Texas Baby

Finally, everything was still. Into the silence, a plume of steam shot up like a geyser, smelling of rust and heat. Its snakelike hiss almost smothered the low, agonized moan of the driver.

Chase’s anger had disappeared. He didn’t feel anything but a dull sense of disbelief. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. Not in his life. Maybe the sun had actually put him to sleep.

But he was already kneeling beside the car. The driver was a woman. There was no air bag. The frosty glass of the windshield was dotted with small flecks of blood. She must have hit it with her head, because just below her hairline a red liquid was seeping out. He touched it. He tried to wipe it away before it reached her eyebrow, though of course that made no sense at all. Her eyes were shut.

Was she conscious? Did he dare move her? Her dress was covered in glass, and the metal of the car was sticking out dangerously in all the wrong places.

Then he remembered, with an intense relief, that every good medical man in the county was here, just behind the house, drinking his champagne. He found his phone and paged Trent.

The woman moaned again.

Alive, then. Thank God for that.

He saw Trent coming toward him, starting out at a lope, but switching to a full run when he saw the car.

“Get Dr. Marchant,” Chase called. “Don’t bother with 911.”

Trent didn’t take long to assess the situation. A fraction of a second, and he began pulling out his cell phone and running toward the house.

The yelling seemed to have roused the woman. She opened her eyes. They were blue, and clouded with pain and confusion.

“Chase,” she said.

His breath stalled. His head pulled back. “What?”

Her only answer was another moan, and he wondered if he had imagined the word. He reached around her and put his arm behind her shoulders. She was tiny. Probably petite by nature, but surely way too thin. He could feel her shoulder blades pushing against her skin, as fragile as the wishbone in a turkey.

She seemed to have passed out, so he put his other arm under her knees and lifted her from the car. He tried to avoid the jagged metal, but her skirt caught on a piece and the tearing sound seemed to wake her again.

“No,” she said. “Please.”

“I’m just trying to help,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.”

She seemed profoundly distressed. She wriggled in his arms, and she was so weak, like a broken bird. It made him feel too big and brutish. And intrusive. As if touching her this way, his bare hands against the warm skin behind her knees, were somehow a transgression.

He wished he could be more delicate. But he smelled gasoline, and he knew it wasn’t safe to leave her.

Finally he heard the sound of voices, as guests began to run around the side of the house, alerted by Trent. Dr. Marchant was at the front, racing toward them as if he were forty instead of seventy. Susannah was right behind him, her green dress floating around her trim legs.

“Please,” the woman in his arms murmured again. She looked at him, the expression in her blue eyes lost and bewildered. He wondered if she might be on drugs. Hitting her head on the windshield might account for this unfocused, glazed look, but it couldn’t explain the crazy driving.

“Please, put me down. Susannah… This wedding…”

Chase’s arms tightened instinctively, and he froze in his tracks. She whimpered, and he realized he might be hurting her. “Say that again?”

“The wedding. I have to stop it.”

CHAPTER THREE

CHASE ENDURED the next hour the way he’d endured most of the crises in his life—he kept busy.

He played host the best he could. He soothed the hysterical—Jenny Wilcox was hyperventilating and her husband, Pastor Wilcox, wasn’t far behind. He deflected the curious. He tried to get as many guests as possible to go home. This became much more difficult once the rumor began to circulate that the mysterious woman lying upstairs in the north guest room, being tended by Dr. Marchant, was Chase Clayton’s discarded, suicidal lover.

And he refused to dwell on worst-case scenarios. Josephine Ellen Whitford, twenty-five years old, from Riverfork—all information they’d learned from her driver’s license—was going to be okay. She had seemed dazed, scraped and bruised and maybe concussed, but surely not damaged enough to be in danger.

Whatever mischief she’d come here to start, he would face when it presented itself. If it ever did. He still hoped he might have misunderstood her last, slurred words.

He took a deep breath as he waved the Wilcoxes’ car down the drive, which was turning blue in the twilight. He shut his eyes for a minute, gathering his focus for the next job…probably finding a taxi for old Portia Luxton, who had stopped driving ten years ago.

He could handle it, whatever it was. He’d been through worse things than this. His parents’ deaths and the collapse of his first marriage, for starters. And of course the life of a horse breeder came with a hundred little agonies, from the liquid-eyed foals who take a few breaths and die, to the beautiful, doomed stallions whose wild streaks can’t be tamed.

“It’s going to be all right,” Sue said, appearing at his elbow. Her voice was soft. “It’ll be the talk of the town for a week or so, and then Elspeth Grimes will see Elvis in the oil stains on her garage floor and everyone will move on.”

“I know.” He appreciated Sue’s commonsense approach to things, which had been her trademark, even as a child. It was the main reason he’d agreed to this marriage. He could trust her to keep it clean. To carry their plan out to the letter. Marry him, satisfy her autocratic grandfather’s absurd will, then take the money and run.

No sticky emotional swamps. No tangles, no hidden agenda.

No last-minute complications, like sex. Or love.

“I know,” he said again. “I’m just sorry it spoiled your party.”

“It didn’t.” She smiled, but her mouth and her eyes didn’t match. She looked toward the house. “I hope she’s okay. She looked kind of…sick, don’t you think? I mean, not just hurt from the accident, but unwell.”

Chase nodded. He had thought exactly that. Miss Whitford didn’t look like a healthy woman. She was painfully thin, and so pale she might have been made of wax. She probably had beautiful eyes when she was rested, large and blue, with feathery black lashes. But right now they were dull, sunken into deep circles like river stones set in mud.

“I wonder who she is.” Susannah was still looking at the house.

Again, Chase merely nodded, trying to hide how much he, too, wanted the answer to that question. Susannah had no idea that the woman had spoken both their names and had even said she wanted to stop the wedding. He wasn’t planning to talk about those cryptic, disturbing words. Not until he had to.

But for the love of God, what could the woman’s motives be? No one had a problem with this wedding. No one wanted to stop it.

Everyone in Texas knew that Susannah Everly had inherited a raw deal from her grandfather, who had written his will while under the influence of alcohol, the leading edge of Alzheimer’s and one of his all-too-common rages.

It was only fitting, their neighbors believed, that her best childhood pal should help her out of it. A few romantics even dreamed that a butterfly of love might come winging out of the chrysalis of friendship, creating that storybook happy ending everyone craved.

No. No one wanted to stop this wedding. Not even Trent Maxwell. That’s how much the poor sucker loved her.

“Here comes Dr. Marchant,” Sue said. She put her hand on Chase’s arm. He glanced at her steady profile, and he wondered if she’d heard the rumors. What a mess. He remembered promising Trent, just an hour ago, that he’d never embarrass her.

He wondered how long he could keep that promise. Perhaps no longer than it took a seventy-year-old man to travel the few yards of oyster-shell driveway between them and the house.

He watched the old man striding toward them, his shock of leonine white hair glowing, even in this gathering gloaming. His face was unreadable in the dim light, but he’d taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. Something in his movements suggested that his news would not be good.

When Marchant reached them, he didn’t waste time with a preamble. He had always given his diagnoses the same way he gave his medicines—nothing more than you needed, and nothing less. And he expected you to take it like a man, even if you were only four and frightened.

He didn’t believe in sugarcoating.

“She’s going to be fine,” he said.