Kelton's Rules (Harlequin Super Romance)

by Nicholson, Peggy

  “Very nice,” she said, although a twist of uneasiness coiled through her stomach. Bad enough to be so obliged to the man already. But to have him as her next-door neighbor—ready, willing and able to give his opinion on her every move from here on out… I don’t need this. “Well…” She swiveled in her seat.

  “Hang on.” Jack bounded out of the Jeep and around to her side. “You shouldn’t put your weight on that ankle. Not till we’ve had a look at it.”

  “I can manage.”

  “I’m sure you can.” But his hand blocked her passage, leaving her the choice of shoving it aside—or accepting it.

  Used to having his own way, for all his charm and goodwill, Abby decided, gritting her teeth behind a close-mouthed smile. She’d learned not to trust charm. She’d found that it was often a substitute for less polished but kinder, more genuine emotions.

  “Thank you.” Her nerves skittered as those oven-warm fingers closed over hers. Then he took her other arm, supporting her weight as she slithered down from the high seat. They stood for an instant toe-to-toe, Abby looking up—quite a way up—and Jack holding on to her just a heartbeat too long, his fingers seeming to squeeze her a hairsbreadth too tightly.

  Or maybe her alarm sprang from her rattled nerves, sensing danger where it didn’t exist. There was also the simple fact that she hadn’t stood this close to a man—a virile, ruggedly attractive man—in months. “Thanks,” she said again.

  But he didn’t take that as dismissal. Instead Jack transferred her hand to his forearm, a support as hard and muscular as the rest of him obviously was. “We’ll get you settled and then…” His shaggy head swung back toward his own yard as they moved carefully across the grass. Abby could see one decisive eyebrow drawn down in a scowl. “Then I’ll just…”

  What was bothering him over there?

  But faced with the stairs to the porch, she abandoned speculation to concentrate on making it up the six steep steps, then limping across the warped decking to the unpainted front door.

  While Jack fit the key into the lock, Sky joined them, frowning unhappily, his cat cradled on his shoulder. She could read his thoughts as if he’d shouted them out loud. Compared to a brand-new, suburban five-bedroom house back in New Jersey, this wasn’t much. Compared even to the Motel 6 room they’d slept in last night, this cottage was outclassed. And it’s all your fault, Mom!

  “It seems very…comfortable,” she managed as Jack steered her inside and switched on the light. If your taste ran to plaid, broken-backed sleeper sofas. To a La-Z-Boy chair spilling foam stuffing across a dirt-gray braided rug, or fluorescent bulbs in a tacky cartwheel chandelier. A wall-mounted elk head that wore a red bandanna and probably had a case of fleas. A collection of beer cans and bottles, arranged artfully along the mantel over a small, ash-choked firebox. “And look, Sky, we have a fireplace!” Her words came out much too cheery.

  “Hmm…” Jack led her to the couch and lowered her, oblivious to the fact that she’d stiffened her spine, signaling her resistance to the maneuver. “Haven’t been in here since last fall, when Maudie gave me a choice between her two places. Looks like those college kids who came here to ski over spring break were a little…rough on the decor.” He straightened to aim a forefinger at Skyler. “Now you, kid—you’re in charge of unloading your stuff from my Jeep while I’m gone. Don’t let your mom budge, okay?”

  He turned to Abby as Sky set down DC and trooped out the door without a protest. “And you— Let me see if there’s ice in your freezer.” He strode off toward the rear of the house and returned in seconds. “Nope, no ice. So sit tight, let Sky do the work—I mean all the work, Abby—and I’ll be back soon as I can. There’s a few things I have to…”

  He was gone before she could open her mouth to tell him thank-you, but from here they could manage alone.

  BY THE TIME Sky returned with their sleeping bags, Abby had hobbled into the kitchen. Propped against the back of a wobbly kitchen chair, she surveyed the vinyl floor with its missing tiles; that had to be pre-World War II. The dingy cabinets, the ancient, grease-caked gas stove and narrow refrigerator with its rusty door, to which somebody had taped a poster of a snow-boarding ski bunny, wearing nothing but a bikini and a wet-lipped smile.

  Lemons into lemonade, Abby chanted inwardly. You get lemons, you make lemonade. There was no reason to cry, no real reason at all. This dreadful kitchen wasn’t a preview of the rest of her life. Wasn’t the top of the slippery slide to poverty and despair and loneliness. This was only a temporary setback, something she’d be laughing about six months from now—even a week from now, when they reached Sedona.

  Surely.

  Tonight she was simply…tired.

  “Mr. Kelton just put a guy in a truck,” Sky said, dropping his load on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

  She rubbed her lashes and turned with a puzzled smile. “Put who, honey?”

  “A guy with a cowboy hat. And boots. Into that truck over there. He sort of carried him by his belt and his collar and…threw him.”

  “Ah… Oh…” Wonderful. “Well, he’s very helpful, sweetie, isn’t he?” And just who had Jack been helping out his door? His wife’s lover? Oh, we don’t need this at all!

  “Then the guy drove off like a bat out of hell!”

  So that was the roar and rumble of gravel she’d heard a moment ago. “Don’t swear, Skyler.”

  “Dad says hell.”

  “Your father’s a grown man.” Physically, if not emotionally or mentally. And now were they stranded next to another overgrown adolescent with his own amorous troubles? They ought to leave first thing in the morning, but how? Even if Maudie would refund their money, renting a car for even a week would deliver the coup de grâce to her tottering budget. “When you’re grown up—”

  “I’m moving back to New Jersey.”

  A brisk knock on the front door saved her from a retort she might have regretted. Jack strode into the kitchen, his hair no wilder than it had been before, his clothes untorn. He didn’t appear to have been brawling, though the color across his craggy cheekbones might be a bit higher. With the fluorescent lighting, Abby couldn’t be sure. Perhaps Sky had misinterpreted whatever he’d seen.

  “Let’s check out that ankle.” Jack set a loaded tin soup pot on the counter, then swung out a chair for her. “And, Sky, hustle the rest of your gear out of my car, will you? I need to take off in a minute.”

  The fastest way to get Jack out of their lives was to let him follow his own program, Abby concluded, giving up and sitting. When he’d gone, she could lock the door, reestablish control. By tomorrow, once she’d caught her breath, she’d be able to cope with him. Enforce her boundaries. Resist his plans without rudeness.

  Tonight—for a few more minutes—she just needed not to scream.

  She bit her bottom lip as he lifted her foot to another chair and then, with surprising gentleness, pulled her sock down over her—shockingly swollen ankle. Which was already turning a fine shade of mottled eggplant.

  “That hurt?” He glanced up as she made a tiny sound of dismay.

  “Not…much.”

  “Hmm.” Frowning, he drew one fingertip from her ankle down the top of her foot to her toes.

  A line of ice and then fire sizzled behind his touch. She blinked back tears, focusing fiercely on his big blunt fingertip with its well-tended nail. On work-roughened hands that were very clean. On the top of his down-bent head. He had thick, straight hair of that color men call dirty-blond and women call wheat or tawny. His eyes were gray, she noted, as he peered up at her from under bristly brows, two shades darker than his hair.

  “I’m no doctor, but I’d guess it’s a sprain.” Idly, absently, his finger returned up her foot as he held her gaze.

  For too long.

  He looked into her too deeply.

  Something leaped between them before she could lower her lashes. Awareness. It triggered an echoing flutter in her stomach, a flow of warmth. Between one breath and
the next, Abby felt as if they were toppling toward each other. Gripping the sides of her chair, she fought down the urge to smack his hand aside. I don’t need this. Don’t want it. “I seem to be able to—oo-oh—move it. Sort of.”

  “Your call, Abby. I’ll be happy to drive you into Durango if you want to go to the emergency room. Or I suppose I could ask Doc Kerner, our local vet, to come over, give us his opinion.”

  Was he kidding?

  He wasn’t. The town of Trueheart, what she’d seen of it, seemed to be less than a mile square. No motel. Apparently no real doctor. “Why don’t I give it till morning?” Forty miles to Durango and back again in Jack’s unnerving company was more than she could face at this point. He’d been coming on to her, hadn’t he?

  “That’s what I’d do,” he agreed with a relief that assured her she must have been mistaken. Rising with an easy grace that belied his big-boned build, he reached into the pot. “I was a bit low on ice cubes myself, but I’ve got frozen peas and corn a-a-nd wild mountain blueberries.” He draped a plastic bag of each across her ankle as he spoke. “Give it half an hour, if you can sit still that long.”

  He was a fine one to talk. Jack was halfway to the exit already, speaking as he moved backward. “I’ve got to drive this little, um, a baby-sitter home and then I have to find Kat. But after I’ve rounded her up, can we take you and Sky to supper? Nothing fancy—Michelle’s will be closed by then. But Mo’s Truckstop has the best steak-burgers in a hundred miles and Mo keeps the grill fired up all night.”

  A baby-sitter. So Jack and his wife had a child or children. And the banished cowboy with the truck is the baby-sitter’s boyfriend, Abby hazarded a silent guess. That was a better scenario than her first one. Meanwhile Kat, Jack’s wife, must be out on the town. This was too many players to follow. “That’s awfully kind of you, but please don’t trouble yourself. We’ve got sandwich makings right here.” She nodded at Skyler, edging past the man with his arms full of a big plastic cooler. “I think we’ll eat in, then go straight to bed.”

  “Probably just as well,” Jack said readily. “In that case, sleep tight, and don’t worry about the bus. Whitey and I will look after it first thing tomorrow.”

  And he was out the door before she could make the man see that she’d rather handle her own problems.

  SUNLIGHT and the sound of birdsong awoke her the next morning, cool pine-scented air wafting in an open window. Abby smiled, stretched luxuriously…and let out a yelp as her injured foot brushed the footboard.

  “Oh!” She lurched to a sitting position, memory tumbling back in a jumble of sharp-edged images. Her ruined sketchbook. Steve’s infidelity. A blue columbine she’d picked somewhere recently. Her mother’s fretful face, matching her querulous voice on the phone. Steve’s new wife, Chelsea—pridefully, astoundingly pregnant when Abby had run into her at the mall. The plunging crimson bus. The pain in her side as she chased it.

  A man’s hand on her aching foot.

  Piece the puzzle together, and here she sat on a lumpy bed in the middle of nowhere. Her wincing gaze swept the tiny bedroom with its minimal furnishings. A scratched maple bureau and an ancient pine wardrobe; she’d bet there was a twin to that piece next door. And what time was it? Her faithful old wind-up alarm clock must be ticking away back in the bus.

  If it hasn’t been stolen by now.

  A second wave of panic washed through her. All their belongings out there on a mountainside! Jack had promised her they’d be safe, but Jack struck her as the type to whistle through hurricanes. Hardly a worrier.

  Shower. Coffee. Get out there, girl! Abby threw off the covers.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, she stood lopsidedly at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. There was a jar of instant coffee tucked in her cooler for waking in motels. But there was no way she’d boil water in any of the utensils she’d found in the cupboards before she’d thoroughly scrubbed them.

  Meanwhile, where was Jack? He’d said something about helping her early this morning. But when she’d looked out her front door and across their adjoining fence, she’d seen no sign of his Jeep.

  Maybe he’d forgotten his offer? Went off to work, wherever and whatever that was? He seemed to be a short-attention-span kind of guy, superb in a crisis, too restless to be good with the follow-through.

  Or possibly he’d sensed her discomfort last night and had left her to handle her own affairs.

  “Careful what you wish for,” she told herself wryly. Without his help, how would she get out to the crash site? A town with no doctor would hardly have a taxi service. And then how to contact this Whitey person, the mechanic?

  “Coffee first,” she decided, then she’d cope. Somehow.

  “Arrrr…” Skyler trudged into the kitchen, DC tiptoeing hopefully at his heels.

  “Morning, love.” She smoothed his pillow-tossed hair, the same pale ash-blond shade as her own. “Sleep well?”

  “Mmmph.” He took after her in appearance, and in most other ways, as well. But unlike her, Sky was no morning person. He sat heavily at the table, his glasses wobbling on the end of his nose, the cat winding around his bare shins. “What’sferbreakfast?”

  Abby tried for a note of enthusiasm. Think of this as an adventure, will you? “Tuna fish sandwiches.” All that was left. She’d meant to replenish their traveling snacks when they reached Cortez last night.

  “Yech-hh! Why can’t we have oatmeal?”

  As she usually gave him back home, was the unspoken accusation, but if Sky mentioned New Jersey one more time, she’d throw something. “When we get to Sedona I’ll buy some, sweetie, but this morning—”

  Knock knocka knock knock! A cheery rap sounded on the back screen door, which Abby had opened to air out the kitchen.

  Relief surged through her chest, mixed with an odd sense of wariness. She hobbled across the room, wondering: Could the man have half the impact in daylight that he’d had on her last night? Or had the shock and disorientation of the bus crash made her unusually—and temporarily—vulnerable?

  She’d have to wait to find out. Their visitor was a child—a girl roughly Skyler’s age—all long spindly legs and reed-thin golden arms. She stood on the back stoop, fist lifted to knock again. “Um, hi.”

  “Good morning.” Her ponytail was two shades lighter than the wheat color it would probably be when she was grown. Still, Abby knew who’d bequeathed her that tiny cleft in the chin. And those enormous gray eyes. She opened the screen door with a smile—and blinked. The child had Jack Kelton’s eyes, but how to explain her lack of eyelashes? Her eyebrows frizzled to kinky ash? The crinkled hair along her forehead that had obviously come too close to a flame?

  “Dad said to bring you these.” The girl clutched a pile of bright packages to her skinny chest with a clumsily bandaged hand. “He said you’d want breakfast.”

  “He didn’t need to do that, but please, come in.” Abby stepped aside and had to smile as the two children spotted each other. The girl stopped short and scowled. Skyler looked up—and whipped off his glasses, which rendered him utterly blind. He turned them nervously in his hands, torn between seeing and being seen, squinting up at her.

  “Waffles,” announced Jack’s daughter, dumping her packages at Sky’s elbow. “Dad said you have the blueberries to go with ’em already. And these are burritos.” She placed another frozen package on top of the first. “And a pizza.”

  This was Jack’s idea of breakfast?

  “And coffee.” A package of ground coffee—now here at last was something useful—was added to the stack of offerings. Jack’s daughter made a rueful face as she turned toward Abby and pulled a crumpled envelope from the pocket of her ragged blue jeans cutoffs. “And this is for you.”

  As her name, printed in a bold, slashing script, attested. Abby leaned back against the counter, opened the envelope and read.

  Hi, neighbor!

  Whitey and I are checking out your bus. Meanwhile, this surly outlaw is grounded from here to eternity and
I’m down one baby-sitter. Mind keeping half an eye on her, just for the next hour? There’s a fire extinguisher next to your stove.

  Thanks.

  Jack

  Surely that last line was a joke? Had to be. And asking Abby to pinch-hit for his baby-sitter was certainly reasonable, given all he’d done for her. Now Jack was doing even more, taking time out from his own day to look over her bus with the mechanic. Still, she wished he’d taken her along. She hoped he didn’t intend to commit her to a course of action without consulting her first.

  At the table, curiosity had overcome Sky’s vanity and he’d put on his glasses. Studying his counterpart, he demanded, “What happened to your eyebrows?”

  “Burned ’em off, welding.” Apparently some decision had been reached. The girl pulled out a chair and sat, scooping up the tomcat to drape him over her lap. “I never saw a cat with one green eye and one blue before. What’s his name?”

  “DC-3.”

  “Huh!” She nodded gravely. “I’m a Kat, too—Kat Kelton. Who are you?”

  Kat. So this was Kat? Abby sucked in a breath, suddenly feeling that the walls had flexed inward half a foot or so. She limped to the screen door and stood there, seeing not the house beyond the fence but a big, blunt fingertip gliding down her ankle. She felt something oddly akin to panic….

  Good grief, what was this, a goose waddling across her grave? Or caffeine withdrawal—what time was it, anyway?

  Gradually the sensation faded; her eyes refocused on the house next door, her ears on the halting conversation behind her.

  There might be a Kat Senior, as well, she told herself with a surge of relief.

  Which dropped as swiftly as it had spiked. No. There couldn’t be. Had there been a mother in residence, she’d already have trimmed that fire-frizzled hair. And Kat’s bandage needed redoing. Coffee first, then I’ll see to it.

  So Abby lit the oven, put the water on to boil, washed three plates, three glasses, three sets of silverware. Picked up one of the packages and wrinkled her nose as she read the directions. Frozen pizza for breakfast; that should’ve told her everything she needed to know.