events.
Travis tugged on Sam’s shirttail. “Did you see all her earrings, Daddy?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring hard at the side of her face. “I saw ’em.” Then his gaze swept down and she realized that wasn’t all he’d seen. Or, she guessed, approved of. Well, that was his problem, wasn’t it?
Travis and Radar wandered over to watch her father assess the damage to the camper’s interior. Brave souls, the pair of them.
“You really swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel?” Sam asked.
She looked back at Sam. “I really did. Although my guess is he probably darts out in front of cars on a regular basis, just for the hell of it. Squirrel ‘chicken,’ or something.”
“Dangerous game.”
“Guess he figures what’s life without a little danger to make it interesting? Crap,” she said on a wince as her knee tried its level best to give out on her.
Sam’s hand instantly cupped her elbow, followed by a heart-piercingly gentle, “What is it?”
“My knee. Or what’s left of it. I need to sit.”
“Can you get up into the truck?”
She nodded, and Sam put an arm around her waist and helped her over to his truck, then boosted her up into the passenger seat. It smelled very…male, although she couldn’t have possibly said what she meant by that.
“I’m not playing the damsel in distress, I swear,” she said, lifting the hem of her pants to massage the muscles around her Ace-bandaged knee.
“Didn’t figure you were.” Standing by the door, he nodded at her knee. “What happened?”
“Repetitive stress injury, basically. I’m a dancer. Was a dancer,” she added with a rueful glare at the offending joint.
“In your case, I’m guessing that’s not a euphemism for stripper.”
Despite pain bad enough to make her eyes cross, she laughed. “No, I don’t exactly have the equipment for that line of work.”
His grin managed to be both slightly devilish and very dear. And he was giving off this amazing, basic masculine scent of clean clothes and sun and that indefinable something that makes a woman’s mouth water, and she thought, Oh, God, just shoot me now.
“I was a ballerina,” she said, refusing to believe her dry mouth was due to anything other than a craving for orange juice. “In Cincinnati.”
“No fooling?” Sam leaned one wrist on the truck’s roof. “I always wondered how you gals danced on your toes like that.”
“Painfully.” His low rumble of amusement made her mouth even dryer. “What about you?” she said, nodding toward his right leg.
He grimaced. “Had a run-in with a bad tempered cow, Thanksgiving Day, a couple years ago. They tell me it healed perfectly, but corny as it sounds, I can definitely tell when it’s going to rain. So…what brings you to these parts?” he said over her chuckle.
She pulled her pants leg back down over her knee, then nodded over to her father, who was showing something or other to Travis. Seemed a shame, really, to waste such great grandpa material on a daughter who had no interest in being somebody’s mother.
“Road trip,” she said.
“Now, why do I get the feeling there’s a story behind this?”
She smiled, then shifted in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position for her knee. “My mother died a couple years ago,” she said softly over the ache of loss that still hadn’t quite dissipated. “Dad insisted he was okay—and here’s the part where I blow any chance I had of making a good first impression—and I chose to believe him because it made my life easier. Except then when I suddenly didn’t have a life, I took a good look at my father and realized I didn’t like what I was seeing. So I suggested we hop in the camper and drive until we got bored.”
“Is it working?”
“My dad, you mean?” She squinted over at the man. “Hard to tell. He’s a master at putting up a front. I suppose twenty years in the Army will do that to a man. Oh! Is that the tow truck?”
Sam glanced over. “Sure is. So what do you say I take you into town, and your father can ride with Darryl in the wrecker?”
“Sounds good to me,” she said, even though it didn’t sound good at all. What it sounded, was dangerous.
Unaware of her rampant ambivalence, Sam shut her door before starting to walk away, only to twist back around and say, “Just so you know…as far as impressions go, you did okay.”
“Oh,” she said as blood rushed gleefully to her skin’s surface. “Is this a good thing?”
He stared at her harder than a stranger had any right to, then shook his head. “No, ma’am, it most definitely is not,” he said, then strode off toward the beeping wrecker, leaving Carly feeling as tilted as her father’s truck.
Chapter 2
“My, my, my…wouldja lookee there?”
Having just attended a protracted birth that ended up getting transferred to the hospital in Claremore anyway, Ivy Gardner wasn’t sure how much of anything she could see. Or cared to, frankly. At the moment she was beginning to think she was getting too damn old for this foolishness, never mind how much she loved her work. She could also do without Luralene Hastings’s poking her before she’d had a chance to finish her first cup of coffee. But since the redheaded proprietress of the Hair We Are would only bug the hell out of Ivy until she responded, she peered blearily across the diner at the unfamiliar couple sitting in the far booth, both frowning at the twenty-five-year-old laminated menus that nobody local ever used.
Except then her vision cleared for a second or two and her brain managed a Huh of interest. Might’ve been more than that if she hadn’t been sleep deprived. Then again, maybe not—she was long past the age where her heart fluttered at the sight of a good-looking male. Which this definitely was, she wouldn’t deny it, with those good-size shoulders and thick, snowy hair. Ivy shifted uncomfortably in her seat, feeling very doughy, just at the moment.
“Wonder who they are?” Luralene said, poking Ivy again.
“Does it matter?”
Exasperated green eyes—which clashed with the turquoise eye shadow—met Ivy’s. “You know, you have turned into a regular stick-in-the-mud. I remember when you used to be fun.”
“And I remember when you used to be subtle.” Except then she took another sip of coffee and shook her head. “Strike that. You were never subtle.”
“Damn straight. Oh, oh—don’t look now—” this in a stage whisper you could hear in Tulsa “—but he’s lookin’ at you!”
And of course, Ivy lifted her eyes and yep, ran right into a pair of baby blues that set things to fizzing that hadn’t fizzed in a long, long time. And even as she wondered if maybe
