Amy heard his worry. She thought of her own son, home in California, safe with Aunt Betts. Still, a mother never stopped worrying.
“I’ll drop you off at the high school.” He switched on the turn signal to head left.
“Like hell.”
He shot her a sharp look.
“You’ll lose time.” She didn’t want to increase his worry by adding that he might need her medical expertise when he found his cousin’s son.
“I don’t like the idea—”
This time she didn’t hesitate to put her hand on his forearm. “I came here to help, Jesse,” she said softly.
He looked at her. She imagined he was unaware of the rare warmth that shone in his eyes.
“So, can the arguments, cowboy.”
The warmth in his eyes flickered with amusement before he remembered himself and made his features a mask once again. Many men hid their emotions. But was Jesse hiding more? Amy wondered.
Jesse knew that trained Red Cross volunteers, along with Flo Templeton and volunteers from the ladies’ auxiliaries, were manning the high school and more than capable of handling anything that might arise before the storm hit. Any serious emergencies requiring Amy’s more extensive skills were likely to occur after the hurricane. If anything had happened to Michael and his friends, timing could be critical. They would need Amy now. Still, if she were in the evacuation center, she would be safe. And so would he, separated from her inquiring gaze and pointed questions.
Jesse radioed the dispatcher at the rescue station. “Any reports from the coastal patrol? Teenage boys picked up on their way to catch a big wave?”
“Not that I know of. What’s up?”
“My cousin Clare’s boy, Michael, and a few of his buddies decided to head down along the shore to hang ten on the high waves coming in from the storm.”
“Can’t imagine how they got there. The interstate south is closed to everything except police and emergency vehicles.”
“They could have taken the back route. It’s longer but they would have avoided any barriers.”
“I’ll send out a BOLO, see if anyone knows anything, although communication has been hit and miss.”
“Let me know if any reports come through. I’m heading down there now. Dr. Sherwood is going with me. If Clare calls, tell her not to worry. I’ll find the boys and bring them home. Any other problems?”
“The usual scramble for supplies, long lines, short nerves, but otherwise, things have been relatively quiet, knock on wood. Not much to do now but wait.”
Jesse looked at the sky with its pale-green cast and the rains like a river. He held tight as the winds rocked the Bronco. He glanced at his passenger. She was also looking into the storm’s strange light. Wait, he thought. Until all hell breaks loose.
“A BOLO?” Amy questioned.
“Be on the lookout,” Jesse answered.
“Right.” Amy peered through the window, saw the rains pelting the grass flat. The farm lagoons had been drained to their lowest level, the pastures emptied, livestock herded into shelter. The blinding rain and battering wind slowed the Bronco’s progress. The radio had been reduced to bursts of static until, with a frustrated sigh, Jesse snapped it off.
State police vehicles blocked the on ramp to the interstate heading south. Jesse eased the vehicle over to the shoulder and jumped out into the rain and wind toward one of the cruisers. Amy’s professional eye saw a pronounced leaning toward the left in his first steps, but it was quickly corrected. The wet, the rain, the wind would aggravate old wounds, make them ache like a newly broken heart.
Jesse climbed back into the cab a few minutes later, bringing the wind and a new dampness inside. The police cruiser pulled over onto the ramp’s shoulder, allowing the Bronco access.
“Communication’s sporadic due to the heavy winds and rains. If the leading bands of the storm move on and he can get a signal, he’ll radio the other patrols along the coast to see if any teenage boys were found.”
“Michael and his friends are probably headed home as we speak,” Amy said, “bragging to each other all the way.”
It was silent inside the cab for a few minutes, then Jesse muttered, “God willing.”
Amy brushed at a smear of dirt on her slacks. She’d brought several changes of clothes, all permanent press and designed to coordinate. She was a sensible person. Even as a teenager, she’d been focused and determined. Miss Goody Two-shoes, the meaner kids would say. But they’d been right. She’d never done anything wild in her life…until she fell in love with Jesse Boone.
She looked at the man beside her with the same name. A less sensible woman would say it was fate, not coincidence, that had brought them together. Despite all logical objections, a less sensible woman would have believed the boy she had loved fourteen years ago sat beside her now as a man. A less sensible woman would have wasted precious time searching for a possibility that didn’t exist.
She was not that woman.
“How old is the boy?”
“Turned sixteen a month ago. He doesn’t even have his damn driver’s license yet.”
“Sixteen.” Amy repeated. A lifetime ago. She studied Jesse’s grim profile. “What an age. Not only do you think you know everything, you truly believe you’re invulnerable. Later you look back and realize how truly stupid you were.”
He glanced at her. She knew what he saw. She looked down at her unpolished chipped nails and experienced a rare yearning for color, if only a pale-pink tint. She would like to say her sensible shoes, trim chinos and button-down shirt were chosen for their utility. She would even like to imagine that beneath her conservative outfit were silk panties and a low-cut lace camisole instead of one hundred percent white cotton briefs and a no-frills, functional bra. But it would not be the truth. She used the excuse she was too busy to bother with the extras that were a part of other women’s daily routine—makeup, any hairstyle more complicated than a twist into a barrette, shoes with heels, gold chains that sparkled.
“Sorry, Doc, you don’t strike me as ever having been the stupid type.”
Once, she thought. She surprised herself with a smile as the memory came with a strength equal to the elements shuddering their vehicle now. Once, when she fell in love with a wild, dark-eyed boy.
Jesse caught her smile. She’d seen surprise on his face also. That face so unfamiliar, yet there was something in those eyes. Those dark eyes. Her smile dissolved. Once she’d been the stupid type. No more.
“You’d be wrong, Sheriff. I’ve had my share of foolish moments, although I’ll admit, they were many moons ago and few and far between.”
“Don’t know anyone who goes through life without a mistake or two.”
“My aunt says, ‘Make a mistake once and you’re human. Make it twice and you’re a fool.’”
“Is that what you did? Learn from your mistakes?”
She looked him square in the face. “The lesson of a lifetime.”
Silence filled the cab.
“How about you?” Amy asked.
He glanced at her.
“No mistakes?” She had no right, but something urged her on.
His mouth formed a tight, wry smile, twisting the thin scar along his jaw line. “No one gets thirty-two years under their belt without mistakes.”
Thirty-two. Same age as herself. Same age as the Jesse Boone she’d known. She stared at him, hearing the pummeling wind and rain outside, the pounding of her heart within. He ignored her stare, but she saw the tension turn up a notch in his strong, sober features. She reached out her hand, trained to heal. She had no right.
She didn’t care.
She touched his forearm. The skin was still damp but the flesh was warm, hard muscle underneath. He lowered his gaze, his face a cool mask.
“This.” Her fingers moved, lightly traced a scar. “How did this mistake happen?”
CHAPTER FOUR
HE JERKED his arm away. He stared straight ahead into the storm. Anger burned in
his eyes. She had touched something much deeper. She did not rationalize her question with professional license, the insensitivity that came from the assembly line of illness and injury that made up a doctor’s day. She had a personal reason for asking about this man’s private past. An irrational need warring within her that forced her blunt questions. She was ashamed of herself.
“Look…” she began to apologize.
“It was an accident.” His interruption surprised her.
Let it be. She turned to the man beside her but found she couldn’t let it go. “An automobile accident?”
He shot a warning glance at her.
“None of my damn business, Sheriff?”
He nodded.
“You’re right.” But she didn’t apologize. She sat silent for a few heartbeats, telling herself she was out of line.
“Industrial? Agricultural?”
He glared at her for a second, then began to slowly shake his head from side to side. The anger in his features tempered. To her own astonishment, his mouth quirked into a half smile. Still shaking his head, he turned his attention back to the highway. “You don’t give up, do you?”
She scanned his body, now healed from what must have been a beating. “Obviously, neither do you.”
He drove another quarter mile. He did not look at her when he said, “It was a long time ago.” He turned his head. Their eyes met. “It’s over.”
Except for the scars that were more than physical. Amy had seen the devastation a serious accident could cause. Lives that had been happy, healthy, whole were consumed by the sheer terror of possibly never taking a step again without assistance, never speaking without slurring, never waking without an ache somewhere to remind the victims of the mere seconds that had changed their life forever.
“Jess.” She said the name without realizing it until she heard its soft reverberations. Every feature on his face held firm. He did not look at her.
She had no right. Except she had once loved a boy named Jesse Boone. Now, beside her, was a man with the same name, the same age. What if he was the Jesse Boone who’d disappeared from her life without warning? What then? Would an explanation erase the pain of fourteen years?
She looked at the man, looked for the boy she’d loved so fiercely. She had to be certain. “What happened?”
Jesse silently cursed her. Her stubbornness, her persistence had not lessened. On the contrary, her determination had only intensified in fourteen years. It was these cornerstones of Amy’s character that had brought her mother to his bedside after the accident. The woman, bespectacled, bowed at the shoulders from years of working in the canning plant and raising a daughter who had been given every opportunity she herself had not been privilege to, had sat at his bedside and pleaded.
A full scholarship, son. Amy’s mother had looked at him through glasses that dominated her thin face, her eyes the same blue-green as her daughter’s, magnified by the lenses. She’d taken his hand. He had barely felt the grip, but the veins along the top of her hand had stood out in anxious relief.
You know my daughter, Jesse. She learns of this… Her glance had swept his body, now bandaged and wired, fed by tubes, monitored by machines. And she won’t go. She’ll give up the scholarship, everything she’s worked so hard for. Both her hands had clasped his. Don’t do that to her. Don’t take her dream from her.
He’d known she’d been right. The fact did nothing to lessen the pain that was a thousand time more wretched than any physical injuries. Amy would have rushed to his side and stayed there. At the minimum, it would have been years of operations and therapy, surgery to fuse the bones, rebuild the shattered jaw. Even so, the doctors hadn’t been able to guarantee that his body, once that of a promising athlete, would ever be able to take a small step unsupported.
He had not been able to speak that day. The shattered bones in his face had been wired tight. He had not even been able to squeeze the hands clinging to his in utter desperation. Using every once of strength not already sucked from his body, he’d nodded. It was all he could give Amy’s mother. He saw from the relief and gratitude in her face that it was enough.
Thank you. Thank you. She’d stood and leaned over to kiss his bandaged brow. You’re doing the right thing.
He looked at Amy now, his selfish need to tell her the truth warring again with his need to do the right thing. Let it be, Jess, he told himself, unconsciously using the name she’d so often softly spoken fourteen years ago. I love you, Jess. He still heard those words—whispered in a young girl’s voice, at night in the darkness. Let it be, he told himself again. Let it remain in the darkness.
His gaze went hard on her, his annoyance evident.
She smiled back at him, telling him he didn’t frighten her none. Not that he had expected to. Some things had changed over the past years, but some things were eternal. One was the woman’s grit.
“None of your damn business,” he answered with a hard edge of warning in his voice. He snapped the radio back on. It crackled, kept breaking up, the distance and high winds interfering with the reception. He fiddled with the tuner, hoping for a clear signal. Snippets of reports interrupted by static came through. He turned up the volume. “Landfall farther southwest…unexpected wind patterns…the Gulf… less-populated along Mexican border.”
“Sounds like it’s turning, breaking up.” Jesse could almost hear the men seated on the diner stools telling one another, ‘Just as I predicted.’ He looked over at Amy. He was far from being out of danger himself.
“Your cousin’s son and his friends may have lucked out this time,” Amy said.
“Maybe from the hurricane.”
“But Michael will have to deal with you?”
“And his mother.”
“Seems to me, your cousin and her boys are lucky to have you around.”
He shrugged. “I help out when I can. It’s hard enough being teenagers. Add to the fact their father takes off with a woman not much older than they are, and you have a set up for big-time trouble.”
“It’s hard for teenagers not having a parent around.”
Silently Jesse agreed. He had never known his own mother. His father had had many faults, but he’d never abandoned his son, which was exactly why Jesse had been unable to abandon him when he’d wakened Jesse in the middle of the night six months before the accident and said, “Come on, boy, we’re moving on.” No, his father had never left his son behind. Until death.
He glanced at Amy, saw her thoughtful expression and wondered if she was remembering her own adolescence as the child of a single parent. The experience had provided a common bond that had drawn them closer. He’d never talked about the pain of not knowing a parent with anyone before Amy. Nor had she. Although her mother had tried to make up for the lack, Amy had suffered from not knowing her father. She had sworn she would never raise a child in a single-parent household. She would never have a child until she was certain she could give it a loving home with both a mother and a father. He’d sworn the same. Funny thing was, when they’d made the promise, they’d believed it would be the two of them raising children born of their love and happiness.
A gust of wind came up strong, snapping him out of the past. The wheel tried to pull hard to the right, but Jesse held steady, focusing past the windshield wipers beating furiously, to the stretch of highway ahead. He had gotten through the past fourteen years. Now all he had to do was get through the next two, three, four days at the most.
Amy could smell the sea as they came closer to the coast. They headed into open territory, the sheltering illusion of being inland gone. The wind, unencumbered, sped freely over the expanse of water and sky, bending the crowns of the scattered palms. She felt the wind’s push, bowing the vehicle’s side, sucking in around the edges as if it wanted them gone. Yet this whip of a wind was only a mild messenger of what the storm’s wrath could be.
Jesse continued to check the radio, hoping to make contact to learn if the boys had been found. He moved betwee
n channels but the storm was too strong. Communication had been knocked out.
Amy saw concern and frustration etching lines into Jesse’s face. This man would be a good father, she thought. “I’ll bet your cousin’s boy and his friends are riding into Turning Point right now. If not, we’ll find them. We won’t go back until we do or we’re sure they’re not here.”
Jesse stared out at the rain falling like a sea, sweeping in horizontally. “It’ll take us an hour to check all along the shore—maybe longer with these driving conditions.”
“From those last reports, it sounds like the storm might miss the Texas coast completely.”
Jesse scanned the darkening sky, although nightfall was hours away.
“We’ve come this far, Sheriff.”
Jesse looked at the woman beside him and fell in love all over again.
“You shouldn’t have come.” His voice was gruff.
“It was my choice.”
“Foolish one,” he said, trying to offset the feelings inside him.
She smiled, as if amused by him. She’d always been the smart one of the two of them. “Not my first and probably won’t be my last.”
The wind shook the vehicle with renewed vehemence. Jesse’s brow pulled low with worry. If those reports were wrong… If Michael and his friends were still out at the beach… He pressed the accelerator. Five miles an hour faster was all he dared. They drove parallel to the shore. The sea rose with a siren’s scream, waves eighteen feet high moving in fast, churning the water white with wide, breaking sprays.
The teenagers’ trip was a dangerous venture. Yet Amy could understand why they were tempted. She thought of her own son at home. Amy had lived in Courage Bay with Aunt Betts, her mother’s older unmarried sister, from the time she’d gone to medical college. Her aunt had helped care for Ian since his birth, and would keep a stern eye on him. Ian was also younger than these boys. Yet not many years from now, Amy herself could be the one anxiously waiting for a phone to ring with the news her son was safe from a dangerous escapade. She didn’t realize she’d sighed aloud until she saw Jesse glance over at her.
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