that is, we’re looking for a friend of ours. He ain’t been seen since them twisters went through here, and we thought he might’ve run into some trouble.”
If she’d had antennae, they would definitely have been twitching. Not that she had anything in particular against tattoos—it was purely a matter of personal preference—but this man was covered with them. “A friend, you say?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am, he’s a real good friend. We been on his tail since—” His silent companion elbowed him, and he stepped back and cleared his throat. “That is, we sure would like to find him, ma’am. You seen any strangers passing through here since the twister cut through?”
Later, Ellen would wonder what on earth had possessed her to lie. It wasn’t her nature at all, but something about this pair set off alarms. She put it down to a cross between a woman’s intuition and a mother’s protective instincts. “Only the men from the power company. They were checking all along here. One of them came by earlier today to be sure my power was back on.”
“Power company, huh? You sure you haven’t seen nobody else?”
“Perhaps if you described your friend?”
“’Bout six feet tall, maybe a few inches taller, wouldn’t you say?” He looked at his companion, who nodded vigorously. “Dark hair, dark eyes—I guess if I was a lady, I might call him good-looking.” His mouth stretched into a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. They remained flat and expressionless.
“What’s your friend’s name?”
The two men looked at each other. It was the tattooed man who spoke. “Harrison. J. S. Harrison. Ma’am.”
Ellen tucked the name away to consider later. “And your names?”
A furtive look passed between the two men. “I’m Bill Smith and this here is, uh, Bill Jones.”
Right, Ellen thought. And I’m the president’s mother-in-law. She wouldn’t trust either one of these men to take out her garbage. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you, but if I see anyone fitting that description, I’ll be sure to tell him you’re looking for him.”
The devil she would. The moment she closed the door and shot the bolt, she moved to the window to make sure they left. For several minutes they stood outside their car, heads close together as if they were talking. What if she’d been wrong and they really were friends of her stranger?
J. S. Harrison. That at least sounded plausible. What kind of man was she harboring under her roof? If he was a friend of Smith and Jones, she didn’t want him anywhere on her property.
Finally they got into the car, made a three-point turn and headed back down the lane. At the rate they were driving, if their muffler survived the potholes, she’d be very much surprised. She told herself she was being paranoid, but then, just down the hall, a stranger was sleeping in Jake’s bed. A man she didn’t know from Adam.
A man who didn’t know himself from Adam. Maybe she should have let them in to meet him—at least they might have told him who he was and where he belonged.
And maybe not, she thought, stroking away the goose bumps that suddenly pricked her upper arms.
On impulse, she slipped quietly into the downstairs bedroom and gazed at the sleeping stranger. Who are you? she wondered. Have I just made a serious blunder? Were those two men really your friends?
She didn’t think so. His name might actually be Harrison. Then again, there was no J. in his monogram.
Ellen would be the first to admit that she could be wrong about this whole business. The description they’d given her could fit half the men in Lone Star County. Six feet tall, lean but powerful build, dark hair and eyes. They hadn’t mentioned the shape of his mouth or the way his eyebrows lifted at the inner ends when he was puzzled, but then, men probably wouldn’t even notice such things.
Still, she might have solved all his problems if she’d let them come in and look. Some of his problems, anyway. It certainly wouldn’t have hurt…would it?
That was the trouble, she just didn’t know. She did know this man had been injured saving her son’s life. She owed him more than she could ever repay, and if that meant lying on his behalf, then she would lie until her tongue blistered.
She’d have to tell him about the men, of course, as soon as his knot went down and his headache eased. It would help if she could come up with some logical reason for her reaction. A woman’s intuition? She could just hear him jeering at that. Men always did.
“You sent them away? Because you didn’t like their looks? Are you crazy, or what?”
Okay, so she was crazy. She’d done what she thought best at the time. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever acted on impulse. If that made her guilty of some crime, so be it. At the moment her guest was her responsibility. In his vulnerable state he was in no condition to defend himself against a couple of weirdos who came knocking on her door in the middle of the night.
“So sue me,” she muttered, collecting the supper tray on her way out.
The man called Storm struggled to absorb and process information, but it was slow going. One thing he knew—his head still hurt like hell. And he knew he wasn’t about to take any painkillers, not without knowing more about himself than he did. He’d heard of people taking a simple over-the-counter remedy and going into shock.
He’d heard of it? Where? Who?
“Think, man, think!”
The trouble was, whenever he tried to reach out mentally and latch on to something solid—some glimmer of information hiding just beneath the surface of his mind—it slipped away. He didn’t have time to waste sleeping. He needed to stay awake long enough to put two and two together and come up with some answers, but he kept dozing off.
It was still pitch-black outside. He seemed to recall being awakened several times. Gingerly feeling the knot on the side of his head, he winced.
Head wound. Concussion. Check the pupils.
He knew that much, at least. Maybe he was a medic, a doctor.
The woman—Ellen Wagner—had been frantic over her son. “I knew he was on his way home from Joey’s,” she’d said. “But when I saw that sky…”
She’d taken several deep breaths then, unable to go on. Oddly enough, he understood how she’d felt. There was a hell of a lot he didn’t understand yet, but that much, he did. She was a mother. Her kid had been threatened; she’d reacted. She was still reacting.
So what did that mean—that he had a mother or that he had a son?
The boy was sound asleep, she’d told him the last time she’d roused him to be sure he was still alive. Or maybe the time before that—he’d lost all sense of time. She should have gone to bed hours ago, but she’d stayed up to wake him periodically in case he started showing signs of a concussion. Sometime during the night she’d taken the trouble to heat a can of chicken noodle soup, telling him that her son used to call it chicken oogle soup. The small confidence hadn’t triggered any buried memories, but the soup had helped stave off the shakes.
He knew now that he was in a downstairs
