gentlest of care, he escorted her aunt toward the house. The door opened and an older man peered out. His hair gleamed silver in the light from the room behind him. He was as tall as Trevor and had the same lean, rangy frame.
A total stranger would have known they were kin at a glance. The man had to be Trevor’s uncle Nick.
“What happened?” Mr. Dalton asked, realizing something was wrong.
“Accident,” Trevor said. He quickly explained about taking the old logging road and cutting the station wagon off at the county road, causing her to run into the ditch.
The older man came out on the porch, then stepped down on a giant flat granite boulder that served as the step to the front porch that ran all the way across the log portion of the house.
“My God,” he said. “Fay, is that you?”
“Yes, Nick,” her aunt replied with a smile in his direction. She clasped Trevor’s arm and walked with a decided limp toward the porch.
“I’d given up on you for today.” The Dalton uncle, wearing only socks, rushed to her other side and wrapped a supporting arm around her waist. “Call Beau,” he ordered his nephew. “He’s a doctor,” he said to Lyric’s aunt.
“Let’s get the women in the house first,” Trevor suggested with a hint of impatience.
Lyric followed behind the three, rather like a stray pup who hoped the others would take her in. She was beginning to feel very apprehensive about being here. Trevor didn’t seem thrilled to see her.
In the house, after Aunt Fay was seated in an easy chair and checked over again, Lyric stood inside the door and wondered what to do.
Finally the older man noticed her. “Are you all right?”
Lyric nodded. She had to clear her throat in order to talk. “Yes. I think so,” she amended, suddenly aware of pain in her knees, as if her body had come back to life at that instant and now reminded her of aches she hadn’t known she had.
“Nicholas?”
The Dalton patriarch turned back to her aunt and took her hand. “Now don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll have you right as rain in no time. Trevor, have you called Beau yet?” he questioned with a stern glance at his nephew.
Lyric was aware of Trevor’s gaze on her, of the tight set of his mouth, of the unwelcoming stance in his strong, lithe body. She felt terribly confused and disoriented.
He turned away. “I’m doing it now.” He went into the kitchen. In a minute she heard his voice explaining the situation to the nephew who was a doctor.
Lyric hadn’t met any of the Dalton family except Trevor, but she knew them all. Her aunt Fay had been a cousin and best friend to Milly Dalton, who had been married to Trevor’s uncle Nick. Milly had died in an automobile accident many years ago. Their daughter, Tink, had been taken from the scene of the accident and never found again.
At least, that was what was assumed. The three-year-old had disappeared. She could have wandered away and died in the wilderness, but the sheriff had concluded the child had been abducted for some reason, because the child’s body had never been found.
A tremor rushed over Lyric at the thought. One time a stranger had tried to grab her while she was on her way home from school in Austin, Texas.
She’d screamed and kicked and bit the man as hard as she could, the way her father had taught her, and had gotten free. She’d been lucky. A schoolmate on the next block had been kidnapped later the same afternoon. A month went by before the body was found in a lonely section of woods. That summer Lyric’s parents had moved to the ranch her father had inherited from his dad.
Another tremor ran down her body and lodged in her legs. Alarmed, she realized her knees were about to give way. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but…”
The words were barely a whisper.
She tried again. “I’m sorry, but…”
“Catch her,” a voice said from far away as the room became dark and mysterious.
Lyric blinked rapidly as strong arms closed around her. She knew these arms, this embrace.
Pressing her face into the clean expanse of the white shirt, she inhaled deeply and was filled with the scent of masculine aftershave, fresh-as-the-outdoors laundry and something more—a faint aroma that she recognized somewhere deep inside her. Yes, she knew this man.
She relaxed as he lifted her. She looped her arms around his shoulders and closed her eyes. Safe. She was safe. And home. Home at last.
“Here,” Trevor said, putting Lyric on the leather sofa. “Lie still,” he ordered when she started to sit up. He removed the glasses from her face, then winced at the redness on each side of her nose and running down under her eyes. The air bag had hit her hard, he realized. He laid the glasses on the end table.
A memory wafted into his mind—him removing her glasses, her laughing protests about not being able to see, his suggestion that she close her eyes, then the kisses…the hotter-than-molten-steel kisses, the fireworks that had gone off in his brain, stunning him with the force of the passion between them…and the feelings, the found-my-other-half joy of holding her….
“Get some ice,” his uncle said. “Fay needs some on her face and knees.”
“So does Lyric,” Trevor said.
His throat closed after he said the name. Last fall he’d vowed never to say it again.
He silently mouthed all the expletives he could remember while going to the kitchen and grabbing several first-aid ice bags from the freezer. The ranch always had a good supply of such items on hand for the occasional kick from a recalcitrant horse or stubborn cow.
Along with dish towels and clothespins, he took the ice bags to the living room.
“When will Beau be here?” his uncle asked.
“He won’t. He and the midwife have a difficult delivery going on. Since nothing is broken or bleeding and they’re both coherent, he said to bring them to the clinic in the morning and he’d check them out.”
“Mmm,” Uncle Nick said in his disapproving tone.
Ignoring Lyric, who now sat upright and as prim as a spinster, Trevor ministered to her aunt, affixing two ice bags and dish towels to her knees with the clothespins and advising her to put the other on her face.
Finished, he went to Lyric. “Put this on your nose,” he said, handing over the wrapped bag and noting the glasses were back in place. He couldn’t help but steal a glance at her left hand and the bare ring finger. Forcing his gaze to the task at hand, he knelt and, as careful as a doctor performing brain surgery, rolled up her pants.
He winced when he saw the abraded skin of her knees and the blotches that indicated more extensive bruising than her aunt had suffered. As the driver, she’d had her seat closer to the dashboard so she could reach the brake pedal and accelerator. That meant she’d hit the dash harder.
At five feet, five inches, she’d felt small and delicate in
