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He couldn’t see very well without them. He wasn’t blind as a bug-eyed bat, the way that jerk Timmy Ryder at school was always telling everybody, but things got kind of…blurry when he took them off. “Move over, fur brain.” Shoving the cat to the left with his foot, Sky squeezed under the steering wheel and cautiously down. “Where are they?”
He patted under the high-set pedals. Nope. “What are you doin’, sitting on ’em?” He pulled the cat up onto his knee, ignoring his warning growl. DC was too timid to bite even a mouse.
“Or maybe—ooof—keep still!” He twisted around to grope under the seat and— “Yeah, got ’em.” Unbroken; for once in his life he was lucky. He jammed them on top of his head, let go of the exasperated tom and, reaching up to the dash, caught hold of something, a handle of some kind, and started wriggling up past the steering wheel.
Thock! The handle jumped in his hand. The bus quivered and groaned.
“What was that?”
No comment from the cat. Ears flattened to his head, DC was doing his best to exit left, wedging his plump body between the driver’s seat and the side of the bus in an unsuccessful effort to reach the back. His tail lashed in frustration.
Sky grabbed the wheel to pull himself off the floorboard—and it spun hard to the right. “Hey!” Something felt wrong. The wheel was shuddering in his grasp. Gravel rumbled under the tires. As he squirmed into the driver’s seat and pulled his glasses down onto his nose, things swam into focus—and streamed away. No, it was the bus that was moving, he realized, as it gave a horrible lurch.
And kept on rolling.
Backward.
Swerving with a ponderous, dreadful deliberation off the road, then down across the pasture.
CHAPTER TWO
MARYLOU WON’T DO, Jack Kelton told himself, aiming his open Jeep down the road to Durango.
The baby-sitter might be five years older than his daughter, Kat, but she was three jumps behind every time. Missing Kat’s straight-faced jokes and veiled warnings. Failing to foresee her pranks, or knowing how to handle them once they’d been played. Worst of all, the girl was gullible, taking Kat at her word when she shouldn’t. Apparently they weren’t teaching critical thinking in high school these days, or if they were, Marylou was failing.
“And now, shoot me if she’s not in love,” Jack muttered, scrubbing a hand through his wind-whipped hair as the Jeep topped the hill. A fifteen-year-old in calf-love was useless! Lethally oblivious to the world and her responsibilities.
With Marylou lost in love, Kat would run wild this summer. She was probably contemplating mayhem this very moment, since she’d wanted to accompany him into Durango. She’d pulled a major pout when he refused to let her go to a kickboxing movie alone while he met with an after-hours’ client. Right now, back in Trueheart, Marylou was probably sprawled on Jack’s couch, bare feet up on the backrest, spooning the last of their chocolate-chip ice cream out of the carton as she giggled on the phone with the Love of her Life. While forgotten Kat was probably somewhere down the street, hot-wiring somebody’s car. She’d pass him any second now with a whoop and a wave and an offer to drag race. Automatically he glanced in his mirror.
Nothing but empty road back there. Still, facts had to be faced. He’d have to find another sitter, and soon. Not that Trueheart had much to offer in the baby-sitting department.
The Jeep crested the next rise and Jack cocked his head. Fifty yards downslope, a bright red, sawed-off school bus was parked by the edge of the road, facing his way. Not from around here; Trueheart school buses were yellow and full-size. Jack’s brows drew together as his Jeep closed the distance. Was it—?
It was rolling. Backing down the road. Or, no— “What the devil?”
As Jack’s foot moved to his brake, the bus curved slowly off the shoulder and trundled out into the field. Some idiot had left it parked without shifting into first! Most likely the emergency brake had let go.
Well, so be it. Whoever the idiot was, he was about to learn his lesson the hard way. The narrow band of brush and cottonwoods at the bottom of the hill screened a twenty-foot drop-off to a nifty little trout stream where Jack sometimes fished. Once the bus had gathered momentum, it would blow right through that fragile barrier.
“Hope to God the moron’s not directly in line below, communing with na—” Jack’s eyes narrowed. He stomped down on the gas, then spun the wheel. The Jeep swerved off into the pasture, bucked over a hummock and roared in pursuit. There was somebody in that bus, a head bobbing above the steering wheel! “Step on the brake, bozo!” Or could the brakes have failed? Swearing out loud, Jack floored the accelerator.
A race between gravity and distance, speed and time. Eyes sweeping the slope below, gauging probable trajectories and possible outcomes, Jack spotted the woman. Bursting from the trees, a blur of yellow with flailing arms. Pale flapping hair, a mouth open wide in what must be a scream, though he couldn’t hear her over his engine’s roar. “Get the hell out of our way, lady!” What did she think she could do—catch the damn bus like a fly ball? “Move it, woman!”
Well, she’d have to take care of herself. The Jeep closed the last few feet, bounding along driver’s side to driver’s side, and Jack stared up through the open window—into a small, wide-eyed face. Jeez, a kid! “Step on the brake!”
“I can’t!” His voice squeaked with panic. “My cat’s stuck under the—” He swung back into the bus, yanking desperately at the gearshift.
Jack gritted his teeth at the agonized squawk of stripping gears. So much for the transmission. “Step on the brake and damn the cat! Do it now!”
The boy shook his head frantically. “He w-w-won’t move! If I could shift into—”
The bus must’ve been doing twenty by now. Maybe a hundred yards to the trees—a hundred and three to the cliff. The woman had vanished behind the bulk of the vehicle. “Forget shifting, kid, and listen!” Jack yelled, leaning halfway out of the Jeep. “Grab the top of your wheel—yeah, that’s right! Now slo-owly—ve-er-ry slowly—turn it toward me!”
A calculated risk. If the kid panicked and swung the wheel too fast, the Jeep, running parallel, would smash into the bus’s left flank. “Good! That’s good.” Thank God he could take directions.
“Now slowly. Turn another inch toward me—excellent!” If the bus didn’t flip, if they still had room to pull off the maneuver, the kid could steer it in a gentle curve away from the creek, gradually swinging cross-hill till the bus coasted to a halt. “Gimme another inch—good!”
Jack turned his own wheel; they were now running side by side, not three feet apart. He flinched as the bus slammed into something solid—a rock or a log—and the exhaust system peeled away. He glanced back in his mirror as tailpipes and other parts popped into view and clattered along in their wake. “So who needs a muffler?” he assured the kid, sending him a rakish grin.
Yeah, right, we’re all under control here. Having the time of our lives!
But the kid actually smiled back at him and Jack laughed out loud. Spunky little devil! “Turn it a little more—ea-aa-sy does it. Yeah!” He sucked in his breath as the bus wobbled, trying to lift onto its right-side wheels—then settled back four-square. Whew! I owe You one, up there!
One more in a long list.
“Give it another inch. You’re doing great!” And he’d better be—they had forty feet left to the trees and the bus was angled roughly fifty degrees to the fall line. Jack corrected his own course, nodding fiercely. “Now one last time, son—gently—a couple of inches.”
As it curved cross-slope, the bus had been gradually losing momentum. It was doing maybe ten when it plowed into the bushes. But hitting them almost broadside, it didn’t slice on through. Branches shrieked along steel. Slender tree trunks crackled and snapped. An avalanche of baggage inside the vehicle rumbled to the far side. The bus rocked up onto its off-side wheels for a heart-stopping moment—then, supported by the bushes, settled back again.
As he braked to a halt alongside, Jack blew out his breath. And thank You! He stepped out and sauntered on shaking legs over to the kid’s window. “That was exciting.” They measured each other solemnly—then grinned from ear to ear. “Well done,” Jack told him, socking his shoulder. “Very well done ind—”
“Sky! Oh, baby!”
And here came Momma at last, panting and wind-torn and half-hysterical, clutching a forgotten bunch of crumpled wildflowers. A small frantic tornado, she roared down the narrow gap between the vehicles and actually bumped Jack aside, getting to her child. “Oh, sweetie!” She wrenched open the kid’s door. Jack winced as the edge of it banged into the Jeep. So much for his paint job.
“Are you all right?” But she wasn’t waiting to hear; apparently touch would tell her faster. Her fingers flew over the boy’s face, his arms, his ribs. Tugging at his clothes, smoothing his hair. “Where does it hurt?”
Jack met the kid’s eyes over her shoulder and gave him a commiserating grin. Sometimes a guy just had to put up with the mushy stuff.
“Aw-ww, Mom! I’m fine.” The boy twisted away as she tried to pull him into a hug, then dived under the wheel. “It’s DC…”
The largest cat Jack had ever seen crouched behind the pedals, tail fluffed to the size of a firehose, eyes like black saucers. Moaning throatily, he slashed at the boy’s outstretched hand.
“Ouch! He’s never done that before!” The boy— Sky?—brought scratched fingers to his lips.
“Reckon you’ve never run him backward down a mountain before,” Jack said mildly. “Give him a minute.”
Momma swung around, registering his presence at last.
And worth the wait, Jack decided as his gaze dropped from wide green eyes still dilated with shock, down over a lush trembling mouth, over a pair of still heaving, just-the-right-size breasts, to—oh, boy, forget it! To a slogan emblazoned across the T-shirt, claiming: A Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle.
Hoo-boy, one of those. A lady with an ax to grind. His eyes flicked back to the bus, filled almost to window level with its assortment of household rubble. Jeez, that thing on its side—could that be a washing machine?
“Been divorced long?” he asked casually.
She blinked. Blinked her long lashes again, grateful smile fading to wariness as she raised her chin. “H-how did you guess?”
Jack threw back his head and laughed.
SHE’D SWORN she’d stand on her own two feet from now on, yet here she was again, letting a man take charge.
Not that it was easy to stand alone when apparently she’d wrecked an ankle, somewhere in that pell-mell, adrenaline-powered chase, Abby reminded herself. Sitting in the topless Jeep, where their rescuer had planted her when he realized—at the same moment she did—that she could barely hobble, Abby clasped still-shaking hands between wobbly knees. She watched with growing uneasiness as he stalked around the bus, hands on lean hips, shaking his shaggy head to himself as he summed up the state of her disaster and decided what should be done about it.
She had a terrible suspicion his conclusions would be the right ones—logical, sensible and therefore impossible to refute, much as she’d rather refute them. She’d already had one sample of his plain-spoken intelligence, with that guess about her marital status.
I don’t need this!
Didn’t need a disastrous setback, just as she was starting to pick up the pieces of her life and think about rebuilding.
Didn’t need someone—another too confident, too brash, too good-looking-for-his-own-good male—telling her what to do and how to do it.
Except that she did. She was utterly exhausted and confused. Overwhelmed. She supposed this was what they called shock. Looking at her son as he smiled wanly up at the man who’d rolled out from under the bus to stand and pat his shoulder, her eyes filled slowly with tears. Oh, Sky, I could have lost you!
Losing the life she’d known since she was nineteen was nothing compared to that.
And being bossed around by another know-it-all man—who’d known enough to save her son—was a small price to pay. A price she’d pay gladly again and again. The bargain of a lifetime.
“I haven’t even thanked you yet,” she said huskily a few minutes later when he came to sit beside her in the Jeep. “That cliff beyond the trees…if Sky’d gone over that…”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I couldn’t have done it without him. He’s a smart kid. Stayed cool when it counted.”
“Yes…” Cool under pressure. Steve and his pilot buddies had valued that quality above all else.
Sometimes she wondered if it signified ice at the center. A basic heartlessness. Easy to be cool if you didn’t really care. When she’d told him she wanted a divorce, Steve had shrugged, given her a rueful grin and merely said, “Can’t say I blame you, babe.”
She shook off the memory with a jerk of her head. Who cared if this man was just one more of that type? It wasn’t as though she was buying him and taking him home. “I don’t understand how this could’ve happened,” she said now, eyes returning to the bus. “I know I left the brake on. And I thought I left it in gear.”
He glanced down at his boots, then quickly up again—and smiled. “Brakes have been known to fail. My name’s Kelton, by the way. Jack Kelton.” He held out a big hand and reluctantly she surrendered her own to its shockingly warm clasp, aware of the roughness of his palm. A carpenter, perhaps? Or out here in cow country, with those boots he was wearing, maybe a cattleman?
“Abby Lake,” she murmured. “And that’s Skyler.” She nodded at her son, who’d climbed into the back of the bus and was apparently searching for DC among the tumbled boxes. In the gathering twilight, she could barely see him moving beyond the windows.
“Good enough. So first question, Abby. Do you have any sort of towing service we can call?”
“I’m afraid I—” She’d had roadside assistance, of course, on her car. But in her scramble to close on the house, then move, since the new buyers had insisted on immediate occupancy… What with all the other details of dismantling one’s life and carting it across country: changing bank accounts, health insurance, credit cards, mailing address… “I forgot to get it. I just bought the bus last week.”
“Ah,” Kelton said neutrally, although she could hear his disapproval. No doubt he would have remembered. “So question two. I take it money’s an issue here?”
A sensible deduction—prodding old bruises and a still-simmering indignation. Three months ago, money wouldn’t have been an issue. Now it was survival itself. “It’s tight.” Budgeted to the penny and now, looking at the bus, she realized her budget was blown. What am I going to do?
“Okay, so hiring a tow truck to come out from Durango, then haul a bus forty miles back, isn’t practical. And once you get it to a garage, it may need a new transmission, definitely a new exhaust system. I’m not sure about the axles, though they might be intact… Repairs are going to be costly, if you can even scrounge the parts for this old girl. And meantime, while somebody’s fixing it for a week or more, I suppose you’ll have to stay in a motel. Unless you have friends in Durango?”
“No…” Abby threaded a hand through her disheveled hair. Tried to find a smile. “We’re from New Jersey. At least lately…” It was one of the things she’d hated most about being a military wife all those years. The repeated uprootings. The constant farewells. A shy woman like her needed to nest in one place, where she could build and nourish long-term friendships. The kind of support system that sustained you through disasters such as this.
“Anyway, that all adds up to a lot of money,” Jack concluded, casually reaching across to brush a knuckle across her cheek, where a tear had escaped. He glanced skyward with a comical frown. “And on top of all that, damned if it doesn’t look like rain.”
Reflexively, Abby followed his gaze. Over their heads stretched a vault of cloudless silvery blue, cupping the last of the light, one star already twinkling in the east. She laughed shakily, wiping one hand across her wet lashes. “Cats and dogs by the bucketful.”
“Well, then…” Jack folded his arms and leaned back, stretching his long legs, boots braced against the pedals. “If Durango’s not an option, what about this instead? We’re three miles from Trueheart. There’s an old cowhand north of town, Whitey Whitelaw, who’s the best shade-tree mechanic I’ve ever seen. Cobbling together clapped-out feed trucks and tractors is his specialty, and his prices are pretty reasonable. I imagine he’d cut you a deal.”
“He doesn’t know me from Adam. I don’t know why he’d—”
“Why don’t you ask him and see? I can call Whitey when we get back to town, ask if he’d come out here in the morning, take a look at her…”
Abby nodded doubtfully. She could think of nothing better to try. “I…suppose so. And for tonight, we’ve got a mattress in back and a camp stove.” She could boil enough creek water to—
But Jack was shaking his head. “Don’t even think it. You need a real bed and a hot meal—you both do—and that ankle needs some ice to bring it down. You’re coming with me. I’ve got just the place for you.”
“You mean, to your…house?” If he was married it would be awful, descending on his surprised, solicitous wife, and if he wasn’t, even worse. “Oh, no! We couldn’t impose.” She’d rather camp for a year in a cow pasture than be forced into that kind of dependency on a stranger, no matter how kindly intended.
“Abby, I never let anybody impose on me. And Kat and I don’t have room for guests at the moment.”
So he was married. She should have guessed, attractive as he was. He didn’t wear a ring, but then that came as no surprise. Steve had shed his within a year of their marriage, insisting it was dangerous, what with all the machinery and electronics a pilot had to deal with.
“But there’s an empty rental cottage next door to us set up for mountain bikers and for skiers in winter. It’s furnished down to the pots and pans and bedsheets—and I’m sure I can arrange for you to stay there. My landlady owns it.”
Abby smiled in spite of herself. He had it all figured out. And she’d bet Jack could sell coconuts to Tahitians, if he took the notion. She should be thankful he was willing to help.
“So what are we gonna do?” Skyler demanded, appearing out of the dark at her elbow, his arms wrapped around a glowering DC-3.
Abby let out a long breath. She supposed she’d never really had a choice in the matter. “I guess we’re going with Mr. Kelton.”
CHAPTER THREE
“AND HE-ERE WE ARE,” Jack announced grandly as he swung the Jeep into an unpaved driveway. Set fifty feet back in a narrow lot, a tiny, two-story cottage crouched under the trees. “Be it ever so humble, you’ll find it homey enough. It’s basically identical in layout to mine. They were built at the same time for twin daughters, back in the 1880s.”
He’d warned her it would be rustic, Abby reminded herself, searching for something to say as she studied the sagging front porch, the weathered clapboard siding that suggested this twin hadn’t sprung for a paint job since the 1890s.
Still, whatever its appearance, the price had indeed been right for a week’s lodging. On the far side of Trueheart, Jack had left them in the Jeep while he’d negotiated with his landlady, Maudie Harris. He’d loped out of her house minutes later, wearing a triumphant grin while he twirled a key ring around his finger.
“That’s my place over—” Jack paused in the act of nodding to their right, across a picket fence hedged by an overgrown border of bushes and waist-high weeds. He scowled. “Over there.”
Through leafy branches, Abby could make out the glint of a pickup truck, parked in the shadows beyond an identical sagging porch that ran the width of Jack’s cottage. With lights glowing from the front-room windows, his house looked more inviting than hers.
“Very nice,” she said, although a twist of uneasiness coiled through her stomach. Bad enough to be so obliged to the man already. But to have him as her next-door neighbor—ready, willing and able to give his opinion on her every move from here on out… I don’t need this. “Well…” She swiveled in her seat.
“Hang on.” Jack bounded out of the Jeep and around to her side. “You shouldn’t put your weight on that ankle. Not till we’ve had a look at it.”
“I can manage.”
“I’m sure you can.” But his hand blocked her passage, leaving her the choice of shoving it aside—or accepting it.
Used to having his own way, for all his charm and goodwill, Abby decided, gritting her teeth behind a close-mouthed smile. She’d learned not to trust charm. She’d found that it was often a substitute for less polished but kinder, more genuine emotions.
“Thank you.” Her nerves skittered as those oven-warm fingers closed over hers. Then he took her other arm, supporting her weight as she slithered down from the high seat. They stood for an instant toe-to-toe, Abby looking up—quite a way up—and Jack holding on to her just a heartbeat too long, his fingers seeming to squeeze her a hairsbreadth too tightly.
Or maybe her alarm sprang from her rattled nerves, sensing danger where it didn’t exist. There was also the simple fact that she hadn’t stood this close to a man—a virile, ruggedly attractive man—in months. “Thanks,” she said again.
But he didn’t take that as dismissal. Instead Jack transferred her hand to his forearm, a support as hard and muscular as the rest of him obviously was. “We’ll get you settled and then…” His shaggy head swung back toward his own yard as they moved carefully across the grass. Abby could see one decisive eyebrow drawn down in a scowl. “Then I’ll just…”
