Her Miracle Man

by Karen Sandler

  The side that had been wrapped around her was only slightly damp, the afghan having wicked up most of the moisture from her body. It made sense to spread it across his bed and let it completely air dry. The fact that Mia’s fragrance still lingered in the fabric had nothing to do with it.

  He knew his justifications were nothing but BS. Even still, after he showered and pulled on pajama bottoms—more than he usually wore, but she might need him during the night—he climbed under the comforter. He had to push it aside to keep from overheating even in the coolness of his bedroom. But the edge of it was only inches from his face, and he couldn’t help but inhale Mia’s subtle scent.

  He barely read a page before his eyes grew heavy. Switching off the light, he dropped immediately into sleep, dreams of Elizabeth fading into images of Mia.

  Pale sunlight slanting into Mia’s face woke her. Still drowsy, she blinked at the dancing dust motes and struggled to work out where she was. Jack’s house, she remembered. Safe in his guest room. Warmth filled her at the thought.

  She relaxed against the pillow, eyes closed. She drifted back into a half sleep, and for the briefest moment the answers to who and what and why seemed to dance just out of reach. If she lay still, held her breath, reached carefully toward them, she would know everything.

  But before she could touch those evanescent memories, something intruded between her and her past, something dark and frightening looming in her mind’s eye. She moaned in her semidream state, her heart hammering in her chest. Her body lay frozen; she was unable to pull herself free of that menace.

  With a jolt she came fully awake, her field of view filled with Jack leaning over her, his large, gentle hands on her shoulders. Now she registered him calling her name, realized it was Jack who had pulled her to consciousness and safety.

  The points of contact where he touched her sent warmth seeping into her shoulders, meandering down her spine. She wanted to run her hands along his arms, stroke the hair-roughened skin from wrists to elbows where he’d pushed up the sleeves of his black turtleneck. Her breathing had slowed after the scare of her nightmare, but now it quickened as she imagined how those ropy muscles would feel under her palms.

  His dark gaze dropped to her mouth. His head bent toward her fractionally, as if in preparation to lower it to hers, to kiss her. Her lips parted in anticipation.

  He snatched his hands away as if she’d burned him. “Your clothes are on the dresser. Breakfast in five minutes.” He backed away from the bed, then strode from the room.

  She lay there, stunned, wondering what in heaven’s name she could have been thinking. He wasn’t about to kiss her. Her head must have still been foggy from sleep to have imagined something so crazy.

  Throwing back the covers, she rose from the bed. Jack had left the bedroom door partly open, and when she inhaled, her mouth watered at the aroma of coffee, bacon and toast. Her stomach kicked into overdrive, persuading her to get moving.

  On the dresser, Mia found her freshly laundered jeans and another T-shirt and sweatshirt. A well-worn pair of sneakers two sizes too large were on the floor. Her bra and panties were on the dresser, as well, but the bra was torn so badly, it was unusable. She was small enough to do without.

  The image of Jack washing her intimates, the silky scraps dwarfed by his large hands, sent a shiver rippling down her spine. She quashed the unwanted sensation as she gathered up the pile of clothes, tossing the bra into the trash.

  Where was her wool sweater? she wondered as she crossed to the bathroom. Maybe it hadn’t survived the dunking in the creek. Regret flickered through her at the thought that Jack might have thrown it away without asking her. She had only the vaguest memory of what the sweater looked like, but it meant something to her nevertheless.

  As she stripped out of the pajamas and donated panties, she saw the bruises in the bathroom mirror. The angry red marks on her legs, her stomach, had faded overnight into a pale purple blue. As she twisted behind her in the bathroom mirror she caught a glimpse of the splotches on her back from her trapezius to just above her glutes. One on her lower back had purpled even darker. Had her back struck the railing that hard as she fell?

  She dithered for a moment after she’d dressed, reluctant to face Jack again. Could he have seen the expectation in her eyes? Was that why he’d withdrawn so abruptly? The possibility filled her with mortification.

  Her stomach didn’t care how embarrassed she felt, grumbling its demand to be filled. She’d just have to pretend that moment in the bed had never happened.

  Folding the pajamas, she set them on the foot of the bed then headed toward the kitchen. The too-large sneakers flopped on her feet as she went.

  She found Jack stirring eggs at the stove. A plate piled high with bacon sat on the dining-room table beside a carton of orange-mango juice. A check of the bread basket revealed triangles of buttered toast.

  “Scrambled eggs okay?” Jack asked as he shut off the stove.

  “I’m starving.” She took a toast triangle and slice of bacon and rolled the strip up into the bread. Seating herself at the table, she munched as she waited for Jack to bring the eggs over.

  Two plates in his hands, he gave her an odd look. “Do you always do that?”

  Her mouth full, she looked down at the rolled bread. “I have no idea. I didn’t even think before I did it.”

  Setting down the plates, he sat beside her. “Any change since yesterday?”

  She served herself more bacon and toast, then scooped up a forkful of eggs. “This morning, when I was half dozing, I thought I might remember. But I think it was just a dream, a trick of my mind.”

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to do when I take you to the sheriff?”

  Fear prickled inside her. “How can they even help if I don’t know who I am?”

  “They’ll check their missing-persons database, look for a match. If there’s nothing local, they’ll notify other agencies. I’m sure someone who knows you will come forward.”

  She should be relieved at the prospect. Instead, terror mounted inside her. She swallowed a mouthful of toast and bacon with difficulty. The darkness she’d found so frightening in her dream seemed to hover on the periphery, waiting for its chance.

  Jack poured her some juice, although she didn’t see how she would force any down her throat. Her stomach, just a moment ago clamoring for food, roiled.

  “Maybe we’ll find your car on the way down the hill,” Jack said. His gaze fixed all too perceptively on her. “We’d be able to ID you positively.”

  She sat stock-still, staring down at her plate, hands gripping the table. Tears felt perilously close, although she didn’t understand why. Hand trembling, she picked up her juice and with an effort pushed some past her tight throat.

  With Jack’s gaze on her, Mia left most of the eggs on her plate, as well as the toast and bacon she’d served herself. He didn’t comment as he picked up her nearly full plate and set it by the sink. Too distressed to offer help, she watched him wordlessly as he tidied up.

  He was ready to leave far too quickly, gathering up his keys and ushering her to the garage. Once he’d settled her in his truck and opened the garage door, he started the engine, ready to pull out.

  He shoved the car back into Park. “Forgot something.”

  She huddled in her seat as he hurried back inside. When he returned, he held a red bundle against his chest.

  He handed her the bundle. “I was afraid to put it in the dryer, so it’s still a little damp.”

  She unfolded the red sweater, saw the cheery snowman and Christmas tree knitted into the front and burst into tears.

  Chapter Four

  Jack didn’t think. He just leaned across the center console and pulled Mia into his arms. She sagged against him, her body trembling as she sobbed. The soft sound of her tears set off an ache in his chest, made him want to roar at the universe for hurting her.

  Elizabeth, sweet, sensible and down-to-earth, rarely cried. The
few times she did—when her mother died, when she learned from her doctor that she was barren—it broke his heart. He’d held her in his arms just as he did Mia.

  “What is it?” he asked her when she quieted.

  He felt her shake her head against his shoulder. “I don’t know. The sweater. I was just so glad to see it.”

  “Did it spark a memory?” he asked.

  Her fingers worked against the knit of his wool sweater, and he fought to suppress a shudder. “No,” she said finally. “It means nothing to me. It just seems…important.”

  She took a long breath, her chest swelling briefly against his, then pulled away from him. He found himself reluctant to let her go. Regretted the necessity of her leaving, of her stepping out of his life as precipitously as she’d entered it.

  She was a stranger; why should she matter to him? Jack pressed the button on the garage remote and started the truck. He backed the Suburban into the sullen, damp December morning.

  “I can take you up into Tahoe or down into Placerville,” he told her as he turned the truck and headed down the driveway.

  “County sheriff has an office in both locations.”

  “Whatever’s closer,” she said, slumping back in her seat. She clutched the sweater in her hands.

  He’d take her up Highway 50 to South Lake Tahoe, then to the office there. They’d file any necessary reports, contact other agencies, help her with any medical care she needed. She’d be in good hands.

  He imagined walking away from her at the sheriff’s office, driving the truck back home with the seat beside him empty. Despair bloomed inside him, a loneliness he thought he’d conquered years ago.

  It’s the anniversary, he told himself. It’s got you off balance.

  They reached the bridge, littered with deadfall and gravel washed up by the rain-swollen creek. Jack stopped the truck to clear away some of the larger tree limbs, tossing them on the downhill side of the bank. When he climbed back into the truck, Mia sat rigid in her seat, her fingers gripping the sweater so tightly, the skin over her knuckles was blanched white.

  “You’re okay,” he told her as he put the truck in gear.

  “You’re safe.”

  As he bumped across to the other side, skidding a little in the rain-sodden mud, she shut her eyes briefly, her chest rising and falling as she breathed. They left the bridge behind, and her hands relaxed in her lap.

  He wanted to reach over, link his fingers with hers, maintain that contact for the short time they had together. It made no sense. It would be foolhardy in any case, dangerous. In the stretch ahead, the road down grew steeper, the mountainside dropping away precipitously on the right and towering in a sheer face on the left. That section of road always required careful driving.

  But he couldn’t resist another glance over at her, an impulse that nearly was their undoing. He glimpsed the sudden fear on her face an instant before he faced forward and slammed on the brakes. The truck fishtailed to a stop inches from a wall of rock and mud.

  “Dammit.” Jack stared at the landslide across his road, assessing quickly that there was no getting past it.

  Her cheeks were far too pale, her eyes too wide as they stared out the windshield. “Is there an alternate route to the highway?”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “No.”

  She glanced at him, the alarm plain in her face. “How do we get out?”

  “We don’t. As unstable as that mess is, it’s too risky to try to cross it. Until it’s cleared away—” he clenched his teeth so tight, his jaw ached “—we’re trapped here.”

  She shoved open her door, and before he could stop her, she slid from the truck, leaving the red sweater behind on the seat. Jack shut off the engine and hurried after her. He caught up to her beside the tumbled edge of rock, mud and gravel that filled the roadbed. When she would have climbed onto the face of the slide, he grabbed her arm, pulling her back.

  “You can’t walk on that. It’s not stable.”

  “There has to be a way to go around it.” She tugged against him. He hated tightening his grip on her, but he didn’t dare let her go.

  “No way around it, Mia. Not even a four-wheel-drive truck could drive along that hillside. It would just get stuck in the muck if I tried to go over, and we’d risk bringing more of it down on us.”

  Her teeth chattered in the chill. “I want to go home.” Her sharp intake of breath was more sob than inhalation. “But I don’t even know where that is.”

  He loosened his fingers, ready to clamp down again if she tried to bolt. But the panic seemed to have eased.

  She wrapped her arms around herself. “What do we do now?”

  “We go back to the house and I call my friend Dawson, arrange for a crew to come out and clear the road.”

  She nodded, but still, she didn’t move. His hand on her shoulder, he turned her away from the rockslide.

  “We should get back to the truck. We’re vulnerable as long as we’re here.” The hillside, wet with mud, loomed above them. “We damn well don’t want the truck buried if it lets loose again.”

  Not to mention how cold it was, between the drizzle and the sinking temperatures. The brief sunshine of early morning had given way again to overcast. The last thing he needed was to have Mia get sick on top of everything else.

  As they retraced their steps, Mia stared at the downhill side of the road. “It took some trees with it.”

  The rockslide had stripped saplings and shrubs from a swath of the mountainside both above and below. The broken trees and manzanita studded the field of mud and rocks.

  “A mudslide can accelerate to upwards of thirty-five miles an hour.” She shuddered as cold air gusted past them. “Considering how steep that hillside is, this one probably moved that fast.”

  Her ears were reddening in the cold, making him want to nestle her against him to warm her. The near constant compulsion to touch her set him on edge.

  He wrenched the door to the truck open for her. “How do you know that?” he demanded. “You can’t remember anything else, but you know so damn much about landslides.”

  “I don’t know.” The confusion in her face was clear as he helped her into her seat. “It just popped into my mind.”

  He went around the back of the Suburban, grabbing a blanket stowed behind the third seat. He threw it over Mia, then backed the truck out of the danger zone. Retreating around the curve, he looked for a spot wide enough to turn around in.

  He cranked up the heater, and Mia held her hands out to the warmth blowing from the vents. The blanket tucked up under her chin, she sat silently, her wounded gaze on the sodden trees alongside the road. She made only one noise as they jounced along, a gasp of fear when they fishtailed badly right before the bridge. It took everything in him to keep driving, to resist the impulse to pull her into his arms, soothe her fear.

  She finally spoke as they pulled up the last stretch of road to the house. “How long will it take?”

  He pulled back into the garage and waited until the automatic door had shut before he answered. “I won’t know until I talk to Dawson.”

  “Is Dawson in construction?”

  “He’s my chief operating officer.” At her blank look, he elaborated, “I run an engineering firm from my house. Mostly municipal projects, water storage and delivery, that sort of thing. Dawson’s the face of Traynor Engineering.”

  He wasn’t sure if she’d even absorbed his explanation. She still had that lost look on her face and was shivering as they stepped inside the house. Either cold or emotions shook her slender body; in any case, he wanted her sitting in front of the fire ASAP.

  His hand splayed across the middle of her back, and he nudged her toward the pellet stove. Despite the layers of fabric between his skin and hers, he could so easily imagine her heat.

  “I’m fine,” she said through chattering teeth as he urged her along.

  “Right.”

  She hugged herself, determination surfacing in her face, belying
her seeming fragility. Jack thought she would have held back her body’s trembling with sheer will if it was possible.

  He opened a small door beside the pellet stove to reveal a control panel. She might as well know how to operate it if she was going to be here a few days.

  “You press this button to start it.” He stabbed the round green button. “You make the fire hotter by adjusting the fuel feed. This is the fan speed.” He arrowed up those buttons as high as they would go.

  Dragging the recliner closer to the pellet stove, he pointed to the chair. “Sit.”

  About to retrieve the afghan throw from the dryer, he remembered the blankets stored in Elizabeth’s hope chest. Set under the window seat that overlooked the yard, the hope chest was handier than the laundry room. The blankets inside might be musty, but they were warm, thick wool.

  Grabbing a brightly colored Navaho blanket from the chest, he dropped it in Mia’s lap. It wouldn’t be wise to tuck it around her himself. His memory of wrapping the afghan around Mia’s wet body last night were still all too clear.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Nodding, she kept her gaze fixed on the flames already flickering through the glass window of the pellet stove. Her teeth had stopped chattering, but the cold and emotional upheaval had taken their toll after the ravaging her body had experienced the day before. Exhaustion left her cheeks pale and dark smudges under her eyes.

  Even as he headed for his office, he battled the temptation to take her in his arms, settle her in his lap to warm her in his embrace. It was as if with Mia’s appearance so close to the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death, his brain had misfired. His emotions had entangled Mia with his memories of his beloved wife, and he was responding to this slender, dark-haired woman as if she was Elizabeth.

  That had to be the reason he seemed so obsessed with her after such a short time. He usually had better sense and showed more caution.

  Dawson had flown to Boston late last night, and was scheduled to meet clients this morning near MIT. Jack had met Dawson Jones fifteen years ago at Berkeley, and he’d been Jack’s only true friend during the nightmare of Elizabeth’s murder. Now Dawson was chief operating officer of Traynor Engineering Consulting and the public face for the business.