A Run For Her Money: Alphas in the Wild, #3

By Ann Gimpel

Dark. Daunting. Unforgettable. Survival adds a demanding edge to love in the wilds.

Sara’s day begins like any other. A routine extraction in tandem with a local Search and Rescue team. Routine crashes to a halt when she ends up trapped in a hut, high atop Muir Pass in the Sierras. Four days later, running out of food for herself and her dog, she makes a bold dash for safety.

Jared’s walking the Muir Trail when all hell breaks loose. After hunkering beneath a boulder pile for days, he dares a difficult cross-country route, hoping it’ll put him into position to approach a backcountry ranger station. Surely one of the rangers will know what happened, because he sure as hell doesn’t.

Jared locates the cabin, but it’s locked tight. He’s getting ready to leave the next morning when a helicopter lands, with Sara at the helm. There’s no time to trade war stories. It takes a leap of faith, but they throw in their lot together. Can they face the impossible and come out the other side unscathed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ann Gimpel Books, LLC
• Release date: Oct 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536534245

Ann Gimpel

Ann Gimpel is a national bestselling author. She's also a clinical psychologist, with a Jungian bent. Avocations include mountaineering, skiing, wilderness photography and, of course, writing. A lifelong aficionado of the unusual, she began writing speculative fiction a few years ago. Since then her short fiction has appeared in a number of webzines and anthologies. Her longer books run the gamut from urban fantasy to paranormal romance. She’s published over 20 books to date, with several more contracted for 2015 and beyond.A husband, grown children, grandchildren and three wolf hybrids round out her family.

Book preview

A Run For Her Money

Alphas in the Wild, Book Three

Urban Fantasy Romance

By

Ann Gimpel

Dark. Daunting. Unforgettable.

Survival adds a demanding edge to love in the wilds.

Copyright Page

All rights reserved.

Copyright © December 2015, Ann Gimpel

Cover Art Copyright © November 2015, Fiona Jayde

Edited by: Angela Kelly

Names, characters, and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or people living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, e-mail, or web posting without written permission from the author.

Publishing history:

A Run For Her Money: This book began as a short story by the same name published by Sam’s Dot Publishing in March 2012.

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Book Description

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Book Description

Sara’s day begins like any other. A routine extraction in tandem with a local Search and Rescue team. Routine crashes to a halt when she ends up trapped in a hut, high atop Muir Pass in the Sierras. Four days later, running out of food for herself and her dog, she makes a bold dash for safety.

Jared’s walking the Muir Trail when all hell breaks loose. After hunkering beneath a boulder pile for days, he dares a difficult cross-country route, hoping it’ll put him into position to approach a backcountry ranger station. Surely one of the rangers will know what happened, because he sure as hell doesn’t.

Jared locates the cabin, but it’s locked tight. He’s getting ready to leave the next morning when a helicopter lands, with Sara at the helm. There’s no time to trade war stories. It takes a leap of faith, but they throw in their lot together. Can they face the impossible and come out the other side unscathed?

Chapter One

My name is Sara Holcomb and I’m a Ranger for the U.S. Park Service, a post I’ve held for better than twenty years. There are those who say I should’ve transitioned to a desk job long ago, but somehow I don’t think I’d like that nearly as much. See, I’ve loved the backcountry ever since I was a little girl, probably because my daddy was a Park Ranger too. He used to tell me stories about the forest creatures from the saddle we shared while he patrolled Yosemite Valley. I’m sure you couldn’t get away with dragging your daughter along on horse patrol now, but things were different back then. Another thing is I don’t really like people all that much, so wandering the trails in the national parks is about as perfect a job as I’m likely to get...

Her forehead furrowed in thought, Sara read over what she’d written as she absent-mindedly swept a strand of greasy hair out of her eyes with grime-crusted fingers. It didn’t stay put, though, and she found herself looking through the lank, black strands again almost immediately.

Well, she muttered, this doesn’t have to be a literary masterpiece. I’m just writing it so people will know what happened to me if they find my body.

She cleared her throat to flush the thought of her possible death out of her mind and picked up her pen again. That was one of the good things about the Muir Hut, there were lots of pens and paper as well. Too bad some desperate traveler had chopped up the only table and burned it for firewood years before. The Park Service debated replacing it, but in the end they decided not to. If one table could burn, a replacement might meet the same fate. Besides, it wasn’t easy to get supplies to the beehive shaped stone hut sitting atop twelve thousand foot Muir Pass.

Blowing air out through her pursed lips, Sara frowned as she considered what to write next. She’d planned to dive right into the meat of things, but whoever read her journal really needed to know how she’d ended up trapped in the Muir Hut, so they could understand all the rest.

...I’m getting ahead of myself here. I’ve been stationed at the McClure Meadows Ranger Station for the past few summers. Sometimes there’s another Ranger with me, but usually there’s not. The Park Service has had some cutbacks in recent years. McClure Meadows is in Evolution Valley, and it’s my favorite of all the backcountry stations. It even has a geothermal spring so I don’t have to heat water for baths. At ninety-six hundred feet, it’s below timberline, so there are lots of trees around it—not just granite and shale. Incredible wildflowers dot the meadows all summer.

About six days ago, I got a radio call for help late in the day. A climber was stranded on Mount Darwin, and things weren’t looking good. I put in a call for the rescue chopper, packed up what Jake and I would need, and started on the five-mile trek to Evolution Lake. Jake is my coal black, search-and-rescue German Shepherd the Park Service finally agreed to let me keep in the backcountry.

It was pretty much a mess when we got there. Suzy, the missing climber’s wife or girlfriend, was hysterical and it took me over an hour to get anything useful out of her, like which route her significant other had taken. By then the chopper was circling to land. There are some flat areas at the south end of the lake that are perfect for that...

A chill seeped into Sara from the cold, stone floor, so she changed positions. As she rubbed feeling back into her butt cheeks, she wished again for the missing table. She could’ve sat on it. A stone bench leaned against the wall of the hut outside in bright sunshine, but it was safer if she didn’t go out there. Benches lined the hut’s walls inside too, but they probably wouldn’t be much warmer than the floor. Stone was a real heat-sink unless it had a chance for the sun to warm it. She gazed back over what she’d written and shrugged. Pushing to her feet, she stretched, rotating her torso first in one direction, then in the other.

Fingers pressed against the ceiling, she blessed her height and her strength, shaped by years of grueling, manual labor. She could do anything a man could, and she was proud of that. Though frequently the object of admiring glances, she’d been very selective in that regard. The occasional co-worker had possibilities but, while the Park Service said relationships are fine so long as you’re not in a direct line of command on paper, Sara didn’t think they were especially open-minded in that regard, so she kept her dalliances brief and private.

Sometimes it was a lonely life, but it was the one she’d chosen. Her hours and time away from home wouldn’t have played well with most men, anyway. Children were out of the question. Not if they ever wanted to see their mother.

Crap, my thoughts are really wandering, she said wryly as she reached over to stroke Jake’s soft head. When she’d come to her feet, the Shepherd did as well. Not much point in telling whoever might read this about the rescue, she went on, talking to her dog. The climber was dead when I got to him, so the main problem was figuring out how to get the poor son-of-a-bitch out of there.

Jake whined as if he understood exactly what she was saying.

The actual extraction had taken hours. The SAR volunteers—God only knew where they’d been trained—had been less-than-useful. They were competent enough as climbers, but one began puking at the sight of the dead guy’s mangled remains, and the other had a hell of a time forcing himself to actually touch the corpse. Since she ended up doing most of the packaging-up of the body herself, Sara was exhausted when she slithered down the last steep talus slope above the southern end of Evolution Lake. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since she’d started on the rescue mission, and she was surprised she was still capable of sentient thought.

One thing that still bothered her was an unusual amount of rock fall during her descent. Not that she could see anything, but explosions boomed around her. Usually if you heard rock avalanches, you could see them, but not this time. One of the SAR dudes had asked what the fuck all the noise was, but she’d been too tired to have much of an answer.

It had been a relief when the chopper left, and she and Jake were alone again.

In the few hours she’d been high on Mount Darwin, autumn had attacked the aspens around Evolution Lake with a vengeance, and fall colors blazed from every hillside. That was the way things happened above ten thousand feet. Winter lasted a really long time, while the other seasons came and went in the blink of an eye.

After feeding Jake, she’d keyed her radio to report in, finding a small pleasure in hearing Lonnie’s cheerful voice. He was her boss, and he ran the dispatch service from Park Headquarters.

How’s it going, pumpkin? he’d asked. In his sixties, Lonnie didn’t pay much attention to the latest governmental directives about not using words that might be construed as sexual harassment.

Not bad, she replied. But I’m tired. I’ll camp here tonight and head back to McClure tomorrow.

Now that you mention it, he drawled, think you might have enough energy to run up to the pass?

Sara didn’t feel like running up to the pass. It was another four miles and fifteen hundred feet of climbing. Uh, not really, she murmured. At least not tonight.

Come on, Sara, he’d urged. We’ve been getting odd reports from that area. I’d like some firsthand data. You move fast. You could be there in well under two hours. There was a pause, then Lonnie added, It won’t even be dark by then, princess.

Maybe it was the princess that did it—her father used to call her that. Sara gathered what she thought she and Jake would need for a few days, stashing all her extraction gear behind a boulder pile. Then she shouldered her pack and struck out for Muir Pass. Lonnie was right, she did move quickly over the trails, her long-legged stride capable of eating up over three miles an hour uphill, more if she was coming down.

Distracted as she replayed the tragedy on Mount Darwin, Sara was surprised how quickly she reached the hut. It was still twilight. Plenty of time to get herself situated.

She dragged herself back to the present, settled on her spot on the floor, and picked up her pen again.

...The extraction was long, but uneventful. No point in describing it here. Once it was over, my boss sent me to Muir Pass to check on reports he’d been getting of unusual activity. While I wasn’t anxious to do more traveling that day, I do know how to follow orders. Jake and I reached the hut around six-thirty. I pushed the door open and, as always, was greeted by whichever of the resident rodents chose to take a stand. Jake made short work of them