“And where’s Baby? Is everything okay? Is he sick?”
“No,” she told him quickly. “He’s fine. I left him with Ellen Bigelow.”
Grey suddenly stiffened and took a step back from her, dropping his hands to his sides. “Why?” he asked curtly.
Grace shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
His expression said he didn’t like her answer. Grace wiped the dripping rain from her own hair and sighed. What was it with this man, his mood blowing back and forth like a wind-whipped sheet on the line? “Look, I left him there so that I could come check on you. I wanted to see how your ski lift is standing the strain of the ice. When you left yesterday, you said you were worried about it.”
“You’re here to check on us?” Morgan asked, sounding as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “You’
ve got it backward, lass. We’re supposed to be looking after you.”
Grace couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of his thinking. “I’m not the one with the imperiled ski lift. I live in a sturdy old house that will still be standing long after we’re dead.” She looked out the open mountain side of the shed, at the sagging cables that appeared to be stressed to their limits. She nodded in the lift’s direction. “That doesn’t look good.”
“And what would you know about it looking good or bad?” Ian asked, walking out from behind a gondola, rolling up sheets of paper.
Grace spun around to face him. She wasn’t insulted by the man’s skepticism. She’d run into his kind often enough.
“I know that if those cables break, the arms on every one of your towers will snap like matchsticks. Not to mention the damage it will do to both this shed and the one at the summit. Your last couple of towers will probably be compromised beyond redemption if they don’t break off completely, and whatever gondolas you have out there,” she added for good measure, “will be destroyed as well.”
Ian’s eyes widened in alarm as he looked up the mountain to where the towers disappeared into the rain.
He looked back at her, his expression darkened with suspicion.
“You’re a woman,” he said, only to scowl suddenly at his own words.
“Thank you for noticing,” she drawled. “Are those the schematics for the lift?” she asked, nodding at the roll of papers in his hands.
Ian looked at Grey, silently asking for help out of the hole he’d dug for himself.
With a chuckle, Grey walked over and took the papers from him. “You’re right, Ian,” he said. “She is a woman. And she’s a damn sight smarter than you. Try to remember that in the future, okay?”
Ian was now flushed to the roots of his graying red hair. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, then nodded slightly. “Sorry,” he murmured. “That was uncalled for.”
Grace waved his apology away. “It’s okay. I get it all the time.”
“Ya do? From who?” Ian wanted to know, appearing ready to run out and defend her.
“From most males,” she told him truthfully, walking over to Grey and taking the drawings out of his hands. “But that’s the fun part. I always get the last laugh.”
Ian nodded. “Good,” he said. “Now, lass. Do you think you can read those damnable papers? I’ve been trying, but I can’t make heads or tails of what they mean.”
Grace took the papers—which looked as if they’d been rolled up and squeezed quite a bit lately—over to a bench under a light and laid them out to read.
“The specs on the ski lift,” she told Ian and Grey, moving aside so Morgan could also look, “give the stress loads for every square inch of the ski lift.”
“Where do they say that?” Ian asked, pushing against her to see better. “And what in hell are all those numbers written all over the damn thing?”
“They’re weight loads,” Grace told him. “Like here. This says this particular beam will withstand the pressure of one thousand pounds of weight sitting on it.”
“A thousand pounds?” Ian asked. “Hell, my horse weighs more than that. You’re saying this piece of steel wouldn’t even hold up my horse?”
“Not by itself, it wouldn’t,” she explained to him, smiling at his analogy. “But place it in a carefully planned structure, and you can multiply that weight several times. Like here,” she said, pointing to a drawing of one of the towers. “This is designed to bear the weight of a cable full of gondolas even if the tower above or below it fails or the arm snaps off one of them. The towers are not your worry; they won
’t break because of their design. The cable is what can cause the most damage.”
Ian looked up from the papers and squinted at her. “How do you know all this?” he asked.
“It’s what I do for a living. I work out mathematical equations that prove or disprove whether something like this ski lift system will work. It’s basic physics.”
“Are ya saying that you can read this and tell us how much weight the cable can bear? If we could find out how much the ice weighed, we could tell if it will break.”
He’d finished the last part of his question with a theory of his own. Grace smiled to let him know she liked his logic.
“That’s right. But I already know how much ice weighs.”
“Ya do? Why would ya know something like that?” he asked.
“When you shoot a rocket into space, Ian, ice sometimes builds up on it as it moves through the atmosphere. Any third-year physics major learns how to calculate lift loss for ice weight and what it will take to shatter it off.”
Ian lifted a brow and looked at Grey. “She’s pulling my leg, ain’t she?” he asked him. “This woman you hauled off the mountain has a daft sense of humor. Nobody can hold that much knowledge in their brain.”
Grey simply shook his head as he stared down at her, his evergreen eyes gleaming in the dim light of the shed. He was quite a handsome fellow when he wasn’t scowling at her, Grace thought.
“She has no sense of humor,” he told Ian, still staring at her. “She thinks flying is a good thing.”
“How long would it have taken you to drive from Bangor to TarStone the other day?” she asked him, matching his mischievous look with one of her own. “Ninety minutes? Two hours?”
“Two.”
“But you made it here in less than forty minutes because of the plane.”
That changed his expression. The man’s eyes suddenly narrowed to slits. “We landed ten miles short and one thousand feet high of our mark, woman. And it ended up taking me half the day and the whole night to get home.”
Grace reached up to tap his chest and gave him a huge grin. “Details, MacKeage. Minor details. It usually goes much more smoothly.”
He appeared to be one second short of throttling her, but Grace wasn’t worried. No sense of humor, indeed. She looked back at the papers.
“How thick’s the ice now, do you think?” she asked Ian.
He held up his plump and calloused little finger. “This thick,” he said. “And it’s growing all the time.”
“Your finger?”
“Nay, lass,” he said with a pained groan. “The ice!”
“We were just deciding to start up the ski lift,” Morgan interjected.
Grace turned to the younger man, who had been quiet up until now. “Don’t,” she said. She turned to Grey. “It might put too much stress on the system.”
“But we’re thinking to break up the ice so it will fall off,” Ian added. “To take off the weight.”
“It’s too late. You would have had to do that two days ago,” she told him.
“Too late? You mean we’re going to have to just stand here and watch it collapse?” Morgan asked.
Grace shook her head. “Maybe not. There’s always a great safety margin factored into these structures.
It may hold until the rain stops.”
“If it stops,” Ian muttered, turning away from the bench and staring out at the lift. He looked back at her over his shoulder, his brows knitted into a frown. “Is there nothing we can do?”