The Family You Make (Sunrise Cove #1)

“Create algorithms and predictive models . . . for business needs, stuff like that.”

She looked around once again for the first aid kit that had to be here somewhere. Yes, there it was in the corner. She hooked it with her foot and opened it up. “Could you create an algorithm to tell me which fast-food joint is most likely to give me a stomachache when I’m inhaling food after a twelve-hour shift?”

“The answer is all of them. And that’s a long workday.”

“Betting you work long hours too.”

“I do. How about I feed you real food after this?”

She snorted. “Are you flirting with me right now, Levi the Data Scientist Consultant?”

The man managed a small smile, sexy as hell even with him sprawled out on the floor, bleeding. “I’m stuck in a gondola with a beautiful woman who took off her clothes. The least I can do is make her laugh.”

She did just that as she found the antiseptic and gauze and doctored up his head the best she could for the moment. “This isn’t exactly a laughable situation.”

“I know. I didn’t even get mouth-to-mouth—”

He broke off as another huge gust of wind hit them like a battering ram, rocking them violently.

Jane crouched over him to keep anything else from hitting him. “Wonder how many gondolas have fallen at this resort,” she asked with what she wanted to be a calm voice, but which sounded thin to her own ears.

Levi reached up and covered her hands with his. “Until tonight? Zero.”

“You better not be lying to make me feel better.”

“I’m not. I mean, I’d totally lie to make you feel better, but it’s also the truth. A gondola has never fallen in the Tahoe region. Scout’s honor.”

“Until now.”

His steely eyes held hers. “Until now.”

She realized their faces were inches apart. Pulling back, she began going through the stuff littered around them, finding a bottle of water. “Are you allergic to acetaminophen?” she asked.

“No.”

She handed over two pills from the small sample packet in her first aid kit. He propped himself up and popped them into his mouth, swallowing them before she got the bottle of water open. He lay back down and closed his eyes again. A muscle ticking in his jaw was the only sign he was in pain.

“What else do you need?” she asked.

“Can you reach into my front pocket?”

“Not even in your dreams.”

That got her another almost smile. “To get my phone.”

“Oh.” Right. The fact he was no longer flirting with her and his face was pinched with pain made her even more worried. Worried enough to indeed reach into his pocket and pull out his phone. She handed it over and watched as he sent out a quick text, getting an even quicker response. “I’ve got a friend on the search-and-rescue team here. He says the resort security alerted them. There’s already a team in place, but they’re being held up at base because there’s zero visibility.” He gave a very tense smile. “He said to hang tight.”

Jane risked another look out the window and was startled to realize she couldn’t see an inch past the glass, nothing beyond a swirling, vast void that seemed all encompassing. She swallowed hard. She’d done a lot of things in her lifetime that would be considered dangerous. The locales of some of the places she’d been sent to deliver health care, for instance. Or when she’d been mugged on a train in Europe. And then there’d been the time she and a group of other medical workers had been flown to a remote village in the Philippines that had caught on fire while they were there.

But this. Hanging by a thread, facing a fall that she knew neither of them could possibly survive . . .

Levi reached for her hand, his big and warm. “We’re going to be okay.”

She stared down at his long fingers gripping hers. “That would be more believable if you weren’t gripping me hard enough to make the muscles in my fingers cramp. Tell me the truth: you think we’re going to die, don’t you.”

“We don’t actually have any muscles in our fingers,” he said. “Their function is controlled by the muscles in our palms and arms.”

That was actually true. She knew it from nursing school. He was trying to distract her the way she always distracted her patients when she had a needle coming for them. “You can’t distract me. I’m indistractable.”

He managed a small smile. “I’d like to prove you wrong, but right now I’m all talk. How about we don’t put it out there into the universe that we’re going to die, okay? Let’s put it out there that we’re going to make it, that there’s no alternative.”

Looking into his eyes, she almost believed him. Then he flashed a small smile. “Besides, you haven’t thanked me for saving your life yet. Can’t die before that.” He held out his phone.

She stared at it. “What do you want me to do with that?”

“Call your family,” he said quietly.

To say goodbye, he meant, and suddenly her heart was in her throat again.





Chapter 3


Jane stared down at the cell phone, then glanced to the windows again. Snow blowing sideways, still zero visibility, still absolute chaos, but in here it was oddly quiet, insulated, almost . . . intimate. It felt odd to look out into the wilderness, so close that without the glass, she could’ve reached out and touched one of the towering heavily snow-draped Norway spruces. She felt like she was inside a snow globe in an enchanted winter wonderland scene.

Still lying down, Levi was patiently waiting for her to make a call, even though he was the one in pain and injured, and yeah, okay, they were both in an impossible situation, but his was most definitely worse than hers.

And he’d offered her his phone first. “My cat can’t answer a phone,” she said. “It’s an opposable thumbs thing.”

His lips quirked. She hadn’t been trying to be funny, but rather distract from the truth—she had no family to call.