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?”

Grace thought about that. There was, but it was only a theory in her mind. One that could backfire on them with disastrous results. Either the ice would melt off the cable like a spring thaw, or TarStone’s ski lift would shatter like glass and probably take them with it.

“Good God,” Ian exclaimed. “I swear I can see her brain working,” he said, walking back to her and looking quizzically into her eyes. He waved a hand in front of her face. “What’s going on in there, lass?”

he asked. “Have ya an idea?”

Grace turned her gaze to each of the three men, one at a time. She might have an idea. But she also might just have a very powerful bargaining chip that could save the Bigelow Christmas Tree Farm as well.

“That depends,” she started carefully, still undecided about how she wanted to approach this subject.

“On what?” Morgan asked, walking up beside Ian so he could stare into her face as well.

She needed to buy herself some time. She couldn’t very well bargain for them to give her their snow-making equipment and not be able to deliver on her promise to save their lift. And truth be told, she preferred to present her offer to Grey, not all three of them, to better her odds of succeeding. It was much easier to sway just one person than it was to convince a united front that helping Michael MacBain would be the decent, neighborly thing for them to do. These men all seemed to respect Grey’s opinion, and that made him the person she needed to talk to.

And she needed to talk to him alone.

Ian was waving his hand in front of her face again. “Has your brain cramped, lass?” he asked. “Have ya overworked it?”

Grace blinked, then shot him a smile. “No. But before I get your hopes up, I need to see the top part of the lift.” She looked at Grey. “Will you take me up there in the snowcat?”

Grey, who had remained unusually silent except to tell her she had no sense of humor, suddenly lifted the corner of his mouth in a wry grin. “You’re actually wanting to go back up that mountain? Didn’t you get enough of it the other day?” he asked, repeating her earlier question to him.

“Where’s your phone?” she demanded, not taking her eyes off his as she held out her hand. “I’m going to call and ask Ellen if she can watch Baby for a few more hours.”

“It’s over on the wall,” Morgan said.

Already lost in the depths of Grey’s unfathomable green eyes, it took Grace a moment to realize that someone had spoken. She forced herself to break eye contact with Grey and look where Morgan was pointing.

There was the phone, right by the door. She made her legs move next, willing them to carry her over to it. It was a nearly impossible task, what with her knees being so weak and her heart pounding so erratically. It really wasn’t fair that Grey was so handsome. Or that not seeing him for twenty-four hours could affect her this way.

Silence, and the feel of evergreen eyes piercing her back, followed Grace across the room as she walked over to the phone.

She didn’t make it to the wall before Grey spoke.

“Morgan, go to the house and have Callum make a thermos of hot chocolate,” she heard him instruct.

“Ian, warm up the snowcat.”

“I’m going with you,” Ian said, heading for the door.

“No,” Grey said, his voice sounding as if he was still looking at her, not at the man he was speaking to.