Chapter 1 - THE MAN WHO WATCHED ME FALL
The snow swallowed my scream.
One second, I was standing on an icy overlook outside Aspen, begging my husband to take me home. The next, Victor Hale drove both hands into my shoulders and sent me backward over the cliff.
I was nine months pregnant.
My arms tore through the frozen air as I searched for anything to grab. Ice scraped beneath my nails. The white sky spun above me, and Victor’s face appeared at the edge for one terrible second.
He did not look frightened.
He looked relieved.
My body struck a narrow ledge halfway down the mountain. Pain exploded through my ribs and wrist. A deeper pain tightened around my stomach.
I pressed both hands over our baby.
“Please stay with me.”
Victor looked down from the cliff.
Beside him stood Serena Blake, the woman I had welcomed into our home for dinners, holidays, and my baby shower.
“Is she dead?” Serena asked.
Victor laughed.
“For fifty million dollars, she’d better be.”
They walked away.
For nearly two hours, I drifted in and out of consciousness beneath the falling snow. Every breath felt sharp enough to cut me from the inside.
Then a searchlight crossed the mountainside.
A helicopter hovered above the ravine. A man descended through the storm on a rescue line, his black overcoat whipping around him.
He landed beside me and dropped to his knees.
Silver hair. Steel-gray eyes. A face I had seen once in an old photograph hidden among my mother’s papers.
Adrian Cross.
Founder of Cross Atlantic Insurance Group.
According to the letter my mother left before she died, he was my biological father.
“Elena?” he breathed.
I tried to speak, but blood filled my mouth.
His hand covered mine over my stomach.
“You’re not dying here.”
At the hospital, doctors cut away my frozen clothes and rushed me into surgery. I had broken ribs, a fractured wrist, severe hypothermia, and internal bleeding.
The room filled with machines and urgent voices.
A nurse moved a monitor across my stomach.
For several seconds, there was nothing.
Then a tiny heartbeat broke through the noise.
Weak.
Fast.
Alive.
I cried until the medication pulled me under.
When I woke, Adrian was sitting beside my bed in a dark suit. His hand rested near mine, close enough to offer comfort but not assuming I wanted it.
“How did you find me?” I whispered.
His expression hardened.
“I didn’t find you by accident.”
He opened a black folder.
“Victor submitted a claim on your life insurance policy forty-three minutes before anyone reported you missing.”
I stared at him.
“He told investigators you slipped during the storm,” Adrian continued. “He reported that you and the baby had died before a search team had even reached the mountain.”
“I didn’t know I had a fifty-million-dollar policy.”
“You didn’t.”
My heart began beating faster.
Adrian leaned closer.
“Not until your husband forged your signature.”
Across Aspen, Victor was telling police he had watched helplessly as I vanished into the storm.
At the same time, he was demanding that Adrian’s company pay him fifty million dollars.
May you like
Victor thought the snow had buried his only witness.
He did not know I had opened my eyes.
