeah, Jonas had rolled that around in his brain for the past four days since returning to Slovenia.
That and the conversation he’d found himself in after the throwdown with Fraser, about big brother’s injury, his future, and the girl he’d joined forces with to find Creed. Pippa something. Bodyguard.
Fraser liked her—Jonas had spotted that from the first. And yes, he’d pushed a little. Confronted him with a Maybe, if you were honest, you want more.
He’d meant the words for Fraser, really.
Really.
Okay, in truth, it could be he’d been speaking out of his own heart.
More than running after, or into, storms.
More than returning home after a high-stakes night to nothing more than his sleeping bag and a couple power bars. And the shortwave giving him yet another weather update.
Most of all, Jonas could live without the guilt of—
He nearly missed the turn for Poče, a chip-painted sign that pointed east.
It led him around a farm, through a cluster of trees, down a hill, through more farmland, and then, in the distance, he spotted the stone spire of an ancient church, surrounded by a handful of red-roofed buildings.
Poče.
He pulled over to the side of the road and picked up his cell phone. Widened the map area.
The last known location put Frannie just outside the village, about one kilometer to the southeast.
He spotted a farm in the distance settled into the rolling hills, more wooded foothills rising to the east. Taking out the binoculars, he scanned the fields.
A couple farm implements, but mostly just harvest debris. Still, pieces of Frannie could be scattered all over the field.
He got out, the air brisk although the sun had come out, the sky a bright blue with just a few cirrostratus clouds, high and flat, scattered across the atmosphere.
No snow, at least for a couple days. And a look behind him at Mt. Triglav, jutting bold and white into the sky, said that any weather would have to jockey around it.
For a moment, the memory of his rescue of Ina Novak on said mountain whispered through him.
And not the long stretch of misery carrying Ina to help, but the next morning. After he’d slept like the dead and woke to discover that he’d somehow crashed in the room reserved for Ina and her friend, Sibba.
Oops. Or maybe the reservation had belonged to both of them—Europeans didn’t seem to worry about those things.
The ladies had already risen, and he’d found Ina and Nixon in the kitchen, with the staff arranging for her descent down the mountain on a four-wheeler. The swelling had gone down, and the doctor from the previous night had agreed to ride down with her.
Her friend Sibba, however, wasn’t in the kitchen. And when he’d asked about her, Ina had sent him outside, saying there wasn’t any more room on the four-wheeler.
He’d gone outside and seen an orange-and-blue parachute spread on a grassy hillside, Sibba wearing a harness.
“What are you doing?”
She’d looked up at him then, her tawny-brown hair pulled back into a braid, snaking out of her helmet. She wore a lime-green jacket, leggings, hiking boots, and stood up at his call.
He knew his question was probably stupid—he knew what a parachute looked like. And the quick math said she was a paraglider pilot, but—
“Would you like to go flying?”
The question, borne on the wind, carried to him, and he stood there, his mouth open. “What?” He stepped closer so she didn’t have to yell, walking around the massive limp silks, now undulating in the rising wind.
The storm had wrung itself out over the mountain, and overhead, a clear blue sky, free from any cumulus, suggested a gorgeous day to, um, fly.
The drop from this altitude swept the breath from his lungs, and he preferred his feet on the ground, thank you. At least, he thought he did.
She shook out the lines of her chute. “Ina’s in good hands, and they’re arranging transport for her down the mountain. I’m going to the base to get help. But—I have an extra harness if you want to fly with me.”
And then she smiled at him. The sight of it undid him, a complete about-face to the woman he’d met on the summit yesterday. She was pretty, in a sort of no-nonsense, no-makeup, just-sunshine-and-fresh-air sort of way.
“I…”
“C’mon. I promise, I won’t let you get hurt.”
Something about her smile teased, pulled at him, and crazily, the urge to nod, to walk into her proffered harness and clip on, to soar with her over the mountains, swept over him in a wash of heat and light and—desire.
Yes, that’s what it was. The desire for something more.
So he didn’t know why he raised a hand. “Sorry. I—I think I prefer my feet on the ground.”
She raised her hands, as if in surrender, and shrugged. “Thanks for getting my friend off the mountain! I’ll see you at the bottom.”
Then she picked up her lines and, like a kite, urged the chute into the air. Started running.
The chute lifted her off the ground as gently as a bird taking flight, and she rose on the thermals of the Julian Alps.
Then she opened her eyes and knelt in front of the bomb.
She took out the book and again opened it to the right diagram. Checked it twice against the fuze and markings, then took a felt pen and drew on the fuze.
Then she picked up the hand drill.
She was a surgeon, her own life in her hands.
Keeping perfectly vertical, with just the right pressure to cut through the alloy head, she drilled slowly with continued pressure to the correct depth.
Then she blew out the metal shards to keep any litter from falling into the hole and withdrew the bit.
The screw-threaded hollow needle with a valve went next, creating an airtight seal in the gap. She pulled out the plastic tubing from her kit, along with a bottle of saline solution. This was the tricky bit—connecting the tubing to the needle, then using a bicycle pump to create a vacuum with one hand and with the other, flipping open the valve to release the saline into the fuze.
Then she had to pressurize it with the pump to neutralize the fuze.
The wind tumbled a few broken leaves down the road, lifted her braided hair from her neck, her breath steady, her work practiced.
In her exams, she’d completed this test with three minutes to spare.
But it wasn’t a race. Just a pass/fail.
And this time, she passed.
She let out a breath, finally, as she stepped back, packing her tools into her kit. Then she raised her hand.
Triumph. With the fuze immunized, the ordnance could be moved, the payload extracted, and the bomb destroyed.
No lives lost.
Now sweat trickled down her spine, but she unzipped her jacket and turned, lifting her radio. “All clear, Director.”
He was already on the move down the road, but he confirmed anyway.
She didn’t wait for them to arrive but headed back inside the house.
Nice place. Homey, with a compact dining table set into a banquette against the wall, and a massive, tiled stove in the corner, not unlike her grandfather’s place.
So, an older home, and probably it had a couple attic bedrooms and a living room, although children lived here—evident from the drawings taped to the refrigerator in the small kitchen.
Through the west-facing window, the snow-capped Mount Triglav rose in the distance.
“Keep your eyes on me, and you’ll be fine. I won’t let you get hurt.”
And there he was, Spidey, back in her head, still, after a month.
It would help if he hadn’t landed in her world like some kind of superhero. Made her feel, at least for a space of time, safe. As if she had a few more tomorrows ahead of her.
She could still see him running out as if to save her life—not in the storm but the next morning as she stood on the hillside, the air a glorious, unhindered blue, her sail on the hillside above her—
“What are you doing?”
He’d stood above her, and if she thought he was handsome in the dead of night, soaking wet, it had nothing on his brown hair tousled in the wind, a thicker layer of golden-brown whiskers, his blue eyes lighting with concern.
Maybe that’s why she’d sort of lost her brains. Again. “Would you like to go flying?”
For a second—a long, glorious second—she’d thought he might say yes. Because he took a step toward her.
Then, “What?” His gaze went to the cliff, the drop just thirty feet ahead of her, where she’d launch and…
Right. So maybe she’d misjudged the guy. Not the kind to dive off a cliff. Still, her mouth seemed not to have caught up— “Ina’s in good hands, and they’re arranging transport for her down the mountain. I’m going to the base to get help. But—I have an extra harness if you want to fly with me.”
“I…”
And she couldn’t help it. “C’mon. I promise, I won’t let you get hurt.”
Please. And for a second, she thought—
“Sorry. I—I think I prefer my feet on the ground.”
Of course he did. She was the crazy one here, clearly. “Thanks for getting my friend off the mountain! I’ll see you at the bottom.”
She hadn’t seen him at the bottom. Which was for the best, probably. She wasn’t a fool. She’d trained herself to live in a one-meter view of the world. She didn’t have the luxury of anything more.
“Ma’am?”
Sibba turned. Young Milovik came into the kitchen. “Yes, soldier?”
“Should I call the military for removal?”
“Yes. It’s safe to move.”
On the table beside him, where she’d set her kit, her phone buzzed. She picked it up and opened a text. Ina.
>>Not to worry you, but have you checked on your grandfather? According to mine, the derecho went right through Poče.>>
She’d called him two days ago but hadn’t gotten through, and then had been picked up by Milovik to attend to ordnances near Lake Bled.
So… She pocketed the phone and turned to Milovik. “I need to go. I need transport back to Cerkno.”
“I need to stay until the disposal team arrives.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take you, Sibba.” Director Vlasic.
She gathered her kit—left the Kevlar suit for the military to disinfect—put the gear into the boot of his car, then left them to dig up the past.
The drive back to Cerkno wasn’t far, but another unanswered call to her grandfather had her heart pumping.
“Everything okay?”
She liked Vlasic. Mid-sixties, he had a couple grandchildren and was liked, voted in for years in her town of two thousand.
“My grandfather lives in Poče.”
A beat. “They got hit. Electricity went down. Might still be down.”
Right. Could be why her call didn’t go through.
“I know your grandfather. He’s quiet. Keeps to himself.”
She said nothing.
“Good man, though. Wasn’t he mayor?”
“Four times.”
He gave a chuckle. “Did he ever take you back to the States?”
She shook her head, looked out the window. The effects of the storm still littered the ditches along the highway, branches down, water running across low patches in the road.
“Why not?”
“He had his reasons.”
Vlasic nodded. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s a survivor.”
A survivor. Yes. He’d had to be.
But one didn’t live through war, especially one like Vietnam, without scars. She hadn’t seen his PTSD rise to the surface in years, but after the storm last weekend…
And he never knew when the past might show up, either, and destroy everything.
She drew in a breath as the town of Cerkno came into view. Nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains, it was this storybook view of red-roofed homes, a white spire of a central church, and one quaint main street that drew tourists from nearby Ljubljana. That and, ten kilometers to the north, just out the driver’s window to the east, the glorious slopes of the Cerkno Ski Centre.
The last thing the tourist industry needed was the rumor of unexploded bombs littering these pine-soaked mountains.
Hence why, after everything, Sibba had found herself back here, forty kilometers from her hometown.
Safe.
Settled.
Living large, one day at a time.
Vlasic dropped her off at her townhome, near the center.
“Thanks.” She headed upstairs, dropped her kit, then grabbed the keys to her Citroen Berlingo, a jacket and her backpack, and headed out.
She called her grandfather again on the way up, but again, voice mail.
Really, she shouldn’t worry. He managed just fine alone on his farmland, rented it out to a neighbor mostly and lived on his bee money. But he missed her grandmother. And the storm…
She knew every curve, turned right at the V in the road and noticed the effects of the storm on the hay mounds as she drove past farmland.
Twenty minutes later, she spotted Poče. Just a village, a blink on the map, but she knew every storefront, every cobblestone drive, every face.
Her grandfather lived on a farm just outside the village, on a hill overlooking his kingdom. Or at least that’s sort of how she’d felt, being his granddaughter.
She cut right again, into his long drive. Ahead, his wooden barn still stood, and across the drive, the whitewashed stone home that had been built by her great-grandfather.
Before it was absorbed into the nightmare that was Yugoslavia.
Before, even, the first war that ravaged their land.
She pulled up alongside the barn and eyed her grandfather’s tractor sitting outside. A cat jumped from a high fender and scampered away.
She got out. “Dedi?” The air was colder here, touched with a breath of winter, although reaping the pine scent from the surrounding foothills.
She walked up alongside the barn and stood in the drive. The house seemed cold. Dark. Empty. “Dedi?”
Then, from behind her, a cry.
She whirled and froze. Zuma, his prized Drežnica goat, stood in the open door of the barn, bleating at her.
“Oh, you.”
It ran back into the barn.
“Dedi?” She headed to the barn.
And that’s when she grew cold.
Empty. The milking cow, Berta, gone.
His horse, Imbero, also gone, his stall open.
And his dog, the old mutt Lenard, hadn’t appeared to announce her.
She turned and headed to the house. As usual, the door was unlocked, and she walked in.
Her childhood rushed back to her in the familiar smell of oiled wooden floors, the old coal furnace in the corner of the main room, the drying dill and oregano from the small kitchen, and the scent of Dedi’s pipe. She missed the smell of Babička’s sourdough bread.
“Dedi?”
She climbed the open stairs to the two small attic bedrooms, her stomach tight.
Both beds were covered in fraying, comfortable quilts.
She stood there, in his empty bedroom, her gaze on his bureau, and her heart thumped.
His Bible was gone.
She pressed a hand to her stomach. He was fine. Probably.
Outside, a rumble thundered from the road, and she walked to the window.
Military transport trucks, two of them, kicked up dust as they lumbered toward the village of Poče.
And sure, it was crazy, but the old stories, the old whispers suddenly rose, consumed her thoughts, and all she could think as she stood there was Run, Dedi, run.
She had to be around here somewhere, Jonas just knew it.
“She” being weather balloon number four, aka, Frannie, who’d vanished off the radar four days ago near about the time a windstorm swept through northern Slovenia and took off roofs, upended trees, and generally left a wake of destruction akin to a derecho across the plains of the Midwest in America.
No wonder Frannie, and Trixie and Alice, had dropped from the sky, the latter two practically disintegrating in the air to drop into piles of metal and electronics scattered over farmland and wooded areas like Humpty Dumpty. Thankfully, the GPS locators on the black boxes remained intact, and he’d managed to retrieve the radiosondes inside.
Frannie, however, hid from him, her GPS on the fritz, her last known location some thirty klicks from Cerkno, in a valley under the shadow of Mt. Porezen, near a village called Poče.
Just a smudge on the map—maybe sixty inhabitants, total, but large enough to have experienced damage from the storm, not to mention a six-foot dirigible crashing through their main square.
Hopefully not catching fire, since the helium it contained to keep it aloft wasn’t flammable, but he’d seen crazy things happen, and the last thing he wanted was for his experiment to turn tragic.
He’d had enough blame to shoulder.
Now he drove along the rutted, two-wheel dirt road winding through foothills crisp with the October cold, the trees lush with reds and oranges, aflame with autumn, reminding him too much of his home state, Minnesota.
Or maybe that was just a byproduct of his recent conversation with his brother, Fraser.
At least, the conversation he’d had after Fraser had jumped him while Jonas had been busy breaking into his sister’s place in Lake Como, Italy. Okay, not exactly breaking in, because Iris kept the welcome mat out, but he’d forgotten his key. Which had necessitated a B&E trick his dad had taught him with the sliding glass door.
Jonas had never expected to get tackled right there in the living room, although he’d given himself some kudos for reacting fast and getting his brother—a former Navy SEAL, thank you—down on the ground.
And sure, Fraser’s fitness level may have been a little underdone, but still, big bro had skills, and Jonas was just a weatherman, so hoo-yah and a fist pump for him.
But the triumph had been short lived when he’d discovered that Fraser was in country because their kid brother, Creed, was on the lam with a princess he’d met in Geneva.
Way to go, Creed. Except Creed was apparently also a named witness to a murder, so…
Yeah, Jonas had rolled that around in his brain for the past four days since returning to Slovenia.
That and the conversation he’d found himself in after the throwdown with Fraser, about big brother’s injury, his future, and the girl he’d joined forces with to find Creed. Pippa something. Bodyguard.
Fraser liked her—Jonas had spotted that from the first. And yes, he’d pushed a little. Confronted him with a Maybe, if you were honest, you want more.
He’d meant the words for Fraser, really.
Really.
Okay, in truth, it could be he’d been speaking out of his own heart.
More than running after, or into, storms.
More than returning home after a high-stakes night to nothing more than his sleeping bag and a couple power bars. And the shortwave giving him yet another weather update.
Most of all, Jonas could live without the guilt of—
He nearly missed the turn for Poče, a chip-painted sign that pointed east.
It led him around a farm, through a cluster of trees, down a hill, through more farmland, and then, in the distance, he spotted the stone spire of an ancient church, surrounded by a handful of red-roofed buildings.
Poče.
He pulled over to the side of the road and picked up his cell phone. Widened the map area.
The last known location put Frannie just outside the village, about one kilometer to the southeast.
He spotted a farm in the distance settled into the rolling hills, more wooded foothills rising to the east. Taking out the binoculars, he scanned the fields.
A couple farm implements, but mostly just harvest debris. Still, pieces of Frannie could be scattered all over the field.
He got out, the air brisk although the sun had come out, the sky a bright blue with just a few cirrostratus clouds, high and flat, scattered across the atmosphere.
No snow, at least for a couple days. And a look behind him at Mt. Triglav, jutting bold and white into the sky, said that any weather would have to jockey around it.
For a moment, the memory of his rescue of Ina Novak on said mountain whispered through him.
And not the long stretch of misery carrying Ina to help, but the next morning. After he’d slept like the dead and woke to discover that he’d somehow crashed in the room reserved for Ina and her friend, Sibba.
Oops. Or maybe the reservation had belonged to both of them—Europeans didn’t seem to worry about those things.
The ladies had already risen, and he’d found Ina and Nixon in the kitchen, with the staff arranging for her descent down the mountain on a four-wheeler. The swelling had gone down, and the doctor from the previous night had agreed to ride down with her.
Her friend Sibba, however, wasn’t in the kitchen. And when he’d asked about her, Ina had sent him outside, saying there wasn’t any more room on the four-wheeler.
He’d gone outside and seen an orange-and-blue parachute spread on a grassy hillside, Sibba wearing a harness.
“What are you doing?”
She’d looked up at him then, her tawny-brown hair pulled back into a braid, snaking out of her helmet. She wore a lime-green jacket, leggings, hiking boots, and stood up at his call.
He knew his question was probably stupid—he knew what a parachute looked like. And the quick math said she was a paraglider pilot, but—
“Would you like to go flying?”
The question, borne on the wind, carried to him, and he stood there, his mouth open. “What?” He stepped closer so she didn’t have to yell, walking around the massive limp silks, now undulating in the rising wind.
The storm had wrung itself out over the mountain, and overhead, a clear blue sky, free from any cumulus, suggested a gorgeous day to, um, fly.
The drop from this altitude swept the breath from his lungs, and he preferred his feet on the ground, thank you. At least, he thought he did.
She shook out the lines of her chute. “Ina’s in good hands, and they’re arranging transport for her down the mountain. I’m going to the base to get help. But—I have an extra harness if you want to fly with me.”
And then she smiled at him. The sight of it undid him, a complete about-face to the woman he’d met on the summit yesterday. She was pretty, in a sort of no-nonsense, no-makeup, just-sunshine-and-fresh-air sort of way.
“I…”
“C’mon. I promise, I won’t let you get hurt.”
Something about her smile teased, pulled at him, and crazily, the urge to nod, to walk into her proffered harness and clip on, to soar with her over the mountains, swept over him in a wash of heat and light and—desire.
Yes, that’s what it was. The desire for something more.
So he didn’t know why he raised a hand. “Sorry. I—I think I prefer my feet on the ground.”
She raised her hands, as if in surrender, and shrugged. “Thanks for getting my friend off the mountain! I’ll see you at the bottom.”
Then she picked up her lines and, like a kite, urged the chute into the air. Started running.
The chute lifted her off the ground as gently as a bird taking flight, and she rose on the thermals of the Julian Alps.
