“That would be wonderful,” she said, a relieved smile breaking out on her face.
Wonderful for her, maybe. Not for him. The last thing he needed was an Ivana look-alike, with a baby no less, staying one thin wall away from him.
“My name’s Gina, by the way.” She shifted the diaper bag and held out a hand.
“Buck Armstrong.” He reached out, wrapped his oversize hand around her soft, delicate fingers and wished he’d driven home another way.
* * *
Gina Patterson climbed into the backseat of the handsome stranger’s extended-cab pickup, her heart thudding. Please, Lord, keep us safe. Watch over us.
Don’t let him be a serial killer.
But a dog wouldn’t be that friendly with a serial killer, and a serial killer wouldn’t act that loving with a dog. Would they?
“Air bags,” she explained when he looked over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. “Can’t sit in front.” Technically, she shouldn’t even bring Bobby into the truck, not without a car seat, only she couldn’t figure out what else to do. She couldn’t give Buck the keys to get her car seat from her out-of-gas SUV, and she certainly couldn’t leave Bobby with him while she walked the three miles back to her vehicle.
They were safer in the backseat, she figured, safe from him as well as from any kind of car accident. If he tried to kidnap them, she could at least hit him in the back of the head with her shoe.
She was ready to drop with fatigue after three long days of driving, and it was getting colder by the minute. Buck’s arrival had to be the blessing she’d prayed for. Although he seemed pretty gruff for a rescuer.
“Right, I knew that. It’s less than a mile,” he said, and his dog panted back over the seat at her, smiling in the way happy dogs did. It made her miss her poodles, but she knew her best friend back home would take care of them.
She scratched the dog’s ears for a minute and then let her head sag back against the seat, thanking God again for keeping her and Bobby safe during their journey.
Well, mostly safe. She’d been foolish to leave her bag on the sink while she’d changed Bobby’s diaper. Who’d have thought there’d be a purse thief in a rest area in rural Indiana? Fortunately, she’d filled her tank just before the theft—with cash—so she’d kept going as far as she could, leaving the interstate so there’d be less of a trail.
The debit card she’d kept in her jacket pocket might help in the future, once things back home cooled down, but she didn’t dare use it now.
After the theft, she’d gotten scared and timed things all wrong. She’d thought she could make it to a hotel she’d seen advertised in a larger town up ahead, but the SUV was a gas hog and had sputtered to a stop a few miles back.
At which point she’d realized she didn’t have enough cash for a hotel, anyway.
“All set?” Buck looked back at her and Bobby, brows raised over eyes the color of the ocean on a cloudy day.
Man, those were some haunted eyes. “We’re set. Thank you for helping us.”
She studied the back of him as he put the truck into gear and drove into the town. Broad shoulders, longish hair and stubble that made him look like a bad boy.
What had he been doing out at 2:00 a.m.? The question only now occurred to her, now that she and Bobby were safe, or seemed to be. “Excuse me,” she said, leaning forward, “but you haven’t been drinking or...partying, have you?”
His shoulders stiffened. “No. Why?”
Whew. She hadn’t smelled alcohol on him, but alcohol wasn’t the only thing that could mess you up. Her husband had been an old hand at covering his addiction to cocaine, right up until he’d lost control on a California mountain and skied headlong into a tree. The drugs had shown up in the autopsy blood work, but when he’d left the ski chalet an hour earlier, she hadn’t even known he was impaired. Yet another mistake her in-laws had laid at her feet.
Her throat tightened and she crammed the memories back down. “Just wondering.”
So maybe she’d done the right thing after all. When Bobby had started to cry, she’d decided it was better to risk walking than to stay with her vehicle. She’d scraped together change from the floor and found her emergency twenty in the bin between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. So at least she could get Bobby some food. At ten months, he needed way more than mother’s milk.
Hopefully, she could find a church that would take her in, because calling in her lost wallet might put the police on her trail. She chewed on her lower lip.
How had she ever gotten into this situation? She tried to tell herself it wasn’t her fault. While she’d committed to stay with her husband, she hadn’t married her in-laws. Once he was gone, so was her obligation to them. When Bobby was old enough to know the whole story, he could choose to reconnect in a safe way if he wanted to.
“Guesthouse is right up there.” Buck waved a hand, causing Gina to look around and realize that Rescue River was a cute little town, the kind with sidewalks and shops and glowing streetlamps, a moonlit church on one corner and a library on the other. The kind of safe haven where she might be able to breathe for a little while and figure out her options.
Except that, without ID and with just a twenty and change, her options seemed very limited. Worry cramped her belly.
The stranger pulled up in front of a rambling brick home. The outdoor light was on, revealing a porch swing and a front-door wreath made of flowers and pretty branches.
“I’ll have to wake up my sister. You can wait here in the truck or out front.” He gestured toward the house.
Well, okay, then. No excess of manners.
Except that, actually, she was the stranger and he was doing her a service. “I’ll wait on the porch. Thanks.”
He seemed able to read her mind as he came around to open the truck door for her. “Sorry to leave you outside, but my sister is sort of touchy,” he said as they walked up the narrow brick walkway. “I can’t bring a stranger in to set up shop without asking permission. It’s her place.” He paused. “It’s a very safe town, but I’ll leave Crater out here if that will make you more comfortable.”
“It will, thanks.” It had been the dog, and the stranger’s reaction to the dog, that had made her decide he was a reliable person to help her.
That, and the fact that she was desperate.
In her worst moments she wondered if she’d done the right thing, taking Bobby away from her in-laws’ wealth and security. But no way. They’d become more and more possessive of him, trying to push her out of the picture and care for him themselves. And she kept coming back to what she’d seen: her mother-in-law holding Bobby out for her father-in-law to hit, hard, causing the baby to wail in pain. Her father-in-law had started to shake Bobby, she was sure of it, despite their vigorous denials and efforts to turn the criticism back on her.
Once she knew for sure, she couldn’t in good conscience stay herself, or leave Bobby in his grandparents’ care.
When she’d first driven away from the mansion that had felt increasingly like a prison, relief had made her giddy. She’d not known how oppressed she had felt, living there, until she’d started driving across the country with no forwarding address. Realizations about her dead husband’s problems had stacked up, one on top of the other, until she was overwhelmed with gratitude to God for helping her escape the same awful consequences for herself and Bobby.
As she’d crossed state lines, though, doubts had set in, so that now her dominant, gnawing emotion was fear. How would she make a living? What job could she get without references and with few marketable skills? And while she worked, who would watch