had to think for five minutes to come up with the right words to walk her up to the reality of what had happened to Max Jones.
Her hands covered her face for an instant, then went back down to fist in her lap. “He’s okay?”
Alex tried to keep his voice level and calm. He’d really hoped to avoid that question. “No, Max is not okay, but he survived and we’re arranging for him to get the best of care as fast as we can. That means you ought to pull a few things together and come with me. They’ve taken him into Chicago by helicopter, and we’ve got one waiting for you and me over in Dubuque. If you have parents who ought to come, give me that information and I’ll pass it along to the studio to arrange travel.”
“Mom doesn’t know?”
“Max only listed you on his emergency info. I didn’t know you were Max’s sister until about thirty minutes ago. I’m sorry.”
JJ shot off the chair. “Of course Max left Mom out of the loop. He’s fabulous at that.” The split-second frustration was quickly replaced with teary-eyed worry. “What happened to him?”
Alex had decided to parcel out the details of the accident in small stages, giving JJ time to cope with the catastrophe. Catastrophe. That was one of Sam’s favorite words, one Alex usually banned from his vocabulary—but it fit this time.
“Max fell during a night climb.”
“Fell? Far?”
“Yes. He was airlifted in serious but stable condition to Lincoln General about twenty minutes ago.” He was hoping that would be enough, that she would take those facts and move forward to gather her things. She didn’t budge. “JJ, we should go as soon as we can.”
He saw something click behind her eyes. She shifted gears into a harder, more precise version of herself, but she still didn’t get up. Instead, her eyes narrowed at Alex as she watched him more closely. Of course. She’d mentioned she was planning to use her experience to join the volunteer fire department here if she stayed. She wasn’t just a soldier—she must have been a first responder of some kind. She wasn’t going to let him off with a vague assessment of Max’s condition. Her eyes told him she needed as much information as he could give right now, no matter how bad.
“They suspect a spinal cord injury. He’s not conscious, and they’re going to keep him sedated while they assess the...” he hesitated to use this word but knew it was what she was looking for “...damage. Lincoln General has the best doctors for this. The show’s producers are doing all they can but right now we really should go.”
She’d been too calm up to this point. The women he knew would have lost it ten minutes ago, would be rushing in tears to the car he had outside. JJ was pulling herself inward, winding up into a tight ball of control. It worried him more than tears would, especially knowing what he did about why she was in Gordon Falls. She’d come here to escape the tension and turmoil she’d known overseas, and he’d literally brought trauma to her doorstep.
He’d almost breathed a sigh of relief when she turned toward the hallway, hopefully to gather her things. He went to make a call to the office for an update but stopped when she turned at the end of the room to glare at him with ice-cold eyes. “You’re Alex Cushman. You own Adventure Gear and you’re involved with the show WWW where Max just practically got himself killed.”
It was an excruciatingly fair assessment of the circumstances. Alex could only nod.
She made a disgusted sound that Alex felt in the pit of his stomach and left the room.
* * *
JJ had ridden in helicopters more times than she could count. She’d done things—seen things—that would make most people run in fear. Serving as a firefighter in Afghanistan had given her nerves of steel.
Or so she’d thought. As the helicopter swooped up off the ground and veered east toward Chicago, a sick sense of dread filled her. She’d been in enough crises to pick up on everything Alex wasn’t saying. Worry about her brother battled with anger at herself for feeling so disappointed in the man Alex had turned out to be. The dreamy bubble she’d cast around this stranger, this man who had captured her imagination, had now burst in the worst way possible.
When had she lost her common sense? Their avoidance of everyday topics, deliberately not sharing their identities... All that seemed beyond foolhardy now. Ordinarily, JJ was nothing if not careful.
Unlike Max. Max was a carnival of carelessness. Suddenly the jokes Mom and her late father would make, like, “It’s a wonder Max hasn’t gotten himself killed yet,” weren’t so funny. A wave of concern for her younger brother waged war with anger over having to deal with another Max-induced calamity. She leaned her head against the aircraft’s cool glass in an effort to calm her roiling stomach.
“Are you going to be okay?” Everything about Alex had shifted in the past hour. He’d lost the casual air, that look of having all the time in the world that had first drawn her to his silhouette as he sat on the dock in the moonlight. Now, even over the chopping of the helicopter blades, his voice was clipped and tight. The unmistakable tone of someone trying to manage a crisis.
“I doubt it.” She wasn’t going to give Mr. Adventure Gear the satisfaction of an “I’ll be fine.” Nothing about this was going to be fine, at least not anytime soon. A man’s mother isn’t hauled in from out of state for small injuries. Damaged spinal cords didn’t heal completely, if ever. She looked at him and leaned in. “Tell me what you know.”
“There’s not much to know just yet.”
Standard first-responder jargon. “Tell me all the stuff you haven’t told me yet. I’m not going to go to pieces.” Alex’s eyes told her he feared just that. Other people probably would in this situation. Only she wasn’t other people. “Look,” she tried again, although shouting over the helicopter noise didn’t exactly make for easy chatting. “I’d feel better with more facts.” And less coddling, she added silently.
Alex raked his fingers through his hair. “They were rappelling down the side of a cliff. Darkness, bats, all kinds of good television. Evidently you earned bonus points if you went first because no one knew what was at the bottom, and Max jumped at the chance to increase his lead. He’d been the clear front-runner all week.”
“I had no idea, but then again, how could I? You don’t allow me any communication with Max.” Technically, it was the show that didn’t allow communication—Max had shown her the pile of “do not disclose” statements he’d had to sign before the car had come to pick him up. She knew it wasn’t fair to blame Alex for what WWW had done, but the panic was yelling accusations in the back of her brain she didn’t have the energy to fight. “I didn’t even know he was in the state park...so close.”
“You weren’t supposed to know. The only reason I knew was because it was my job to make sure equipment got there. I’m not even sure Max knew he was only an hour from home. They do a good job of isolating the set.”
He was skirting the issue. “So what happened?”
“He fell. We think he may have swatted a bat and taken his hand off the break strand—I don’t know the details yet, really—but he swung far to one side and hit the platform where the camera crew was.” She watched Alex pause for a moment, crafting his next words. “His back struck the metal scaffolding.”
“Was he wearing safety gear?” Max was in the habit of skipping such equipment. In the week before he left, as he was teaching her how to rent the kayaks and canoes he offered alongside cabin and motorboat rentals, she watched him give a safety lesson five times a day to customers, then completely disregard all of it when he went out himself.
“Yes, he was. The show required it. I don’t think I’ve heard mention of any head injuries, although he wasn’t conscious when they lifted him. I do know he...hit...pretty hard. I’ll check my phone again when we land but I don’t think they really have a lot of information. I don’t want to tell you something I can’t be