Swept Away

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.