“Abby could use some cheering up, so don’t hurry this job, okay? I need a little time.”

“Huh.” Old Whitey leaned over to spit his tobacco in the grass. “Thought she wanted her vehicle repaired so she could lay tracks out of Trueheart. Said something about gettin’ to Sedona.”

“Things have changed,” Jack muttered. Don’t make me say what, old man.

“What?”

Great. Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “Well…Abby would be smart to settle here for the winter.” Jack forged on, feeling as if he were trudging head down into a dust storm. “She’s never built anything and she thinks she’ll build an adobe by the fall? Ain’t gonna happen.”

“Gal’s pretty spunky.”

“Yep, but take it from a divorce lawyer, she’s smack-dab in the middle of the Divorce Crazies. She’ll change her mind ten times in the next ten months. Meanwhile, till she’s over this phase, Trueheart’s a safer, saner town to raise her son than Sedona’ll ever be. Last thing Abby needs is to get lost in a power vortex.”

“Hmm.” Whitey chewed thoughtfully, then said, “Sure you know which end of the branding iron you’re grabbing?”

Jack cocked his head. “Meaning?”

“Meanin’ if anybody gets burned around here, it might not be Abby.”

Dear Reader,

In this fifth story in my series about the town of Trueheart, Colorado, Abby Lake is a woman caught up in that wonderful/terrifying phase of life I call the “Divorce Crazies.” I hope you’ve never experienced it yourself, but if you have, you know it’s a time of extreme vulnerability and extreme creativity.

Since (through no fault of her own) her last effort at making a good life failed, Abby’s determined to get it right this time for herself and her young son, Skyler. She’s changing everything—her job, her home, her attitude toward men, love and marriage. She means to grab life and happiness with both hands before they slip away.

To Abby’s wary new neighbor, lawyer Jack Kelton, it seems that Abby “hasn’t a clue what she wants—but she’ll be flying off in all four directions at once, looking for it.”

Jack may have a point. I remember the first year of my own divorce: buying a handyman’s-special house on the East Coast one week (I wasn’t that handy), then flying to California the next to learn if a man I hadn’t seen for fifteen years might be The One. (He wasn’t.) Darting back to my new house to buy forty of everything (paper towels! canned beans! flashlight batteries!) as if I could build a wall with all those supplies between me and the cold scary world.

And so forth for the rest of that crazy year, till at last I met someone who taught me to calm down and smile again. So here I give you Abby Lake, on her way to learning how to smile again in the town of Trueheart, Colorado. As always, hope you enjoy!

Peggy Nicholson

Kelton’s Rules
Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Ron, for all the times

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER ONE

“MO-O-OM, WE SHOULD GO back!” Perched on the bench seat behind his mother, Skyler smacked the Colorado road map.

“Sweetie, I know I took a wrong turn, but see what a gorgeous place we’ve found. Can you believe those mountains?” Abby Lake took one hand off the school bus steering wheel and waved to the right where distant peaks caught the late-afternoon sun. “Just wonderful, huh?”

Framed in her rearview mirror, Skyler was pink-faced and scowling. He pushed his glasses up his short nose and glared straight ahead at the two-lane country road. “You should’ve asked me before you turned. I’m the navigator.”

“You and DC looked so comfy back there, I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” Buckled in behind her on the one bench seat remaining in the stripped-out bus, Skyler had drifted off. He’d been smiling in his sleep, hugging DC-3, the enormous white tomcat that lay cradled against his chest.

Abby hadn’t seen her son smile like that in two months or more. She’d drunk in the sight, feeling like a wanderer in the desert who’d stumbled upon a stream at last—and knelt to scoop cool, clear water with both hands. Because maybe that smile meant the worst was behind them. Skyler would find his happiness again. And then, please God, he’d forgive her.

Stealing glimpse after glimpse in her mirror, memorizing the tender curve of her child’s mouth, the shape of the cat’s ear and the spray of his whiskers—she planned to sketch this scene tonight, once they stopped—somehow she’d missed her road, somewhere west of Durango.

“We should go back!”

“It’s sort of difficult to turn this beast.” Used to a compact car, Abby was still amazed by the huge turning radius of the ancient half-size bus. And it must be leaking power-steering fluid—a tight turn elicited a screeching protest that set her teeth on edge. Never should’ve bought this thing. “Besides, I think we’re coming to a town up ahead—Trueheart, if we’re where I hope we— Where I believe we are. If so, we can angle southwest again toward Cortez.” She reached behind her to pat his map someplace in the vicinity of the tiny dot with the charming name of Trueheart. “So we haven’t lost too many miles.”

“I mean we should go back to New Jersey. We should go home. This is stupid. I hate this place!”

“Oh, Sky, sweetie,” Abby murmured helplessly. Beyond the bug-spattered windshield, the road wavered and blurred. She blinked it clear again. “We can’t go back.” They had no “back” to return to. The divorce settlement had given her the suburban trophy house that Steve had insisted they buy two years ago when he’d left navy aviation to become a commercial pilot. But on a single income, she couldn’t possibly afford to keep a five-bedroom minimansion. Didn’t want it anyway.

Last week she’d sold it for a profit of twenty-thousand dollars, which would be their grubstake for a fresh start. A new life out west.

A life her ten-year-old son hated already.

“We could! We could be home in four days. Dad’s gotta be missing us.”

Want to bet? With Chelsea the Super Stewardess—oh, pardon me, flight attendant—to fly? And a new family on the way? He hasn’t spared us a thought. “Of course he misses you, sweetheart. But he can come visit you anywhere there’s an airport.”

“There’s no airport around here! Nothing but cows and…and cow poop and grass. It stinks!”

Also a sky like a vast, inverted bowl of blue bird feathers. Cerulean. Indigo. Turquoise at the edges. Mountains turning to blazing lumps of coal as the sun rolled down toward a jagged purple horizon. Breathtakingly beautiful country, if her son would only look. “Okay, but Trueheart’s not where we’ll be living, you know. Once we make it to Sedona—”

“I’ll hate that, too!”

Abby sighed, reached back to touch his knee, then grimaced as he flinched away. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that he was glaring out his side window, mouth quivering. Don’t cry, sweetie, oh, don’t! If I’d had any choice in this…

She’d do it all again. Not even for Sky could she have stayed married to Steven Lake once she’d realized the extent of his cheating. What a blind, trusting fool I was! She should’ve seen it coming. Any woman with two eyes in her head—the kind of woman who didn’t muddle her maps and end up blithely wandering off into the wilderness with the sun going down…

But Abby had never been that kind of woman—a woman who paid attention. She was always marveling over a pebble, or a dandelion, or a cloud, when she should’ve been turning out her husband’s pockets every time he returned from a cross-country flight.

“And I hate this stupid ol’ wreck of a bus! The radiator’s boiling over again. Didn’t you look at the heat gauge?”

Abby looked—yelped—and took a foot off the gas. “You’re right!” They’d filled the radiator only this morning and also the day before around noon. The mysterious leak seemed to be gaining on them with every passing mile.

Coasting to a stop—she hadn’t seen another car for ten minutes or more—Abby pulled over to the ragged shoulder of the road and blew out a breath. “Wonderful… Okay, where’s the water jug?” They’d used more water than gasoline, it seemed, these past two days.

“It’s back—” Skyler unbuckled himself and scrambled into the rear of the bus, which was crammed with boxes and baggage and a washing machine and all the other household essentials they couldn’t leave behind. Skyler’s model airplanes. Abby’s books and easel. DC’s litter box. “Uh-oh…”

“What?” She’d stopped on a long, gradual upgrade, so Abby shifted the floor lever carefully into first gear, stepped on the emergency brake pedal, then swung around. “What’s the matter?”

Sky held up an empty five-gallon jug. “The cap came off. Your sketchbook’s all wet.”

Abby clenched her teeth on a groan and closed her eyes. Her sketchbook! She’d had three or four drawings in this one that she felt sure were keepers. She’d intended to mat and frame them once they reached Sedona, then use them as samples in her search for a gallery to handle her work. You couldn’t have found a safer place to put the blasted jug? She managed a shaky smile. “Well… Okay. No big deal.” Now what? “We’ll just have to find some water.” They’d crossed a narrow creek perhaps two miles back, down at the base of this long, long slope. The road had been gradually climbing up from the plains for the last twenty miles.

“I’m sorry.” Sky looked as crushed as she felt.

“Plenty more sketches where those came from.”

“If we’d stayed in New Jersey it never would’ve happened.”

“Well, we didn’t!” She held out her hand for the jug. “We didn’t,” she repeated, lowering her voice. “We’re just going to have to make the best of where we are, kiddo.” She swung open her door a cautious inch or two, checking underfoot for the cat, who also seemed bound and determined to bolt back east. “Want to come along? I think there might be a stream down there.” The roadside pasture also sloped gently down toward a distant line of trees.

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, I’ll lock this door then.” Not that there was anyone within miles to worry about. In fact, the real concern was how they’d find someone to help them if she didn’t locate water. How could a country be so big and so deserted? Not a fence, not a telephone pole, not a house in sight. Just enormous rolling slopes, rising in wave after dusty wave toward the far-off mountains. “I’ll be straight down there, if you change your mind.”

SKYLER STOOD, staring at the ruined sketchbook, while her footsteps crunched on gravel, then faded away. “Darn. Crap. Oh, booger, DC!” He could have found a better place to stow the water. Should have. Had he wanted that to happen, or was he just stupid?

His dad was always telling him to pay attention. Laughing and calling him Spaceshot when he forgot to do something or when he was clumsy doing it. Sky stooped for the cat. “I used to think Spaceshot was good.” A name for an astronaut, maybe, or a test pilot. He still remembered how it had stung when the true meaning finally dawned on him.

“Come’ere, luggums.” Arms filled with twenty pounds of cat, he rubbed his face through the thick white fur till a rumbling purr kicked into gear. “Like a big ol’ DC-3 humming along,” his dad used to say. “Fat thing.” He wandered forward to sit in the driver’s seat, holding the cat in his lap as he stared out through the windshield.

At nothing. There was nothing out there that mattered. “’Cept her,” he muttered grudgingly, turning DC’s head so they both peered down the hill to where his mom’s yellow T-shirt bent for an instant toward the ground. Picking flowers, when she ought to be looking for water. “Or maybe not.” Why should he care about her when this was all her fault? If she hadn’t gotten so angry at his dad, he’d never, ever have left them. He’d told Skyler that. “But what can a guy do?” Sky muttered, echoing the breezy words he’d heard so many times before.

I can drive us home where we belong.

Skyler blinked behind his thick lenses. He could hijack this stupid bus sometime, when his mom was taking a nap on the mattress in the back, as she did when she got too tired to see the road.

“Drive all the way back to New Jersey,” he gloated, picturing it as he ruffled DC’s fur, then smoothed it again. “She’d wake up and—zowie—there we’d be in the driveway.” Home. His eyes started to water. “Like we never left at all.”

If only he could drive.

He leaned over the cat to examine the pedals. Three instead of two like on his dad’s BMW and his mom’s old Taurus. Which she never should have sold. Not for this hunk of junk.

And this thing had a floor-mounted stick shift. It looked a lot harder to handle than the gear shift on his dad’s car, which he’d been studying all year, practicing in his mind. He’d planned to ask his dad if he’d teach him to drive this summer.

Instead here he sat, in the middle of nowhere. Hundreds and thousands of miles from his dad, his friends at school, his bedroom and his tree house out back. “So first you have to shift.” He tried it and was surprised at the big lever’s resistance. “Ooof—move, you stupid thing!”

DC stood up on his lap, tail swishing in irritation. Sky hooked his left forearm around the cat to steady him. “Help me out here, will you? Why won’t it—oh!” Spaceshot. Dummy. He’d forgotten the clutch pedal. You stepped on that, then you shifted. “Pedal, then hold it, then—ha!” The gearshift moved easily, with a soul-satisfying clunk!

“Yeah!” Sky shifted up, down, then over and up again, the way he’d seen his mom do it. Then down again on the other side. “And that’s fourth gear, when we’re really rolling.” Hey, this was easy! He shifted back to the middle.

“Now we have to turn it on.”

Did he dare? He stole a glance downhill, but his mom was out of sight in the trees. “She’ll never hear us if we run it for just a minute,” he assured the cat. Resting his chin on DC’s round head, he leaned forward to finger the key. She couldn’t possibly hear, but still… His mom didn’t get mad often, but when she did…

“Ouch!” Tired of being squashed, DC dug in his claws and slithered down from his lap. His double-wide tail slapped Skyler’s glasses, which as usual had slid to the end of his nose. “Hey, stupid hairball, watch what you’re doing!”

Cat and glasses hit the floorboard at once, with a clatter and a weighty thump. “If you’ve broken them—” Sky’s mom paid for his first pair of replacement glasses each year, then the rest came out of his allowance. This was pair number three and it was only June. “Crap!”

He couldn’t see very well without them. He wasn’t blind as a bug-eyed bat, the way that jerk Timmy Ryder at school was always telling everybody, but things got kind of…blurry when he took them off. “Move over, fur brain.” Shoving the cat to the left with his foot, Sky squeezed under the steering wheel and cautiously down. “Where are they?”

He patted under the high-set pedals. Nope. “What are you doin’, sitting on ’em?” He pulled the cat up onto his knee, ignoring his warning growl. DC was too timid to bite even a mouse.

“Or maybe—ooof—keep still!” He twisted around to grope under the seat and— “Yeah, got ’em.” Unbroken; for once in his life he was lucky. He jammed them on top of his head, let go of the exasperated tom and, reaching up to the dash, caught hold of something, a handle of some kind, and started wriggling up past the steering wheel.

Thock! The handle jumped in his hand. The bus quivered and groaned.

“What was that?”

No comment from the cat. Ears flattened to his head, DC was doing his best to exit left, wedging his plump body between the driver’s seat and the side of the bus in an unsuccessful effort to reach the back. His tail lashed in frustration.

Sky grabbed the wheel to pull himself off the floorboard—and it spun hard to the right. “Hey!” Something felt wrong. The wheel was shuddering in his grasp. Gravel rumbled under the tires. As he squirmed into the driver’s seat and pulled his glasses down onto his nose, things swam into focus—and streamed away. No, it was the bus that was moving, he realized, as it gave a horrible lurch.

And kept on rolling.

Backward.

Swerving with a ponderous, dreadful deliberation off the road, then down across the pasture.

CHAPTER TWO

MARYLOU WON’T DO, Jack Kelton told himself, aiming his open Jeep down the road to Durango.

The baby-sitter might be five years older than his daughter, Kat, but she was three jumps behind every time. Missing Kat’s straight-faced jokes and veiled warnings. Failing to foresee her pranks, or knowing how to handle them once they’d been played. Worst of all, the girl was gullible, taking Kat at her word when she shouldn’t. Apparently they weren’t teaching critical thinking in high school these days, or if they were, Marylou was failing.

“And now, shoot me if she’s not in love,” Jack muttered, scrubbing a hand through his wind-whipped hair as the Jeep topped the hill. A fifteen-year-old in calf-love was useless! Lethally oblivious to the world and her responsibilities.

With Marylou lost in love, Kat would run wild this summer. She was probably contemplating mayhem this very moment, since she’d wanted to accompany him into Durango. She’d pulled a major pout when he refused to let her go to a kickboxing movie alone while he met with an after-hours’ client. Right now, back in Trueheart, Marylou was probably sprawled on Jack’s couch, bare feet up on the backrest, spooning the last of their chocolate-chip ice cream out of the carton as she giggled on the phone with the Love of her Life. While forgotten Kat was probably somewhere down the street, hot-wiring somebody’s car. She’d pass him any second now with a whoop and a wave and an offer to drag race. Automatically he glanced in his mirror.

Nothing but empty road back there. Still, facts had to be faced. He’d have to find another sitter, and soon. Not that Trueheart had much to offer in the baby-sitting department.

The Jeep crested the next rise and Jack cocked his head. Fifty yards downslope, a bright red, sawed-off school bus was parked by the edge of the road, facing his way. Not from around here; Trueheart school buses were yellow and full-size. Jack’s brows drew together as his Jeep closed the distance. Was it—?

It was rolling. Backing down the road. Or, no— “What the devil?”

As Jack’s foot moved to his brake, the bus curved slowly off the shoulder and trundled out into the field. Some idiot had left it parked without shifting into first! Most likely the emergency brake had let go.

Well, so be it. Whoever the idiot was, he was about to learn his lesson the hard way. The narrow band of brush and cottonwoods at the bottom of the hill screened a twenty-foot drop-off to a nifty little trout stream where Jack sometimes fished. Once the bus had gathered momentum, it would blow right through that fragile barrier.

“Hope to God the moron’s not directly in line below, communing with na—” Jack’s eyes narrowed. He stomped down on the gas, then spun the wheel. The Jeep swerved off into the pasture, bucked over a hummock and roared in pursuit. There was somebody in that bus, a head bobbing above the steering wheel! “Step on the brake, bozo!” Or could the brakes have failed? Swearing out loud, Jack floored the accelerator.

A race between gravity and distance, speed and time. Eyes sweeping the slope below, gauging probable trajectories and possible outcomes, Jack spotted the woman. Bursting from the trees, a blur of yellow with flailing arms. Pale flapping hair, a mouth open wide in what must be a scream, though he couldn’t hear her over his engine’s roar. “Get the hell out of our way, lady!” What did she think she could do—catch the damn bus like a fly ball? “Move it, woman!”

Well, she’d have to take care of herself. The Jeep closed the last few feet, bounding along driver’s side to driver’s side, and Jack stared up through the open window—into a small, wide-eyed face. Jeez, a kid! “Step on the brake!”

“I can’t!” His voice squeaked with panic. “My cat’s stuck under the—” He swung back into the bus, yanking desperately at the gearshift.

Jack gritted his teeth at the agonized squawk of stripping gears. So much for the transmission. “Step on the brake and damn the cat! Do it now!”

The boy shook his head frantically. “He w-w-won’t move! If I could shift into—”

The bus must’ve been doing twenty by now. Maybe a hundred yards to the trees—a hundred and three to the cliff. The woman had vanished behind the bulk of the vehicle. “Forget shifting, kid, and listen!” Jack yelled, leaning halfway out of the Jeep. “Grab the top of your wheel—yeah, that’s right! Now slo-owly—ve-er-ry slowly—turn it toward me!”

A calculated risk. If the kid panicked and swung the wheel too fast, the Jeep, running parallel, would smash into the bus’s left flank. “Good! That’s good.” Thank God he could take directions.

“Now slowly. Turn another inch toward me—excellent!” If the bus didn’t flip, if they still had room to pull off the maneuver, the kid could steer it in a gentle curve away from the creek, gradually swinging cross-hill till the bus coasted to a halt. “Gimme another inch—good!”

Jack turned his own wheel; they were now running side by side, not three feet apart. He flinched as the bus slammed into something solid—a rock or a log—and the exhaust system peeled away. He glanced back in his mirror as tailpipes and other parts popped into view and clattered along in their wake. “So who needs a muffler?” he assured the kid, sending him a rakish grin.

Yeah, right, we’re all under control here. Having the time of our lives!

But the kid actually smiled back at him and Jack laughed out loud. Spunky little devil! “Turn it a little more—ea-aa-sy does it. Yeah!” He sucked in his breath as the bus wobbled, trying to lift onto its right-side wheels—then settled back four-square. Whew! I owe You one, up there!

One more in a long list.

“Give it another inch. You’re doing great!” And he’d better be—they had forty feet left to the trees and the bus was angled roughly fifty degrees to the fall line. Jack corrected his own course, nodding fiercely. “Now one last time, son—gently—a couple of inches.”

As it curved cross-slope, the bus had been gradually losing momentum. It was doing maybe ten when it plowed into the bushes. But hitting them almost broadside, it didn’t slice on through. Branches shrieked along steel. Slender tree trunks crackled and snapped. An avalanche of baggage inside the vehicle rumbled to the far side. The bus rocked up onto its off-side wheels for a heart-stopping moment—then, supported by the bushes, settled back again.

As he braked to a halt alongside, Jack blew out his breath. And thank You! He stepped out and sauntered on shaking legs over to the kid’s window. “That was exciting.” They measured each other solemnly—then grinned from ear to ear. “Well done,” Jack told him, socking his shoulder. “Very well done ind—”

“Sky! Oh, baby!”

And here came Momma at last, panting and wind-torn and half-hysterical, clutching a forgotten bunch of crumpled wildflowers. A small frantic tornado, she roared down the narrow gap between the vehicles and actually bumped Jack aside, getting to her child. “Oh, sweetie!” She wrenched open the kid’s door. Jack winced as the edge of it banged into the Jeep. So much for his paint job.

“Are you all right?” But she wasn’t waiting to hear; apparently touch would tell her faster. Her fingers flew over the boy’s face, his arms, his ribs. Tugging at his clothes, smoothing his hair. “Where does it hurt?”

Jack met the kid’s eyes over her shoulder and gave him a commiserating grin. Sometimes a guy just had to put up with the mushy stuff.

“Aw-ww, Mom! I’m fine.” The boy twisted away as she tried to pull him into a hug, then dived under the wheel. “It’s DC…”

The largest cat Jack had ever seen crouched behind the pedals, tail fluffed to the size of a firehose, eyes like black saucers. Moaning throatily, he slashed at the boy’s outstretched hand.

“Ouch! He’s never done that before!” The boy— Sky?—brought scratched fingers to his lips.

“Reckon you’ve never run him backward down a mountain before,” Jack said mildly. “Give him a minute.”

Momma swung around, registering his presence at last.

And worth the wait, Jack decided as his gaze dropped from wide green eyes still dilated with shock, down over a lush trembling mouth, over a pair of still heaving, just-the-right-size breasts, to—oh, boy, forget it! To a slogan emblazoned across the T-shirt, claiming: A Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle.

Hoo-boy, one of those. A lady with an ax to grind. His eyes flicked back to the bus, filled almost to window level with its assortment of household rubble. Jeez, that thing on its side—could that be a washing machine?

“Been divorced long?” he asked casually.

She blinked. Blinked her long lashes again, grateful smile fading to wariness as she raised her chin. “H-how did you guess?”

Jack threw back his head and laughed.

SHE’D SWORN she’d stand on her own two feet from now on, yet here she was again, letting a man take charge.

Not that it was easy to stand alone when apparently she’d wrecked an ankle, somewhere in that pell-mell, adrenaline-powered chase, Abby reminded herself. Sitting in the topless Jeep, where their rescuer had planted her when he realized—at the same moment she did—that she could barely hobble, Abby clasped still-shaking hands between wobbly knees. She watched with growing uneasiness as he stalked around the bus, hands on lean hips, shaking his shaggy head to himself as he summed up the state of her disaster and decided what should be done about it.

She had a terrible suspicion his conclusions would be the right ones—logical, sensible and therefore impossible to refute, much as she’d rather refute them. She’d already had one sample of his plain-spoken intelligence, with that guess about her marital status.

I don’t need this!

Didn’t need a disastrous setback, just as she was starting to pick up the pieces of her life and think about rebuilding.

Didn’t need someone—another too confident, too brash, too good-looking-for-his-own-good male—telling her what to do and how to do it.

Except that she did. She was utterly exhausted and confused. Overwhelmed. She supposed this was what they called shock. Looking at her son as he smiled wanly up at the man who’d rolled out from under the bus to stand and pat his shoulder, her eyes filled slowly with tears. Oh, Sky, I could have lost you!

Losing the life she’d known since she was nineteen was nothing compared to that.

And being bossed around by another know-it-all man—who’d known enough to save her son—was a small price to pay. A price she’d pay gladly again and again. The bargain of a lifetime.

“I haven’t even thanked you yet,” she said huskily a few minutes later when he came to sit beside her in the Jeep. “That cliff beyond the trees…if Sky’d gone over that…”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I couldn’t have done it without him. He’s a smart kid. Stayed cool when it counted.”

“Yes…” Cool under pressure. Steve and his pilot buddies had valued that quality above all else.

Sometimes she wondered if it signified ice at the center. A basic heartlessness. Easy to be cool if you didn’t really care. When she’d told him she wanted a divorce, Steve had shrugged, given her a rueful grin and merely said, “Can’t say I blame you, babe.”

She shook off the memory with a jerk of her head. Who cared if this man was just one more of that type? It wasn’t as though she was buying him and taking him home. “I don’t understand how this could’ve happened,” she said now, eyes returning to the bus. “I know I left the brake on. And I thought I left it in gear.”

He glanced down at his boots, then quickly up again—and smiled. “Brakes have been known to fail. My name’s Kelton, by the way. Jack Kelton.” He held out a big hand and reluctantly she surrendered her own to its shockingly warm clasp, aware of the roughness of his palm. A carpenter, perhaps? Or out here in cow country, with those boots he was wearing, maybe a cattleman?

“Abby Lake,” she murmured. “And that’s Skyler.” She nodded at her son, who’d climbed into the back of the bus and was apparently searching for DC among the tumbled boxes. In the gathering twilight, she could barely see him moving beyond the windows.

“Good enough. So first question, Abby. Do you have any sort of towing service we can call?”

“I’m afraid I—” She’d had roadside assistance, of course, on her car. But in her scramble to close on the house, then move, since the new buyers had insisted on immediate occupancy… What with all the other details of dismantling one’s life and carting it across country: changing bank accounts, health insurance, credit cards, mailing address… “I forgot to get it. I just bought the bus last week.”

“Ah,” Kelton said neutrally, although she could hear his disapproval. No doubt he would have remembered. “So question two. I take it money’s an issue here?”

A sensible deduction—prodding old bruises and a still-simmering indignation. Three months ago, money wouldn’t have been an issue. Now it was survival itself. “It’s tight.” Budgeted to the penny and now, looking at the bus, she realized her budget was blown. What am I going to do?

“Okay, so hiring a tow truck to come out from Durango, then haul a bus forty miles back, isn’t practical. And once you get it to a garage, it may need a new transmission, definitely a new exhaust system. I’m not sure about the axles, though they might be intact… Repairs are going to be costly, if you can even scrounge the parts for this old girl. And meantime, while somebody’s fixing it for a week or more, I suppose you’ll have to stay in a motel. Unless you have friends in Durango?”

“No…” Abby threaded a hand through her disheveled hair. Tried to find a smile. “We’re from New Jersey. At least lately…” It was one of the things she’d hated most about being a military wife all those years. The repeated uprootings. The constant farewells. A shy woman like her needed to nest in one place, where she could build and nourish long-term friendships. The kind of support system that sustained you through disasters such as this.

“Anyway, that all adds up to a lot of money,” Jack concluded, casually reaching across to brush a knuckle across her cheek, where a tear had escaped. He glanced skyward with a comical frown. “And on top of all that, damned if it doesn’t look like rain.”

Reflexively, Abby followed his gaze. Over their heads stretched a vault of cloudless silvery blue, cupping the last of the light, one star already twinkling in the east. She laughed shakily, wiping one hand across her wet lashes. “Cats and dogs by the bucketful.”

“Well, then…” Jack folded his arms and leaned back, stretching his long legs, boots braced against the pedals. “If Durango’s not an option, what about this instead? We’re three miles from Trueheart. There’s an old cowhand north of town, Whitey Whitelaw, who’s the best shade-tree mechanic I’ve ever seen. Cobbling together clapped-out feed trucks and tractors is his specialty, and his prices are pretty reasonable. I imagine he’d cut you a deal.”

“He doesn’t know me from Adam. I don’t know why he’d—”

“Why don’t you ask him and see? I can call Whitey when we get back to town, ask if he’d come out here in the morning, take a look at her…”

Abby nodded doubtfully. She could think of nothing better to try. “I…suppose so. And for tonight, we’ve got a mattress in back and a camp stove.” She could boil enough creek water to—

But Jack was shaking his head. “Don’t even think it. You need a real bed and a hot meal—you both do—and that ankle needs some ice to bring it down. You’re coming with me. I’ve got just the place for you.”

“You mean, to your…house?” If he was married it would be awful, descending on his surprised, solicitous wife, and if he wasn’t, even worse. “Oh, no! We couldn’t impose.” She’d rather camp for a year in a cow pasture than be forced into that kind of dependency on a stranger, no matter how kindly intended.

“Abby, I never let anybody impose on me. And Kat and I don’t have room for guests at the moment.”

So he was married. She should have guessed, attractive as he was. He didn’t wear a ring, but then that came as no surprise. Steve had shed his within a year of their marriage, insisting it was dangerous, what with all the machinery and electronics a pilot had to deal with.

“But there’s an empty rental cottage next door to us set up for mountain bikers and for skiers in winter. It’s furnished down to the pots and pans and bedsheets—and I’m sure I can arrange for you to stay there. My landlady owns it.”

Abby smiled in spite of herself. He had it all figured out. And she’d bet Jack could sell coconuts to Tahitians, if he took the notion. She should be thankful he was willing to help.

“So what are we gonna do?” Skyler demanded, appearing out of the dark at her elbow, his arms wrapped around a glowering DC-3.

Abby let out a long breath. She supposed she’d never really had a choice in the matter. “I guess we’re going with Mr. Kelton.”

CHAPTER THREE

“AND HE-ERE WE ARE,” Jack announced grandly as he swung the Jeep into an unpaved driveway. Set fifty feet back in a narrow lot, a tiny, two-story cottage crouched under the trees. “Be it ever so humble, you’ll find it homey enough. It’s basically identical in layout to mine. They were built at the same time for twin daughters, back in the 1880s.”

He’d warned her it would be rustic, Abby reminded herself, searching for something to say as she studied the sagging front porch, the weathered clapboard siding that suggested this twin hadn’t sprung for a paint job since the 1890s.

Still, whatever its appearance, the price had indeed been right for a week’s lodging. On the far side of Trueheart, Jack had left them in the Jeep while he’d negotiated with his landlady, Maudie Harris. He’d loped out of her house minutes later, wearing a triumphant grin while he twirled a key ring around his finger.

“That’s my place over—” Jack paused in the act of nodding to their right, across a picket fence hedged by an overgrown border of bushes and waist-high weeds. He scowled. “Over there.”

Through leafy branches, Abby could make out the glint of a pickup truck, parked in the shadows beyond an identical sagging porch that ran the width of Jack’s cottage. With lights glowing from the front-room windows, his house looked more inviting than hers.

“Very nice,” she said, although a twist of uneasiness coiled through her stomach. Bad enough to be so obliged to the man already. But to have him as her next-door neighbor—ready, willing and able to give his opinion on her every move from here on out… I don’t need this. “Well…” She swiveled in her seat.

“Hang on.” Jack bounded out of the Jeep and around to her side. “You shouldn’t put your weight on that ankle. Not till we’ve had a look at it.”

“I can manage.”

“I’m sure you can.” But his hand blocked her passage, leaving her the choice of shoving it aside—or accepting it.

Used to having his own way, for all his charm and goodwill, Abby decided, gritting her teeth behind a close-mouthed smile. She’d learned not to trust charm. She’d found that it was often a substitute for less polished but kinder, more genuine emotions.

“Thank you.” Her nerves skittered as those oven-warm fingers closed over hers. Then he took her other arm, supporting her weight as she slithered down from the high seat. They stood for an instant toe-to-toe, Abby looking up—quite a way up—and Jack holding on to her just a heartbeat too long, his fingers seeming to squeeze her a hairsbreadth too tightly.

Or maybe her alarm sprang from her rattled nerves, sensing danger where it didn’t exist. There was also the simple fact that she hadn’t stood this close to a man—a virile, ruggedly attractive man—in months. “Thanks,” she said again.

But he didn’t take that as dismissal. Instead Jack transferred her hand to his forearm, a support as hard and muscular as the rest of him obviously was. “We’ll get you settled and then…” His shaggy head swung back toward his own yard as they moved carefully across the grass. Abby could see one decisive eyebrow drawn down in a scowl. “Then I’ll just…”

What was bothering him over there?

But faced with the stairs to the porch, she abandoned speculation to concentrate on making it up the six steep steps, then limping across the warped decking to the unpainted front door.

While Jack fit the key into the lock, Sky joined them, frowning unhappily, his cat cradled on his shoulder. She could read his thoughts as if he’d shouted them out loud. Compared to a brand-new, suburban five-bedroom house back in New Jersey, this wasn’t much. Compared even to the Motel 6 room they’d slept in last night, this cottage was outclassed. And it’s all your fault, Mom!

“It seems very…comfortable,” she managed as Jack steered her inside and switched on the light. If your taste ran to plaid, broken-backed sleeper sofas. To a La-Z-Boy chair spilling foam stuffing across a dirt-gray braided rug, or fluorescent bulbs in a tacky cartwheel chandelier. A wall-mounted elk head that wore a red bandanna and probably had a case of fleas. A collection of beer cans and bottles, arranged artfully along the mantel over a small, ash-choked firebox. “And look, Sky, we have a fireplace!” Her words came out much too cheery.

“Hmm…” Jack led her to the couch and lowered her, oblivious to the fact that she’d stiffened her spine, signaling her resistance to the maneuver. “Haven’t been in here since last fall, when Maudie gave me a choice between her two places. Looks like those college kids who came here to ski over spring break were a little…rough on the decor.” He straightened to aim a forefinger at Skyler. “Now you, kid—you’re in charge of unloading your stuff from my Jeep while I’m gone. Don’t let your mom budge, okay?”

He turned to Abby as Sky set down DC and trooped out the door without a protest. “And you— Let me see if there’s ice in your freezer.” He strode off toward the rear of the house and returned in seconds. “Nope, no ice. So sit tight, let Sky do the work—I mean all the work, Abby—and I’ll be back soon as I can. There’s a few things I have to…”

He was gone before she could open her mouth to tell him thank-you, but from here they could manage alone.

BY THE TIME Sky returned with their sleeping bags, Abby had hobbled into the kitchen. Propped against the back of a wobbly kitchen chair, she surveyed the vinyl floor with its missing tiles; that had to be pre-World War II. The dingy cabinets, the ancient, grease-caked gas stove and narrow refrigerator with its rusty door, to which somebody had taped a poster of a snow-boarding ski bunny, wearing nothing but a bikini and a wet-lipped smile.

Lemons into lemonade, Abby chanted inwardly. You get lemons, you make lemonade. There was no reason to cry, no real reason at all. This dreadful kitchen wasn’t a preview of the rest of her life. Wasn’t the top of the slippery slide to poverty and despair and loneliness. This was only a temporary setback, something she’d be laughing about six months from now—even a week from now, when they reached Sedona.

Surely.

Tonight she was simply…tired.

“Mr. Kelton just put a guy in a truck,” Sky said, dropping his load on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

She rubbed her lashes and turned with a puzzled smile. “Put who, honey?”

“A guy with a cowboy hat. And boots. Into that truck over there. He sort of carried him by his belt and his collar and…threw him.”

“Ah… Oh…” Wonderful. “Well, he’s very helpful, sweetie, isn’t he?” And just who had Jack been helping out his door? His wife’s lover? Oh, we don’t need this at all!

“Then the guy drove off like a bat out of hell!”

So that was the roar and rumble of gravel she’d heard a moment ago. “Don’t swear, Skyler.”

“Dad says hell.”

“Your father’s a grown man.” Physically, if not emotionally or mentally. And now were they stranded next to another overgrown adolescent with his own amorous troubles? They ought to leave first thing in the morning, but how? Even if Maudie would refund their money, renting a car for even a week would deliver the coup de grâce to her tottering budget. “When you’re grown up—”

“I’m moving back to New Jersey.”

A brisk knock on the front door saved her from a retort she might have regretted. Jack strode into the kitchen, his hair no wilder than it had been before, his clothes untorn. He didn’t appear to have been brawling, though the color across his craggy cheekbones might be a bit higher. With the fluorescent lighting, Abby couldn’t be sure. Perhaps Sky had misinterpreted whatever he’d seen.

“Let’s check out that ankle.” Jack set a loaded tin soup pot on the counter, then swung out a chair for her. “And, Sky, hustle the rest of your gear out of my car, will you? I need to take off in a minute.”

The fastest way to get Jack out of their lives was to let him follow his own program, Abby concluded, giving up and sitting. When he’d gone, she could lock the door, reestablish control. By tomorrow, once she’d caught her breath, she’d be able to cope with him. Enforce her boundaries. Resist his plans without rudeness.

Tonight—for a few more minutes—she just needed not to scream.

She bit her bottom lip as he lifted her foot to another chair and then, with surprising gentleness, pulled her sock down over her—shockingly swollen ankle. Which was already turning a fine shade of mottled eggplant.

“That hurt?” He glanced up as she made a tiny sound of dismay.

“Not…much.”

“Hmm.” Frowning, he drew one fingertip from her ankle down the top of her foot to her toes.

A line of ice and then fire sizzled behind his touch. She blinked back tears, focusing fiercely on his big blunt fingertip with its well-tended nail. On work-roughened hands that were very clean. On the top of his down-bent head. He had thick, straight hair of that color men call dirty-blond and women call wheat or tawny. His eyes were gray, she noted, as he peered up at her from under bristly brows, two shades darker than his hair.

“I’m no doctor, but I’d guess it’s a sprain.” Idly, absently, his finger returned up her foot as he held her gaze.

For too long.

He looked into her too deeply.

Something leaped between them before she could lower her lashes. Awareness. It triggered an echoing flutter in her stomach, a flow of warmth. Between one breath and the next, Abby felt as if they were toppling toward each other. Gripping the sides of her chair, she fought down the urge to smack his hand aside. I don’t need this. Don’t want it. “I seem to be able to—oo-oh—move it. Sort of.”

“Your call, Abby. I’ll be happy to drive you into Durango if you want to go to the emergency room. Or I suppose I could ask Doc Kerner, our local vet, to come over, give us his opinion.”

Was he kidding?

He wasn’t. The town of Trueheart, what she’d seen of it, seemed to be less than a mile square. No motel. Apparently no real doctor. “Why don’t I give it till morning?” Forty miles to Durango and back again in Jack’s unnerving company was more than she could face at this point. He’d been coming on to her, hadn’t he?

“That’s what I’d do,” he agreed with a relief that assured her she must have been mistaken. Rising with an easy grace that belied his big-boned build, he reached into the pot. “I was a bit low on ice cubes myself, but I’ve got frozen peas and corn a-a-nd wild mountain blueberries.” He draped a plastic bag of each across her ankle as he spoke. “Give it half an hour, if you can sit still that long.”

He was a fine one to talk. Jack was halfway to the exit already, speaking as he moved backward. “I’ve got to drive this little, um, a baby-sitter home and then I have to find Kat. But after I’ve rounded her up, can we take you and Sky to supper? Nothing fancy—Michelle’s will be closed by then. But Mo’s Truckstop has the best steak-burgers in a hundred miles and Mo keeps the grill fired up all night.”

A baby-sitter. So Jack and his wife had a child or children. And the banished cowboy with the truck is the baby-sitter’s boyfriend, Abby hazarded a silent guess. That was a better scenario than her first one. Meanwhile Kat, Jack’s wife, must be out on the town. This was too many players to follow. “That’s awfully kind of you, but please don’t trouble yourself. We’ve got sandwich makings right here.” She nodded at Skyler, edging past the man with his arms full of a big plastic cooler. “I think we’ll eat in, then go straight to bed.”

“Probably just as well,” Jack said readily. “In that case, sleep tight, and don’t worry about the bus. Whitey and I will look after it first thing tomorrow.”

And he was out the door before she could make the man see that she’d rather handle her own problems.

SUNLIGHT and the sound of birdsong awoke her the next morning, cool pine-scented air wafting in an open window. Abby smiled, stretched luxuriously…and let out a yelp as her injured foot brushed the footboard.

“Oh!” She lurched to a sitting position, memory tumbling back in a jumble of sharp-edged images. Her ruined sketchbook. Steve’s infidelity. A blue columbine she’d picked somewhere recently. Her mother’s fretful face, matching her querulous voice on the phone. Steve’s new wife, Chelsea—pridefully, astoundingly pregnant when Abby had run into her at the mall. The plunging crimson bus. The pain in her side as she chased it.

A man’s hand on her aching foot.

Piece the puzzle together, and here she sat on a lumpy bed in the middle of nowhere. Her wincing gaze swept the tiny bedroom with its minimal furnishings. A scratched maple bureau and an ancient pine wardrobe; she’d bet there was a twin to that piece next door. And what time was it? Her faithful old wind-up alarm clock must be ticking away back in the bus.

If it hasn’t been stolen by now.

A second wave of panic washed through her. All their belongings out there on a mountainside! Jack had promised her they’d be safe, but Jack struck her as the type to whistle through hurricanes. Hardly a worrier.

Shower. Coffee. Get out there, girl! Abby threw off the covers.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, she stood lopsidedly at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. There was a jar of instant coffee tucked in her cooler for waking in motels. But there was no way she’d boil water in any of the utensils she’d found in the cupboards before she’d thoroughly scrubbed them.

Meanwhile, where was Jack? He’d said something about helping her early this morning. But when she’d looked out her front door and across their adjoining fence, she’d seen no sign of his Jeep.

Maybe he’d forgotten his offer? Went off to work, wherever and whatever that was? He seemed to be a short-attention-span kind of guy, superb in a crisis, too restless to be good with the follow-through.

Or possibly he’d sensed her discomfort last night and had left her to handle her own affairs.

“Careful what you wish for,” she told herself wryly. Without his help, how would she get out to the crash site? A town with no doctor would hardly have a taxi service. And then how to contact this Whitey person, the mechanic?

“Coffee first,” she decided, then she’d cope. Somehow.

“Arrrr…” Skyler trudged into the kitchen, DC tiptoeing hopefully at his heels.

“Morning, love.” She smoothed his pillow-tossed hair, the same pale ash-blond shade as her own. “Sleep well?”

“Mmmph.” He took after her in appearance, and in most other ways, as well. But unlike her, Sky was no morning person. He sat heavily at the table, his glasses wobbling on the end of his nose, the cat winding around his bare shins. “What’sferbreakfast?”

Abby tried for a note of enthusiasm. Think of this as an adventure, will you? “Tuna fish sandwiches.” All that was left. She’d meant to replenish their traveling snacks when they reached Cortez last night.

“Yech-hh! Why can’t we have oatmeal?”

As she usually gave him back home, was the unspoken accusation, but if Sky mentioned New Jersey one more time, she’d throw something. “When we get to Sedona I’ll buy some, sweetie, but this morning—”

Knock knocka knock knock! A cheery rap sounded on the back screen door, which Abby had opened to air out the kitchen.

Relief surged through her chest, mixed with an odd sense of wariness. She hobbled across the room, wondering: Could the man have half the impact in daylight that he’d had on her last night? Or had the shock and disorientation of the bus crash made her unusually—and temporarily—vulnerable?

She’d have to wait to find out. Their visitor was a child—a girl roughly Skyler’s age—all long spindly legs and reed-thin golden arms. She stood on the back stoop, fist lifted to knock again. “Um, hi.”

“Good morning.” Her ponytail was two shades lighter than the wheat color it would probably be when she was grown. Still, Abby knew who’d bequeathed her that tiny cleft in the chin. And those enormous gray eyes. She opened the screen door with a smile—and blinked. The child had Jack Kelton’s eyes, but how to explain her lack of eyelashes? Her eyebrows frizzled to kinky ash? The crinkled hair along her forehead that had obviously come too close to a flame?

“Dad said to bring you these.” The girl clutched a pile of bright packages to her skinny chest with a clumsily bandaged hand. “He said you’d want breakfast.”

“He didn’t need to do that, but please, come in.” Abby stepped aside and had to smile as the two children spotted each other. The girl stopped short and scowled. Skyler looked up—and whipped off his glasses, which rendered him utterly blind. He turned them nervously in his hands, torn between seeing and being seen, squinting up at her.

“Waffles,” announced Jack’s daughter, dumping her packages at Sky’s elbow. “Dad said you have the blueberries to go with ’em already. And these are burritos.” She placed another frozen package on top of the first. “And a pizza.”

This was Jack’s idea of breakfast?

“And coffee.” A package of ground coffee—now here at last was something useful—was added to the stack of offerings. Jack’s daughter made a rueful face as she turned toward Abby and pulled a crumpled envelope from the pocket of her ragged blue jeans cutoffs. “And this is for you.”

As her name, printed in a bold, slashing script, attested. Abby leaned back against the counter, opened the envelope and read.

Hi, neighbor!

Whitey and I are checking out your bus. Meanwhile, this surly outlaw is grounded from here to eternity and I’m down one baby-sitter. Mind keeping half an eye on her, just for the next hour? There’s a fire extinguisher next to your stove.

Thanks.

Jack

Surely that last line was a joke? Had to be. And asking Abby to pinch-hit for his baby-sitter was certainly reasonable, given all he’d done for her. Now Jack was doing even more, taking time out from his own day to look over her bus with the mechanic. Still, she wished he’d taken her along. She hoped he didn’t intend to commit her to a course of action without consulting her first.

At the table, curiosity had overcome Sky’s vanity and he’d put on his glasses. Studying his counterpart, he demanded, “What happened to your eyebrows?”

“Burned ’em off, welding.” Apparently some decision had been reached. The girl pulled out a chair and sat, scooping up the tomcat to drape him over her lap. “I never saw a cat with one green eye and one blue before. What’s his name?”

“DC-3.”

“Huh!” She nodded gravely. “I’m a Kat, too—Kat Kelton. Who are you?”

Kat. So this was Kat? Abby sucked in a breath, suddenly feeling that the walls had flexed inward half a foot or so. She limped to the screen door and stood there, seeing not the house beyond the fence but a big, blunt fingertip gliding down her ankle. She felt something oddly akin to panic….

Good grief, what was this, a goose waddling across her grave? Or caffeine withdrawal—what time was it, anyway?

Gradually the sensation faded; her eyes refocused on the house next door, her ears on the halting conversation behind her.

There might be a Kat Senior, as well, she told herself with a surge of relief.

Which dropped as swiftly as it had spiked. No. There couldn’t be. Had there been a mother in residence, she’d already have trimmed that fire-frizzled hair. And Kat’s bandage needed redoing. Coffee first, then I’ll see to it.

So Abby lit the oven, put the water on to boil, washed three plates, three glasses, three sets of silverware. Picked up one of the packages and wrinkled her nose as she read the directions. Frozen pizza for breakfast; that should’ve told her everything she needed to know.

One week, she reminded herself. No more than a week.

CHAPTER FOUR

PIZZA FOR BREAKFAST wasn’t such a bad idea, after all—if you ate it outside on a blanket, on a glorious sunny morning in southwestern Colorado.

Picnic completed except for a last cup of coffee, Abby limped along the weed-choked perennial border between her cottage and Jack’s. Once upon a time an ardent gardener must have lived here. The remnants still bloomed: several sprawling rambler roses, a late lilac of an exceptionally gorgeous shade of violet, a clump of daisies splashed white against the rioting green. Blue flag irises unfurled their petals to the sun, while at their feet, ruby and white alyssum duked it out with the dandelions. A bit of unkempt heaven just begging her to reach for pen and ink and watercolors.

Kat and Skyler had insisted that DC-3 should join their feast, and now Sky lay on the blanket with the tomcat crouched on his chest like a rampant lion. Abby cut another branch of blowsy pink roses, arranged it in a chipped blue stoneware pitcher she’d filled with water, then glanced around. “Where’s Kat?” Just a minute before, the girl had been perched on the old swing that hung from the branch of the gigantic oak tree shading the back of their house.

“Went to get something at her place,” Sky said as he stroked a knuckle down DC’s outstretched throat.

How close an eye was she supposed to be keeping on this girl? Normally, Abby wouldn’t have thought twice about allowing a visiting neighbor’s child to wander back home, back in suburban New Jersey. But here in Trueheart she didn’t know the rules or the dangers.

As far as she’d been able to see last night, the town was safe as could be, near idyllic. Small enough that strangers, good-intentioned or otherwise, would be instantly noticed. So small that any adult would know all the children—and more to the point, their parents. Her cottage was on a narrow road serving perhaps twenty nineteenth-century houses set on deep, old-fashioned lots that had been laid out at a time when each family probably tended a vegetable garden or kept chickens and a milk cow out back.

“Maybe you should go find her,” Abby suggested. She wouldn’t have dreamed of entering Jack’s domain uninvited, but somehow Sky wouldn’t seem quite such an intruder.

“Don’t need to.” Her son nodded at the fence, where Kat was just now wriggling between two missing pickets. Abby swallowed a laugh. The girl hadn’t bothered to deviate thirty feet out of her path toward the street, to where a garden gate stood ajar under an arching, rose-smothered trellis. Kat was a straight shooter in every sense of the word, Abby was finding. Another trait she’d inherited from her blunt-spoken father.

And where is her mother? Abby had wondered that several times already this morning. Not that it was any of her business. “Oh…Kat,” she murmured helplessly as the girl arrived beside her to offer a pair of garden shears.

“Do you want to use these? They were in our junk drawer.”

“Much better than this old knife,” Abby agreed, accepting them. “Thank you. And I see you…fixed your eyebrows.”

Kat’s brows had been scorched to ash in whatever fire had burned her poor little hands in several places. Abby had attempted to question her while she’d smoothed antiseptic cream on her burns then rebandaged them. But beyond claiming that she’d been welding last night, Kat had scowled and refused to elaborate.

“They were so icky I figured I’d shave ’em,” Kat confided now.

She had. She’d shaved them off entirely—then redrawn them, with what looked like black ink from a felt-tipped pen. She’d drawn them the way a child usually pictures eyebrows, in continuous arching lines rather than short, hairlike strokes. Worse yet, she’d placed them a quarter-inch too high and given the left one a zany, quizzical slant. She looked like Groucho Marx, astounded.

“Yuck!” Skyler had come to join them. “You look weird! Loony!”

Kat bristled. “No loonier than you, goggle-eyes!”

Sky went as pink as the roses, and Abby fought the urge to rush to his rescue. His weak eyesight was a constant source of woe. Bullies at school had singled him out for attention, using his thick lenses as a point of derision, even snatching his glasses off his face.

But on this occasion, Sky had been the first to make a personal remark and so should pay the price.

“Least I didn’t burn off all my hair,” he retorted, unrepentant.

Oh, Lord, if he gave Kat the idea of shaving her head! “I wonder what Kat would look like in glasses?” Abby intervened hastily.

“Yeah.” Sky whipped them off and held them out. “I dare you! Let’s see if you look any better.”

Apparently “dare” was the magic word. Kat settled them on her nose and gave him a haughty glare.

Skyler smirked. “Now you’re a goggle-eyed loon.”

“And you’re another!” But Kat wriggled her brows, made a maniacal face—and Sky burst into giggles.

“If you c-could see what you look like!”

They trooped off into the cottage in search of a mirror and Abby let out a sigh of relief. Storm averted for now, anyway. Life would be so much easier this next week if those two got along. And Sky had been dreadfully lonely these past few days, mourning the loss of his friends on the East Coast. He was a bad mover, as she’d always been, shy and therefore slow to reach out, to make new friends.

Another reason Abby felt guilty. Was she totally crazy—utterly selfish—dragging him away from his hard-won pals? From the only town he’d ever lived in for more than a single year?

But what about me? She’d hadn’t chosen a new life; she’d been launched into it willy-nilly when Steve had left her for a young woman who was determined to bear his children.

But once he’d done that, didn’t Abby have the right to make the best life she could, someplace fresh and new and unencumbered by old hurts and worn-out dreams? Where she wouldn’t have failure rubbed in her face each time she encountered her replacement? Biting her lip, she cut another spray of roses, a handful of daisies, and shoved their stems into her pitcher. Then she stood, hugging the bouquet of flowers to her breast, staring vaguely around her at the overgrown yard and woebegone cottage. I wanted a new life for us, but look at this! This wasn’t part of the plan.

She raised her head at the sound of distant engines coming nearer. Then a parade of vehicles burst from beyond her far neighbor’s pine trees and came rumbling down the street. In the lead rolled an enormous, open-backed truck whose drab olive color and rugged design suggested some sort of military surplus. It towed a crimson bus—her bus—effortlessly behind it. Jack Kelton’s Jeep brought up the rear, a pile of lumber angled up over its stern. He lifted his hand in a jaunty wave.

Didn’t even think to ask me if I wanted my bus here—or somewhere else, she thought, half vexed, half amused. He’d simply decided what was best for her and forged ahead.

The truck turned down her driveway, while the Jeep continued on to Jack’s. When the vehicle stopped beside her, Abby stood on one wobbly tiptoe to peer into its cab.

“Ma’am.” A weathered old cowboy touched his battered Stetson. “Reckon you’d be Miz Lake?”

“Abby.” She stepped onto the running board to accept his extended hand, dry and gnarled as a knot of driftwood. “And you’re Mr. Whitelaw?”

“Whitey, and this ol’ cuss is Chang.”

In the dimness of the cab, Abby had taken the lump of white and orange at his side for a heap of rags. But now a rounded head reared up; two rheumy-brown pop-eyes considered her with an air of jaundiced malevolence. An ancient Pekinese. The dog lifted his black lip in a toothless snarl as she stretched out a hand to pat him—then changed her mind. “Pleased to meet you both, Whitey, but however did you drag my bus up that hill?”

“Huh! This truck could yank that oak out by the roots, if I asked it to—” He jerked a thumb at the swing tree. “Now, where’d you like your bus?”

JACK JOINED ABBY and the children to watch Whitey maneuver the bus farther into the backyard, working it around so that it was finally parked, hood toward the street, tail-lights a few feet from the listing toolshed that stood near the back fence. The bus was nicely shaded by trees, with a strong limb overhanging the engine, in case Whitey needed to set up a block and tackle.

Jack nodded approval, then glanced down at his daughter and flinched. “Katharine Kelton, what am I going to do with you?” To look at her, you’d never guess that her mother had been—was—a beauty. As feminine as a pink powder puff or a feather-trimmed, high-heeled mule.

Kat stuck out her stubborn chin. “I like ’em better this way.”

“Glad to hear it, ’cause if that’s my pen you used, it’s permanent ink.” He sent Abby a rueful look, meant to show he had no hard feelings. You watched the Kat every minute of the day, which, of course, was impossible, or you learned to live with the consequences.

“Oh, I’m sure we can get it off, whenever she likes,” Abby murmured, laying a slim hand on Kat’s shoulder.

The lightest of touches, but it seemed to align woman with girl, consigning Jack to the outside of an invisible circle. Leave her to me, said that gesture.

Fine; so he would. He hadn’t a clue what to do with Kat and it got worse every year. He turned to Sky for some masculine support—and groaned out loud. The kid gave him an embarrassed smirk from under an inked-on mustache, à la Adolf Hitler. “Whatever.” Too much to hope for that Abby would bring a note of sanity to the neighborhood. She was just a new kind of craziness.

He pulled her aside, noting as he did that her ankle was still swollen but apparently functional. “Whitey says the gears are stripped. That means a new transmission, plus the new exhaust. And he thinks your radiator is shot—rusted through at the bottom.”

She’d crossed her forearms under her breasts, as if to hold herself together. “Yes, I knew about the radiator.”

It took real effort to keep his eyes focused on her face. “He can work on it for fifteen dollars an hour plus parts, if you like. That’s less than half of what you’d pay a city mechanic. But he thinks maybe you should junk her. Sell her for whatever you can get.”

“Darn…” Abby tried for a smile. “What a sucker I was. If she hadn’t been such a wonderful color…”

Jack frowned. “Come again?”

“I fell in love with that crimson. It’s why I bought her. I could just picture her parked in front of those red-orange cliffs you see in Arizona Highways with that blue desert sky. I even brought along some green-and-purple striped canvas to make an awning for her.”

“That would’ve been…bright,” he allowed. You’re losing me here, Abby. You make life decisions based on color? Still, he felt himself leaning toward her, she looked so little and lost. “But maybe it’s time to let her go. Buy something a little more practical.” Like a car. “You could rent a truck to get you and your belongings to wherever you’re going, then—”

“Sedona. That’s where we were headed.”

Sedona. He should’ve guessed. Sedona, Arizona, where all the hippies and mystics and misfits and tofu-eaters and New Age scam artists congregated, drawn by power vortexes and drumming circles and too many juice bars. Well, that explains a lot.

“I have a friend out there, a Feng Shui consultant, who owns some land. She was going to let us park our bus on her property. We were going to live in it for the summer while we built something permanent. An adobe, I was thinking.”

Ah, yes, he’d seen this so many times before. A clear case of the Divorce Crazies. “Have you, um, ever built a house before?”

“Well, no, but how hard can it be?”

Jack turned with relief to Whitey, who’d been unhitching the bus and now stumped over to join them, his moth-eaten Pekinese waddling at his worn-down boot heels. “You tell her what I said?” He leaned aside to spit a stream of brown tobacco juice, then pulled out a yellow bandanna to dab primly at his mouth. “Gettin’ the parts is gonna be the hardest thing. Might take some fancy scrounging. There’s a yard over on the reservation. Seems t’me they had an ol’ bus or two.”

“Do you…have any idea how many hours it would take…to fix her?” Abby asked.

How much it would cost, she meant. Jack wondered what kind of settlement she’d gotten. Whether she’d had a competent lawyer. Dithering soft women like this one always seemed to hire kindly bumblers, while their husbands hired sharks.

“There’s no telling. I’d put one foot in front of t’other till she’s done or till you say ‘whoa.’”

She stood, arms clasped tightly around her middle. “Could you tell what caused the brake to fail in the first place?” she said at last. “Or how it popped out of first gear?”

Whitey and Jack exchanged a quick, wry glance, then the old man shrugged. “Driver error.”

“But I wasn’t—” Her eyes widened. “You mean, Skyler? Sky did this? I know he tried to stop it, but you think he—”

“He’s a boy, ain’t he? When I was his age, anything on wheels was fair game. How else is he s’posed t’learn?”

“Driver’s Ed when he’s of legal age!”

“Pshaw! Most ranch kids’re driving by the time they can see over the steerin’ wheel.”

“But he’s not—” Abby swiped a lock of hair behind her ear and blew out her breath. “Okay. What’s done is done. About fixing it, though. Whitey, you really can’t give me an estimate?”

“None that I’d care to stand by.” Whitey shifted from his good leg to his bad and back again. “You know, you might want t’chew it over, Miz Lake. I’m in no hurry. Can’t work on her anyways, ’cept Saturdays and Sundays. We’re pretty hard-pressed out at the Circle C, since Kaley dropped her twins this spring, smack in the middle of calving season. Been up to our ears in puke and diapers ever since, ain’t we, Chang?” He looked down at his feet, then quickly around when he didn’t see the dog.

A feline screech and a flurry of barks dragged everyone’s eyes across the yard. DC shot out from under the truck with the Pekinese snapping toothlessly at his heels, bellowing blue murder.

“Dadblast you, Chang!” Whitey yelled, “Get on back here!”

The tomcat swarmed up the swing oak and disappeared beyond the leaves. Chang hopped twice, scrabbling frantically at the bark—then collapsed in a wheezing heap at the base of the tree.

“Gonna give yourself a stroke someday,” Whitey scolded, though Jack could tell this was for Abby’s benefit. The old man’s face was pink with pride. “I’m mighty sorry, ma’am. If a cat looks at him sideways, he can’t control himself.”

The kids had hopped out of the bus at the first sound of mayhem. Sky leaned against the trunk, staring upward. “DC? DC! What if he falls, Mom?”

“He’s not an outside cat,” Abby explained to Jack. “I don’t think he’s ever been up a tree before. Certainly not a high one.”

He was an hour late for work already and his ladder was across town at the building site. Jack clamped a lid on his instinct to ride to the rescue. For Abby, anytime, but not for a cowardly hairball. “Not bad for a beginner.” And what goes up must eventually come down. No use breaking his own neck speeding the process along. “Once Chang goes away…”

“He’s leavin’ now. We gotta get a move on.” Whitey whisked his snarling companion into the truck, clambered up, then poked his head out the window. “You sleep on it, Miz Lake, and give me a call, okay?” With a wave to the children, he rolled off toward the street.

“I can get him,” Kat declared, peering up into the branches. “If I had spiked boots like a lumberjack it’d be easier, but if somebody’d boost me up to that first limb…”

“Uh-uh.” Jack tugged on her ponytail. “You’re grounded, kiddo, and that means what it says. Both feet strictly on the ground.”

She gave him a disdainful look, or it would have been, except for those funhouse eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the office?”

He showed his teeth. “I am. Soon as I set you up. Go get the extension cord out of the Jeep and plug it into the carport plug. You’ve got some sanding to do. Lots of sanding.”

Kat made a terrible face, but she knew when to stop arguing. Off she trotted.

Sky looked from the tree to the departing girl squeezing through the gap in the pickets. “Don’t you try and climb this, either,” Jack warned him. “He’ll come down when he’s hungry.”

“DC’s always hungry.”

“Then we’ll see him soon.”

Sky nodded doubtfully, then brightened. “Can I help Kat, Mr. Kelton?”

“Not for a minute. I suppose you can watch, but don’t let me hear that you helped, Skyler. Kat earned every inch and splinter of this job and now she pays up.”

They watched the boy hurry down to the gate, then through. “There was a fire?” Abby inquired after a pause.

“Mmm.” Jack hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and braced his back against the tree trunk. “She snuck out on her baby-sitter last night, then went over to where I’m building a house, across town. Played with my butane torch and somehow set a can of kerosene on my workbench—and then the bench itself—on fire. Luckily Sheriff Noonan happened by while she was trying to beat out the flames.” And if Noonan hadn’t? His shoulders jerked in a shudder. “At this rate I’ll have white hair before I’m forty. I had a pet raccoon when I was a kid that could open any drawer, any cabinet, any package a human could, but Bandit wasn’t half this much trouble.”

“She is rather…high-energy.” Abby laughed softly. “What’s her punishment?”

“I stopped by my site and collected enough rough lumber to build a new bench. But it all needs sanding, then painting. Her eyebrows will grow in before she’s done with the eighty grit.

“And that reminds me.” He caught Abby’s arm—blinked at its silky warmth and slender definition—then eased her toward the gate. “I’ve decided to give her baby-sitter, Marylou, one last chance. But if you happen to see a red pickup parked outside my house anytime today—anytime this week—would you let me know? Marylou can entertain her boyfriend on her own time, not mine.”

“Of course.”

They’d halted, facing each other as they reached the gate. His fingers were strangely reluctant to leave her skin. Been too long, Kelton. He’d been too busy this spring, working every weekend, to chase women. “Well…”

“You’re headed to your office,” she murmured helpfully. “You’re a…contractor?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I build on my own time. Weekdays, I’m a lawyer—family law. Wills. Custody squabbles. Divorce.”

“Ah.” She took half a step backward, out of his grasp. “Oh, I—” If he’d announced he slept with snakes in the bed and ate kitty cats for breakfast, she’d have looked at him in much the same way.

Jack gave her a steely smile. Lots of people didn’t like lawyers. Just as well that Abby was one of them. Last thing he needed was to chase a woman in the midst of the Divorce Crazies. Been there, done that, honey, with the scars—and the kid—to prove it. “Have a nice day, Abby.”

“You, too. And…thanks for retrieving my bus.” She turned away before he did.

A lesser man might have slammed the gate. Jack closed it with a precisely calibrated firmness. The top hinge tore away from the post.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS BO-O-ORING sanding the planks. Kat had enjoyed the feel of a big, vibrating block sander in her hands for maybe five minutes—then it got old. And she’d felt kind of superior at how impressed Sky was that she knew how to use power tools, but then that good feeling had faded, too. Now it was nothing but rumble up the long plank laid out on two sawhorses in her yard, then buzz back the other way.

Each time she turned and faced Sky, who sat on the kitchen steps, she made a horrible face. Since she was using the enormous earphones her dad had insisted she wear to protect her hearing, she couldn’t hear Sky’s resulting laughter, but she could see it.

By the third time, he was making faces back at her. From then on it was a contest: who could make the grossest, most terrible face?

After what must have been hours and hours, Marylou came out on the stoop—her soap opera had probably stopped for a commercial—so Kat made faces at her.

Mushy, gushy Marylou. Kat had actually seen her stick her tongue—her tongue!—in Peter Sikorsky’s mouth last night. They hadn’t realized she was sitting at the top of the stairs while they were on the couch. Revolted by that disgusting spectacle, Kat had decided it was time to go. She’d crawled out her bedroom window to the branch of a tree, then to the ground and away.

And why don’t you go away, she silently told Marylou. Marylou was gooey nice to her when her dad was around. Other times they did their best to ignore each other. Kat touched the tip of her tongue to her nose, well, nearly to her nose, crossed her eyes and wobbled her head back and forth like a dizzy duck.

Marylou shook her head pityingly and went back indoors. Sky almost fell off the steps laughing.

The next time Kat completed her dreary circuit and looked his way, she stopped short and grinned. Sky was standing on his head on the top step, with his mouth twisted into a sneer, which looked like a loony smile upside down.

She switched off the sander. “Not bad.” She would have to try a headstand like that, with her forearms down on the ground. If he could do it, surely she could, too. “Where’d you learn that?”

“My mom does yoga.”

“And she does that?” Kat was impressed.

While she changed to a fresh square of sixty-grit paper, Sky turned right-side up again and came to stand beside her, running his palm gingerly along the board. “Still pretty rough.”

“Yeah,” she agreed glumly. “I have to sand ’em all—” she nodded at the stack of planks “—with sixty grit, then eighty, then Dad’s still deciding about one hundred. I’ll be sanding till I go back to school in September. Till Christmas!” Or maybe she’d die of boredom first.

“He’s pretty tough,” Sky observed.

“Yeah.” But he was fair. Like Justice, the blind lady with the scales that he always claimed he was dating on those rare occasions when he dressed up and went out at night—leaving Kat stuck with Marylou.

“Tough is good,” she defended him when Sky looked too sympathetic. “Navy SEALs are tough.”

“Not as tough as navy aviators.”

“Huh! They’re much tougher.” Someday she’d be a SEAL, just like Demi Moore in that movie, if she didn’t become—

“No way! Pilots have to handle terrorists and thunderstorms and icing on the wings and—” He shrugged. “They take care of people every day. My dad’s a pilot.”

“Really? In the navy?” Kat felt a twinge of envy. Her dad only worked in a stupid office.

“Um, no,” Sky admitted, fiddling with the sander. “He used to be, but now he’s a commercial pilot. Flies for American Airlines. He flies all over the country.”

That was still way cooler than sitting in an office, filling out forms. “Is that where he is right now, flying?”

“Yeah…” Sky didn’t look up. His hands had stilled on the sander. “That’s…why he couldn’t come with us. But he’ll catch up with us later on. Sometime soon. He can fly to meet us just about anywhere.”

“There’s an airport—a little airport—here, outside of town. But I guess he couldn’t land his jet.”

Sky shrugged. “That wouldn’t stop Dad. Sometimes for fun he rents a twin-engine plane, a Cessna. I was—I am going to learn to fly. He’ll teach me when I’m older.”

Kat could think of nothing to match that. So she put her earphones back on, crossed her eyes and twitched her upper lip and nose like a chewing rabbit, then sanded away.

The next time she swung around with an even better face, Sky had wandered off to the carport and stood kicking the tires of her dad’s winter car, the Subaru he’d accepted in trade for some legal work. Sky looked as bored as she felt. If only she weren’t grounded, she could take him around Trueheart. Show him the creek that ran through the center of town and how she could catch fish with her hands. They could buy ice cream at Hansen’s.

It would be nice to have a friend in Trueheart. She and her dad had only moved up here from Durango last fall. The girls were all mushy and prissy and talked about nothing but boys. The guys were more interesting, but then she’d tackled Sam Jarrett, a really big eighth-grader, in a football game last October. She’d sat on his foot and wrapped her arms and legs around his calf and ridden him almost to the goalposts before she’d brought him down. But instead of being impressed, the other boys had fallen all over themselves laughing. Ever since then, they just smirked when she asked if she could play. And Sam flat-out hated her. She sighed, realized her sandpaper had gone dull and stopped.

Sky appeared beside her with another square all cut to size and ready.

“I’m going to sail away on a tall ship someday soon,” she confided as she fastened it into place. “Like Rafe Montana’s daughter, Zoe. She sailed all over the ocean counting whales and dolphins. I’m going to be a ship captain someday, for Greenpeace, and I’ll save the whales.” If she didn’t become a navy SEAL; it was a hard choice.

“Cool.” Though Sky didn’t sound very interested.

But maybe he had a stomachache or something. He looked sort of funny and distracted, the way her dad had the time he’d eaten the bad taco. Her stomach rumbled at the thought of food. Or maybe Sky was just hungry.

The next time Kat stopped, she opened her mouth to ask if he’d like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but he spoke first. “You know how to weld?”

“Uh-huh. Um, well, sort of. I’m teaching myself.” She’d learned the most important lesson last night. You should never leave your torch on, then set it near a can of kerosene while you crouched down for the piece of steel you’d dropped.

“Cool. What are you going to weld?”

“I’m making—I was trying to make—a brand. But the metal wouldn’t bend. Guess I didn’t get it hot enough.”

“Guess not.” Sky nodded judiciously. “Why do you want a brand?”

She gave him a mysterious smile. “I’ve got something needs branding.”

“SO IT’S…going to need a little work,” Abby finished her carefully edited tale, trying for a note of brisk optimism. She never should have called her mother, but she’d promised to stay in touch. Phoning her friend Lark in Sedona to report their delay had given her the momentum, but it was now fading under her mother’s grilling. Seated in the swing, she held the cell phone to her ear and glanced overhead. Forty feet up, looking like a snowy, feather-fluffed owl perched in the crook of a branch, poor DC returned her rueful gaze. His rounded eyes were black pools of dismay. He could no sooner climb down this tree than he could fly.

“How much is ‘a little work’?” her mother demanded, as usual going straight to the bottom line. “And how much will this cost?”

“Oh, possibly a week’s worth.” Or more, if Whitey could only work weekends. And how long would it take him to scrounge the parts? “I’ve found—my neighbor found—an excellent mechanic, whose prices are very reasonable.” She hoped and prayed. Though Whitey moved about as swiftly as his Pekinese. If he cost half as much as a garage mechanic, but took three times as long to…

No. Surely Jack wouldn’t have recommended him if he couldn’t—

“What’s he do?”

“The mechanic? He’s a cowhand, I believe, at a ranch north of—”

“Your neighbor. The nice man who drove you into town. What does he do for a living? And please don’t tell me he’s a cowboy, because if he is, I understand that cowboys never settle down.”

“He’s a lawyer, Mom, not that it matters in the least.”

“O-oh… Lawyers are very good. They always make a living. The worse times get, the better they seem to do.”

Abby sighed softly. Her late father had been a portrait painter, a really wonderful artist, whose hobby was painting houses, as he’d always put it with a wink and a grin. They’d had enough money, but not a penny more, while he was able to work.

After he’d fallen three stories off a ladder and was no longer able to pursue his “hobby,” times had gotten much harder. But he’d stayed happy to the end, painting his portraits of their friends and neighbors and even getting the odd paying commission. He’d have been so proud to know that, seventeen years later, his work was starting to receive critical acclaim.

To Abby’s mother, who’d sold all but one of his portraits years ago, this was the final drop of frustration in a bitter cup.

“Is he a trial lawyer? Or perhaps corporate. They do extremely well.”

“He’s in family law, Mom. Small-town stuff, I imagine, but—listen to me—it doesn’t matter. I’m not shopping for a lawyer, a tailor or an Indian chief. Really, I’m not. I’ve only been divorced since March.”

“It’s never too early to plan.”

Abby bet she could hit the bus’s side mirror from here, if she threw the phone. She took a deep breath instead. “Mom, please try to understand. I’m not in the market for a man.

“And if I was, the last man on earth I’d choose—the very last—would be a lawyer. I’ve had it up to here with lawyers.”

She was only beginning to realize what a poor choice she’d made in a divorce lawyer. When she’d first hired him, Mr. Bizzle had seemed kindly and wise and avuncular. He’d agreed with her completely that two people who’d once loved each other shouldn’t try to snatch and maim when they parted. That the high road was always the best road.

Meanwhile, Steve had found a lawyer who was considered to be the best divorce specialist in northern New Jersey—a smiling, hard-eyed man who could smell a wounded wallet a mile away. Who thought the high road was for losers and fools. Who knew how to turn caring into weakness, selfishness to strength.

Under his cynical tutelage, the Lake family assets had melted away like dirty snow in springtime.

Abby had protested that only months before they’d seemed to be doing quite well, that between Steve’s income and her teaching salary, they’d amassed a reasonable cushion of stocks and savings. Where had that all gone? she’d wondered. Mr. Bizzle had patted her hand and sworn he’d get to the bottom of the mystery—well, he’d hire a couple of two-hundred-dollar-per-hour accountants to get to the bottom of the mystery—and then he’d squeezed her shoulders, walking her out of his office, and asked her for a date!

By the time the whole miserable process was finished, Steve’s lawyer had done magnificently for himself. And quite handsomely for Steve and his new family. Mr. Bizzle’s fee had taken a hefty slice of what remained, which seemed to console him for Abby’s inexplicable coolness to his advances.

So Abby had walked away from twelve years of marriage with twenty-thousand dollars that must be carefully hoarded for the coming year.

And a lifetime loathing of lawyers.

“You feel that way now, dear, but later on I’m sure you’ll—”

“Not now.” Abby shook her head emphatically. “And not later. I’ve learned my lesson.” About lawyers. About men in general. “You build your entire world around a man…” The way you did yourself, Mom, and look what it got you.

“You make him the almighty center of your world, and then one day he up and goes? Then you have nothing left.” Nothing, nothing. She was hollowed out—an empty echo where her heart used to be.

And when she gathered the strength to fill that hollow again, it would be with something other than the love of a man. Something more trustworthy and enduring. Something she could always count on—herself, happily and capably living a life she’d shaped to her own design. Meanwhile… Abby swallowed and found that the ragged lump she’d carried in her throat all this past winter had returned. Dadblast it, Mom! as Whitey would have put it.

“You have Skyler,” her mother pointed out.

Who blames me for leaving his dad! Abby’s eyes blurred; she tipped her head back and focused desperately on the blue patches beyond the leafy green. “Yes, Mom, I have Sky. And come to think of it, he must be starving by now. Why don’t I call you back in a day or two?”

JACK WAS SHARING a late in-house lunch with his friend Alec Fielding, a defense attorney who rented an office suite down the hall, in a three-story building in Durango. They ate together once a week or so, when whoever had lost their latest bet paid up with Reuben sandwiches and barbecue potato chips from the deli down the street.

This week Jack in his wisdom had bet that Lena Koo, the assistant district attorney, would not press criminal charges against Councilman Ferulli’s son, an impetuous youth who’d been injudicious enough to drink two six-packs of Coors, then sic his pet macaw Geronimo on an unfortunate girlfriend.

Instead, true to Jack’s prediction, assault charges had been dropped in favor of an agreement that young Ferulli take a course in rage management—and that he pay all plastic surgery fees for the young lady’s new and greatly improved nose.

“Food of the gods,” Jack proclaimed, more by way of self-congratulation than thanks as he waved his last half sandwich at his friend. Leaning forward over the ostrich-skin boots that he’d propped on his desk, he grabbed another chip.

“I really wanted that case,” Alec mourned, his own custom-booted feet resting on the coffee table in the conversation area at the other end of Jack’s office.

“Winning cases for councilmen’s sons is always good,” Jack allowed. “Political capital in the bank.”

Alec snorted. “That junior thug? I always looked on the bird as my client. I had three credible witnesses ready to testify that he’d been regularly and unduly provoked by the plaintiff.”

“And if you could’ve put the parrot on the stand…” They grinned at each other. “Polly wants to whack her?”

Alec toasted him with his can of root beer. “Self-defense all the way.” He reached for his chip bag. “So what’s new on the home front? The enchanting Kat robbed any banks this week? Shot any cowboys yet?”

A confirmed bachelor himself, Alec found tales of Kat’s escapades endlessly entertaining. He’d gone along this spring when they’d been invited to a branding party at Suntop Ranch. Kat had been horrified—outraged—when she realized they were actually “burning” the calves.

When her protests had been ignored, she’d offered to brand several of the highly amused cowhands to show ’em how it felt. At last Jack had given up and hustled her home and she hadn’t eaten meat since that day. Which was a problem, since her father had an extremely limited repertoire of meals to cook—and none of them featured tofu or soy milk.

“She scorched her eyebrows last night. But the real news is, I have a new neighbor.” Jack found himself describing the bus rescue. That led to a long and involved discussion of transmissions, then the best junkyards for used parts in southwestern Colorado.

Finally, as Alec stuffed his trash in a deli bag and rose to go, he asked casually, “So what’s she like?”

“Who?” Jack said, instantly on the defensive.

Alec smirked. “That good?”

“Oh, her. Um, nothing special.” Small, with dangerous curves and a mouth that quivered when she was upset. Warm velvety skin. “Lots of frizzy, mousy blond hair.” Almost but not quite the color of cornsilk, and it was rumpled and ripply, rather than frizzy, but why tell Fielding that?

“Hot?” Alec insisted.

Jack gave an irritated shrug. “Wouldn’t matter if she was. I’ve got my rules.”

“Yeah?” Alec folded his arms. “What are they this week?”

“This week and forever. Kelton’s Rules of Survival.” Jack held up one admonishing finger. “Rule One. Never marry.”

“Honored in the breach!” Alec jeered.

“And Rule Two,” Jack continued, ignoring him. “If you’re stupid enough to ignore Rule One, then never, NEVER marry a newly divorced woman. She’s in the midst of the Divorce Crazies. She hasn’t got a clue what she wants, but she’ll be flying off in all four directions at once, looking for it. And no doubt she hates men—temporarily, which’ll be just long enough to make your life hell.

“Or she hates men permanently—which means you’ll spend the rest of your miserable marriage atoning for her last husband’s sins.”

“But if she’s hotter than hot?” Alec teased, pausing in the doorway.

Jack flipped up his hands. “Then have a fling. Have a hot, short, sexy affair with her if you must. Be her Transition Man between her last cad and her next husband. Teach her how to smile again—then run for your life! But NEVER get serious about the newly divorced.”

Alec flashed that coming-in-for-the-kill grin he usually saved for hostile witnesses. “Who’s talking about marriage, old buddy? I was asking if the lady was bedworthy.” Seizing his exit line, he turned and walked.

Leaving Jack standing, mouth ajar, hands frozen in midair.

CHAPTER SIX

AROUND FOUR that afternoon the phone rang and Jack glanced up from a client’s divorce petition, which he’d been reviewing. The second button on his phone began to blink, meaning the caller was on hold.

A slender hand with lime-green fingernails curled around the edge of his door and cracked it open to reveal Emma Castillo, his quasi-legal, as Jack thought of her. She was wearing a tiny turquoise stud in her nose today, to match her blue-green jumpsuit and that one blue streak in her raven hair. “Are you in?”

“Depends on who’s calling.” He was about ready to wrap it up for the day. The whole point of working for oneself was the hours. Jack had slaved six years in a big-city law firm, struggling to make partner, before he’d seen the light and opted for a saner, less lucrative lifestyle in ski country.

“A woman with a sort of scratchy, stop-and-start voice. Um, Annie Leek? Locke?” Emma could be hopelessly preoccupied, when she was writing songs on the sly instead of filing.

“Abby Lake.” Jack grabbed for the phone, nodded his thanks to Emma, then turned halfway around in his swivel chair. “Kelton, here.”

“Oh…I was hoping you’d still be in,” Abby murmured, sounding not all that happy to find him.

He smiled in spite of himself. She did have a voice that scratched pleasantly along a man’s nerve endings—low and a bit breathy, as if she’d been nudged awake in the moonlight. Had just rolled over on her pillow and opened those big green drowsy eyes. “Hello, Abby. How’d you find my number?”

“Kat. She’s the reason I’m calling, actually.”

He groaned. “What’s she done now?”

“Not a thing. The poor kid’s been sanding all day, except for a lunch break, where we ate your burritos. But I was wondering, could I ask you to drop by a drugstore on your way home? If you bought an eyebrow pencil, I think I could improve on the clown face.”

An odd little glow started under his rib cage, if that wasn’t the corned beef returning to haunt him. “I could do that. What color?”

He listened carefully as she dithered, stopping and starting as Emma had noticed, deciding at last that perhaps two closely related shades of light brown and taupe—whatever that was—would give the most natural effect. “I can do that,” he repeated finally. Or rather, he could report the request word-for-word to any female clerk at a drugstore and likely come back with what was required.

“Oh, good!” She started to speak, paused, then added, “And I was wondering. About her hair. Do you ever take her to a hairdresser?”

“She always insists on my barber when she needs a trim.”

“Ah. Well, then. How would you feel if I tried to do something with that frizzled hair on her forehead? I was thinking bangs.”

Relief, that was what this sensation of warmth must be. To hand Kat over to somebody who knew what she was doing, for even a week… “As long as she’ll let you, cut away. Or you can wait till I get home to hold her down.”

“Oh, she’ll sit still for me.” On that score, Abby apparently had no doubts.

“Fine, have at her.” As Abby made sounds of imminent farewell, he added quickly, “Besides which, I’m glad you called. I forgot to ask this morning if you could use some groceries—cereal or juice or whatever. I’ll drive you into town for a real stock-up this weekend, but in the meantime?”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to…”

“Of course you can.” What had she planned to do, hobble down to Hansen’s on that ankle? “You can ask me for anything you need. You’re out west now, remember? Where the sky is big, the dogies are bold and the neighbors are neighborly, neighbor.”

She had a shy, husky laugh. Funny how a phone freed a man’s imagination, allowed him to draw his own mental pictures. New and improved pictures. He could see her swiping a soft tangle of hair out of her eyes when she laughed like that. Imagine her stretching sleepily beside him so that the covers rustled.

“Okay, neighbor, if you put it like that.” Abby paused, then murmured, “Milk?”

God, but she was sexy. “Skim, one percent or whole? Goat or cow? Quart or gallon?” He reached for a pad and pen. And how do you feel about T-bones? Because he was cooking tonight. Suddenly company seemed like an excellent idea. Best idea he’d had in months. “A gallon of skim—fine—and what else?”

JACK HAD ROLLED blithely over Abby’s protests that he must be tired after a day at work. Also that he shouldn’t feel the least responsibility to entertain the Lakes simply because they’d landed next door to him for a week.

Never once had it occurred to him that she’d really rather eat alone with Sky. That making dinner-table conversation with a stranger—an exuberant, overwhelmingly male stranger and a lawyer, at that!—was an ordeal she’d just as soon skip. A quiet meal, followed by a book and then bed would have suited her better.

But Sky’s face had lit up at the invitation. And she simply didn’t have the force of personality to refuse Jack once he’d gathered momentum. So Abby had smiled and gone along. In the end, she was glad. It hadn’t been such an ordeal, after all.

Abby had whisked Kat off to the Kelton’s upstairs bathroom, where she’d recreated the girl’s eyebrows, then cut her bangs while Jack and Sky prepared the meal.

The first half of the feast had been a rowdy foursome with the kids and Jack doing most of the talking, allowing Abby to sit back and applaud or tease or ask the odd question. And savor steak cooked to medium-rare perfection on a gas grill by the back door, then served in Jack’s kitchen along with deli potato salad, baked beans and coleslaw. Savor, too, the luscious light, since Kat had insisted they put out the overhead bulb and eat by the glow of a kerosene lantern, which she and her father used on camping trips.

“Which means this rates as a special occasion,” Jack had translated as she ran to get it. “We haven’t lit it since my birthday in April.”

Lemonade for the kids. A glass of dry zinfandel each for the adults. As the evening flowed on, Abby felt as if the clock spring inside her that had been wound to the breaking point all winter had loosened half a turn at last. Jack’s kitchen was comfortably messy rather than hopelessly shabby like her own, charming by lamplight. Every which way she gazed, she found scenes that needed sketching. Kat’s delicate profile as she whispered wickedly in Sky’s ear. The powerful lines of Jack’s flame-gilded throat when he threw back his head in laughter. The miracle of Skyler smiling again.

Sky arranged his fork and knife along the top edge of his plate. “Could we be excused, Mom? I’ve gotta go check on DC.”

Throughout the day the tomcat had descended perhaps five perilous feet to a wider limb, but there he’d lost his nerve and stuck. Abby had a nasty suspicion that Trueheart didn’t have a fire department with cat-rescuing firemen, either. “Ask your host, sweetie.”

Jack bent his shaggy head. “Off with you both, but no climbing. Understood?” They vanished with a clatter of chairs and a bang of the screen door.

Sooner or later, she was going to have to do something. If her ankle hadn’t been twisted, she’d have gone after the big softy herself. Abby speared a potato slice and contemplated it with a worried frown.

“If he’s not down by morning, I’ll get him,” Jack assured her as he refilled her glass.

“You’ve done so much already…” Too much. The last thing she wanted was to feel obligated.

He waved a dismissive hand. “For the woman who gave my daughter back her eyebrows? Nothing’s too good.”

She laughed quietly. “They’ll do by lamplight, anyway.” Actually she’d made a pretty good job of it. And somehow the bangs softened Kat’s intensity. Now she looked like a warrior princess, rather than a prince. “I…couldn’t help noticing tonight, Jack, that she doesn’t eat much.” Kat was still in the prepubescent stage—all slender limbs, not an ounce of fat—but still…

“Mmm. She’s gone vegetarian on me, since this spring.” He told her about the branding and Kat’s indignation. “She’s been picking the pepperoni off her pizza ever since. I don’t think it’s occurred to her yet that frozen fish sticks come from fish, but other than that…”

“You’re not, um, worried?” His daughter was at an age when calories and nutrition really mattered. But Abby knew how she hated it when her mother criticized her own parenting decisions with Skyler.

“Not yet. I find, generally speaking, that the less I push her, the more yardage I gain. And so far she seems to be thriving on ice cream and peanut butter. Plus I convinced her that all Olympic athletes and navy SEALs take two scoops of protein powder in their fruit smoothies every day.”

“Do they?” He had a wonderfully whimsical smile by lamplight.

“Cross my heart and hope to choke.” He raised one big hand over an imaginary Bible. “Besides, this strike’s only been going on since May. Kat tends to practice her passions pretty fiercely, then drop them when new ones come along. With any luck, by Christmas she’ll be shooting elk and dragging them home for me to roast.”

Meal finished, Abby offered to do the dishes, but Jack shook his head. “Don’t worry so much about the quid for the quo,” he teased her, collecting their wineglasses. “Who’s keeping count?” He nudged the screen door open with a shoulder. “Let’s see if the moon’s risen yet.”

It had.

Hard to believe this was the same cold, pinched and saddened sphere that had pursued her every night of the drive from the east coast. This was a big, boisterous jack-o’-lantern moon, dancing over the trees to their east. She and Jack settled on the top step of the back porch to watch it climb.

“So what did you decide about the bus?” Jack asked after a while.

She sighed. “No choice, really. We’ll still need someplace to live once we get to Sedona. Lark doesn’t have enough room for us in her own adobe.” She ran the cool rim of her wineglass along her bottom lip. “I had it all perfectly figured out. The bus would save us the cost of a moving van across country, then rent when we got there. Once we’d built our own place, I could sell it—recoup our money. Seemed like it would work.” She shrugged her mood aside and sipped. “I’ll still make it work.” She had to.

“Sure you will,” Jack said comfortably. “And I suppose you’ll get a job. Do you have any particular, uh, something you do?”

“I’ve been a teacher—high school art—these past two years.” It had taken her forever to finish her degree and gain a teaching certificate. First she’d become pregnant with Sky, and she’d let her own education lapse while she found her feet as a mother. When Sky reached kindergarten age, she’d begun again. Still, with all their moves from base to base, she’d needed years to complete her degree.

“Oh, well, that’s all right then,” Jack said. He seemed relieved. “Teachers can always get jobs.”

She hunched her shoulders. “Except I don’t want to teach anymore.”

“Burned out already?” He’d used a light, humorous tone—but the wrong words. Steve had taunted her with those same words on more than one occasion.

She stiffened. “Not that, precisely, but I’m afraid teaching was a mistake from the start. I loved the kids but not the discipline—forcing them to work when they weren’t in the mood, and at that age, they’re never in the mood. I’m not much good at forcing anybody.” Plus the endless paperwork: the grading, the testing, taking attendance.

And—oh, Lord—the lectures! Steeling herself day after day to face a roomful of squirming bodies, tapping feet, twenty-five bored or sympathetic or even hostile teenage faces. Shy as she was, she’d always been better dealing with people one-on-one rather than in groups.

“It just wasn’t what—” Why she’d ever dreamed she could… Angrily, Abby brushed her hair back from her brow. She didn’t have the words to explain her dismay. All those years I wasted—what a dope I was! “It just wasn’t what…I’d imagined. Teaching art isn’t the same as making art.” She didn’t want to watch others create, she’d quickly realized; she needed to do it herself.

“Ah,” Jack said, sounding more disapproving than enlightened. “Okay, so what will you do instead?”

She felt a flicker of irritation. Since when was she required to give him a report? She edged away from him on the step, stared up at the moon and muttered, “I’m going to write a book and illustrate it. A children’s picture book.”

“Ah.” His voice was blank, carefully neutral.

“Then I’ll do another…and another.” And another. She had ideas to burn.

“And you plan to sell them?” he inquired.

“Well, of course I do!” She got restlessly to her feet. “I know it sounds crazy, but don’t you see? This is my chance—maybe my last chance to get my life right. To find what works for me and commit myself to it.” To meet nobody’s expectations, this time, but my own. Not Steve’s, not her mother’s, not her principal’s. “To become the artist I’ve always wanted to be.” Even when I was too scared to admit that’s what I wanted.

Last chance to shape a happy life. It’s now or never.

Steve might have kicked her off his magical airplane, but she was darned if she’d fall.

She meant to fly. No wings, no man, just…sheer determination. And terror.

“Hmm.” Jack rubbed a knuckle across his mouth. He might have been erasing a skeptical smile.

At least that was what she thought—and she bristled. Think I can’t do it? Well, who cares what you think?

“So the bus is part of that plan,” she continued. “I made enough selling our house to carry us for a year, while I create my first book and find a publisher to buy it. But there’s not a penny to spare. So I hope Whitey can fix our poor bus, and soon.”

Jack tilted back his glass to finish his wine in a gulp. “Assuming he can find the parts, Whitey’s your man.” And I wash my hands of you, said his tone and that gesture.

The moonlight wavered and she realized her eyes were watering. Odd how her courage never lasted for more than five minutes at a stretch. “Well. I guess I should be heading home.” She grimaced. To a cottage with a moulting elk head in the living room.

“I’ll walk along. Collect my hotshot.”

But the kids came running to meet them as they neared the gate.

“Mom, it’s DC!” Skyler yelped. “He’s missing!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE NEXT MORNING was Friday, thank God, Jack reflected as he tossed his briefcase into his Jeep. Saturday was trudging into view on leaden feet, but at least it was coming. Or maybe his were the feet of lead. He’d helped Abby search for her damned cat till midnight, driving slowly around and around Trueheart. Then he’d taken her and the kids home, but haunted by her stricken face, he hadn’t been able to sleep.

At 2:00 a.m. he’d given up the battle and gone out to walk the neighborhood, softly calling, “Here, kitty, kitty” till, over on Polaris Street, old Clay Abbott had almost shot him for a prowler. At which point he’d staggered home and caught at least a couple hours of shut-eye.

Not nearly enough. He slid behind his wheel, then blinked stupidly at the paper he could see through his windshield.

A note from Abby, which she’d tucked beneath his wiper. “Jack, could you please see me for a second before you go? A.”

When he came through the garden gate, she was huddled, looking very small, on the top step of her front porch. She set a mug of coffee aside and smiled at him wearily. “Thanks for stopping by.”

“My pleasure.” She had shadows under her eyes to match his own, and guilt stabbed him again. Abby had taken enough losses lately, something told him. She didn’t need to lose that tomcat, however worthless he was. Wouldn’t have, if Jack had followed his first instincts and climbed to the rescue. So much for being sensible. Practical. “I take it he didn’t return?”

Abby had left her kitchen door propped open, with a bowl of the beast’s favorite food just inside, but her face told him the ploy hadn’t worked.

“’Fraid not. So I was wondering, could I ask a favor? Is there a print shop anyplace near your office where you could drop this off? Ask if they’d make fifty copies?” She handed him a manila envelope, stiffened with cardboard.

“Sure. May I?” When she nodded, he slid the single sheet of paper out—and gave a grunt of surprise.

He held a portrait, a Wanted poster of DC-3. Seated upright, with his big tail curled primly around his toes, the white tomcat was depicted in a few lovely loose strokes of black ink. The effect was as fluid as a Japanese brush painting. Comical. Not meant to be camera-realistic but, all the same, DC to his owl-eyed life, whiskers bristling, somehow looking the tiniest bit sheepish and homesick.

“Wanted!” Abby had lettered in big block letters above his ears. At the bottom of the poster, she’d inked in the rest of her plea: name and description of the cat, her cell phone number, a one-hundred-dollar reward for his return.

Jack opened his mouth to tell her that to cover Trueheart, she’d need maybe five copies, if that. But he changed his mind. This poster was eye-catching. Framable. He wanted one for his own wall. Even in law-abiding Trueheart, people would be swiping this as soon as it was tacked to a tree. Well, well, well, Ms. Lake. Maybe she wasn’t quite as crazy as he’d feared last night when she’d told him of her plans. Not that one illustration made a book. And certainly not a publishing career, but still…

“I didn’t have a photo of him that I thought would blow up worth a darn,” she explained as she pulled a cloud of pale hair back behind her small shapely ears. “Do you think this’ll do?”

“Oh, this’ll get their attention, all right. As will the money. That’s a mighty handsome reward for these parts, ma’am.” More than Abby could afford, he suspected.

He’d won a smile with his cowboy drawl, but it faded away. “I’ve got to get him back. He’s Skyler’s and Sky…he’s lost enough.”

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