Книга - The Quiet Seduction

The Quiet Seduction
Dixie Browning


Mills & Boon Silhouette
To Ellen Wagner, Spence Harrison was a hero. He'd rescued her son from a tornado–and lost his own memory in the process.He could not remember who he was or how he got to the beautiful widow's ranch. But amnesia was the least of his problems. The mob was looking for him, and Spence knew just by being with Ellen and her son he was putting them in danger. Somehow he had to solve the mystery of his past…so that he could be free to love the woman who'd infiltrated his heart.







CLUB TIMES

For Members’ Eyes Only

Dorothy sure ain’t in Texas anymore!

If Mission Creek isn’t going to Hades in a handbasket, I don’t know what is happening. ’Tis the season for losing your valuables! First Luke Callaghan abandons us, and now our scrumptious D.A., Spence Harrison, has disappeared! In addition, Nadine Delarue claims she lost her diamond solitaire, but something tells us that new pooch of hers might have needed some extra crunch in his dog food.

By the way, let’s see a show of hands for those who think Josie Carson (née Lavender) might be overdoing it with “eating for two.” Isn’t there a limit to how much you’re supposed to gain during pregnancy? Whatever the case may be, Josie, that extra baby weight sure looks good on you!

I’m pleased to announce that Dylan Bridges is the winner of our Yellow Rose Café Wednesday raffle.

Dylan is now the proud owner of the Lone Star Country Club quilt made by our very own “Over Eighty” quilting circle. Dylan, ignore some of the irregular stitching patterns and remember that there’s enough room under that quilt for you and that beautiful wife of yours. All raffle proceeds go to benefit the Mission Creek High School marching band and their tour of New York City.

And that’s all she wrote for this issue, members. As always, make your best stop of the day right here at the Lone Star Country Club!




About the Author







DIXIE BROWNING

is an award-winning painter and writer, mother and grandmother. Her father was a big-league baseball player, her grandfather a sea captain. In addition to nearly ninety-five contemporary romances, Dixie and her sister, Mary Williams, have written more than a dozen historical romances under the name Bronwyn Williams.

Among her romances, very few have been set in Texas. Even so, despite having lived in North Carolina her entire life, she was tempted by the offer to write one of the LONE STAR COUNTRY CLUB books. Long a fan of suspense, she was especially drawn to that particular aspect of the series. New tactics were required to deal with the many continuity elements. Some things, however, transcend location. If you agree that she’s succeeded in rising to the challenge, perhaps you can reassure her through her Web site, www.dixiebrowning.com, or at: P.O. Box 1389, Buxton, NC 27920.




The Quiet Seduction

Dixie Browning







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Welcome to the






Where Texas society reigns supreme—and appearances are everything.

The Texas mafia is on the warpath….

Spence Harrison: While en route to the state prison, this high-powered D.A. saw a little boy in harm’s way of a tornado. It wasn’t a question whether he’d heroically risk his life to save the lad. But hitting his head and suffering amnesia wasn’t part of the plan. Neither was seducing the boy’s soft-spoken mom, whose tender ministrations penetrated Spence’s guarded heart….

Ellen Wagner: This struggling farmer didn’t know what to make of the wounded stranger who made her pulse race out of control. But when menacing men came looking for her handsome housemate, she instinctively knew she had to protect him. Will their newfound love be darkened by the Texas underworld?

Mayhem in Mission Creek: During a power struggle between two formidable mobsters, a shocking suspicion comes to light about a presumed-dead heiress. Now the truth sets off a dangerous chain of events….













To my editor, Margaret Marbury, the woman behind the entire LONE STAR COUNTRY CLUB series.

Margaret, I’m in awe of your talent.




Contents


Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen




One


Spence Harrison scanned the dial in search of a weather update while he drove, half his attention on the highway, half on the sky. He had enough on his mind without heading into a patch of nasty weather. In this section of South Texas, scattered showers might mean anything from a few tepid drops to baseball-size hail. Yesterday’s prediction of scattered showers had produced a deluge.

Luckily, traffic was light on the secondary highway. All he had to do was watch out for slow-moving tractors and a speeding ticket, as his foot tended to be heavier on the accelerator when he was under tension. For a district attorney on his way to the state prison to take an on-site deposition—one he didn’t trust anyone else to take—a speeding ticket would be embarrassing, to say the least.

Reaching up, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. Damn, it was getting hot! He turned the air conditioner up another notch. Cutting back to a moderate sixty-five miles an hour, he tried to concentrate on the task ahead. The trouble came in trying to narrow his focus.

The last call he’d taken before leaving his office had had nothing to do with the murder trial he was preparing to prosecute, or even the information he was hoping to uncover from this particular witness. Instead it concerned Luke Callaghan, a good friend, Virginia Military Institute classmate and old marine corps buddy who had dropped off the radar screen after arriving in Central America. It had been more than a week since he’d reported in.

Considering his usual extravagant lifestyle, his disappearance would not have been surprising, but in this particular case it was definitely a cause for alarm. Luke was involved in a risky undercover rescue mission. Their former commander, Phillip Westin, had gone down somewhere in a Central American jungle—not a great place to go missing. Spence wasn’t privy to all the details, but from the few he did know he’d been able to extrapolate others with his well-honed power of deduction. A logical mind and the ability to reason were valuable tools in his particular line of work.

At the moment, however, those abilities were being stretched thin. As the miles sped past, Spence’s thoughts ricocheted back and forth between Luke’s situation and recent revelations on an entirely different front that made it imperative that he find out just which cops had gone rogue. It was hardly the thing a man could ask if he wanted to stay healthy. At this point, not even Internal Affairs was above suspicion.

Spence could count on the fingers of one hand the cops he could trust. It was a sad state of affairs, damned sad. Most were probably clean, but he couldn’t be sure. Not until he had enough evidence to trigger an outside investigation. He was counting on today’s deposition to add a few more parts to the puzzle.

It had been the murder of Judge Carl Bridges that had shaken things loose. The judge had been a powerful man in Lone Star County—a man who had influenced countless lives, Spence’s included. The two had met at a time when Spence had been headed down a dead-end road. He’d been no stranger to juvenile court. Thanks to Carl Bridges he had turned around, worked his tail off, and now, a couple of decades later, had a respectable career as a district attorney to show for it.

It was the judge’s recent murder that had driven Spence on a mission of his own. Alex Black’s finger-prints might have been all over the murder weapon, but someone else had to be pulling his strings. Black wasn’t bright enough to act on his own. Spence was all but certain the punk was being set up to take the fall. He had a pretty good idea who was behind it, but certainty wasn’t enough. He needed irrefutable evidence, and getting that evidence was not going to be easy. Under the circumstances, it might even be hazardous.

There had been a few questionable incidents recently that, taken singly, meant little. The car that had nearly run him off the road last week, he’d put down to a DUI. He’d immediately called the highway patrol, but by the time they’d arrived on the scene, the jerk had evidently gone to earth.

The hang-up calls he’d been receiving late at night he’d put down to kids’s pranks. Even taken together, the incidents weren’t conclusive-enough evidence that the mob wanted him out of the picture to put their own man in place. He happened to know, however, that they had their own candidate waiting in the wings should Spence decide to take early retirement.

On the surface Joe Ed Malone’s credentials were impeccable, educationally, socially and politically. Scratch the surface, though, and he was as corrupt as they came. The mob owned him, from his custom-made toupee right down to his bench-made boots. Spence had evidence in a hidden file, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it, as it implicated several prominent citizens.

God, it was getting hot! Was this the end of November or the Fourth of July? Setting the AC on Arctic Blast, he angled the vents to blow in his face. The fact that he was running late didn’t help. He should have taken the interstate, but he had some thinking to do and he couldn’t concentrate with a fleet of eighteen-wheelers bearing down on his rear bumper.

Once again he checked his watch, then glanced nervously at the sky. Was it only his imagination or was that cloud up ahead several degrees darker?

Sighting a gas station, he checked his fuel gauge. Better to stop now than wait until he was hovering at empty. He should’ve filled up before he’d left town, but he’d had his mind on how to go about extracting the information he needed from a guy who probably didn’t realize the significance of what he knew. Odds were better than even he wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but it was worth a try. When a man was on a rat hunt, he couldn’t afford to pass up a single dark hole.

After topping up his tank, Spence replaced his credit card in his wallet, slid the wallet back into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, then slung the coat onto the passenger seat atop his briefcase and portable tape recorder. Climbing back behind the wheel, he switched on the radio and hit the scan button, searching again for a weather forecast as he pulled back onto the highway.

Given a choice of farm reports, a cooking show or country music, he settled for Willie Nelson singing about an angel flying too close to the earth. There’d be break-in bulletins if any serious weather was headed this way.

He’d been driving less than five minutes when he noticed the ragged bottom of a particularly dark cloud rapidly moving toward him. Despite the heat, he felt a rash of cold prickles down his spine. Weather alert or no, he increased his speed. Not that he was all that eager to reach the state prison. He still hadn’t quite decided on the best tactic to employ, but if things were about to turn nasty, there was a lot more security to be found behind those thick walls than on a wide-open stretch of highway in the middle of cow country. Black skies were bad; greenish-black skies were about seventeen degrees worse.

“Sweet Jesus,” he muttered soulfully, glancing again through the side window. A moment later he began to swear in earnest as an all-too-familiar formation began to take shape. It was a funnel, all right. And unless one of them switched direction in the next few minutes, they were on a collision course.

It was then that Spence saw the boy on a bicycle a couple of hundred feet ahead. Poor kid was frozen, gawking at the twister racing toward him like steel to a magnet. Reflexes kicked in and Spence floored the accelerator, then slammed on the brakes. Not waiting for the car to stop fishtailing, he struggled to wrench open his door.

“Hit the dirt!” he screamed as he catapulted over the hood and dived at the figure standing immobile on the highway right-of-way. A chrome hubcap sailed out of nowhere, missing his head by inches. “Hit the ditch, hit the ditch!” he screamed again, tackling the kid and carrying them both into the drainage ditch just as a blinding wall of sand struck him in the face.



The sudden darkness was suffocating. Unfocused pain splintered through him, then there was nothing but noise and darkness. His first thought was that he was blind. Only gradually did disjointed fragments of awareness begin to drift past.

A kid maybe eight or nine years old… A kid on a bike beside the highway…

Echoes of a nasal tenor voice singing about…

Singing about something or other.

Lying half submerged in a swollen stream of muddy water, he made no effort to hang on to the images, the impressions, dimly aware that sooner or later something would snag and he’d be able to use it to pull himself up and get started on his way to—

To wherever.

In the sudden stillness he heard the sound of a woman’s voice. She was shouting, crying.

Then something whimpered. A dog, maybe a kid.

Himself?

It sure as hell wasn’t Willie Nelson, because he remembered Willie’s voice. That was a start, wasn’t it?

Something raked over his face. It hurt, and he tried to turn away.

Angel flying too close to the earth…

“Wait until I wipe off some of the mud. Don’t try to open your eyes yet.”

He opened his eyes. Tears flushed away some of the grit and he blinked away the dirty film to stare up at the haggard-looking angel leaning over him. She was holding a filthy rag in one hand. “I told you not to open your eyes,” she scolded.

He tried to speak, grimaced and spat out whatever was in his mouth. More mud. He’d been lying on his side in a ditch.

In a ditch?

What the hell was he doing in a ditch?

A voice kept echoing in his head. Someone screaming, “Hit the ditch, hit the ditch!”

Oh. That ditch. Evidently he’d hit it harder than intended. They both had. A kid on a bicycle had been under him, at least he remembered that much. The boy was now huddled a few feet away, pale as wet plaster except for the mud dripping off his hair, his face, his clothes. There was no sign of the bike, but a nice tubular aluminum chair lay on its side a few yards away, along with what looked like the remains of a bombed-out flea market.

Lying on his back, he gazed up at a woman who remained featureless, either because angels couldn’t be seen by mere mortals, or because he was seeing her silhouetted against the sky.

She jabbed at his head again with her rag. Wincing, he caught her arm and said, “What the devil are you trying to do? Damn it, that hurts!”

Major understatement. Various parts of his body were beginning to report in to command central. The message was pain. Agonizing, unfocused pain.

“Mom, what about the horses?” Kid’s voice.

“They’re fine.” Angel’s voice.

He wanted to hang on to both, hang on to something solid until his world settled down again. God, don’t let me throw up!

“Is he going to be all right, Mom?”

“I hope so, hon. Here, help me prop him up.”

“Do you think you can walk?” That was addressed to him, not to Hon, in a soft contralto voice he found oddly comforting.

He felt hands on his shoulders, then one slipped under his back. Something smelled like cinnamon, which was funny, because up until then all he could smell was mud and something green and faintly resinous.

He tried to shift to a sitting position and yelped as pain stabbed his left knee all the way up to his groin.

“Don’t touch him, hon. You might have to go for help.”

“But, Mama, my bike’s gone.”

“Then go home and call nine-one-one.”

“But, Mom—”

Mom the Angel sighed. “What am I thinking? The lines are probably down. I don’t even know if the town’s still there. Oh, God.”

He wanted to tell her to use his cell phone, but the impulse died as he realized the phone was in his car and at the moment, there was no vehicle in sight. Where the hell was his car? Did he even have one?

Well, sure he had one. Why else would he be stuck out here in the middle of nowhere? He’d been on his way to—

Where? Where the hell am I going? A sense of urgency overrode the pain and he struggled to get up.

Firm hands held him down. “Wait,” she said. “We don’t know yet if anything’s broken.”

Taking the line of least resistance, he closed his eyes again, releasing the vague feeling of urgency as pain rolled over him in shuddering waves. The woman leaned over and placed her hands on his sides, patting him down as if she were searching for weapons. “I’m just trying to see if anything’s noticeably out of place,” she said apologetically. “I took a course in first aid a few years ago.”

When she got as far as his knees, he began to curse, then bit it off. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Kids and angels don’t—”

“Shh, I’ve heard worse. Look, I didn’t find anything obviously broken, but your left knee feels swollen to me. Was it that way before—” She broke off, biting her lip. “Oh, lordy, I hope I didn’t do anything awful when I rolled you over onto your side. Pete was half under water. I had to pull him out from under you.”

“Give me a minute,” he growled. Carefully, he flexed his fingers, testing. So far, so good. Wrists still functioned, arms and elbows were still in working order. They hurt like the devil, but still obeyed his brain’s instructions.

The angel said something about rocks in the ditch, as if that might explain everything. Next time he took a header he’d make certain there were no rocks in the ditch first. “I think they’re just chunks of old culverts,” she said apologetically. “From when they replaced them along this stretch of highway winter before last.”

As if he gave a damn.

He moved his left leg and sucked air in through his teeth. Not a good sign. “Would you mind looking to see if there’s a bone poking through my skin?” he said through clenched jaws.

Tearfully—he could have sworn he saw tears streaking down her face—she leaned back and peered at the lower half of his body. If he was in bad enough shape to make an angel weep, he wasn’t too sure he cared to hear the details.

“I don’t think it’s broken, but you must have twisted it. There’s part of a pine tree lying over there—lots of junk everywhere. You probably tripped. I think your left ankle might be sprained, too, but I don’t think it’s broken. Is that your shoe caught under that branch over there? Pete, how about digging it out?”

“Left knee, left ankle.” His attempt at a smile was more of a grimace. “The good news is, I’ve still got one good limb, otherwise you’d have to shoot me.”

“Hush,” she said sternly. “Lie still a minute and let me think.”

He didn’t have a whole lot of choice. Aside from the injuries she’d mentioned, he’d already discovered a lump above his left temple that was roughly the size of a West Texas cantaloupe.

And then he lost it again. Flat out fainted. Later he had to wonder how they’d managed to get him up and moving. Angels, he figured, had their methods. He didn’t remember flying. Sure as hell didn’t remember any harp music. Remembered hearing a siren in the distance that wailed on and on and on until he felt like taking it out with a high-powered rifle. Somewhere a dog was barking. At least the kid had stopped whimpering. Now he couldn’t seem to shut up, chattering on and on about the noise, and how scared he was, and wow, look at all those broken trees.

By the time he was able to focus on anything besides his own pain, they had reached a shabby, two-story farmhouse neatly surrounded by two-thirds of a picket fence.

Working together to support his not-inconsiderable weight, the kid and the woman, who was a lot stronger than she looked, had managed to ease him onto the front porch. Somewhere during the painful journey he’d figured out that she was no angel. He remembered gazing up from his undignified position in the foul-smelling wheelbarrow they’d used to trundle him down a long, bumpy lane, to focus on her face. It was probably not the most beautiful face he’d ever seen, but he’d clung to the image, because he’d desperately needed to cling to something.

“Give me a minute,” he gasped. Seated on the porch floor, both hands gripping his swollen knee, he focused on riding over the pain. Breathe in, breathe out, slowly and deeply. Count off, count off, count off….

A glimpse of something vaguely familiar slipped in and out of his mind—a mind that admittedly wasn’t working too well at the moment. Uniforms…semi-automatic weapons…?

His head felt as if it had been shot out of a mortar.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” the woman said.

Squinting through narrowed eyes, he sized her up when she came and knelt in front of him. She was soaking wet, dirty, but had all the right curves in all the right places. Oh, yeah—he’d have to be dead to miss that much. Green eyes, brown hair—nice, but nothing fancy. The kind of woman a man might have given a second look, but probably no more. And yet…

“Do I know you?” he asked cautiously. He felt the need to reach out and hold on to something—someone—familiar. At the same time he felt an unsettling need for caution.

Why?

Who knew?

“I don’t think so. I’m Ellen Wagner. The boy you saved is my son, Pete. I’ll never be able to repay you, Mr….?”

There was something at once earthy and ethereal about her. Thin face, hollow cheeks, haunting eyes—or maybe he meant haunted. Without being actually pretty, she was beautiful. She was obviously waiting for him to introduce himself. He ran a quick mental check before the walls slammed down.

It’ll come, he thought with growing desperation. This kind of thing happened in books and movies, not in real life. At least, not to him.

Whoever the hell he was.



By the time he woke up again, it was pitch-dark. There was a night-light on, one of those small, fake-candle things. He waited for his eyes to adjust. Nothing looked familiar. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but nothing about the room rang any bells. Evidently he wasn’t at home. He couldn’t quite remember what home looked like, but he’d lay odds this wasn’t it.

Cautiously sitting up, he began to swing his legs over the side of the bed. Pain slammed through him as it all came back.

Correction. The immediate past came back. For all he knew he could’ve been born in a ditch with a pale-faced angel for a midwife and a skinny wet kid for an assistant.

Hell of a thing. He was used to—

What? He didn’t know what he was used to; he only knew this wasn’t it.

“How long have I been out of it?” he asked as the woman came silently into the bedroom. Any minute now, he assured himself, things would begin to click into place.

She was barefoot. White robe, no halo, no wings. Avid for information, he latched onto the smallest detail. She glanced at her watch. A man’s watch, he noted, on a delicate wrist.

“It’s just past eleven now—p.m. They say the tornado struck at seven minutes to one this afternoon. I woke you up several times just to be sure you were all right, the way you’re supposed to with a head injury. Don’t you remember?”

“Lady, I don’t remember shi—anything.” Evidently he did remember how to talk to a lady.

“We’ll have to call you something. What comes to mind?”

“Bathroom. And no, I don’t want to be called John, but if you’ll point me in the right direction, I’d be much obliged.”

Seeing the smile that trembled on her lips, he’d have given anything to have met her under better circumstances.

She indicated a door across the hall and mentally he measured the distance. If he could grab a chair he could probably use it to lurch across the room.

“You really need to keep your left leg elevated as much as possible,” she told him.

“I can handle it.” He could handle the pain better than he could handle asking her to help with his more intimate needs.

“There was a crutch—I think I put it in the attic. If you’ll wait right here a minute, I’ll run see.”

“Take your time,” he said through a clenched jaw.

Evidently she recognized his most pressing problem at the moment. She was gone and back before he could decide whether to risk falling on his face or an even worse indignity.

“Here, I don’t know if it’s the right height. It was in the attic when we moved in. Thank goodness I never got around to clearing things out.”

She eased into position under his arm to help him up, and even in his battered condition, he recognized the smell of a woman fresh from her bath. At any other time he had a feeling he’d have responded to it.

She handed him the crutch and helped him position it before he embarrassed himself. It was short, but at least it allowed him some mobility. He thanked her and hobbled off to tend to nature’s call. And incidentally, to look in the mirror to see who the hell he was.

The face that stared back at him moments later would have looked right at home on any Wanted poster. A jaw that redefined the word stubborn. A largish nose that canted slightly to the southwest. High forehead, distorted at the moment by the large, discolored lump above his left temple. Nothing rang any bells, including the stubble, the mud-stiffened brown hair and the suspicious dark eyes. After staring for long moments at the mirror image, he felt like crying. Howling like a lovesick coyote.

If he’d ever before come face-to-face with the man in the mirror, he didn’t remember it.

He managed to wash up, even doused his head in the basin a few times to remove some of the mud. The rest he left behind on one of her pretty pink towels.

She was still there when he made it back to the room. Ms. Wagner. Mrs. Wagner. She had a son.

Think, man! Get it together!

How the devil could he get it together when his head felt like a filing cabinet that had been bludgeoned with a sledgehammer? The image of a silver-gray metal filing cabinet flickered in and out so fast he didn’t have time to latch on to any details.

“Are you hungry? We had supper hours ago, but I could heat you some soup. What about chicken noodle?”

“Coffee. Strong, black and sweet. I don’t usually take sugar, but I need the…” His voice trailed off as it occurred to him that things were starting to come back. Any minute now he’d remember who he was, and where he was supposed to be. According to the boy, he’d been in a hell of a hurry, but then, with a tornado bearing down on them, that was understandable.

Was anyone looking for him? A family? A wife? Chances were that whatever transportation had brought him this far was no longer available. Picturing the scene when he’d first looked around that ditch, he didn’t recall seeing anything resembling wheels. Not even the kid’s bike.

“What shall I call you?” She was waiting quietly. Patience was a quality he’d always admired, especially in a woman. Without knowing how he knew, he knew.

“Uh, might as well call me Storm.”

She had a way of tilting her head that spoke louder than words. You’re kidding, right?

“Look, I seem to have temporarily mislaid a few things. Like my long-term memory. Can we just make it easy until I get it back?”

“I’ll bring you the coffee, but you’d probably better eat something, too. The minute the lines are up I’ll call my doctor.”

“My cell phone—” He broke off, confused, frustrated—feeling helpless and somehow knowing it was not something he was accustomed to feeling.

“If you had one, it wasn’t on you when I found you.”

It was then he noticed for the first time that his shirt was striped cotton, and so were his drawstring pants. They were also too wide and too short.

“I never wear pajamas,” he said, oddly offended.

“You do now. No matter how sick you are, you’re not getting into my bed in those muddy rags you were wearing. I threw away your tie—it was hopeless. I washed your shirt and underwear. As for your pants, well, I sponged them, but I doubt if even a dry cleaner will be able to do much with them. I’m sorry. Pete went back and found your other shoe. I did the best I could, but I’m afraid they’ll never be the same. Cordovan leather doesn’t take kindly to being scrubbed inside and out, even with saddle soap.”

He took a moment to absorb the implications. There were several. There might be something in one of his pockets that would give him a clue as to his identity—even a monogram would help. Half joking, he said, “I don’t suppose you found a name, address and serial number among my effects, did you?”

“Serial number?”

Serial number? “I mean phone number. Hell, I don’t know, I’m just reaching here. Help me out, will you?”

“Sorry. You were wearing a nice wristwatch, but I’m afraid it didn’t survive. The crystal was broken and it was full of muddy water. You might be right about your name, though. There was a handkerchief in your hip pocket that had what looked like an H with an S in the middle—sort of a design, you know? Storm…hits? Storm Help? Harry Storm?”

“Nice try. Don’t worry, it’ll come. And tell your husband thanks for the use of his pajamas.”

“I’m a widow,” she said quietly. “I kept Jake’s things after he died because…well, just because, I guess.” Leaning her hips against the dresser, arms crossed over her breasts, she shrugged. “I’d better go heat some soup—I hope canned is okay. I’ll bring the coffee as soon as it’s made.”

“I see the power’s on.”

“Ours wasn’t off more than a few hours, but just up the road—you can see some of it from here—things are pretty torn up. A few miles south of here, two farms and a trailer park were completely wiped out. I’m not sure about the rest, I haven’t had time to watch much news.”

“Casualties?”

“None reported so far.”

“Do you have a radio I can borrow?”

“I can bring one in, but right now you probably need sleep more than you need news. If you can make it as far as the living room in the morning, you can eat breakfast while you watch the storm coverage on TV. Maybe something will ring a bell.”

She left then, and he sat for a moment longer and considered what he knew and what he didn’t.

What he knew was easy. He was alive. He’d been rescued by a widow with a kid named Pete, although he was usually called Hon. Her husband, Jake, had been shorter and broader. As for the widow herself, she had a surprisingly womanly body under the baggy clothes she’d been wearing when she’d found him in that ditch and the bathrobe she’d worn later.

Oh, yeah, he knew all that, all right. It was what he didn’t know that was giving him fits. Like who the devil he was.

Like where he’d been going in such a hell of a hurry. Like what he had been doing that had left this nagging sense of urgency inside him. Almost a sense of wariness.

Like what happened to his vehicle.

And which one of them—the woman or her son—had got him out of his clothes and into these striped pajamas.




Two


At a quarter to midnight, after checking the doors and switching off the outside lights, Ellen glanced toward the stairs, feeling as if she’d just run a three-day marathon. Pete was finally asleep; the stranger had been fed and was now sleeping—safely and normally, she sincerely hoped. When he’d opened his eyes earlier, she’d looked closely and could detect no sign of irregular pupils, but with such dark eyes it was hard to tell.

Nice eyes, really. It wasn’t like her to notice a man’s eyes—or a man’s anything else. But as she’d been the one to get him out of his clothes and into a pair of pajamas…

Well, there were some things no woman who wasn’t blind and totally devoid of hormones could help but notice.

She yawned. She would try to cram eight hours of sleep into what was left of the night, but she knew in advance that it wouldn’t be enough. All too soon the alarm clock would go off and she’d have to get up again, get Pete off to school. After that, unless Booker and Clyde showed up, she would turn out the horses, come back inside and make the beds and put the breakfast dishes in to soak, then go back to the barn and muck out the stalls, clean troughs and do all the other things she paid that worthless pair to do. Even when they went through the motions, she had to follow right behind them to see that things were done properly. It was almost easier to do them herself in the first place, but there were still some jobs that needed a man’s strength.

Absently she picked up a plastic robot and a model airplane and put them on the stairs to go up. Crossing to the fireplace, she wound the mantel clock, touched the framed picture beside it and yawned again.

Lord, she was tired. There weren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all that needed doing, nor enough energy to last, even if she could have found the hours.

She was halfway up the stairs when someone knocked on the front door. “Oh, shoot, what now?” she muttered, glancing at her watch. No matter how tired she was, she could hardly ignore a summons in the middle of the night, not after what had happened only a few hours ago. She’d got off lucky. Others hadn’t been so fortunate. If someone needed her help…

She switched on the security light again and peered out the window. A dark car had pulled up to the front gate, one of those low-slung models with a spoiler on the rear end and decorations all over the body. Long, curling flames, in this case.

Almost everyone she knew drove a truck, but most families also had a car. That detailing, though, was unfamiliar.

“May I help you?” She opened the door only a few inches, keeping her right foot wedged against the bottom so that she could slam it shut if need be. If worse came to worst, Jake’s old .420 gauge shotgun was propped in the corner behind the coatrack. Of course the shells were upstairs in her dresser under her socks and sweaters, but a housebreaker wouldn’t know that.

House-breakers also didn’t go around knocking on front doors.

“Yes’m, 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 bedroom she’d furnished for her husband after he’d grown too weak to climb the stairs. She’d told him that when he asked. He might not know who he was, but at least he knew where he was. In a pine-paneled room on a small ranch about five miles from the town of Mission Creek, in Lone Star County, in the State of Texas.

That part felt right, anyway. The Texas part. It didn’t really ring any bells—he could have been from the planet Pluto for all he knew—but somehow, Texas felt right.

It was just beginning to get light outside when she came to bring him her late husband’s shaving kit. “I thought shaving might make you feel better. I’m not sure about letting you stand long enough to take a shower, though. If you got dizzy and fell…”

“Maybe you could roll me outside and hose me down.”

She was obviously running on fumes. He wondered how much sleep she’d gotten during the night. Judging from the early hour, it couldn’t have been much.

She took the time to give him a general description of the area. “It’s mostly small farms and cattle ranches. We have year round grazing here, so cattle are a big thing, but crops are big, too. At this point our farm hardly qualifies as a working ranch—we’re just hanging on to status quo, you might say, but— Oh, I don’t know why I even said that, you couldn’t possibly be interested. Anyway, we love it here. It’s a great place to raise a son.”

If she was hoping something she said would trigger his memory, she was disappointed. They both were. She had a nice voice, though. A bit raspy, as if she might have screamed herself hoarse searching for the boy. She’d be the type, he was somehow sure of it, to run outside in the teeth of a tornado to rescue her child.

Lucky kid.

During the wakeful periods of the night they’d exchanged a few words—just enough to let her know he hadn’t gone off the deep end. From a few things she’d said, he’d gained the impression that she and the boy might be having a pretty rough time keeping their heads above water. Not that she’d complained. He’d had to ask a few leading questions. Somewhat surprisingly, he’d discovered that he was good at it, even when he wasn’t particularly interested in the answers.

Although, oddly enough, he was. The woman was nothing to him. He’d brushed off her gratitude, saying that whatever he’d done for her son, she had more than returned the favor by hauling his ass out of that ditch. Not that he’d phrased it that way. Which told him something else about himself. It wasn’t enough, but it was a beginning.



Some five miles away, a terse conversation was taking place between two men. The air was redolent with the smoke of a Cuban cigar. “I’m telling you, Frank, he’s dead. He’s gotta be dead, else them two guys I sent scouting around woulda found him. They found what was left of his car over by that Quik-Fill place out on 59. I had ’em haul it to the chopshop.”

“You’re sure it was Harrison’s?”

“I had a guy run the plates. ’Sides, his coat was still inside caught up in some branches where a tree limb busted through the windshield. Big mama! Rammed clean through the front and out the back. Man, nobody coulda lived through that! Hood’s gone, one o’ the doors ripped off. Nothing left but scrap metal.”

Lying on a polished table between the two men was a sodden wallet, a driver’s license, several credit cards, a Triple-A membership card and ninety-eight dollars in cash. No one had reported the missing credit cards.

“Where the hell is he?” the older man muttered, stabbing his cigar at the driver’s license issued to one J. Spencer Harrison, six feet, one inch tall, one hundred eighty-seven pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, born November 4, 1967.

“Man, I’m telling you, nobody could’ve survived that hit. Ask me, he’s buzzard bait by now.”

Frank Del Brio paced in a tight circle, occasionally thumping ashes onto the plush carpet. After several minutes of silence he turned and jabbed his stub of a cigar toward the other man. “You ask around?”

“You know me, Frank. I say I’ll check something out, I check it out.”

“Who’d you send?”

“Sal and Peaches.”

“Jesus Christ, man, those two couldn’t find their ass with a road map!”

“You wanted it kept quiet, didn’t you? Sal don’t talk and Peaches owes me.”

More pacing. More scattered ashes. Finally, as if he’d come to a conclusion, Del Brio turned to face his companion. “I’m gonna have to trust you on this one. Joe Ed’s already positioned to take his place, but I swear to you, if Harrison turns up once a new D. A. is appointed, there’s no place south of the North Pole I can’t find you. You might want to notify your next of kin, just in case.”



Ellen roused Pete and got him ready for school. They probably wouldn’t get much work done today, as everyone would be full of talk about the tornado. She tried not to think about the two men who had showed up only hours earlier. If they’d been telling the truth about a dear friend who’d been missing since yesterday, wouldn’t they have seemed more upset? More concerned? Not that they hadn’t tried, but they hadn’t been convincing. Something about the whole scene had struck her as off-key, and she was a firm believer in instinct. Jake used to tease her about relying on what he called her witch’s antenna, but even he had eventually learned to listen to her.

Only by then, it had been too late.

When she’d looked out and seen those two men at her front door, every ounce of intuition she possessed had warned her against revealing the presence of her stranger. Once his memory returned she would tell him and let him make the decision. They were certainly easy enough to describe. If “Smith” and “Jones” were such good friends of his, he would know how to reach them. It would be his decision to make, not hers.

By the time she came in to collect his tray after getting Pete off to school and letting the horses into the paddock, he’d fallen asleep again. For several moments she stood silently at the foot of the bed and gazed down at him. How many hours had she sat beside that same bed, in this same room, watching Jake sleep, telling herself that at least when he was sleeping, he wasn’t in actual pain. Praying that that was true….

Evidently Storm had used the shaving things. Awake, he’d looked older. Even wary. Asleep, he looked oddly vulnerable. His features were too irregular to be called handsome, yet he was strikingly attractive, even with a purple lump on the side of his head. “Whoever you are,” she murmured, “you’re safe here.” It was the best she could do in return for his saving Pete’s life.

The next time he awoke he would probably remember who he was and call someone to come for him if they couldn’t locate his car. If he had any sense at all, he’d have them drive him directly to the hospital in Mission Creek for X rays.

Once he was gone things would go back to the way they’d been before, with her and Pete and two no-account hired hands trying to do the work she and Jake and Mr. Caster had done before her world had fallen apart.

Ellen’s shoulders drooped. She was tired before the day even started. Booker and Clyde, the two transients she’d recently hired, were no more than adequate even when they were sober. They didn’t know nearly as much about horses as they’d claimed when they’d showed up looking for work, but at least they were willing to work for what she could afford to pay and weren’t too proud to take orders from a woman. Desperate to hang on to what they had without having to turn to her father again—something she had sworn she would never do—she had hired them on the spot.

After washing off a scratch, she dabbed on antiseptic, winced at the sharp sting and sighed. Sometimes she wished she could just take a single day off and do something frivolous, such as curl up with a good book and read and sleep all day long, or take Pete to a circus, or even a movie in town.

Christmas was only a few weeks away, and she hadn’t even thought of what she was going to get him. A bike, of course, but some little surprise would be nice.

With no heritage of his own, Jake had been determined to build one for their son. Now Jake was gone, but with any luck, she’d be able to raise their son right here, the way they had planned. Pete would grow up on Wagner property. Eventually he would marry and have children of his own, and one day, if they were lucky, her grandchildren would grow up here along with the descendants of the quarter horses she and Jake had bought with such high hopes for the future.

She’d made meat loaf and mashed potatoes for supper last night and served leftovers for lunch. Her mystery man had eaten little either time, and talked even less. Fine. He needed rest more than anything else, and she was too tired to make conversation.

Funny, the way a dream could change, she mused as she washed the supper dishes. One dream simply merged into another, and then another as time went on, evolving, but never quite losing the essential core.

The only dream she had room for now was to guide her son safely through the next few years to try to make up for his lack of a father. It wouldn’t be long until she’d be dealing with an adolescent instead of a sweet child who was almost too eager to please—almost as if he were afraid she would go away, too, the way his father had.

She had done everything she could think of to reassure him—they had talked to a counselor at the school. But Ellen knew that she alone was responsible for raising her son to be a decent, responsible adult. She didn’t know how much of a role model she could be, but she fully intended to give it her best shot. They would make it. One way or another, she would see to it.

“And as for you, my mysterious stranger,” she whispered, “I’ll take care of you, too, for as long as you need me. I owe you.”



He was still sleeping when she glanced in again before heading upstairs to her own bed. This time she didn’t try to rouse him. It had been more than twenty-four hours now and there’d been no indication of a concussion. And he really did need his sleep. The sooner he healed and remembered, the sooner he’d be off her hands and the sooner she could get back to building Pete a legacy from a few horses and a few hundred acres.

After pulling the light quilt up over his shoulders, she felt his forehead with the back of her hand, then tiptoed from the room, leaving the door ajar in case he needed anything. It was almost like having two sons to care for.

Oh, no, it wasn’t. She didn’t know what she felt toward the man called Storm, other than gratitude, but whatever it was, it wasn’t even faintly maternal. No way!

He would probably insist on getting out of bed tomorrow. Men could be stubborn about such things, taking any kind of sickness or injury as a threat to their manhood. Jake had been the same way. He wouldn’t admit to having allergies even when he was sneezing his head off, his nose running and his eyes all watery. As if hay fever somehow negated his masculinity.

Oh, Jake, she thought, sighing. She had long since run out of tears, but she still wept inside her heart. After more than two years she still caught herself glancing around, expecting to see him kicking the mud off his boots on the back porch, or hanging over the paddock fence, gloating over his precious horses. Two yearling mares, two geldings and a stallion. Hardly the mix he’d been planning on, but he’d bought the lot of them at a bargain price from a man who’d unexpectedly been forced to relocate.

They had mapped it all out on paper—the buying, the breeding strategy, but they’d hardly got started when Jake had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent and fast-growing form of cancer. He had died just thirteen months after they had bought the ranch and moved to Lone Star County.

And dear God, a part of her had died with him. If it hadn’t been for Pete, she didn’t know what she would have done. Going back home had never been an option. She didn’t know what her own father would have thought of his grandson if they ever met, but that wasn’t going to happen. Never again would she beg. Leonard Summerlin had disowned her when she’d married against his will and turned his back when she had needed his help so desperately.

Not for the first time, the irony of the situation struck her. Unless he fathered a son of his own, Pete was her father’s sole male descendent. For a man who liked to think of himself as a dynasty builder, Leonard Summerlin was his own worst enemy.

He had told her countless times that she was just like her mother, then gone on to recount her mother’s shortcomings. Celinda Summerlin was vain—but then, Celinda Summerlin had been beautiful. Ellen had never had anything to be vain about. According to her father, Celinda hadn’t a clue when it came to managing money, but even as a child Ellen had understood that her mother had never had enough money to manage before marrying Leonard Summerlin.

When it came to managing, Ellen had been no better, no worse than most of her friends at staying within her allowance. In later years she had discovered somewhat surprisingly that the less there was to manage, the better a manager she became. The bank in Mission Creek that held the mortgage on the ranch had advised her to lease out most of her acreage, keeping back only enough for pasturage and to grow feed for the horses. That way, the banker had explained, she could be certain of meeting the mortgage payments with a bit left over without the risk of losing an entire crop to flood, drought or a sudden freeze. The weather everywhere, he’d reminded her, had been increasingly erratic over the past few years.

It had seemed sensible to her. She had kept the stock although she hadn’t known the first thing about horses, much less about breeding them. But the horses had been Jake’s dream, and she was determined to hang on to as much of that dream as she could for their son. She might have come from a privileged background, but from someone—her mother, most likely—she had inherited a backbone. Dust-bowl-survivor genes, Jake had called it, teasing her about the way her jaw squared off when she got what he’d called her I-shall-not-be-moved look on her face.

Whatever it was, grit or survivor genes, it had enabled her to get through another day and then another one when she couldn’t see her way through the coming night, much less the years ahead.



“No way,” the man called Storm said adamantly. “Look, I’ll get out of your hair if my being here is a problem, but I’m not going to any damned hospital for a simple sprain and a headache.”

“Oh, hush up and let me think,” Ellen grumbled. They’d been arguing about how long it had been. She’d said this made three days. The man had said he could only remember one, and not too much of that.

Pete grinned. He’d come in to bring the morning paper just as his mother was fussing at him again. Boy, it sure was cool to hear her fussing at a grown man the same way she did him when he wouldn’t finish his macaroni and cheese or forgot to put his dirty clothes in the hamper.

“All right,” his mama said finally, laying down the law. He knew that tone. Man, did he ever! “You can get out of bed and come in the living room. I know you’re dying to watch the storm coverage on TV, but you’re going to keep that foot up and if I hear one more peep out of you about leaving, I’m going to—”

Pete watched, grinning broadly.

The man watched. He was scowling.

“—to call the paramedics to come haul you off and you can argue with them for a change. I just don’t see what’s so awful about having a doctor look you over. For all you know, you might have some broken bones. There are hundreds of bones in your feet, and your foot’s not all that far from your ankle.”

Storm looked at Pete and lifted a brow. “She go on like this a lot?”

Solemnly the boy nodded. “Yessir, that she does, but she means well. That’s what my daddy always said.”

Ellen’s hands flew up in a gesture of surrender. “All right, be one, then!”

“That’s what she always says,” Pete confided. “Daddy used to tell her B1 was a bomber, and she’d just walk off the way she’s doing now, all huffy and puffy. She’s not really mad, though.”

Storm didn’t think she was, either. Somewhere among the jumbled miscellaneous impressions he’d dredged up was the knowledge that women acted that way when they cared about someone who refused to bow to their superior wisdom.

How the hell do I know that? Do I have a wife? Daughters?

Irritated, frustrated and amused, he said, “Your mother says you’re a checkers champ. Lay out the board, son. Best two out of three, okay?”

“You bet! But first I’d better go feed up and fill the trough. Booker and Clyde, they’re pro’ly drunk again. Don’t tell Ma, though. She threatened to fire ’em next time she caught ’em drinking.”

“Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.”

They continued the conversation after the boy completed his chores. While Pete got out the checkerboard, Storm reiterated his suggestion. From what he’d heard about the two hired hands, they weren’t the type any decent man would want around his wife and child.

“Know what? They smoke, too. My mom said if she ever caught ’em smoking in the barn around all that hay and stuff, she’d run ’em off with a pitchfork.”

“Smart woman, your mama.”

Pete shrugged his skinny shoulders. Emptying out the worn drawstring bag, he began setting up the board. Without looking up, he said, “Know what? Booker’s cigarettes don’t smell much like Mr. Ludlum’s. They smell more like a chicken house. They look kind of funny, too.”

Very carefully, Storm centered a black checker in a red square. He was going on sheer instinct. “They ever offer you a smoke?”

“Nope. I wouldn’t take it if they did. I promised Mom.”

Storm made a tentative move, which Pete promptly countered. He had an idea there was more being handed around in that barn than a bottle of hooch and a filter tip. Frowning, he made another move.

Pete promptly jumped his man and glanced up, a triumphant grin lighting his bony little face. “Gotcha!”

“Fair and square. I’d better concentrate on what I’m doing here. I didn’t figure you to be this good.”

“I’m pretty good, all right. I beat Mom almost every game, but that’s pro’ly ’cause she lets me.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure.”

Storm hadn’t even been sure when he’d offered to play whether he knew how. Evidently, he did. They played in silence for a few more minutes. Then, without looking up, the boy said, “Trouble is, if Mom gets rid of Clyde and Booker, we’ll have to do everything ourselves again, and she’s no good at pulling wire. Last time we tried to fix a section of fence she couldn’t hardly get out of bed the next day. She’s even worse with a post-hole digger than she is with a wire puller, but I’m not tall enough yet. We had us an auger for the tractor, but the P.T.O. got broke.”

“The what?”

Frowning, Pete tried to describe, using his hands, how the power take-off worked with different attachments. “I get the idea,” Storm said. And he did—sort of. “What about your neighbors? Can’t one of them lend you a couple of hands for certain jobs?”

“Nobody wants to work for a woman.” It was a simple declarative statement. Pete looked up from the checkerboard, disgust clear on his tanned face. “’Sides, we’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel. Least, that’s what my friend Joey’s pa says. Mr. Ludlum says men don’t like taking orders from a woman, even when she’s the boss.” He shrugged his bony shoulders and clapped a crown on one of the reds. “My mom’s real smart, but Booker, he calls her stuff behind her back.” The boy’s face turned a dusky red as he concentrated on the worn checkers.

Storm felt something inside him tighten like a fist. One thing he would do before he left—have a talk with this Booker fellow, whoever and whatever he was. Anger crammed in on the frustration he felt at being laid up, both mentally and physically. He had a strong feeling he wasn’t used to inaction. Restlessness didn’t begin to describe his reaction. Wariness came closer.

What the devil did he have to be wary about? Was he an escaped prisoner? A drug runner? They weren’t all that far from the border. Then, too, there was something about the state prison….

It was gone. The impression flickered through his mind like a firefly, then winked out before he could catch it.

“Gotcha! Mr. Storm, I gotta go help Mom bring in the horses and rub ’em down now. Booker and Clyde, they’ve got to unload the hay wagon ’cause I can’t lift the bales yet.”

“Yeah, you go ahead, son. We’ll play more later—after you’ve done your homework.”

Mr. Storm. The name wasn’t a perfect fit, but it felt pretty close.



The next day went largely like the others. Storm was increasingly aware of the creeping hours and increasingly fed up with being out of commission. His head still ached, but it was a manageable ache—nothing he couldn’t handle. Disdaining the use of the crutch, he limped into the living room and plopped down on the sofa. His knee still suffered the occasional twinge if he turned too quickly, but most of the swelling was gone. His ankle was better, too, as long as he didn’t overdo it.

He was damned tired, though, of having to wear another man’s clothes. The sooner he got back to his own home, his own clothes and his own business—wherever and whatever that was—the better he’d like it. Hadn’t anyone even reported him missing? A business partner, or a family member?

No man is an island. Had someone actually said that or had he only dreamed it up? Was it some great philosophical insight or gibberish? It was the damnable uncertainty that was driving him nuts. Why wasn’t anyone out searching for him? It hadn’t been that long; it only seemed that way. Was there a wife somewhere going quietly out of her mind with worry? He didn’t feel married—however that was supposed to feel. There was no sign that he’d ever worn a wedding ring.

Ellen wore a plain gold band. Her hands were rough, but nicely shaped. He had a feeling his wife—if he had one—would have smooth, pale hands with polished nails and a full complement of jewelry.

Now why would he think that? Actually, now that he considered it, Ellen’s hands were just right for a woman. Strong, capable, without being any less feminine. Which pretty well summed up the woman herself.

From the TV coverage he’d seen, the rash of tornadoes that had barreled across the southwest corner of Texas before streaking up the Mississippi Valley had managed to miss the most heavily populated areas. Thank God for that, at least. The southeast portion of Lone Star County had suffered most of the damage.

Lone Star County. That definitely triggered a reaction, but for all he knew, he could have seen it on a road sign. He could’ve been just passing through on his way from—

From where? To where?

He swore softly and discovered that he was good at it. Came naturally. What else, he wondered, would come naturally? Talking to a kid? Yeah, that was no big strain.

Talking to a woman? Touching a woman?

Again it was Ellen Wagner he thought of—the image of her pale green eyes and tanned, hollow-cheeked face. He thought about the woman—about the soft, firm way she had of speaking to her son. The soft, firm way she had touched his brow that first night when she’d thought he was sleeping.

Back off, man. You’ve already got more than a full caseload of trouble.

There was a framed crayon drawing hanging on the wall over the bookcase. Crudely drawn horses standing in a lime-green pasture while seven fighter jets flew overhead. Pete’s signature was as big as the horses.

Oddly touched, he wondered if his own mother had ever hung one of his drawings in such a prominent place. Could he even draw? Did he have a mother?

Come on, folks, get on the ball! If I mean anything to anyone, come find me. Hide and seek gets pretty frustrating after the first few days.

Using the remote, he turned the TV on and switched channels until he found the CNN headline news. OPEC, Congress, Bosnia were in the news again.

Again? Shrugging, he switched channels, caught a name—Mercado—and swore as they went to commercial.

Mercado. Did the name mean anything, or was he grasping at straws? “Storm Mercado.” He spoke out aloud, trying it on for size. It didn’t fit. He muted the TV sound and reached for the newspaper. The more he scanned, the more his gut twisted. Several names snagged momentarily, but nothing came into sharp focus. Finally, in sheer desperation, he turned to the sports page.

Hell, he didn’t even know who—or what—to look for there. Was he a football fan? If so, which team?

A headline read Golf Pro At Lone Star Country Club Claims Vandalism.

Lone Star Country Club. “Come on, come on,” he muttered. It was there, just beyond his reach. Like a voyeur standing outside the fall of light, watching from the darkness, he tried to see into his own mind.

And felt like crying when he failed.




Three


Thank God for Saturdays. Leaving Pete to finish up in the horse barn, Ellen came in at noon to start setting out sandwich makings for lunch. She sliced a tomato and reached for a sweet Texas onion, working with short, jerky movements.

Clyde had showed up for work about ten, smelling like a brewery. Booker hadn’t made it in at all. Clyde said he had a headache.

“You mean a hangover,” she’d retorted. “That’s no excuse not to show up for work. I was counting on you two to repair that section of fence today.”

“Tell the truth, ma’am, he weren’t feelin’ no pain a’tall last time I seen him.” Clyde had smirked at her. He did that a lot, and it invariably drove her up a wall, but what could she do? She had to have someone. With Pete in school five days a week, she simply couldn’t keep up alone.

“Hi, Mom, where’s Storm?” Pete banged in through the kitchen door, stepped back, kicked off his boots, then reentered, smelling of sunshine, horses and little boy.

“Watching the noon news. I piled up pillows on the couch so he could keep his leg elevated and—”

Both turned at the sound that came from across the hall. A thud and a muffled moan. “Oh, Lord, what now?” Ellen muttered. Drying her hands on her shirt-tail, she hurried into the living room, colliding with Pete in the doorway.

Storm was on the floor, blinking awake. “What happened?” she cried, rushing to kneel beside him. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, this is my idea of a good time,” he said, his voice like crushed gravel. “I fell asleep and rolled off the damned couch!” Pete squatted beside him and he closed his eyes. “Sorry, son. Forget I said that.”

Pete, with one hand under the man’s arm and the other reaching for the crutch, said solemnly, “I know stuff lots worse than damn. You ought to hear what Booker calls that old Zeus! He calls him—”

“Never mind,” Ellen said repressively.

Together they managed to get him on his feet again, and Ellen suggested he move into the kitchen, as it was time for lunch. “I can pull up a stool so that you can sit and prop your foot on it.”

“I don’t need the stool, but thanks,” he said. They’d argued about it before. She made suggestions that he ignored for the most part, but he invariably apologized for putting her to so much extra work.

Ellen didn’t mind the extra effort, she really didn’t. It was nice having another adult in the house. Pete seemed to enjoy him, as well.

He hobbled into the kitchen just as the back door opened and a scruffy-looking individual wearing ragged jeans and a dirty shirt came in. “This is Clyde,” Ellen said, tight-lipped. “Clyde, this is Mr. Storm. Clyde, you might want to wash up.” She looked pointedly at his grimy hands, then busied herself pouring iced tea, leaving the decision up to him.

“Yes’m,” he said, disappearing into the washroom off the kitchen, where he stayed for all of five seconds.

“Don’t think I seen you around these parts before,” the hired hand said with a smirk, looking from Storm to Ellen and back.

Pete said gruffly, “Storm’s visiting.”

“That so?” Clyde had tracked mud into the kitchen, which Ellen made a point of sweeping up. “Sorry ’bout that, ma’am,” he said, leering at Ellen’s backside as she leaned into the cleaning closet to hang up the dust-pan.

Storm’s eyes met Pete’s. The boy was furious and embarrassed, but being a boy, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it. Storm might be impaired in a lot of ways, but that much he picked up on easily.

“This looks mighty good,” he said with a smile that was patently false. Change the subject. You’re in no shape to take on the bastard in hand-to-hand, much less to take his place if he quits.

But he was getting there. One more day and she wouldn’t have to depend on that pair. Even with a sore head and a bum leg, he could shovel manure and push a wheelbarrow.

“I haven’t had time to shop for groceries this week,” Ellen apologized. “I heard part of the roof was torn off the warehouse next to the IGA.”

“And the church steeple,” Pete said with boyish excitement. “Man, it was busted to pieces! Joey said they found the pointy part way over by Mrs. Williams’s house.”

They made sandwiches from the ingredients she’d set out and drank iced tea and talked about the storm damage, reports of which were still coming in. Clyde didn’t have much to say, but he made the little he did say unpleasant by taking a big bite of bologna, onion and cheese on white bread and talking while he chewed. As far as Storm was concerned, that alone was a firing offense.

“Man, that sure is a ugly knot on your head,” Clyde said admiringly.

Storm wondered what he was supposed to say—thank you? If he’d been Pete’s age, he might have said, “That sure is an ugly knot on your shoulders. What is it, your head?”

Irritated, he excused himself and stood, picking up his plate and glass. Ellen frowned at him, and he got the message. He wanted to say, “I’m not totally helpless. Let me at least do this much.”

But with both Pete and Clyde watching, he remained silent. Before he left he was going to have to find a way to repay her for hauling him out of that ditch, feeding him, giving him a bed, not to mention binding up his knee and ankle and doctoring his assorted minor scrapes. Even in the shape he’d been at the time, the feel of her cool hands on his hot, swollen flesh had damn near finished him off. Under the circumstances, his reaction had been just plain crazy.

She’d even washed his shirt, his shoes and his underwear. Silk underwear. What kind of man wore silk underwear? What was he, anyway, some kind of freaking Hollywood type? A drug lord?

No way. He might not know who he was, but he sure as hell knew who he wasn’t.

At the moment he was wearing a pair of her late husband’s jeans, which were a few inches too short in length and slightly too big at the waist. Instead of bunching them up with a belt, he’d let them ride low on his hips. Pete said he looked cool.

Cool or not, it was the best he could do for now. His own pants were beyond help. He’d looked them over, hoping for a clue—hoping for something to jar his mind loose. A tailor’s label—anything.

There’d been nothing. Nothing other than the fact that they were flawlessly tailored of an excellent worsted, cut to hang just the way a pair of pants should hang, although just how the devil he knew that, he couldn’t have said.

“Do you always invite your hired hands to eat in the house with you and Pete?” he asked Ellen when they were alone together in the kitchen. Ellen had stayed behind to wash the dishes. He put away the mustard and mayonnaise and opened cabinets until he found where the salt and pepper belonged.

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she shrugged. “The last man did. Mr. Caster was a thoroughly decent man. Pete liked him a lot. When we bought the place, the old bunkhouse had already been turned into storage, but we were planning to clean it out and add a bathroom so he wouldn’t have to commute. We never got around to it.”

She didn’t have to explain. There hadn’t been enough time then, and there wasn’t enough money now. He was getting pretty good at sizing up situations from insufficient evidence, or maybe he’d always been good at it. There was no way of knowing…yet.

“Booker and Clyde have only been working here a few weeks. Mr. Caster left toward the end of September, as soon as his social security kicked in. His arthritis was getting pretty bad, not that he’d admit it. I started advertising for a replacement as soon as he gave notice, but it didn’t take long to discover that anyone even marginally competent was already working. By the time that pair of…of—”

“Bums,” Storm supplied.

“To put it delicately.” She spared him a fleeting smile. “Anyway, by the time they showed up, I was at my wit’s end. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even bother to check their references.”

She was an easy mark, he concluded. She’d proved that much by dragging home a man she had never before laid eyes on. A vulnerable woman, living alone with her son, yet she had brought him into her home, taken care of him—even lent him her late husband’s clothes and shaving gear. He could’ve been a proverbial ax murderer for all she knew. There were no rules that said ax murderers couldn’t get caught in a tornado.

“You should have called nine-one-one and let someone else drag me out of that ditch.”

She shrugged. He decided on the spot that the least he could do in return was to see that those two scoundrels who were supposed to be working for her didn’t take advantage of her. The kid was willing, but at eight years old, he simply wasn’t up to the task. “Ellen, a woman needs to be careful about the kinds of people she brings home with her, especially when there’s a kid involved.”

She looked at him, started to speak, and then bit her lip. It occurred to him that green eyes could look both clear as glass and opaque as moss, depending on the light. Or perhaps on the lady’s mood.

“If you’ll excuse me, I need to go turn Zeus into the large pasture. The grass there isn’t nearly as good, but he gets restless in the small pen.”

When the going gets uncomfortable, the uncomfortable get going. The words came to him, a paraphrase of something or other. Apt, though, he mused. “Sure, go ahead. You need some help?”

“No thanks. If you’re smart, you’ll get off that leg.”

Whether he was smart remained to be seen. He was tempted to follow her just to prove he wasn’t totally useless. He could open and shut gates, if nothing else. However, knowing that the best way to help was to stay out of the way, he spent several minutes scraping together the scant evidence he had and trying to weave it into something more solid.

Judging from the look of his hands—not to mention his clothes—he was probably a white-collar worker of some sort. Banker, broker… “Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief,” he finished out loud. The situation might even have been amusing if only it weren’t so damned frustrating. Just because his nails had been relatively clean when he’d been found and dragged here to the Wagner ranch, that didn’t mean he was a respectable businessman. He could just as easily be a professional gambler, an embezzler, a pimp—the possibilities were endless.

And endlessly chilling.

“Think, man—concentrate! Speech patterns. Words, images—they don’t come out of a vacuum.”

Judging from certain speech patterns and word images that seemed to come naturally to him, while he might not be a crook, he was no stranger to the criminal life. Best case scenario, he was a cop.

A cop who wore hand-tailored suits, silk underwear and a high-dollar wristwatch? If he was a cop, then odds were better than even he was a cop on the take. The implications of that were dizzying, if not downright sickening.



Day four. That was how he counted time now. With both his past and his future a blank wall, all he could do was live in the moment and wait for an opening. One thing he’d discovered right off—patience was not his long suit. Any man, under the circumstances, would be impatient, he told himself, but rationalizing didn’t help. Ellen had called him the quintessential Alpha male. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant, or how she could tell, but if it meant he didn’t like sitting around doing nothing more productive than sweeping, dusting and making beds—chores she’d only grudgingly allowed him to take over yesterday—then she was dead on target.

She had offered several times to go into town to ask around, to see if anyone was missing a stray male of the human species. Even offered to place an ad in the paper advertising his whereabouts. They had actually laughed over the possible wording of such an ad.

“Where would you list me, with the lost pets?” he’d asked.

“Why not? Good-tempered, house broken—we’d have to guess as to whether or not you’re up to date on your shots.”

He had found himself enjoying the repartee, drawn deeper by the hint of laughter that tugged at the corners of her mouth. In the kitchen doorway they’d stood toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye, caught in an extemporaneous sparring match, each daring the other to give in. It was a crazy confrontation about nothing at all, fueled by the unexpected, not to mention inappropriate way he was beginning to react to her presence. Even over such a trivial matter as a classified ad, he’d felt the adrenaline race through his body, tightening nerves, heightening senses. His own brown eyes had bored into her changeable green ones as if searching for a hint of weakness.

When it came to strengths and weaknesses, there was no contest. He’d managed to pass it off as teasing, as a joke. But for a minute there, it had felt like something entirely different.

Logical or not, he’d declined her offer to advertise his whereabouts. Later, whenever she’d suggested he ride with her to town and back to see if anything looked familiar, he’d found some excuse not to go. His head was bothering him—or his knee or his ankle, both of which were almost back to normal except for the occasional twinge when he turned too quickly.

The truth was—

Hell, he didn’t know what the truth was; he only knew he felt safe here. Until he knew what was out there waiting for him—until he was fully fit, both physically and mentally—he preferred to play it safe.

“Look, why don’t I go by to see what the library has on amnesia?” Ellen offered.

“Thanks, but that’s not necessary. Now that my headache’s almost gone, my memory’s showing definite signs of returning.”

Neither of which was consistently true, but close enough. His headache was down to a dull, background pressure, and for the past couple of days he’d been…sensing things. Usually it was something on the news or in the daily paper that triggered a reaction.

Now all he had to do was figure out what the reaction meant—waiting, not pushing too hard. No point in confusing himself with a lot of psychobabble.

Then, too, he didn’t want Ellen going out of her way to do him any more favors. He already owed her too much. Once his brain came back on line and he was able to pick up his life again, he would be on his way. The first thing he intended to do was to find some way to repay her. Maybe he could find her a couple of good men and pay them under the table. Or maybe he could set up some kind of a fund for Pete. Whatever he did would have to be done tactfully, possibly even secretly. For a lady who was living from day to day, she had more than her share of pride.

Maybe he could arrange to buy a couple of her horses, although where he would keep them, not to mention what use he had for them, remained to be seen.

As did far too much else.



Storm was going over an old newspaper he’d found in the kindling basket a day or so later when Ellen came inside from her morning chores, cheeks glowing and her hair slipping free of the scarf she’d used to tie it back. She was either upset or angry. He recognized that militant march.

“Where’s Pete?” he asked, rising from the only man-size chair in the room.

“School. This is Monday, in case you’ve lost track.”

“I thought that was a bus I heard early this morning.”

“He hates having to ride it. He’s been begging me all year to let him ride his bike to school, but now…”

Right. Now the argument was settled. Probably for the best, as the highway was no place for an eight-year-old on a bike. “Any chance of getting him another one?” He knew the answer before she spoke. She’d admitted to being unable to pay higher wages to attract good help. She was good at disguising it, but the signs of near poverty were everywhere. Beans, macaroni and bologna sandwiches weren’t exactly his idea of gourmet fare.

“Maybe for Christmas. I worried about letting him ride it even as far as Joey’s, but then, it’s not like we’re on a major highway.”

“Not all the dangers are out on the interstate.”

“Oh, I know, you think I’m being overprotective, but—” She gestured helplessly, visible anger seeping away as she crossed the room to hang up her heavy wool shirt. “I hate to deny him anything he really wants when he’s already lost so much. And yes, you don’t have to say it—I know he has to grow up. It’s just that he’s all I have. You know how it is.” Shrugging, she gestured, palms out, with her calloused hands.

When he didn’t reply, she looked at him and bit her lip. “Sorry. I guess you don’t.”

“No problem.” And then, “Yeah, big problem. Look, I can’t even offer to pay room and board, much less—”

“Hush! I owe you more than I can ever repay. Pete would’ve— He told me how he froze, watching that awful thing roaring down at him, with no place to hide even if he’d had time. If anything had happened to him, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

She turned away, arms hugging her chest as she stared out through the window at the red barn that was in far better shape than the house. He waited, not saying anything because he didn’t know what to say. Hell, maybe he had saved the kid’s neck, but it hadn’t involved any heroics. There hadn’t been time for heroics. Truth was, he’d come close to drowning them both in that flooded drainage ditch before Pete had managed to wiggle out from under him.

“How long has it been?” he asked, curious now about more than his own identity.

“How long?” She turned away from the window, arms still wrapped around the bosom she disguised whenever she went out to the barn by wearing a man’s shirt. He’d noticed that about her—guessed the reason for it. “If you mean how long have you been here, I’ve lost track. Let’s see, the storm hit last…was it Tuesday or Wednesday?”

“No, I meant how long since your husband…”

“Died? You can say it. I’m not fragile.”

She was far more fragile than she cared to admit, but he didn’t think she’d like knowing he’d picked up on her vulnerability. A man would have to be blind not to. Blank he might be; blind he was not. “How long have you and Pete lived here alone?”

“Jake died just over two years ago. He was sick for a while before that, and we stayed here as long as we could. The visiting nurse taught me—” Breaking off, she took a deep breath and turned to stare out the window at the high clouds building up out over the Gulf of Mexico.

She’d nursed him at home. It had to have been hellish for her, knowing that the end was inevitable. Somehow, though, he wasn’t surprised. “Pete was in the first grade when Jake died,” she said, picking up the threads of her story as if determined to lay out all the facts and then move on. “We’d moved here from Laredo. Before that we lived in Dallas. And before that, we were in the army. At least, Jake was. See, we’d been looking for just the right place because Jake’s ambition was to breed quarter horses, and we both wanted a place away from town, but close to a good school.”

He waited for her to go on, had a feeling she needed to talk. As far as he knew, no one had even come by to see how she’d fared in the tornado, which meant either she hadn’t had time to make friends or she’d managed to tick off all her neighbors. She didn’t strike him as antisocial, so too busy for much of a social life was his best guess.

Her next words corroborated it. “At first I didn’t much like it, with no close neighbors. I mean, I’ve always had people around. I grew up with lots of friends, and then, in the army, of course, there were the other wives.” She bit her lip and he found himself staring at the way her teeth dented the soft, pink flesh. “But once we settled in there wasn’t time to think about anything but getting the barn in shape—that was our first priority, then we were going to tackle the house.”





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