But her inconvenient conscience pinged with each turn of the pickup’s wheels. The thermometer at the bank in LaGrange had registered a searing 115 degrees when she’d driven out of town. Her cutoffs and stretchy knit top were soaked with sweat, despite the wind that had rushed through the truck’s open windows. The hitchhiker wouldn’t last an hour out there.
Guilt piled on top of the soft heart that had gotten her into trouble more often than not. During her thirteen years at the South Oklahoma City Baptist Children’s Home, the Reverend and Mrs. McNabb had taught her better than to pass by someone in need.
She speared another quick glance at the rearview mirror. Common sense and bitter experience waged a short, ferocious battle with the precepts of love, faith and simple charity.
Muttering an oath that would have shocked the good Reverend McNabb, Lissa stomped the brake. The pedal had more play in it than the old accordion she’d first learned to pump out hymns on. She’d pressed it almost all the way to the floor before the ten-year-old pickup rolled to a stop.
She sat for a moment, both hands on the steering wheel, eyes locked on the mirror, trying to think how best to handle this situation. All the while, Marty Jones and the Silver City Quartet belted out the hymn Lissa had composed last year.
The sight of the hitchhiker loping down the road toward her galvanized her into action. Snapping off the radio, she shoved the truck into Park, but left the engine running…just in case! She shouldered open the door and climbed out. Heat flowed right through her sneaker soles the instant she hit asphalt.
“Stop right there!”
At her command, the hitchhiker slowed to a halt thirty or so yards away. What little of his face she could see under the brim of the ball cap registered approval.
“Smart lady. You’re right to be cautious.”
His voice rolled down the hot tarmac, deep, resonant, not dry or scratchy enough to indicate he’d been in the sun too long. He didn’t sound like a bum, Lissa thought, but then her judgment when it came to scum-of-the-earth scuzz-balls was notoriously lacking.
“I’m more than cautious,” she called back. “I’m outta here if you take one more step before explaining just why you’re stuck way out in the middle of nowhere.”
He tugged off the ball cap to swipe his arm across his forehead. A thatch of brown hair darkened to mink by sweat glistened in the bright sun. Below it was a tanned face too rugged for handsome and too striking for any woman’s peace of mind.
“I was heading south to Yuma when I got into a battle for the right-of-way with a jackrabbit. He won.”
A wry grin tugged at his mouth.
Disgust tugged at Lissa’s.
Even from this distance, she could see he was a charmer, just like Doc. Only younger. Sexier. Definitely sexier. Plopping his hat back on his head, he hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans. His white teeth gleamed. The tanned skin beside his blue eyes crinkled with a smile that said “trust me, darlin’.”
Well, she’d trusted one too-smooth snake oil salesman. She’d never trust another.
“I don’t see a car,” she called, her voice laced with suspicion. “Were you walking to Yuma when you lost out to that jackrabbit?”
“No, I was riding a motorcycle.”
He swung a hand toward the ditch beside the road. Lissa sidestepped and caught a glint of metal.
It was a monster. One of those expensive toys that only motorcycle fanatics or wealthy yuppies hoping to be thought really cool would invest in.
Of course, there was no saying he’d bought the thing. He could have stolen it. Or inveigled some stupid, gooey-eyed female into buying it for him.
Just like Doc.
“I appreciate your stopping,” he called, breaking into her thoughts. “I know you’re taking a risk. I promise, I’m not a rapist or a serial killer.”
“And I’m just supposed to take your word for that?”
“My name’s Henderson, Evan Henderson. I’m on my way back to San Diego after visiting family in Flagstaff. Here, I’ll put my wallet down on the road. You can check my ID. My business card’s in there, too.”
He dug a leather billfold out of his rear pocket and dropped it onto the asphalt. Nerves jangling, Lissa watched him turn and walk back down the road.
She sucked in a swift breath at the sight of his back. A bouquet of bright red splotches decorated his left shoulder. He’d hit that ditch hard and left some pieces of himself on the rocks.
She almost called out, almost told him to grab his wallet and jump into the truck so she could get him to a hospital to clean those cuts and scrapes.
That’s what Melissa Marie James, nicknamed Lissa by the kindly Reverend and Mrs. McNabb, would have done.
Missy Marie—former child prodigy on the gospel singing circuit, crossover country music superstar and convicted felon—kept her lips clamped tight.
Chapter 2
When the hitchhiker had retreated a good distance, Lissa backed the pickup just far enough to reach his wallet. Once more she kept the truck in idle and the door open while she climbed out to scoop up the wallet. The Ford’s temperamental engine spit gusts of gassy exhaust into the air, almost choking her as she studied Evan Henderson’s picture on his California driver’s license.
The photo didn’t do him justice. The camera had failed to capture the full impact of his rugged masculinity or the smile she was sure had knocked the wind out of more than one unsuspecting female.
Swiftly she absorbed the pertinent details. Height, six-one. Weight, one eighty-two. Most of it muscle, if his lean hips and flat belly were anything to go by. Eye color, blue. Birth date…a quick calculation put him at thirty-one to her twenty-seven. He was also an organ donor, which won her grudging approval.
“My business card’s in the side pocket.”
She glanced up sharply to make sure he’d maintained his distance. If he’d budged as much as an inch, she would have jumped into the pickup and left him to broil in the afternoon sun. Although he gave every appearance of being exactly what he claimed—a stranded motorcyclist—Lissa had learned the hard way not to trust her instincts when it came to appearances.
Or men.
She dug into the side pocket to extract his card. When the center fold gapped to reveal a wad of bills, her stomach clenched. Doc had always carried a money roll so thick it would choke a mule. He’d love to whip it out, particularly in front of Lissa’s fans. He’d made sure, too, the diamonds adorning both his pinkies flashed when he peeled off some bills.
They had to live up to her image, Doc would say when Lissa protested the ostentation he insisted on for both her and himself. Her fans loved show-biz glitter and glitz. For Missy Marie, he’d ordered thigh-skimming fringed skirts, gaudy sequined vests that bared more cleavage than they covered, and dramatic stage makeup. For himself, Italian suits and hand-tooled ostrich-skin boots.
Since the handsome, charismatic Doc had plucked Lissa out of the Baptist Children’s Home at the ripe old age of sixteen and propelled her from the relative obscurity of the gospel circuit into a country-and-western superstar, she could hardly argue with his management plan. Although she’d cringed inside at the sequins and truly missed the uplifting nature of gospel, Lissa had trusted him with her career and her finances. The sad fact was, she’d followed his lead like a sheep to the slaughter.
Even worse, she’d tumbled into love with the handsome rat. Or thought she had. Only after he skipped town, leaving her to shoulder the blame for the illegal moneymaking schemes he ran in her name, did she appreciate her close escape. She’d also learned the bitter truth of the cliché…money really was the root of all evil. If anything, the wad Henderson carried around in his billfold made her twice as leery.
Her eyes icy, she tossed him a question. “Do you always carry this much cash with you?”
“I do when I’m traveling.”
“How do I know you didn’t knock off a convenience store or rob some couple parked by the roadside in their RV?�
��
“The money’s mine.”
The answer came easy, but Lissa could see that her wary suspicion was getting to him as much as the heat. His smile lost some of its charm.
“I earned it,” he said as her searching fingers found his business card. “I’m an assistant U.S. district…”
“Attorney,” she read, her voice vibrating with three years of accumulated loathing.
He blinked, clearly taken aback by her venom but recovered quickly. Like all of his kind, Lissa thought on a sneer.
“I take it lawyers don’t figure among your favorite people,” he drawled.
They hadn’t figured at all, until her arrest and trial. Just the memory of those awful days closed Lissa’s throat. She’d taken full responsibility for Doc’s scams. How could she do anything else? He’d used her name to bilk a legion of trusting fans out of sums ranging from as little as five dollars to as much as several thousand. It had taken everything Lissa had left after Doc disappeared with the money he’d stolen, but she’d repaid most of the angry victims. As a result, she’d received probation instead of a jail sentence.
She didn’t blame anyone but herself for her stupidity in trusting Doc. Acknowledging her own culpability didn’t, however, make it any easier to stomach the lawyers who’d roasted her on a judicial spit. They ranked right up there with the media who’d subjected her to such a savage public pillorying.
She had to fight the urge to leave this particular snake out here with his scaly desert brethren. It was a fierce battle. Spinning on one heel, she grabbed the open door of the truck to haul herself up.
“Get in,” she called coldly over her shoulder.
“Thanks.”
Blowing out a long, relieved breath, Evan closed the distance to the pickup. The tang of hot tar bubbling between the cracks in the road stung his nostrils. The flashing scorn in his rescuer’s eyes when she’d read his card stung his pride.
Like all members of the bar, he endured his share of lawyer jokes over the years. A few, he appreciated for their wit. Most, he shrugged off. He gained too much satisfaction from putting the scum he prosecuted behind bars to worry about jokes.
So why the heck did it bother him what this long-legged, tumble-haired blonde thought of his profession? Obviously she’d knocked up against the legal system at some time in her life. You didn’t grow that kind of aversion by watching from the sidelines.
He climbed into the pickup, grimacing when the heat from the sun-baked plastic seat burned through his jeans, and slammed the door.
“We’ve established my identity,” he began as he caught the wallet she tossed him. “Care to tell me…”
She gunned the engine. The pickup shot forward. Evan’s head jerked back, hitting the rear window with a thump.
“…yours?” he finished, his mouth tightening.
She didn’t answer. White-knuckled, her hands gripped the wheel. Her eyes drilled the empty landscape ahead.
Evan had to admit they were incredible eyes. Cinnamon-brown with thick lashes, under delicate, arching brows several shades darker than her sun-streaked tawny hair. She’d pulled the shoulder-length mane back in a loose ponytail, but enough strands had escaped to frame high cheekbones and a short, straight nose lightly dusted with freckles.
But it was her mouth that grabbed Evan’s attention and wouldn’t let go. He guessed her lips were full and luscious when they weren’t pressed into such a tight line. No lipstick, he noted. No makeup at all, in fact. Not that she needed it with that soft, creamy skin tinted to a golden brown by the sun.
She looked vaguely familiar, although he was sure he’d never met her before. He would have remembered her striking face. Not to mention the body that went with it.
He let his glance drop, following the line of her throat to the full, high breasts covered in stretchy blue knit. His eyes lingered on the slice of bare skin between her top and the waistband of her cutoffs. Funny, he’d never thought of the midriff as a particularly erotic portion of the female anatomy, but his rescuer’s dips and hollows and tiny, curled belly button stirred a definite spark of masculine appreciation.
And her legs. God, the legs stretching out below those ragged cutoffs contained more long, smooth curves than Evan had seen in…
“Lissa.”
He yanked his gaze back to her stony profile. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“Not listen. Lissa.” Swiping back her wind-whipped bangs, she fired him an impatient look. “My name is Lissa.”
“Oh. Right.”
She didn’t offer a last name and Evan knew better than to ask for one. The woman might possess the body of a sun-kissed goddess, but that sexy collection of curves came packaged with the personality of a cactus.
“The ditch runs out a little way up ahead,” she said curtly. “I’ll turn around and take you back to the hospital at LaGrange.”
He wasn’t about to impose on her more than he already had. “I don’t need a hospital. Only a phone to call my road service.”
“Those scrapes on your back should be looked at.”
“They’re okay. What’s up ahead?”
“Paradise.”
He hooked a brow. Despite his reputation as a prosecutor who’d slice right to the jugular of a lying witness, he couldn’t tell whether or not her response was a sarcastic reference to the locale.
She caught his questioning look and offered a grudging explanation. “Paradise is what’s left of a mining town. It’s about three miles further south.”
“I didn’t see anyplace by that name on the map.”
“You wouldn’t. It disappeared from most maps a decade or so ago.”
Which was exactly why Lissa had chosen it as her sanctuary. Tiny, dusty, deserted Paradise, set smack in the middle of the hottest stretch of nowhere God had put on the earth. Its isolation provided her the obscurity she craved, the total anonymity she’d needed to lick her wounds.
“Does Paradise have a phone?” her passenger asked. “And somewhere I can get a cold drink?”
“There’s a café of sorts in the gas station. It has a pay phone.”
“Then I don’t need to take you out of your way. You can drop me off in Paradise.”
He smiled when he said it, his lips curving in a way that invited her to share in the joke. Lissa kept her eyes on the road and her mouth set.
She hoped he’d take the hint. She should have known a lawyer couldn’t resist poking and probing.
“Are you from around here?” he asked a moment later.
“I am now.”
She coated the words with ice to discourage further conversation, but the truth of her reply warmed her inside. She’d found peace in the dry, dusty isolation of Paradise. A measure of contentment she hadn’t thought she’d ever achieve again. For three years now, she’d whittled away at her remaining debts by composing and selling songs under a pseudonym. For three years, she’d recovered from the shame of her trial in total obscurity.
Except…
Lately Paradise hasn’t seemed as peaceful or as isolated as when she’d first arrived. A couple of times she’d glimpsed a car parked at the edge of town. Just last week, the mongrel who’d taken up residence under her trailer had set up a furious racket. Recently she’d had the eeriest feeling she was being watched when she picked up the mail and royalty checks Mrs. McNabb forwarded to her in LaGrange. She might have dismissed the feeling as pure nerves if she hadn’t been sure her mail had been tampered with.
The idea that someone might have tracked her down, might be lying in wait for her, made her stomach curl. She’d buried herself in Paradise to escape the hordes of reporters and angry fans she’d let down…not to mention the small army of talk show hosts and con artists who’d descended on her like locusts after the trial. They refused to believe the millions Doc had scammed in her name had disappeared with him. At the time, a stunned Missy Marie couldn’t believe it, either.
Older and far wiser now, Lissa couldn’t imagine how she’d ever b
een so naive.
Suspicion settled hard and cold in her chest. Was this Evan Henderson really who he said he was? Had he been sent by one of the talk show hosts or magazine editors who kept pestering her through the mail forwarded by Mrs. McNabb, trying to entice her back into the public eye? Had he planted himself out here in the middle of the desert as a ruse, intending to intercept her when she’d come cruising back from La Grange?
She aimed a quick glance at her passenger. He was an attorney, if she could believe his business card. An assistant D.A. He swam in the same waters as the legal sharks who’d ripped her apart three years ago, but there was no reason to believe he’d come in search of her. She’d paid her debt to society. Most of it, anyway. A few more hit songs and she could breathe free again.
Evan caught her speculative look and returned it with one of his own. Propping his arm on the open window frame, he stretched out his legs as far as the stick shift and rusted floorboards would allow.
“You look familiar, but I know we’ve never met before. I would have remembered.”
So would she. As much as her experience with Doc had turned her off men in general and smooth-talking charmers in particular, she would have remembered Evan Henderson. After all, she wasn’t dead. Only gut-shot and gun-shy.
“Maybe we bumped into each other on the street somewhere,” he mused when she didn’t answer. “Have you ever been to San Diego?”
Lissa gritted her teeth. The last thing she wanted was to engage in small talk with this too-handsome stranger. As she knew from bitter experience, however, a stony silence provided no protection against a lawyer’s relentless, sometimes savage inquisitions. Besides, she’d only fire his curiosity if she kept silent.
“No.”
“Flagstaff?”
“No.”
He cocked his head. “Not particularly inclined to conversation, Ms…. Lissa?”
“No.”
His blue eyes laughed at her even as they raised little flicks of nerves under her skin.
“Okay. I’ll just sit back and enjoy the view.”
The Harder They Fall (Intimate Moments) Page 2