She’d known very little about the plants and herbs the earth gave, or how beneficial they could be. Not until she’d needed them—for Callie.
Mariah was grateful to Una for sharing her knowledge. The herbals helped Callie as nothing else had been able to do.
Certainly not the doctors’ medicines.
Una had become a friend when Mariah moved here two years ago. Mariah’s marriage to Will Cade had ended, probably even before he’d left for California and the new life he wanted for himself.
A life without the responsibilities of a wife or child.
A sick child.
She’d been frightened then—and alone. Except for Callie. Una had made her feel welcome, even taken her under her wing until Mariah was able to recover her pride and put her life on a steady footing.
She seldom thought of the past now, her marriage, or the man who’d abandoned them with so little regard for their welfare.
The herbs that she gathered for Callie soon became a source of livelihood for her, a way to support herself and her daughter. She began by preparing and packaging the extras she collected and selling them to the local people. Last year she started her own mail-order business, reaching even more people with her natural medicines.
It wasn’t a lot of money—her only large account was a health-food store in Phoenix—but it was enough to provide a modest living for them. And even a few extras now and then.
Just then she neared the place where she’d encountered the man on the mesa, the man with the golden body and the storm-blue eyes.
Luke.
She wasn’t sure why he intrigued her, but he had. She wondered where he’d come from—and where he was headed on that big cycle of his. Not many people strayed this far from the interstate. She might have asked him, but she’d needed to get on with what she was doing. She didn’t like to be away from Callie too long.
She glanced down the road, shading her eyes, curious to see if his cycle was still parked where it had been, but it was gone. She denied the quick pang of disappointment she felt, calling herself foolish for the weakness. She was no longer a schoolgirl with silly ideas in her head, but a woman, a mother—with a child who needed her.
She shifted the basket to her other hip and continued on, but Luke Phillips wasn’t easily dispelled from her mind. Sunrise was a town that had been forgotten by time, passed over by the tourist trade, though it could well boast of some of Arizona’s most breathtaking scenery. They didn’t get very many strangers passing through—but that was no reason this man should have such a hold on her.
Perhaps it had been that indefinable look she’d glimpsed in his eyes, as if he, too, carried a pain he found difficult to bear, a pain that tore at his heart.
The way Callie did hers.
Then over the next rise Mariah stopped in her tracks. There’d been an accident. The shiny silver of a motorcycle glinted back at her, looking like a fallen warrior as it lay on its side in the center of the road.
Where was Luke?
Was he hurt?
She swiftly scanned both sides of the road, then spotted him sitting under a lone cottonwood a few yards away. “Luke,” she called out to him. “What happened? Are you all right?”
He turned at the sound of her voice and she approached warily. The right side of his face was dirty and bloody. The denim of his right pant leg was ripped and he’d stripped off his black T-shirt and tied it around his thigh to stop the bleeding that was already beginning to soak through the fabric.
Her gaze slid over his bare, muscled torso, not missing the scrape across his right shoulder and the ugly purple color already starting to darken the skin.
“Damned armadillo,” he cursed.
She met his scowl. “Armadillo?”
“Yeah.” His scowl deepened. “I swerved to miss it and the bike went spinning out of control. Know what’s the worst of the deal? It just lumbered on past me without a glance, off into the damned sagebrush.”
“And left you in a mess, it seems.”
“And the bike unridable,” he added. “Don’t happen to know a good mechanic around here, do you?”
Mariah’s gaze swept over him. “Right now I think it’s more important to get you seen to. Some of those cuts and scrapes look serious.”
Luke didn’t agree. He was a doctor—at least enough of one to know that the wounds were mostly superficial. But what he’d done for the last ten years of his life was not something he wanted to reveal to this woman. It would only bring on the inevitable questions, questions he didn’t want to answer.
“Look, I’m fine,” he said. “The only thing seriously damaged is my pride. No man wants to admit he was brought down by a miserable armadillo.”
His answer didn’t dissuade her from her concern, though it did prompt a smile, a smile that could pump a little daylight into the dark reaches of his heart—if he allowed it to.
He tried to forget the brightness in her smile, but it wasn’t as easy to ignore her touch when her fingers brushed his shoulder softly, gently, probingly.
She knelt in front of him and examined the wound in his leg, loosening the makeshift dressing to make her own assessment of the damage. Her touch was as confident as any surgeon’s—and damningly sensual. That last thought had him sucking in a breath.
She glanced up. “Sorry—does that hurt?”
There was innocence pooled in her green eyes, the kind that could make a man believe in the world again. But that would be a tall order for Luke.
“Would a macho guy like me admit it if it did?” he returned.
That brought another smile to her pretty lips, and for one dangerous moment he wanted to crush those lips with his own, feel them part for him, taste their sweetness and that all-fired innocence of hers. There was something so natural about her, nurturing, and a serenity he envied.
“Look—we’ve got to get you cleaned up,” she said as she retied the dressing on his leg. “My truck is parked nearby. Sit still, and I’ll go get it. We can load the cycle in the back.”
He glanced at her slender body and decided the woman wouldn’t be of much use in the loading department.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she said.
As if Luke had anyplace to go in this wilderness.
As if he had anyplace to go at all.
He leaned back against the tree and watched as she disappeared on down the road. He should have asked her how far she had to go to retrieve that truck of hers. A mile? Ten miles? Luke had the feeling distance didn’t mean all that much to her, that she was well-accustomed to getting where she wanted to go—and under her own power.
He frowned at his now-useless bike and ran a hand over his jaw. How the hell had he gotten himself into this mess? But that wasn’t something he wanted to think about.
It was more than one nuisance armadillo in the road.
It was why he was on this road in the first place, what had happened in the trauma unit that one tragic night—and his inability to live with himself because of it.
He wasn’t sure how long he could keep on running from his pain—or if he could ever escape it. All he knew was that it had traveled with him every mile of his journey.
An unwanted companion on his ride to nowhere.
It didn’t take Mariah long to retrieve the truck from where she’d parked it. But there was no time