Excerpt from Chapter One of

SUNDOWN

Book Three in The Sky King Ranch series

by

Susan May Warren

Colt Kingston was in worse shape than he thought.

One good look at himself in the mirror said that he probably shouldn’t be climbing at seven thousand feet, where the air turned into a whisper in his lungs, where his heart had to work double time, and where every movement turned his muscles into a fist.

But the view. Oh, the view from atop Avalanche Spire, just south of Denali National Park, could just about stop his heart anyway.

Colt scanned the area with his binoculars.

From the north, the massive Denali range rose, snowcapped and magnificent, its hulking mass thundering across the horizon. A blue-gray shadow fell upon the mountains below, sweeping down to the rich greens of a pine and fir forest, the deep blues of valley lakes set in pockets inside the rising peaks of the foothills.

Snow and ice still capped a number of low-lying peaks, glaciers running off the edge like frosting. The air smelled of the summer wildflowers, and the sunlight hung long upon the day.

“I see the plane,” he said, his gaze dropping to a small white-and-red-striped crumple of metal caught in one of those glaciers, about a half mile down from the cliff where they stood. “Right where you left it, Tae.”

He lowered his binoculars and shot a glance at Taylor—Tae—Price. She wore her blond hair in a singular braid, had on a pair of Gore-Tex hiking pants, a warm jacket, and a wool hat against the still-crisp Denali wind.

Her mouth tightened at the edges. “It wasn’t there when I left it.”

Colt’s brother Dodge had walked over and now gestured for the binoculars. Colt handed them over.

“Looks like the plane slid,” he said. “I can see the trail where the melt carried it.”

“They must have landed in the valley above it, and the glacier carried it down the slope,” Echo, Dodge’s fiancée, said. She had put down her backpack and was taking a drink of water. Two golden-brown braids stuck out of her knit hat. She glanced at Tae. “I still can’t believe you survived.”

They stood on a ridge just above where they’d landed the Piper Super Cub that Dodge had flown, searching for the downed plane. Even the chopper wouldn’t have been able to put down closer to the wreck, so taking the plane gave them more reach to confirm, well, that Tae hadn’t been lying.

Not that Colt thought she was outright lying, per se, but with the position of the plane, it seemed a little far-fetched that the story went down the way she’d told it. The one that included a kidnapping, her attempts to crash the plane, surviving not only the crash that killed the pilot and her kidnapper but also a late-season blizzard.

“I can’t believe I survived either,” Tae said, maybe realizing that no, none of it really added up. Still, here she stood, daring him not to believe her words even as he stared at the crumpled evidence. Dodge and Echo had found her in a gully nearly ten miles away, so maybe . . .

“We need to get to the plane,” Tae said. “My backpack is inside. It has my research and . . .” She looked at Colt, her pale blue eyes on him, a small glare headed his direction.

Fine. Whatever. He’d sort of thought there might be a little something between them over the past few weeks. She had, after all, sat by his bedside during those early days after his extraction from an op-gone-south in Africa. Heard his nightmares. And he’d witnessed one of her own, so . . .

But after he’d cornered her, forced her story out two weeks ago, something had changed between them. The big chill.

He should have expected that, maybe. No one liked being interrogated.

“We’ll have to traverse the glacier,” Dodge said, “and then ice climb down to the plane. It looks pretty precarious.” He glanced at Colt. “You sure you’re up for this?”

Colt didn’t want to bristle at his brother’s question, but still, it burned through him. “Of course.”

If it hadn’t been for the beating Colt had suffered while being held hostage by a group of terrorists in Nigeria, he would have been out here two weeks ago. Right after local sheriff Deke Starr had turned up with the proof that someone was after Tae—someone meaning some Russian mafia group.

And now he sounded crazy, even to himself.

Clearly, he was desperate to put a little hero back into his reflection in the mirror. The one that stared at him with reddened eyes and fading bruises. He didn’t go to sleep every night without replaying that moment when the truck of jihadists pulled up in a Nigerian village and forced him and his fellow security officer to their knees. When, for the first time in years, he prayed that God hadn’t completely abandoned him. Maybe, maybe not, because somehow most of them survived, including Noemi, his brother Ranger’s wife, who had been an aid in Nigeria.

It didn’t mean that God was actually looking out for Colt. He attributed God’s favor to Noemi and Selah, the other humanitarian aid worker, and maybe even the doctor Colt had been tasked to protect.

Thankfully, the doc had survived, but no thanks to Colt.

Bottom line, he’d failed.

To continue reading Chapter One of SUNDOWN, click here!