style="font-size:15px;"> “I’ll tell you what,” Darla said. “We’ll just keep you locked away in our comfortable lodge until he charges out here on his trusty steed to demand your hand, your heart and your body for all time. Sound good?”
Isabel tried to imagine her even-tempered Roger doing anything so wildly romantic. Her mother would have laughed at the very thought.
But her mother had been wrong to suggest that men in general were lazy. Roger was anything but. Maybe he would come whisk her away, if he missed her enough. “Sounds wonderful,” she murmured.
“It sure does. How soon can you get here?”
Chapter Two
Trevor Kincaid backed his foot off the gas pedal when he noticed the tan four-door pulled over on the shoulder, fifty yards ahead. What a rotten break, to have car trouble on this remote mountain road. Few cars traveled up here this early in the morning. Most of the tourists wouldn’t be out and about quite yet, and the natives would be headed down to the cities to work. But someone else would see the car—maybe a county sheriff. Trevor was running late.
That car looked ancient. Small wonder it had broken down. The driver was probably another kid, arriving in the Colorado Rockies to live out his dream. They arrived in droves out here, with a few dollars in their pockets and no clue about where they would sleep at night.
All kinds of colorful characters lived off these less-traveled roads, too—mostly dreamers from the past who’d found the means to stay. Hell, some stayed without the means. Vagrancy was a real problem in the area.
Lord knew what kind of person might stop if Trevor didn’t. He slowed further. He didn’t have time to check a neglected engine, but he could give the kid a lift to the Lyons garage, along with a lecture about clean living and safe travel.
After he parked his Jeep behind the car, the driver of the sedan opened the door and got out. It wasn’t a kid, though. It was a woman, mid- to late-twenties and pretty, with long dark hair.
The woman waved at him, and a gust of wind lifted her already-short skirt.
Those legs were long and sexy.
And those frou-frou shoes would have been worthless if Trevor hadn’t stopped and she’d needed to hike a few miles to get help. What genius designer had decided to put high heels on flip-flops? Trevor’s female students wore the dang things all the time, too, but at least their treks were across the groomed grounds of the Boulder campus.
He got out of his vehicle and met the woman between their bumpers.
“I’m so glad you stopped,” the woman said as she pressed a palm to her heart. “I wasn’t sure if what people said about strangers was true.”
“Depends on what you’ve heard people say.”
She studied his face for a moment, her expression pensive. She must have decided he was okay then, because she dropped her hand. “Guess that’s true.”
Another half second, then she chuckled. “There’s not much up here, is there?”
Trevor gazed around at the scenery. They were standing in a canyon a few dozen miles east of Rocky Mountain National Park. Massive rocks towered to the sky on their left. A brook flowed by thirty feet down on their right. The spruce and pines were especially fragrant this time of year, making the earth smell clean.
He loved this area. He’d grown up exploring this wilderness. The woman’s idea of not much was a far cry from his.
Apparently, she’d understood his thoughtful perusal of the land, because she opened her eyes wide and said, “Oh, it’s beautiful out here. I meant there isn’t much civilization. I was hunting for landmarks, but I kept seeing that rock wall on one side and the river on the other. I’m trying to find Longmont. Do you know it?”
Oh. So she was lost, not stranded. Great, he’d give her directions and get on his way. “I traveled through there a few minutes ago, which means you’re headed away from it. Turn around, and you’ll see a sign fairly soon. Take a left toward town. Then you can’t miss it.”
She frowned. “I’m not so sure. I must be lousy at directions. I stopped a half hour ago to ask at a convenience store, and look what happened. Would you mind showing me on my map?”
That would mean he wouldn’t get to the lodge as early as he’d hoped. But the woman acted so…innocent. He’d feel like a brute if he got home tonight and heard a news story about some female traveler who’d run into bad luck.
“Sure.” As soon as he’d said it, the wind whirled down the canyon and picked up the bottom of that skirt again. “Maybe we’d better do this in your car,” he added.
She frowned. Perhaps she was reconsidering the wisdom of trusting a stranger. Atta girl.
“I meant that you could sit in your car with the map, and I could stand outside and point out the way. I wouldn’t want your map to blow off down the road.”
“I figured that was what you meant,” she said. “But I have a little girl napping in my car. We might wake her.”
She had a child in the car? Trevor was oddly disappointed to hear it, but even more glad he’d stopped.
The woman bit her bottom lip, her brows lowering. “I could take the map to your car,” she said after a moment.
“That’d work.”
The woman teetered in her shoes as she crossed the gravel. She opened her car door, and Trevor tried not to watch those legs as she leaned in to grab the map. Gently she closed her car door again, then went around to the Jeep’s passenger side.
She wanted to get in?
Man, she was gullible. Trevor considered giving the woman a safe-travel lecture, but instead simply opened his door and slid into the driver’s seat.
“I can’t believe Angie conked out this early in the day,” the woman said after they’d closed themselves inside. “We had a long drive yesterday, and she resisted my wake-up call this morning.”
Trevor studied the woman’s face again, wondering if she could be sleeping through the reports of kidnappings, molestations and robberies that dominated the news every day. He could think of several things this woman had done wrong this morning. She’d left her little girl alone in an unlocked car, for one.
Maybe she was from some quiet little burg where nothing bad ever happened. “Where’re you coming from?” he asked.
“Augusta, Kansas, about twenty miles east of Wichita.” She shrugged. “It’s a small town, but it was in the news last year when a good portion of the town flooded. The president declared our county a national-disaster area.”
A national disaster sounded bad enough.
“Were you and your husband affected?” he asked.
“I’m not married.” Briefly she lifted her ringless hand. “But yes, my house was damaged. I had to move out for a few months, until my family and I finished repairs.”
Not
