The Wrangler And The Runaway Mom. RaeAnne Thayne

You’re blinding me here.”

      She shifted the beam to the ground. “Sorry. What are you doing?” she repeated.

      She sensed, rather than saw, his shrug. “I was on my way to bed and noticed you had a flat. Figured I’d fix it so you wouldn’t have to deal with it in the morning.”

      She stared at him. “You just took it upon yourself to start fixing it without talking to me first?”

      “Um, could you move that flashlight again?”

      Maggie flushed when she realized she had instinctively aimed it into his eyes once more. She pointed the light to the ground again, where it now illuminated a jack propped next to a tire that sagged forlornly. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

      “It seemed the neighborly thing to do.”

      He wasn’t breaking into her truck, he was going out of his way to fix her flat tire. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done something so genuinely kind for her. A burst of warmth flooded through her, trickling over her shoulders and down her back.

      Her opinion of Colt McKendrick suddenly seemed to shift and slide around inside her. She didn’t want to soften toward him, though. She didn’t dare.

      “You really don’t have to do this,” she mumbled. “I’m perfectly capable of changing a flat tire.”

      “I’m just saving you the trouble. Just look at it as my way of paying you back for patching up my shoulder yesterday. Nice frying pan, by the way. Odd time of the night for making pancakes, if you don’t mind me saying.”

      Embarrassed heat soaked her skin at the flash of his grin in the darkness. She dropped the frying pan to her side. “You never know what sort of riffraff you could run into in the middle of the night.”

      “True enough.”

      Lightning suddenly seared across the night again, and the air smelled of ozone and that peculiar musty smell of a summer storm about to be unleashed.

      McKendrick glanced up at the sky. “Looks like I’d better get a move on if I’m going to beat that. You know, I could probably make better time if you’d shine that flashlight over here.”

      “Oh. Of course.” She clicked it on and watched him jack up the truck and quickly, efficiently, replace the flat tire with her spare.

      When the last lug nut had been tightened, he hefted the flat into the bed of the pickup. “You’ll want to get this tire repaired before you go too much farther. I wouldn’t want you to be stranded on the road somewhere without a spare.”

      “I’ll do that.” She frowned. “I wonder what happened to it. It wasn’t flat earlier this evening.”

      He busied himself gathering up the tools. “Maybe you picked up a nail or something. Had a slow leak for a couple days that finally finished the thing off. Or you could have—Damn!”

      “What is it?” She aimed the flashlight at him and saw him cradling one hand with the other.

      “Blasted jack cut my hand.”

      “Let me see.”

      He wiggled it as if he could shake off the pain and picked up the crowbar. “It’s okay. Nothing that hasn’t happened to me dozens of times on the ranch.”

      She gazed at him, momentarily diverted. “You have a ranch?”

      He looked away as if he were too embarrassed to meet her gaze. “Uh, I used to.”

      Compassion swept through her. He must have fallen on hard times and lost his ranch, the same fate suffered by countless other ranchers during the recent run of lousy beef prices and high feed costs. Maybe that’s why he was on the circuit. For a good cowboy, a summer spent rodeoing could be a quick route to ready cash to help rebuild a ranch.

      She swallowed her words of sympathy, somehow knowing they wouldn’t be welcome. “Still,” she said quietly, “I would feel better if you allowed me to take a look at that hand.”

      Before he could argue, she dropped the frying pan into the dirt and grabbed his fingers. As her hand met his skin, hardened and rough from hard work, heat raced between them every bit as powerful as the lightning sizzling across the sky.

      Unnerved, Maggie cleared her throat and dropped his hand. “That looks deep. You should put some disinfectant and an antibiotic on it.”

      He shoved the injured hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ll be all right.”

      “I insist, especially since it was my tire you were fixing. Come on. I’ve got some iodine in the trailer.”

      “I wouldn’t want you to wake up your kid. I’ve probably got something I can use at my place.”

      She frowned at him. “You might as well accept my help. I’m not going to be able to sleep until I know you’ve put something on that.”

      “Fine, Doc. Whatever you say. Since you’re so set on it, you can come and watch to make sure I stick the Band-Aid on right side up.”

      As he led the way to his camper, the skies finally opened and began to spit huge drops that plowed into the dusty ground like bullets. They made it inside just as the storm began in earnest.

      “Welcome to the McKendrick hacienda,” he said, flipping on a light above the little stove. Maggie instantly realized she had made a mistake by following him.

      A huge mistake.

      The camper was no more than eight feet wide and a dozen feet long, small and compact and intimate, especially with the storm playing a symphony on the thin aluminum skin of the roof.

      Her nerves were in entirely too much turmoil for her to be comfortable in such close quarters with Colt McKendrick. She couldn’t breathe without brushing against him, but she inched as far away as she could manage. “Um, where’s your disinfectant?”

      “It’s in here somewhere. Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll see if I can rustle it up?”

      He bent to rummage through a drawer, highlighting thin spots where his jeans had worn almost white from all the time he spent in the saddle. She caught herself staring and jerked her gaze away.

      What on earth was the matter with her, gawking at the man like she was some kind of buckle bunny on the make for a good-looking cowboy? Embarrassed, she slid onto one of the vinyl bench seats around a little gray-speckled Formica table

      To distract herself she studied the interior of the camper, looking for some clue into McKendrick’s personality. It appeared to be about the same general era as the trailer she had bought with the proceeds from selling her Volvo The decor was straight out of the 1970s, all orange, yellow and dark green tones. A well-used rope, coiled neatly, hung on the back of the door. A pair of worn boots, an older twin to the pair he was wearing, waited by the bed.

      Earlier in the day she had noticed that the pickup and horse trailer both looked fairly new and in much better condition than the camper. Wasn’t that just like a cowboy? Worry about his horse and his truck but not about where he laid his own head at night.

      The only somewhat jarring note that kept the inside of the camper from being completely stereotypical was a stack of books on the window ledge. She studied their authors. Larry McMurtry, Louis L’Amour, a couple of mysteries. Just what she might have expected. But she suddenly did a double take at the slim volume at the bottom of the stack. Descartes? A cowboy who reads philosophy?

      Before she could ask him about it, he emerged from the cupboard with a battered first aid kit lifted victoriously in his hand. “Here we go. I knew this was in here somewhere.”

      He slid into the seat across from her and thrust out his hand. “Okay, Dr. Rawlings. Do your worst.”

      She eyed his hand with trepidation. After what had happened outside when she touched him—that odd, silvery shower of sparks—she was reluctant