without so much as a scratch.
What amused him about the whole thing is that Mona had a similar incident in her past. It had happened when she was ten. Rather than a joyride, after an argument with her grandmother Mona decided to run away from home. She took her grandmother’s car to enable her escape. But the adventure was short-lived. Mona managed to go down only two streets before her grandmother had caught up to her—on foot. Even at that age, the old woman had been swift.
The car sustained no damage. The same, he knew, couldn’t be said for Mona’s posterior or her dignity. She was grounded for a month.
“I wouldn’t throw rocks if I were you,” he said, leaving it at that. When she frowned, he knew that she knew exactly what he was referring to.
A second later, Mona sat up straight in her seat, suddenly animated. “I see it. You were right. The cabin is here.”
“Nice to know you have faith in me,” Joe cracked, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. It was getting harder to keep the vehicle from veering.
“It’s raining horses and steers,” Mona cried, gesturing at the windshield and doing one better than what she considered to be the stereotypical comment about cats and dogs. “Anyone could have gotten turned around in this storm.”
“Most people could have gotten turned around,” he allowed. Things like that never happened to him. He took his natural sense of direction for granted.
She sighed, shaking her head. Same old Joe, she thought. “Despite what you think, you are not mystically empowered, Joe Lone Wolf.”
Not for one minute did he think of himself as having any special, otherworldly powers, but he couldn’t resist teasing her. “I came to your rescue out of the blue, didn’t I?”
“You were just on your way home and stumbled across me,” she corrected. “You’ve been taking the same route ever since you went to work for my brother as one of his deputies.”
He turned the tables on her with ease. “Are you saying you took this path on purpose?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Just to run into me?”
“No, I’m saying that you—I mean, that I—” This wasn’t coming out right. He was getting her all tongue-tied. Mona gave up. “Oh, hell, think what you want—but you do know better than that.”
Yeah, he thought, he did. Had known it from the first moment that he’d laid eyes on Ramona as she walked into his second-period tenth-grade English class that February morning ten years ago. She’d been so beautiful to look at that it hurt him right down to his very core.
And right from the beginning he knew that girls like Ramona Santiago did not wind up with guys like him. He was an Apache through and through and it wasn’t all that long ago that people regarded Native Americans like him as beneath them.
Granted, Mona, like her brother, was one third Apache herself, but it was the other two thirds of her, the Mexican-American and especially the Irish side of her, that carried all the weight. And those two thirds would have never welcomed a poor Apache teenager into her life in any other capacity than just as a friend.
So a friend he was. Someone for her to talk to, confide in if the spirit so moved her. Being her friend—her sometimes confidant—he’d long since decided is what made his life worth living. And what had, ultimately, made him abandon the wild, bad boy who didn’t play by the rules and take up the straight-and-narrow path instead. The guy he had been would never have pinned on a badge and sworn an oath to it. But he’d done it for her, for Ramona.
She probably hadn’t had a clue, he thought now.
Just as she didn’t have a clue about the rest of it. About his feelings for her. And he intended for it to stay that way.
Resisting the urge to speed up just a little, Joe slowly drove the Jeep up to the rickety cabin that had once been home to an entire family.
Silently breathing a sigh of relief, he pulled up the hand brake as he turned off the engine.
Mona, he noticed, hadn’t undone her seat belt. “Something wrong?” he asked her.
“Is it safe?” she asked, eyeing the cabin uncertainly. There’d been ghost stories about the cabin when she’d been growing up. She didn’t believe those for a minute, but the cabin did look as if it was about to blow away in the next big gust of wind.
Joe knew that the cabin wasn’t as structurally sound as some of the newer buildings in town, but he really didn’t expect it to fall down around them—unless one of the termites sneezed, he thought, suppressing a smile.
“It’s standing and it’s dry inside,” he pointed out. “Or reasonably so,” he added, figuring that time had been hard on the roof and there had to be places where it would leak. “Right now, that’s all that matters.” Unbuckling his seat belt, he glanced at her, waiting. “Now are you coming, or are you planning on spending the night in the Jeep?”
The latter idea thrilled her even less than spending the night in the rickety cabin. With a sigh, Mona pressed the button and undid her seat belt.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she muttered.
Opening the passenger door, Mona got out. As she stoically battled her way to the cabin’s front door, she suddenly shrieked as the cold rain whipped about her face and body, drenching her for a second time in a matter of moments and stealing her breath away, as well.
The next moment, a strong arm tightened around her waist and pulled her the rest of the way to the cabin.
Joe pushed the door open for her. The cabin hadn’t had a working lock on it for most of the twenty years it had been empty.
“I can walk,” Mona protested as he all but propelled her into the cabin.
“You’re welcome,” he replied after putting his shoulder to the door and pushing it closed again, despite the fact that the rain seemed to have other ideas.
Steadying herself, Mona scanned the area to get her bearings. The interior of the front room looked particularly dreary, like an old prom dress that had been kept in the closet years too long. The roof, she noted, was leaking in several different spots.
“So much for staying dry,” Mona muttered under her breath as she moved aside after a large splotch of rain had hit her on her forehead.
Rubbing his hands together to warm them, Joe gave her an amused look. “You just have to make sure you don’t stand under any of the holes in the roof.”
“Brilliant as always.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Did you figure that out all by yourself?”
Joe’s expression remained stoic and gave nothing away. He deflected the sarcasm with a mild observation as he pointed out, “I’m not the one getting rained on.”
Mona struggled with her temper. He wasn’t the reason she was in this mood. She’d planned on surprising Rick with her early arrival. He thought she was coming in a couple of weeks, just in time for his wedding. She had sped things up on her end, taking her license exam earlier rather than later, so that she could come and lend a hand in the preparations. Her almost-sister-in-law was six months pregnant and most likely not up to the rigors involved in preparing for a wedding.
