Shoving her way past the barrier of bodies and the barricade, intent on saving what she could, it vaguely occurred to her that the gas tank had ruptured.
“Hey, lady! Stay back!”
“Somebody stop her!”
She had no idea who’d yelled at her. “That’s my truck!” she cried again, only to feel something hard clamp around her arm.
That iron grip stopped her cold.
Disbelieving, distraught, she whirled to see Cord holding her back as the other men slipped past the barricade.
“What are you doing?” she screamed, struggling to break his hold.
“I’m saving your neck!” The heat of his palm burned into her, his grip as unyielding as his tone. “That claw is still swinging up there, and the beams it dropped aren’t stable. If one lands on you, it’ll break half the bones in your body.”
Even as he spoke, a long, heavy girder slipped from the top of the pile. It slid to the dirt with the groan of metal and a resounding thud that had men jumping back as if they’d been jerked by strings. Someone yelled for someone else to put out his cigarette. Overhead, the huge black claw that had held the beams swung from its cables like the pendulum of a clock.
Madison’s glance fell back to what was left of her truck and the dark pool slowly seeping from under it. With a shiver, she realized a single spark could turn the pile of collapsed metal into a bonfire.
“You’re lucky you were bringing the coffee,” Cord muttered above her. “If you’d been inside there, you’d have been history.”
Shock turned to incredulity.
“You think my bringing you breakfast saved me from being hurt?” Adrenaline surged as her eyes collided with his. “Are you delusional? If I hadn’t delivered that order, I would have been halfway to my next stop by now. That’s clear over by the docks, miles away from that…that…thing,” she concluded, waving her free arm at the crane.
“Hey,” he soothed. “Take it easy.”
Easy? “How am I supposed to do that?” she demanded, offended that he would even suggest it. “Because I did deliver that order, I’m not going to make that stop or any of my other stops. My truck has been reduced to a manhole cover, and the food I got up at three o’clock to make is mush. That truck is my livelihood, Kendrick, and the people at my stops depend on me to be there on time.”
Her outstretched arm reminded her that he still had her other one shackled. Not caring at all for the patient look he had the nerve to give her, she jerked back. Hard.
Suspecting that she hadn’t freed herself so much as he had let her go, not liking the idea that he held power over her in any form, she spun away, only to spin right back. He actually thought he’d helped her?
“I never should have listened to you,” she insisted, her chin up, her voice quavering with anger and the anxiety that got a firmer grip with each passing second. “I should have stuck to my schedule and not paid any attention to anything you offered or anything you said. You’re the one who told me to park there. Right there. In that very spot,” she reminded him, poking her finger toward the pile. “You even told me to ignore the warning sign. So, don’t you dare act like you’ve done me any favors.”
She was furious. She was distraught. She clearly blamed him and him alone for what had happened.
She also looked as if she could go for his throat because she’d done what he had asked. Fearing she might do just that, anxious to avoid a scene, Cord ignored the lack-of-sleep headache brewing in the base of his skull and started to reach for her again.
She immediately stepped away. Since calming her down by touch didn’t appear to be an option, he made his manner as placating as he could.
“You’ll get another truck,” he assured her. “I’ll buy you a new one and you’ll be back in business in no time.”
Her eyes flashed at his attempt to appease. The bits of gold in their liquid brown depths reminded him of flame. “I need to be back in business now,” she informed him. Her hand darted toward the pile of rubble again “Throwing your money at this isn’t going to fix it. You can’t replace a catering truck the way you can a car. New ones have to be ordered.”
“So I’ll order one.”
“It took me three months to get that one! What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
Cord opened his mouth to reply. Having no idea what to say that wouldn’t just add fuel to her fire, he shut it again. Jamming his hands into his pockets, he watched her walk off. Stalk, actually, though even angry, she moved with a feminine grace that held his focus on the slender line of her back, the gentle flare of her hips, her long, long legs. She did more for cotton knit and denim than most women did for cashmere and silk. Definitely more than many of the women he’d met over the years. Especially the models. There was a softness about her curves that told him she at least had some meat on her bones.
With her luminous brown eyes and her incredible mouth, Madison O’Malley looked like pure temptation. Or would have if she hadn’t gone off the deep end about who was responsible for the state of her truck.
Feeling another publicity nightmare coming on, willing to do anything to avoid it, he followed to where she’d made it past two engineers in hard hats scratching their heads over how best to move the beams. He wanted coffee. He wanted food. He wanted to finish his meetings here, get ready for the sailing race in Annapolis next week and forget he’d ever laid eyes on the spitfire now arguing with the site supervisor.
Unfortunately, what he wanted wasn’t possible at the moment.
Madison wasn’t arguing.
She was begging.
“Just let me see if I can get the storage door open. Please,” she asked the weathered-looking man in a chambray shirt blocking her way. “I just want to salvage whatever is left of my food.”
“I keep telling you, ma’am, it’s too dangerous.” He motioned to the driver of a forklift, far less concerned with her problems than his own. Progress had just come to a screeching halt at this section of the huge project. “You saw that beam slip a minute ago. That one there could go next,” he said, pointing to one hovering at eye level. “Let us get this cleared out, then you can do what you need to do. You shouldn’t be here without a hard hat, anyway.”
His glance moved past her shoulder. “I told her she shouldn’t be here, Mr. Kendrick,” he called. “She’s just not listening.”
“It’s okay,” Cord called back, walking toward them as if he owned the place—which, she supposed, he did. “I’ll take care of this.”
It was as obvious as the supervisor’s relief that no one was going to let her near her truck, much less inside any part she might be able to squeeze into. Realizing that, Madison looked from the crossed lengths of steel and frantically switched gears. If she couldn’t save some of her inventory, then she needed to focus on transportation. She needed some way to get to her other stops and tell her customers…
Tell them what? she wondered, deliberately turning from Cord’s approach. That she couldn’t feed them today? That she couldn’t feed them the rest of the week? The month?
Only once in her life had she failed an obligation. That had been years ago, yet she still lived with the consequences of that failure in one form or another every day of her life. She had diligently met every responsibility ever since. The thought of not meeting her commitments now added anxiety to pure distress.
She needed a vehicle. Something large. But her thoughts got no further than wondering whose vehicle she could borrow when she realized her mind was turning in aimless circles, too overwhelmed to think at all.
The