Before she had time to ponder the question, he was hugging her, wrapping her in his all-masculine scent and strength.
And his touch wasn’t awkward or inappropriate, but comforting and warm. And then, just as unexpectedly as the sensations had come, they were gone, and Jed was waving and walking out the door. Thanking her again. Smiling again. Alerting Annie to the undeniable fact that she was very much in trouble with a man and his adorable children—all over again.
HOURS LATER, Annie woke to a ringing phone.
It took a few minutes of fumbling in the dark to realize she’d fallen asleep on Jed’s sofa instead of her own. Another few minutes to actually find the phone—or not.
Somewhere, an answering machine clicked on.
Hey—congratulations! You’ve reached Jed. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.
Annie grinned.
During the time they’d spent together, Jed hadn’t shown any signs of having a sense of humor. The notion that he did made him that much more appealing.
“Jed,” a woman’s voice said. “Good grief, it’s after midnight out there. Where are you? Are my babies okay?”
Patti.
Hoping she’d find a phone attached to the machine recording the woman’s voice, Annie hustled up the stairs.
“You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had finding a phone. Anyway, I’m all right, but—”
By the time Annie got to the top of the stairs, dashed across the short hall and into a master bedroom that was the mirror image of hers, it sounded as if the woman had been cut off.
Annie found the phone on a nightstand beside a badly rumpled king-size bed.
She answered but was too late. The dial tone buzzed in her ear.
She turned on a lamp and checked the phone for caller ID, but the cordless model didn’t have an ID window. She tried *69, but got an error message.
Great.
If the woman on the phone had been Patti, it seemed that she either didn’t want to be found or was having technical difficulties.
Annie sat on the edge of the bed.
From talking to Jed, she got the impression that he thought his sister had suffered some kind of emotional breakdown, then taken off on a joyride. But the woman on the phone sounded weary—not at all like she was off having fun. Her voice was full of concern—quite the opposite of a woman who’d abandoned three newborns with her bachelor brother. A brother who obviously didn’t know the first thing about caring for infants.
Waaaaaaa huh waaaaaaa!
Maybe it was time to quit playing detective and start playing temporary mom.
She smoothed the down-filled pillow on the bed and breathed in the room’s heady male scent.
Oh, boy.
Annie had the feeling she’d entered a definite danger zone.
Bedrooms were highly personal places.
They told a lot about people.
But since she was wasn’t interested in dating just yet, Annie didn’t want to know how sumptuous Jed’s navy-blue sheets felt against her skin. Or how they smelled of fabric softener and just a touch of his aftershave that had already made her heart race.
She especially didn’t want to see the really great framed print over his bed. Gauguin’s And the Gold of Their Bodies.
She’d always loved that painting.
Interesting that Jed did, too.
The full-figured island women evoked paradise and pleasure.
Waaa huh!
On her way out of the room, Annie trailed her fingertips along the cool, dust-free surface of an ornate antique dresser.
She loved antiques.
The stories behind them.
Where had this piece come from? Was it a family heirloom? Or something Jed picked up at auction? Did he like auctions? Annie did. Maybe they could go together some time? Share a Frito-Lay chili pie during—
Waaaaaaaaahh!
Casting one last curious look around the room, Annie hustled downstairs.
She’d scooped Pia out of her carrier and was feeling her diaper for thickness when the phone rang.
If it was Patti, she wasn’t missing her.
Running up the steps, Annie cursed herself for not bringing the cordless phone downstairs.
“Hello?” she said, out of breath. By the glow of the lamp she’d forgotten to turn off, she stared into the blue eyes of a grinning, wide-awake baby.
“Hey, Annie. Good—you found the phone.” There went that curious flip-flopping in her stomach. Could it be because Jed sounded as hot over the phone as he did in person? No. And to prove it, she changed her focus to plucking Pia’s pink Velcro bow off her pajama sleeve where it was once again stuck to return it to her hair.
“Were you hiding it?” she asked.
“What?”
“The phone.”
“Nah, I keep forgetting to move it. Lightning fried the one downstairs.”
“Did you serve it with ketchup or tartar sauce?”
He groaned. “That stank.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”
“You’re forgiven. So? Everything going okay?”
“Sure. Pia’s up, but the boys are still sleeping. Oh—and your sister called.”
“You didn’t get to talk to her?”
“It took me forever to find the phone, and by the time I did, she’d been cut off.”
A long sigh came over the line.
Annie asked, “Want me to play the message for you?”
“Sure.”
She pressed the red button beside a blinking light, then held the phone to the speaker. When the woman’s voice abruptly ended, she said, “Well? That tell you anything?”
“Yep. Tells me to call off the cops and move on to Plan B.”
“What’s that?”
“Going to get her.”
“But you don’t know where she is.”
“Oh, yes, I do.”
Annie shifted the cooing baby to her other arm. “Care to let me in on the secret?”
Chapter Three
In the specially designated cell phone waiting area, Patti held an ancient-model cell phone over her head, waving it back and forth in the hope of finding a signal. The man she’d borrowed it from, Clive Bentwiggins of Omaha, was visiting his mother. Clive was at least ninety-eight and on oxygen. The hissing from his portable tank sounded like wind shushing through the Grand Canyon.
“Get one yet?” Clive asked, cradling a cup of black coffee.
Edging toward the Coke machine, holding up her phone arm, Patricia shook her head. “I had one over by that fake ficus, but I—oh, here. Right here.” Yes. Between the Coke machine and a corral of IV poles, the light indicating a signal glowed an intense green.
“Dial fast,” Clive said. “Don’t want you getting cut off again.”
She cast her phone benefactor a smile and dialed Jed’s number. It rang three times before the answering machine picked up. After the beep, she said, “Jed? Jed, honey, are you there? Jed!” She heard static on the line. Crap. She inched closer to the IV poles, but the green light disappeared.
Wheeling his hissing tank behind him, Clive walked toward her. “Losing it again?”
Patti nodded, tears welling in her eyes.
Where could they be?
Something had to be wrong. It was too late for Jed not to answer his phone.
He didn’t have a woman over, did he?
She should’ve known better than to leave her babies with him.
The green light came back on, but all she could hear was the hissing from Clive’s tank.
Covering the phone’s mouthpiece, she said, “Would you mind scooting your tank just a little bit that way? I’m having a hard time—” Too late. The signal was gone.
Patricia sighed.
Clive patted her back. “I raised six kids and twenty-three grandbabies. Trust me, your flock is fine. It’s that busted-up husband of yours you need to worry about.”
“HELLO?” Annie said, hands on her hips. “Care to fin
ally let me in on your big secret?”
Jed had been home from his twenty-four-hour shift for five minutes. In those five minutes, he’d replayed Patti’s latest message ten times. Now he definitely knew where his sister had gone.
He shot into action, barreling into the kitchen. He’d take everything Patti left with him. There were only a few cans of formula and three or four diapers, but that should at least get him over the Colorado state line. In Denver, he’d grab whatever else he needed.
“Jed?” Annie’s sweet voice jolted him from his todo list.
Arms laden with his few requisite supplies, Jed looked up on his way back to the living room. “Yeah?”
“What are you doing?”
“Packing.”
Annie’s eyes narrowed as she kissed the top of Pia’s head. “Please tell me you’re not planning to load up these sweet, sleepy babies and trek them wherever you think your sister may be.”
“Hey,” he said from the living room, dumping the baby grub into the diaper bag, “I can see why you might think I’m crazy to go traipsing blindly across the country. But for your information, I happen to know exactly where Patti is.”
“Oh, you do?” She followed him into the living room and gently set Pia on a fuzzy pink blanket on the floor. “Mind telling me how you worked it out, Sherlock?”
“Love to, Watson.” He grinned. “You like those old movies, too?”
Frowning, she said, “I prefer the books.”
“La-di-da.”
She stuck out her tongue. “Just get to the part where you unravel the mystery.”
“Simple deduction.” He snatched the diaper wipes from the coffee table. “Remember all that hissing and shushing on the answering machine message?”
“Yeah…” she said, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. “Can’t wait to hear where this leads.”
“She’s at our family cabin just outside Fairplay, Colorado.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Patti hardly said two words on that message, and from that you’ve deduced she’s holed up in some cabin?”
Snatching a few teething toys—plastic key rings and a clear plastic thingamajig with fish floating around inside—Jed said, “You know babies, right? Well, I know my sister. Ever since having the triplets, she’s had a rough time of it.”
“Duh.”
He shot his smart-mouthed neighbor a look.
She shot him one back.
Try as he might to stay on topic, Jed couldn’t help thinking that he liked this feisty side of her. As soon as he got things settled, he just might tackle a whole new case—figuring out how to take Annie’s PG-13 rating to a wicked-fun R!
He shook his head to clear it of the sweet sin threatening to muck up the next task on his road-trip agenda.
“Well?” she asked. “You’re zero-and-one. Gonna go for zero-and-two?”
Jed glanced up as he stuffed a blue blanket into his now-bulging duffel bag. “Anyone ever tell you that for having such a fine package, you sure have a sassy mouth?”
Annie’s face reddened and she looked away.
Hmm…Apparently he’d just pulled off his first TKO. “For your information, Little Miss Sassy Pants, all that hissing on the answering machine wasn’t hissing, but wind. Wind whistling through the pines and firs outside our family cabin to be specific. Cell-phone service is touchy up there, which explains why she constantly gets cut off.”
As much as Annie hated to admit it, Jed’s warped logic made perfect sense.
“Patti loves the place. When our folks were alive, we spent every summer up there for as long as I can remember. After they died, Patti and I went there as often as we could. Here in town, she was all about keeping up appearances. I guess she felt she had to put on this cool act. But up at the cabin, she was herself. A sweet kid who allowed herself to have fun.”
“But Jed—” Annie crossed the small space cluttered with stuffed animals to touch his arm “—she’s not a kid anymore. She’s a grown woman with a family of her own. If your assumptions are true—that she ran off to figure out her life—maybe what she doesn’t need is her big brother charging in for a needless rescue. Maybe she needs time to get her head on straight. I mean, that’s essentially why I moved here. I miss my grandmother something fierce, but it was time for me to grow up. To face a few issues on my own. I’m betting Patti feels the same.”
Annie looked down to see that she was still touching him, and she marveled not only at his physical strength—tightly corded and radiating heat beneath her fingers—but at his sheer mental will.
“Look,” he said, “I realize that I probably seem a little psycho right about now.”
“A little,” Annie said with a smile.
He didn’t return her smile.
Instead, he dropped the baby bag and sat hard on the bottom step. He cupped his forehead. “There are some things about me. My past. Patti’s. There’s no time to rehash it all now. You just need to know that I have to get up there. See for myself that she’s all right.”
“Okay.” Her tone softer, Annie nudged him aside to sit next to him.
Big mistake.
The entire right half of her body hummed. All the way from her shoulder to her thigh to her bare ankle that almost touched Jed’s bare calf. The ankle felt a twitchy, electrical buzz of attraction that she—and her ankle—had never come close to feeling before.
This was wrong.
Here she was, trying to comfort her distraught neighbor and all she could think of was what it might feel like to graze her smooth-shaven legs against the coarse hairs on his.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Um—” She swallowed hard. “Where was I?”
“How should I know?”
“Right. That’s it.” Before plopping down beside him, she’d been about to explain how he could find out his sister was safe without driving hundreds of miles. “There’s a very simple way you can not only reassure yourself that Patti’s okay, but skip a lo-o-ong road trip with three babies. All you need to do is—”
“I know—call. But the cabin doesn’t have a phone, and I already tried her cell. Big surprise, it’s not working. Which leaves me calling my friend Ditch, who’s the local sheriff.”
“Ditch?” She raised her eyebrows.
“It’s a long story. Anyway, I tried calling Ditch both at home and at work, and got nothing but answering machines. I left messages for him to call me back ASAP. The town has a hardware store, gas station and a grocery, so I called those, too. Nobody’s seen her, but that doesn’t mean she’s not there. I have to talk to her and see for myself that she’s okay.”
“I’ll tell you who’s not gonna be okay after being cooped up with three screaming babies all the way to Colorado.”
Jed shook his head. “Babies supposedly like cars, don’t they? I mean, I took ’em to the zoo yesterday—or was that the day before?” He rubbed his forehead. “See how messed up Patti’s got me? I don’t even know what day it is.”
“All the more reason for you to go upstairs and take a nap. You’re in no condition to make that drive. You’ve been up for days. Now, if you could fly or take a train or if someone else could help you, then—”
“That’s it!” he said, turning around on the steps to face her.
Annie crinkled her nose. “What?”
“Someone to help. And I know just the person.”
Though Jed looked straight at her, Annie glanced over his shoulder at the pasta-colored wall. A nice sage-green would be a vast improvement.
She gasped when he put his fingers beneath her chin, dragging her gaze right back to him. “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Um…” She licked her lips. Maybe that wall could be painted celadon. Or pumpkin. Any color that took her mind off Jed’s arresting eyes. “If that special someone is me,” she said, “I have a very full schedule. I start my new job a week from Monday. So, this week, I have tons of painting to do, ceiling scraping and—”
“I’
ll pay you,” he interrupted. “Name your price. As long as I have that amount in savings, it’s yours.”
She stared down at her lap where she clutched her knees with a white-knuckled grip. “This isn’t about money, Jed.”
It was about this crazy yearning she had at the thought of sitting beside him in the intimate confines of a car for the next few days. It was about falling for him—from his laugh to his smile to the fact that he honestly believed four diapers and a few cans of formula were going to get him and three babies all the way to Colorado.
He hadn’t even packed a can opener!
He needed her, and what scared her even more was that she might very well need him. But she couldn’t need him, because just as soon as this crazy road trip was over, his need for a babysitter would vanish, and her need for companionship would be that much stronger.
Her head and heart that much more messed up.
“Annie?” he said softly. “Please?”
She used the wall for leverage to push herself up from the stairs. She had to get away from Jed, from his citrusy smell and his strength and, worse yet, his vulnerability.
Friends told her she worried way too much about other folks’ problems and not enough about her own.
Well, this was one time she needed to listen to their advice. Her friends were right. Jed and his adorable crew were trouble with a capital T.
She stood in front of the door staring at the doorknob. “I have to go.” I can’t allow myself to fall for you.
She was still too raw from Conner. And she hadn’t even begun to sort out the mess Troy had made of her soul. She was weary from missing Grams and from being all alone in this town—and practically the whole world.
Jed stood too, and then he was behind Annie, resting his strong hands on her shoulders.
“Ever since our folks died,” he said quietly, “Patti’s been my responsibility. She was a good kid—the best. She was also the worst teen. I’ve been through hell with her. The night she gave up her virginity to the first greasy-haired punk who asked, it was me she came home to. I was the one who held her while she cried. Just like when I found her underneath a highway overpass in a seedy part of downtown Tulsa. She’d run away because she’d gotten mad at me for making her wash the dishes. She was shivering, and I wrapped her in a quilt our mother had made for her fifth birthday. It matched the yellow-and-white daisies on Patti’s bedroom walls. When our house burned down, Mom had wrapped the quilt around Patti as we fled.”
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