Swept Away Read online

  Right. Car problems.

  “Think you can move your truck?” he asked Carly’s father, as Travis and Radar hopped out of Sam’s, the dog bounding off into the weeds to chase something or other. That squirrel, most likely.

  “Have no idea,” Lane said, which Sam took as an invitation to join the older man in the ditch to check underneath the vehicle. A minute later, having agreed that, yep, the axle was bent, all right, Lane called Triple A on his cell phone as Sam took in Carly and Travis standing four feet apart, sizing each other up. Neither one seemed quite sure what to make of the other.

  Since apparently nobody’d yet answered, and to distract himself from staring at the man’s daughter as much as anything, Sam said, “Mostly likely, they’ll send out Darryl Andrews. Since he’s the only mechanic in town.”

  “And what town might that be?”

  “Haven. Oklahoma,” he added, since you could never be too sure with tourists. Then Lane said “Hello, yeah, I’ve got a broken down vehicle here, I need a tow” into the phone and Sam went back to watching Carly and his son, who appeared to have started up something resembling a conversation.

  The kid was kind of cute, Carly supposed, if you were into that sort of thing. Like the way the sun glinted off his hair, fine and white blond like peach fuzz, the pudgy little tummy pooching out his sweatshirt, his scuffed Spiderman sneakers. He was subdued but not shy, which she found nearly as disconcerting in the preschooler—when did kids start losing their baby teeth, anyway?—as she did in grown men.

  Like the lanky one with the honeyed gaze currently talking to her father.

  “That’s my daddy,” the child said, and Carly forced herself to look away from whatever she found so fascinating. Because other than a slight hitch in his gait which raised the question How? there was nothing remarkable about the man. Just a country guy in jeans and plaid shirt worn open over a T-shirt, sun-baked features shadowed by the brim of a Purina ball cap. Nothing noteworthy at all. But her eyes would keep moseying back over there, wouldn’t they?

  Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t had breakfast.

  “I kind of figured that,” she said to the kid, thinking maybe she should smile or something. “What’s your name?”

  “Travis. How come you got so many earrings?”

  Carly’s hand lifted to one ear, touching the dangling strand of beads hanging from her lobe. A pair of studs kept it company, while farther up a small gold loop hugged the rim. “’Cause I like ’em,” she said. “And this way, I don’t have to narrow it down to a single choice every morning.”

  Travis seemed to consider this for a minute, then said, “My sister, Libby, has holes in her ears, too. But only one set. Does it hurt?”

  “No,” Carly said as the dog—a mottled gray and black thing with enormous ears and a toothy grin—exploded out of the weeds in front of them, dancing around the boy for several seconds before realizing he’d been remiss in not acknowledging the other human standing there. The beast plopped his butt down in the dirt, his wagging tail stirring up a dust cloud as he woofed hello.

  “His name’s Radar,” the boy said. “He likes everybody. Daddy says he’s nothing but a big ol’ pain in the butt.”

  The dog woofed again, and Carly laughed, which the dog took as an invitation to jump up and plant his paws on her thighs.

  “Radar! Down!” “Daddy” said, striding over to grab the dog’s collar, even as Carly said, “No, no—it’s okay, really,” and then she looked up into his face and damned if she didn’t forget to breathe for a second or two. Because there was a substance behind those brandy-colored eyes that she hadn’t seen in an extraordinarily long time. If ever. Something that went beyond the surface friendliness, or even the shrewd intelligence that masked—barely—a simmering sensuality that made her slightly dizzy.

  It was honesty, she thought with a start. The completely ingenuous openness of a man with no hidden agenda, with nothing to hide.

  Or to lose.

  “Shouldn’t be more’n ten, fifteen minutes before Darryl gets here with the wrecker. Hey,” he said when she swayed slightly. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “What? Oh, yes, I’m fine. Just, um, hungry. I skipped breakfast,” she hastily added, thinking, Oh, brother.

  The crumples now rearranged themselves into a grin, one which created not a few wrinkles around his eyes and mouth and made her realize this was not a man in his first—or second—blush of youth. Either.

  “Well,” she said. “Thanks for stopping. But there’s no sense in your hanging around any longer, since you said the tow truck would be here pretty soon….”

  “And only one of you can fit in Darryl’s cab for the ride into town, so I guess that means the other one gets to ride with me.” Despite the man’s grin, Carly got the weirdest feeling he wasn’t all that happy about this turn of events.

  Travis tugged on Sam’s shirttail. “Did you see all her earrings, Daddy?”

  “Yeah,” he said, staring hard at the side of her face. “I saw ’em.” Then his gaze swept down and she realized that wasn’t all he’d seen. Or, she guessed, approved of. Well, that was his problem, wasn’t it?

  Travis and Radar wandered over to watch her father assess the damage to the camper’s interior. Brave souls, the pair of them.

  “You really swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel?” Sam asked.

  She looked back at Sam. “I really did. Although my guess is he probably darts out in front of cars on a regular basis, just for the hell of it. Squirrel ‘chicken,’ or something.”

  “Dangerous game.”

  “Guess he figures what’s life without a little danger to make it interesting? Crap,” she said on a wince as her knee tried its level best to give out on her.

  Sam’s hand instantly cupped her elbow, followed by a heart-piercingly gentle, “What is it?”

  “My knee. Or what’s left of it. I need to sit.”

  “Can you get up into the truck?”

  She nodded, and Sam put an arm around her waist and helped her over to his truck, then boosted her up into the passenger seat. It smelled very…male, although she couldn’t have possibly said what she meant by that.

  “I’m not playing the damsel in distress, I swear,” she said, lifting the hem of her pants to massage the muscles around her Ace-bandaged knee.

  “Didn’t figure you were.” Standing by the door, he nodded at her knee. “What happened?”

  “Repetitive stress injury, basically. I’m a dancer. Was a dancer,” she added with a rueful glare at the offending joint.

  “In your case, I’m guessing that’s not a euphemism for stripper.”

  Despite pain bad enough to make her eyes cross, she laughed. “No, I don’t exactly have the equipment for that line of work.”

  His grin managed to be both slightly devilish and very dear. And he was giving off this amazing, basic masculine scent of clean clothes and sun and that indefinable something that makes a woman’s mouth water, and she thought, Oh, God, just shoot me now.

  “I was a ballerina,” she said, refusing to believe her dry mouth was due to anything other than a craving for orange juice. “In Cincinnati.”

  “No fooling?” Sam leaned one wrist on the truck’s roof. “I always wondered how you gals danced on your toes like that.”

  “Painfully.” His low rumble of amusement made her mouth even dryer. “What about you?” she said, nodding toward his right leg.

  He grimaced. “Had a run-in with a bad tempered cow, Thanksgiving Day, a couple years ago. They tell me it healed perfectly, but corny as it sounds, I can definitely tell when it’s going to rain. So…what brings you to these parts?” he said over her chuckle.

  She pulled her pants leg back down over her knee, then nodded over to her father, who was showing something or other to Travis. Seemed a shame, really, to waste such great grandpa material on a daughter who had no interest in being somebody’s mother.

  “Road trip,” she said.

  “Now
, why do I get the feeling there’s a story behind this?”

  She smiled, then shifted in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position for her knee. “My mother died a couple years ago,” she said softly over the ache of loss that still hadn’t quite dissipated. “Dad insisted he was okay—and here’s the part where I blow any chance I had of making a good first impression—and I chose to believe him because it made my life easier. Except then when I suddenly didn’t have a life, I took a good look at my father and realized I didn’t like what I was seeing. So I suggested we hop in the camper and drive until we got bored.”

  “Is it working?”

  “My dad, you mean?” She squinted over at the man. “Hard to tell. He’s a master at putting up a front. I suppose twenty years in the Army will do that to a man. Oh! Is that the tow truck?”

  Sam glanced over. “Sure is. So what do you say I take you into town, and your father can ride with Darryl in the wrecker?”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said, even though it didn’t sound good at all. What it sounded, was dangerous.

  Unaware of her rampant ambivalence, Sam shut her door before starting to walk away, only to twist back around and say, “Just so you know…as far as impressions go, you did okay.”

  “Oh,” she said as blood rushed gleefully to her skin’s surface. “Is this a good thing?”

  He stared at her harder than a stranger had any right to, then shook his head. “No, ma’am, it most definitely is not,” he said, then strode off toward the beeping wrecker, leaving Carly feeling as tilted as her father’s truck.

  Chapter 2

  “My, my, my…wouldja lookee there?”

  Having just attended a protracted birth that ended up getting transferred to the hospital in Claremore anyway, Ivy Gardner wasn’t sure how much of anything she could see. Or cared to, frankly. At the moment she was beginning to think she was getting too damn old for this foolishness, never mind how much she loved her work. She could also do without Luralene Hastings’s poking her before she’d had a chance to finish her first cup of coffee. But since the redheaded proprietress of the Hair We Are would only bug the hell out of Ivy until she responded, she peered blearily across the diner at the unfamiliar couple sitting in the far booth, both frowning at the twenty-five-year-old laminated menus that nobody local ever used.

  Except then her vision cleared for a second or two and her brain managed a Huh of interest. Might’ve been more than that if she hadn’t been sleep deprived. Then again, maybe not—she was long past the age where her heart fluttered at the sight of a good-looking male. Which this definitely was, she wouldn’t deny it, with those good-size shoulders and thick, snowy hair. Ivy shifted uncomfortably in her seat, feeling very doughy, just at the moment.

  “Wonder who they are?” Luralene said, poking Ivy again.

  “Does it matter?”

  Exasperated green eyes—which clashed with the turquoise eye shadow—met Ivy’s. “You know, you have turned into a regular stick-in-the-mud. I remember when you used to be fun.”

  “And I remember when you used to be subtle.” Except then she took another sip of coffee and shook her head. “Strike that. You were never subtle.”

  “Damn straight. Oh, oh—don’t look now—” this in a stage whisper you could hear in Tulsa “—but he’s lookin’ at you!”

  And of course, Ivy lifted her eyes and yep, ran right into a pair of baby blues that set things to fizzing that hadn’t fizzed in a long, long time. And even as she wondered if maybe the man needed glasses, a suggestion of curiosity wormed past the fizzing, dragging a tiny speck of feeling flattered along with it. Then the man returned his attention to the younger woman with him, it all went poof, and Luralene was asking Ivy how her mayoral campaign was going and Ivy found herself entertaining the idea of stuffing one of Ruby’s blueberry muffins into the redhead’s mouth.

  She still wasn’t quite sure how she’d gotten hoodwinked into running for mayor, although she seemed to recall the Logan brothers, the youngest of whom was her son-in-law, had a lot to do with it. But when eighty-something Cy Hotchkins decided not to run for reelection—it would’ve been his sixth term, but term limits were not a big issue in a town of a thousand where most people were just happy somebody was willing to do the job—who should throw her forty-year-old pillbox into the ring but Arliss Potts, the Methodist preacher’s wife known more for her culinary eccentricities than her leadership qualities. And before Ivy knew it, her daughter Dawn, the town’s only attorney, had gotten a petition going and amassed enough signatures to get Ivy on the ballot, and suddenly she was a political candidate. She, an aging hippie who’d had the nerve to raise her illegitimate daughter in a town not known for its liberal leanings. At least, not three decades ago.

  But then, the reasoning went, a woman who believed in the town enough to stick around despite all that early censure was the perfect person to head its admittedly skeletal government. And besides, the reasoning went further, since more than half the people who’d looked down at her all those years ago were dead, and she’d delivered a fair number of all the younger voters, her chances of victory weren’t too bad, considering.

  Whatever. If nothing else, if she was elected, city council meetings would be spared an endless parade of deviled eggs made with ginger and horseradish and Cheez Whiz canapés topped with anchovy stars. But since she figured her winning was unlikely—Arliss was a good person at heart, even if she couldn’t cook worth spit, and this was a picayune Bible-belt town, after all—she was basically only going along with the whole idea in order to make her deluded but well-meaning friends and family happy.

  “Campaign’s goin’ fine,” she finally lied, but Luralene had already moved on, her beady little eyes scanning the diner like radar. You could practically hear the bleep…bleep…bleep from underneath her bomb-shelter hairdo. Jenna Logan came in with her niece Blair, who was smiling like a goon at everybody until finally Ruby said, “Well, look who got her braces off!” and the out-of-towners—father and daughter, she was guessing—glanced over and smiled, which is when Ivy got a load of all the earrings marching up the outer rim of the gal’s ears, the number of rings on her long, thin fingers. She seemed a little old to be dressed that way, to tell the truth, but then, Ivy supposed she had no room to talk with her long, gray braid and embroidered East Indian tunic. Not to mention the Birkenstocks.

  Hey. Being a cliché took a lot of effort. Just ask Luralene.

  The man’s cell phone rang. He dug it out of his shirt pocket, said, “Uh-huh” and “I see” a few times, then clapped it shut (it was one of those fancy flip-up numbers) and frowned at the gal, mumbling something that made her mouth twist all up. She leaned over to get her purse off the floor while the man paid the bill and praised Ruby’s cooking, which earned him the black woman’s brightest smile. The two of them passed by Luralene and Ivy’s booth on their way out, the man surprising the living daylights out of Ivy by meeting her gaze directly, then nodding.

  Luralene poked her. “Didja see that?”

  But Ivy barely heard her for all the blood rushing in her ears.

  Sam had promised the Stewarts he’d check in with them after he’d run his errands to see how things were going, so that’s what he was going to do. Because he was a man of his word, for one thing, and because it didn’t seem right, abandoning them if they were going to be stranded—which he suspected they were—for another. However, to say he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the prospect of seeing Carly Stewart again was one of the bigger understatements of the year. Why, he couldn’t say, exactly. Other than the obvious, which was that something about her was tickling awake things he’d just as soon stay asleep, thank you. He always had hated being tickled. However, by the time he got back to Ruby’s, they’d already left.

  “And not lookin’ particularly happy about things, would be my take on it,” Ruby said, ringing up the breakfast burrito he and Travis were going to share. Setting foot in Ruby’s without ordering something violated a basi
c law of nature. Then the white-haired woman frowned. “How’d you know about them, anyway?”

  “We were right behind them when their truck landed in a ditch. Axle’s shot, looked like.” He pocketed his change. “I didn’t have the heart to tell ’em it’s probably unlikely Darryl’s got a replacement lying around, which means they might be here for a while.”

  Ruby gave him a speculative look, the kind that preceded a comment he doubted he wanted to hear, so he was more than grateful when Blair Logan suddenly appeared at his side, grinning up at him.

  “Well, hey, Blair,” Sam said with a grin of his own for Libby’s best friend. Her calm, rational, normal best friend who, in jeans and a long-sleeved top that skimmed her slender figure rather than strangling it, wasn’t showing signs of going over to the dark side. At least not yet. “You got your braces off, huh?”

  “This morning, yeah,” she said, handing the check and a twenty to Ruby, then scooping Travis up into her arms to give him a hug, her cinnamon-colored hair glimmering in the streak of sunlight angling through a nearby window. “So,” she said, setting his son on his feet again, “you know those people who were in here earlier?”

  “Not really, no. I only stopped to help them out on the road.”

  “Oh. The woman looked kinda cool. For someone that old, I mean.”

  Then again, the dark side took many forms, he thought as Ruby handed the teenager her change.

  Once back in the truck, now loaded down with enough fencing supplies to circle the state, Sam drove the three blocks to Darryl Andrews’s garage, turning a blind eye to Travis’s sharing his half of the burrito with the dog in the back seat. Sure enough, Carly and her father were standing out in front, backpacks and duffels strewn at their feet, looking like they weren’t quite sure what to do next.