her gaze to his buddies before finally turning back to him.
“Do all of you guys go to church with my aunt?” She strung out the words, hesitating between each one, as if they didn’t quite make sense when she put them together.
Elijah felt one corner of his mouth twitch slightly upward with the hint of a half smile. Yes, he was well aware that they didn’t look like your typical church group. For himself, he certainly wasn’t pretty as a picture. The scars on his face were small, but people noticed them. Some of his fellow riders looked a little rough, too. He chose his friends based on their character and gave no thought to how they looked to anyone else. But how do you explain that in a few quick seconds to a woman who looks as if she’s on the verge of panic?
You don’t.
He glanced at her car jammed up against a sapling that had nearly snapped in half, and then he looked back at her. “It’s a crazy world.”
She actually laughed. Only once, but it seemed to help calm her. Eventually he would press her a little harder for details on what had happened. Right now he just wanted to help her hold it together, assist her with her car and get her someplace safe.
“Olivia!” Through the phone, Claudia was trying to get her attention.
“I’m here,” Olivia mumbled, sounding dazed.
“Why don’t you hand the phone back to Elijah? Let me talk to him and find out where you are so I can figure out what we need to do.”
“Okay.” Olivia held out the phone to Elijah. “She wants to talk to you.”
“I’ll have your niece on her way as soon as I can,” Elijah said into the phone.
“Would you take me off speaker?”
“Sure.” He hit the button. “You’re off speaker.”
“Is she really all right?” Claudia asked.
Elijah wondered that himself as he started walking around her car to take a closer look. The glow from a dozen motorcycle headlights gave him a pretty decent view. There were the expected scrapes and scratches along the sides of the car that probably came from the rocks and trees once she’d gone off road. But there were dents on the back bumper, too.
“She seems all right,” he said into the phone. “Her car’s wrecked, though. One of us needs to hang up and call Ricky so he can fire up his tow truck and get her car.”
“I’ll do that right now,” Claudia said.
After they disconnected, he walked down the highway looking for the spot where Olivia’s car had left the road.
He found it. It looked as if Olivia had turned off the road deliberately. If there were skid marks showing she’d tried to brake, it was too dark to see them.
“A tow truck will be here soon,” he said when he got back to her. “Want to tell me what happened?”
“I ran off the road.” She turned away, suddenly very interested in looking everywhere but at him.
She was hiding something.
Elijah would have to find out what that was. Claudia Sweeney might be Olivia’s blood relative, but she’d been Elijah’s neighbor for his entire life. He was not about to let anything happen to her. Painted Rock was full of people he cared about. If trouble was coming to his town, he wanted to know about it.
As soon as Olivia’s car was loaded onto the flatbed of the tow truck and Olivia was safely stowed in the cab with Ricky, Elijah’s fellow riders headed for their homes while Elijah rode ahead to Claudia’s house to wait for Olivia’s arrival. He wasn’t leaving until he knew exactly what was going on.
“It’s a shame Olivia had car trouble on top of everything else,” Claudia said quietly.
“Yes, ma’am,” Elijah agreed. He didn’t know what “everything else” was, but he would find out.
He was sitting on his motorcycle in front of Claudia’s house, a frontier Victorian with pink, yellow and lavender gingerbread. Claudia stood near the bottom of the wooden steps leading to the wraparound porch. At just over six feet tall, Claudia’s regal bearing hadn’t been stooped by the advancing years. But it had turned her formerly auburn hair to silver. She wore it tied in a loose bun, like usual, but in honor of her niece’s visit, she’d dressed up in a long denim skirt and a red flowery blouse. Two of her dogs, Jasper and Feldspar, sat by her feet while the third, Opal, nosed around a flower bed.
“So you and the guys were just out riding and happened to come across Olivia?” Claudia asked.
“We were coming back from a home visit. We dropped off a gift card to the grocery store, then rode around and gunned the engines a few times for the kids. I took the oldest kid for a short ride, we handed out a few toys and then we left. We were on our way back when I saw her.”
The tow truck with Olivia’s car finally turned into the circular drive. Elijah got off his bike and walked over to stand beside his adopted “aunt.” She clenched her blue-veined hands with impatient excitement while waiting for Olivia to climb out of Ricky’s tow truck. Elijah hadn’t breathed a word of his wariness about her grandniece to her. She’d been so anxious for this moment, he didn’t want to spoil it. Not unless he had to.
The tow truck squeaked to a stop and Olivia opened her cab door. Elijah strode over and offered up a hand to help her out.
“I can manage,” she said tightly, so he stepped back.
Ricky hopped out of the driver’s side of the truck and started to pull Olivia’s luggage from the compartment behind the cab.
Elijah grabbed a couple of bags. If that annoyed Olivia, too bad.
Olivia grabbed a duffel bag and frowned at him. “Thanks for your help, but I can take care of things from here.”
She thought she could dismiss him? That was cute.
He walked beside her across the drive and caught her biting her bottom lip when she saw an Oso County Sheriff’s Department patrol car pull in.
Ricky had called for a deputy while they were still out on the highway. Olivia had stepped away to talk to the lawman when he arrived, so Elijah hadn’t been able to hear their conversation. Deputy Bedford was newly assigned to Painted Rock. He’d been pretty closemouthed after talking to Olivia, walking around with a flashlight and looking at her car and at the surface of the road.
Since it was impossible to see very far down the winding road in the darkness, even using the spotlight on his patrol car, Bedford had wanted to drive down the highway and look for skid marks or debris. He’d told them he’d meet them at Claudia’s house to wrap up the incident.
Elijah and Olivia reached the bottom of the porch steps and set down their bags.
“You made it!” Claudia cried out in delight, wrapping her arms around her niece and rocking her slightly from side to side.
“Finally.”
