“The baby was crying,” the mother repeated hysterically. “I was just trying to get her home. Ted will kill me. I…”
Loren’s fingers tightened protectively on the woman’s wrist and then she let her go, her voice low and soothing and totally in control. “Everything will be fine. Your baby is unharmed. You look more shaken than hurt…” Loren glanced back out through the pelting rain, saw the flashing lights of a police car approach, and a group of neighbors milling out of their houses obviously willing to brave the rain to see what was going on. Over the strident screams of the baby, the man in the navy sweater came forward again.
“Miss, you really shouldn’t be talking to her, you know. When it comes to an insurance settlement—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Loren said disgustedly. Again she glanced around. There were three women, all rather grandmotherly in shape and dress. “Could we get the baby out of the damp?” she requested in general to all of them. A gray-haired woman in a dark dress stepped forward as Loren leaned back into the car. “Would you like me to take the baby?” she asked gently.
The bewildered mother nodded. She was rubbing her forehead in a dazed reaction. Loren handed out the diaper bag and then reached in again to unhook the straps of the baby’s car carrier. In a moment she had the burden of blankets and furiously crying child in her arms, and she cuddled the baby instinctively for a few seconds before handing her to the gray-haired lady. “I’ll take her, miss. I’m the house right there. You’ve no need to worry. I raised five of my own; she’ll be fine—”
The baby was snuggled to an ample breast and sheltered from the rain. Loren turned back to the child’s mother. “Come on now,” she said calmly. “Let’s see if you’re hurt…” She lifted the baby’s car carrier to the back, out of the way, and reached in to help the young mother out of the car. The blonde moved awkwardly over the gear shift, raised her legs out, stood up shakily with Loren’s help and promptly burst into tears.
It was a nightmare. The little VW was totalled; it took more than twenty minutes in the back of the police car for the two policemen to get a coherent story out of the mother to corroborate Loren’s. Finally, the man named Ted arrived to take his wife and baby home, and Loren allowed the enormity of what had happened to sink in at last. She had nearly killed two people. It didn’t do any good to know that it would not have been her fault or that there was nothing she could have done. She nearly killed a young woman. A baby. A baby.
When she finally stepped out of the police car, she saw the wrecked yellow VW being attached to a tow truck. The look of the smashed-in side made her hands shake violently. The garage owner approached her. “I’m afraid your van’s not driveable either, miss. I’m not saying it can’t be fixed, but there’s no chance you’ll be driving it for a while.”
She had forgotten her own vehicle. In comparison with the VW the van fared a thousand times better, of course; it was the bigger, sturdier vehicle. But the front still looked like an accordion…“What do you want me to do?” the man asked patiently. “It’ll have to be towed off the street, miss.”
So it was towed off the street. Loren was offered the use of a telephone by the grandmotherly lady, and she called Janey at work. Janey arrived less than fifteen minutes later, took one look at her boss’s face and said, “Why don’t you just let me take you home? I can hold down the fort for a day.”
Loren shook her head. There was the regular staff meeting on Mondays; she had a dozen other things that had to be done today. She’d never fallen apart in a crisis in her life, and she was not about to start now.
“I told Frank,” Janey admitted. “To begin with, he was looking for you first thing this morning…”
“Go home,” Frank told her bluntly, the moment she walked into the staff meeting.
But she didn’t go home. In fact, she made every effort to shine in the meeting. Her facts were clear and concise, her presentation clear, her smiles brilliant. The accident was over; all she had to do was put it out of her mind. No one had been hurt. She whipped through her work that morning in triple time and wasn’t alone in her office again until noon.
She had to call the garage. The repairs on her van would cost more than her insurance coverage, and the young couple were evidently as underinsured as she was. Loren put down the phone, leaned back in her chair and lifted her ninth cup of coffee that morning to her lips, trying to ward off the sudden, stupid, unreasonable welling of tears. After all, she’d known for a long time that the van was going. It was just a delayed reaction to hearing that baby’s frantic cries for those few instants before she knew the child wasn’t hurt.
She put the coffee down, leaned forward and pressed her palms to her temples. There was a raised spot on her forehead, hidden by a wave of russet hair. Irritably, she moved her fingers over so that she could at least press out the tension in the rest of her temples.
There was a sharp rap on her half-opened door, and she glanced up. A tall, intimidating frame suddenly filled the doorway. She had never seen Buck’s eyes loaded with such desperate tension before. She swallowed and blinked rapidly, perhaps not quite fast enough to totally erase the glaze of moisture in her eyes.
“Why the hell didn’t you call me, Loren?”
She shook her head and put her hand out to stop him from coming any closer. If he touched her, she knew darn well she was going to be folded in that strength of shoulder and tears would follow. “Just…don’t.”
“Don’t be silly, Loren—” He came a few steps closer, and she shook her head more wildly.
“It matters to me, Buck. I hate women who fall apart. Just don’t touch me for a minute. Please!”
His whole face seemed to tighten for an instant, and there was a flare of something stark and lonely in his eyes. Then he turned, and his eyes fixed on her raincoat hanging from the back of the door
“No,” she said simply.
“You look as though you used bleach for makeup today.” His voice was so normal, that Loren thought she’d imagined the anguished look in his eyes.
“Thanks,” she said, with a monumental effort to sound normal herself.
“I’m starving. I shrivel up to five foot one if not fed lunch on time.” He lifted the raincoat, a stubborn glint in his eyes. Arguing would have as much effect as trying to scale a brick wall barefoot. She sighed. “Think of the fat little brandy I’m going to order for you,” he coaxed. “Think of the beating I’ll give you if you don’t come. Think of—”
“All right,” Loren said with exasperation. She put on the coat and then turned back to him, trying to smile. “But I’m only coming for the beating. If I drink anything at lunch, I’ll float all afternoon.”
“Coming up, one beating, after we let them know you’re leaving,” he said gravely. But as she made to move past him, his hands suddenly laced across her shoulders. Her startled protest didn’t stop his determined inspection of her arms to test for bruises. In a remarkably small number of seconds, he’d discovered the swelling blotch on her forehead. “Head hurt?”
“No.” She had the horrible feeling he might just have stripped her to the buff to check for injuries if she hadn’t pulled away and darted into the hall. “Buck, I’m all right,” she hissed furiously up at him.
Yet it was the first time she’d felt steady all morning, when he tugged her close to his side walking out to the parking lot. He smelled fresh and warm and familiar, and the feel of him was like coming home. But those feelings warred with others. It was all…off balance again. She was needy once again—needing him. It never seemed to work the other way around. She knew she was still shaken up, that there wasn’t a rational thought in her head, but she resented needing him. Terribly.
The restaurant was quiet and dark and nearly empty. The “fat little brandy” rested beside Loren, sipped once. Buck, for all his claim to hunger, had ordered coffee for himself. In front of her was a clear consommé and a double order of plain, ordinary toast, all of which she was pushing around in haphazard fash
ion. “I don’t understand how you knew,” she said absently. “Did Janey call you?”
“Frank called. Which he should have done several hours before,” Buck said gruffly, taking another sip of coffee. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her from the time they entered the restaurant. “I didn’t ferret out a thirty-thousand-dollar savings for him in raw materials from the goodness of my heart. I’ve got empathy for any man in the top chair, and a fool could tell he was a genius in the engineering line, but he lets his purchasing agent sit around on a constant coffee break.”
“John is rather that way,” Loren admitted vaguely and then suddenly raised startled eyes to him.
“What’s wrong?”
She just looked at him, feeling a helpless welling of confusion inside. Anger, hurt, and that something shaky that had haunted her all morning even before the accident. “How could you?” she demanded.
“How could I what?” He looked bewildered.
“Interfere, Buck. You’re the reason Frank gave me the part-time assistant, aren’t you? You’re the reason that I’m suddenly no longer taking home reams of work. That day you were in the office…”
Buck’s eyes shifted to the coffee cup. “Don’t be ridiculous, Loren. I never told him to hire an extra person in your office. I never told him to do anything.”
She set down her cup, glaring speechlessly at him. No, he’d never told Frank anything. It wouldn’t have happened that way. He just did Frank a major and very expensive favor and dropped her name and the connection. And Frank had suddenly scrambled to treat her like a favorite niece.
Buck was glaring back at her, his features just as strained as her own. Quite obviously, he’d never really intended to tell her; it had just slipped out. “It’s not the time to discuss it,” he said shortly. “Another time, Loren, you can set up the boxing ring. Right now you’re going home.”
“I am not going home. I am going car shopping.”
He took a look at her pale complexion, at the dark gray eyes glowing like coals, at the determined set to her jaw that, in spite of its minute size, was really remarkably like his own. He sighed and leaned back to finish the last of his coffee. “There are times,” he said mildly, “when the Detroit Lions could probably hire you as a fullback, as is. They’d probably even manage to win a few games in the season.”
She didn’t smile. “I have to have transportation.”
His own smile faded. They stood up, and he nudged at the small of her back to urge her toward his car. “What you have to have is some emotional letdown.” His tone was a deep-throated growl. “You’re as strung out as a whip, just waiting to lash back.” He closed the door with a little clip in her ear. When he got in his side, there was controlled patience in his voice. “Just let me take you home, Loren. You can use the Town Car until you really feel up to looking for another car. I can handle—”
“No,” Loren interrupted furiously. He was right in everything he said. She was an emotional mess; she couldn’t even hold a coherent thought in her head; she belonged home, and there was no horror of a hurry over some ridiculous car. She wanted to obey, to let him take charge. But irrationally all she could think of was that she was turning into a doormat. “Look. I don’t expect you to waste a whole afternoon. I’m more than capable of shopping for a car on my own. It’s not your problem—”
The look he shot her was deadly. She knew immediately that she had stepped over a forbidden line and had a startling vision of Buck virulent in anger. Worse, she glimpsed the fleeting bleakness in his eyes again and knew she’d hurt him, terribly.
“It’s not my problem?” he echoed. “You’re not my concern, Loren, particularly when something’s happened to you?”
“Buck, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“I think you did.” He stabbed the key in the ignition, and the engine roared to life.
Chapter Sixteen
They drove in silence. Loren’s head ached from the swelling bruise on her forehead. She felt exhausted and strung out and confused.
She glanced at Buck as he drove, at his craggy features, the deep-set green eyes, the jutting jaw and the sensual mouth now firmly compressed. His suit was Italian; she’d just noticed. The economy of line emphasized his broad shoulders, and he was a powerfully forbidding man when his jaw was set just so.
She longed to reach out and touch him. Desperately, she craved the protective embrace he had offered her so often, and just as desperately she wanted to erase her rashly spoken words. She hadn’t meant to shut him out by implying her life was none of his business, and she hated herself for hurting him.
Yet she didn’t touch him. He had hurt her as well. He had no right to interfere in her workplace, and the blow to her pride was sharp and unbearable. It wasn’t just that…it was everything. Frank, Angela, Gramps; he’d stepped in and taken over. All of his actions were done for her; she knew that. It was just that in his view, she must seem like a puppet, as he capably moved the strings that affected her life. It wasn’t how she wanted him to see her. A very capable, confident, bright, even rather successful young woman—that was how she wanted him to see her because it was what she was…at least until she’d met him.
Buck turned into a car dealership, and Loren tried to refocus on the more immediate problem at hand. She frowned; a Volvo dealer wasn’t anywhere near what she had in mind. “Buck,” she said quietly. “I can’t afford this. There’s no point in my even looking here.”
His green eyes pinned hers. “We’re going to leave money out of this one,” he warned her. “I’m not suggesting the top-of-the-line gas guzzler or an engine with more power than you can handle. I am suggesting transportation that doesn’t crumple at the first minor bump in a parking lot. Now are you really going to argue with that?”
She felt she was on a downhill toboggan run and couldn’t get off. She got out of his car, looked around and had only to read the first sticker prices to know there wasn’t a car in the lot in her price range. She knew Buck had every intention of buying the car for her, just as she understood that the taut nerves were not all on her own side. She’d seen the way he looked at her when he first arrived in the office and knew he’d suffered a frantic drive to her plant when he’d discovered she’d been in an accident, but she could not seem to grapple with anything beyond a head that kept pounding with increasing anxiety. And she simply could not let him pay for the car.
“I really think I would like to look at something less expensive,” she said finally.
Buck drove her where she wanted to go in complete silence. A bright rainbow of compact cars were all lined up, bug-sized, and Loren walked a little ahead of him in the drizzle, with a salesman trailing after Buck. She peered into several cars, finally finding one that had none of the gadgets that brought up the sticker price.
“Would you like to try it out?” the young salesman asked hopefully.
“Yes.” She glanced back at Buck for the first time in the past fifteen minutes. Her effort to smile died. His face was granite. Turning back to the salesman with a stubborn look, she repeated, “Yes. I would like to drive it, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Yet when she slid behind the steering wheel, the pounding in her head tripled; she felt suddenly cold all over, and her hands turned clammy. This was exactly what she wanted, exactly what she could afford, and the car was really an attractive little runabout. But then so was the little lemon VW the mother had been driving that morning…the one that had crushed like paper even in a slow-speed accident. She had a sudden vision of herself zigzagging around semi trucks on the expressway in this little red car, and somehow her palms were so damp she couldn’t make the ignition key turn. In fact, suddenly she couldn’t seem to move at all.
The driver’s door opened abruptly. Buck didn’t even look at Loren’s suddenly white face. His arms reached in, and though for a moment her legs argued with the steering wheel, her face was buried in Buck’s chest a moment later. He just held her, rocking her back and forth in the middle o
f that crazy parking lot until the shuddering stopped.
“Is there anything wrong?” the salesman asked uncertainly. But his voice was muffled; one of Buck’s hands was at the back of her head, stroking her hair, over and over.
“Nothing,” Buck said pleasantly. “We just decided we were only in the market for Mack trucks today. Thanks for your time.”
“I…pardon?”
“You can take the keys out of it,” Buck said flatly. As in take a hike, mister.
The footsteps clapped on pavement and then faded. Buck sighed and pressed his hands very gently on either side of Loren’s face to lift her eyes to his. His mouth rubbed fleetingly on hers, as if touching base. She felt a rush of comfort.
“I keep living it over and over in my head,” Loren whispered wrenchingly. “I’m not a good driver. A thousand times I’ve been too distracted. But not this morning, Buck. This time there was just nothing I could have done, and she…had a baby. The baby kept crying, and I kept thinking that I could have killed that baby…”
He folded her close again. Her eyes were filled with stinging tears, and desperately she swallowed and reswallowed the lump in her throat. He didn’t seem to care, but she did. She was not going to come apart at the seams in the middle of a car dealership. She touched aching fingers to her temples, drawing away from him. “Dammit. I have to have a car,” she said distractedly. “I can’t just keep thinking about it. I have to be at work tomorrow—”
“And you will be.” Buck steered her gently back to his Town Car. “I’ll take care of it, Loren, I promise you. But for right now, I’m taking you home.”
She rocked against the car seat as though it were a cradle, closing her eyes as Buck drove. Those few minutes when he had held her were over. Her head was pounding again, the same disturbing refrains. It had happened again; he had taken charge, and somehow she was doing things his way. And it was wrong. Everything was all wrong. Old ghosts haunted her, and she couldn’t seem to dismiss them.
Kisses From Heaven Page 17
