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“I’ll keep trying the cleaning company in Jackson. They might have an emergency contact number on her employment records.”
“Good thinking. Drive safe. I think the storm is going to be here earlier than the weather forecasters said. No question about Pine Gulch having a white Christmas this year, I guess.”
“Is there ever?” he said drily as he climbed into the pickup truck.
After making sure his guest was safely buckled in, he waved to Jake and backed out of the parking lot then headed toward the River Bow, a few miles out of town, through a lightly falling snow.
“Your truck smells like Christmas,” she said, rather sleepily.
He pointed to the little air freshener shaped like an evergreen tree that hung from the rearview mirror. “You can give my daughter credit for that. She complains that it usually smells like shi—er, manure.”
“You have a daughter?”
He nodded. “Yep. Destry’s her name. She’ll be twelve in a couple of months.”
“Like the movie with James Stewart.”
“Something like that.” His late ex-wife had been fascinated with the old western Destry Rides Again, probably because she fancied herself a Marlene Dietrich wannabe. She had loved the name, and at that point, he would have done anything to try saving his marriage.
“Where is she?”
“Er, who?”
“Your daughter. Destry.”
Ah. That was easy. Explaining that his ex-wife took off a few months after their daughter was born would have been tougher.
“She stayed at her cousin’s house last night, but she’s supposed to come home later tonight.”
“Oh, that’s nice. I have twenty-four kids.”
He jerked his gaze from the road just long enough to gape at her. “Twenty-four?”
“Yes. Last year it was only twenty-two. The year before that, I had twenty-five. I had the biggest class in the first grade.”
“You’re a teacher?”
She nodded, though her head barely moved on the headrest and her eyes began to drift closed. “Yes,” she mumbled. “I teach first grade at Sunny View Elementary School. I’m a great teacher.”
“I’m sure you are. But I thought you worked for the cleaning service.”
She frowned a little, opening her eyes in confusion before they slid shut again. “I’m soooo tired. My head hurts.”
Just like that, she was asleep.
“Sarah? Ms. Whitmore?”
She snorted and shifted in her sleep. The mystery deepened. The woman was staying at the inn, drove a rental car and apparently taught first grade.
He knew teachers weren’t paid nearly enough. Maybe she had picked up extra work during the school break, but that didn’t explain the inn or the rental car.
His cell phone rang just as he pulled into the long, winding lane that led from the main road to the ranch house. “Ridge Bowman,” he answered.
“Oh, Mr. Bowman,” the flustered voice on the other end of the line exclaimed. “This is Terri McCall from Happy House Cleaners in Jackson. There’s been a terrible mix-up. I’m so sorry! You would not believe the day we’ve had here.”
He glanced at the woman sleeping on the bench seat beside him. “Mine hasn’t been exactly a walk in the park, either.”
“It’s been chaos from the moment I walked in this morning. Our power was knocked out in the night and we’re only just getting back up. Meantime, all the computers were down. I just saw your name on my caller ID and realized we had your dates wrong, so I’ve been scrambling to find someone else. I had you down for party cleanup tomorrow. I’m so sorry. I’m sending someone right now. She should be there within the hour, I promise, and we’ll have you sorted out.”
He gazed at the woman sleeping beside him. “Wait a minute. What about Sarah?”
He was met with a little awkward pause. “The woman I’m sending is Kelli Parker. She’ll do a fine job. I’m afraid I don’t know a Sarah.”
“Sarah. Sarah Whitmore. I left you a message about her. We’re just coming from the doctor. She broke her arm and had a concussion in the fall.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I haven’t had time to listen to my messages, with everything that’s been going on. Do you need us to clean her house, too?”
“No. She works for you! She showed up this morning to clean for me. In the process, she tripped and fell down my stairs.”
“This is all very strange.” The woman sounded baffled and a little concerned. “We don’t have anyone named Sarah working for us and, as I said, we had the dates switched.”
“You didn’t send someone.”
“Yes. Just now,” she said patiently. “Not earlier this morning. Kelli Parker. She’s very efficient. One of our very best, I promise you.”
“So if you didn’t send someone to clean my house, who the hell is this woman sitting next to me with the broken arm and the concussion?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. She’s not my employee, I can promise you that. Why would anybody want to pretend to be? Perhaps you had better call the police.”
He pulled up in front of the ranch house and sat in the truck for a moment, the phone still pressed to his ear. He didn’t want to call the police. In Pine Gulch, the police meant his brother Trace. Bad enough that Taft had to come out on the emergency call and find a strange woman crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Trace would never let him hear the end of this one.
“Okay. Thank you. I’ll watch for your actual employee.”
“I’m sorry again for the mix-up. I don’t want you to think we usually conduct our business in this scatterbrained way. The holidays have been crazy anyway, with everybody wanting sparkling houses for their parties and overnight guests, and six hours without electricity or computers didn’t help matters.”
“No problem. Thanks.”
He hung up and looked across the cab at Sarah. A strand of auburn hair had drifted across her cheek, accentuating the complexion that was still too pale for his liking.
He would sure like to figure out just what the hell was going on, but he wasn’t quite ready to call the police. Trace had an annoying tendency to take over in matters of an investigative nature, and Ridge was feeling oddly territorial about this woman.
He figured he could get her settled and then if she was still out of it, he could go through her purse and try to find out why a woman who claimed she taught first grade at Sunny View Elementary School decided to spend a little time cleaning up the party mess at a ranch house in some small backwater Idaho town.
She didn’t appear to wake even after he shut off the engine and walked around to the passenger door. “Here we are. Let’s get you inside. Can you walk, or do I have to carry you?”
She opened her eyes for just a moment before closing them again. That was apparently all the answer he was going to get. He sighed and scooped her into his arms, thinking again how slight and delicate she was. She hardly weighed more than Destry.
She was definitely a curvy little handful, though. He tried not to notice, tried to remind himself she was a mysterious stranger who had entered his home under false pretenses, tried not to remember how very long it had been since he’d held a sweet-smelling woman in his arms.
He carried her up the stairs to the mudroom and then through the kitchen to the hallway that led to Caidy’s downstairs bedroom.
In contrast to everything else about his hard-riding, horse-training, dog-loving sister, her bedroom was soft and feminine, with a lavender and brown quilt joining a flurry of pillows on the bed and lace curtains spilling from the window.
The room might have been made for Sarah. She had a kind of sweet, ethereal beauty that fit perfectly with all of Caidy’s frills.
She moaned a little when he lowered her to the bed and he quickly propped one of Caidy’s hundreds of throw pillows underneath her casted arm.
“There. Is that better?”
Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked around, still with that vaguely unfocused look.
“This isn’t my hotel room,” she said, her voice a husky rasp.
“No. You’re temporarily staying at the River Bow ranch.”
“I need to talk to the Bowman family,” she stated, still dreamily. “It’s really important.”
This whole thing was so strange. What was she doing here? What did she need to talk to his family about? He frowned as he eased away from her, but she had already closed her eyes again.
She didn’t look at all comfortable. After a pause, he reached down and slipped off her shoes, but that was about as far as he dared go.
He grabbed a soft fleece blanket from the foot of the bed and tucked it under her chin, then stood back and studied her.
What an odd day. Why couldn’t he shake the strange feeling that something momentous was happening? He didn’t like it, especially because he didn’t understand it.
After a moment, he gave her one more careful look then turned and walked from the bedroom. The sun went down early on a late-December afternoon. In another hour, it would be dark, which meant he needed to hustle out to take care of chores. He was a rancher, which meant he didn’t have all day to stand and look at his mysterious guest, no matter how lovely she might be.
Chapter Four
Sarah awoke to a mouth as dry as the Mojave in August and, conversely, a desperate need to use the bathroom.
She opened her eyes slowly and tried to make sense of where she was, why the room didn’t look familiar. A lamp glowed beside the bed, illuminating a comfortably feminine room. A plump armchair stood in one corner and just next to it, she could see an open doorway that looked like it contained the facilities she needed.
When she sat up, a grinding wave of pain washed over her. Her head and her left arm seemed to be the focus of most of the pain but the rest of her body felt as if she had just ridden out the permanent press cycle on a front-loading washing machine.
By the time she hobbled back out of the nicely decorated en suite bathroom, vague, rather unsettling memories were beginning to filter through.
She was at the Bowman family’s River Bow ranch—she could tell by the log walls and the general decor of the place. She had fallen down the stairs while she was cleaning the ranch house after Caidy Bowman’s wedding.
She remembered Ridge Bowman, suddenly—piercing green eyes, hard features, broad shoulders. He thought she was from a cleaning company, and she had been too much of a coward to tell him otherwise.
She remembered an ambulance ride with a man who had Ridge Bowman’s same handsome features and those stunning green eyes.
The actual trip from the clinic to the ranch house was mostly a blur of random impressions, pain and confusion and embarrassment. There had been a kind doctor, a painful procedure and then the rest was a blur.
Why was she back at the River Bow and not at her room at the Cold Creek Inn? And how had she ended up in that bed with her shoes off and a pillow tucked under her arm?
It must have been Ridge. Who else? Her stomach trembled when she thought about him taking care of her. Had he carried her inside? Slipped her onto the bed? Covered her with that blanket?
She could hardly imagine it.
She had to talk to him, right away, before things became even more complicated. She wouldn’t be in this mess if only she had been able to find the courage to tell him everything when she showed up on his doorstep, instead of letting her fear at what he might think of her overwhelm all her good sense.
How long had she slept? She couldn’t see anything outside the fragile lace curtains. She found the clock radio beside the bed and was shocked to discover it was after 9:00 p.m. She must have been out of it for hours, though she wasn’t exactly sure how long she had been at the clinic in Pine Gulch.
She was just trying to gather the energy and the courage to go in search of her unwilling host when she heard a knock on the door.
“Ms. Whitmore? Are you awake?”
Nerves trembled through her to join the aches and pains. “Yes. Come in.”
He pushed open the door and stood there wearing a soft-looking blue shirt and jeans.
You are one great-looking cowboy.
The words seemed to echo through her memory, and she frowned, wondering where they came from. Not that it mattered—they were absolutely true. Ridge Bowman was even more handsome than she remembered, tough and rugged, with shoulders that looked as if they could bear the weight of the world.
“I’m under orders from Doc Dalton to keep an eye on you through the night. I guess I’m supposed to make sure you’re not delusional or anything.”
She thought of the crazy choices she had made since she showed up at the ranch that morning. Really. Cleaning the man’s house as an avoidance method. Could she be any more ridiculous?
“I was half hoping this whole thing was some kind of wild nightmare,” she said. “Does that count as delusional?”
The corner of his mouth danced up just a bit as if he wanted to smile, but he quickly straightened it again. “I’m supposed to check. Do you know your name?”
“Yes. Sarah Whitmore.”
“That’s what your driver’s license says.”
He was holding out her bag, which looked incongruously feminine in his big, masculine hand.
“You looked through my purse?”
“I was trying to find a cell phone that had an emergency contact on it. I couldn’t find one.”
She didn’t go anywhere without her cell phone. She frowned, trying to remember. “Did you check the car? It might be there. Otherwise, I probably left it at the hotel.”
“I’ll look through the car again. Maybe it fell on the floor. I can also have Laura look at the hotel.”
“Why don’t you just take me back to the hotel and I can look for myself?”
He looked sternly implacable. “You can’t stay on your own tonight. Doctor’s orders. And as great as the service is now at the Cold Creek Inn since Laura took over, she just can’t send a desk clerk to your room every couple of hours to check on you. I’m afraid you’re stuck here, at least overnight.”
She wanted to argue, but she couldn’t come up with the words, between the pain and her angst.
Some of her distress must have shown on her features. He held out a water glass she hadn’t noticed before, along with a bottle of medication.
“You’re also late for your pain pill. Sorry about that. I was supposed to give it an hour ago, but I had a problem down at the barn and now I’m running late.”
