Surrender: A Bitter Creek Novel Read online

  Praise for Joan Johnston

  “Johnston’s page-turner is replete with romantic angst, sizzling sex, and the promise of an enduring love.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Joan Johnston continually gives us everything we want…fabulous details and atmosphere, memorable characters, a story that you wish would never end, and lots of tension and sensuality.”

  —Romantic Times

  “A master storyteller…Joan Johnston knows how to spin a story that will get to the readers every time.”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  “Johnston has a keen eye for quirky circumstances that put her characters, and the reader, through a wringer. Laughing one moment and crying the next, you’ll always have such a great time getting to the happy-ever-after.”

  —Romance Junkies Reviews

  “Johnston is a writer who can combine romance side by side with tragedy, proving that there is magic in relationships and that love is worth the risk.”

  —Bookreporter

  Surrender is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Joan Mertens Johnston, Inc.

  Excerpt from Sullivan’s Promise by Joan Johnston copyright © 2018 by Joan Mertens Johnston, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Dell, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DELL and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Sullivan’s Promise by Joan Johnston. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  ISBN 9780399177767

  Ebook ISBN 9780399177774

  Cover design: Lynn Andreozzi

  Cover photograph: Rob Lang

  randomhousebooks.com

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  By Joan Johnston

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Sullivan’s Promise

  DOES YOUR LIFE really flash before your eyes when you know you’re going to die? Taylor Grayhawk was a great pilot, but there was nothing she could do with both engines flamed out. Her hands were shaking and a knot of fear had formed in her throat. Without the rumble of engines, the Twin Otter that had just dropped seven smoke jumpers on a raging inferno in Yellowstone National Park was eerily quiet.

  She took a firmer grip on the control column as a way to keep herself—her emotions and her mind and her body—calm. The terrifying threat of plummeting into the fire, along with undeniable whiffs of choking black smoke in the cockpit, made it plain she didn’t have much time left to figure out a way to save herself and the single passenger left on the plane.

  Taylor had just dropped the last jumper to fight the blaze that had been burning for the past two weeks, when a whirlwind of fire had engulfed the Otter. Without power, she’d been slowly, but steadily, losing altitude. She turned, with eyes she hoped didn’t reveal how frightened she was, to stare over her shoulder at the single smoke jumper remaining on the plane.

  “You can still jump,” she said loud enough to be heard over the unnerving whisper of wind in the open doorway at the rear of the Otter.

  “Not without you,” the jumper replied, pulling off his headset.

  “I don’t have a parachute.”

  “We can share mine.”

  Taylor calculated the odds of getting to the ground hanging on to Brian Flynn by her fingernails—and whatever other body parts she could wrap around him. She wasn’t a gambler by nature, and she didn’t like what she saw. Brian was wearing a yellow, padded jump jacket and Kevlar-reinforced pants, which acted like a cowboy’s chaps, to protect the firefighter’s trousers from being ripped by brush and tree limbs. She imagined herself falling—sliding down his body—into the scorching flames below, and shivered.

  “I’ll take my chances on getting the plane to the ground in one piece,” she said, turning back to the control panel to see how much lift she could manage without the engines. Not much. She searched in vain for a meadow—any flat place, for that matter—where she might crash-land the plane. The only barren terrain she saw, in one of the most remote areas in the Lower 48, were steep mountain slopes leading straight down into the ferocious fire.

  The spotter, who was required to be on all flights to gauge the wind, fire activity, and terrain, hadn’t shown up for this 9 P.M. flight, which took advantage of the long August daylight. So Brian, already dressed in smoke-jumping gear, had doffed his Ram Air parachute and cage helmet in the corner of the plane, donned the spotter’s harness and helmet, and served as spotter instead. After the last smoke jumper had gone out the door, Brian had suggested that Taylor drop down to survey the fire perimeter, in order to send the latest information back to base.

  It was a judgment call whether the risk was worth the reward. But this fire had been frighteningly unpredictable, and she understood Brian’s concern for the safety of his fellow smoke jumpers. It hadn’t been easy to see anything through the cloud of black smoke, so she’d slipped even lower—and been engulfed in a sudden tornado of flame, rising hundreds of feet from the 250-foot conifers below.

  They’d been drifting downward ever since.

  Brian met her gaze with worried eyes. “This plane’s headed straight into the fire,” he said from the open doorway. “We need to jump now, while there’s still time to hit a safe clearing. Get over here, Tag. Move your butt!”

  The use of her nickname, which came from her initials—Taylor Ann Grayhawk—conjured powerful, painful memories. Brian had dubbed her with it when he was a junior and she was a freshman at Jackson High.
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br />   Taylor felt her stomach shift when the plane jolted, as the right wingtip was abruptly shoved upward by a scorching gust of air. Time was running out. Her eyes were tearing from the smoke, and her chin was trembling, despite her clenched teeth. In a voice that was hoarse, but surprisingly composed, considering the desperation she felt inside, Taylor reported their position on the radio, along with the information she’d gleaned from their survey of the fire and the fact that she’d been unable to restart the engines.

  “I’m putting us down in the first clearing I find,” she told the dispatcher.

  “Roger,” the dispatcher replied. “Good luck.”

  As Taylor surveyed the violent landscape, she figured it was going to take more than luck to survive. It was going to take a miracle. She didn’t see an area large enough to allow her to land without going in nose first. If the crash didn’t kill them, they would burn to death in the converging fire.

  She knew her thoughts should be focused on wind currents and lift and drag. What consumed her instead was her greatest regret: What would my life be like now, if I hadn’t broken up with Brian Flynn in high school?

  Taylor had memories of the few autumn months she’d secretly dated Brian that were hard to forget. Laughter. Loving. Sharing and bonding. He’d seemed almost as perceptive of her feelings as her fraternal twin, which was saying something, because her life and Vick’s had been wrapped, one around the other, like clinging vines.

  It was easy to blame the tensions between their feuding families for driving them apart. Vick had been appalled when she discovered Taylor was dating one of “those awful Flynn boys” and demanded she stop seeing Brian. But ultimately, the decision had been hers. She was the one who’d given up on the possibility of loving and being loved. She was the one who’d walked away.

  After college, Brian had become a firefighter and married someone else. She’d become a corporate jet pilot who flew CEOs to meetings around the country and found time during the summer to drop smoke jumpers from a twin-engine Otter. She’d been engaged three times, but she’d never married.

  Since Brian’s divorce a year ago, they were both single. During that year she’d done nothing to engage his interest, nothing to reignite the secret romance-of-a-lifetime that had been snuffed out thirteen years ago, like a campfire you were done with.

  She’d often thought about approaching Brian once she learned he was free. But she’d waited too long. Very likely, they were going to die in the next few minutes.

  But if we live through this…

  “Tag?”

  She focused her gaze on the tall, broad-shouldered man who’d been forbidden fruit when she was a teenager.

  “I’m not leaving without you,” Brian said from the doorway. “Get your beautiful ass over here!”

  When their eyes met, she felt the past flooding back. All the things she should have done…and hadn’t. All the things she shouldn’t have done…and had.

  The hope of a future with Brian almost had her rising. But there was too much water under the bridge. Or water over the dam. She’d been disappointed too many times by too many men. Some people were lovable, and some were not. She was just one of those people who wasn’t destined to find a man who could love her. She no longer believed in the myth of “happily ever after.” Her life was liable to end in an altogether more gruesome way.

  “You should jump,” she said turning back to search through the thick black smoke for the grassy clearing she knew had to be there somewhere.

  A moment later she felt a strong hand grip her arm, yanking her out of her seat.

  “I am not, by God, going to take the blame for leaving you behind, you stubborn brat!”

  The plane shimmied again, and the wings tipped sideways.

  “Let me go!” She reached back in an attempt to right the plane, but he pulled her inexorably toward the door, which was starting to tilt upward at an angle that might keep them both from escaping.

  Taylor jerked free, her heart thundering in her chest, and grabbed the control column, bringing the plane back to level flight. Panting, breathless, her eyes locked with Brian’s. “Just go! Someone has to keep the plane steady so you can get out the door.”

  “I’m not going without you, Tag. Get that into your head. So you can either join me in getting out of this plane, or we can both go down with it in flames.”

  TAYLOR FOUGHT PANIC as the paint on the nose of the plane began to blister. The heat in the cockpit was insufferable. Any second the gas tank might blow. Brian was right. If she wanted to live, she had to abandon the Otter. Now!

  She seized the bungee cord she’d used to hold a bunch of charts together and tied off the control column, then stumbled her way along the empty belly of the plane, grabbing at one of the storage racks along the side to keep from falling when the wings abruptly tipped and, just as suddenly, righted themselves. She was gasping with fear when she finally reached Brian. He was still wearing the spotter’s helmet, but he’d replaced the spotter’s harness with his smoke-jumping parachute.

  “How do you want me to hang on, once we go out the door?”

  “Come here,” he said curtly.

  Brian put a cage helmet, which normally protected a smoke jumper’s face from being impaled by branches on the way down, onto her head and settled a spotter’s harness around her chest. He secured the clip at the back, which had kept him attached to the plane while he was hanging out the door as the spotter, to a carabiner on his smoke jumper’s rigging belt. When he was done, she stood in front of him at the door to the plane, her back arched slightly by the PG—personal gear—bag he had strapped to his stomach.

  He pointed out the door. “See that spot? That’s where we’re headed.”

  Taylor looked where he’d gestured and saw a tiny circle, with patches of green and brown, surrounded by towering flames. Colored streamers he’d dropped to show the direction of the wind drifted downward through the black smoke. While she stood frozen, trying to fathom that this was really happening, that they really were going to jump into the inferno below, he kicked a tall, narrow cargo box used by smoke jumpers out the door. The box contained a sleeping bag and Brian’s Pulaski tool, along with other supplies, including three days’ worth of food and water.

  She was still watching the descent of the cargo box parachute, which was headed in the same direction as the streamers, when Brian yanked her close.

  “Trust the harness to hold you. Keep your arms crossed over your chest and your knees bent,” he ordered tersely. “Lean your head back against my shoulder and lift your feet off the ground.”

  She barely had time to do as he’d asked, before he put his long, powerful arms around her and dropped out of the plane.

  Taylor would have screamed as they fell, except she was so frightened, she couldn’t draw breath to make a sound. She whimpered when a flying cinder slipped through the metal cage protecting her face and landed on her cheek, but she was afraid to move her hands from the position she’d been told to take, so she shook her head frantically to get rid of it.

  “Settle down,” Brian said in an infuriatingly calm voice, tightening his hold until she thought her ribs might crack. “I have you.”

  It surprised her how much relief she felt at Brian’s deep-voiced reassurance, but that small comfort didn’t last, because she could see that they were headed straight into the hottest part of the fire. Any second, she expected to be impaled on a burning limb. She felt like she might throw up. How did smoke jumpers do this time after time after time?

  Taylor followed the direction of the streamers far below, which seemed to be headed into the fiery blaze. Her search was interrupted by a jerk and a sudden reversal of direction upward, as Brian pulled the rip cord and the chute opened.

  “I’m going to let go of you now. I need to adjust the risers.”

  Taylor felt herself slide downward
and screamed, “Brian!”

  “You’re not going to fall. Just do as I say.”

  Then his arms were gone.

  Taylor would have given anything to be facing the other way, holding on to Brian like a baby animal clutched to its mother’s belly. It was torture watching the ground coming up at her faster and faster. She closed her eyes and felt their bodies sliding sideways as Brian adjusted the steering toggles. But the fearsome noise rising upward, as the fire hissed and growled like a multitude of predatory cats and carnivorous dogs, was too ominous to ignore.

  Taylor forced herself to open her eyes, but her heart skipped a beat at the sight that greeted her.

  An inferno. Nothing but death in every direction.

  “There,” Brian muttered, gesturing with his chin, which nudged the back of her head.

  Taylor spied their supposed destination, a tiny, unburned meadow at the base of the mountain. It was about the size of a baseball field and was bounded everywhere she looked by giant burning spruces and pines. The patch of grass Brian had spotted was too small a target. They would never make it. “You can’t—”

  Taylor bit off the rest of her speech. The meadow he’d found was ridiculously tiny, but it was the only place she could see anywhere around them that wasn’t licked by flames. She watched the cargo box land in rugged brush ringed by trees that crackled viciously as they burned. Black smoke rose ominously, so thick and hot it was difficult to breathe. Maybe they weren’t going to be scorched to death after all. Maybe they were going to suffocate.