Above It All (Eureka, Colorado Book 4) (Contemporary Romance) Read online

  Also by Cindy Myers

  The View from Here

  “Room at the Inn” in Secret Santa

  The Mountain Between Us

  A Change in Altitude

  Above It All

  CINDY MYERS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  THE VIEW FROM HERE

  SECRET SANTA

  THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US

  A CHANGE IN ALTITUDE

  Copyright Page

  To Jim, forever and always

  Chapter 1

  “Happy birthday, Mommy.”

  “Happy birthday!”

  Squeals and giggles, punctuated by applause, filled Shelly’s ears as she blew out the candles on the black-and-white cake her husband, Charlie, must have ordered from the Last Dollar Café. She smiled across the table at her spouse. A burly guy with a full, ginger beard, he wasn’t given to romantic gestures, but he’d come through for her this birthday. Not only had he ordered her favorite cake, he’d managed to get the day off from his job running a road grader for the county and he’d promised to take the boys fishing this afternoon, giving her a rare few hours all to herself, an unimaginable luxury.

  “Happy birthday, sweetie.” Charlie kissed her cheek as she cut into the cake. She served the boys, Cameron and Theo, first, then gave Charlie an extra-large slice. Finally, she sank a fork into her own serving. The combination of rich fudge cake, velvety vanilla cake, marshmallow cream filling, and chocolate frosting made her want to moan with delight.

  “Good cake, Mom.” Seven-year-old Cameron grinned at her, revealing the gap where a new tooth was just coming in.

  “Good!” five-year-old Theo agreed, his mouth smeared with chocolate.

  “The cake is wonderful. Thank you. And thank you for the presents.” In addition to the cake and the promise of an afternoon’s freedom, she’d received a T-shirt decorated with the boys’ handprints from their sitter, Debbie Starling, a rock shaped like a heart that Cameron had found in the river, a new romance novel from Charlie’s mom, and a lilac bush from Charlie.

  The boys had already finished their cake and showed signs of restlessness. “Who wants to go fishing?” Charlie asked.

  “I do! I do!” They jumped up and began racing around the table, more like two puppies than human boys.

  Charlie grabbed one boy under each arm, growling like an angry bear. They squealed and giggled. Shelly finished her cake, the sounds of her happy family filling her with such joy that tears threatened. Her own childhood had been so different from the life she lived now. How had she ended up so lucky?

  “Go on, get in the truck. Cameron, help your brother buckle up. I’ll be out in a minute.” Charlie sent the boys racing for his truck. He turned to Shelly. “Sure you don’t want to come?”

  “I’m going to spend the afternoon in a bubble bath, reading about some sexy Scottish Highlander.”

  “Are you now, lass?” He did a fair imitation of a Scottish brogue and nuzzled her neck. “You’ll have to tell me all about it, later.”

  Laughing, she pushed him away. “Go. Before the boys decide they want to learn how to drive the truck.”

  When the door closed behind him, she sighed and sat back in her chair. She debated eating a second piece of cake, but the second helping of anything was never as wonderful as the first, so she covered the cake and carried their dishes to the sink. She’d see to them later. For now, she was going to run that bath, do a quick check of her e-mail, then forget about everything for a while.

  She headed upstairs to the master bath, which Charlie had redone two years ago, with an oversize claw-foot tub she’d found in Lucille Theriot’s junk shop, and slate tiles the green and gray of river stones. They’d added golden oak wainscoting and clean white plaster on the walls. As a girl, she’d dreamed of an elegant retreat like this. But the best feature of the room, one even her fertile childhood imagination couldn’t have conceived, was the five-foot picture window over the tub, which afforded a view of Mount Garnet, a jagged peak capped with snow most of the year. Now, in August, a riot of wildflowers—red paintbrush, blue columbine, purple bee balm, and yellow black-eyed Susan—spilled across the meadow at the foot of the mountain like spatters of color dotting a painter’s smock. Who needed bouquets from the florist, with a scene like this right outside her window?

  She turned the taps to start the water running, poured in a generous glug of vanilla bubble bath, then moved into the bedroom, to the desk in the corner where her laptop sat open. Charlie had fixed up this little corner office for her, too, with twin bookcases filled with her favorite novels and her collection of Colorado history books. She logged into her e-mail and waited for it to load, scanning the headlines that filled the homepage. The usual assortment of celebrity gossip, political speculation, and crime news. Here in tiny Eureka, Colorado, all of that seemed so far away.

  Then her gaze fixed on a picture in the corner of the page, of a dirt-smeared, wide-eyed toddler with a halo of white-blond curls. Her heart pounded and in an instant she felt the bone-weariness and aching hunger of that little girl, the fierce need to be held and comforted, and her fear of the reporters around her.

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW? asked the headline. WE REMEMBER THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RESCUE OF BABY SHELLY.

  Unable to stop herself, she clicked the link to the story.

  “Those five days in August of 1990 changed our family forever,” says Sandy Payton, seated in the kitchen of the home she and husband, Danny, built after the rescue of their older daughter, Shelly. Sandy was only nineteen when her child disappeared through a crack in the dry earth, into a previously unknown cavern beneath the family’s ranch land in northwest Texas. Eight months pregnant with her second daughter, Mindy, Sandy could only watch helplessly and pray as rescuers from around the world descended on the ranch to try to save the little girl, whose picture dominated news reports over the next five days as volunteers worked day and night.

  “We’ll always be so grateful to all the people who helped, not only during rescue efforts, but for years afterward,” Sandy told this reporter. “Shelly needed a lot of help to recover from her ordeal, but I’m happy to report she’s doing well today.”

  Sandy says she and her elder daughter remain close, but she declined to reveal Shelly’s location, out of respect for her privacy.

  Feeling sick, Shelly shut off the computer and closed her eyes, but she couldn’t shut out the flood of memories—trapped in that cavern, terrified of the dark, cold and hungry. But worse than the physical suffering had been the sense of abandonment. She wanted her mother and father even more than she wanted food or blankets. She didn’t understand what had happened. One moment she’d been playing; the next, she’d been plunged into this alien landscape. She worried about monsters, or devils, but most of all, she feared she had been forgotten. Exhaustion eventually dulled her s
enses. She found a puddle of water and drank from it, and curled up in a patch of sand and slept.

  She’d spent five days in the cavern. The time was a blur of memory. She had had no idea that the whole world was focused on the search for her. When rescuers finally opened a passage into the cavern, she’d been pulled into blinding light—not from the sun, for it was dark when they reached her, but from the spotlights belonging to fifty television crews that filled her grandparents’ ranch. Reporters shouted and jostled for a view of her, and camera flashes exploded around her. Shelly clung to her mother, crying, but instead of holding her close, Sandy held the girl out to the cameras. “Say thank you to all the wonderful people who’ve rescued you,” she commanded.

  That photo of the blond, blue-eyed toddler dangling from her mother’s hands had appeared on the front pages of papers all over the world. BABY SHELLY SAFE! screamed the headlines. BABY SHELLY WILL CELEBRATE HER FIFTH BIRTHDAY ABOVE GROUND!

  She should have known better than to log online today, of all days. The twenty-fifth anniversary of her rescue. Mom would be sure to find a way to exploit that. Sandy Payton had made a career out of being Baby Shelly’s mom. She’d shown a natural talent for milking the public’s interest in the story. Every year on the anniversary, she sent out press releases with updates on Baby Shelly. By the time Shelly was eight, she’d come to dread her birthday. By the time she was fifteen, she’d rebelled, refusing to talk to the reporters anymore, or to let herself be photographed.

  The day she graduated high school, she left home, never to return. Some people probably thought she was cold and uncaring, the way she’d cut off communication with her family. But her parents, especially her mother, Sandy, didn’t think of Shelly as a beloved older child, but as a meal ticket.

  People from all over the world had sent money to care for poor Baby Shelly, who lived with her teenage parents in a mobile home on her grandparents’ run-down ranch. Shelly had read various reports of the sums raised—most reported close to $300,000 sent to the adorable toddler who’d been lost underground for five days. Sandy and Danny Payton used the money to buy a house near the ranch. They bought into a dry cleaning franchise, which failed, and then a shoe store, which also failed. They said they had put aside money to pay for Shelly’s education, but when she asked for the funds to go to college, she learned the money was gone.

  “You can always get more money,” her mother had told her. “Now that you’re eighteen, you should write a book. People will love it.”

  A wave of nausea washed over Shelly. She stumbled into the bathroom, just in time to shut off the water and keep the tub from overflowing. She let a little of the water drain, then stripped off her clothes and sank into the bath. Gradually, she began to relax. Seeing the story had been a shock, though it shouldn’t have been. She knew what her mother was like, and what the press was like. Of course they’d exploit the anniversary. But she was safe here in Eureka. Charlie was the only one who knew her background. Whenever other people asked about her childhood, she made some remark about how she’d grown up “very ordinary and boring.” Her accent branded her as being from Texas, so she didn’t deny it, but because she never talked about or visited family, most people assumed her parents were dead, and she let them think that. Her parents didn’t know she’d married Charlie Frazier, or about her two boys. Maybe it wasn’t fair to deprive the boys of a set of grandparents, but Shelly just couldn’t risk it. If her mom ever found out where Shelly lived, the family would have no peace. Shelly wouldn’t subject her boys to the constant public scrutiny that had ruined her own childhood.

  When the water turned cold and her toes and fingers shriveled like walnut shells, she pulled the plug and climbed out. She’d pour a glass of wine and settle onto the sofa with her new book. Sure, it was only three in the afternoon, but she could have one glass of wine on her birthday, couldn’t she?

  She was searching for the corkscrew when the doorbell rang. She debated pretending she wasn’t home, but most people knew her car and could see it parked in the driveway. They also knew it was her birthday and that she’d taken the day off to celebrate. Eureka was that kind of place—people kept tabs on each other.

  She set aside the wine bottle and went to check the peephole. All she could see was the back of a blond head. Whoever was standing there had turned around, possibly to admire the view of the mountains from this lot on the edge of town. Was this a lost tourist in need of directions? Who else would be out here in the middle of the afternoon?

  She pulled open the door. “May I help you?”

  The woman turned around and for a moment Shelly had the dizzying feeling of falling. She grabbed hold of the doorframe to steady herself and stared at her mother.

  Or rather, this wasn’t Sandy Payton, but a stranger who looked the way Sandy had looked twenty-five years ago—teased, bleached-blond hair, a gap between her two front teeth, and an overabundance of eye makeup. “Hello, Shelly,” the woman drawled. “I’ll bet you thought you could hide from us forever.”

  “Mindy.” The blonde couldn’t be anyone but her little sister, born a month after Shelly’s rescue. Mindy had emerged from the womb screaming and demanding attention and had never really stopped. “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t easy.” Not waiting for an invitation, Mindy shoved past Shelly into the house. She stopped just inside the family room to set down an oversize blue suitcase and look around—at the trophy bull elk Charlie had shot two winters ago, at the boys’ toys piled in the corner, at the worn but comfortable plaid sofa and matching love seat. “Well, isn’t this . . . quaint,” she said.

  “Mindy, what are you doing here?” Shelly stared at the suitcase, fighting panic.

  “Maybe I wanted to visit my big sister. How long has it been? Eight or nine years?”

  It had been ten. On Shelly’s twentieth birthday, when Sandy, fifteen-year-old Mindy in tow, had ambushed her outside her apartment with a camera crew from 20/20. Shelly had had enough of annually reliving her tragedy for profit. She’d packed that night and moved to Colorado, and done her best to disappear. She’d legally changed her name to Green, then changed it again when she married Charlie. She never talked about her past and, on her birthday, she did her best to forget those five days underground, and all the days after that in the glare of the spotlight, had ever happened.

  It was harder to ignore the flesh-and-blood woman standing in front of her. “How did you find me?” she asked again.

  “I hired a private detective. A good one. It cost a lot of money, but my publisher was happy to pay up.”

  “Your publisher?” Shelly’s blood felt like ice water.

  “I’m writing a book.” Mindy dropped her purse onto the sofa, then sank down beside it. She wore a pink denim miniskirt, high-heeled sandals, and a pink tank top that stretched across the well-endowed chest she’d also inherited from their mother. “They sent some ghostwriter dude to help me, but I told them I really didn’t need him. I mean, how hard can it be?”

  “What’s the book about?” Shelly asked, though she already knew the answer. Part of her held on to the hope that she was wrong.

  “What do you think?” Mindy snarled at her. “The book is about you—the blessed Baby Shelly, rescued from the bowels of the earth. As written by her sweet-but-neglected little sister.”

  “No.” Shelly swallowed, then said the word again, louder, and with greater force. “No. I won’t help you write a book. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Don’t take that attitude with me.” Mindy popped up from the couch and rushed at Shelly so fast Shelly took a step back. Mindy grabbed her arm. “You owe me this. Our whole life, you got everything, while I got the leftovers. Well, I’m not going to let you cheat me out of this chance. This publisher is willing to pay me a lot of money for your story, and I’m going to give it to them.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about—leftovers.” Shelly tried not to show how shaken she was by Mindy’s words. “Mom d
oted on you. The two of you were just alike. I was the outsider, the one who never fit in with your shopping trips and fashion shows. You were Miss Sweetwater County, for goodness’ sake!”

  “I only entered that pageant to try to get Mom’s attention,” Mindy said. “But it didn’t work. August seventh rolled around and it was back to ‘my darling Shelly.’ Whatever money we had went to pay for your clothes and do your hair, so that you’d look good for the television cameras.”

  “But she wouldn’t let me get my teeth fixed.” Shelly ran her tongue over her newly straightened teeth, free of braces for only a few months now. “She wanted people to think we were still too poor to afford things like that, so I had to wait until I was grown, and pay for them myself.”

  “It was still all about you,” Mindy said, refusing to be sidetracked from her rant. “Mom spent all her spare time writing letters and making phone calls to the press, to try to get attention for you.”

  “Attention I never wanted,” Shelly protested. Honestly, had she and Mindy really grown up in the same household? Aside from the annual money grab over the anniversary of her burial and resurrection, Shelly had felt ignored by her family. She was the studious, shy, and reserved child in a family of brash and coarse rednecks. While her parents and little sister raced four-wheelers around the family ranch, Shelly stayed in her room, reading Jane Eyre and dreaming of living in Victorian England. As far as she was concerned, the world her parents and Mindy reveled in was a scary, dangerous place. But they could never understand that.

  “I can’t help it if you were too stupid to appreciate a good thing when you had it,” Mindy said. “But I’m not stupid. This is my one chance to make something of myself, and I’m going to take it. With or without your help.” She sat on the sofa again, arms and legs crossed, chin jutting defiantly.