A Cold Creek Secret

“Ma’am, you’re going to have to get out of your jeans. Do you need my help or can you manage by yourself?”

“Help,” she mumbled.

Naturally. He sighed and reached to unfasten the snap and zipper of her jeans. His hands brushed her waist under her soft, blue silk turtleneck. Whether his fingers were cold or whether she was reacting just to the shock of human contact, he didn’t know, but she blinked a few times and scrambled away with a little cry.

The tiny dog yipped and abandoned her investigations of the room to trot over and stand protectively over her mistress, teeth bared at him as if a few pounds of fluff would do the trick to deter him.

“You need to get into dry clothes, that’s all,” he said, using the same calm tone he did with injured soldiers in the field. “I’m not going to hurt you, I swear. You’re completely safe here.”

She nodded, eyes still not fully open. As he looked at her in the full light, a memory flashed across his brain of her in some barely-there slinky red dress, tossing her dark curls and giving a sultry bedroom look out of half-closed eyes.

Crazy. He had never met the woman before in his life, he could swear to it.

He pulled her jeans off, despising himself for the little stir of interest when he found her wearing pink lacy high-cut panties.

He swallowed hard. “I’m, uh, going to check for broken bones and then I’ve got some sweats here we can put on you, okay?”

She nodded and watched him warily from those half- closed eyes as he ran his hands over her legs, trying to pretend she was just another of his teammates. Trouble was, Rangers didn’t tend to have silky white skin and luscious curves. Or wear high-cut pink panties.

“Nothing broken that I can tell,” he finally said and was relieved when he could pull the faded, voluminous sweats over her legs and hide all that delectable skin.

“Are you a doctor?” she murmured.

“Not even close. I’m in the military, ma’am. Major Brant Western, Company A, 1st Battallion, 75th Ranger Regiment.”

She seemed to barely hear him but she still nodded and closed her eyes again when he tucked a blanket from the edge of the sofa around her.

Without his field experience, he might have been alarmed about her state of semiconsciousness, but he’d seen enough soldiers react just this way to a sudden shock—sort of take a little mental vacation—that he wasn’t overly concerned. If she was still spacey and out of it when he came back from taking care of Tag, he would get on the horn to Jake Dalton, the only physician in Pine Gulch, and see what he recommended.

He threw a blanket over her. “Ma’am.” He spoke loudly and evenly and was rewarded with those eyes opening a little more at him. He was really curious what color they were.

“I need to stable my horse and grab more firewood in case the power goes out. I’ve got a feeling we’re in for a nasty night. Just rest here with your little puffball and work on warming up, okay?”

After a long moment, she nodded and closed her eyes again.

He knew her somehow and it bothered the hell out of him that he couldn’t place how, especially since he usually prided himself on his ironclad memory.

He watched the dog circle around and then settle on her feet again like a little fuzzy slipper. Whoever she was, she had about as much a sense as that little dog to go out on a night like tonight. Someone was probably worrying about her. After he took care of Tag, he would try to figure out if she needed to call someone with her whereabouts.

Shoving on his Stetson again, he drew in his last breath of warm air for a while and then headed into the teeth of the storm.

He rushed through taking care of Tag and loaded up as much firewood as he could carry in a load toward the house. He had a feeling he would be back and forth to the woodpile several times during the night and he was grateful his tenant/caretaker Gwen Bianca had been conscientious about making sure enough wood was stockpiled for the winter.

What was he going to do without her? He frowned as one more niggling worry pressed in on him.

Ever since she told him she was buying a house closer to Jackson Hole where she frequently showed her pottery, he had been trying to figure out his options. He was a little preoccupied fighting the Taliban to spend much time worrying about whether a woodpile thousands of miles away had been replenished.

When he returned to the house, he checked on his unexpected guest first thing and found her still sleeping. She wasn’t shivering anymore and when he touched her forehead, she didn’t seem to be running a fever.

The dog barked a little yippy greeting at him but didn’t move from her spot at the woman’s feet.

He took off his hat and coat and hung them in the mudroom, then returned to the family room. His touching her forehead—or perhaps the dog’s bark—must have awakened her. She was sitting up and this time her eyes were finally wide open.

They were a soft and luscious green, the kind of color he dreamed about during the harsh and desolate Afghan winters, of spring grasses covering the mountains, of hope and growth and life.

She gave him a hesitant smile and his jaw sagged as he finally placed how he knew her.

Holy Mother of God.

The woman on his couch, the one he had dressed in his most disreputable sweats, the woman who had crashed her vehicle into Cold Creek just outside his gates and whose little pink panties he had taken such guilty pleasure in glimpsing, was none other than Mimi frigging Van Hoyt.

A man was staring at her.

Not just any man, either. He was tall, perhaps six-one or two, with short dark hair and blue eyes, powerful muscles and a square, determined sort of jaw. He was just the sort of man who made her most nervous, the kind who didn’t look as if they could be swayed by a flirty smile and a sidelong look.

He was staring at her as if she had just sprouted horns out of the top of her head. She frowned, uncomfortable with his scrutiny though she couldn’t have said exactly why.

Her gaze shifted to her surroundings and she discovered she was on a red plaid sofa in a room she didn’t recognize, with rather outdated beige flowered wallpaper and a jumble of mismatched furnishings.

She had no clear memory of arriving here, only a vague sense that something was very wrong in her life, that someone was supposed to help her sort everything out. And then she was driving, driving, with snow flying, and a sharp moment of fear.

She looked at the man again, registering that he was extraordinarily handsome in a clean-cut, all-American sort of way.

Had she been looking for him? She blinked, trying to sort through the jumble of her thoughts.

“How are you feeling?” he finally asked. “I couldn’t find any broken bones and I think the air bag probably saved you from a nasty bump on the head when you hit the creek.”

Creek. She closed her eyes as a memory returned of her hands gripping a steering wheel and a desperate need to reach someone who could help her.

Baby. The baby.

She clutched her hands over her abdomen and made a low sort of moan.

“Here, take it easy. Do you have a stomachache? That could be from the air bag. It’s not unusual to bruise a rib or two when one of those things deploys. Do you want me to take you into the clinic in town to check things out?”

She didn’t know. She couldn’t think, as if every coherent thought in her head had been squirreled away on a high shelf just out of her reach.

She hugged her arms around herself. She had to trust her instincts, since she didn’t know what else to do. “No clinic. I don’t want to go to the doctor.”

He raised one dark eyebrow at that but then shrugged. “Your call. For now, anyway. If you start babbling and speaking in tongues, I’m calling the doctor in Pine Gulch, no matter what you say.”

“Fair enough.” The baby was fine, she told herself. She wouldn’t accept any other alternative. “Where am I?”

“My ranch. The Western Sky. I told you my name before but I’ll do it again. I’m Brant Western.”

To her surprise, Simone, who usually distrusted everything with a Y chromosome, jumped down from the sofa to sniff at his boots. He picked the dog up and held her, somehow still managing to look ridiculously masculine with a little powder puff in his arms.

Western Sky. Gwen. That’s where she had been running. Gwen would fix everything, she knew it.