Page 1 of Mountain Struggle

Chapter 1

Damien

Damien Gray stood up, stretching to relieve the kinks in his neck and shoulders. He wasn’t sleeping well these days, and sitting at his desk most of the day hadn’t helped.

He wondered if he should be upgrading his bed to a Super King—in recent months Jamie, his six-year-old son, had made a habit of wandering into Damien’s bed sometime between three and four in the morning. The boy was typically fast asleep minutes later, but by then it was too late for Damien—he was fully awake.

He often spent an hour lying beside his son, watching his little chest rise and fall gently, before giving up and getting out of bed. Asleep, Jamie seemed younger than his six years, and Damien was often returned in his mind to the moment four years earlier when the boy’s mother had turned up on Damien’s doorstep with the toddler in tow.

Damien looked down at his watch—almost five p.m., and he still had to stop by the store on his way home. He and Jamie were going to teach Tess, Jamie’s nanny, how to cook chicken fajitas.

As always when he thought of Tess, he felt a completely inappropriate surge of desire course through him.

Stay away.

She’s twenty-five years old, and she’s great with Jamie.

Don’t fuck it up.

Damien turned off his computer and lined up the papers on his desk. He’d have to come in early tomorrow to wrap up a couple of reports, but it was worth it to spend the evening with his son.

His hand was already on the door handle when his cell phone rang.

“Gray,” he answered, forcing himself to tone down his impatience.

“Commandant?” The word was spoken in a lilting Canadian accent.

Damien and Drake Jacobs, his second-in-command at the Chamonix Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute Montagne—PGHM for short—had worked together long enough that, as soon as he heard the other man’s somber tone, Damien knew his dinner plans would have to be put on hold.

“We just got a call from Cosmiques. Two climbers went out on a climb early this morning, they were expecting them back for a late lunch, but they haven’t arrived yet.”

“Where are you now?”

“In the car, on my way to the office.”

“Can you pick me up?”

“Sure thing, I’ll be there in three minutes, Commandant.”

There was a time when getting ready would have involved little more for Damien than grabbing his uniform jacket and the pack he kept ready, but that was before he had a son.

He sat down behind his desk again, feeling every one of his thirty-six years, and sighed softly before picking up the phone. It rang three times before anybody picked up on the other end.

“Hello?”

“Tess? It’s Damien. Is Jamie there with you?”

She sounded slightly out of breath. “He’s under the couch. I’m under the kitchen table. We’re playing at being whales.”

Damien smiled despite himself. His son’s imagination never ceased to amaze him—it was definitely not something the boy had inherited from him.

“Should I put him on?” she continued in her soft Oxfordshire accent.

“No, please don’t.” He and Jamie didn’t communicate well on the phone, perhaps because their only phone interactions happened whenever Damien was cancelling plans on his son—something that happened altogether too frequently. “Something came up … I’m not going to make it to dinner.”

There was a moment of silence. Tess knew how much tonight’s dinner meant to Jamie.

“I’m sorry,” he continued. “I need to go up to the Aiguille du Midi station. I don’t know what time I’ll be home. Please tell Jamie—”