Page 2 of One Last Promise

And then Shep, too, felt a blow, right to his lungs.

Tillie.

She sat on a bench in the kitchen. Long, dark hair pulled back, a black jacket, grimy jeans, and tennis shoes, brown eyes that widened when the crew came in. She held an icepack to her cheek, her lip broken, her eye swollen.

Boo walked up to her. “Tillie? What happened?”

Poor Moose. He stood near the end of the counter, holding on like he needed balance. Or maybe just tucking in emotion behind the fierce, dangerous expression.

Everything stilled, waiting.

Then Tillie said, her voice quiet, even a little shaken, “I’m sorry, but I had no other choice.” She looked at Moose. “My daughter has been kidnapped. And I need your help to get her back.”

CHAPTER 1

Twenty-four hours earlier . . .

As if Moose Mulligan didn’t have enough problems, the mountain tried to bury him.

The cracking sound spiked the clear blue air as the ice cones hanging off the eastern cliffs detached and careened toward the Byron Glacier, a frozen river spilling out through a valley of granite.

Moose looked up from where he was dipping his thermos into the crystalline meltwater stream of the massive blue-veined plane of ice?—

“Run!”This from his copilot, London, who’d been capping her water bottle. She wore a red rescue suit and mirrored aviator sunglasses, her long blonde hair pulled back in a braid, and had already leaped to her feet.

He’d heard the dog barking some fifteen seconds before, so perhaps Moose should have seen it coming. In his defense, he had a lot cluttering up his brain—like the lawsuit that could take down Air One Rescue, and the unrelenting worry about thedisappearance of Tillie Young, a woman he really shouldn’t be obsessed about, and the gnawing problem of the inheritance that didn’t really belong to him—the one that funded everything he owned. Just little things that could blow apart the life he’d built.

Whatever.

Still, when they’d first landed on the ice with his chopper, he’d spotted—and hadn’t liked—the way the serac of old snow and blue-gray ice clung to an upper lip of granite.

Now, his body went cold as the entire wall cascaded into the valley, thirty tons of icy boulders and snow and silt thundering toward them.

They were dead where they stood.

“Move!” He hit his feet and tried to locate the three tourists who’d purchased his day charter to the glacier, a clearly not-so-brilliant idea to keep his rescue flight service in the black. Two sisters and their brother wanted a close-up view of the glacier. One of the sisters was a photographer, intent on capturing the sunset just as it winked off the icy plane. Another worked with a dog, a beautiful Malador that looked a little like Balto and possessed the energy of an entire dog-sled team, the way it explored the area.

He spotted his people already sprinting.

“There!” He pointed to a cavern nearby, carved out of the rock, a cleft born from earlier ice flows. The dog bolted for the entrance—the one littered with boulders and silt, like teeth.

Behind them, the ice flow gathered speed, chunks of lethal ice roaring toward them, a cloud of debris like a volcano rising above it.

London hit the cave first and pulled in one of the sisters to crouch with her against the wall.

The brother came in beside her, and next to him, his other sister.

Moose practically dove into the space, some twenty feet deep, grabbed the dog into his arms, and hid behind a Volkswagen-sized barrier. Then he ducked hishead and prayed.

Sort of prayed. More like a repeated,help, help, help.

Moose and the Almighty had been in a sort of ongoing conversation for the past month, mostly about Tillie, but also his depleted bank account and the lawsuit, and yes, really about Tillie and?—

And then the avalanche swept across the mouth of the cave like a freight train, loud and consuming. One of the women put her hands over her ears and screamed, and all Moose could think was . . .

This was how it would end.

Him, trapped in an ice cave, freezing to death.

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