Swept Away

“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 basic 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.

A vague feeling of impending doom came over Sam, coinciding nicely with the sharp ping of sexual awareness as he took in a scrap of her springy hair toying with her long neck. And he thought of Libby and the hormone riots she was no doubt inciting these days and how Blair thought Carly was “cool” and how Libby would no doubt see in this woman a kindred spirit, and Sam marveled at his brain’s ability to produce so many thoughts simultaneously, not a single one of them reassuring in the slightest.

Except maybe for the briefly entertained idea of getting the hell out of there.

However. He pulled up beside them, and Carly leaned in the passenger-side window like she’d been expecting him and said, “Darryl said it’d take a week to get the axle, so it looks like we’re stuck,” and now he noticed just how full her bottom lip was and he thought This is nuts. He also noticed she wore that resigned expression of someone who was actually ticked but knew giving vent to those feelings would serve no useful purpose. “So I guess we need someplace to stay for a few days. Is there a motel around here?”

See, this is the part he was dreading. Because he’d known before she’d even opened her mouth what the options were, and what the outcome was likely to be, both of which tied nicely in with that impending doom thing. “There’s the Double Arrow out by me,” he said as if reading a script, “but it’s closed for the next couple of weeks while the owners finish up remodeling it.”

“No place in town, then?” her father put in from over her shoulder. “A rooming house or something?”

Here’s the funny thing: Any number of people could have been behind Carly and her father this morning when their truck went off the road. And any number of people would have made the offer he was about to make. But it hadn’t been any number of people, it had been him. He could practically hear Jeannie saying, “Nothing happens without a purpose,” although her voice wasn’t nearly as clear as it used to be.

Still, Sam shook his head, a gesture which apparently rattled loose the words he knew he was going to say all along. “No, the Double Arrow’s it. But if you don’t mind family living, you could bunk with us. Libby, my girl, has an extra bed in her room. And there’s a fold-out couch in the living room.”

“Oh, now,” Lane said, as Carly—Sam noticed out of the corner of his eye—simply stared at him as if not quite sure what to think, “we don’t want to put you out—”

“It’s no bother,” Sam said, because logistically, it wasn’t, really. “And besides, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of choice, does there?”

Father and daughter regarded each other for several seconds; then Lane said, “We insist on paying you for putting up with us, though,” and Sam laughed.

“You’re talking about a ninety-year-old farmhouse, six kids and one bathroom. Somehow, it wouldn’t seem right to take your money.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to take it out in trade,” the older man said. “If you need some work done around the place, stuff like that.”

Sam sensed an eagerness behind Lane’s offer which surprised him. “Thought you folks were on vacation?”

“Believe me,” Lane said, “if it was a vacation I wanted, traipsing around the countryside with this pain in the backside—” he jerked his head toward Carly “—would not be my first choice.”

“Hey,” she said, gently smacking him. But since nobody seemed to be taking anybody else too seriously, Sam figured he didn’t need to, either. So they tossed all their gear into the back seat next to the kid and the dog, and Carly and her father climbed up onto the truck’s bench seat and they took off. Within seconds, the truck was filled with conversation. And the faint scent of coconut, which Sam would swear he’d never in his life found arousing before now.

Six kids?

Carly stared straight ahead as they bumped and squeaked over the road, trying not to stare at how the veins stood out on top of Sam’s hand cradling the gearshift. Who the hell has six kids these days? Thank God they weren’t alone, was all she had to say, although she wasn’t in much of a mood to thank God or anybody else for the situation as a whole. Her last relationship had ended just long enough ago to leave her dangling over that emotional hellhole between still stinging (she’d never been much good at being the dumpee) and really, really missing sex. Not that she hadn’t dangled over this particular emotional hellhole a few—okay, more than a few—times before, so it wasn’t as if she didn’t know she’d survive. It was what she tended to do to survive that could be the problem.

She caught a whiff of Sam’s aftershave and shut her eyes, drumming, Wrong, wrong, wrong into her head.

There. That should do it.

The men, having no idea of the horde of nefarious demons intent on colonizing her brain, had fallen into an easy conversation about sports or whatever, she wasn’t paying much attention, while her thoughts orbited around a single idea (and those demons), which was that this little sidebar to their trip went way beyond her original proposal to “go wherever the mood struck.”

Not that she was all that upset about the axle business. These things happen. And it wasn’t as if they were on any kind of set schedule or anything. Nor did she have a problem with whatever the accommodations turned out to be. God knows—although her father did not—she’d spent more than a few nights in some pretty seedy places over the years. Her ability to crash almost anywhere had not, she didn’t imagine, fallen into disuse simply because she’d been living more or less like an actual grown-up for some time. As long as she had a can opener and toilet paper (which she did), she was good.

However…turning back to the hellhole business for a minute: It was not exactly reassuring to discover that, at thirty-seven, her hormones were apparently every bit as out of control now as they had been at twenty. Or—her mouth pulled tight—fifteen. Now, Carly had long since accepted the fact that she clearly lacked whatever instincts steered other women to their life mates. And that, at this point, it was downright disingenuous to chalk up her inability to form a meaningful attachment to simply needing to mature a little more. So finding herself attracted to some farmer with a batch of kids—in all likelihood, a married farmer with a batch of kids, since that was one thing she did not do—was very depressing.

Wait. If Sam was married…

Carly cleared her throat and said, “Um…shouldn’t you have cleared our coming with your wife first?”

She saw the muscles in his hand tense as he shifted gears to climb a hill.

“Jeannie’s been gone for coming up on three years now,” he said softly, then twisted to give her what he probably thought was a reassuring smile. “Nobody to clear this with but me.”

Her first thought—a slightly panicked realization that the marriage thing had been her ace in the hole—collided with the most bizarre sensation of…wait, the word was there, somewhere…caring, that was it. Not that she never felt sympathy for anyone, because of course she did, it wasn’t as if she was cold-hearted. No, it was the intensity of the moment that knocked her off her pins, the overwhelming rush of compassion for this perfect stranger who was opening his home to them. The obvious love in Sam’s voice, the residual grief—something she understood all too well herself—somehow made her feel very, very humble. And shallow.

“I’m so sorry,” she finally said, even as her father put in about how hard it must be for Sam, raising all those kids on his own.

Indeed.

Sam wordlessly acknowledged their sympathy, then said, “That’s the farm up ahead. It’s just a small operation, but we call it home.”

But Carly barely registered the small grove of fruit trees, the corn-stalk-stubbled fields, the modest two-story farmhouse, white with blue shutters, proudly standing underneath a huge old oak tree, its leaves rust-tinged. Because she was too busy processing the newsflash that even though there was no Mrs. Sam in the picture, the six kids should work quite nicely as a libido suppressant. Because no way was she messing around with a man with six kids.

No. Damn. Way.

Sitting by herself on a patch of hot, prickly grass outside the school cafeteria, Libby glowered at her bologna sandwich, then took a bite, seeing as she was hungry and it wasn’t like it was gonna change, anyway. The “cool” girls—mostly juniors and seniors—sat in a cozy bunch under the massive cottonwood, their laughter drifting over on the breeze. Lunch—a trial on the best of days—really sucked when Blair wasn’t there. And Sean was no help, since he liked to spend every spare moment working on whatever car was up on the blocks in Auto. So it was just Libby and her bologna sandwich. Oh, and chips and an apple. Big whoop.

Actually, in some ways it wasn’t nearly as bad as she thought it would be. Most of her classes were okay, although she could do without Mr. Solomon, her English teacher, trying so hard to act like he was everybody’s best friend. The homework was no big deal, and she’d already gotten a ninety-three on her first biology quiz, so she felt pretty good about that, but lunchtime—the girls giggled again—was the pits. Why most of the kids she’d gone all through school with had suddenly decided it wasn’t cool to hang out with their old friends anymore, she had no idea. Not that any of ’em had anything to be stuck-up about—for the most part, everybody here was a farmer’s or rancher’s kid, just like her. When she’d bitched to Dad, he’d told her to sit tight, reminding her how hard her first weeks had been in middle school and how well that had turned out.

Like Dad had a clue how she felt. He used to be pretty cool, too, until he’d gone on this overprotective tear. Like showing two inches of skin or wearing makeup was going to turn her into a slut, for crying out loud. She was in high school, for heaven’s sake! Why didn’t he get that?

Libby glanced down at her breasts—36C and still growing—and sighed, thinking maybe he got more than she wanted to admit. Then she noticed Blair striding across the grass from the parking lot, her red hair looking like it was on fire in the sunlight, and felt a little better.

“Where were you?” Libby asked, knowing she sounded short. But Blair only plopped down beside her on the grass, not taking offense.

“I told you, I had to go get my braces off this morning.”

“Oh, yeah, huh. I forgot. So let me see.”

Blair bared her teeth, like a dog.

“It looks weird,” Libby said. “I guess because I’ve only ever seen you with braces.”

Blair and her aunt Jenna—who’d brought Blair to Oklahoma from Washington, D.C., in search of Blair’s father, Hank Logan, only to fall in love with him and get married, which Libby thought truly one of the most romantic things she’d ever heard—had only been living in Haven for a little over a year. Blair and Libby had become best friends practically within minutes of meeting each other. Libby had sometimes thought maybe their instant friendship had something to do with Jenna being so much like Jeannie, Libby’s mom’s name, but this was not a theory she’d voiced aloud to anybody for fear of being thought silly.

“It feels weird,” Blair said, running her tongue over her naked teeth. “But I got used to having ’em, so I guess I’ll get used to not having ’em.”

“So, you ate before you came?”

“Yeah, Jenna took me to Ruby’s. Oh!” She sat up, her blue eyes all excited. “I almost forgot—there were these new people there, an old man and his daughter, she was so cool, like obviously not from around here—” Libby had found Blair’s previous big-city experience to be pretty reliable when it came to pegging somebody as cool or not “—and I think your father took them out to your place.”

Libby looked hard at Blair, because this information was not sinking in.

“What are you talking about? Why would Daddy be taking two strangers out to the farm? And how the heck do you know this?”

Blair snitched one of Libby’s potato chips—it wasn’t fair, since Blair could eat as many chips and candy bars as she wanted and never gain any weight, while all Libby had to do was think about the stuff and her jeans got tight—and said, “I saw your dad at Ruby’s, too, and he said something about being behind them when their truck went off the road and landed in a ditch outside town—”

“Ohmigosh! Was anybody hurt?”

“No, I don’t think so. But I got the feeling their truck was going to be out of commission for a while. Anyway, then Jenna and I stopped by Darryl’s to get gas, and we saw them get into your father’s truck with their backpacks and stuff and take off.”