A Man of His Word

Sydney had come to the same conclusion herself just before she went bungee jumping without a bungee, but she didn’t particularly enjoy hearing it from someone else. Still, he’d plucked her out of her eagle’s nest. She owed him, big-time.

Ordering her arms and legs to do their thing, she pushed herself to her feet. Her rescuer had to shoot out a hand and catch her before she whumped back down on her rear. Shaking off his hand, she tried to sound grateful.

“Thanks. Again. I’m Sydney Scott, by the way.”

“I know who you are.”

She flushed at the drawled response, feeling even more stupid than he’d implied earlier. If he was part of a search party, of course he’d know who he’d come looking for.

“And you are?”

“Reece Henderson.”

“Oh.” The straw Stetson that shaped his head as if made for it had led her to assume he was a local. “You’re the dam engineer.”

From the way his eyes narrowed, she must have put a little too much emphasis on dam. Either that, or their exchange of terse faxes had annoyed him as much as it had her.

“When you didn’t show for our meeting this morning,” he said curtly, “I called your assistant and woke him up.”

So much for the massive search-and-rescue effort Sydney had assumed Zack set in motion!

“The kid told me you’d driven out to the canyon. He seemed to think you might have fallen into an artistic trance and gotten lost.”

“I don’t fall into artistic trances,” she said with another smile, slightly strained but still trying hard for grateful.

One black brow lifted in patent disbelief.

“All right,” she admitted grudgingly, “I did leave a pot of red beans and rice on the stove a couple of months ago while I was working a treatment, but the fire didn’t do any real damage.”

When he only looked at her through those cool blue eyes, Sydney gave Zack a mental kick in the shins. How much had her assistant told this guy, anyway?

“Maybe I did start out for San Diego last week and didn’t realize I was going in the wrong direction until I passed Santa Barbara,” she said defensively, “but I was outlining a script in my mind and sort of got caught up in it.”

With a little snort that sounded suspiciously like disgust, her rescuer strolled back to the Jeep to untie the rope. “Is that what you were doing last night when you drove off a cliff?”

“I was not in any kind of a trance last night.”

Well, she amended silently, maybe she had let her imagination go for a while, particularly when the wind whistled eerily through the canyon and raised goose bumps all over her body. Henderson didn’t need to know that, though.

“As I told you, there was a boulder in the road, a chunk of sandstone. I swerved to avoid it.”

“If you say so, lady.”

Gratitude was getting harder and harder to hang on to. Sydney folded her arms across her now-scruffy yellow T-shirt.

“I do say so.”

He straightened, the rope half-looped in his hand, his eyes as sharp and slicing as lasers. “Then maybe you’ll also tell me why you were driving around in a restricted area without a permit? A permit that I had intended to issue at our meeting this morning, by the way.”

That “had intended” caught Sydney’s attention and shoved everything else out of her mind. The terror of sliding over a cliff, the long, frightening hours alone with only a piñon tree for company, the crab-walk up a sheer rock wall fell away. All that remained was her absolute determination to capture the magic of the ruins on videotape…for her dad, for herself, for the joys and tears they’d shared.

Every inch a professional now, she cut right to the heart of the issue. “I apologize for going around you, Mr. Henderson. I arrived in Chalo Canyon earlier than planned yesterday afternoon. I tried to contact you for permission to drive out to the site, but you were out of town. At a wedding, or so they told me.”

“So you drove out, anyway.”

“After I talked to one of your engineers. He said he thought it would be okay. I believe his name was Patrick Something.”

It would be Patrick, Reece thought in disgust. Young, breezy, overconfident of his brand-new civil engineering degree that hadn’t yet been tested by thousands of tons of wet concrete and millions of yards of rushing water. Reece finished looping the rope.

“Apology accepted this time, Ms. Scott. Just don’t go around me again. I’m chief engineer on this project. The responsibility for the safety of everyone involved, including you and your crew, rests with me.”

“It’s Sydney,” she returned, seething inside at the undeserved lecture, but determined to hammer out a working relationship with this bullheaded engineer.

“Sydney,” he acknowledged with a little nod. “Now we’d better get you back to town so you can have those scrapes and dents checked out. In the meantime, I’ll get hold of the county sheriff and let him know about the accident.”

“I’d prefer to conduct our planned discussion before I hitch a ride into town. If this sunlight holds and the rest of my crew arrives on time, I want to shoot some exterior footage this afternoon.”

Reece stared at her across the Jeep’s hood. For God’s sake, was she for real? She’d just spent the night perched in a tree. Her baggy fatigue pants and yellow T-shirt looked like they’d been worn by someone on the losing side of the last war. Her tangled, dark brown mane hung in rats’ tails on either side of her face…a face, he admitted reluctantly, made remarkable by wide green eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth a man could weave some pretty lurid fantasies around.

Not Reece. Not after all he’d heard about Sydney Scott. He’d make damned sure he didn’t weave fantasies of any kind about this particular package of trouble. That tug he felt low in his belly was grudging admiration for her sheer guts, nothing more.

“All right. We’ll drive back to the dam and go over schedules.” He reached into the Jeep and tossed her the mobile phone. “Here, you’d better call your assistant and let him know you’re okay while I block the road.”

With the rope looped over one arm, he rooted around in the back of the Jeep for the toolbox he never traveled without. Inside was a thick roll of electrical tape. It wasn’t red, but it would have to do as a hazard warning until he could get a crew out here to erect permanent barriers.

“Zack? It’s Sydney.”

Her voice carried to him at the rear of the Jeep, attractive enough now that most of the croak had disappeared.

“No, I didn’t get lost. I, er, drove off a cliff.”

She caught Reece’s sardonic look and turned her back.

“Yes, I’m fine. Really. Honest. I swear. Just get hold of the insurance company, okay? Make sure our on-location liability coverage extends to rented Blazers that now reside at the bottom of a river gorge. And arrange for another vehicle. I want to do some site shots this afternoon.”

Reece turned away, shaking his head. This was one single-minded female. He’d remember that in future dealings with her.

“It’s a long story,” she told her assistant, scooping her tangled hair back with one hand. “I’ll fill you in on the details later. What have you heard from Tish and the others? Noon? Good! Tell them to be ready to roll as soon as I get back. What time is it now?”

Her little screech of dismay followed Reece to the vertical outcropping a few yards away. Reddish limestone striated with yellow and green pushed upward. Hardened by nature, sculpted by time, it formed a wall of oddly shaped rock. Too often wind and rain toppled smaller segments of these formations and sent them tumbling down, which in turn caused bigger pieces to break off.

Pale gashes showed where the rock had broken loose last night. Reece fingered the marks, frowning, then surveyed what remained of the road at this point. The stone formations butted out, making it almost impossible to see around the curve. A driver couldn’t have chosen a worse point to go head-to-head with a fallen rock.

Edging past the narrow neck, he blocked the road off from the other side. He did the same on the Jeep side. His insides still were tight from the narrowness of her escape when he returned.

Sydney buried a sigh at the scowl on her rescuer’s face as he strode toward her. She had to work with this guy for the next few weeks. They were not, she decided, going to rank up there among the most enjoyable weeks of her life. With any luck, she and Henderson wouldn’t have to see each other again after today.

That hope sustained her during the short, silent ride to the Chalo River Dam. She’d seen the massive structure many times before, of course. During the years her father had served as fish and game warden for the state park that enclosed the reservoir, he’d taken her by boat and by car when he went to check water levels and shoot the breeze with the power plant operators.