The Miracle Man

by Sharon Sala

  Holley frowned. “His rap sheet is on my desk. I know the type.”

  “You don’t know Emmit Rice. He doesn’t take hostages, and he leaves his victims in pieces.”

  “Oh, my God.” Toni felt the room beginning to spin.

  “Grab her,” Justin shouted. “She’s going to faint.”

  The help came from an unexpected source. Lane rose onto his elbow and caught Toni as she staggered.

  “Hey, lady, don’t go out on me now,” he said gently.

  With the low rumble of his voice, the room settled, along with Toni’s stomach. His hand was warm, his grip firm. She stared first at it, then at him, then swallowed twice before she could speak.

  “I don’t faint.”

  He smiled, and Toni’s heart fell all the way to her toes.

  “I imagine I knew that,” Lane said.

  Toni took a deep breath. “Well, are you going to take me up on my offer, or do you want to recuperate here?”

  “I think that if you're willing to take me and all this on, then I would rather be with you.” When he realized how that sounded, he felt obliged to add, “It would put me closer to the on-site investigation.”

  Toni nodded. She’d known what he meant. At this point in her life, there was no way she would assume a man could possibly have a romantic interest in her. Besides, she reminded herself, she wasn’t looking for romance, not anymore. What she wanted was a family. It took a man to get a baby, and there was a lot of man on the bed.

  She gave him a long look. Now that she knew he was a socially acceptable person and not the missing prisoner, he might be the answer to her prayers. That is, if he had no personal attachments....

  Then she heard herself asking, “Do you want us to notify your wife, or significant other?”

  Toni’s question was simple, and not entirely unexpected. Yet somehow, Lane sensed a desperation in the polite request. Answering her question hurt. Saying aloud a truth that he had spent five years trying to accept wasn’t easy. He lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. If he didn’t have to see their faces, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to say.

  “I don’t have a wife. Not anymore. And there are no others, significant or otherwise.”

  It took all she had not to smile. Her relief was so overwhelming that she missed the grimness around his mouth as he spoke.

  “Well, then that’s that.” She gave the doctor a straightforward look. “You'll have to give me instructions for his care. What I can’t do, Justin can.”

  Justin didn’t waver under her look. “Sure thing,” he said. “Always ready to help a good man out.”

  With this act, Antonette Hatfield’s fate was set in motion.

  * * *

  By the morning of the next day, the Hatfield farm was crawling with police, FAA investigators, men with bloodhounds and several local hunters who were familiar with every nook and cranny of the Smoky Mountains surrounding Toni’s home.

  She went about her chores as if there were no one there. But when she went inside her home, there was no way to ignore the man whose presence permeated every inch of space.

  She came in the back door and winced as it slammed behind her, hoping that Lane hadn’t been asleep. If he had, he probably wasn’t now. The sound was still echoing through the house.

  “Shoot,” she muttered as she went to the kitchen sink to wash her face and hands. “Only four months since Daddy died, and I've already lost all of my manners. Momma would have had my hide for slamming doors.”

  The water ran swift and cool beneath her fingers as it sluiced her heated skin. For early May it was very hot and the day was so humid that her clothing had become stuck to her body in the first five minutes she’d been outside. Unaware of how revealing the damp clothes were against her skin, she washed, then dried her hands, while absently considering what she might fix Lane to eat.

  The crutches thumped with every swing of his arms, but Lane’s socks-clad feet made no sound as he moved from the bedroom where he’d been resting, in search of Toni. She didn’t seem like a stranger, and he wondered if it was because of the life-and-death situation in which they’d become entwined. Then he knew that was a foolish thought, because he had little to no memory of anything except waking up in the wreckage and then crawling off the edge of a cliff. What he did remember vividly was waking up handcuffed to a mad-as-hell woman.

  He still wondered how that had happened, and stifled a smile. Man alive, but his Toni could work up a snit faster than anyone he’d ever known. When he realized he’d just thought of her as his, he staggered into a wall and bumped everything that hurt.

  “Oh, damn,” he groaned, and propped himself up with the crutches until the stars dancing beneath his eyelids stopped spinning.

  Toni heard him coming up the hallway, followed by the groan and the curse. She was out of the kitchen before he could think to hide his pain.

  “What do you think you're doing? You already broke my table and now you're aiming at my walls.” She slipped an arm beneath his shoulder and let him rest upon her instead of on the awkward crutch.

  When Lane was able to talk, he looked down to speak, but got lost instead in the study of her face. Apart, not one of her features was particularly unique. But the accumulation of them upon her face, coupled with her statuesque body and fiery temperament, made her unforgettable.

  Her eyes were so dark that he had to strain to discern the pupils from the irises. Her nose was not too long and not too short, a perfectly straight nose for a straightforward woman. But there were freckles scattered across the bridge that he suspected she would not like to be reminded of. Her eyebrows and lashes were dark, a perfect match to the thick, almost chocolate-colored hair, and her mouth was full, just shy of voluptuous. Just like her body. At that thought, he shuddered. There was quite a lot of woman in his arms.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “You know that you shouldn’t be up,” she reminded him.

  “You've been up since daybreak,” he countered.

  “That’s different. I wasn’t in a plane crash. I didn’t try to drown myself in Chaney Creek. I didn’t—”

  Lane put a finger across her lips, shocking himself as much as her by his action. “Oh, but, lady, I think you did just that,” he said softly. “You saved my life, at great risk to your own, I might add. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  Toni could only shake her head. She had no idea how he felt. But at that moment, she could have given lessons on lust. Everywhere she touched, she felt muscle. Everywhere she looked, she saw a brown, firm expanse of skin. And beyond the obvious attraction of so much man and so little time, Toni felt a sense of loss. She wished those clear blue eyes were darkening with passion for her, and not his own pain.

  “I think you probably feel like hell,” Toni said.

  “I think you're right,” Lane replied, then sighed.

  “Do you want to lie back down?”

  “No. In fact, hell, no,” Lane growled. “What were you about to do?”

  “Fix us some lunch.”

  “Can I watch? You can tell me what’s going on outside. It makes me crazy knowing that everyone is involved in my business except me.”

  For a long moment, they stood arm in arm within the confines of the cool, dark hallway, assessing the possibilities that lay between them. But when it came down to fact, there was nothing between them. Not really. Two days ago, neither of them had known the other existed. Today, one of them had the other to thank for a life.

  “Come with me,” Toni said. “You can sit in Daddy’s chair. He used to watch me work before he got so sick he couldn’t sit up anymore.”

  As she helped him down the hall and into the kitchen, Lane silently absorbed the textures of her sadness, and wondered how long she’d been alone here on her farm.

  Pillowed by the old recliner in the corner of the kitchen, he was forced to let her help him. It disgusted him greatly that he couldn’t even lift
his own leg onto the extended footrest.

  As she cradled his foot, the muscles in her bare arms corded, and for the first time he was forced to consider her strength. She wasn’t bulky like a man would be, but when she moved, the muscles rippled delicately beneath her skin like ribbons upon water. He liked how it made her look. He liked how she made him feel. If only they had met under different circumstances—when he was strong on two feet and not flat on his back—he might like to test the waters between them in other ways.

  But he lived in Florida, and she was here in Tennessee. The city in which he lived was hectic, and his job was often a reflection of the uglier side of humanity. On the farm, her life was simple, almost sedate. Fate had thrown two people from two different worlds together. There was no way a relationship between them would ever work, and he had no will to even attempt one. He thought of Sharla, and the image of her petite features and short, flyaway blond hair came and went within his mind’s eye. He thought of his wife’s smile—and then of the pain that she had endured before she died.

  Forget it all, he told himself. Toni has no place in my life.

  With that thought firmly settled in his mind, Lane looked out the window at the circus of vehicles and people beyond the walls of her house.

  “Is this making you nuts?” He meant the mess outside, but she’d taken it another way.

  Toni turned. “What? Having you here? Of course not. I'm glad for the company.”

  The moment she’d said it, she wished that she hadn’t. It made her sound pitiful, and she wasn’t a pitiful sort of person. She was resourceful. She should know; she’d been told so by her family all of her life.

  “How long since your father died?”

  Toni’s hand stilled on the potatoes that she’d been peeling. Her emotions were well in hand by the time she turned to answer.

  “Just over four months. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday, other times...” She shrugged. “Other times it seems like I've been by myself forever.”

  “I know there must be times when you're lonely, but don’t you ever feel afraid?”

  The smile on her face was too wide, the glitter in her eyes too bright. “Of what? In case you haven’t noticed, I'm a very big girl. I can take care of myself.”

  Lane frowned. This wasn’t the first time that he’d heard her put herself down. He sighed. Hell, from what he’d heard out of her brother Justin, her family had probably been doing it to her for years. She was simply echoing what she’d heard all of her life.

  “You may be taller than some, but I don’t know where you get off thinking that makes you less of a woman, lady. From where I sit, it only makes you more.”

  Toni’s eyes widened and her mouth went slack. A faint flush slid across her cheeks and up into her hairline. She could feel the heat of her blush under her skin, as surely as the man on the other side of the room who was already under it. Then she eyed his bandages and the gray pallor on his face and knew that he was way too hurt and sick for what she was thinking.

  “It’s time for your medicine.”

  The minute she said it, Toni knew how inane she must have sounded. He’d paid her a dazzling compliment, and all she wanted to do was knock him out with pain pills. She needed more than her head examined.

  Lane grinned. “Doping me up won’t change a thing, Antonette.”

  She glared. “If it will shut you up for a while, it’s worth it.” She ignored his smirk and turned with relief as Justin entered the kitchen with a bang.

  “I just talked to Dan Holley,” he said.

  “Who?” Lane asked, certain that the name was one he should remember, yet unable to think where he’d heard it.

  “The sheriff,” Toni said. “He took the handcuff off of you in the hospital, remember?”

  Lane nodded, then hid a grin when he saw Toni’s blush. He would give a lot to know exactly how that had occurred, and what exactly had happened afterward.

  Justin frowned and got back to the story that he’d been about to tell. “Sheriff Holley says that old Sam Sumter left home again. I swear, that sorry excuse for a man leaves every time his wife has another baby. Their latest can’t be more than a month or two old. If he doesn’t like to feed them, why in hell do they keep having them?”

  Toni frowned. It wasn’t right. People like Livvie Sumter had babies they didn’t want, and she wanted one she couldn’t have. The world was not a fair place.

  “Where does he go?” Lane asked.

  Toni shrugged. “Who knows? The pitiful thing is that he always comes back, and Livvie Sumter keeps having babies.”

  Justin snorted. “Right. But while he’s gone, every farmer within ten miles of the Sumter place will come up short on anything that isn’t tied down.”

  Lane frowned. “Why?”

  “Because Samuel Sumter has eleven, maybe twelve, children and they're hungry,” Toni said. “Sometimes, they take something they can sell for money to buy food. Other times, they steal the food outright. About a year before Daddy died, we lost a cow. Never did find it. We figured that the Sumter boys took it for the milk. I didn’t have the heart to send Dan Holley out to check.”

  Outside, a car horn honked as a man shouted. Justin frowned. “I haven’t seen such a mess outside since the day of Momma’s funeral,” he grumbled.

  Toni sniffed, then turned back to her potatoes. “It’s not on your front porch, so I don’t see why you're squawking.”

  Justin glared. “Even if you hated it, you wouldn’t tell me so because then you wouldn’t be able to argue about it.”

  Lane grinned. Although brother and sister seemed in constant disagreement, it was obvious that they were close. It was especially obvious to Lane when Justin gave him a long, assessing look.

  “So, feeling any better?” he asked. “I see you're able to get about.”

  “A couple of other marshals will be spending the night here for a while, Justin,” Toni stated. “They've already been here with their luggage, so you can wipe that look off of your face. God forbid that I might spend the night alone with a man.”

  “Well, hell, Toni, I don’t remember hearing myself say anything about where you spend your nights, or who with.”

  She turned away from the conversation and dumped the potatoes into the sink, then washed and cut them up before dropping them into a pan to boil. While both men tried not to look at her, or at each other, Toni got Lane’s medicine.

  She didn’t speak as she dropped the pills into his hand, then shoved a glass of water beneath his nose.

  “What’s that?” Justin asked as the lawman made a face.

  “Knockout pills. She’s trying to shut me up,” Lane said, and stifled a grin by tossing the pills to the back of his throat and chasing them with the drink of water.

  “I hate both of you,” Toni said mildly, and walked out of the kitchen before she said anything else that she would later regret.

  Justin looked miffed. Lane grinned. It was an odd ending to a hell of a day.

  Chapter 4

  Toni stared down the long garden rows and stretched the aching muscles in her back, wishing that she’d had the foresight not to plant so many rows of peas. But the long pods of purple-hulls had been her father’s favorite.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.” She had planted them long after her father’s death.

  Even if she ate peas all year long, she would never be able to eat them all. The only thing she could do was call upon her two brothers who lived nearby. Their wives would be glad for the chance to pick the patch; feeding their hungry families was a never-ending job.

  The muted sounds of voices carried over the evening air, permeating her solitude. She sighed. This was the third day since the crash, and the authorities still weren’t finished with the investigation. It was getting late. They must be quitting for the day, she thought.

  She glanced at her watch. Nearly four and a half hours had passed since everyone from the FAA to the coroner’s office had filed through her front yard
. The crash had been ruled an accident due to the weather. Surely this investigation would end soon.

  She thought of Lane and wondered where he was. He’d been resting when she left the house. But if she knew Lane Monday, he wouldn’t be flat on his back when they brought what was left of his friend out of the hills.

  She hefted the bushel basket of peas onto her hip and started toward the house. Minutes later, with the peas sitting in the shade of the back porch, she entered the kitchen, pausing only long enough to wash the purple stain from the pea pods off of her fingertips.

  “Lane?”

  Her voice rang clear throughout the house, but an echo was her only answer. Where had he gone? She began drying her hands on her denim shorts as she headed toward the front door.

  She looked out and could see him at the far end of the yard, and in the thick of things, right where she’d expected him to be. All she could see was his back, but she could tell by the set of his shoulders and the stillness with which he stood, that the impact of what was taking place had hit him hard.

  His crutches were by the steps where he’d obviously dumped them in frustration. They were too short for his height, but they were the longest ones in town that had been available for rent. The jeans he was wearing were the ones that he’d had on when she found him. They had been laundered, but Toni had purposely not mended the tear in the left leg of his Levi’s to accommodate the bandages over his stitches.

  As she stared across the yard, she couldn’t help noticing that blue jeans suited him better than most of the men she’d known and decided that it had something to do with his long legs and the way the fabric cupped his backside. His blue, long-sleeved shirt hung loose upon his shoulders. Untucked and unbuttoned, the tail flapped gently in the hot summer breeze as he watched the proceedings going on before him.

  Toni frowned as he wiped a hand across his face. She hoped that he was only sweating. If she saw him cry, she would not be able to keep her heart at the distance it needed to stay. Already, she had become more emotionally involved with him than she’d intended. It wouldn’t pay to care for the man she’d chosen as a means to an end.