nothing more than to have weathered the miserable storm holed up in his office—warm and dry and comfortable. But this was Mesa County—his county—and that meant he didn’t have a choice. When something happened in this rugged, remote corner of the state, Sheriff Joe Mountain wanted to know all about it.
He glanced back to the woman on the seat beside him. She didn’t need to be conscious to tell him something had definitely happened out here, something pretty unusual. He may not have lived on the reservation in years, but there was enough Navajo left in him to know something was out of harmony, out of balance. In the dim light of the dashboard, her lips looked blue with cold and her skin was an ashen white. No wonder she’d collapsed. Wandering around in weather like this, she had to be half-frozen.
Wedging his knee against the steering wheel, he shrugged out of his jacket. The buckskin leather was soaked, but the white, wooly lining was warm and dry. With one hand, he covered her with the coat, tucking it around her tight.
Looking at her, he felt something tighten in his chest. This whole thing had him feeling restless and unsettled. Things didn’t fit; she didn’t fit. She didn’t belong here, wasn’t dressed for rough weather and rough country. She looked more like she belonged in a trendy coffeehouse somewhere sipping caffe lattes, or shopping in some stylish boutique.
He reached across the seat, running the backs of his fingers along her cheek. Even against his cold hands, her skin felt like ice. Yet frigid skin and drenched hair couldn’t hide her delicate features. He might be a cop investigating a possible accident or potential crime, but he was also a man, and he would have had to be dead not to notice just how lovely she was. She was a beautiful woman—a very beautiful woman. She had an almost perfect face—delicate, refined, feminine—which only added to his uneasiness. How did someone like her end up in a place like this?
Reaching down, he adjusted the heater vents, directing them toward her, and let his foot press down harder on the gas. Looking through the windshield at the road ahead, he shifted uneasily against the seat. He’d been a law enforcement officer for nearly fifteen years, and he’d seen a lot in that time—tragic accidents, grisly crime scenes. But the fear he had seen in her eyes that moment before she’d collapsed was something he would never forget.
“What’s got you so frightened, rain lady? Is it Logan?” he said, reaching across the seat and running a finger down her cheek again. “Is Logan what sent you running into my county?”
“So what do you think, Doc?”
“I don’t know,” Cruz Martinez mumbled, letting the eyelid of the woman on the gurney gently close and flipping the tiny beam of his penlight off.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Joe insisted, stepping to one side to let two paramedics push past him. “You’re a doctor, you should be able to tell something.”
“You’re right, I’m a doctor, not a fortune-teller,” Cruz said, straightening up. He reached for the end of the gurney and pushed it toward the doors of Mesa County General’s ER. “Joe, come on, give me a break. The woman just got here.”
“Okay, all right, okay,” he conceded, grabbing the other side of the gurney and helping him push it through the doors and into the crowded emergency room. “But she’ll be all right, won’t she? You think she’s going to be okay, don’t you—”
“Joe,” Cruz said, cutting him off. He gestured to one of the nurses, who rushed to assist him. “Give me a few minutes, let me see what we’ve got here and then I’ll let you know.”
“Sure, sure, okay,” Joe said, following the gurney past the nurses’ desk and through the swinging doors to the examination rooms. “But—”
“Joe,” Cruz said in a calm voice, stopping him at the entrance of the examination room. “Let me do my job.” He reached up, catching hold of the curtain and giving it a yank. “So then you can do yours.”
“Right,” Joe said with a resigned sigh as Cruz slid the curtain closed between them. “I’ll, uh, just be outside,” he said to no one in particular.
Turning around, he slowly made his way back through the swinging doors and to the long row of chairs in the emergency waiting room. Sitting down, he slipped off his damp cowboy hat and rubbed at his tired, scratchy eyes.
He knew he was being unreasonable, knew he had to be patient and just cool his heels until Cruz had a chance to examine her, he just didn’t feel like waiting. He’d been waiting for the last hour it had taken to drive back to Mesa Ridge—an hour the “rain woman” had spent unconscious.
Rain Woman. That was how he’d come to think of her—woman of the rain. He lived and worked in the world of the white man, but his mind and his soul were still Navajo, still relating everything to the elemental basics in life—sun, moon, earth, sky, wind and rain. She had come into his world with the rain, so to him she was Rain.
“Rain,” he muttered, thinking of the woman who was as puzzling, as enigmatic as the elements themselves. It was time to balance the scales, to put the world back in its place again. He’d waited, now he wanted action. He had questions, now he wanted answers. It was time for balance.
“You look like you could use this.”
Joe looked up, surprised to see Cruz Martinez’s wife, Marcy, standing in front of him with a foam cup of coffee in her hand. “Marcy, hello. What are you doing here?”
“Well, I was hoping to get my husband out of here at a reasonable hour, but…” She stopped and glanced back at the doors leading to the examination rooms. “You pretty much took care of that.”
Joe grimaced apologetically. “Sorry about that.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Marcy confessed with a resigned sigh, turning back to him and offering him the steaming cup of coffee. “I was just hoping we could have a few hours together this evening since I’ll be taking off for the state capital tomorrow.”
“Giving up the bench for the governor’s office?”
Marcy laughed. “Just hearing a change of venue case up there for a few weeks.” She looked down at the cup in her hand. “Here, drink this before it gets cold.”
Joe smiled up at her. He’d barely known Marcy when she’d married Cruz two years ago, but since then he’d come to not only like her, but admire her as well. In addition to being a devoted wife and mother, she was also a Mesa County Superior Court Judge.
“Thanks,” he said, taking several sips of hot brew, savoring its black, bitter taste.
“Better?”
Joe nodded. “Much.”
“If you don’t mind me saying so, Sheriff Mountain, you look a little like a drowned rat.”
“I don’t mind, Your Honor,” he admitted. “I happen to feel a little like a drowned rat at the moment.”
She gestured back to the examination rooms with a nod of her head. “Accident victim?”
Joe shook his head slowly, glancing at the closed doors, and shook his head. “Got me.”
Marcy frowned. “You don’t know?”
Joe thought of the woman, thought
