Kelton's Rules

“Are you all right?” But she wasn’t waiting to hear; apparently touch would tell her faster. Her fingers flew over the boy’s face, his arms, his ribs. Tugging at his clothes, smoothing his hair. “Where does it hurt?”

Jack met the kid’s eyes over her shoulder and gave him a commiserating grin. Sometimes a guy just had to put up with the mushy stuff.

“Aw-ww, Mom! I’m fine.” The boy twisted away as she tried to pull him into a hug, then dived under the wheel. “It’s DC…”

The largest cat Jack had ever seen crouched behind the pedals, tail fluffed to the size of a firehose, eyes like black saucers. Moaning throatily, he slashed at the boy’s outstretched hand.

“Ouch! He’s never done that before!” The boy— Sky?—brought scratched fingers to his lips.

“Reckon you’ve never run him backward down a mountain before,” Jack said mildly. “Give him a minute.”

Momma swung around, registering his presence at last.

And worth the wait, Jack decided as his gaze dropped from wide green eyes still dilated with shock, down over a lush trembling mouth, over a pair of still heaving, just-the-right-size breasts, to—oh, boy, forget it! To a slogan emblazoned across the T-shirt, claiming: A Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle.

Hoo-boy, one of those. A lady with an ax to grind. His eyes flicked back to the bus, filled almost to window level with its assortment of household rubble. Jeez, that thing on its side—could that be a washing machine?

“Been divorced long?” he asked casually.

She blinked. Blinked her long lashes again, grateful smile fading to wariness as she raised her chin. “H-how did you guess?”

Jack threw back his head and laughed.

SHE’D SWORN she’d stand on her own two feet from now on, yet here she was again, letting a man take charge.

Not that it was easy to stand alone when apparently she’d wrecked an ankle, somewhere in that pell-mell, adrenaline-powered chase, Abby reminded herself. Sitting in the topless Jeep, where their rescuer had planted her when he realized—at the same moment she did—that she could barely hobble, Abby clasped still-shaking hands between wobbly knees. She watched with growing uneasiness as he stalked around the bus, hands on lean hips, shaking his shaggy head to himself as he summed up the state of her disaster and decided what should be done about it.

She had a terrible suspicion his conclusions would be the right ones—logical, sensible and therefore impossible to refute, much as she’d rather refute them. She’d already had one sample of his plain-spoken intelligence, with that guess about her marital status.

I don’t need this!

Didn’t need a disastrous setback, just as she was starting to pick up the pieces of her life and think about rebuilding.

Didn’t need someone—another too confident, too brash, too good-looking-for-his-own-good male—telling her what to do and how to do it.

Except that she did. She was utterly exhausted and confused. Overwhelmed. She supposed this was what they called shock. Looking at her son as he smiled wanly up at the man who’d rolled out from under the bus to stand and pat his shoulder, her eyes filled slowly with tears. Oh, Sky, I could have lost you!

Losing the life she’d known since she was nineteen was nothing compared to that.

And being bossed around by another know-it-all man—who’d known enough to save her son—was a small price to pay. A price she’d pay gladly again and again. The bargain of a lifetime.

“I haven’t even thanked you yet,” she said huskily a few minutes later when he came to sit beside her in the Jeep. “That cliff beyond the trees…if Sky’d gone over that…”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I couldn’t have done it without him. He’s a smart kid. Stayed cool when it counted.”

“Yes…” Cool under pressure. Steve and his pilot buddies had valued that quality above all else.

Sometimes she wondered if it signified ice at the center. A basic heartlessness. Easy to be cool if you didn’t really care. When she’d told him she wanted a divorce, Steve had shrugged, given her a rueful grin and merely said, “Can’t say I blame you, babe.”

She shook off the memory with a jerk of her head. Who cared if this man was just one more of that type? It wasn’t as though she was buying him and taking him home. “I don’t understand how this could’ve happened,” she said now, eyes returning to the bus. “I know I left the brake on. And I thought I left it in gear.”

He glanced down at his boots, then quickly up again—and smiled. “Brakes have been known to fail. My name’s Kelton, by the way. Jack Kelton.” He held out a big hand and reluctantly she surrendered her own to its shockingly warm clasp, aware of the roughness of his palm. A carpenter, perhaps? Or out here in cow country, with those boots he was wearing, maybe a cattleman?

“Abby Lake,” she murmured. “And that’s Skyler.” She nodded at her son, who’d climbed into the back of the bus and was apparently searching for DC among the tumbled boxes. In the gathering twilight, she could barely see him moving beyond the windows.

“Good enough. So first question, Abby. Do you have any sort of towing service we can call?”

“I’m afraid I—” She’d had roadside assistance, of course, on her car. But in her scramble to close on the house, then move, since the new buyers had insisted on immediate occupancy… What with all the other details of dismantling one’s life and carting it across country: changing bank accounts, health insurance, credit cards, mailing address… “I forgot to get it. I just bought the bus last week.”

“Ah,” Kelton said neutrally, although she could hear his disapproval. No doubt he would have remembered. “So question two. I take it money’s an issue here?”

A sensible deduction—prodding old bruises and a still-simmering indignation. Three months ago, money wouldn’t have been an issue. Now it was survival itself. “It’s tight.” Budgeted to the penny and now, looking at the bus, she realized her budget was blown. What am I going to do?

“Okay, so hiring a tow truck to come out from Durango, then haul a bus forty miles back, isn’t practical. And once you get it to a garage, it may need a new transmission, definitely a new exhaust system. I’m not sure about the axles, though they might be intact… Repairs are going to be costly, if you can even scrounge the parts for this old girl. And meantime, while somebody’s fixing it for a week or more, I suppose you’ll have to stay in a motel. Unless you have friends in Durango?”

“No…” Abby threaded a hand through her disheveled hair. Tried to find a smile. “We’re from New Jersey. At least lately…” It was one of the things she’d hated most about being a military wife all those years. The repeated uprootings. The constant farewells. A shy woman like her needed to nest in one place, where she could build and nourish long-term friendships. The kind of support system that sustained you through disasters such as this.

“Anyway, that all adds up to a lot of money,” Jack concluded, casually reaching across to brush a knuckle across her cheek, where a tear had escaped. He glanced skyward with a comical frown. “And on top of all that, damned if it doesn’t look like rain.”

Reflexively, Abby followed his gaze. Over their heads stretched a vault of cloudless silvery blue, cupping the last of the light, one star already twinkling in the east. She laughed shakily, wiping one hand across her wet lashes. “Cats and dogs by the bucketful.”

“Well, then…” Jack folded his arms and leaned back, stretching his long legs, boots braced against the pedals. “If Durango’s not an option, what about this instead? We’re three miles from Trueheart. There’s an old cowhand north of town, Whitey Whitelaw, who’s the best shade-tree mechanic I’ve ever seen. Cobbling together clapped-out feed trucks and tractors is his specialty, and his prices are pretty reasonable. I imagine he’d cut you a deal.”

“He doesn’t know me from Adam. I don’t know why he’d—”

“Why don’t you ask him and see? I can call Whitey when we get back to town, ask if he’d come out here in the morning, take a look at her…”

Abby nodded doubtfully. She could think of nothing better to try. “I…suppose so. And for tonight, we’ve got a mattress in back and a camp stove.” She could boil enough creek water to—

But Jack was shaking his head. “Don’t even think it. You need a real bed and a hot meal—you both do—and that ankle needs some ice to bring it down. You’re coming with me. I’ve got just the place for you.”

“You mean, to your…house?” If he was married it would be awful, descending on his surprised, solicitous wife, and if he wasn’t, even worse. “Oh, no! We couldn’t impose.” She’d rather camp for a year in a cow pasture than be forced into that kind of dependency on a stranger, no matter how kindly intended.

“Abby, I never let anybody impose on me. And Kat and I don’t have room for guests at the moment.”

So he was married. She should have guessed, attractive as he was. He didn’t wear a ring, but then that came as no surprise. Steve had shed his within a year of their marriage, insisting it was dangerous, what with all the machinery and electronics a pilot had to deal with.

“But there’s an empty rental cottage next door to us set up for mountain bikers and for skiers in winter. It’s furnished down to the pots and pans and bedsheets—and I’m sure I can arrange for you to stay there. My landlady owns it.”

Abby smiled in spite of herself. He had it all figured out. And she’d bet Jack could sell coconuts to Tahitians, if he took the notion. She should be thankful he was willing to help.

“So what are we gonna do?” Skyler demanded, appearing out of the dark at her elbow, his arms wrapped around a glowering DC-3.

Abby let out a long breath. She supposed she’d never really had a choice in the matter. “I guess we’re going with Mr. Kelton.”

CHAPTER THREE

“AND HE-ERE WE ARE,” Jack announced grandly as he swung the Jeep into an unpaved driveway. Set fifty feet back in a narrow lot, a tiny, two-story cottage crouched under the trees. “Be it ever so humble, you’ll find it homey enough. It’s basically identical in layout to mine. They were built at the same time for twin daughters, back in the 1880s.”

He’d warned her it would be rustic, Abby reminded herself, searching for something to say as she studied the sagging front porch, the weathered clapboard siding that suggested this twin hadn’t sprung for a paint job since the 1890s.

Still, whatever its appearance, the price had indeed been right for a week’s lodging. On the far side of Trueheart, Jack had left them in the Jeep while he’d negotiated with his landlady, Maudie Harris. He’d loped out of her house minutes later, wearing a triumphant grin while he twirled a key ring around his finger.

“That’s my place over—” Jack paused in the act of nodding to their right, across a picket fence hedged by an overgrown border of bushes and waist-high weeds. He scowled. “Over there.”

Through leafy branches, Abby could make out the glint of a pickup truck, parked in the shadows beyond an identical sagging porch that ran the width of Jack’s cottage. With lights glowing from the front-room windows, his house looked more inviting than hers.

“Very nice,” she said, although a twist of uneasiness coiled through her stomach. Bad enough to be so obliged to the man already. But to have him as her next-door neighbor—ready, willing and able to give his opinion on her every move from here on out… I don’t need this. “Well…” She swiveled in her seat.

“Hang on.” Jack bounded out of the Jeep and around to her side. “You shouldn’t put your weight on that ankle. Not till we’ve had a look at it.”

“I can manage.”

“I’m sure you can.” But his hand blocked her passage, leaving her the choice of shoving it aside—or accepting it.

Used to having his own way, for all his charm and goodwill, Abby decided, gritting her teeth behind a close-mouthed smile. She’d learned not to trust charm. She’d found that it was often a substitute for less polished but kinder, more genuine emotions.

“Thank you.” Her nerves skittered as those oven-warm fingers closed over hers. Then he took her other arm, supporting her weight as she slithered down from the high seat. They stood for an instant toe-to-toe, Abby looking up—quite a way up—and Jack holding on to her just a heartbeat too long, his fingers seeming to squeeze her a hairsbreadth too tightly.

Or maybe her alarm sprang from her rattled nerves, sensing danger where it didn’t exist. There was also the simple fact that she hadn’t stood this close to a man—a virile, ruggedly attractive man—in months. “Thanks,” she said again.

But he didn’t take that as dismissal. Instead Jack transferred her hand to his forearm, a support as hard and muscular as the rest of him obviously was. “We’ll get you settled and then…” His shaggy head swung back toward his own yard as they moved carefully across the grass. Abby could see one decisive eyebrow drawn down in a scowl. “Then I’ll just…”

What was bothering him over there?

But faced with the stairs to the porch, she abandoned speculation to concentrate on making it up the six steep steps, then limping across the warped decking to the unpainted front door.

While Jack fit the key into the lock, Sky joined them, frowning unhappily, his cat cradled on his shoulder. She could read his thoughts as if he’d shouted them out loud. Compared to a brand-new, suburban five-bedroom house back in New Jersey, this wasn’t much. Compared even to the Motel 6 room they’d slept in last night, this cottage was outclassed. And it’s all your fault, Mom!

“It seems very…comfortable,” she managed as Jack steered her inside and switched on the light. If your taste ran to plaid, broken-backed sleeper sofas. To a La-Z-Boy chair spilling foam stuffing across a dirt-gray braided rug, or fluorescent bulbs in a tacky cartwheel chandelier. A wall-mounted elk head that wore a red bandanna and probably had a case of fleas. A collection of beer cans and bottles, arranged artfully along the mantel over a small, ash-choked firebox. “And look, Sky, we have a fireplace!” Her words came out much too cheery.

“Hmm…” Jack led her to the couch and lowered her, oblivious to the fact that she’d stiffened her spine, signaling her resistance to the maneuver. “Haven’t been in here since last fall, when Maudie gave me a choice between her two places. Looks like those college kids who came here to ski over spring break were a little…rough on the decor.” He straightened to aim a forefinger at Skyler. “Now you, kid—you’re in charge of unloading your stuff from my Jeep while I’m gone. Don’t let your mom budge, okay?”

He turned to Abby as Sky set down DC and trooped out the door without a protest. “And you— Let me see if there’s ice in your freezer.” He strode off toward the rear of the house and returned in seconds. “Nope, no ice. So sit tight, let Sky do the work—I mean all the work, Abby—and I’ll be back soon as I can. There’s a few things I have to…”

He was gone before she could open her mouth to tell him thank-you, but from here they could manage alone.

BY THE TIME Sky returned with their sleeping bags, Abby had hobbled into the kitchen. Propped against the back of a wobbly kitchen chair, she surveyed the vinyl floor with its missing tiles; that had to be pre-World War II. The dingy cabinets, the ancient, grease-caked gas stove and narrow refrigerator with its rusty door, to which somebody had taped a poster of a snow-boarding ski bunny, wearing nothing but a bikini and a wet-lipped smile.

Lemons into lemonade, Abby chanted inwardly. You get lemons, you make lemonade. There was no reason to cry, no real reason at all. This dreadful kitchen wasn’t a preview of the rest of her life. Wasn’t the top of the slippery slide to poverty and despair and loneliness. This was only a temporary setback, something she’d be laughing about six months from now—even a week from now, when they reached Sedona.

Surely.

Tonight she was simply…tired.

“Mr. Kelton just put a guy in a truck,” Sky said, dropping his load on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

She rubbed her lashes and turned with a puzzled smile. “Put who, honey?”

“A guy with a cowboy hat. And boots. Into that truck over there. He sort of carried him by his belt and his collar and…threw him.”

“Ah… Oh…” Wonderful. “Well, he’s very helpful, sweetie, isn’t he?” And just who had Jack been helping out his door? His wife’s lover? Oh, we don’t need this at all!

“Then the guy drove off like a bat out of hell!”

So that was the roar and rumble of gravel she’d heard a moment ago. “Don’t swear, Skyler.”

“Dad says hell.”

“Your father’s a grown man.” Physically, if not emotionally or mentally. And now were they stranded next to another overgrown adolescent with his own amorous troubles? They ought to leave first thing in the morning, but how? Even if Maudie would refund their money, renting a car for even a week would deliver the coup de grâce to her tottering budget. “When you’re grown up—”

“I’m moving back to New Jersey.”

A brisk knock on the front door saved her from a retort she might have regretted. Jack strode into the kitchen, his hair no wilder than it had been before, his clothes untorn. He didn’t appear to have been brawling, though the color across his craggy cheekbones might be a bit higher. With the fluorescent lighting, Abby couldn’t be sure. Perhaps Sky had misinterpreted whatever he’d seen.

“Let’s check out that ankle.” Jack set a loaded tin soup pot on the counter, then swung out a chair for her. “And, Sky, hustle the rest of your gear out of my car, will you? I need to take off in a minute.”

The fastest way to get Jack out of their lives was to let him follow his own program, Abby concluded, giving up and sitting. When he’d gone, she could lock the door, reestablish control. By tomorrow, once she’d caught her breath, she’d be able to cope with him. Enforce her boundaries. Resist his plans without rudeness.

Tonight—for a few more minutes—she just needed not to scream.

She bit her bottom lip as he lifted her foot to another chair and then, with surprising gentleness, pulled her sock down over her—shockingly swollen ankle. Which was already turning a fine shade of mottled eggplant.

“That hurt?” He glanced up as she made a tiny sound of dismay.

“Not…much.”

“Hmm.” Frowning, he drew one fingertip from her ankle down the top of her foot to her toes.

A line of ice and then fire sizzled behind his touch. She blinked back tears, focusing fiercely on his big blunt fingertip with its well-tended nail. On work-roughened hands that were very clean. On the top of his down-bent head. He had thick, straight hair of that color men call dirty-blond and women call wheat or tawny. His eyes were gray, she noted, as he peered up at her from under bristly brows, two shades darker than his hair.

“I’m no doctor, but I’d guess it’s a sprain.” Idly, absently, his finger returned up her foot as he held her gaze.

For too long.

He looked into her too deeply.

Something leaped between them before she could lower her lashes. Awareness. It triggered an echoing flutter in her stomach, a flow of warmth. Between one breath and the next, Abby felt as if they were toppling toward each other. Gripping the sides of her chair, she fought down the urge to smack his hand aside. I don’t need this. Don’t want it. “I seem to be able to—oo-oh—move it. Sort of.”

“Your call, Abby. I’ll be happy to drive you into Durango if you want to go to the emergency room. Or I suppose I could ask Doc Kerner, our local vet, to come over, give us his opinion.”

Was he kidding?

He wasn’t. The town of Trueheart, what she’d seen of it, seemed to be less than a mile square. No motel. Apparently no real doctor. “Why don’t I give it till morning?” Forty miles to Durango and back again in Jack’s unnerving company was more than she could face at this point. He’d been coming on to her, hadn’t he?

“That’s what I’d do,” he agreed with a relief that assured her she must have been mistaken. Rising with an easy grace that belied his big-boned build, he reached into the pot. “I was a bit low on ice cubes myself, but I’ve got frozen peas and corn a-a-nd wild mountain blueberries.” He draped a plastic bag of each across her ankle as he spoke. “Give it half an hour, if you can sit still that long.”

He was a fine one to talk. Jack was halfway to the exit already, speaking as he moved backward. “I’ve got to drive this little, um, a baby-sitter home and then I have to find Kat. But after I’ve rounded her up, can we take you and Sky to supper? Nothing fancy—Michelle’s will be closed by then. But Mo’s Truckstop has the best steak-burgers in a hundred miles and Mo keeps the grill fired up all night.”

A baby-sitter. So Jack and his wife had a child or children. And the banished cowboy with the truck is the baby-sitter’s boyfriend, Abby hazarded a silent guess. That was a better scenario than her first one. Meanwhile Kat, Jack’s wife, must be out on the town. This was too many players to follow. “That’s awfully kind of you, but please don’t trouble yourself. We’ve got sandwich makings right here.” She nodded at Skyler, edging past the man with his arms full of a big plastic cooler. “I think we’ll eat in, then go straight to bed.”

“Probably just as well,” Jack said readily. “In that case, sleep tight, and don’t worry about the bus. Whitey and I will look after it first thing tomorrow.”

And he was out the door before she could make the man see that she’d rather handle her own problems.

SUNLIGHT and the sound of birdsong awoke her the next morning, cool pine-scented air wafting in an open window. Abby smiled, stretched luxuriously…and let out a yelp as her injured foot brushed the footboard.

“Oh!” She lurched to a sitting position, memory tumbling back in a jumble of sharp-edged images. Her ruined sketchbook. Steve’s infidelity. A blue columbine she’d picked somewhere recently. Her mother’s fretful face, matching her querulous voice on the phone. Steve’s new wife, Chelsea—pridefully, astoundingly pregnant when Abby had run into her at the mall. The plunging crimson bus. The pain in her side as she chased it.

A man’s hand on her aching foot.

Piece the puzzle together, and here she sat on a lumpy bed in the middle of nowhere. Her wincing gaze swept the tiny bedroom with its minimal furnishings. A scratched maple bureau and an ancient pine wardrobe; she’d bet there was a twin to that piece next door. And what time was it? Her faithful old wind-up alarm clock must be ticking away back in the bus.

If it hasn’t been stolen by now.

A second wave of panic washed through her. All their belongings out there on a mountainside! Jack had promised her they’d be safe, but Jack struck her as the type to whistle through hurricanes. Hardly a worrier.

Shower. Coffee. Get out there, girl! Abby threw off the covers.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, she stood lopsidedly at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. There was a jar of instant coffee tucked in her cooler for waking in motels. But there was no way she’d boil water in any of the utensils she’d found in the cupboards before she’d thoroughly scrubbed them.

Meanwhile, where was Jack? He’d said something about helping her early this morning. But when she’d looked out her front door and across their adjoining fence, she’d seen no sign of his Jeep.

Maybe he’d forgotten his offer? Went off to work, wherever and whatever that was? He seemed to be a short-attention-span kind of guy, superb in a crisis, too restless to be good with the follow-through.

Or possibly he’d sensed her discomfort last night and had left her to handle her own affairs.

“Careful what you wish for,” she told herself wryly. Without his help, how would she get out to the crash site? A town with no doctor would hardly have a taxi service. And then how to contact this Whitey person, the mechanic?

“Coffee first,” she decided, then she’d cope. Somehow.