stretching, pressing ache deepened. She really needed to find that town.
She reached for her handbag, a pink crocodile spy bag her mother had purchased for Jenna’s twenty-second birthday six weeks ago. The purse, stuffed full of the very best cosmetics, a spa coupon, and a five-thousand-dollar shopping card, had been nothing short of a bribe and Jenna knew it. Unfortunately Mother never understood that monetary possessions had ceased to inspire loyalty in her daughter. Only one thing had her complete and utter devotion—the tiny person who, at this very moment, was causing a great deal of discomfort to Jenna’s body.
As her fingers flipped open the purse flap, Jenna hissed a frustrated breath between her teeth. She no longer owned the elegant slider phone, complete with GPS and remote Internet access. Still fully charged and activated, she’d donated it to a bewildered but grateful soldier at an airport in Philadelphia. By the time the device had been located, it would be somewhere in the Middle East.
“Who would you call anyway?” Even 9-1-1 was fraught with difficulties. Though the Carringtons disdained public attention, choosing to deal with their scandals in a more discreet and private manner, Jenna would allow no chance of alerting anyone to her whereabouts.
She forced herself to breathe slow and deep. The tense, tense muscles in her back only grew tighter.
A flutter of panic trembled in her stomach. What if she went into labor out here alone?
She turned on the radio, praying for a distraction, while also pressing the car’s accelerator. She needed to get somewhere fast.
A male voice, rich in Texas twang, came through the speakers to announce a fall festival at Saddleback Elementary School and a garage sale at 220 Pinehurst behind the Saddleback Pizza Place.
Saddleback must be a town. But where was it?
She gave the radio a pleading glance. “Can’t you be a bit more specific?”
The pressure inside her body increased. A new and more insistent discomfort had moved around front to a spot low in her belly. Very low. She gasped and shifted sideways onto one hip. The pressure mounted, deeper, harder, stronger.
A guttural groan erupted from Jenna’s throat. The sound was foreign, so different from her normal modulated tone.
From the radio pounded a driving beat of electric guitar and bass. The intensity echoed in her body.
The road ahead seemed to waver.
Fingers of iron gripped her abdomen. She was in trouble. Real trouble.
She blinked, panting, fighting the pressure. Sweat stung her eyes. Texas weather was cool, though not nearly as cold as a Pennsylvania November, and yet, Jenna was roasting inside the small blue economy. She reached for the air-conditioning controls and saw, with concern, how pale and shaky she’d become.
Before she could take another breath, a squeezing pain of epic proportions followed hard on the heels of the intense pressure.
“Oh no.” She was in labor. Either that or her body was rupturing from the inside out.
Mouth open, panting like a puppy, she gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to stay on the road.
“Not yet, baby. Not yet. Let me find a hospital first.” She squinted into the glare of an overcast sky, hoping for something, anything. A town, a house, another car.
Nothing but the endless brown landscape and an occasional line of naked trees.
The pressure mounted again, little by little, a warning that another power punch was on the way. Dread tensed her shoulders. “Nooo.”
Her body poured sweat. So unladylike. Had Mother perspired this much with her?
She had to escape the pain. She had to. Perhaps if she stopped, got out of the car and walked a bit. Walking had helped in the past to ease the back ache. Even if walking didn’t help, she could drive no further. She wouldn’t take a chance of having an accident.
She tapped the brake and aimed the car toward the grassy roadside. Her belly tightened again. With one hand, she grabbed for the rock-hard mound, moaning with dread. The terrible pain was coming again. She could think of nothing but the battle raging in her body.
Just before the agony took control, Jenna saw a flash of barbed wire and orange fence posts. The fence moved closer and closer.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
As his King Ranch pickup truck roared down County Road 275, Dax Coleman had two things on his mind: a hot shower and a good meal.
At the last thought, his mouth curled, mocking him. He hadn’t had a good meal since the latest of a long string of housekeepers quit two weeks ago. Supper would be microwave pizza or scrambled eggs, the extent of his culinary gifts. His own fault, certainly. He wasn’t the easiest man in Texas to live with. Just ask his ex-wife—if you could find her.
A snarl escaped him. He reached over to raise the radio volume and drown out thoughts of Reba.
As he rounded the last lazy curve before the turnoff to the Southpaw Cattle Company, a car in the distance caught his attention. Dax leaned forward, squinting into the overcast day.
The guy up ahead was either drunk, lost or having trouble. Dax took his foot off the accelerator. The car, a dirty blue economy model, was taking its share of the road out of the middle. It wove to the left and then back again as the driver began to slow.
With a beleaguered sigh, Dax tapped the brake. He wasn’t in the mood for drunks. He wasn’t in the mood for any kind of people, come to think of it.
For the last five years, all he’d really wanted out of life was his son and his ranch. The rest of the world could leave him the heck alone.
The car ahead slowed considerably and aimed for the side of the road. Maybe the fella was having car trouble.
After an afternoon of helping Bryce Patterson separate calves, Dax was too tired and dirty to play nice.
Still, he was a Texan, and the unspoken code of the country was rooted into him as deeply as the land itself. Out here, folks helped folks. Even when it was inconvenient.
Another car might not come along for hours and cell phone usage was spotty. He grabbed the plain black device from the seat next to a pair of dirty leather gloves and a pair of fencing pliers. Sure enough. Not a single bar of connection. He tossed the phone aside.
“Don’t know what good the blasted thing is if it never works where you need it.”
As he glanced back up, still grumbling, the dirty blue car wobbled off the road, onto the grass, and down a slight incline.
“Come on, buddy, stop. Stop!”
The car ahead kept rolling.
Five strands of brand-new barbed wire bowed outward before snapping like strings on a fiddle. Orange fence posts toppled. Dax’s fence posts.
“Blast it!” he ground out through gritted teeth and slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel. Somewhere in the back of
