And yet, here she was taking on her biggest adventure of all. Coming home to where she no longer had a home, where she was constantly reminded of why she’d left in the first place, forcing herself to face her demons and grief.

And then there was once again seeing the first man to have ever stolen her heart.

Stolen.

Stomped on.

Run over.

Which meant that maybe she still had a little bit of risk taking inside her after all.

Chapter 6

That evening Aidan strode to his truck after a hell of a long day, his eyes gritty with exhaustion, his stomach rumbling from eating nothing but a few PowerBars all day long.

The lost hiker call had turned out to be a false alarm, and Aidan had ended up making the board meeting after all, which was how he’d seen Lily on the monitors, hiking toward Dead Man’s Cliff.

He’d been surprised, though he shouldn’t have been.

If he’d lost one of his siblings on the mountain and had left Cedar Ridge shortly thereafter, it’d probably be one of the first places he’d want to go see upon his return as well.

But he wouldn’t want to do it alone.

He’d started to go up after her when he’d gotten another S&R call—a three-year-old had wandered out his back door into the woods and vanished.

It’d taken several heart-stopping hours to find the kid three hundred yards from his house, asleep at the base of a huge cedar tree only a few feet away from a steep drop-off.

Now Aidan was finally heading home. An evening thunderstorm was moving in, and, as always in the Rockies, it moved fast. In the five minutes that passed while he stopped for a desperately needed soda, the sky had darkened considerably. Thunder rolled in with the rain, loud booms that made the earth shudder. Already the roads had become slick and dangerous, but that didn’t give him pause. Cedar Ridge was rustic, remote, and isolated, and only the hardy and the durable lived here.

He wondered whether Lily was still hardy and durable. Not that it mattered. He’d been there, bought the T-shirt, and gotten left behind, not for the first time either. The first time it had been his father who’d left. But Aidan had a steep learning curve and worked hard never to repeat a mistake.

Allowing himself to care about Lily again would be just that—a big mistake.

Lightning flashed, followed by another rumble of thunder that had the road beneath his tires trembling. The other vehicles on the road kept as steady as he did. Yep, durable stock in these parts. And Aidan and his family were just about as durable as they came. People said they were untamable and born troublemakers.

They’d be right on all counts.