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What had she done? Jumped from the frying pan into the fire? He could be a serial killer. A rapist, a...
Calm yourself, she ordered silently. Surely fate would not put her squarely in the path of danger twice in one day.
Look at the car seat. And the teddy bear. This was somebody’s daddy going home after a hard day’s work to his wife and his baby. A serial killer wouldn’t smell quite so...heavealy.
The car purred to life.
With sudden relief, she realized she’d been given a better escape than she could have dreamed up herself. Daddy longlegs there in the front seat would drive her safely out to suburbia When he got out of the car and was safely in his house with his nice little wife and baby, she could make her exit. Find a phone booth, call a cab and be back at her hotel in no time. A call to the police and then, with a little luck on her side, she could probably make the red-eye flight back to San Diego tonight.
Luck. Wasn’t that what the ring was supposed to bring her?
The car pulled smoothly out into traffic.
A plump little man, she told herself firmly, in a slightly rumpled suit. Glasses, a few hairs combed over a bald spot
He turned on some music. A mournful voice sang about a renegade horse and a bad woman. He hummed absently along.
His voice reassured her, though it wasn’t a plump voice. It was definitely a daddy’s voice. Nice and deep and calm.
She noted the racing of her heart stilling somewhat. She pulled the blanket quietly back from her nose so it wouldn’t tickle. She tried to figure out where they were, but it was absolutely impossible, even if she had been familiar with the city, which she was not.
The minutes ticked by. She looked at her watch, reminding herself every minute would seem like an hour. But after an hour, she began to get a little nervous.
Large cities had traffic snarls, but where did he live? She couldn’t very well change her plan now. What was she going to do? Leap up from the back seat and say “Boo”? “Surprise”? She’d probably kill them both.
Half an hour more, she thought. That was it. Then she’d have to put plan B into action, if she had one by then.
She was exhausted even though the.tension continued to knot her shoulders as the car purred along, stopping and starting at lights, moving smoothly in and out of traffic.
It was bloody uncomfortable being crammed into that narrow space on the rear floorboard.
Her mother had always taught her to look for something to be thankful for, even in the bleakest moments. She felt quite bleak right now, being carried away to parts unknown, life suddenly wrested right out of her control.
Danger had been evaded. She shivered just thinking of those men, thinking of the little proprietor quaking in their grasp. She had escaped.
That was something to be grateful for.
That and the fact she didn’t have to sneeze. Or go to the bathroom.
She could have been trying to lie on the floor of a shrimpy little import car instead of this large and rather luxurious one.
Oh, her mother had taught her well. She felt a wonderful lassitude creeping through tense muscles. Daddy driver’s scent and his deep voice humming wrapped around her.
Please, God, she prayed silently, don’t let me go to sleep. Let us get to wherever we are going fast.
She absolutely could not go to sleep. Absolutely not... The last thing she remembered hearing was the radio announcer saying, “And now, Garth Brooks with ‘Unanswered prayers.”’
Garret Boyd resisted the impulse to honk at the little red sedan that cut him off.
It was the car seat in the back of the little car that made him curb the impulse to vent his temper with his horn.
He knew all about how small children could rattle a person. The harried mother driving that miniature car too fast was probably rushing to get to the day care.
Just like him, really. Except that his day care was ninety minutes away once he cleared the city, and it wasn’t officially a day care. Officially, it was taking advantage of the neighbor’s good nature.
Which he could only hope was going to hold, since his mission here had failed. Miserably.
He’d come to interview Mrs. Ching about the nanny position. Despite the language barrier when he’d spoken to her on the phone yesterday, he’d liked her. She’d sounded sweet and gentle and old.
She had been sweet and gentle and old. Her apartment, over some stores in busy Chinatown, had been impeccably clean.
Things had started to unravel when she introduced her granddaughter. Lily had been wearing a leather jacket and a leather miniskirt. She had a safety pin through her nose and a chain wrapped around her wrist.
Thankfully, she had looked every bit as horrified as he had when her grandmother nodded at her approvingly and announced she was the candidate for nanny.
The ensuing argument had taken place in Chinese, but he’d had a pretty good idea of what it was about. He’d slipped out the door at about the point the girl had said, in a sudden change to English, where her grandmother could put Eliza.
The town he came from. So small it probably would have fit.
Eliza. A little mountain village exactly in the middle of nowhere. On the edge of Garibaldi Provincial Wilderness Park, Eliza was reached by traveling over one hundred miles on the twisting, dipping, cliff-hugging, Sea-to-Sky highway from Vancouver. It was not quite close enough to the world-class and much acclaimed Whistler/Blackcomb resort area to be appealing.
Today, the first day of February, Vancouver was already in the throes of spring. Flowers blossomed and the grass was green. Eliza was still wrapped in its blanket of icy white. Snow would fly for at least another month. It was the perfect location to run a search-and-rescue school and to write articles for various professional journals on the finer points of mountain search and rescue.
But no one wanted to live there.
Garth Brooks came on the radio and started singing about unanswered prayers.
“Oh, tell me about it,” Garret breathed. He’d been looking for a nanny, frantically, for three months.
He’d been doing single-parenting duty for six.
Only six months since the call in the night that had changed his life forever.
His twin brother and his sister-in-law dead after their small plane had gone down in a heavy fog off the coast of Vancouver Island. His beautiful niece, Angelica, just turned five, suddenly as alone in the world as he was. And for a reason he would now never know, his brother and sister-in-law had appointed him her guardian.
Him. Garret Boyd. World-renowned expert in mountain search and rescue.
Garret Boyd, leader of more than a thousand successful rescues.
Garret Boyd. Hopelessly unqualified for kid duty.
Calm and unflappable in every crisis except this one.
Somehow they were getting through it, he and that tiny little being who looked so much like he did.
Somehow that sweet little girl, with her flash-fire moods, her chattering, her calls for her mommy in the night, was helping his heart mend in ways he had not thought possible.
When she first came into his life, he’d thought being her guardian meant do what was right for her. And to him that meant finding a wonderful child-adoring couple to raise her and love her.
But after a week, he came to the stunning realization that he could search the world over and never find another soul who could love her as deeply as he did.
And so he learned. About tears. And teddy bears. And skin so sensitive he had to buy special laundry soap. About Woody and Buzz, Chance and Sassy. About macaroni and cheese being considered edible by people under four feet high.
This month she wanted a French braid.
He sighed. He didn’t think he was ever going to get the braid right or ever quit trying to get it, either. Angelica had ended up with some pretty exotic hairdos while he tried to get his hands, which could tie a dozen kinds of knots with ease, to make her hair look like the hair in the picture.
The picture of her mom.
Juggling this plunge into fatherhood with a busy career was more of a challenge than getting a skier off a rock precipice with a helicopter in the middle of a blizzard. He had a four-day intensive rescue course coming in less than twenty-four hours.
When Angelica first arrived, she had come on a rescue with him, simply because every time he tried to part from her, she’d become hysterical Given that her loss was so recent and the situation so urgently required action, he’d broken the rules. She’d loved it—being the center of attention at rescue headquarters, trudging courageously up the Diamond Head behind him, taking turns being carried by various members of the search party. Luckily, it had been August and a straightforward search, if there was such a thing.
She’d loved it, but he had felt the intensity of his concentration diluted by her presence. Part of him was always looking after her when he needed to be one hundred percent focused on what he was doing.
But it had been Angelica who called to him to stop, said she had heard something on the lonely wind.
He’d heard nothing. No one had heard anything.
But she had scrambled down from his arms and begun to run.
He’d been so annoyed. Until she ran directly to a cave where a weary hiker lay very close to death. A hiker in no condition to make any kind of sound.
When he asked her how she’d found the hiker, she had just shrugged. “I don’t know. I heard something.”
By some twist of fate or luck, she had been an asset on the rescue. But he didn’t think he could count on that kind of luck to hold for the four intense and exhausting days of the school. She wasn’t exactly the kind of kid who would sit contentedly at the back of the class with a coloring book.
She called him Unkie, a particularly unflattering name that he loved when it came off her lips. A little less by the time he’d heard it for the hundredth time in one day. A lot less if he was trying to teach a class.
Candy would help him.
His good-natured next-door neighbor. Unfortunately, she had always looked at him with something a little more than just neighborly interest, and she was now shamelessly using his need for a sitter to try to get involved in his personal life.
Which she could not seem to believe was nonexistent. And that he liked it that way.
He could do worse. Candy was, as the name might imply, cute as a button and a little on the plump side. She was the single mom of two active preschoolers. If her conversation was limited to the daily soap operas she was able to bring in on the huge satellite dish that dominated her front yard, well, so what?
She actually liked the town of Eliza and had no wish to live anywhere else. She was able to do the ribbonsand-curls thing for Angelica. French braids were nothing to her. She could do amazing things with canned tuna and cornflakes.
He was thirty. Totally engrossed in his work. Marriage had never crossed his mind.
He was of these mountains. He understood them as much as any man ever would in all their lonely and harsh glory. The mysteries that remained called to him. They were magnificent mistresses and he had never needed another.
But Angelica needed something more.
A mommy.
A picture of coming home every day to Candy entered his mind. Everything in him rebelled against it. He couldn’t do it. Not even for love of Angelica.
“A nanny,” he said out loud, firmly, and sent a pleading look heavenward. “One small helper.” He snapped off the radio before Garth got to the part about the blessings hidden in unanswered prayers.
He had turned off the main highway and was only about ten minutes from Eliza when he heard the sound in the back seat. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. A breath. A whisper of clothing.
He was a man who relied on instinct far more than average men, and his hackles rose now on the back of his neck.
There was someone back there.
He knew it with such sudden force and certainty he wondered how he had not known it the whole time. But he did not let on that he knew, keeping his speed steady, his eyes checking the locks.
Both back passenger doors were unlocked.
He cursed his stupidity. In Eliza, a locked car door was unheard of. In Vancouver, he’d made a concession to the big city by locking the one he’d gotten out of. The rest of them had slipped his mind.
And now he had an unwanted passenger.
What he wasn’t going to do was drive a psychopath, possibly armed, right up in front of Candy’s house in Eliza, where it might endanger Angelica and Candy’s own children.
He made a split-second decision.
Smoothly, he pulled off the road onto the shoulder. He stopped the vehicle but didn’t turn off the engine.
He eased his pocketknife out of his blue jeans pocket. Then with lightning swiftness, he hurled himself over the back seat, whipped the blanket off the person huddled under it on the floorboard.
Shock rippled through him.
The woman looking at him with huge green eyes and red hair that spiraled wildly in every direction was absolutely beautiful.
Of course, it was very dark in the back of the car. Maybe he was mistaken. He reached up and turned on the dome light.
She blinked, if anything, more beautiful in the brighter light than she had been before.
He sighed uneasily and slipped the knife into his pocket.
The animal terror went out of her eyes.
“I don’t suppose you’re a nanny, are you?” he asked dryly. No, he’d asked for a small helper. The way she was crammed into that space, small she was not. In fact, she seemed to be kind of stuck, so he took her wrist and helped her, none too gently, onto the seat beside him.
She had on a very tight gray skirt and it rode up a long slender leg as she settled herself beside him. She saw the direction of his gaze and yanked it down.
“A nanny?” she asked weakly. “Like Mary Poppins?”
“Hmmm,” he said.
“Que sera, sera?” she said hopefully.
“That’s Doris Day.”
“Damn,” she said.
