Читать онлайн книгу «Christmas Cowboy Duet» автора Marie Ferrarella

Christmas Cowboy Duet
Marie Ferrarella


“Why should you go out of your way like this for someone you don’t even know?”
Whitney had to understand his motives. First saving her from drowning and rescuing her car, and now helping her find a place to stay.
“I did have a hand in saving your life, so that gives us a kind of bond,” he told her. “I also want you to be happy living the life I saved.”
The man was practically a saint. Excited, relieved and feeling almost euphoric, Whitney threw her arms around his neck and declared, “You’re a lifesaver.” She said it a second before she kissed him.
She only meant for it to be a quick pass of her lips against his, the kind of kiss one good friend gives another. But at the last second, Liam turned his head just a fraction closer in her direction. What began as a fleeting kiss turned into a great deal more.
Something of substance and depth.
The exuberance she had initially felt stole her breath. Her body suddenly ignited, and had his arms not gone around her when they did, she would not be standing up right now. A wave of weakness snaked through her, robbing her of the ability to stand. Forcing her to cling to him in order to remain upright.
She shouldn’t be doing this.

Christmas Cowboy Duet
Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
MARIE FERRARELLA, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA
Award-winning author, has written more than two hundred books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com (http://www.marieferrarella.com).
To
Dr Seric Cusick, the ER physician who sewed my face back together.
Thank you!
Contents
Cover (#u6a3cf25c-5ae0-52c7-9a36-661fe63bdbcd)
Introduction (#u90012932-095c-5d6a-affd-760149608d58)
Title Page (#u987fb7cf-90d7-598f-8c63-c2d150f839a2)
About the Author (#uaa90806f-6392-5eb8-8d24-b0b109f6912e)
Dedication (#uea732737-5331-579f-b84c-c9951ab2011e)
Contents (#u23b85e88-912b-58d0-925c-8dee48de98c4)
Prologue (#u3282d7f8-e964-5e9e-94a8-879a666161d6)
Chapter One (#u5c102599-229f-5a6b-8c85-d91f260dd503)
Chapter Two (#uaedc2bf8-ed4d-59cd-9fb0-103ecf936000)
Chapter Three (#u490eafbe-42c5-5755-888c-0c846e7f404b)
Chapter Four (#u113cc346-a30c-520f-99e9-740d4a7f9ff0)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_65da3cf4-0b9a-504e-920f-9d8684ee92e9)
She’d never learned how to swim.
Somehow, there never seemed to be the right time to sneak in lessons.
Since she was born and bred in Los Angeles, close to an ocean and many pools, everyone just assumed she knew how to swim. It was a given. There were all those beaches, all that tempting water seductively lapping against the shore during those glorious endless summers.
But Whitney Marlowe had never had the time nor the inclination to get swimming lessons. Something more pressing always snagged her attention.
For as long as Whitney could remember, she’d always had this little voice inside of her head urging her on, whispering about goals that had yet to be met.
Swimming was recreational. Swimming was associated with fun. Even growing up, Whitney never seemed to have time for fun, except maybe for a few minutes at a time. A child of divorce, she was far too involved in making a name for herself to dwell on recreation. Everyone in her family was driven and it seemed as if from the very first moment of her life, she had been embroiled in one competition or another.
Oh, she dearly loved her siblings, all five of them, but she loved them just a tiny bit more whenever she could best them at something. It didn’t matter what, as long as she could come out the winner.
Her father had promoted this spirit of competition, telling his children that it would better equip them when they went out into the world. He’d been a hard taskmaster.
But right now, all those goals, all those triumphant moments, none of them mattered. None of them meant anything because the sum total of all that wasn’t going to save her.
This was it, Whitney thought in frantic despair.
This was the place where she was going to die. Outside of a town that hadn’t even been much more than an imperceptible dot on her map. A stupid little town prophetically named Forever. Because her car—and most likely her body—were going to become one with this godforsaken place. She would become eternally part of Forever’s terrain and nobody was even going to realize it because she would live at the bottom of some body of water.
Forever.
Oh, why had she taken this so-called “shortcut”? she upbraided herself. Why hadn’t she just gone the long way to Laredo the way she’d initially intended? It wasn’t as if she was trying to outdo her brother in trying to land this new account for the family recording label. She was the only one who’d been dispatched to audition the new band The Lonely Wolves. Desperate for their big break, the band would have waited for her to come until hell froze over.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t hell freezing over that was about to be the cause of her demise; it was the torrential rains, all but unheard of in this part of the country at this time of year.
And yet, here it was, a downpour the likes of which she had never witnessed before. The kind that would have had Noah quickly boarding up the door of his ark and nervously setting sail.
The rains had fallen so fast and so heavily, the dry, parched ground—clay for the most part—couldn’t begin to absorb it. One minute, she was driving through a basin, her windshield wipers going so fast, she thought they were in danger of just flying off into the wind. The next, the rain was falling so hard that the poor windshield wipers had met their match and did absolutely no good at all.
Stunned, Whitney had done her best, struggling to keep her vehicle straight, all the while getting that sinking feeling that she was fighting a losing battle. Before she knew it, her tires were no longer touching solid ground.
The rains were filling up the basin, turning the cracked, dusty depression into what amounted to a giant container for all this displaced, swiftly accumulating water.
She gave up trying to steer because nothing short of a rudder would have any effect on regaining control of her vehicle. She’d been driving the sports car with the top down and when the rains hit, they came so fast and so heavy, she couldn’t get the top to go back up. Now her car swayed and bobbed as well as filled up with water. It didn’t take a genius to know what would happen next.
She would be thrown from her car into the swirling waters—which meant that her life was over. She would die flailing frantically in the waters of a miniscule, backwater town.
She wasn’t ready to die.
She wasn’t!
Whitney opened her mouth to yell for help as loudly as she could. But the second she did, her mouth was immediately filled with water.
Holding on to the sides of the vehicle to steady herself, she tried to yell again. But the car, now at the mercy of the floodwaters, was utterly unsteady. Water was sloshing everywhere. As it crashed against her car, tipping it, Whitney lost her grip.
And then, just like that, she was separated from the vehicle. The forward motion had her all but flying from the car. The next second, she found herself immersed in the dark, swirling waters—waters that hadn’t been there a few short heartbeats ago.
Whitney tried desperately to get a second grip on any part of her car, hoping to somehow stay afloat, but the car was sinking.
There was no help coming from anywhere. No one knew she’d taken this shortcut. No one back home really bothered to trace her route—that was partially because she had insisted years ago not to be treated like a child. She could make her own decisions, her own waves, as well. Certainly, at thirty, she was no longer an unsteady child.
So other than competing with her, her siblings—except for Wilson, the oldest—all stayed clear of her, making a point not to get in her way. After all, she was the second oldest in the family.
Tears filled Whitney’s eyes before the rains could lash at them. This wasn’t how she wanted to die. And certainly not the age she wanted to die, either.
As if she had a choice, the little voice in her head mocked.
Nevertheless, just before she went under, Whitney screamed the word Help! again, screamed it as loudly as she could.
She swallowed more water.
And then the waters swallowed her.
Chapter One (#ulink_3227c0b0-97a4-50c4-9e16-8f51fade76fd)
The deluge seemed to come out of nowhere.
On his way back to town after a better-than-average rehearsal session with the band he’d helped put together, Liam and the Forever Band, Liam Murphy immediately made his way to high ground at the first sign of a serious rainfall.
Traveling alone out here, the youngest of the Murphy brothers was taking no chances—just in case. Flash floods didn’t occur often around here, but they did occur and “better safe than sorry” had been a phrase that had been drummed into his head by his older brother Brett from the time he and his other brother Finn had been knee-high to a grasshopper.
As it turned out, Liam had made it to high ground just in time. Rain fell with a vengeance, as if the very sky had been slashed open. As he watched in awed fascination, in less than ten minutes, the onslaught of rain turned the basin below from a virtual dust bowl to a veritable swimming pool—one filled with swirling waters.
More like a whirlpool, Liam silently amended, because the waters were sweeping so angrily over the terrain, mimicking the turbulent waters in a Jacuzzi.
Liam glanced at the clock on his dashboard. Depending on when this was going to let up, he was either going to be late, or very late. This, after he’d promised Brett he’d be in to work early. He was due at Murphy’s, Forever’s only saloon. Fortunately, it belonged to his brothers and him, but Brett was still not going to be happy about this turn of events.
Liam took out his phone, automatically glancing at the upper left-hand corner to see if there were any bars available.
There were.
“Not bad,” he murmured to himself when he saw the three small bars. “Service must be improving,” he noted with some relief.
There’d been a time, not all that long ago, when no bars were the norm. A few short years ago, the region around Forever, for all intents and purposes, was a dead zone. But progress could only be held off for so long. Civilization had gotten a foothold in the town, though it had to be all but dragged in, kicking and screaming. Even now, on occasion, the strength of the signal was touch and go.
Liam pressed the appropriate buttons. It took a very long minute before the call connected and he could hear the line on the other end ringing. He silently began to count off the number of times the other phone rang.
He was up to four—one more and it went to voice mail—when he heard the cell phone being picked up.
There was an almost deafening crackle and then he heard, “Murphy’s.”
The deep, baritone voice could only belong to Brett, the oldest Murphy brother, the one who had been responsible for keeping him and Finn from becoming wards of the state when their uncle died a mere eighteen months after both their parents had passed on. Brett had done it at great personal cost, but that was something he and Finn had only found out about years after the fact.
“Brett? It’s Liam. Looks like I’m going to be late for my shift,” he told his brother. The rain was beating against the rolled-up windows of his truck with a vengeance as if determined to gain access. All that was missing was a big, bad wolf ranting about huffing and puffing.
“Don’t tell me, you got caught in this storm.”
Liam could hear the concern in his brother’s voice—not that Brett would say as much. But it was understood. “Okay, I won’t tell you.”
He heard Brett sigh. “I always knew you didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain. Were you at least smart enough to get to high ground?”
“Yes, big brother, the truck and I are on high ground.” Even as he said the words, his windows stopped rattling and the rain stopped coming down in buckets. He looked up through the front windshield. It seemed to have stopped coming down at all. “Matter of fact,” he said, pausing for a moment as he rolled down the driver’s-side window and stuck his hand out, palm up, “I think it just stopped raining.”
It never ceased to amaze him just how fast rain seemed to turn itself on and then off again in this part of the country.
“I’d still give it a little time,” Brett warned. “In case it starts up again. I’d rather have you late than dead.”
Liam laughed shortly. “And on that heartwarming note, I think I’m going to end this call. See you later,” he said to his brother. The next moment, Liam hit the glowing red light on his screen, terminating the connection.
Tucking the phone into his back pocket, he continued driving very slowly. As he began guiding his truck back down the incline, he could have sworn he heard a woman’s scream.
Liam froze for a second, listening intently.
Nothing.
Had to be one of the ravens, he decided. Most likely a disgruntled bird that hadn’t managed to find shelter before the rains hit, although he hadn’t seen one just now.
Still, even though he was now driving down the incline to the trail he’d abandoned earlier, Liam kept listening, just to make sure that it was only his imagination—or some wayward animal—that was responsible for the scream he’d thought he’d heard.
If it was his imagination, it was given to re-creating an extremely high-pitched scream, Liam decided, because he’d heard the cry for help again, fainter this time but still urgent, still high—and resoundingly full of absolute terror.
Someone was in trouble, Liam thought, searching for the source of the scream.
Throwing caution to the wind, he pushed down on the accelerator. The truck all but danced down the remainder of the incline in what amounted to a jerky motion. He had a death grip on the steering wheel as he proceeded to scan as much of the area around him as humanly possible.
Liam saw that the basin had completely filled up with rainwater. Something like that was enough to compromise any one of a number of people, even those who were familiar with this sort of occurrence and had lived in and around Forever most of their lives.
The water could rush at an unsuspecting driver with the speed of an oncoming train. Sadly, drownings in a flash flood were not unheard of.
With his eyes intently focused, Liam scanned the area again.
And again, he saw nothing except brackish-looking water.
“Maybe it was just the wind,” Liam murmured under his breath.
He knew that there were times when the wind could sound exactly like a mournful woman pining after a missing lover.
If Brett were here with him, his older brother would have told him to get his tail on home.
Stop letting your imagination run away with you, Brett would have chided.
Liam was just about to get back on the road home when something—a gut feeling, or maybe just some stray, nagging instinct—made him look down into the rushing waters flooding the basin one last time.
That was when he saw her.
Saw the woman.
One minute she wasn’t there at all, the next, a half-drowned-looking woman, her shoulder-length brown hair plastered to her face, came shooting up, breaking the water’s surface like a man-made geyser, her arms flailing about madly as they came into contact with nothing but the air. It was obvious that she was desperately searching for something solid to grab on to.
The woman was drowning.
He’d only witnessed such abject panic once before in his life. Then it had been on the face of a friend who had accidentally discharged a pistol and missed his head by an inch, or less. The horror of what could have happened had been visible in his friend’s shaken expression.
This time the horror of what could be was on the face of an angel. A very desperate, panicky, wet angel.
Before he had time to assess if this waterlogged angel was real or a mere figment of his overactive, overwrought imagination, Liam leaped out of his truck and came flying down the rest of the incline. There was no time to think, to evaluate and make calculated decisions. There was only time to act and act quickly.
Which he did.
Without pausing, he flung off his jacket because it would keep his arms too confined and from the little he had time to assess, he was going to need all the upper-arm power he could manage to summon. Leaving on his boots and hat, Liam dived into the water.
* * *
SHE WAS GOING DOWN for the last time.
Four, she’d counted four. Four times she’d gone down and managed to somehow get back up again, desperately gasping for air.
Her thoughts were colliding wildly with one another. And she was hallucinating, Whitney was sure of it, because she’d just seen someone plunging into the water to rescue her.
Except that he wasn’t real. This area was deserted. There was no one around, no one to rescue her.
She was going to die.
Suddenly, Whitney thought she felt something. Or was that someone? Whatever it was, it was grabbing her by the arm, no, wait, by the waist. Was she being pulled up, out of the homicidal waters?
No, it wasn’t possible.
Wasn’t possible.
It was just her mind giving her something to hang on to before life finally, irrevocably drained out of her forever.
Just a figment of her imagination. This rescuing hero she’d conjured up, he wasn’t real.
And very, very soon, Whitney knew she wouldn’t be real, either. But right now, she could have sworn she was being roughly dragged up out of the water.
Where was the light? Wasn’t she supposed to be going toward some kind of light? Whitney wondered. But there was no light, there was only pressure and pain and the sound of yelling.
Did they yell in heaven?
Or was this the Other Place? She hadn’t been an angel, but she wasn’t bad enough to land in hell.
Was she?
But being sent to hell would explain why something was beating against her, pushing on her ribs over and over again.
* * *
“C’MON, DAMN IT, breathe! Breathe!” Liam ordered, frustrated and fearful all at the same time. The woman wasn’t responding.
Damn it, Brett was the one who should be here, not him, Liam thought as he continued with his chest compressions. Brett would know what to do to save this woman. He just remembered bits and pieces of CPR, not from any sort of training but from programs he’d watched on TV as a kid.
Still, it was the only thing he could think to do and it was better than standing helplessly by, watching this woman die in front of him.
So he continued, almost on automatic pilot. Ten compressions against the chest, then mouth to mouth, and then back to compressions again until the dead were brought back to life.
Except that this woman—whoever she was—wasn’t responding.
He was losing her.
The thought made him really angry and he worked harder.
Liam began another round, moving faster, pushing harder this time. He fully intended on continuing in this manner until he got some sort of a response from the woman he’d rescued from the water. Granted she’d looked more dead than alive when he’d pulled her out, but when he put his head against her chest, he was positive that he’d detected just the faintest sound of a heartbeat.
It gave him just a sliver of hope and he intended to build on that.
* * *
IT CAME TO HER in a blurred, painful haze: she wasn’t dead.
Dead people didn’t hurt.
Did they?
Whitney hadn’t given much thought to reaching the afterlife. She’d always been far too preoccupied in getting ahead in the life that she had on earth. But she felt fairly certain that after transitioning to the afterlife, pain and discomfort were no longer involved, certainly not to this degree—and she was definitely experiencing both.
Big-time.
After what seemed like an absolute eternity, Whitney came to the realization that she wasn’t inside of some dark abyss—or hell. The problem was that her eyes were shut. Not simply shut, it felt more as if they were glued down that way.
With what felt like almost superhuman effort, she kept on struggling until she finally managed to pry her eyes open.
Focusing took another full minute—her surroundings were a complete blur at first, wavy lines that made no sense. Part of her was convinced that she was still submerged.
But that was air she was taking in, not water, so she couldn’t be underwater any longer. And what was that odd, heavy pain across her chest that she kept feeling almost rhythmically?
And then she saw him.
Saw a man with wet, medium blond hair just inches away from her face—and he had his hands crisscrossed on top of her chest.
“Why...are...you...pushing...on...my...chest?” The raspy words felt as if they had dragged themselves up a throat that was lined with jagged pieces of glass.
They weren’t any louder than a faint whisper.
Liam’s head jerked up and he almost lost his balance, certainly his count. Stunned, he stared at her in surprise and disbelief.
It worked! he thought, silently congratulating himself. She was alive!
He’d saved a life!
“I’m giving you CPR,” he told her. “And I guess it worked,” he added with pride and no small sense of satisfaction. He felt almost light-headed from his success.
“Then...I’m...not...dead?” she asked uncertainly. It took Whitney a second to process this influx of information on the heels of the panic that had enveloped her.
The last thing she clearly remembered was being thrown from the car and sinking into dirty water.
“Not unless I am, too—and I wasn’t when I last checked,” he told her. He’d actually saved a life. How about that? Right now, Liam felt as if he could walk on water.
It took him a minute to get back to reality.
The woman he’d rescued was looking at him with the widest green eyes he’d ever seen. She tried to sit up only to have him push her back down again. Confused, disoriented, she looked at him uncertainly.
“I don’t think you should sit up just yet,” he told her. She wanted to argue with him, but the energy just wasn’t there. “You almost drowned. Why don’t you give yourself a couple of minutes to recover?” he suggested tactfully.
“I’m...fine...” she insisted.
She certainly was fine, Liam couldn’t help thinking. Even looking like a partially drowned little rabbit, there was no denying that this woman was strikingly beautiful. No amount of wet, slicked-back hair could change that.
Still, Liam didn’t want her trying to run off just yet. She could collapse and hit her head—or worse. He hadn’t just risked his own life to pull her out of the rushing waters only to have her bring about her own demise.
He continued to restrain her very gently.
“I just saved your life,” Liam told her patiently. “Humor me.”
The rains had obviously stopped and the waters, even now, were trying, ever so slowly, to recede. Within a couple of hours or so, it would be as if this had never happened—except that it had and an out-of-towner had almost died in it.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time, he mused. He was grateful now that band practice had run a little over. If it hadn’t, he would have passed the basin when the rains hit and he would have never been there to rescue this woman.
“Okay.” Whitney gave in, partially because she felt about as weak as a day-old kitten and partially because she was trying to humor the cowboy who had apparently rescued her. “But just for a few minutes,” she stipulated, her speech still a little slow, definitely not as animated as it normally was.
Whitney tried to move her shoulders and got nowhere. Whoever this man was, he was strong. Definitely stronger than she was, she thought.
She’d never trusted strangers—but this one had saved her life so maybe a little trust was in order.
“Does this kind of thing happen often?” Whitney asked warily. Because if it did, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live here.
Why not? her inner voice mocked. You live in the land of earthquakes. One natural disaster is pretty much like another.
Her expression remained stony as she waited for the cowboy to give her an answer.
“No, not often,” Liam assured her, removing his hands from her shoulders. “But when it does, I guarantee that it leaves one hell of an impression.”
The woman was trying to sit up again, he realized. Rather than watch her digging her elbows into the ground to try to push herself up, Liam put his hands back on her shoulders, exerting just the right amount of pressure to keep her down.
The look she gave him was a mixture of exasperation and confusion.
“Why don’t you just hold on to me and I’ll get you into a sitting position,” Liam suggested.
Having no choice—she was not in any shape to outwrestle him and she suspected that out-arguing this gentle-spoken cowboy might be harder than it appeared—Whitney did as he proposed.
With her arms wrapped around his neck, Whitney was slowly raised into a sitting position. She realized that she was just a few feet away from what had been angry, dangerous waters a very short time ago, not to mention her final resting place.
The scene registered for the first time. The man beside her had risked his life to save hers. Why?
“You dived into that?” she asked in semi-disbelief.
Liam nodded. “I had to,” he replied simply. “You weren’t about to walk on water and come out on your own. What happened?” he asked. “Did the water overwhelm you?” Then, before she could answer, he added another basic question to the growing stack in his head. “Why weren’t you swimming?”
She was about to lie, saying whatever excuse came to mind, but then she stopped herself. This man had risked his life in order to save her. She owed him the truth.
“I don’t know how,” she murmured almost under her breath.
Liam stared at her, still not 100 percent convinced. “Really?”
Her very last ounce of energy had been summarily depleted as she had devoted every single ounce within her to staying alive in the swiftly moving waters. If it hadn’t been, she would have been annoyed at his display of disbelief.
“Really,” she answered wearily.
“Never met anyone who didn’t know how to swim,” he commented.
“Well, now you have,” she answered, trying her best to come around enough to stand up.
Since the torrents had abated and she was now sitting on the ground, utterly soaked, Whitney looked around the immediate area.
That’s when it finally hit her. She wasn’t overlooking it. It wasn’t anywhere in sight.
“Where’s my car?” she asked the man who had rescued her.
Liam looked at her a touch uncertainly.
“What car?”
Chapter Two (#ulink_1495acde-d639-541e-8aba-eb34c00763b4)
“What do you mean ‘What car?’” Whitney asked, bewildered as she echoed her rescuer’s words back to him. “My car.”
The events of the past few minutes were far from crystal clear in her mind, however, amid the lashing rains and the tumultuous rising waters in the basin, Whitney was fairly certain that her car hadn’t sunk to the bottom of the threatening waters. She and the car had gone their separate ways, but she was sure that she’d been thrown from the vehicle as it was raised up, not pushed down.
Liam shook his head. “I didn’t see any car,” he told her honestly. “All I saw was you.”
“But I was in a car,” she insisted. “At least, I think I was.” She looked at him, struggling to keep her disorientation and mounting panic contained. “How do you think I got out here?”
Liam had done very little thinking in the past few minutes, mostly reacting. He was still reacting right now. Saving a life was a heady feeling and it certainly didn’t hurt matters that she was a knockout, even soaking wet.
He shrugged in response to her question and hazarded a guess, his expression giving nothing away.
“Divine intervention?” It was half a question, half an answer.
“No, I was driving a car,” Whitney retorted, then took a breath. Her nerves felt as if they were systematically being shredded. “A pearl-white Mercedes,” she described. There couldn’t be any other cars like that around, she reasoned, not in a town that was hardly larger than a puddle. “A sports car,” she elaborated. “I wound up being thrown from my car because I couldn’t get the top up once that awful deluge started. Don’t you people get weather warnings?” she asked, frustrated. She’d always been in control of a situation and what she’d just been through had taken that away from her.
She didn’t like feeling this way.
“Sometimes,” Liam answered, although he had a feeling that wouldn’t have done her any good. The woman would have had to have her radio station set to local news and he had a hunch she would have been listening to some hard-rock singer.
Her story about being thrown from her vehicle was completely plausible. There was no way she would have been out here without a car or at least some mode of transportation.
But if that was the case, where was her car? Had it gotten completely filled with rainwater and wound up submerged? If so, it would turn up once the floodwaters receded. Unless the turbulent basin waters had succeeded in dragging it out to the gulf.
In either case, the car she was asking about wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Just for good measure, and because the woman appeared so utterly distraught, Liam looked around the surrounding area again.
Slowly.
Which was when he saw it.
Saw the car the woman had to be asking about. The topless white vehicle wasn’t lying mangled on the side of the newly created bank, but it might as well have been for all the use she could get out of it in its present position.
How was she going to take this latest twist? he couldn’t help wondering.
Only one way to find out, Liam decided, bracing himself. “Is that your car?” he asked, pointing toward the only vehicle—besides his own—in their vicinity.
Hope sprang up within her as Whitney looked around. But she didn’t see anything that even resembled her gleaming white vehicle—
Until she did.
Whitney wasn’t aware of her mouth dropping open as she rose to her feet and walked toward her car, moving like someone in a trance—or more accurately, in a very bad dream.
“Yes.” Her voice was barely a whisper and she felt numb all over as she stared at the Mercedes in utter disbelief. Her beautiful white vehicle appeared to be relatively intact—but there was one major problem with it.
The white sports car was caught up in a tree.
“What’s it doing up there?” she cried, her voice cracking at the end of her question.
None of this seemed real to her, not the sudden deluge coming out of nowhere, not the fact that she had almost drowned in water that hadn’t been there minutes earlier and certainly not the fact that her car now had an aerial view of the area.
“By the looks of it, I’d say hanging,” Liam replied quietly.
“Can’t you get it down?” she asked him. She hadn’t the faintest idea on how to proceed from here if he gave her a negative answer.
As she looked up at him hopefully, Liam gave her a crooked grin. “I might be strong,” he told her, “but I’m not that strong.” Having said that, Liam took out his cell phone. Within a second, his fingers were tapping out a number on his keypad.
“Are you calling AAA?” she asked.
Again, Liam smiled. He was calling the only one everyone in the area called when they had car trouble, Forever’s best—and only—mechanic.
“I’m calling Mick,” he told her. “He might be rated AAA, I don’t know, but he’s been a car mechanic for as long as I’ve known him and he’s pretty much seen everything.”
Maybe it was because her brain was somewhat addled from its underwater adventure, but the fact that this cowboy was calling some hayseed mechanic didn’t exactly fill her with confidence or sound overly encouraging to her.
Whitney took a step closer to the tree and to her dismay, she realized that she’d lost one of her shoes during her brief nonswim. That left her very lopsided. The fact only registered as she found herself pitching forward.
The upshot of that was she would have been communing—face-first—with the wet ground if the man who had initially pulled her out of the water hadn’t lunged and made a grab for her now, grabbing her by the waist.
“Are you okay?” Liam wanted to know, doing his own quick once-over of the woman—just in case. His arm stayed where it was, around her waist.
She wanted to say yes, she was fine. She’d been trained to say yes and then pull back, so that she could go back to managing on her own. But training or not, she still felt rather shaky inside, the way a person who had just come face-to-face with their own mortality might.
Given that state of mind, in a moment of weakness, Whitney answered him truthfully, “I don’t know yet.”
Turning so that he was facing her and the incline, he indicated his truck. “Why don’t you sit down in the cab of my truck while we wait for Mick to get here? Or, better yet, I could take you to the clinic in town if you want to be checked out.”
“Clinic?” she repeated with a slight bewildered frown. “You mean hospital, right?”
“No, I mean clinic,” he replied. “If you want a hospital, I could take you,” he said, then warned her, “but the closest one is approximately fifty miles away in Pine Ridge.”
He was kidding, right? Were the hospitals around here really that far apart?
“Fifty miles away?” Whitney echoed, utterly stunned. “What if there’s a medical emergency?” she asked.
Fortunately, they had that covered now—but it hadn’t always been that way. The residents of Forever had gone some thirty years between doctors until Dan Davenport had come to fill the vast vacancy.
“It would have to be a pretty big emergency to be something that Dr. Dan and Lady Doc couldn’t handle,” Liam told her.
Very gently, he tried to guide her over to his truck, but the petite woman firmly held her ground. She had to be stronger than she looked.
Dr. Dan. Lady Doc. She felt like Alice after the fictional character had slid down the rabbit hole. For a second, Whitney thought that the cowboy was putting her on, but there wasn’t even a hint of a smile curving his rather sensual mouth and not so much as a glimmer of humor in his eyes.
He was serious.
What kind of a place was this?
“So, do you want to go?” Liam prodded.
“Go? Go where?” Whitney asked. Her light eyebrows came together in what looked like an upside-down V.
“To the clinic,” Liam repeated patiently. If she couldn’t keep abreast of the conversation, maybe he should just take her to the clinic even if she didn’t want to go. He sincerely doubted that she could offer any real resistance if he decided to load her into his truck and drive into town. And it would be for her own good.
“No, I’m okay,” Whitney insisted. “A little rattled, but I’m okay,” she repeated with more conviction. “And I’ll be more okay when my car is taken down out of that tree.”
Looking over her shoulder to see if she had finally convinced him, she found that the cowboy had walked away from her. The next moment, he was back. He had a fleece-lined denim jacket in his hand that he then proceeded to drape over her shoulders.
“You look cold,” he explained when she looked at him warily. “And you’re already chilled. Thought this might help.”
Her natural inclination to argue subsided in the face of this new display of thoughtfulness. Besides, she had begun to feel a cold chill corkscrewing down along her spine. The jacket was soft and warm and given half a chance, she would have just curled up in it and gone to sleep. She was exhausted. The next moment, she was fighting that feeling.
Whitney smiled at the cowboy and said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” he responded, then extended his hand to her. “I’m Liam, by the way. Liam Murphy.”
Whitney slipped her hand into his, absently noting how strong it felt as she shook it. “Whitney Marlowe,” she responded.
Liam’s grin widened. “Pleased to meet you, Whitney Marlowe,” he said, then added, “Sorry the circumstances weren’t better.”
Whitney laughed softly to herself. “They could have been worse,” she told him. When he looked at her quizzically, she explained, “You might not have heard me in time and then I would have drowned.”
What she said was true, but he had learned a long time ago not to focus on the bad, only the good. “Not a pretty picture to dwell on,” he said.
“Nonetheless, I owe you my life.”
The grin on his face widened considerably. If she really felt that way, he could take it a step further. “You know, in some corners of the world, that would mean that your life is now mine.”
“Oh?” The single word was wrapped in wariness. “But this isn’t ‘some corner of the world.’ This is Texas,” she pointed out. “And people don’t own other people here anymore and haven’t for a very long time,” she added just in case he was getting any funny ideas.
He could almost feel her tension escalating. “Relax,” he soothed her in a calming voice that, judging by her expression, just irritated her more. “It’s just a saying. You sure you don’t want me taking you into town so you can get checked out at the clinic?”
“I’m sure,” she insisted as adamantly as she could, given the circumstances. Her throat felt as if she’d swallowed a frog wearing pointy stilettos that scraped across her throat with every word she uttered.
The noise she heard coming in the distance alerted her of the car mechanic’s impending arrival.
Whitney turned toward the sound and if she’d been expecting a large, souped-up-looking tow truck, she was sadly disappointed. Mick, the town mechanic who had been summoned to the scene, was driving a beat-up twenty-year-old truck that had definitely seen far better days.
Stopping his truck directly opposite Liam’s, Mick lumbered out. Thin, he still had the gait and stride of a man who had once been a great deal heavier than the shadow he cast now.
Mick took out his bandanna-like handkerchief and wiped his brow, then passed it over his graying, perpetual two-day-old stubble.
“What can I do you for, Little Murphy?” he asked Liam, tucking the bandanna back in his pocket.
Putting one hand on Mick’s sloping shoulder, Liam directed the man’s attention to the reason he had been called. “Lady got her car stuck in that tree.”
“And you want me to get it down,” Mick guessed. Taking off his cap, he scratched his bald head as he took a couple of steps closer to the tree.
“That’s the general idea,” Liam replied.
Mick nodded his head. “And a good one, too,” he commented seriously, “except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Whitney asked, cutting in. She didn’t like being ignored and left out of the conversation. After all, it was her car up there.
“The thing of it is,” Mick told her honestly, “I don’t have anything I can use to get that car down.” He squinted, continuing to look at the car. “I could cut the tree down,” he offered. “That would get the car down, but I sure couldn’t guarantee its condition once it hit the ground again.” His brown eyes darted toward Liam. “You’re going to need something a lot more flexible than my old truck for this.”
“So what do I do?” Whitney asked. This was a nightmare. A genuine nightmare.
“Beats me,” Mick said in all honesty.
Liam suddenly had an idea. “Would a cherry picker work?”
Mick bit the inside of his cheek, a clear sign that he was thinking the question over. “It might,” he said. “But where are you gonna get one of those?”
“From Connie,” Liam replied, brightening up. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? he silently demanded. It seemed like the perfect solution to the problem.
“Who’s Connie?” Whitney asked, unwilling to be left on the sidelines again. She looked from Liam to the mechanic.
“Finn’s fiancée,” Liam answered, clearly excited about this new solution he’d just come up with. Taking out his cell phone again, he made another call.
Connie, Finn, Mick. It sounded like a cast of characters in a strange college revue, Whitney thought. How did any of this get her reunited with her car? she wondered impatiently.
Because the man who rescued her from a watery grave was on the phone, she glanced at the scruffy man in coveralls whom Liam had called to the scene first. “Who’s Finn?” she asked.
“That’s Liam’s brother. One of them, anyway,” Mick amended.
“And this Finn, his fiancée has a cherry picker?” Whitney asked incredulously. This definitely sounded surreal to her. What kind of woman had a cherry picker on her property? And what would she be doing with one, anyway?
“She does,” Mick confirmed.
It still sounded unbelievable to her. Whitney waited for more of an explanation. When none came, she realized she hadn’t gone about this the right way. She had to ask for an explanation before she could expect one to be forthcoming. Even that struck her as strange. Didn’t these people like to spin tall tales, or go endlessly on and on about things?
So why did she have to pull everything out of them? “Why does she have a cherry picker?” Whitney asked.
Liam had quickly placed and completed his call. Tucking his phone away, he answered her question for her before Mick could. “Because Connie’s in the construction business and she’s currently building Forever’s first hotel.”
Something was finally making sense, Whitney thought with relief. “And she’s willing to let you borrow it?”
“Better than that,” Liam told her. “She’s willing to have one of her crew drive it over here and get your car down,” he corrected.
Liam took no offense at the extra measure. He was actually relieved about it. Intrigued though he was about getting a chance to handle a cherry picker, this was really not the time for him to get a new experience under his belt. Especially if he wound up dropping the very thing he was attempting to rescue.
Besides, he’d already had his new experience for the day—he had never saved a person’s life before and even though he had expertly deflected compliments and thanks, knowing that he had saved a life still generated a radiant feeling within him.
Having answered Whitney’s question, he turned toward Mick and asked the mechanic, “Are you going to stick around?”
Mick nodded his head.
“The car might need a little babying once it’s on flat ground.” He gestured toward the white car. “Those kind of vehicles really thrive on attention.”
Whitney frowned. “You’re talking about my car like it’s a person.”
Mick obviously saw no reason to contradict her. “Yes, ma’am, I am. And it is,” the mechanic assured her. “And it’s a she, not a he. It responds to a soft touch and kindness much better than to a rough hand,” he explained, making his case.
Whitney opened her mouth to protest and argue the point. She had every intention on setting the grizzled old man straight.
But then she shut her mouth again, deciding that it really wasn’t worth the effort. This wasn’t the big city and people thought differently out here in the sticks. The mechanic seemed cantankerous and if she had a guess, she would have said that the man was extremely set in his ways—as was his right, she supposed.
When she got down to it, as long as this mechanic got her car down out of the tree and running, what he called the car or how he interacted with it really didn’t matter all that much.
“What are you doing here?” Liam asked her, averting what he took to be a budding clash of wills.
Whitney turned around to look at the cowboy. The question, coming out of the blue, caught her off guard. “What?”
“What are you doing here?” Liam repeated. “In Forever,” he added in case she didn’t understand his question.
Whitney laughed shortly. “You mean when I’m not drowning in a flash flood?”
Liam’s easy grin materialized again. “Yeah, when you’re not doing that. What brought you to Forever? Are you visiting someone?”
As a rule, they didn’t get many people traveling to Forever—unless they were visiting a relative and Liam was fairly certain that if this woman was related to anyone in town, he would have known about it.
Still, in the past couple of years, they’d had people coming to the town and making changes to the structure of Forever’s very way of life.
“Nothing,” Whitney told him. “I was just on my way to Laredo.”
“Laredo?” He rolled the name over in his head, mentally pinpointing the city on a map. “That’s kind of out of your way, isn’t it?” Liam asked.
She didn’t like being wrong. Having that pointed out to her was a pet peeve of hers and she had trouble ignoring it. “I was just following the map—”
“Guess your map’s wrong, then,” Liam informed her simply.
“I’m beginning to get that impression,” she answered with a barely suppressed sigh.
Chapter Three (#ulink_f091c30d-74e5-521e-bbcd-21f9b40dfaba)
“Now, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Mick commented.
Before either Liam or Whitney could ask what he was referring to, the mechanic pointed behind them. Turning, they saw a bright orange cherry picker being driven straight toward them.
Maybe this was going to turn out all right after all, Whitney thought.
“Somebody put out a call for a cherry picker?” the machine’s operator, Henry MacKenzie, asked cheerfully as he climbed down from inside the cab. He approached Liam, obviously assuming that he was the one in charge. “Ms. Carmichael told me to tell you that this baby is at your disposal for as long as you need it. I guess, by association, I am, too. Unless you know how to operate this thing and want to do the honors yourself,” the tall, burly man added.
Henry, along with several others on the construction crew, had initially been sent out from Houston by the construction company’s business manager, Stewart Emerson. Highly skilled laborers, they were needed to operate the machinery that had been shipped out to do the basic foundation work for Forever’s first hotel.
At this point, that part of the project had been finished more than a month ago, but the men—and their machines—had been instructed to remain on-site until the project was completed. Emerson had paid them well to remain in Forever and on call—just in case some unforeseen glitch suddenly made their services necessary.
Eager though he might have been to try his hand at operating the fancy forklift’s controls, Liam had no desire to risk retrieving the car from out of the tree merely to satisfy his own curiosity. One wrong move on his part and the car was liable to become a thousand-piece puzzle.
He definitely didn’t want to be the one responsible for that unfortunate turn of events.
“No, haven’t got a clue,” Liam confessed. “She’s all yours.”
Henry nodded his head, clearly expecting the reply he’d just heard.
“So why do you think you need a cherry picker way out here?” Henry asked. He looked from Liam to Mick and then to Whitney.
“Because of that,” Liam answered, pointing to one of the trees along the basin.
“That tree?” Henry asked. “Why would you— Oh.” The cherry picker’s operator stopped abruptly as he took in the entire scene and finally saw the precariously perched vehicle. He laughed shortly as he shook his head in wonder. “You people sure don’t make things easy out here, do you?”
Anxious about the condition of her sports car, Whitney cut to the chase. “Do you think you can get it down?” she asked.
“Oh, I can get it down, all right. But it’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to be fast,” Henry warned. “And it might not even be in one piece. But I can get it down,” he reasoned.
Getting the car piecemeal wasn’t going to do her any good. “How long would it take you if you took the proper precautions to get it down in one piece?” Whitney asked.
“Won’t know until I start,” Henry answered. “I’m also going to have to have someone working with me,” he added, giving the situation further thought. “This is not a one-man job.”
“What do you need?” Liam asked.
“I need someone in the basket,” Henry said, nodding at the extreme upper part of the cherry picker. “To secure the car,” he explained. “Otherwise, the damn thing’ll just come crashing down to the ground the second we try to move it.”
“Tell me what to do,” Liam told the operator, volunteering for the job.
Henry laughed softly to himself. “The first thing you need to do is back away from the cherry picker and let me call someone on-site,” the man said seriously. “No offense—and thanks for the offer—but this’ll go a whole lot better and faster if someone with experience is doing it.”
Liam took no offense at being turned down. “I get it. But in the interest of time, I thought I’d volunteer.” And then he felt compelled to add, “Securing a car isn’t rocket science.”
“Might not be rocket science,” Henry agreed, “but one wrong move and no car, either. Hey, it don’t matter to me one way or the other, but I think this little lady might have something to say about it.” Henry’s small, deep-set brown eyes darted toward her.
Whitney was still having trouble wrapping her mind around this rather strange turn of events: first she nearly drowned, and then her vehicle was thrown into a tree. It all felt like some sort of a bizarre nightmare. A small part of Whitney thought that she’d actually wake up at any moment.
The more practical side of her, however, knew that was not about to happen. Her car really was stuck in a tree—and would remain there unless drastic measures were taken.
“Do whatever it takes,” Whitney told the machine operator.
“Yes, ma’am,” Henry replied. He was on his cell phone in less than five seconds, calling for one of the other crew members to come out. “Need a hand here, Rick,” he said to the man who had answered his call. “You’re not going to believe this,” he added with a deep chuckle. “No, I’m not going to tell you. This you’ve got to come out and see for yourself. Boss lady okayed this job,” he added in case there were any questions about priorities. Henry rattled off the same directions to Rick that he had been given earlier.
With that part of it taken care of, Liam turned his attention to Mick. “Looks like it’s going to be a while before they have the car on solid ground,” Liam told the mechanic. “Why don’t you go back to the shop? I can call you once the car’s ready to be looked over,” Liam suggested.
Mick raised his rather wide shoulders and then let them drop again in a dismissive shrug. “Ain’t got no other place to be right now,” he confessed. “Mrs. Abernathy took her old Buick last night so there’s nothing for me to work on in the shop. I might as well stay here and watch history being made,” Mick said philosophically, his eyes all but glowing with fascination as he stared up at the treed vehicle.
“Suit yourself,” Liam said. “You don’t mind if I take her to the diner to get a bite to eat, do you?” he asked, indicating Whitney. Since he was the one who had put in the call to Mick in the first place, he felt a little guilty about leaving the man here more or less on call.
“Not as long as you bring me back somethin’,” Mick qualified.
“Like what?”
Mick began to slowly circle the tree, searching for the path of least resistance. “Surprise me,” Mick answered.
Having been privy to the entire exchange, Whitney frowned—deeply. Granted there was a part of her that longed for a strong, forceful man to take charge. However, the greater part of Whitney was wary of someone usurping her control over her life and that was exactly the part that was presently balking at what Liam had just told his mechanic friend.
“What if I don’t want to go for ‘a bite’?” Whitney asked.
“I’m not about to force-feed you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Liam said, then asked, “You’re not hungry?”
She wanted to say no, she wasn’t. The problem was that she was hungry. Very.
As if to bear witness to that, her stomach suddenly rumbled—not quietly but all too loudly.
“If you’re not hungry,” Liam continued, “I think you should tell your stomach because I get the definite impression that your stomach seems to think it’s very hungry.”
She lifted one shoulder in a disinterested shrug. The jacket began to slip off and she made a grab for it, returning it to its place.
“I suppose it can’t hurt to go get something to eat,” she allowed.
“Well, maybe in some cases,” Liam told her in all honesty, “but not when it involves Miss Joan.”
Following him to where he had parked his truck, Whitney stopped walking and took hold of his elbow, turning him around to face her.
“Wait, are you taking me to someone’s house?” she asked, ready to put the skids on this venture before it got underway. She was in no mood to be friendly and exchange small talk with some stranger bearing the quaint name of “Miss Joan.” Right now, she wasn’t up to exchanging discomfort for a hot meal.
“No, we’re not going to someone’s house,” Liam assured her. “Although she’s there so much, there are times I think that the diner really could double for her home.”
Her head hurt and all these details that Liam kept tossing out were just making it that much worse. “‘She,’ who’s this ‘she’ you’re referring to?” Whitney asked.
A control freak for most of her life—she no longer saw the point in disputing her siblings’ accusations—it was hard for her to just hand over the reins to someone in matters that concerned her. But she had no idea when this person the cherry picker operator had called was going to get there. And she was hungry.
She supposed there was no harm in going along with this wandering Good Samaritan, she thought, slanting a look in Liam’s direction—at least until her car was back on solid ground.
“Miss Joan,” Liam said, answering her question. “She’s the ‘she’ I was referring to. It’s her diner.”
“Oh.”
The pieces started to fall into place, making some sort of sense. She supposed she was being too edgy. Whenever she felt the slightest bit insecure, she could be demanding, needing to know every detail of the future. This man who had rescued her—and was now trying to rescue her car—didn’t deserve to have her constantly challenging his every move.
“All right. As long as I get a call the minute my car is down and ready to go,” Whitney ordered. She was looking directly at Henry when she said it.
“You heard the lady,” Liam said, eyeing Mick. “Do me a favor and call me on my cell.”
“You got it,” Mick replied, then promised, “The second it’s down, I’ll give you a call.”
Henry nodded his agreement.
At which point Liam regarded Whitney. “Good enough?” he asked her.
It would have to be, Whitney decided.
“Let’s go,” she told Liam just as her stomach offered up another symphony of off-key, embarrassing growling noises.
Liam brought her over to his truck, opened the passenger door and stood by it, waiting for her to get in.
“Are you planning on strapping me in, too?” Whitney asked, wondering why he was just standing there like that instead of getting in on the driver’s side.
He grinned. “Just want to make sure you don’t need any help getting in,” he explained.
Buckling up, Whitney flashed him a look of irritation. “Why, do I look feeble to you? I’ve been getting into cars and sitting down rather successfully for more than a couple of decades now.”
He answered her truthfully. “You don’t look feeble but you do look pale.”
The last thing she needed was to be criticized by a cowboy.
“Good,” Whitney quipped. “I was going for a pale look,” she told him flippantly.
“Then I guess you’ve succeeded.” Liam started up his truck, then rolled down the window on his side before putting the truck into Drive. As he drove past Henry and Mick, he called out, “I’ll be back soon.”
Both men nodded in acknowledgment.
With that, Liam drove toward town.
* * *
THERE WAS SILENCE for the first few minutes of the drive. Not the comfortable kind of silence that two people who ended each other’s sentences might have slipped into, but the awkward kind of silence that became steadily deeper and more ominous as the seconds ticked into minutes, then hung around oppressively.
Enduring it for as long as possible, Liam decided that enough was enough.
“You always have this chip on your shoulder, or is this something new for you?” he asked Whitney.
“I don’t have a chip,” she informed Liam indignantly, sitting up stiffly as her entire body became completely rigid.
“Yes, you do,” Liam contradicted. “From where I’m sitting, that chip is pretty damn big and very nearly impenetrable. In case you haven’t noticed, these people are just trying to help you.”
“I noticed,” she said a bit too defensively.
Whitney paused, pressing her lips together. She was searching for a way to get her point across without sounding as if she had an ax to grind. She really didn’t; it was just that because of this setback, she had gone into overdrive. Whenever that happened, she wound up having the kind of personality that put people off. All except for the people she signed to recording contracts. That group would have been willing to cut the devil some slack as long as they got what they were after: a shot at the big time. And because of what she did for a living and the label she was associated with, she was their first step in the right direction.
“But they’re not trying to help me out of the goodness of their hearts, it’s just business. Everyone’s going to get paid for their services,” she told Liam, wondering why he thought that was so altruistic.
“Mick’s hanging around, waiting for your car to be brought down from its perch. A savvy businessman would have gone back to the shop—and charged you just for coming out,” Liam pointed out.
“This way he gets to charge me for his downtime,” she countered.
Liam shook his head. “That’s not the way Mick operates,” he disagreed, then said with emphasis, “That’s not how any of us operate around here.”
She wasn’t ready to believe that. After all, this was just some tiny Texas town, not Oz. However, in the interest of not starting an argument, she merely said, “If you say so.”
“I do, but that doesn’t mean anything. I guess you’ll just have to see for yourself. There it is,” he said abruptly.
She sat up a little straighter, as if she’d just been put on notice.
“There ‘what’ is?” Whitney asked, her green eyes sweeping up and down the muddy road ahead of her. From where she was sitting, it just looked like open country—and more of the same.
“Miss Joan’s,” Liam elaborated, gesturing up ahead and to the left.
As Whitney looked, the diner came into view more clearly. It looked like a long, silver tube on wheels and it was completely unimpressive in her opinion.
It was also rather blinding.
The sun, which had decided to come out in full regalia now that all the water had been purged out of the sky, seemed to be literally bouncing off the sides of the diner. It made it rather difficult to see, if anyone wanted to drive past the establishment.
But Liam had no intentions of driving past the diner. For him, the diner was journey’s end.
He pulled his truck up to the informal area that was the diner’s unofficial parking lot.
When Liam turned off the engine, she looked at him. The diner made her think of a third-rate, greasy-spoon establishment that played fast and loose with sanitary conditions. It definitely didn’t inspire confidence.
“Isn’t there another restaurant we could go to?” she asked as he began to open the door on his side.
Liam paused, his hand on the door handle. “Not without driving fifty miles.”
There it was again, she thought. That fifty-mile separation from everything civilized. Was everything of any worth in this region automatically fifty miles away?
Whitney looked grudgingly at the diner. Maybe she would be lucky and not get ptomaine poisoning.
“Seems to me that this town would do a whole lot better if it just picked itself up and moved fifty miles away,” she said cynically.
“We like Forever just where it is and the way it is,” Liam informed her.
Yeah, backward and hopelessly behind the times, she thought to herself. Out loud, Whitney offered up another, less hostile description. “Old-fashioned and impossibly quaint?”
“Honest and straightforward,” he contradicted.
“Well, I guess that really puts me in my place,” she quipped.
He laughed, shaking his head. “I really doubt if anything could ever put you in your place—unless you wanted to be there,” he qualified.
Getting out of his truck, he rounded the hood and came around to her side. Opening the door for Whitney, he put his hand out as if to help her get out.
She looked down at it for a moment as if debating whether or not she should take it. Deciding that it wouldn’t hurt anything to act graciously, she wrapped her fingers around his.
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
He looked surprised by this unusual turn of events. “For?”
In for a penny, in for a pound. Wasn’t that what her mother used to say before she ran off? Whitney decided that she might as well say it.
“For acting like an ungrateful brat.” She flushed as her own label hit home. “I guess I’m a little out of my element. I’m usually the one on the receiving end of gratitude, not on the giving side.”
He wasn’t exactly sure what she was trying to say, but he knew contrition when he saw it and he had never been the kind who enjoyed making people squirm. “Hey, you just went through a harrowing experience. You’re allowed to act out a little.”
His forgiving attitude made her feel even guiltier than she already did.
Their hands were still linked and he tugged on hers just a little. “C’mon,” he coaxed. “Everything will seem a lot better after you eat something. Angel will whip up something that’ll make you feel as if you’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“Angel?” she repeated a little uncertainly.
“Miss Joan’s head cook. Woman could make a mud pie taste appetizing,” he told her with enthusiasm.
“I think I’ll pass on the mud pie, but I could go for a cheeseburger and fries.”
“Great,” he responded, drawing her into the diner. “Get ready to have the best cheeseburger and fries you’ve ever had.”
She sincerely doubted that, but she decided to play along. After all, she owed him.
Chapter Four (#ulink_e939f239-620a-5220-b421-552050cefbe7)
“So this is the little lady you saved from a watery grave, eh?”
The rather unusual greeting came from Miss Joan less than a heartbeat after Liam had walked into the diner with Whitney at his side.
As was her habit, Miss Joan, ever on top of things, seemed to appear out of nowhere and was right next to them.
Amber eyes took measure of the young stranger quickly, sweeping over her from top to toe in record time, even for Miss Joan. She noted that the young woman was struggling very hard to keep from trembling. Small wonder, Miss Joan assessed.
“You look pretty good for someone who’d just cheated death less than a few hours ago. Wet, but good,” she amended for the sake of precision.
Stunned, Whitney held on to the ends of the sheepskin jacket, unconsciously using it as a barrier between herself and the older woman. She slanted an uneasy look at Liam.
“Did you just call and tell her about the flash flood—and everything?” she added vaguely. How else could the woman have known that she almost drowned unless Liam had told her?
“Nobody has to call and tell Miss Joan anything,” Liam assured her. “She’s always just seemed to know things, usually right after they happen.”
“How?” Whitney asked. Did the woman claim to be clairvoyant?
The smile on the redheaded owner’s face was enigmatic and Whitney found it irritatingly unreadable. “I’ve got my ways,” was all Miss Joan said.
“She’s kidding, right?” Whitney asked in a hushed whisper.
Because she had turned her head away from Miss Joan and whispered her question to him, Liam felt Whitney’s warm breath feathering along the side of his neck. It caused various internal parts of him to go temporarily haywire before he was able to summon a greater degree of control. When he finally did, it allowed him to shut down the momentary aberration and function normally again.
But for just a second, it had been touch and go.
“You’ll know when Miss Joan is kidding,” he promised Whitney.
“Let me show you to a table,” Miss Joan offered. The words stopped short of being an order.
Miss Joan brought them over to a table on the side that was relatively out of the way of general foot traffic.
Once they were seated, the owner of the diner looked from Liam to his companion, as if to make a further assessment, and then asked, “So, what can I get for the hero and the rescuee?”
“I’m not a hero, Miss Joan.”
“No point in denying what everybody’s thinking, boy,” Miss Joan said. Then, looking at the young woman at the table, she confided, “He’s always been a little on the shy side, downplaying things he’s done.” Her thin lips stretched out in a smile. “But you’ll get to see that for yourself if you stay around here long enough.”
“I’m sure I would,” Whitney replied, thinking she might as well be polite and play along with what this woman was saying. “If I were staying, but I’m not. I’m just killing a little time here before I get back on the road.”
Miss Joan smiled knowingly. “You go right ahead and do that, dear. You do that.” Her tone of voice made it clear that she knew more about the situation than either the young woman or Liam. Amber eyes shifted to Liam. “Want your usual?”
Liam grinned and nodded. He viewed the meal as comfort food. He was about due for some comfort, he thought. “Yes, please.”
“And you, honey?” Miss Joan asked, turning her gaze to Whitney.
“I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries,” she told the older woman.
“Coming right up,” Miss Joan promised as she withdrew from the table.
Whitney noted that the woman hadn’t written down either order. Lowering her voice, Whitney leaned in closer to the man who had brought her here in the first place.
“Is she always like that?” she asked once Miss Joan had withdrawn.
“Like what?” Liam asked, curious. As far as he was concerned, it was business as usual for the owner of the diner.
“Invasive,” Whitney finally said after spending a moment hunting for the right word to describe what she’d felt.
Liam turned the word over in his head, then shrugged. “I suppose so. That’s just Miss Joan being Miss Joan,” he said, then assured her, “I’ll tell you one thing. There’s nobody better to have on your side when you’ve got a problem or need a friend than Miss Joan.”
Whitney glanced over her shoulder toward the older woman. The latter was behind the counter, engaging one of her customers in conversation as she refilled his coffee cup.
Aside from the fact that the woman seemed nosy, Whitney saw nothing overly remarkable about Miss Joan. The woman certainly didn’t strike her as someone people would turn to in an emergency.
“Her? Really?” she asked Liam.
“Her. Really,” he confirmed with a hint of an amused grin.
Whitney shook her head. “I’m afraid I just can’t see it.”
“Well, you’re still an outsider so that’s understandable. You’ll have to experience it for yourself.”
Whitney laughed shortly, waving the idea away.
“I’ll pass on that, thanks. The second my car is back on solid ground, I’m out of here.” She glanced at her watch and frowned. She was really behind schedule. “I should already be on my way.”
“Maybe you should call whoever you’re going to see and let them know that you’re being held up,” Liam suggested.
Her eyes widened as she looked at him warily. “Held up?”
“Delayed,” Liam amended.
“Oh.”
Whitney chewed on her lower lip, thinking. She really didn’t want to call to say she’d be late, but she had to grudgingly admit that the cowboy had a point. With that, she shrugged his jacket off, letting it rest against the back of her chair, and dug into her pocket for her phone.
Pulling it out, she began to tap out the phone number of the band she was on her way to audition. When nothing happened, she tried the number again—with the same result. Frustrated, she took a closer look at her phone and realized that it was completely dormant. The light hadn’t really come on.
Why was it acting as if it was drained? “I just charged the battery,” she complained.
Liam leaned over and placed his hand over hers, turning her phone so that he could get a better look at it. The diagnosis was quick and succinct.
“I think it’s dead.”
“Dead?” Whitney echoed. “How can it be dead?” she challenged.
He had an answer for that, as well. “That’s not a waterproof case, is it?” He’d phrased it in the form of a question, but he already knew the answer.
“No,” Whitney snapped. And then she remembered something. “But you dived in to pull me out of the water and you had your phone in your pocket,” she recalled. “I saw you take it out to call that mechanic and whoever sent over that cherry picker.”
Rather than say anything, Liam took out his phone and held it up to let her see the difference between his and the one she had in her hand.
“Mine’s sealed in a waterproof case,” he told her. She looked as if she was about to protest, so he explained rather matter-of-factly, “Things happen out here. All you can do is try to stay as prepared as possible.”
Of course, he thought, he definitely wasn’t prepared to be as strongly attracted to this woman as he was. But then, he’d never saved anyone from drowning before and maybe that had a lot to do with it.
Whitney was torn between actually liking the fact that he was this prepared and resenting the fact that he was taking charge like this while she couldn’t. What was even worse was that she was having all sorts of feelings about this man that had absolutely nothing to do with any of this—except that he had saved her.
“Like a Boy Scout,” she commented.
“Something like that, I guess. Want to borrow my phone to make that call?” he offered, holding it out to her.
“I guess I’m going to have to,” she muttered, less than thrilled about this turn of events. She glared at her unresponsive phone. “I guess this is just an expensive paperweight now.”
“Not necessarily,” Miss Joan said.
Whitney nearly jumped out of her skin. The woman had seemingly materialized out of nowhere again. Didn’t anyone else find that annoying? she couldn’t help wondering.
Taking a breath to steady nerves that were becoming increasingly jumpier, Whitney turned in her seat and focused on what the older woman had just said rather than the fact that she was beginning to view Miss Joan as some sort of a resident witch.
“Do you think you can fix this?” she asked Miss Joan, allowing a trace of hope to enter her voice for good measure.
Miss Joan looked at the phone in question. “Depends. This just happened, right?” she asked, raising her eyes to look at Liam’s companion.
“Right,” Whitney answered quickly.
Miss Joan put out her hand. “Let me take your phone apart and put it in a container of rice.”
“You’re going to cook it?” Whitney asked warily.
Miss Joan laughed. “Hardly. Rice draws the moisture out. Doesn’t work all the time but it’s the only shot your phone has.”
With a sigh, Whitney handed her phone over to the woman, although she was far from confident about what was about to transpire.
“Okay.”
Taking the phone, Miss Joan pocketed it for a moment. “By the way, these are for you,” she said, offering the younger woman what had caused her to return to the table before Angel had finished preparing their orders.
Whitney then noticed that the older woman had brought over a couple of items of clothing with her—a light blue sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans.
Instead of taking the items, Whitney stared at them. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
Miss Joan pursed her lips, a sign that she was banking down a wave of impatience. “Well, this is just a wild guess on my part, but if it were me, I’d put them on. In case you didn’t know, the clothes you have on will dry a lot faster without you in them—especially if I put them in a dryer. Unless, of course, you like looking like something the cat dragged in,” Miss Joan added whimsically.
“Ladies’ room is right through there,” she told Whitney, pointing toward the far side of the diner. And then she held the defunct phone aloft. “I’ll go get your orders after I put this baby into the rice container.”
Whitney felt as if she’d just been doused by the flash flood a second time, except that this time around, it had come in human form.
After a beat, she gazed at Liam. “I think I’m beginning to see what you mean about Miss Joan.”
“Miss Joan likes to look out for everybody,” he explained. “Like a roving den mother. Takes some getting used to for some people. Now, I’m not telling you what to do, but it might not be such a bad idea putting those on.” He nodded at the clothes she was holding in her arms.
She’d felt rather uncomfortable in the wet clothes, despite the jacket Liam had given her. But she hadn’t felt it was worth drawing attention to the fact. After all, it wasn’t as if anyone could do anything about it. Except that obviously Miss Joan could—and had.
Whitney rose without saying a word and walked to the rear of the diner, holding the clothes Miss Joan had brought her.
She had definitely fallen down the rabbit’s hole, Whitney thought as she changed quickly, discarding her wet outer garments and pulling on the sweatshirt and the jeans Miss Joan had given her.
Dressed, Whitney didn’t know what surprised her more, that the strange woman with the flaming red hair had brought her a change of clothing—or that the clothes that Miss Joan had brought her actually fit.
“You look a lot drier,” Liam commented with a smile when she finally returned and quietly slipped back into her chair.
Whitney’s eyes met his. He couldn’t quite read her expression. It seemed to be a cross between bewildered and uneasy.
“How did she know?” Whitney asked.
“That you were wet?” It was the first thing that came to his mind. “It might have to do with the fact that there was a small trail of water drops marking your path to the table.”
He tactfully refrained from mentioning that both her hair and the clothes beneath his jacket were plastered against her body.
She shook her head. “No, I mean how did Miss Joan know what size I took? The jeans fit me as if they were mine.” And she found that almost eerie.
Liam laughed again. These were things that he had come to accept as par for the course, but he could see how they might rattle someone who wasn’t used to Miss Joan and her uncanny knack of hitting the nail right on the head time and again.
“Like I said before, that’s all part of her being Miss Joan. The rest of us don’t ask. We just accept it as a given.”
The next minute, Miss Joan was at their table again. This time Whitney didn’t jump and her nerves didn’t spike.
“You look better, honey,” Miss Joan said with approval. She’d brought their orders over on a tray and now leaned the edge of it against their table. She proceeded to divvy the plates between them. And there was more.
“Figured you might like a hot cup of coffee with that.” Although she had brought two coffees, she directed her comment to Liam. “It’ll take the rest of the chill out of your bones,” she promised with a wink that instantly took thirty years off her face.
The tray now emptied, Miss Joan deftly picked up the discarded blouse and tailored slacks from the floor next to Whitney’s chair. “I’ll just take care of these for you,” the woman said.
“I usually have those dry-cleaned,” Whitney protested as the other woman was beginning to walk away with her clothes.
Miss Joan paused, glancing down at the wet clothing she was holding. “I think we both agree that there’s really nothing ‘usual’ about this now, is there?” she said knowingly.

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