Swept Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dangerous game.”

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

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

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

“Can you get up into the truck?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Road trip,” she said.

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

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

“Is it working?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2

“My, my, my…wouldja lookee there?”

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

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

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

“Does it matter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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