“I know, I know. Do you have a cell phone I can borrow?”
“Not on me. I saw one in your car.”
“It’s dead.” She looked flustered and edgy as she added, “I used the last of the battery to call my insurance agent. He told me I’m too far away and should call a local towing service. Helpful of him, wasn’t it?”
All this was interesting in its own perverse way, but he was running late. Turning on his heel, he said, “Come on, I’ll give you a lift to a phone. You can call a tow truck.”
“Wait, wait,” she said, limping along behind him. “Do you know Dolly Aames?”
“Never heard of her,” he said, opening the passenger door. As Roxanne paused beside him, he noticed the scalp exposed by the part in her hair was as sunburned as the rest of her. She was going to be in pain—soon, too. He reached into the glove box and came up with a battered bottle of aspirin. Shaking out a couple, he handed them to her. “Take these now. For your sunburn.”
She swallowed the aspirin before climbing past him into the truck. “Shade,” she whispered reverently. Hugging the canteen to her chest with one hand and lifting her sunglasses with the other, she glanced down at him. “Heaven,” she sighed.
He’d expected blue eyes. What with her fair skin and blond hair, her eyes should have been blue. But Roxanne’s eyes were chocolate brown, deep, sensuous, eyes that seemed to absorb the world, eyes that looked kind and full of humor and intelligence. Dangerous eyes.
“Thanks,” she said.
He nodded brusquely as he slammed her door. Pulling his hat off his head and putting it back on again, he walked around to his own door, his stride purposeful as he attempted to stuff this woman’s abrupt appearance in his life into a tiny cupboard under his mental stairs.
Trouble was, it was already pretty crowded in there.…
It wasn’t until the truck was headed in the opposite direction that Roxanne began to relax. Well, that wasn’t totally true, she realized. It was a little impossible to relax with the surly stranger sitting beside her taunting every square inch of her parched flesh.
At first, standing in the road, aware that a vehicle was approaching in a cloud of dust, she’d felt tremendous relief. She was to escape an ignominious demise after all. Hallelujah!
But the tall man who jumped out of the truck had startled her with his intensity, with the way his blazing blue gaze had raked her from head to toe, with the twist of his lips as he studied her face and the timbre of his voice as he barked questions. It wasn’t until she registered the canteen in his hand that she was able to mutter anything.
Glancing over at his profile now, she wondered if she dared impose on him further for lip balm, and decided on a long drink of water instead. The sight of him concentrating on the empty road ahead did nothing to soothe her—quite the contrary. Her heart felt like it was beating double time.
“I don’t know your name,” she said.
He flicked her a short glance. “Jack Wheeler.” What he saw apparently didn’t please him because he looked away at once, his brow set in a frown.
It was obvious the handsome stranger didn’t much care for rescuing damsels in distress. Well, she didn’t much like being said damsel.
Jack looked as though he was about a decade older than her, in his mid- to late thirties. His skin was tanned a warm brown color. No wedding ring, no tan line where one had ever been. His short brown hair was sun-bleached and nearly hidden under a worn Stetson. A battered tan work shirt and equally disreputable blue jeans with leather gloves stuffed in a hip pocket completed his ensemble. His facial features were strong, though perhaps this was just an impression helped along by what appeared to be his habitual expression of weary tolerance.
Judging from his worn clothes and the coils of barbed wire she’d glimpsed in the back of the truck, she decided he was a rancher, perhaps with local connections in politics. No itinerant cowboy would be so worried that a newspaper or tabloid had come a-callin’.…Besides, he’d mentioned commissioning an artist to paint his wife’s portrait.
The desert was probably littered with men like him, she thought. Disillusioned men who had somehow lost what they once had.
Like a wife.
Maybe the missus got tired of living out in the middle of nowhere, even if it was with Jack Wheeler who looked more than capable of providing enough nighttime stimuli to keep the old hearth fires burning.
Her heart fluttered a little with the thought of this man starting fires only he could extinguish. All that energy, all that power, all that size—the thought of him leaning in close to her, of running those brown fingers along her face, down her spine—it sent chills racing across her overheated skin.
It was kind of impossible not to compare this hunk of he-man flesh with the refined presence of her former boyfriend, Kevin, a news anchor at the station where they both worked. Four days earlier, he’d dumped her, flashing all twenty-eight perfectly capped teeth as he smiled like a used car salesman and spat out the hated words, “Face it, Roxanne. You’re just like your mother.”
Good riddance, she’d said, but his words had stung.
She put aside thoughts of Kevin and moved along to the next puzzle: a pink box tied with a pink ribbon sitting on the bench seat between them. Utterly feminine, the box implied a new love interest, which made Roxanne so curious it was all she could do to mind her own business.
Business reminded her why she was there. “I’m looking for Dolly Aames,” she declared once again.
“So you said.”
“Last anyone heard from her, she lived out here—”
“Listen,” he said, cutting her short, “this is the desert. A really remote part of the desert.”
“Not that remote, not by car. Not even half an hour from town if you stay in your car—”
“If your friend lived out here and let connections back home drop,” he said, interrupting her with another flick of his blue eyes, “then I’d be the last person in the world to blow her cover. I’ve never heard of her. Honest.”
“But you wouldn’t tell me even if you had?”
“No.”
“Then how do I know you’re not lying now?”
He shrugged. “I guess you don’t.”
About then, they hit the fork in the road. He turned in the direction Roxanne had decided against.
“Where was I headed?” she asked.
“You don’t know?”
She gestured at her foot, slipping the purse off as she did so. How embarrassing to have a man like this come across her with her foot stuffed in a purse! Digging in her skirt pockets, she extracted the car keys, wallet and micro tape recorder she’d deposited there when her shoe broke. At the sight of the tape recorder, Jack grimaced.
“What’s that for?” he demanded.
She held up the little contraption. “This?”
“Yeah. Who do you plan to record?”
“Dolly Aames, of course,” she said, throwing her belongings back in the now-tattered bag where they belonged.
“You should never have turned off the main highway,” he said, his voice as dry as the landscape. “This is all private property out here. It belongs to the High W Ranch. It’s well marked.”
“I didn’t see any signs,” she told him truthfully, but she suspected that even if she had, she would have taken a chance.
He grunted.