A Hero's Christmas Hope (Holidays in Heart Falls #3) - Arend, Vivian Page 0,1

been to Ryan’s house in Heart Falls, but she wasn’t worried about not being welcomed. They might have fallen out of touch over the past couple of years, but their friendship was rock-solid. Forever friends, that’s what they were.

They’d pinkie-sworn on it and everything back when they were twelve.

Still, she’d booked a motel for a couple of weeks so she could visit in the spare moments he could give her. She hadn’t wanted to announce she was coming, just in case she’d had to call it off at the last minute.

Something in the back seat began buzzing. Or rather, something inside one of the boxes stacked in her back seat. She’d never been a pack rat. It hadn’t taken long to bundle everything she owned into the car with room to spare. And one of those things was now making excited noises.

Madison reached back to blindly bang on the cardboard in the hopes it would stop.

Of course, the instant her attention wasn’t fully on the road, she missed the warning for the right-hand turn she was supposed to make.

Heart Falls was small enough that there were no overhead streetlights this far from the center of town. She was stuck on a dark, narrow swatch of pavement that seemed to curve around the shadowy silhouettes of the buildings to her right. Nothing was visible to her left except wide-open fields and, in the far distance, the shadowy outlines of the Rocky Mountains.

“Please a legal U-turn make,” her GPS requested in a familiar nasal tone.

Yoda as a copilot usually amused her, but right now Madison would just like to get where she was going, thank you very much.

She slowed, looking for a place to make that legal U-turn, and her tires slipped. An adjustment to the steering wheel had no effect on her vehicle. She tapped her brakes, but nothing.

Forward motion continued, the car sliding farther to the right, and Madison swore. She wasn’t going to be able to fix this in time. Madison braced both hands on the wheel as her front passenger tire hit the ditch, and her vehicle left the highway.

As her car bumped madly over the uneven ground, she tugged the wheel from side to side, guiding her descent as best she could. A gentle slide instead of a straight plummet seemed like a good idea. Fortunately, there were no trees or massive rocks in her way. Or at least none that she could see in the limited illumination offered by her headlights.

A barbed wire fence shot into view, offering barely any resistance as her Honda Civic smashed through it. Wires snapped, the loose strands scraping against the car’s paint job like fingernails on a chalkboard.

When the vehicle jostled to a stop, Madison gasped for air. Other than her heart pounding in her ears loud enough to deafen her, everything, including her, seemed to be in one piece.

She leaned back in the seat and tried to calm—

The steering wheel airbag went off, smashing into her with breakneck speed, stealing a scream from her as pain shot to high.

So much for her luck holding.

Up on the highway, Ryan Zhao parked his truck as far to the edge of the asphalt as possible and hit the hazard lights. The wind just about took his door off the frame, snow crystals slamming against his skin as he quickly but cautiously made his way across the road and into the ditch.

Snow flickered in front of his flashlight. The icy-cold December wind stole his breath as he waded through the tall, dry grass barely touched with the recent inch of snowfall.

What a contrast. Less than thirty minutes ago, it had been absolutely calm, and he’d been sitting in quiet contemplation in the Heart Falls cemetery. With his ten-year-old daughter, Talia, out for the night at a friend’s, he’d taken the evening to do some serious thinking.

And while his wife, Justina, wasn’t buried in the small community graveyard, Ryan had a habit of going there when he wanted to honour her memory. When he needed to think.

When he needed to make decisions.

He’d left the cemetery with a new goal in mind, but all of that was swept away as he focused on the potential disaster he was striding toward.

The red taillights on the car in front of him faded as the engine cut out, and Ryan picked up the pace. He tapped his pocket to make sure his phone was still there. As a coordinator with the Heart Falls volunteer fire department, he was