A Man of His Word. Merline Lovelace

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      “All right. We’ll drive back to the dam and go over schedules.” He reached into the Jeep and tossed her the mobile phone. “Here, you’d better call your assistant and let him know you’re okay while I block the road.”

      With the rope looped over one arm, he rooted around in the back of the Jeep for the toolbox he never traveled without. Inside was a thick roll of electrical tape. It wasn’t red, but it would have to do as a hazard warning until he could get a crew out here to erect permanent barriers.

      “Zack? It’s Sydney.”

      Her voice carried to him at the rear of the Jeep, attractive enough now that most of the croak had disappeared.

      “No, I didn’t get lost. I, er, drove off a cliff.”

      She caught Reece’s sardonic look and turned her back.

      “Yes, I’m fine. Really. Honest. I swear. Just get hold of the insurance company, okay? Make sure our on-location liability coverage extends to rented Blazers that now reside at the bottom of a river gorge. And arrange for another vehicle. I want to do some site shots this afternoon.”

      Reece turned away, shaking his head. This was one single-minded female. He’d remember that in future dealings with her.

      “It’s a long story,” she told her assistant, scooping her tangled hair back with one hand. “I’ll fill you in on the details later. What have you heard from Tish and the others? Noon? Good! Tell them to be ready to roll as soon as I get back. What time is it now?”

      Her little screech of dismay followed Reece to the vertical outcropping a few yards away. Reddish limestone striated with yellow and green pushed upward. Hardened by nature, sculpted by time, it formed a wall of oddly shaped rock. Too often wind and rain toppled smaller segments of these formations and sent them tumbling down, which in turn caused bigger pieces to break off.

      Pale gashes showed where the rock had broken loose last night. Reece fingered the marks, frowning, then surveyed what remained of the road at this point. The stone formations butted out, making it almost impossible to see around the curve. A driver couldn’t have chosen a worse point to go head-to-head with a fallen rock.

      Edging past the narrow neck, he blocked the road off from the other side. He did the same on the Jeep side. His insides still were tight from the narrowness of her escape when he returned.

      Sydney buried a sigh at the scowl on her rescuer’s face as he strode toward her. She had to work with this guy for the next few weeks. They were not, she decided, going to rank up there among the most enjoyable weeks of her life. With any luck, she and Henderson wouldn’t have to see each other again after today.

      That hope sustained her during the short, silent ride to the Chalo River Dam. She’d seen the massive structure many times before, of course. During the years her father had served as fish and game warden for the state park that enclosed the reservoir, he’d taken her by boat and by car when he went to check water levels and shoot the breeze with the power plant operators.

      And when the reservoir had been emptied ten years ago, leaving the dam naked and glistening in the sun, she’d attempted to capture its utilitarian starkness as well as the Anasazi ruins on film. Of course, she remembered with a wry twist of her lips, that was before her foolish infatuation with Jamie Chavez had blurred both her vision and her purpose.

      She didn’t have that problem now. Now she saw the curved structure through an artist’s eye trained to recognize beauty in its most elemental state. The contrast of whitened concrete against reddish-yellow cliffs made her hands itch for a camera. The symmetry of the arch, with its gated spillways flanking each abutment, pleased her sense of proportion.

      The air-conditioned chill of the administration building pleased her even more. Sydney took a moment for her eyes to adjust from dazzling sunlight to dim interior before accepting the mug Reece handed her.

      “Thanks.”

      “You’d better save your thanks until you taste what’s in it,” he commented dryly. “My guys swear they can use this stuff to patch the dam if we run short of concrete.”

      The sludgelike coffee carried enough caffeine to make it worth the effort of swallowing.

      “Speaking of patching,” Sydney hinted broadly, “when do you plan to start?”

      He shot her another of those sardonic looks, and gestured to a government-issue metal chair beside an equally nondescript desk. She carried her coffee over with her, careful to keep it away from the charts and clipboards precisely aligned on the desktop.

      Tossing his hat aside, Henderson forked his fingers through his pelt of black hair before pulling out one of the clipboards. The tanned skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled with concentration as he skimmed an acetate status sheet filled with grease-pencil markings.

      “The water passed the halfway mark just after 6:00 a.m. this morning.”

      Sydney attempted a quick a mental calculation. The village nestled in an opening in the cliff face fifty feet or so above the riverbed. If the waters had receded halfway down the cliff face already, they’d reach the ruins when? Eight tomorrow morning? Nine?

      Hell! There was a reason she’d routinely cut her science and math classes in college and now carried a really good calculator in her purse at all times. The problem was that at this particular moment both purse and calculator rested amid the wreckage of the Blazer.

      “When can I expect to see the ruins?”

      “If we don’t get any more storms like last night’s, the reservoir should empty down to the river level by noon tomorrow. The cave that contains the ruins is some fifty feet above the riverbed. I calculate the village will start to emerge at approximately 9:24.”

      “Nine twenty-four? Not 9:23, huh? I could probably use that extra minute.”

      He didn’t appear to appreciate her feeble attempt at humor. “I’m an engineer. Precision ranks right up there with timeliness in our book. And safety.” He leveled her a sardonic look. “Try not to drive off any more cliffs, Ms. Scott.”

      “Sydney,” she reminded him, shrugging off the sarcasm as her mind whirled. Thinking of the exterior scenes she wanted to shoot this afternoon and the sequencing for tomorrow’s all-important emergence, she only half absorbed Reece’s deep voice.

      “We’ve detected a stress fracture on the right lower quadrant of the dam’s interior. Depending on my exterior damage assessment, we may have to blast some of the old section and pour new concrete. Check in with me each morning before you come out to the site, and I’ll let you know the status and whether I want you in the restricted area.”

      That got her attention.

      “Each morning?” she yelped. “What happened to your engineering precision here? I need a little more notice than that to plan my daily takes.”

      “Call me the night before, then. That’s the best I can do until we complete the damage assessment.”

      “Okay, okay. Give me your number. My little black book with all my contacts is at the bottom of the gorge right now.”

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