“You are not a talker, are you?” Annie asked as she reached for the newspaper on the seat between them.
He shrugged. “It depends.” He glanced at the woman in the next seat. Annie was in her early thirties, with dark hair she wore short and curly, little to no makeup, and a woman who wore sensible clothes and shoes. She had a terrific smile and a natural maternal instinct that, without having children, was directed at the people who stayed at the hotel.
“Well, you’re an enigma,” she said. “I told Rick that there’s more to you than meets the eye.”
“No, there isn’t,” he murmured.
He heard the newspaper Annie brought with her rustle, and she read, “Crisis in the national forests. Seems that people are killing the forests. I can’t imagine what Silver Creek would be without the forest.”
Neither could Duncan. The few days he’d thought he’d spend in Silver Creek had stretched out into three months, and he found he was starting to feel more and more comfortable in the town. He liked the pace, the people, especially the old-timers who were a far cry from the people who had surrounded him in Los Angeles. And he liked the land around him.
He flipped on the headlights of the SUV as he climbed higher into the mountains. It was barely four-thirty, but dusk was lying heavily all around. “Do you think there’s snow coming?” he asked for something to say.
“We always have snow by Thanksgiving,” Annie said. “And the weather report says we might get some activity. I sure hope so.”
He’d guess the temperature outside had dropped ten degrees, but the sky was painfully clear. Annie read more headlines, and he wasn’t particularly paying any attention until she said, “Business seems to be as depressing as the conditions in the forest.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, asking no questions.
But that didn’t stop Annie from reading more, and everything he’d avoided for six months hit him in the face. And it hit hard. “Tellgare files for bankruptcy. Stocks plummet. Rivals move in. Sounds like some sharks circling the dead or dying.”
That was closer than she thought, and he looked over at her as she refolded the paper. Sickness hit him hard. His father had destroyed Tellgare. He turned his attention back to the road and realized that he’d wandered onto the shoulder. The tires beat on gravel, the three-foot-high wooden safety rail was close and was the only thing to stop a fifty-foot plunge into a rough ravine below.
He tried not to overcorrect, but to ease his way back onto the road. But he didn’t have time to do it properly. At the same time as Annie said, “Look out!” he saw a disabled car on the shoulder, right in his path. Its hood was up and its taillights on.
He had no choice but to jerk the wheel to the left, back toward the pavement. He felt his wheels spin, then grind in the gravel, shooting rocks everywhere as he slipped past the parked car, barely missing impact. But his relief was short-lived when he felt the back end of the SUV start to fishtail wildly, pushing him into a spin. He steered into it, the world outside a blur and Annie’s screams ringing in his ears. The SUV rammed the safety rail, then an explosion and the sound of tearing metal, acrid smoke everywhere, and with a shuddering finality, everything stopped.
Chapter Three
Lauren saw the SUV come out of nowhere, headed right for her, then, in a surreal moment, it passed by her. Before she could blink, the SUV started to spin, throwing gravel back at her car. Dust rose and the SUV slammed into the safety rail sideways, skidded along the barrier, then stopped in a cloud of dust. In that moment she realized the black SUV belonged to Duncan Bishop.
She was out of her car in an instant, running toward the SUV, coughing from the dust and the smell of burning rubber. She reached the driver’s side, grabbed the door handle and pulled, but it was locked. She pounded on the window, calling out, “Open it, open it, open it!” The door flew back suddenly, almost hitting her before she could jump out of the way.
Then she saw Duncan Bishop. The air bag had ruptured from the center of the steering wheel and the smell of chemicals all but choked her. She grabbed his jacket sleeve, the idea that she nearly got him killed too unbelievable to absorb. “Oh, my gosh, are you okay?” she said, the words spilling out over each other. She let go of his arm. “My gosh, I thought you were going to go over the edge.”
“Me, too,” he muttered as he twisted toward her to get out of the SUV. His feet hit the ground, and she backed up to give him space. He towered over her.
“You just skidded, I mean, the SUV was going all over and I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” he said, straightening in the cold air. “And it’s my fault.”
“Oh, no, if I hadn’t parked my car there, you never would have—”
“I got distracted,” he said.
“I can’t open the door.” A voice came from the car and the next thing Lauren knew, a woman had slid across the driver’s seat and gotten out.
She was of medium height, slender, almost plain. Certainly not an Adrianna Barr type. The woman pressed a hand to her chest and gasped, “Oh, my goodness, now that was a ride.”
Duncan asked if she was okay then headed to the hood of the SUV. Lauren followed. Together they stared at the damage. The front tire on the passenger side was torn to bits and the rim had dug into the gravel. The SUV was butted up against the guardrail. Deep ruts were embedded in the body thanks to the large metal bolts that held the wooden rails in place.
“Holy cow,” she whispered and Duncan turned, almost hitting her in the chin with his arm. She moved back quickly. This was not how the plan was supposed to go. “You really did wreck your car, didn’t you?”
“That about sums it up,” he said. “That tire’s history and we’re stuck.”
“No, no, we’ll put on your spare, and we’ll be fine.”
“No, the spare’s gone.”
The SUV was so new it didn’t even have its regular plates on yet. Lauren had to crook her neck slightly to look up at him. “You don’t have a spare?”
“I tore up a tire a week ago on a strip of metal in the road, and I haven’t picked up the replacement yet.”
The mystery woman appeared, pressing herself between Duncan and Lauren to take a long look at the damage. Then she drew back and looked up at Duncan. “And you don’t have a spare?”
“Ladies, there is no spare tire,” he said with a touch of exasperation. He glanced back down the road where Lauren had parked. “What’s wrong with your car?”
She stuck with the words she’d rehearsed while she’d been waiting for him to show up, when she’d hoped he’d stop to rescue another damsel in distress. “It stalled and I can’t get it started, and my cell phone has no signal.”
He exhaled, his breath curling into the cold air. “Let’s see if I can’t get your car started.”
But as he made his way toward her vehicle, Lauren followed and blocked his path. “I can’t let you mess with that car. It’s a classic. It’s not just some old car.”
In fact, the car was her brother’s, almost forty years old, completely restored, and recently had a new paint job that Alan called “cherry-apple red.” It had taken real bribery to get him to part with it for a week or so, and let her drive it all the way here. But she knew she’d need a car that wouldn’t be overlooked or forgotten by Duncan. “And it’s really temperamental.” That was true, and it was also true that if he knew anything about old cars, he’d know that the coil wire