“How bad?”
“Flash-flood warnings in low-lying areas, damaging winds, maybe some hail.”
Ross creased his forehead and looked outside. Ray Pruitt was leading his horse and Hank Lewis’s to the barn. He watched grizzled old Hank, Brokenstraw’s other cowhand, lock the gate on the corral, then fight a gust of wind for his hat. Three more horses danced skittishly in the packed dirt as they waited to be brought up, their ears pricking and nostrils scenting the air. The sky wasn’t just dark now. Some distance off, it was roiling and bruised, thunderheads stacking on the horizon like fat, dirty cotton balls. It had all happened within the space of ten minutes.
Ross saw to the other horses and helped Jess batten down doors and windows in the outbuildings. Then he ran into the house and directly to the phone in the den. When they were working on the church roof, Scott Jackson had mentioned being away this week for a wedding in New Mexico—which meant his parents were alone at the Lazy J. With Maggie working and Moe laid up, preparing for the storm would fall to Lila alone.
He punched in the number, got a busy signal. He tried again a moment later. still busy.
Jess came inside, shedding his hat. “Who are you calling?”
“Moe and Lila. They might need some help. Scott’s away this week.” Ross looked around. “Where are Casey and the baby?”
“In the kitchen making lunch.”
Ross dialed again. This time he got through.
“Maggie?” Lila’s anxious voice came to him before Ross had a chance to say hello.
“No, Lila, it’s Ross. I just called to see if you and Moe need any help over there with the storm coming.”
“We’re fine. I’m just worried about Maggie. I called the sheriff’s office to tell her to stay in town tonight because of the storm warnings, and Farrell said she wasn’t there. He sent her up to Clearcut a few hours ago to serve a summons, and she’s not back yet.”
Ross got nervous. Clearcut wasn’t even a village; it was a three-home settlement. And it was only twenty miles from town, which meant she should be back. Worse, with flash-flooding a near certainty, low-lying Clearcut was the wrong place to be. Situated between two ridges, the road acted like a trough that caught every drop of water that rolled down the granite slopes—and the tiny creeks nearby were notorious for overflowing their banks and washing away anything in their paths. “Didn’t Farrell radio her when she didn’t come back?”
“He couldn’t. She took her own car. Cy thinks she’s just holed up somewhere waiting for the storm to pass.”
She could be, but then again... “Do you know where she went to serve the summons?”
“The Addams place. Do you know it? They don’t have a phone.”
“Yeah, I know it. I’ll find her, Lila.” Ross hung up to the sound of her thanks, then strode to the mudroom off the kitchen for his rain slicker. He grabbed a second one, just in case.
“Where are you going in this weather?” Casey asked, concerned.
“Maggie’s stuck somewhere between here and Clearcut, and Lila’s worried. I said I’d find her.”
Casey moved quickly. “You might have to ride out the storm there. The weather service said we’re in for a real siege.” She grabbed several cans of soda from the refrigerator and loaded the stack of sandwiches she’d just made into the empty bread bag. She seemed to realize that he wouldn’t wait for her to wrap them individually.
“Thanks, Casey.” Then to Jess, he said, “Don’t give me that look. I’ll be fine. If it gets too bad, there’s some high country nearby.” He bent to kiss Lexi’s little upturned face. “See ya later, alligator.”
She giggled and answered the way he’d taught her. “Affer while, cocca-dile.”
“Be careful,” Jess called, as Ross waved and headed out the back door.
“I will.”
His truck would keep him drier—no doubt about it, Ross thought a few minutes later as he threw the saddle blanket over his horse. But trucks couldn’t climb mountainsides or take short cuts across pastures, and horses could. Besides, in the event of flash flooding, a vehicle could wash away in a heartbeat. Which made him worry again about Maggie’s little Ford.
“Sorry, Buck,” he murmured as he cinched his saddle, then climbed aboard. “Maybe with some luck, we’ll find her before the storm hits, and we can all come back home.”
He estimated that he only had about fifteen minutes before the rains pounded down in earnest. Though it was twenty miles from town, Clearcut was only six or seven miles from Brokenstraw. He would cut through the woods until he reached the Clearcut road, then travel the route Maggie would’ve taken. Pulling the hood of his roomy yellow rain slicker over his hat, Ross put his heels to the buckskin’s ribs and let him run, flat out.
Twenty-five minutes later, through a pounding curtain of rain, Ross rode down from the hills to the blue Ford he’d seen through his binoculars. Why was she just sitting there? The ditches were already filled, and water was running over the uncrowned dirt road. A fierce bolt of lightning splintered the sky.
Inside, the windows were steamed, and he watched as Maggie wiped a spot and peered out. Tucking away the information that she seemed relieved to see him, Ross dismounted, hurried to the passenger side, and jerked open the door.
“Come on!” he shouted over the rain drilling down on the car’s metal roof. “We have to get out of here.”
“No, we’ll be safer inside!” she yelled back. “It’s starting to lightning.”
“It’s also starting to flood, and your car isn’t going to be here for very long. Now come on!” Ross shoved the extra rain poncho at her, then took the blanket she’d been wrapped in and stuffed it under his slicker. She was already soaked to the skin.
“I tried to fix it the way you did!” she shouted as she looped the long strap of her purse over her head and pulled on the poncho. “But there wasn’t enough hose left. Then I started walking back to Clearcut, and the rain just pounded down.” Maggie stepped out of the car and into ankle-deep water. She slammed the door.
The radiator hose had blown again? She hadn’t gotten it fixed?
“And don’t you dare tell me how stupid I am for not getting it fixed!” she shouted. “I’ve already told myself that a hundred times since it happened.”
The rain was deafening against the plastic hood. “We’ll talk about it later. Just get on the horse!”
Climbing on behind her, he pointed the buckskin back the way Maggie had come.
“Wrong way,” she yelled.
“Dry way,” he shouted back. “I know a place.”
Heart pounding, Ross urged the buckskin up onto the high bank alongside the road, and headed him toward the dim gray hill in the distance.
Chapter 9
The rain blew at them in driving sheets, pounding the slippery mountainside with a vengeance. Loose rocks washed away in the running mud, and the horse’s hooves scrambled for solid footing. They’d been traveling for nearly five minutes now, and Ross continued to coax the buckskin into the sparsely timbered foothills, staying as far away from the trees as possible. He swore as hail joined the flashing lightning and thunder.
Pulling Maggie closer, he tried to shield her as best he could. He could feel her trembling beneath the yellow plastic rain poncho, but didn’t know how much of that was fear of the storm and how much was the cooler air that the rain had brought. Though she was partially protected by the hood that hung large and baggy over the top part of her face, she’d been wet when he’d found her, and she was chilled. He wanted to reassure her that they’d be okay, tell her that it was less than half a mile to cover now. But with the lightning, the thunder crashing around them, and leaves and thin branches being torn from trees, his words wouldn’t have been worth much.
A bolt of lightning rent the roiling sky and crashed with resonating fury to earth. Buck reared and wheeled, tried to bolt, and Ross yanked hard on the reins. Thirty yards away, a thick Douglas fir snapped like a matchstick.
Maggi
e whirled around, her face white in the strobing flashes. The smell of ozone laced the air.
Ross pointed forty yards up the mountainside. “You can’t see it from here,” he shouted to her. “But there’s a cave up there. We’ll be okay!”
She nodded, her expression fearful.
“It’s getting too steep for the horse,” he yelled again. “We’ll go the rest of the way on foot!”
Ross slid off the horse’s rump, the wind snatching and pulling at his slicker, the rain determined to wash them down to the road-turned-river below. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the rain was falling at a deadly rate and the streams below them were flooding, the Clearcut road was collecting every ounce of water that ran down from the peaks.
Keeping the reins, Ross snared Maggie’s hand with his free one, and they hurried toward the fold in the mountain, where he knew there was shelter. He’d never in his life seen this much water come down so fast.
“I see the opening!” Maggie cried.
“Go!” He watched her scramble up ahead of him, then hurry under a broad rock shelf that broke the unrelenting rain. A few more feet, and she was inside the mouth of the cave. Ross followed, tugging hard on the reins when Buck would have shied away. The horse slipped on the loose stones, whinnied and fought for purchase, then finally obeyed.
After the petting sound of the rain on his hood, it was eerily quiet inside. It was also a good fifteen degrees cooler.
Ross met Maggie’s relieved eyes as they stood in the dim afternoon light just inside the cave.
“That wasn’t f-fun,” she said, quaking.
“No, it wasn’t.” Ross imagined that, to Maggie, the cave had looked relatively small from the outside—the craggy opening only twelve feet wide, the height, fifteen feet at the most. But inside, it opened to a spacious, cornucopia-shaped room. Not as large as he remembered, Ross thought, but plenty big enough for a full-size horse and two wet adults. There was a smaller exit in the back where the cave narrowed and tapered downward, and it provided the cross-ventilation that kept the cavern from smelling dank and musty.
Ross looked to his right and was relieved to see the bench seat he and friends had built fifteen years ago—a notched-out log stretched across two boulders. He was more relieved to see the stone fire ring with the remains of a recent campfire. The cave was still being used, which meant there could be a wood stash inside.
“How do you know this p-place?” Maggie asked, shivering and hugging herself.
Ross shed his hood and hat, then unsnapped the raincoat and pulled out the blanket he’d brought from the car. It was his blanket, he suddenly realized—the same one Maggie had planned to return on the night she’d come to the hot spring. He laid his raincoat on the ground, wet side down, tossed his Stetson on top of it, and held on to the thick Indian blanket. It was a little damp on one side where she’d wrapped it around herself in the car, but it was a lot better than her drenched clothes.
“When I was a kid, a bunch of us hung out in this area. We used to fish those streams below, then later come up here to party.” He nodded at the half-charred log in the ring. “Looks like someone else has claimed it in the meantime.”
“I th-thought you partied at the hot spring.”
Ross frowned, thinking that back then they’d partied anywhere it was convenient. “Not always... You’re freezing. Take off your wet things.”
“That would be everything,” she said, trying to grin. “Skin included.”
With a sympathetic smile, he shook out the blanket. “I think you can leave the skin on.” Maggie eyed him warily as he held out the Indian blanket dressing-screen fashion. Ross softened his voice. “Come on. I won’t look, and I won’t take advantage of the situation. You can get hypothermia at any time of the year. Once you lose your body heat, you can’t get it back if you’re wet. When you’re ready, grab the corners of the blanket and wrap it around yourself.”
“I can’t go home in a blanket.”
“I know that. We’ll work something out.”
Chills wracked her as Maggie fumbled with the wet, knotted tie on the poncho, managed to free it, and then article by article peeled off her soaked uniform and tossed it on his raincoat. She hesitated uncertainly when she was standing there in nothing but a lacy white bra and thin bikini panties. Then she told herself that she had to trust him, and took off her underwear, too.
Finally wrapped in his blanket, she watched as Ross unloaded his saddlebags, unsaddled his horse, and wiped Buck down with the coarse saddle blanket. Then he grabbed a flashlight from his small stack of supplies, shone the broad beam back into the darkness, and led his horse several yards into the rear of the cave. Maggie had heard the echoing splash of water inside, but she was still surprised when she heard the horse drinking.
A few minutes later Ross returned, clicked off the flashlight, and tethered his horse to a boulder some distance away. “We’ve got a small pond in the back where the rain’s dripping in, but it tapers downward so we’ll stay dry.” He lugged his saddle over to the cave’s entrance. Then he plopped it close to the wall and dragged his raincoat in front of it. “Go ahead and sit. I’ll start a fire. I saw some dry wood in the back.” He was already retracing his steps, the flashlight illuminating his path again.
Maggie went to his saddle and sat, then tucked the thick flannel around her freezing feet, pulled her wet braid out of the blanket, and snuggled deeper into it.
When he came back the second time, he was carrying several sturdy branches that had apparently been stored for such an emergency—or for the next party, Maggie thought more realistically. Soon, kindling was teepeed around the charred log, and they had a small fire at the mouth of the cave. In another ten minutes, the log had caught, and Ross was looping his lariat over a jagged outcropping about five feet off the floor and tying it to his saddle horn. He was all grace and efficient movement.
When he bent to pick up her clothes—or more precisely, the bra and bikini that were on top of the pile—Maggie pushed quickly to her feet.
“Thank you, but I can take care of those.”
Ross straightened, amused by her modesty. “Okay,” he said, grinning. “You hang up your things—spread them out nice and neat so they dry quickly—and I’ll hold the folds of your blanket shut.”
Maggie sat back down and let him hang her underwear.
Outside the freak storm raged and howled; inside, the fire was beginning to warm and light their little refuge. Even though Ross had worn a raincoat the entire time, it had fanned out behind him as he rode, covering the saddle and saddle blanket. His shirt was dry, but his jeans were wet from crotch to ankle. Now he stood near the fire, drying them as best he could without taking them off.
“As soon as the storm lets up a little, I’ll go out and find some more wood,” he said, then nodded at the fire. “That should take care of drying your things, but we’ll need the light when night falls.”
When night falls? “We aren’t going back until tomorrow?”
“Can’t,” Ross said soberly. “Even if the rain stops, it’ll be impossible to get out in the darkness.”
Maggie nodded. Logically, she’d known that all along. It was the prospect of their spending the night together that had made her ask the question—and hope for a different answer. Not surprisingly, a heady chemistry had crept into the cave as it warmed—as she warmed—and those male-female undercurrents were making them both entirely too conscious of her nudity beneath the blanket. Too aware of the intimacy of their circumstances.
Almost as though he could read her thoughts, Ross moved restlessly in front of the fire, then checked his wristwatch. “Casey sent sandwiches and cans of soda—ginger ale and cola, I think. Are you hungry? It’s nearly seven o’clock.”
“Sandwiches sound wonderful,” she answered, not really hungry but realizing that eating would give them something to focus on besides each other. She was fast discovering that, once recognized, awareness was a very difficult thing to ignore.
&
nbsp; The sandwiches were ham and cheese, and they were delicious. The conversation was strained because they had to work so hard to maintain it.
Ross talked about his teenage outings in the area, rambling about fishing for cutthroat trout and, on one occasion, tipping over a friend’s canoe. Maggie acknowledged that for someone who’d grown up in Montana, she’d done very few of the things most Montanans took for granted. She’d never been in a canoe, never seen a rodeo before two weeks ago, never held a fishing pole in her hands.
When their food and drinks were gone and they’d run out of childhood adventures to relate, that smothering feeling of being alone descended again, and Ross got up to reposition her clothes for the twentieth time.
Domestic touches from the town hellion? Maggie wondered. Or merely a man keeping his hands busy with incidentals to avoid doing other things?
“I would never have imagined you doing anything like this,” she said quietly.
“What’s that?”
“Fussing with laundry.”
“Oh, I’m just full of surprises.” Though his smile tried to conceal it, Ross’s expression reflected his growing uneasiness as he took her dry underwear from the line and added the horse’s blanket. “I used to do laundry all the time. Until Casey moved in, Jess and I did all the housekeeping chores. Of course, I was a pain in the butt back then, and Saint Jess ended up doing the lion’s share of the work.”
“I thought you got along with your brother.”
“I do.” Ross frowned. “Actually, I don’t know why I called him that just now. I used to all the time.”
“Because he did most of the housework?”
“Because he always did the right thing—nine times out of ten, anyway.”
Maggie had changed seats during “supper”—moved from the saddle to the peeled log-and-stone bench that Ross had placed before a similar campfire years ago. Ross took a seat beside her, then held out her underwear. His disturbing gaze clung to hers.
Self-consciously, Maggie reached through the fold in her blanket to take them. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Accidental Hero Page 13