ask before we go much further down this pretty empty road.”
Amused in spite of everything, he asked, “What happened to me being a damn hero rescuing you?”
“Oh, you’re still a hero,” she assured him, “but you could be crazy, too. You aren’t, though, are you?”
“Would I admit it if I was?”
“You might.” She shrugged. “There’s no telling with crazy people.”
“Know a lot of nut jobs, do you?” Caleb shook his head, he couldn’t believe he was having this conversation.
“A few, but you don’t seem like you’re one of them.” A wide swath of lace lifted into the wind and she snatched it and held it down on her lap. “Have you ever seen so much tulle?”
“What’s tulle?”
“This.” She lifted the swath of netting again. “It’s awful.”
“If you don’t like it, Why’d you buy it?”
“I didn’t.” She sighed. “Jared’s mother picked it out.”
Caleb laughed. “Sounds like her.”
“Okay, you’re not crazy.” She nodded and gave a sigh of satisfaction. “If you don’t like my almost mother-in-law you’re obviously stable.”
“Thanks.” Still shaking his head, he said, “Like I was saying, I’ll take you to the ranch. You can figure out where to go from there.”
“I don’t know where I can go,” she said quietly turning her head to stare out the window at the scenery flying past. “I don’t have my purse, my wallet. God, I don’t even have clothes.”
Caleb didn’t like the sound of the rising hysteria in her voice.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, and her words tumbled over each other in their rush to get out. “My God, I don’t have anything with me.”
“I can take you to an ATM—”
“No purse,” she interrupted. “No wallet, remember? No clothes except for this giant marshmallow of a dress.” She slapped one hand to her chest as if trying to hold her heart inside her body.
“You’re starting to panic,” he pointed out.
“Of course I am.” Her eyes were wild. “Now that I got away, I can think about other things and what I’m thinking is that I’m alone. In a strange place. Don’t know anyone but the people I’m escaping from.”
He watched from the corner of his eye as she shook her head frantically.
“I can’t exactly go over to the Goodmans’ house and say please can I have my things? My clothes. My purse. My ID. My phone.” She dropped her head into her hands and now her face was covered by what looked like an acre of tulle. “This is a nightmare,” she muttered.
“Remember, you wake up from nightmares.”
She lifted her head to glare at him. “Easy for you to say since I’m assuming you actually have a change of clothing.”
“Good point.” He nodded. “Yeah, you’re about the same size as my sister-in-law. You can wear some of her stuff.”
“Great. And what if she doesn’t feel like being generous?”
“She’s out of town.”
A short laugh shot from Shelby’s throat. “So I’ve been on my own about fifteen minutes and already I’m stealing clothes.”
“Not stealing. Borrowing.” He paused. “Are you always this dramatic?”
“Only when my world implodes,” she said and looked at him again. “So basically, I’m homeless and destitute. Well, hasn’t this day turned out all sparkly?”
He laughed.
She narrowed her eyes on him, then reluctantly, laughed herself. “This is not how I pictured my life going.”
“Yeah, not how I saw my day going, either,” he replied, grateful that she seemed to be coming down from that momentary panic.
“Honestly,” she said with another shake of her head, “I didn’t think beyond moving to Texas to marry Prince Charming who turned out to be a frog.”
“And you didn’t notice that right off?”
“No.” She huffed out a breath and turned her face into the wind. “Usually I’m a terrific judge of character.”
When he didn’t agree, she reminded him, “I picked you to rescue me, didn’t I?”
Amused again, Caleb laughed. “Yeah, but your choices were limited.”
“I could have just run screaming down the street,” she pointed out. “Which was first on my to-do list until I saw you.” She paused for breath. “Did you ever notice how appropriate the name Grimm was for an author of fairy tales?”
“Can’t say I ever thought about it.”
“Well, I’ve had the time lately. And the motivation. I mean, seriously. Look at this mess. It’s got it all. The feckless fiancé who’d gone from hero to wimp. His vicious mother and creepy father, not to mention his grabby brother.”
“Grabby?” Caleb scowled at the road ahead and admitted silently that he was really starting to sympathize with his runaway passenger. The Goodman family wasn’t exactly the best Royal had to offer and Shelby Arthur had discovered that the hard way.
She shuddered. “Justin is not someone a woman should be alone with. The only bright spot in that family was Jared’s sister, Brooke. She must be adopted,” Shelby added under her breath, then continued, “but by now, even she’s probably furious with me.”
“Do you need me to respond or are you good to talk all on your own?”
“God this is a mess.”
“Seems to be.”
She turned to look at him. “Not going to try to console me?”
“Would it do any good?”
“No.”
“Then it’d be a waste of time, wouldn’t it?”
“Are you always so chatty?” she asked.
“Yep.”
Shelby laughed, and the sound was soft and rich and touched something in Caleb he didn’t want to acknowledge. Still, her laughter was better than the anxiety he’d just been listening to.
“Look,” he said. “You come out to the house and you can stay there a day or two. Figure out what you want to do.”
“Stay
