Deadly Fall. Elle James
“Leigha?” Andrew Stratford called out.
The old mansion had been quiet for too long.
“Leigha?” he said a little louder.
He glanced up from the computer terminal, having spent the last three hours day-trading, buying as the prices on several of the stocks he had his eye on dipped to an all-time low.
He’d made his fortune on Wall Street. Since the accident, he’d left it all behind and moved to Cape Churn, Oregon. Giving up the high-stress job of managing the fortunes of other people to only managing his own portfolio had been a decision he’d never regret.
Not that he’d had much of a choice. With the scars he’d acquired, his high-powered, beautiful clients would be less likely to come to entrust their money to him. So intent on being the wealthiest, most beautiful people money could buy, they wouldn’t have the courage to face a man with a wicked scar running from the base of his jaw up to his eye. The burn scars on his right hand would be a deal breaker in a society where a good handshake was a measure of a man’s character.
But the main reason he’d come back to Oregon was the reason he rose from his desk.
“Leigha,” he called out.
Now that he had a daughter to look after, he couldn’t live the fast-paced, late-night lifestyle he’d been living for the past ten years as one of the most eligible bachelors in New York City. And, frankly, he didn’t want to. He’d burned the candle at both ends with a high-powered job and a jet-setter lifestyle. Sure, he’d amassed a fortune, but what else did he have to show for it?
Andrew stretched. He needed to get up and move. His housekeeper, Mrs. Dottie Purdy, had ducked in an hour ago saying she needed to stock the pantry and Leigha preferred to stay and play.
Normally, Leigha played in the big mansion with Brewer, her black Labrador retriever. Andrew could count on the reassuring sound of little feet and canine toenails clicking across wooden floors. For the past fifteen minutes there had been nothing. No sounds, no squeals of delight or soft-spoken tea parties in the salon two doors down from Andrew’s office.
Silence used to be calming when he was a bachelor without a care in the world. Now that he had Leigha, silence was disconcerting.
The little girl was always into something. Though she was abnormally solemn, she was a natural-born explorer and adventurer. She reminded Andrew of himself at that age. His nanny had despaired of keeping up with him. Unfortunately, Stratford House perched on the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff. If she wandered too far from the house, Leigha could fall to a very grisly death on the jagged rocks below.
On that thought, Andrew hurried from his office and out into the mansion’s huge entry hall. “Leigha!”
He listened, hoping to hear an answering call in the little girl’s high-pitched voice.
More silence greeted him.
The mansion had three living areas: a massive formal dining room, fifteen bedrooms and a full basement complete with a wine cellar. The child could be anywhere inside.
Andrew went room to room on the main floor and then stood at the base of the sweeping staircase. “Leigha!”
Again, no answering call.
Had she gone outside without telling him? Andrew’s pulse quickened. A glance through the window made his chest tighten. While he’d been busy working at his desk in the study, a cold, gray fog had crept in from the Pacific cloaking Cape Churn in what the locals called the Devil’s Shroud.
“Damn,” Andrew muttered and hurried for the door. If Leigha had gone out when it was clear, she might now be lost in the fog.
Andrew burst through the massive front door and ran out onto the marble portico. “Leigha! Brewer!”
A dog barked in the distance, the sound coming from the back of the house, farther along the coastline, sounding too near to the edge of the cliffs for Andrew’s comfort.
Andrew broke into a sprint, trying to remember just how many steps past the garden led to the cliff’s edge. He’d contracted a local handyman to erect a decorative wrought-iron fence, but he had to wait for the man to finish renovations on another home before he had time to start the work on the fence and other repairs around Stratford House. In the meantime, Andrew worried Leigha or guests might walk off the cliff in a dense fog, such as the one now hiding the treacherous shoreline.
“Leigha? Brewer?”
Again the dog barked.
Andrew slowed, knowing he was close to the edge of the cliff. He would be of no use to Leigha if he fell off. But the thought of the child being out there in the damp fog, her foot slipping on a wet rock, made him hurry as quickly as he could.
Andrew nearly walked into a tree trunk clinging to the ledge.
As he stepped around it, something moved. A shadowy figure detached from the tree and slammed into him.
Andrew’s forward momentum shifted sideways, sending him over the edge of the cliff. He dropped ten feet, hit a jutting boulder, his arms wind-milling the air, grasping at the fog for purchase to keep him from falling three hundred feet to the rocky shoreline. His hand tangled in a tree root. Closing his fingers around it, he held on. Damp with the mist, the root slid through his hand. He grabbed with his other hand and held on tightly. When his body fell below his hands, his arms felt as though they were being ripped out of their sockets. But he managed to arrest his downward plunge.
Andrew clung to the root, his breath caught in his throat as he held on, his hands wrapped around the root, his feet dangling in the air.
For a long moment he hung in midair, thankful for the stalwart tree and its tenacious hold on the rocky cliff. Then he raised his legs, kicking out his feet, searching for ground to dig his toes into. Using the tree roots, he inched his way up the side of the cliff until he was back where he’d started before he’d fallen over the edge.
Or rather,