by Lori Wilde
“Rex,” Kelvin barked to his personal assistant. “Go over to Audie’s, have him open the hardware store up for you, get a twenty-five-foot ladder, and bring it out to the Valentine billboard.”
There was a pause from Kelvin as Rex responded.
“I don’t care if you stayed up ’til three a.m. playing video games with your geeky online buddies. Just do it.”
With a savage slash of his thumb on the keypad, Kelvin hung up and muttered under his breath, “I’m surrounded by morons.”
Brody tried not to take offense at the comment. Kelvin liked his drama as much as he liked ordering people around.
Fifteen minutes later, Rex showed up with a collapsible yellow ladder roped to his pickup truck. He was barely twenty-five, redheaded as rhubarb, and had a voice deep as Barry White’s, with an Adam’s apple that protruded like a submarine ready to break the surface. Brody often wondered if the prominent Adam’s apple had anything to do with the kid’s smooth, dark, ebony voice.
Up on the billboard, Rachael was almost finished with the mouth. She had slashes of angry black paint smeared across the front of her wedding gown. While waiting on Rex to show up with the ladder, Kelvin had spent the time trying to convince her to come down, but she was a zealot on a mission and she wouldn’t even talk to him.
“I want her arrested,” Kelvin snapped. “I’m pressing charges.”
“You might want to reconsider that,” Brody advised. “Since the election is just a little more than three months away and Giada Vito is gaining favor in the polls.”
The polls being the gossip at Higgy’s Diner. He knew the mayor was grandstanding. For the first time in Kelvin’s three-term stint, he was running opposed. Giada Vito had moved to Valentine from Italy and she’d gotten her American citizenship as soon as the law allowed. She was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, the principal of Valentine High, drove a vintage Fiat, and didn’t mince her words. Especially when it came to the topic of Valentine’s favored son, Kelvin P. Wentworth IV.
“Hey, you leave the legal and political machinations to me. You just do your job,” said Kelvin.
Brody blew out his breath and went to help Rex untie the ladder. What he wanted to do was tell Kelvin to shove it. But the truth was the woman needed to come down before she got hurt. More than likely, the wooden billboard decking was riddled with termites.
He and Rex got the ladder loose and carried it over to prop it against the back of the billboard. It extended just long enough to reach the ladder rungs that were attached to the billboard itself.
Kelvin gave Brody a pointed look. “Up you go.”
Brody ignored him. “Rachael, we’ve got a ladder in place. You need to come down now.”
“Don’t ask her, tell her,” Kelvin hissed to Brody, then said to Rachael, “Missy, get your ass down here this instant.”
“Get bent,” Rachael sang out.
“That was effective,” Brody muttered.
Rex snorted back a laugh. Kelvin shot him a withering glance and then raised his eyebrows at Brody and jerked his head toward the billboard. “You’re the sheriff. Do your job.”
Brody looked up at the ladder and then tried his best not to glance down at his leg. He didn’t want to show the slightest sign of weakness, especially in front of Kelvin. But while his Power Knee was pretty well the most awesome thing that had happened to him since his rehabilitation, he’d never tested it by climbing a ladder, particularly a thin, wobbly, collapsible one.
Shit. If he fell off, it was going to hurt. He might even break something.
Kelvin was staring expectantly, arms crossed over his bearish chest, the sleeves of his seersucker suit straining against his bulky forearms. The door to the Cadillac was still hanging open and from the radio Merle Haggard had given it up to Tammy Wynette, who was beseeching women to stand by their man.
Brody was the sheriff. This was his job. And he never shirked his duty, even when it was the last thing on earth he wanted to do. Gritting his teeth, he gathered his courage, wrapped both hands around the ladder just above his head, and planted his prosthetic leg on the bottom rung.
His gut squeezed.
Come on, you can do this.
He attacked the project the same way he’d attacked physical therapy, going at it with dogged determination to walk again, to come home, if not whole, at least proud to be a man. Of course Belinda had shattered all that.
Don’t think about Belinda. Get up the ladder. Get the girl down.
He placed his good leg on the second rung.
The ladder trembled under his weight.
Brody swallowed back the fear and pulled his prosthesis up the next step. Hands clinging tightly to the ladder above him, he raised his head and counted the steps.
Twenty-five of them on the ladder and seventeen on the back of the billboard.
Three down, thirty-nine left to go.
He remembered an old movie called The Thirty-Nine Steps. Suddenly, those three words held a weighted significance. It wasn’t just thirty-nine more steps. It was also forty-two more back down with Rachael Henderson in tow.
Better get climbing.
Thirty-eight steps.
Thirty-seven.
Thirty-six.
The higher he went, the more the ladder quivered.
Halfway up vertigo took solid hold of him. He’d never had a fear of heights before, but now, staring down at Kelvin and Rex, who were staring up at him, Brody’s head swam and his stomach pitched. He bit his bottom lip, closed his eyes, and took another step up.
In the quiet of the higher air, he could hear the soft whispery sound of his computerized leg working as he took another step. Kelvin’s country music sounded tinny and far away. With his eyes closed and his hands skimming over the cool aluminum ladder, he could also hear the sound of brushstrokes growing faster and more frantic the closer he came to the bottom of the billboard.
Rachael was still furiously painting, trying to get in as many licks as she could.
When Brody finally reached the top of the first ladder, he opened his eyes.
“You’re doing great,” Kelvin called up to him. “Keep going. You’re almost there.”
Yeah, almost there. This was the hardest part of all, covering the gap between the ladder from Audie’s Hardware and the thin metal footholds welded to the back of the billboard.
He took a deep breath. He had to stretch to reach the bottom step. He grabbed hold of it with both hands, and took his Power Knee off the aluminum ladder.
For a moment, he hung there, twenty-five feet off the ground, fighting gravity and the bile rising in his throat, wondering why he hadn’t told Kelvin to go straight to hell. Wondering why he hadn’t just called the volunteer fire department to come and get Rachael down.
It was a matter of pride and he knew it. Stupid, egotistical pride. He’d wanted to prove he could handle anything that came with the job. Wanted to show the town he’d earned their vote. That he hadn’t just stumbled into the office because he was an injured war hero.
Pride goes before a fall, his Gramma Carlton used to say. Now, for the first time, he fully understood what she meant.
Arms trembling with the effort, he dragged himself up with his biceps, his real leg tiptoed on the collapsible ladder, his bionic leg searching blindly for the rung.
Just when he thought he wouldn’t be able to hold on a second longer, he found the toehold and then brought his good leg up against the billboard ladder to join the bionic one.
He’d made it.
Brody clung there, breathing hard, thanking God for letting him get this far and wondering just how in the hell he was going to get back down without killing them both, when he heard the soft sounds of muffled female sobs.
Rachael was crying.
The hero in him forgot that his limbs were quivering, forgot that he was forty feet in the air, forgot that somehow he was going to have to get back down. The only thing in his mind was the woman.
Was she all right?
She sat, knees drawn to her chest, head down, looking completely incongruous in that wedding dress smeared with black paint and the butterfly wedding veil floating around her head. Miraculously, the veil seemed to have escaped the paint.
“You okay?”
She raised her head. “Of course I’m not okay.”
Up close, he saw tear tracks had run a gully through the makeup on her cheeks and mascara had pooled underneath her eyes. She looked like a quarrelsome raccoon caught in a coyote trap, all piss and vinegar, but visibly hurting.
He had the strangest, and most uncharacteristic, urge to pull her into his arms, hold her to his chest, kiss the top of her head the way he did his six-year-old niece, Maisy, and tell her everything was going to be all right.
Mentally, he stomped the impulse. He didn’t need any damsel-in-distress hassle.
The expression in her eyes told him anger had propelled her up here, but now, her rage spent, she was afraid to come back down. That fear he understood loud and clear.
Calmly, he held out a hand to her. “Rachael, it’s time to go.”
“I thought I’d feel better,” she said in a despondent little voice as she stared at his outstretched hand. “I don’t feel better. I was supposed to feel better. That was the plan. Why don’t I feel better?”
“Destruction rarely makes you feel good.” His missing leg gave a twinge. “Come on, give me your hand and let’s get back on the ground.”
“You look familiar. Are you married?” she asked.
He opened his mouth to answer, but she didn’t give him a chance before launching into a fast-paced monologue. “I hope you’re married, because if you’re not married, you need to get someone else to help me down from here.”
“Huh?” Had the sun baked her brain or had getting stood up at the altar made her crazy?
“If you’re not married, then this is a cute meet. I’m a sucker for meeting cute.”
“Huh?” he said again.
“My first fiancé?” she chattered, her glossolalia revealing her emotional distress. “I met Robert in a hot-air balloon. He was the pilot. I wanted a romantic adventure. The balloon hung up in a pecan tree and the fire department had to rescue us. It was terribly cute.”
“Sounds like it,” he said, simply to appease her. Mentally, he was planning their trip off the billboard.
“And Trace? I met him when he came to the kindergarten class where I taught. On career day. He was tossing a football around as he gave his speech. He lost control of it and accidentally beaned me in the head. He literally knocked me off my feet. He caught me just before I hit the ground and there I was, trapped in his big strong arms, staring up into his big blue eyes. I just melted. So you see I succumb to the cute meet. I’ve got to break the cycle and these romantic notions I have about love and marriage and dating and men. But I can’t do it if I go around meeting cute. There’s no way I can let you rescue me if you’re not married.”
The woman, Brody decided, was officially bonkers.
“Sorry.” He shrugged. “I’m divorced.”
She grimaced. “Oh, no.”
“But this isn’t a cute meet.”
She glanced over at the fiberglass billboard lips, then peered down at her paint-spotted wedding dress and finally drilled him with almond-shaped green eyes, the only exotic thing about her.
The rest of her was round and smooth and welcoming, from her cherubic cheeks to her petite curves to the full bow of her supple pink mouth. She was as soft-focus as a Monet. Just looking at her made him think of springtime and flowers and fuzzy baby chicks.
Except for those disconcerting bedroom eyes. They called up unwanted X-rated images in his mind.
“I dunno,” she said, “this seems dangerously cute to me.”
“It can’t be a cute meet,” he explained, struggling to follow her disjointed train of thought, “because we’ve already met.”
She tilted her head. “We have?”
“Yep.”
“I thought you looked familiar.”
“So no cute meet. Now give me your hand.”
Reluctantly, she placed her hand in his. “Where did we meet?”
“Right here in Valentine.” He spoke with a soothing voice. Her hand was warm and damp with perspiration. He drew her toward him.
She didn’t resist. She was tired and emotionally exhausted.
“That’s it,” he coaxed.
“You do look familiar.”
“Watch your head,” he said as he led her underneath the billboard, toward the ladder.
She paused at the ladder and stared at the ground. “It’s a long way down.”
Tell me about it.
“I’m here, I’ll go first. I’ll be there to catch you if you lose your balance.”
“Will you keep your hand on my waist? To steady me?”
“Sure,” he promised recklessly, placing chivalry over common sense.
He started down the ladder ahead of her, found secure footing, wrapped his left hand around the rung, and reached up to hold on to her waist with his right hand as she started down.
Touching her brought an unexpected knot of emotion to his chest. Half desire, half tenderness, he didn’t know what to call it, but he knew one thing. The feeling was damned dangerous.
“I’m scared,” she whimpered.
“You’re doing great.” He guided her down until her sweet little rump was directly in his face. Any other time he would have enjoyed this position, but not under these circumstances.
“I’m going down another couple of steps,” he explained. “I’m going to have to let go of you for a minute, so hold on tight.”
The long train of her wedding veil floated in the air between them, a gauzy pain in the ass. In order to see where he was going, he had to keep batting it back. He took up his position several rungs below her and called to her to come down. As he’d promised, he put a hand at her waist to guide her.
They went on like that, painstaking step by painstaking step, until they were past the gap, off the billboard, and onto the collapsible aluminum ladder. In that regard, coming down was much easier than going up.
“You’re certain I already know you?” she asked. “Because seriously, this has all the makings of a meet cute.”
“You know me.”
“How?”
“I’m from Valentine, just like you. Moved away, came back,” he said.
Only four feet off the ground now. His legs felt flimsy as spindly garden sprouts.
“Oh my gosh,” she gasped and whipped her head around quickly.
Too quickly.
Somehow, in the breeze and the movement, the infernal wedding veil wrapped around his prosthetic leg. He tried to kick it off but the material clung stubbornly.
“I know who you are,” she said and then right there on the ladder, she turned around to glare at him. “You’re Brody Carlton.”
He didn’t have a chance to answer. The ladder swayed and the veil snatched his leg out from under him.
He lost his balance.
The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back on the ground, and Rachael Henderson, his one-time next-door-neighbor-turned-jilted-psycho-bride, was on top of him. They were both breathing hard and trembling.
Her eyes locked on his.
His eyes locked on her lips.
Brody should have been thinking about his leg. He was surprised he wasn’t thinking about his leg. What he was thinking about was the fact that he was being straddled by a woman in a wedding dress and it was the closest he’d come to having sex in over two years.
“You! You’re the one.”
“The one?” he asked.
“You’re the root cause of all my problems,” she exclaimed, fire in her eyes, at the same time Brody found himself thinking, Where have you been al
l my life?
But that was not what he said.
What he said was, “Rachael Renee Henderson, you have the right to remain silent…”
THE DISH
Where authors give you the inside scoop!
From the desk of Paula Quinn
Dear Reader,
I’m so excited to tell you about my latest in the Children of the Mist series, CONQUERED BY A HIGHLANDER. I loved introducing you to Colin MacGregor in Ravished by a Highlander and then meeting up with him again in Tamed by a Highlander, but finally the youngest, battle-hungry MacGregor gets his own story. And let me tell you all, I enjoyed every page, every word.
Colin wasn’t a difficult hero to write. There were no mysteries complicating his character, no ghosts or regrets haunting him from his past. He was born with a passion to fight and to conquer. Nothing more. Nothing less. He was easy to write. He was a badass in Ravished and he’s a hardass now. My dilemma was what kind of woman would it take to win him? The painted birds fluttering about the many courts he’s visited barely held his attention. A warrior wouldn’t suit him any better than a wallflower would. I knew early on that the Lady who tried to take hold of this soldier’s heart had to possess the innate strength to face her fiercest foe… and the tenderness to recognize something more than a fighter in Colin’s confident gaze.
I found Gillian Dearly hidden away in the turrets of a castle overlooking the sea, her fingers busy strumming melodies on her beloved lute while her thoughts carried her to places far beyond her prison walls. She wasn’t waiting for a hero, deciding years ago that she would rescue herself. She was perfect for Colin. She also possessed one other thing, a weapon so powerful, even Colin found himself at the mercy of it.
A three-year-old little boy named Edmund.
Like Colin, I didn’t intend for Edmund Dearly or his mother to change the path of my story, but they brought out something in the warrior—whom I thought I knew so well—something warm and wonderful and infinitely sexier than any swagger. They brought out the man.
For me, nothing I’ve written before this book exemplifies the essence of a true hero more than watching Colin fall in love with Gillian and with her child. Not many things are more valiant than a battle-hardened warrior who puts down his practice sword so he can take a kid fishing or save him from bedtime monsters… except maybe a mother who defiantly goes into battle each day in order to give her child a better life. Gillian Dearly was Edmund’s hero and she quickly became mine. How could a man like Colin not fall in love with her?