make the commitment. As soon as he’d paid off his debts and made amends where he could, he was out of here, and who knew whether he’d end up in a dog-friendly place?
“Hey, hold on a minute.” The woman’s voice was the slightest bit husky.
He turned but didn’t walk back toward her. Didn’t look at her. It hurt too much. She was still a reminder of Ivana and all he’d lost. “What?”
“Maybe you could give us a hand. Or a ride.”
Buck drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “Okay, sure,” he said, trying not to show his reluctance to be in her company a moment longer. After all, he’d made the offer, so courtesy dictated he should follow through. “Where are you headed?”
“That’s a good question,” she said, lifting the baby a little to take the weight off her chest.
He remembered Ivana doing that very same thing with Mia. He swallowed.
“What kind of a town is Rescue River?”
“It’s a real nice town.” It was, too. He’d consider staying on there himself if he hadn’t burned so many bridges.
“Think I could find a cheap room? Like, really cheap?”
He cocked his head to one side. “The only motel had no vacancy, last I saw. My sister’s renovating what’s going to be a guesthouse, but it’s not open for another few months...”
“Does she have a room that’s done, or mostly done? We don’t need much.”
Buck wanted to lie, would have lied, except he seemed to hear Ivana’s voice in his head. Quoting Scripture, trying to coax him along the path to believing. Something about helping widows and orphans in their distress.
This woman might or might not be a widow, but to be out walking the rural Ohio roads in the wee hours surely indicated some kind of distress.
“She’s got a couple of rooms close to done,” he admitted.
“Do you think she’d let me rent one?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. Lacey’s not the most trusting person in the world. A late-night guest she isn’t expecting won’t sit well with her.”
The comment hung between them for an awkward moment. It was the simple truth, though. Or maybe not so simple. The fact that the pretty stranger had a baby would disturb Lacey. A lot.
The woman gave him a skeptical look, then straightened and turned away. “Okay. Thanks.”
Squeezing his eyes shut for just a second, he turned and tried to head back toward his truck. She wasn’t his responsibility. He had enough on his plate just to keep himself together.
Nope. Like a fool, he turned around. “Hey, wait. Come on. We’ll try to talk Lacey into letting you stay. At least for the night.”
“That would be wonderful,” she said, a relieved smile breaking out on her face.
Wonderful for her, maybe. Not for him. The last thing he needed was an Ivana look-alike, with a baby no less, staying one thin wall away from him.
“My name’s Gina, by the way.” She shifted the diaper bag and held out a hand.
“Buck Armstrong.” He reached out, wrapped his oversize hand around her soft, delicate fingers and wished he’d driven home another way.
* * *
Gina Patterson climbed into the backseat of the handsome stranger’s extended-cab pickup, her heart thudding. Please, Lord, keep us safe. Watch over us.
Don’t let him be a serial killer.
But a dog wouldn’t be that friendly with a serial killer, and a serial killer wouldn’t act that loving with a dog. Would they?
“Air bags,” she explained when he looked over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. “Can’t sit in front.” Technically, she shouldn’t even bring Bobby into the truck, not without a car seat, only she couldn’t figure out what else to do. She couldn’t give Buck the keys to get her car seat from her out-of-gas SUV, and she certainly couldn’t leave Bobby with him while she walked the three miles back to her vehicle.
They were safer in the backseat, she figured, safe from him as well as from any kind of car accident. If he tried to kidnap them, she could at least hit him in the back of the head with her shoe.
She was ready to drop with fatigue after three long days of driving, and it was getting colder by the minute. Buck’s arrival had to be the blessing she’d prayed for. Although he seemed pretty gruff for a rescuer.
“Right, I knew that. It’s less than a mile,” he said, and his dog panted back over the seat at her, smiling in the way happy dogs did. It made her miss her poodles, but she knew her best friend back home would take care of them.
She scratched the dog’s ears for a minute and then let her head sag back against the seat, thanking God again for keeping her and Bobby safe during their journey.
Well, mostly safe. She’d been foolish to leave her bag on the sink while she’d changed Bobby’s diaper. Who’d have thought there’d be a purse thief in a rest area in rural Indiana? Fortunately, she’d filled her tank just before the theft—with cash—so she’d kept going as far as she could, leaving the interstate so there’d be less of a trail.
The debit card she’d kept in her jacket pocket might help in the future, once things back home cooled down, but she didn’t dare use it now.
After the theft, she’d gotten scared and timed things all wrong. She’d thought she could make it to a hotel she’d seen advertised in a larger town up ahead, but the SUV was a gas hog and had sputtered to a stop a few miles back.
At which point she’d realized she didn’t have enough cash for a hotel, anyway.
“All set?” Buck looked back at her and Bobby, brows raised over eyes the color of the ocean on a cloudy day.
Man, those were some haunted eyes. “We’re set. Thank you for helping us.”
She studied the back of him as he put the truck into gear and drove into the town. Broad shoulders, longish hair and stubble that made him look like a bad boy.
What had he been doing out at 2:00 a.m.? The question only now occurred to her, now that she and Bobby were safe, or seemed to be. “Excuse me,” she said, leaning forward, “but you haven’t been drinking or...partying, have you?”
His shoulders stiffened. “No. Why?”
Whew. She hadn’t smelled alcohol on him, but alcohol wasn’t the only thing that could mess you up. Her husband had been an old hand at covering his addiction to cocaine, right up until he’d lost control on a California mountain and skied headlong into a tree. The drugs had shown up in the autopsy blood work, but when he’d left the ski chalet an hour earlier, she hadn’t even known he was impaired. Yet another mistake her in-laws had laid at her feet.
Her throat tightened and she crammed the memories back down. “Just wondering.”
So
