Free Heartbreaker by Karen Robards Page B

brief moment she didn’t care if he dropped her or not, didn’t care about anything except the pain in the back of her head, in her shoulder blades and left hip. His grip on her wrist seemed to slacken.…
    Just like that, lightning-fast, she was falling. Her stomach shot into her throat.
    And fall she did, but not far. Her arm was almost jerked out of its socket again as he grabbed her wrist once more. The fright of the near fall banished all consciousness of the pain in her head. She began to struggle, kicking and clawing at nothing as she tried to climb the air to safety.
    “Hold still!” It was a roar, and it penetrated her panic. Lynn realized that she was making it difficult for Jess to keep his hold on her wrist. The mist had made her skin wet and slippery. What if he should lose his grip again?
    She went as still as a rabbit with a dog nearby, deadweight as she hung from his hand.
    Then his other hand joined the first around her wrist. Lynn reached up blindly as she felt herself being hauled upward. The pain in her shoulder was excruciating—but it was nothing next to her fear of falling.
    His feet were braced against the rock wall so that his body formed a near forty-five-degree angle with the cliff, she realized as she touched his boot, gripped the sturdy denim of his jeans, and held on for all she was worth. Absurdly, a vivid picture of herself plummeting to earth clutching his jeans while he dangled from the rope in his shorts—briefs?—flashed through her mind.
    His grip on her wrist shifted, seemed to slip. Her heart stopped. Then his gloved fingers were curling around her other wrist too.
    Lynn let go of his leg as he began to pull her up the length of his body. She looked up at him, watching the effort in his face, fighting the urge to grab at him or move in any way that might undermine his attempt.
    “Got ya,” he said with satisfaction as he hauled her up and across his body. Panting, Lynn climbed atop him. Her feet found his left one where it was braced against the cliff, and she used it for leverage as if it were part of the mountain. With her feet beneath her she pushed herself up and hiked one leg over the rope that secured him to the clifftop. His hands released her wrists. One arm wrapped tightly around her waist. The other hand grabbed the rope, steadying them both.
    Her whole body now sprawled on top of his. Her arms locked around his neck.
    For a few moments she just lay against his body, trembling with exhaustion and the aftermath of fear.
    He held her close as Lynn absorbed his warm, solid strength and realized that she was—relatively—safe.
    “Good thing you’re not fat,” he grunted in her ear.
    Lynn laughed. That she could surprised her. It felt good, life-affirming.
    Glancing over his shoulder and down, she located her daughter. The bright pink poncho stood out like a beacon against the bleakness of the rock.
    “Get Rory,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    For a moment longer, though, they remained unmoving. Lynn realized that Jess was winded too. She also realized that she was not exactly rescued. True, she no longer hung in a tree fifteen stories above the ground. Instead, she clung to a man dangling from a rope the same fifteen stories up. If this was rescue, it was by a matter of degrees only.
    “So where’s the rope that hauls me up?” she asked. Her cheek lay against his shoulder. The rope coiled around his torso made hard little ridges beneath her breasts. She could feel the movement of his chest as he breathed. Considering their situation, she felt surprisingly secure—until she looked past him at the vastness of the pristine peaks rising all around them and calculated the distance to the ground.
    “We’re not going up. We’re going down. That broken shelf is too unstable to take a chance on it shifting again.”
    Lynn saw the sense in that. She had witnessed what happened when Jenny was pulled over the slab.
    “Can you get us down?” she asked.
    “I got you out of the