A Cowboy Followed His Horse Into the Mountains—Then Discovered a Woman Everyone Thought Dead

Chapter 2

It wasn’t a path meant for horses. It was a chaos of loose scree and rotting deadfall and sheets of ice-glazed granite, a staircase built by something that hated the idea of anyone using it. Wyatt rode leaning almost entirely over the saddle horn, his weight pitched forward just to keep their center of gravity from dragging them backward off the edge, his thighs burning as he gripped the horse’s barrel. Every time the gelding slipped, dropping to one knee before scrambling violently back up, Wyatt heard the whole story of his life flash behind his eyes, the way men do when they’re a heartbeat from the end of it.

It was madness. Complete, howling madness.

If a leg broke up here, man or horse, that was the end of the story. The mountain didn’t care about intentions. It didn’t care if a man was brave or foolish or desperate. It would simply bury him under a foot of snow and forget he ever existed, the way it had buried a thousand men before him and would bury a thousand more.