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“Yes’m, that is, we’re looking for a friend of ours. He ain’t been seen since them twisters went through here, and we thought he might’ve run into some trouble.”
If she’d had antennae, they would definitely have been twitching. Not that she had anything in particular against tattoos—it was purely a matter of personal preference—but this man was covered with them. “A friend, you say?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am, he’s a real good friend. We been on his tail since—” His silent companion elbowed him, and he stepped back and cleared his throat. “That is, we sure would like to find him, ma’am. You seen any strangers passing through here since the twister cut through?”
Later, Ellen would wonder what on earth had possessed her to lie. It wasn’t her nature at all, but something about this pair set off alarms. She put it down to a cross between a woman’s intuition and a mother’s protective instincts. “Only the men from the power company. They were checking all along here. One of them came by earlier today to be sure my power was back on.”
“Power company, huh? You sure you haven’t seen nobody else?”
“Perhaps if you described your friend?”
“’Bout six feet tall, maybe a few inches taller, wouldn’t you say?” He looked at his companion, who nodded vigorously. “Dark hair, dark eyes—I guess if I was a lady, I might call him good-looking.” His mouth stretched into a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. They remained flat and expressionless.
“What’s your friend’s name?”
The two men looked at each other. It was the tattooed man who spoke. “Harrison. J. S. Harrison. Ma’am.”
Ellen tucked the name away to consider later. “And your names?”
A furtive look passed between the two men. “I’m Bill Smith and this here is, uh, Bill Jones.”
Right, Ellen thought. And I’m the president’s mother-in-law. She wouldn’t trust either one of these men to take out her garbage. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you, but if I see anyone fitting that description, I’ll be sure to tell him you’re looking for him.”
The devil she would. The moment she closed the door and shot the bolt, she moved to the window to make sure they left. For several minutes they stood outside their car, heads close together as if they were talking. What if she’d been wrong and they really were friends of her stranger?
J. S. Harrison. That at least sounded plausible. What kind of man was she harboring under her roof? If he was a friend of Smith and Jones, she didn’t want him anywhere on her property.
Finally they got into the car, made a three-point turn and headed back down the lane. At the rate they were driving, if their muffler survived the potholes, she’d be very much surprised. She told herself she was being paranoid, but then, just down the hall, a stranger was sleeping in Jake’s bed. A man she didn’t know from Adam.
A man who didn’t know himself from Adam. Maybe she should have let them in to meet him—at least they might have told him who he was and where he belonged.
And maybe not, she thought, stroking away the goose bumps that suddenly pricked her upper arms.
On impulse, she slipped quietly into the downstairs bedroom and gazed at the sleeping stranger. Who are you? she wondered. Have I just made a serious blunder? Were those two men really your friends?
She didn’t think so. His name might actually be Harrison. Then again, there was no J. in his monogram.
Ellen would be the first to admit that she could be wrong about this whole business. The description they’d given her could fit half the men in Lone Star County. Six feet tall, lean but powerful build, dark hair and eyes. They hadn’t mentioned the shape of his mouth or the way his eyebrows lifted at the inner ends when he was puzzled, but then, men probably wouldn’t even notice such things.
Still, she might have solved all his problems if she’d let them come in and look. Some of his problems, anyway. It certainly wouldn’t have hurt…would it?
That was the trouble, she just didn’t know. She did know this man had been injured saving her son’s life. She owed him more than she could ever repay, and if that meant lying on his behalf, then she would lie until her tongue blistered.
She’d have to tell him about the men, of course, as soon as his knot went down and his headache eased. It would help if she could come up with some logical reason for her reaction. A woman’s intuition? She could just hear him jeering at that. Men always did.
“You sent them away? Because you didn’t like their looks? Are you crazy, or what?”
Okay, so she was crazy. She’d done what she thought best at the time. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever acted on impulse. If that made her guilty of some crime, so be it. At the moment her guest was her responsibility. In his vulnerable state he was in no condition to defend himself against a couple of weirdos who came knocking on her door in the middle of the night.
“So sue me,” she muttered, collecting the supper tray on her way out.
The man called Storm struggled to absorb and process information, but it was slow going. One thing he knew—his head still hurt like hell. And he knew he wasn’t about to take any painkillers, not without knowing more about himself than he did. He’d heard of people taking a simple over-the-counter remedy and going into shock.
He’d heard of it? Where? Who?
“Think, man, think!”
The trouble was, whenever he tried to reach out mentally and latch on to something solid—some glimmer of information hiding just beneath the surface of his mind—it slipped away. He didn’t have time to waste sleeping. He needed to stay awake long enough to put two and two together and come up with some answers, but he kept dozing off.
It was still pitch-black outside. He seemed to recall being awakened several times. Gingerly feeling the knot on the side of his head, he winced.
Head wound. Concussion. Check the pupils.
He knew that much, at least. Maybe he was a medic, a doctor.
The woman—Ellen Wagner—had been frantic over her son. “I knew he was on his way home from Joey’s,” she’d said. “But when I saw that sky…”
She’d taken several deep breaths then, unable to go on. Oddly enough, he understood how she’d felt. There was a hell of a lot he didn’t understand yet, but that much, he did. She was a mother. Her kid had been threatened; she’d reacted. She was still reacting.
So what did that mean—that he had a mother or that he had a son?
The boy was sound asleep, she’d told him the last time she’d roused him to be sure he was still alive. Or maybe the time before that—he’d lost all sense of time. She should have gone to bed hours ago, but she’d stayed up to wake him periodically in case he started showing signs of a concussion. Sometime during the night she’d taken the trouble to heat a can of chicken noodle soup, telling him that her son used to call it chicken oogle soup. The small confidence hadn’t triggered any buried memories, but the soup had helped stave off the shakes.
He knew now that he was in a downstairs bedroom she’d furnished for her husband after he’d grown too weak to climb the stairs. She’d told him that when he asked. He might not know who he was, but at least he knew where he was. In a pine-paneled room on a small ranch about five miles from the town of Mission Creek, in Lone Star County, in the State of Texas.
That part felt right, anyway. The Texas part. It didn’t really ring any bells—he could have been from the planet Pluto for all he knew—but somehow, Texas felt right.
It was just beginning to get light outside when she came to bring him her late husband’s shaving kit. “I thought shaving might make you feel better. I’m not sure about letting you stand long enough to take a shower, though. If you got dizzy and fell…”
“Maybe you could roll me outside and hose me down.”
She was obviously running on fumes. He wondered how much sleep she’d gotten during the night. Judging from the early hour, it couldn’t have been much.
She took the time to give him a general description of the area. “It’s mostly small farms and cattle ranches. We have year round grazing here, so cattle are a big thing, but crops are big, too. At this point our farm hardly qualifies as a working ranch—we’re just hanging on to status quo, you might say, but— Oh, I don’t know why I even said that, you couldn’t possibly be interested. Anyway, we love it here. It’s a great place to raise a son.”
If she was hoping something she said would trigger his memory, she was disappointed. They both were. She had a nice voice, though. A bit raspy, as if she might have screamed herself hoarse searching for the boy. She’d be the type, he was somehow sure of it, to run outside in the teeth of a tornado to rescue her child.
Lucky kid.
During the wakeful periods of the night they’d exchanged a few words—just enough to let her know he hadn’t gone off the deep end. From a few things she’d said, he’d gained the impression that she and the boy might be having a pretty rough time keeping their heads above water. Not that she’d complained. He’d had to ask a few leading questions. Somewhat surprisingly, he’d discovered that he was good at it, even when he wasn’t particularly interested in the answers.
Although, oddly enough, he was. The woman was nothing to him. He’d brushed off her gratitude, saying that whatever he’d done for her son, she had more than returned the favor by hauling his ass out of that ditch. Not that he’d phrased it that way. Which told him something else about himself. It wasn’t enough, but it was a beginning.
Some five miles away, a terse conversation was taking place between two men. The air was redolent with the smoke of a Cuban cigar. “I’m telling you, Frank, he’s dead. He’s gotta be dead, else them two guys I sent scouting around woulda found him. They found what was left of his car over by that Quik-Fill place out on 59. I had ’em haul it to the chopshop.”
“You’re sure it was Harrison’s?”
“I had a guy run the plates. ’Sides, his coat was still inside caught up in some branches where a tree limb busted through the windshield. Big mama! Rammed clean through the front and out the back. Man, nobody coulda lived through that! Hood’s gone, one o’ the doors ripped off. Nothing left but scrap metal.”
Lying on a polished table between the two men was a sodden wallet, a driver’s license, several credit cards, a Triple-A membership card and ninety-eight dollars in cash. No one had reported the missing credit cards.
“Where the hell is he?” the older man muttered, stabbing his cigar at the driver’s license issued to one J. Spencer Harrison, six feet, one inch tall, one hundred eighty-seven pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, born November 4, 1967.
“Man, I’m telling you, nobody could’ve survived that hit. Ask me, he’s buzzard bait by now.”
Frank Del Brio paced in a tight circle, occasionally thumping ashes onto the plush carpet. After several minutes of silence he turned and jabbed his stub of a cigar toward the other man. “You ask around?”
“You know me, Frank. I say I’ll check something out, I check it out.”
“Who’d you send?”
“Sal and Peaches.”
“Jesus Christ, man, those two couldn’t find their ass with a road map!”
“You wanted it kept quiet, didn’t you? Sal don’t talk and Peaches owes me.”
More pacing. More scattered ashes. Finally, as if he’d come to a conclusion, Del Brio turned to face his companion. “I’m gonna have to trust you on this one. Joe Ed’s already positioned to take his place, but I swear to you, if Harrison turns up once a new D. A. is appointed, there’s no place south of the North Pole I can’t find you. You might want to notify your next of kin, just in case.”
Ellen roused Pete and got him ready for school. They probably wouldn’t get much work done today, as everyone would be full of talk about the tornado. She tried not to think about the two men who had showed up only hours earlier. If they’d been telling the truth about a dear friend who’d been missing since yesterday, wouldn’t they have seemed more upset? More concerned? Not that they hadn’t tried, but they hadn’t been convincing. Something about the whole scene had struck her as off-key, and she was a firm believer in instinct. Jake used to tease her about relying on what he called her witch’s antenna, but even he had eventually learned to listen to her.
Only by then, it had been too late.
When she’d looked out and seen those two men at her front door, every ounce of intuition she possessed had warned her against revealing the presence of her stranger. Once his memory returned she would tell him and let him make the decision. They were certainly easy enough to describe. If “Smith” and “Jones” were such good friends of his, he would know how to reach them. It would be his decision to make, not hers.
By the time she came in to collect his tray after getting Pete off to school and letting the horses into the paddock, he’d fallen asleep again. For several moments she stood silently at the foot of the bed and gazed down at him. How many hours had she sat beside that same bed, in this same room, watching Jake sleep, telling herself that at least when he was sleeping, he wasn’t in actual pain. Praying that that was true….
Evidently Storm had used the shaving things. Awake, he’d looked older. Even wary. Asleep, he looked oddly vulnerable. His features were too irregular to be called handsome, yet he was strikingly attractive, even with a purple lump on the side of his head. “Whoever you are,” she murmured, “you’re safe here.” It was the best she could do in return for his saving Pete’s life.
The next time he awoke he would probably remember who he was and call someone to come for him if they couldn’t locate his car. If he had any sense at all, he’d have them drive him directly to the hospital in Mission Creek for X rays.
Once he was gone things would go back to the way they’d been before, with her and Pete and two no-account hired hands trying to do the work she and Jake and Mr. Caster had done before her world had fallen apart.
Ellen’s shoulders drooped. She was tired before the day even started. Booker and Clyde, the two transients she’d recently hired, were no more than adequate even when they were sober. They didn’t know nearly as much about horses as they’d claimed when they’d showed up looking for work, but at least they were willing to work for what she could afford to pay and weren’t too proud to take orders from a woman. Desperate to hang on to what they had without having to turn to her father again—something she had sworn she would never do—she had hired them on the spot.
After washing off a scratch, she dabbed on antiseptic, winced at the sharp sting and sighed. Sometimes she wished she could just take a single day off and do something frivolous, such as curl up with a good book and read and sleep all day long, or take Pete to a circus, or even a movie in town.
Christmas was only a few weeks away, and she hadn’t even thought of what she was going to get him. A bike, of course, but some little surprise would be nice.
With no heritage of his own, Jake had been determined to build one for their son. Now Jake was gone, but with any luck, she’d be able to raise their son right here, the way they had planned. Pete would grow up on Wagner property. Eventually he would marry and have children of his own, and one day, if they were lucky, her grandchildren would grow up here along with the descendants of the quarter horses she and Jake had bought with such high hopes for the future.
She’d made meat loaf and mashed potatoes for supper last night and served leftovers for lunch. Her mystery man had eaten little either time, and talked even less. Fine. He needed rest more than anything else, and she was too tired to make conversation.
Funny, the way a dream could change, she mused as she washed the supper dishes. One dream simply merged into another, and then another as time went on, evolving, but never quite losing the essential core.
The only dream she had room for now was to guide her son safely through the next few years to try to make up for his lack of a father. It wouldn’t be long until she’d be dealing with an adolescent instead of a sweet child who was almost too eager to please—almost as if he were afraid she would go away, too, the way his father had.
She had done everything she could think of to reassure him—they had talked to a counselor at the school. But Ellen knew that she alone was responsible for raising her son to be a decent, responsible adult. She didn’t know how much of a role model she could be, but she fully intended to give it her best shot. They would make it. One way or another, she would see to it.
“And as for you, my mysterious stranger,” she whispered, “I’ll take care of you, too, for as long as you need me. I owe you.”
He was still sleeping when she glanced in again before heading upstairs to her own bed. This time she didn’t try to rouse him. It had been more than twenty-four hours now and there’d been no indication of a concussion. And he really did need his sleep. The sooner he healed and remembered, the sooner he’d be off her hands and the sooner she could get back to building Pete a legacy from a few horses and a few hundred acres.
After pulling the light quilt up over his shoulders, she felt his forehead with the back of her hand, then tiptoed from the room, leaving the door ajar in case he needed anything. It was almost like having two sons to care for.
Oh, no, it wasn’t. She didn’t know what she felt toward the man called Storm, other than gratitude, but whatever it was, it wasn’t even faintly maternal. No way!
He would probably insist on getting out of bed tomorrow. Men could be stubborn about such things, taking any kind of sickness or injury as a threat to their manhood. Jake had been the same way. He wouldn’t admit to having allergies even when he was sneezing his head off, his nose running and his eyes all watery. As if hay fever somehow negated his masculinity.
Oh, Jake, she thought, sighing. She had long since run out of tears, but she still wept inside her heart. After more than two years she still caught herself glancing around, expecting to see him kicking the mud off his boots on the back porch, or hanging over the paddock fence, gloating over his precious horses. Two yearling mares, two geldings and a stallion. Hardly the mix he’d been planning on, but he’d bought the lot of them at a bargain price from a man who’d unexpectedly been forced to relocate.
They had mapped it all out on paper—the buying, the breeding strategy, but they’d hardly got started when Jake had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent and fast-growing form of cancer. He had died just thirteen months after they had bought the ranch and moved to Lone Star County.
And dear God, a part of her had died with him. If it hadn’t been for Pete, she didn’t know what she would have done. Going back home had never been an option. She didn’t know what her own father would have thought of his grandson if they ever met, but that wasn’t going to happen. Never again would she beg. Leonard Summerlin had disowned her when she’d married against his will and turned his back when she had needed his help so desperately.
Not for the first time, the irony of the situation struck her. Unless he fathered a son of his own, Pete was her father’s sole male descendent. For a man who liked to think of himself as a dynasty builder, Leonard Summerlin was his own worst enemy.
He had told her countless times that she was just like her mother, then gone on to recount her mother’s shortcomings. Celinda Summerlin was vain—but then, Celinda Summerlin had been beautiful. Ellen had never had anything to be vain about. According to her father, Celinda hadn’t a clue when it came to managing money, but even as a child Ellen had understood that her mother had never had enough money to manage before marrying Leonard Summerlin.
When it came to managing, Ellen had been no better, no worse than most of her friends at staying within her allowance. In later years she had discovered somewhat surprisingly that the less there was to manage, the better a manager she became. The bank in Mission Creek that held the mortgage on the ranch had advised her to lease out most of her acreage, keeping back only enough for pasturage and to grow feed for the horses. That way, the banker had explained, she could be certain of meeting the mortgage payments with a bit left over without the risk of losing an entire crop to flood, drought or a sudden freeze. The weather everywhere, he’d reminded her, had been increasingly erratic over the past few years.
It had seemed sensible to her. She had kept the stock although she hadn’t known the first thing about horses, much less about breeding them. But the horses had been Jake’s dream, and she was determined to hang on to as much of that dream as she could for their son. She might have come from a privileged background, but from someone—her mother, most likely—she had inherited a backbone. Dust-bowl-survivor genes, Jake had called it, teasing her about the way her jaw squared off when she got what he’d called her I-shall-not-be-moved look on her face.
Whatever it was, grit or survivor genes, it had enabled her to get through another day and then another one when she couldn’t see her way through the coming night, much less the years ahead.
“No way,” the man called Storm said adamantly. “Look, I’ll get out of your hair if my being here is a problem, but I’m not going to any damned hospital for a simple sprain and a headache.”
“Oh, hush up and let me think,” Ellen grumbled. They’d been arguing about how long it had been. She’d said this made three days. The man had said he could only remember one, and not too much of that.
Pete grinned. He’d come in to bring the morning paper just as his mother was fussing at him again. Boy, it sure was cool to hear her fussing at a grown man the same way she did him when he wouldn’t finish his macaroni and cheese or forgot to put his dirty clothes in the hamper.
“All right,” his mama said finally, laying down the law. He knew that tone. Man, did he ever! “You can get out of bed and come in the living room. I know you’re dying to watch the storm coverage on TV, but you’re going to keep that foot up and if I hear one more peep out of you about leaving, I’m going to—”
Pete watched, grinning broadly.
The man watched. He was scowling.
“—to call the paramedics to come haul you off and you can argue with them for a change. I just don’t see what’s so awful about having a doctor look you over. For all you know, you might have some broken bones. There are hundreds of bones in your feet, and your foot’s not all that far from your ankle.”
Storm looked at Pete and lifted a brow. “She go on like this a lot?”
Solemnly the boy nodded. “Yessir, that she does, but she means well. That’s what my daddy always said.”
Ellen’s hands flew up in a gesture of surrender. “All right, be one, then!”
“That’s what she always says,” Pete confided. “Daddy used to tell her B1 was a bomber, and she’d just walk off the way she’s doing now, all huffy and puffy. She’s not really mad, though.”
Storm didn’t think she was, either. Somewhere among the jumbled miscellaneous impressions he’d dredged up was the knowledge that women acted that way when they cared about someone who refused to bow to their superior wisdom.
