gritted his teeth at the agonized squawk of stripping gears. So much for the transmission. “Step on the brake and damn the cat! Do it now!”
The boy shook his head frantically. “He w-w-won’t move! If I could shift into—”
The bus must’ve been doing twenty by now. Maybe a hundred yards to the trees—a hundred and three to the cliff. The woman had vanished behind the bulk of the vehicle. “Forget shifting, kid, and listen!” Jack yelled, leaning halfway out of the Jeep. “Grab the top of your wheel—yeah, that’s right! Now slo-owly—ve-er-ry slowly—turn it toward me!”
A calculated risk. If the kid panicked and swung the wheel too fast, the Jeep, running parallel, would smash into the bus’s left flank. “Good! That’s good.” Thank God he could take directions.
“Now slowly. Turn another inch toward me—excellent!” If the bus didn’t flip, if they still had room to pull off the maneuver, the kid could steer it in a gentle curve away from the creek, gradually swinging cross-hill till the bus coasted to a halt. “Gimme another inch—good!”
Jack turned his own wheel; they were now running side by side, not three feet apart. He flinched as the bus slammed into something solid—a rock or a log—and the exhaust system peeled away. He glanced back in his mirror as tailpipes and other parts popped into view and clattered along in their wake. “So who needs a muffler?” he assured the kid, sending him a rakish grin.
Yeah, right, we’re all under control here. Having the time of our lives!
But the kid actually smiled back at him and Jack laughed out loud. Spunky little devil! “Turn it a little more—ea-aa-sy does it. Yeah!” He sucked in his breath as the bus wobbled, trying to lift onto its right-side wheels—then settled back four-square. Whew! I owe You one, up there!
One more in a long list.
“Give it another inch. You’re doing great!” And he’d better be—they had forty feet left to the trees and the bus was angled roughly fifty degrees to the fall line. Jack corrected his own course, nodding fiercely. “Now one last time, son—gently—a couple of inches.”
As it curved cross-slope, the bus had been gradually losing momentum. It was doing maybe ten when it plowed into the bushes. But hitting them almost broadside, it didn’t slice on through. Branches shrieked along steel. Slender tree trunks crackled and snapped. An avalanche of baggage inside the vehicle rumbled to the far side. The bus rocked up onto its off-side wheels for a heart-stopping moment—then, supported by the bushes, settled back again.
As he braked to a halt alongside, Jack blew out his breath. And thank You! He stepped out and sauntered on shaking legs over to the kid’s window. “That was exciting.” They measured each other solemnly—then grinned from ear to ear. “Well done,” Jack told him, socking his shoulder. “Very well done ind—”
“Sky! Oh, baby!”
And here came Momma at last, panting and wind-torn and half-hysterical, clutching a forgotten bunch of crumpled wildflowers. A small frantic tornado, she roared down the narrow gap between the vehicles and actually bumped Jack aside, getting to her child. “Oh, sweetie!” She wrenched open the kid’s door. Jack winced as the edge of it banged into the Jeep. So much for his paint job.
“Are you all right?” But she wasn’t waiting to hear; apparently touch would tell her faster. Her fingers flew over the boy’s face, his arms, his ribs. Tugging at his clothes, smoothing his hair. “Where does it hurt?”
Jack met the kid’s eyes over her shoulder and gave him a commiserating grin. Sometimes a guy just had to put up with the mushy stuff.
“Aw-ww, Mom! I’m fine.” The boy twisted away as she tried to pull him into a hug, then dived under the wheel. “It’s DC…”
The largest cat Jack had ever seen crouched behind the pedals, tail fluffed to the size of a firehose, eyes like black saucers. Moaning throatily, he slashed at the boy’s outstretched hand.
“Ouch! He’s never done that before!” The boy— Sky?—brought scratched fingers to his lips.
“Reckon you’ve never run him backward down a mountain before,” Jack said mildly. “Give him a minute.”
Momma swung around, registering his presence at last.
And worth the wait, Jack decided as his gaze dropped from wide green eyes still dilated with shock, down over a lush trembling mouth, over a pair of still heaving, just-the-right-size breasts, to—oh, boy, forget it! To a slogan emblazoned across the T-shirt, claiming: A Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle.
Hoo-boy, one of those. A lady with an ax to grind. His eyes flicked back to the bus, filled almost to window level with its assortment of household rubble. Jeez, that thing on its side—could that be a washing machine?
“Been divorced long?” he asked casually.
She blinked. Blinked her long lashes again, grateful smile fading to wariness as she raised her chin. “H-how did you guess?”
Jack threw back his head and laughed.
SHE’D SWORN she’d stand on her own two feet from now on, yet here she was again, letting a man take charge.
Not that it was easy to stand alone when apparently she’d wrecked an ankle, somewhere in that pell-mell, adrenaline-powered chase, Abby reminded herself. Sitting in the topless Jeep, where their rescuer had planted her when he realized—at the same moment she did—that she could barely hobble, Abby clasped still-shaking hands between wobbly knees. She watched with growing uneasiness as he stalked around the bus, hands on lean hips, shaking his shaggy head to himself as he summed up the state of her disaster and decided what should be done about it.
She had a terrible suspicion his conclusions would be the right ones—logical, sensible and therefore impossible to refute, much as she’d rather refute them. She’d already had one sample of his plain-spoken intelligence, with that guess about her marital status.
I don’t need this!
Didn’t need a disastrous setback, just as she was starting to pick up the pieces of her life and think about rebuilding.
Didn’t need someone—another too confident, too brash, too good-looking-for-his-own-good male—telling her what to do and how to do it.
Except that she did. She was utterly exhausted and confused. Overwhelmed. She supposed this was what they called shock. Looking at her son as he smiled wanly up at the man who’d rolled out from under the bus to stand and pat his shoulder, her eyes filled slowly with tears. Oh, Sky, I could have lost you!
Losing the life she’d known since she was nineteen was nothing compared to that.
And being bossed around by another know-it-all man—who’d known enough to save her son—was a small price to pay. A price she’d pay gladly again and again. The bargain of a lifetime.
“I haven’t even thanked you yet,” she said huskily a few minutes later when he came to sit beside her in the Jeep. “That cliff beyond the trees…if Sky’d gone over that…”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I couldn’t have done it without him. He’s a smart kid. Stayed cool when it counted.”
