Claimed on the Ridge (Sawyer’s Ridge #1)

Prologue

CATHERINE

Eighteen Years Ago

The wipers are losing. Snow piles in the corners of the windshield faster than the blades can clear it, and the road ahead has narrowed to a strip of pale gray between the headlights.

The rest is guesswork. My hands ache on the wheel, fingers locked in a grip that stopped being voluntary somewhere around hour six, and the muscles in my forearms burn from holding the car steady against wind that hasn't let up since Fairbanks.

The rearview mirror catches Amberly first. She is awake in the back seat, knees drawn up as far as the harness allows, her hands resting on the chest clip the way I taught her. Ten years old with eyes that find mine in the glass and hold.

Behind her, through the rear window, the road is dark.

No headlights. Jack is on the Kenai Peninsula with his fishing buddies, three days into a week-long trip.

By the time he gets back to the ridge, my sister, Ruth, will have closed her door behind Amberly and I.

The lock will be turned and it will be done.

If the trip holds. If he doesn't cut it short. If nobody at the lodge calls him.

The wind hits broadside and the car shudders, and my hands tighten before the thought forms.

"Mama." Amberly's voice from the backseat is small and measured, the one she uses when she's reading the weather in a room before she commits to speaking. She learned that voice from reading her father’s mood. It is the reason we are on this road tonight.

"Are we almost there?"

"Almost, baby. Try to close your eyes."

She doesn't. She is watching me the way she watches her father when the drinking starts, tracking my face for the shift that means the air is about to change.

The words I want to say—that she can stop reading rooms, that she will never have to gauge the weather in a man's face again—stay behind my teeth.

Promises feel dangerous when you've broken as many as I have.

The road dips and the wind drops and for three full seconds the snow stops falling.

The road stretches ahead, pale and curving south, and somewhere beyond the next ridge Palmer is waiting.

Ruth's house with the yellow curtains in the room Amberly liked last Easter.

A door that will be open when we get there.

Then the wind comes back and the visibility collapses and the car pushes forward blind, both my hands white on the wheel, counting the seconds until the road reappears.

Four boys in that lodge right now.

Alex will step between his brothers and their father's temper the way he's been doing for two years, sixteen years old and already shouldering a weight that has no business on a boy's frame.

Both versions of Jack live in his face—the patience and the iron—and he doesn't know yet which one will win.

Bryan will go quiet. Cameron will find something to fix.

Dash is twelve and will come looking for me in the morning, and I will be gone, and he will carry that in whatever direction it takes him.

The math only works one way. Five children in this car turns me into a kidnapper in front of any judge Jack's attorney can buy. One child is a woman leaving her husband.

So I took the one he'd fight the least to keep. Jack wanted his boys—the name, the lodge, the legacy carried forward in sons who look like him and work like him and will hold the ridge the way he holds it. Amberly is mine in a way the boys were always his, and that is the ugliest calculation a mother can do. Jack wasn’t the warmest father, but he was never abusive to his children.

Another mirror check. Dark behind us. Just the storm and my daughter's eyes in the glass.

The road curves along the ridgeline and the guardrail flashes in the headlights before a drift swallows it.

Below and to the left, the valley drops into a darkness so complete it could be water, stone, or the edge of the world.

The tires find ice.

The back-end breaks loose first, a sickening sideways lurch that sends the headlights sweeping across the guardrail and into open dark.

The steering wheel goes dead in my hands.

My stomach drops with the gut-level recognition that the car is no longer mine, that two tons of metal are moving on the mountain's terms now, and the sound that comes through the tires is a high, thin whine of rubber on glass.

Turn into the skid. My arms move before the thought completes, wrists rolling, hands fighting for the angle that will bring the back end around. Jack's voice in my muscle memory. His hands over mine on this same wheel, that first winter, when he was still someone I trusted with my life.

The car slides toward the edge. The correction is right there in my hands.

"Mama?" Sharper now. The careful gauging stripped away. In the mirror her hands have tightened on the chest clip, and her eyes are on the road ahead.