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If only to assure himself she was real—and not a dream his tired mind had conjured up.
Her shoulders were slight, her spine straight as a new sapling, and he had the feeling she could move over the terrain as easily as the white-tailed deer he’d glimpsed from the road as he’d passed through this high-desert land.
“So, are you off to gather more plants?” he asked, wondering if she took a siesta to escape the afternoon heat—or if she were somehow immune to it.
She checked the level of the sun, judging her time from it the way others would consult a watch. “Yes—for a little while yet.”
She turned to leave. Again Luke wanted to keep her with him, but he had no reason to, at least no logical reason. He was merely passing through and their paths had crossed.
He watched her go, tripping off down the trail in her soft moccasins. He wondered what—or who—might be waiting for her at home.
A husband?
A child?
But that, he knew, was none of his business.
At least for a little while she’d made him forget his pain. And that was something no one had been able to do for him these past dark, empty months.
A few hours later Mariah’s basket was full to overflowing. Indian fig, wild licorice, comfrey root. Mariah was pleased to have found them all. It had been a good day. She now had enough herbs to last for a while.
She turned and started back toward the ancient truck she’d parked down by the stream that flowed briskly in the spring, fed by the snowmelt from the high mountains.
When summer came, it would dry up to dust and rock, but for now there was enough cool water to splash over her face and arms before she began her drive home.
She’d strayed farther than she’d intended today, but the hope of finding more plants had lured her on. Many of the herbs she needed were scarce in this high-desert region, but Mariah would search until she found that one lone plant. And when she couldn’t find what she needed, she’d substitute.
Una Roanhorse had taught her well. The old Hopi woman’s eyes were failing now—she could no longer gather roots and plants for herself, so Mariah shared what she had with her. In return, Una looked after Callie. It was a good arrangement. Callie loved the older woman, loved the Hopi tales Una often told her, the same tales Mariah had heard as a child growing up on the land of her people.
Mariah’s father had been a bahana, a white man. She didn’t remember him, though. He hadn’t bothered to stay around. Her mother had died many years before, and Mariah had strayed from the native ways—not feeling like a bahana, not feeling entirely Hopi, either.
She’d known very little about the plants and herbs the earth gave, or how beneficial they could be. Not until she’d needed them—for Callie.
Mariah was grateful to Una for sharing her knowledge. The herbals helped Callie as nothing else had been able to do.
Certainly not the doctors’ medicines.
Una had become a friend when Mariah moved here two years ago. Mariah’s marriage to Will Cade had ended, probably even before he’d left for California and the new life he wanted for himself.
A life without the responsibilities of a wife or child.
A sick child.
She’d been frightened then—and alone. Except for Callie. Una had made her feel welcome, even taken her under her wing until Mariah was able to recover her pride and put her life on a steady footing.
She seldom thought of the past now, her marriage, or the man who’d abandoned them with so little regard for their welfare.
The herbs that she gathered for Callie soon became a source of livelihood for her, a way to support herself and her daughter. She began by preparing and packaging the extras she collected and selling them to the local people. Last year she started her own mail-order business, reaching even more people with her natural medicines.
It wasn’t a lot of money—her only large account was a health-food store in Phoenix—but it was enough to provide a modest living for them. And even a few extras now and then.
Just then she neared the place where she’d encountered the man on the mesa, the man with the golden body and the storm-blue eyes.
Luke.
She wasn’t sure why he intrigued her, but he had. She wondered where he’d come from—and where he was headed on that big cycle of his. Not many people strayed this far from the interstate. She might have asked him, but she’d needed to get on with what she was doing. She didn’t like to be away from Callie too long.
She glanced down the road, shading her eyes, curious to see if his cycle was still parked where it had been, but it was gone. She denied the quick pang of disappointment she felt, calling herself foolish for the weakness. She was no longer a schoolgirl with silly ideas in her head, but a woman, a mother—with a child who needed her.
She shifted the basket to her other hip and continued on, but Luke Phillips wasn’t easily dispelled from her mind. Sunrise was a town that had been forgotten by time, passed over by the tourist trade, though it could well boast of some of Arizona’s most breathtaking scenery. They didn’t get very many strangers passing through—but that was no reason this man should have such a hold on her.
Perhaps it had been that indefinable look she’d glimpsed in his eyes, as if he, too, carried a pain he found difficult to bear, a pain that tore at his heart.
The way Callie did hers.
Then over the next rise Mariah stopped in her tracks. There’d been an accident. The shiny silver of a motorcycle glinted back at her, looking like a fallen warrior as it lay on its side in the center of the road.
Where was Luke?
Was he hurt?
She swiftly scanned both sides of the road, then spotted him sitting under a lone cottonwood a few yards away. “Luke,” she called out to him. “What happened? Are you all right?”
He turned at the sound of her voice and she approached warily. The right side of his face was dirty and bloody. The denim of his right pant leg was ripped and he’d stripped off his black T-shirt and tied it around his thigh to stop the bleeding that was already beginning to soak through the fabric.
Her gaze slid over his bare, muscled torso, not missing the scrape across his right shoulder and the ugly purple color already starting to darken the skin.
“Damned armadillo,” he cursed.
She met his scowl. “Armadillo?”
“Yeah.” His scowl deepened. “I swerved to miss it and the bike went spinning out of control. Know what’s the worst of the deal? It just lumbered on past me without a glance, off into the damned sagebrush.”
“And left you in a mess, it seems.”
“And the bike unridable,” he added. “Don’t happen to know a good mechanic around here, do you?”
Mariah’s gaze swept over him. “Right now I think it’s more important to get you seen to. Some of those cuts and scrapes look serious.”
Luke didn’t agree. He was a doctor—at least enough of one to know that the wounds were mostly superficial. But what he’d done for the last ten years of his life was not something he wanted to reveal to this woman. It would only bring on the inevitable questions, questions he didn’t want to answer.
“Look, I’m fine,” he said. “The only thing seriously damaged is my pride. No man wants to admit he was brought down by a miserable armadillo.”
His answer didn’t dissuade her from her concern, though it did prompt a smile, a smile that could pump a little daylight into the dark reaches of his heart—if he allowed it to.
He tried to forget the brightness in her smile, but it wasn’t as easy to ignore her touch when her fingers brushed his shoulder softly, gently, probingly.
She knelt in front of him and examined the wound in his leg, loosening the makeshift dressing to make her own assessment of the damage. Her touch was as confident as any surgeon’s—and damningly sensual. That last thought had him sucking in a breath.
She glanced up. “Sorry—does that hurt?”
There was innocence pooled in her green eyes, the kind that could make a man believe in the world again. But that would be a tall order for Luke.
“Would a macho guy like me admit it if it did?” he returned.
That brought another smile to her pretty lips, and for one dangerous moment he wanted to crush those lips with his own, feel them part for him, taste their sweetness and that all-fired innocence of hers. There was something so natural about her, nurturing, and a serenity he envied.
“Look—we’ve got to get you cleaned up,” she said as she retied the dressing on his leg. “My truck is parked nearby. Sit still, and I’ll go get it. We can load the cycle in the back.”
He glanced at her slender body and decided the woman wouldn’t be of much use in the loading department.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she said.
As if Luke had anyplace to go in this wilderness.
As if he had anyplace to go at all.
He leaned back against the tree and watched as she disappeared on down the road. He should have asked her how far she had to go to retrieve that truck of hers. A mile? Ten miles? Luke had the feeling distance didn’t mean all that much to her, that she was well-accustomed to getting where she wanted to go—and under her own power.
He frowned at his now-useless bike and ran a hand over his jaw. How the hell had he gotten himself into this mess? But that wasn’t something he wanted to think about.
It was more than one nuisance armadillo in the road.
It was why he was on this road in the first place, what had happened in the trauma unit that one tragic night—and his inability to live with himself because of it.
He wasn’t sure how long he could keep on running from his pain—or if he could ever escape it. All he knew was that it had traveled with him every mile of his journey.
An unwanted companion on his ride to nowhere.
It didn’t take Mariah long to retrieve the truck from where she’d parked it. But there was no time for that cooling splash in the stream she’d planned on—not today.
Luke needed her attention.
Already she was thinking ahead to what herbs she had on hand to treat his cuts and bruises. That was, if he held still for her simple remedies.
He probably preferred modern medicine. But it was a long drive to the nearest clinic. She hadn’t wanted to tell him that. Or that it was an even longer drive to the nearest repair shop for his motorcycle.
The old truck started on the first try, which was something of a minor miracle. Usually she had to coax it to life, promising the metal heap she wouldn’t sell it to the first passerby.
Mariah patted the dashboard and smiled, then released the gear and turned the truck around, bouncing over the sagebrush toward the road—and Luke.
Visions of the man, minus his shirt, shimmered before her eyes. She hadn’t been able to draw her gaze away from him, from the smattering of dark, golden hair that arrowed enticingly down to his waist and disappeared beneath his low-slung jeans.
He was easily the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Not that she had seen that many handsome men—but growing up in the Hopi world, Mariah had learned to appreciate the beauty and form of nature.
And the man she’d left sitting under that spindly cottonwood tree was nature at its most perfect.
Her hands felt damp on the steering wheel, and her heart pounded way too fast. What was the matter with her? Luke was a patient, one who needed her attention. She should be concentrating on the man’s injuries, not his tempting body.
The truck coughed and sputtered over the next rise, then Luke came into view. He stood as she neared, shielding his eyes against the sun to watch her approach.
She stopped and executed a turn, backing the truck up in front of the cycle so it would be easier for them to load.
“That thing’s quite a relic,” he said, standing back to take in the truck with a slow, sweeping glance.
“At least it runs,” Mariah returned.
She lowered the tailgate with a rasp of metal, then dragged out a weather-beaten old board from the back end to use as a makeshift ramp.
“Look, you’re not exactly the weighty help I need to load this baby into the back end,” he said, running a critical eye over her smallish shape.
Mariah drew herself up taller. “That may be, but I don’t see anyone else lining up to offer his services, do you?”
Luke cursed inventively and ran a hand through his hair. He hated being at anyone’s mercy—especially a woman who heated his blood the way Mariah did.
He caught her soft scent, sweet and sun-drenched—like the flowers she collected in her basket. Her red blouse dipped just low enough at the neck to reveal the slightest hint of her delectable breasts beneath.
Her arms were bronzed by the sun, slender, capable; just not capable of raising his bike to the bed of her truck, though he had no doubt that she would try.
He had the feeling that she was accomplished at many things, that she had to be. Perhaps she was alone in the world, with no one to share the emotional and physical load she carried—or did she prefer to carry it all herself?
She made him curious, though he had no right to be anything of the sort. This was only a chance meeting of two people in time, one moment of accident that had brought them together.
He longed to feed his soul with her warmth, something he denied himself because of his failure that night in the trauma unit.
The night he couldn’t work his medical magic.
The night he failed to save his son.
Chapter Two
“This is Sunrise,” Mariah said as they passed through the tiny town of only a few businesses.
A small grocery store, an old tavern, a pizza place and a post office surrounded the small center plaza. Several square-shaped houses were scattered around the town’s outskirts. And up on the hill beyond sat the church with its old bell tower, the bell long-since missing.
“You live in town?” he asked.
She glanced over at him, his injured leg stretched out in front of him as best he could in the cramped cab of her truck. She needed to take care of that leg wound. It had to be painful—despite his insistence to the contrary.
The man pretended toughness—and Mariah suspected he wasn’t about to admit to simple weaknesses like cuts and scrapes and bruises.
“I live a short distance beyond. It’s not far,” she said as the truck rumbled past the town’s environs.
Callie would be waiting for her at home. And Una would have supper started. She always did when Mariah was away gathering her herbs and roots.
Both would be surprised she was bringing home a guest of sorts.
A few miles ahead she made a turn, the truck creaking and groaning as if it were an old woman getting out of a rocker after a long afternoon nap.
