Rescued (Navy SEALS Romance Book 1) (2 page)

T
anner Davis stood
in the offices of SEArch & Rescue, staring out at the perfect Southern California day. The offices were actually a tiny little beach house the five of them that made up the new business had rented. They'd relocate to a modern office building somewhere in the city if the business took off.

That would be a shame. Not the business taking off, Tanner thought, but leaving the beach house. It had everything a modern office needed – the wiring had been upgraded to more than a match for technology, and the place was close to the water, perfect for going for runs. There were a lot of S&R jobs on the Pacific and just as many inland, so no way to know where to position themselves for that. The beach house had personality. A modern office building wouldn't.

But they were waiting. SEAL Team Eleven had been upgraded or downgraded or decommissioned or something he still wasn't clear on because Tanner didn't think there'd ever been another time in the history of the Navy SEALs that a Team had been changed to standby the way Team Eleven was after having been an active team. They were reserves now, all but civilians, because of the events that had happened in –

Nope. Not going there. They'd all been trained for it, they'd all known what might happen went then went in on an antiterrorism mission, into Syria past the coast and interior, inland.

"Stop thinking," he growled at himself.

Hard not to, though. He'd been part of an 16-man strike team and one of the eight to come back from that mission. He'd heard all the psychobabble from the shrinks about healing on the inside and survivor's guilt and though no one had said anything so stupid, about getting back in the saddle again. And he'd heard about the outside stuff, too, and knew he had PT in front of him still though he had most of the range of motion back in his shoulder a year later and his buddies said they couldn't remember which shoulder it had been, that he'd built it back up to the same size, even as their eyes lingered on the left shoulder.

The one with the Special Forces tattoo.

What the hell was wrong with him? Beautiful day and he couldn't stop thinking all this crap. Shit happens. Roll with it.

He needed a run. A run or a girl. Something physical. Something to take his mind off. But today Angel and Jake were in Vegas, looking at an inner city casino that fell victim to the last economic downturn. Investors had bought the property and needed the old building demolished. Nothing like the resident demolitions expert Angel and the weapons geek Jake to take that on. Meanwhile Knox – John Knox – was breaking up with some unsuspecting girl, Jake was using Vegas to avoid another bout of dance with the ex and figure out visitation and Michael Hancock was just plain MIA which was par for the course with Mikey nine times out of ten.

That left Tanner on his own. Which was fine. His fellow SEALs were from his team, all quit after the hot team had been taken down. When Tanner suggested the Search & Rescue business, they'd all fallen in.

Tanner was just –

Bored.

He didn't have to be in the office. He could access whatever information he needed from his phone. Not like the old top secret days on the team when he had to find his information in more covert ways. He could probably even go home, though he lived some distance into Swan Canyon and whatever his carrier might say, reception there was sometimes tricky.

He'd be just as bored there.

Finally in desperation he went out into the bright sunlight and folded his six-foot-two bodybuilder frame into the Jeep that waited there. He'd drive to the beach, run his ass off, see if that didn't do the trick. And if it didn't, he'd head for the gym and pump iron until his arms and legs fell off. And if
that
didn't work –

He'd be screwed. He didn't even have an ex he could go to for make up sex.

Or he could study. Man, that didn't appeal on this sunny September day, even with an exam coming up in anatomy. He'd taken the role of medic on the team, and taken full advantage of the opportunity to take the Army Special Forces medic training course while still active. Once he'd gotten out he considered EMT training but that was less strenuous and probably less info than he'd already gotten from the Army course, so WTF, why bother? He didn't want to be an EMT anyway. S&R allowed him to go find people either alive or dead and he had the training to try to forestall the latter if he found them in a condition of the former – i.e., he could usually stop people from winding up dead if they didn't have to when they were found alive. EMTs, they didn't have the S&R part.

He'd miss that.

He liked to help.

Tanner headed into the back, the locker room they'd turned one of the bedrooms into. He'd change, run, maybe study, figure it out. Tomorrow night Angel and Jake would be back and they'd have a Sunday night strategy session about the upcoming work.

Pulling his t-shirt over his head, he caught sight of himself in the mirror and stopped to look at his left shoulder. Truth be told, it didn't look that different anymore, except for the scarring where the shrapnel had hit. Probably much as he hated it, the shrink was right to the extent that the injury was mostly resolved; Tanner just wasn't comfortable with the arm anymore. As if it had let him down by being injured. As if it were the arm's fault.

"Oh, but it was
your
fault?" The shrink had been a girl that time. Woman. Whatever. She was young and pretty and he supposed somebody somewhere thought that would do something to increase his chances of healing from the inside out. Certainly the fucking gorgeous physical therapist on Coronado had been meant for that. Neither worked. He had yet to meet a woman beautiful enough to make him work harder than he automatically worked for himself and his team. Injured was injured. The Tanner Davis code meant injured was vulnerable and vulnerable put other people at risk. Not acceptable.

Then again, the male shrink had said the same thing. He'd gone to that guy longer, and clocked out the minute they told him he could.

He'd deal with it his own way. In his own time.

The shirt popped over his buzz cut blue black hair. His surprisingly blue eyes met themselves in the depths of the mirror. The shirt dropped over the sculpted pecs, the biceps and triceps that popped from nothing more than getting dressed, and covered the eight pack. He pulled his jeans off over his long lean corded legs, pulled on a brief pair of running shorts, slipped his feet into his socks and then shoes and had his keys in hand, cell on his arm in its band, and was just about to forward the land line to himself when it rang.

He didn't know whether or not to laugh.

Probably just Angel, calling in. But he answered with the business name and his own and heard a confused squabble and someone saying something frantic to someone else. He'd be tempted at any other business to hang up on any group so uncoordinated they didn't even say what they wanted when they placed a call but there was a sound of frantic consultation and real fear.

"Hello?" he bellowed into the phone.

"Tanner? It's Danny Duncan."

Tanner ran the name through his mind and came up with a former Marine he'd met at some function on Coronado. Nice guy but not cut out to be career. Duncan had served his time; the guy had served his enlistment contract and gone civilian, working in IT.

"Duncan? What's up?"

Another brief pause and Duncan said, "Got it," apparently to someone he was with and then, "I'm on Mount Palomar and I need help."

Tanner turned to the desk, hit the speaker on his phone, touched the computer to wake it and brought up Palomar, Cleveland National Forest, ranger stations.

And a current alert.

Duncan was just starting to speak when Tanner said, "Are you in the fire zone?"

Relief flooded Duncan's voice. "Not yet. But it's coming our way and moving fast."

"Rangers?"

"On it. That's the problem. I'm here with a group and one girl got separated before the fire had gone out of control. We can't find her and she's not responding to calls. My phone's working, but reception's not great and we're several hours up the trail – not close to ranger stations."

Tanner's training kicked in instantly. The next few minutes he got all the information he could from Duncan, pinpointed where he thought the call would be coming from, poured over maps on the screen, asked about the girl, asked that all the contact numbers be texted to his cell, and fought the running shirt back off. He'd need to change, grab his fire retardant jacket and pants, get the chopper. If he pushed it, including prep time, he could be there in about 35 minutes.

He gave Duncan the only instructions he could think of – to get his party out if the fire changed course and came at them, to keep calling for the girl, to call him if they found her, to keep in contact.

None of it meant anything. It was to stop them panicking and maybe keep them safe by stopping them running about in a panic. The chopper could move fast. It couldn't move that fast. He was more than 60 miles away from them.

Tanner changed, gathered his gear, did a systems check on a helicopter he knew was ready, texted everybody on the team, and cleared for takeoff.

T
he sky was
bright when the chopper got up into it. Tanner checked his settings, radioed his path and took off. Air traffic over San Diego was normal weekend heavy. By Saturday most people had already arrived at their destinations. The sky was fairly clear.

He headed toward Palomar. Midway there he got a call from Knox who for obvious reasons felt heading to a search for a missing girl would be preferable to spending another minute in his soon to be ex-girlfriend's company.

"Too late," Tanner said. "I'm already airborne and en route."

Knox didn't make the obvious "You're not airborne, you're SEALs" joke which meant negations with the ex must be going particularly poorly. "Man, help a brother out," Knox said and Tanner just laughed and hung up. Knox could figure out his own exit strategy, no way Tanner was turning the bird around.

No word from Angel and Jake. He hadn't expected there would be. They were in Vegas. They weren't going to make it for this particular party. No sense filling up the airwaves with chatter.

Still no word from Mike and no idea why. Mike could go dark with the best of them, prone to depression and worse since they'd been put out to pasture at the tender age of 20-something for each and every one of them.

He was on his own.

Just the way he liked it.

Friends said Tanner Davis was happier by himself than he ever was with anyone else. He didn't think that was necessarily true.

He just wasn't unhappier without people around him.

The chopper made good time. The September day wasn't windy. In 31 minutes he found himself approaching Mount Palomar. From a couple miles out he could see the black smoke of the fire rising into the air, and another minute and he could see the flames. The fire was still burning on the valley floor and if her friends were right, then Miss Taylor Adams was probably still all right. The fire was just starting to edge toward the mountainside.

He triggered the phone, told it to dial the last incoming call.

"Tanner?" Duncan's voice and Tanner identified why the man hadn't been cut out for Marines. There was fear in that voice. Fear came later. It couldn't be present while you were doing the job. First sign and you threw out whatever was causing it.

He couldn't land but he could circle. "Any contact?" He'd told Duncan to get his people off the mountain and to call if the girl showed up. Didn't seem like either of those things had happened.

"Nothing from Taylor. Her phone's not going through. I'm not even getting voice mail." He started to give coordinates of where they were and where they'd last seen Taylor. Tanner let the info wash over him. He'd sort it out later provided the usual didn't happen: instant appearance of sheepish lost/stolen/strayed/silly hiker and resolution of everything in less time than it took to fly to the scene.

Only that didn't happen. A full six minutes of making a circuit across the area she'd last been seen, then widening the search to see if she'd gone up or down, and there was nothing. No sign of her.

"Why are your people still on the mountain?" he demanded of Duncan when he stopped processing.

Must have sounded random. He hadn't spoken for a minute or two but they should both still be on task.

"Because it took us several hours to get up here. Going to take a while to get back down. That's why we didn't want to go to the ranger station. Too far away and we didn't want to split up."

From a civilian point of view, he understood that. From his own, they should have sent someone. Taylor Adams had now been missing, without contact, for more than an hour.

T
aylor hadn't noticed
the time when she took off after Monster. She hadn't even paid attention to it when she was trying to make her phone work. It wasn't until she'd started to panic that Taylor had set the stopwatch on her phone, hoping it would keep her centered. Subjectively it felt like hours and lifetimes had gone by since she'd become lost. Objectively, looking at her phone, she'd only been missing for 45 minutes.

Quite long enough. One thing she'd noticed over the years was that being lost made her queasy. She knew, in the grand scheme of things, where she was. She was on the top of Mount Palomar. She was scared because she was disoriented and that was making her dizzy and sick. Didn't make any sense, but not knowing which way she was supposed to go did that to her. So now she didn't know where she was, didn't know where her friends were, and she felt sick and dizzy.

She also knew circles made her dizzy. When she went to malls or libraries or anywhere else based on a wheel, spokes being corridors that led out, she got lost. Give her a straight square or rectangular or even L-shaped mall and she found her way just fine, usually to shoe stores. Give her a circle no matter how small and she wandered around miserably reading
you are here
signs and not believing them.

The top of a mountain was the ultimate circle. She could descend in any direction. She just didn't know which was the right one.

In the end, it didn't matter. Any descent would put her much closer to help from other hikers or rangers or her friends if she accidentally got the right path and she might as well face it the only way she was ending up on the right path was by mistake, or at least by chance.

So she should just go
down
. Especially since the smoke was starting to sting her eyes.

Only down was burning.

"So the opposite of down is out of this nasty little oubliette," she said, recalling a word from
Labyrinth
which meant some kind of hole-like puzzle.

Or something. She thought she had both the meaning and the word wrong.

But the consideration had calmed her. "Monster? Over here." She'd head out of the circle of trees, away from the cliff. She wanted to head down the mountain only
down
was currently on fire.

So what other courses of action were open to her? Staying on top of Mount Palomar made no sense. The air was only just becoming thick and she could hear ranger planes and trucks starting up but they had no way of knowing she was here. Unless her friends had reached the rangers. Then she might be blundering around here and be perfectly safe – maybe the rangers knew where she was, knew where the fire was, and would be round to fetch her before nightfall.

"Not knowing sucks" she told Monster, and crouched down to wrap her arms around the Lab's neck. His whining didn't improve her outlook. If he was afraid, so was she.OK, so sitting still wasn't an option. She never had been the type to just sit and wait for rescue. Time to go. Down might be dangerous. But up might be a terminal trap. If the fire came, it would climb the fall-dry foliage up the side of the mountain in a heartbeat.

Taylor bit her lip. Down, then. She'd see as much as she could and she'd go through the far end of the clearing when she went, just to the inside of the circle of trees. She'd eschew the path because she at least knew where down was from where she was now. The coyotes had gone down. She'd follow in their footsteps only a quarter turn of the circle back – down the way she thought she'd come.

T
aylor took a very deep breath
.

When it made her cough instead of clearing her mind, she panicked again. Her footsteps to the side of the mountain were just short of a run. The way the coyotes had taken wouldn't work for her – she was neither coyote nor mountain goat. Even Monster might have trouble with this decline. To her left when she faced off the mountain into the valley the clearing blending into mountain.
That way's up,
she thought, which corresponded with her belief in which way she'd entered the clearing.

Keeping that in mind, she reversed her steps and looked out the other way. That side was more gradual and probably just beyond the wall of trees she'd come through would be the path that led the same away, and far more gradually. Enough so she might be able to run it, though she'd promised herself nothing as inadvisable as running down a mountain path she was unfamiliar with.

Her glance down there showed she was right. It was a more gradual descent. It was almost undoubtedly the direction of east, from which she'd come. It probably paralleled the damned path she'd been on, which she was starting to hate for its very reticence in showing itself.

And it was on fire.

Taylor stepped back and instinctively clutched Monster's leash tighter before the dog could think to bound down the side of the mountain in a
Here's how you do it, follow me!
motion. Suddenly there was far less air and that
was
imagination but it left her no less dizzy and not a bit less scared.

She tried her phone again. No signal. Now she was probably dealing with the smoke as well. Taylor had no idea how cell phones worked. She might work for a tech company, but that didn't mean that the weren't some sides of tech that didn't just seem like magic.

And magic didn't always work. Magic, according to most novels, demanded sacrifice. That thought made her shudder. Peering down again she saw the fire was climbing swiftly. She could still hear the planes in the air but they didn't know she was here. Now clouds of smoke were rising. She didn't have time to see if they could fly through if or if they could see her. She had to get her and Monster out of there.

"Time to go, Monst," she said and started for the edge of the trees. The instant she crashed through the other side of them, still amazed she couldn't remember doing it in the first place, she found herself on the path.

"Good," she said. She'd count blessings. Concentrate on whatever went right. Better than the way her thoughts were tending. "Now." She looked at Monster and memory, canceled by the events of the last 50 minutes, stirred. They'd been coming up the trail, still happy, enjoying the day, thinking how slow everyone else was and that no, she wasn't going to stop, if they couldn't keep up they could meet her on top, and Monster had disappeared very briefly into the woods on her left side.

Instantly she'd called him, shouting him back to her side. She had no idea what was up here – badgers, lions, squirrels – but she didn't want Monster crashing about by himself. She'd just pulled the leash out and was ready to clip it on him when he'd come back soaking wet and muddy, and done the Labrador equivalent of tradition: he done a thorough ear/jowl/ruff/coat shake, his fur moving in counter sway to his violent shaking and the water and mud splattering her. Mud still clung to her shorts and t-shirt. She should have remembered this.

Because this meant there was a body of water over there and if she was lucky, it was a creek. Giving Monster's collar a sharp tug, she led him with her, tromping through the underbrush, as jumpy as Jessie now about snakes and wishing the ground were a little more clear and a lot more wet so she could see if there were crushed plants or Labrador tracks.

Minutes after they left the path, she came to the stream and here she could see some disturbance down stream, where something large had dug wildly at the side in the mud, happy for the simple fact of water and mud and sunshine.

Good. That was the Lab she was going to get down the mountainside.

"Come on, you," she said, and tugged his leash again, leading him directly into the water. Monster took one look at what she was doing and where she was heading and then barked and grinned, staring at her like she was a goddess. If only she'd known all she had to do to make him adore her was wallow in mud.

"We're going down the river without a paddle," she told him and broke into only slightly hysterical sounding laughter. Better than tears. She was on her feet and moving, they were in water, and far enough to the side away from the valleys and the fire that the air was a tiny bit cleaner.

Still no running. She wasn't going to break her neck or injure her dog. But moving slow was hard to do. They could hear the sounds of the fire now, eating up the side of the mountain, and the Lab kept tugging on the leash, trying to force Taylor to go faster. She couldn't blame him.

Partway down she tried calling again. If her friends could answer, she could find out if where they were was more or less smoky and whether or not there were flames. Maybe she'd need to guide them back to her, though the air was becoming increasingly ugly. Tangible, thick, gray.

"I'm coming, Monster," she said, and started coughing again. Her eyes watered and this time she stopped just long enough to thoroughly soak her t-shirt with water before pulling it up over her face. First breath she sucked in droplets of water, caught them in her throat and couldn't stop coughing. Her eyes streamed tears. She couldn't see or breathe but she could hear the increasingly frantic dog and the sound of the fire coming closer.

I have to get out of here!

She opened her eyes, spat the water out, cleared her throat, put the shirt back over her face, and started to run, following Monster down the creek, splashing in rocks and mud. One foot slipped off a rock that shifted at the wrong minute and pain lanced up into her ankle. She didn't have time to worry about it; the fire was rapidly making its way to them.

Now they were coming out of the trees, into the willow bushes and scratchy prickly bushes. She had more air above her and more light, felt less oppressively hemmed in, but at the same time the branches snagged her clothes, her back, the leash, the dog, and every bit of exposed skin on her. Swearing, starting to cry without wanting to, she trailed behind the dog, stopping long enough to put on her sunglasses. She felt like her vision was compromised then but her eyes were protected from branches and the tears from the smoke slowed a little.

The creek, following the natural bend of the mountain and the path that led up it, suddenly rounded an outcropping of rocks and hillside.

On the other side, she could see the fire. It was still a ways off, but it was at the base of the mountain for sure. It was moving faster than she was. By the time she got there, the way out of the foliage and off the mountain and out of the valleys – all of it would be blocked.

"Oh, god, Monster." She crouched in the stream next to him for a minute, soaking both of them, wrapping her arms around him. She couldn't think what else to do. If the mountain was going to catch, it would. Two sides were already falling to encroaching flames. If she followed the creek back up, maybe she could go higher, but eventually wouldn't the flames just circle the whole thing or climb up and over from where she'd been? She was rapidly depleting all her energy, which reminded her – she offed the pack and pulled out an energy bar, clamped it still wrapped between her teeth and pulled out a handful of kibble for Monster. He wolfed it, wagged the Tail of Doom, smacked her several times with it which made her give a shaky laugh despite everything. He was drinking water as they went so she had a slug of the bottled water, opened the energy bar, ate half of it and pocketed the rest, then stood. Monster was already pulling hard on the leash, the look in his eyes very clear:
Let's go.

"Hope you know something about what's going to happen that I don't know," she said. And followed him down the creek.

T
hey were
within shouting distance of the bottom of the hill when she heard the sound like a million mile an hour wind screaming up at her.

No!

She'd come all the way down, turning her ankle a couple times more, the pain constant and nagging but not stopping her. Monster was bleeding from a branch that had caught him across the muzzle and they were both covered in mud and soaked through in case that gave them a chance to cross a line of flames that was thin. Even then she knew they'd just be in the burning valley, but she was starting to think anything off the mountain was preferable. Surely the Forest Service Rangers would put out the surrounding valley first and mountain second. Mountain had no where else to go unless it really did continue up and west into a complete range of mountains. She had no idea. She was lousy at maps and when they'd left in the morning, she'd had no intention of needing to read one, no intention of being separated from her people, and no intention of needing to know anything past the path she was supposed to be on.

"Fucking path."

That almost felt good. She said it again, then laughed, sounding definitely hysterical, but laughed because Monster barked at her, like he was scolding her.

The laughter ended instantly. The sound was almost on top of them. The trees were bending from what she guessed was the fire wind. The willows were almost flat.

She gritted her teeth, wrapped her arms around her dog, held on for dear life. The water in the creek splashed up at them as if trying to flow backwards.

Taylor cried and hung on.