The Wrangler And The Runaway Mom

She shifted in the narrow bed as familiar shame pinched at her. She allowed Michael to completely dominate her present when she was married to him. How could she have let him so completely take over her past, as well, rewriting it to meet his own expectations?

She had loved those times with her father. Maybe she had turned to the rodeo circuit as an escape now because it represented the best part of her childhood. A safe haven, even then. She had looked forward to her summers with Billy Joe with as much excitement as a prisoner handed a three-day pass to the outside. It was worlds away from the coldness, the studied politeness, of her life with her mother.

She rolled over and punched at her pillow. The reasons weren’t important. The only thing that mattered was Nicky’s safety. If it meant keeping him safe, she would dress up like a rodeo clown and go head-to-head with Corkscrew, Peg’s nastiest bull.

She yawned and glanced at her little travel alarm clock. Nearly 1:00 a.m. and they would be leaving early in the morning for the long drive to Butte, Montana.

She needed sleep. Needed it and feared it at the same time. During the day she could forget, could block from her mind the memory of Michael’s death. But in sleep she was powerless against the terrors that stalked her subconscious.

She fought it as long as she could, but finally her exhaustion won out. The nightmare crept up on her, more terrible because it was all so real. Michael falling again, the blood oozing from his wound like wine trickling from a spilled bottle. Those agonizing moments when she had cowered in the washroom while the men who killed him talked casually over his body, as if they were discussing stock prices or baseball scores.

And then running, running.

In her dream it was as if she were stuck on an out-ofcontrol treadmill, always running and never making any progress, while Carlo with the dead eyes pursued her. He moved inexorably closer to her and, try as she might, she could do nothing to escape.

When he had nearly reached her, he veered away, and she thought she had escaped but suddenly Nicky was there in his arms, kicking and struggling, his little fists pounding against the stranger who held him. Terror and fury and raw fear erupted inside her, and she screamed her son’s name just as Michael’s killer reached into his pocket and pulled out a wooden pistol like Nicky’s.

Even though it looked like a toy, she knew it would be as deadly as the real thing. She cried out and grabbed for it, just as a terrible clanging noise erupted from the pistol.

She awoke in a rush, her heart pounding and the blood rushing in her ears. It was so real! She could still hear the echoes of her cries, still taste the fear in her mouth.

What had awakened her? For long seconds she lay in the darkness and listened to the stillness of the night, forcing her muscles to relax, her breathing to slow.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, long and low, like a slow, steady drumroll played by ghostly hands. That was it. She must have heard the warnings of the impending storm.

Lightning flashed outside the window, and the sky immediately growled again. This time it was joined by something much closer, a clang very much like what she’d heard in her dream, followed by muffled cursing.

It wasn’t the storm that had awakened her, she realized as all the fear came surging back.

Someone was out there!

Chapter 3 (#ulink_92192c70-9158-5759-be36-79eeaac74500)

Lingering visions from her nightmare chased themselves through her mind. Could Michael’s killers have found her? Panic exploded in her chest, and she thrust the light quilt aside to scramble out of bed, consumed with a wild, frantic urge to gather Nicky and flee into the night.

After an instant she forced herself to breathe deeply and try to think through it all rationally. How could they possibly have found her? She had been excruciatingly careful to leave no clue about her whereabouts. She hadn’t tapped into any of her bank accounts. She hadn’t told anyone at the clinic where she was going. She hadn’t even told Rosie.

It was probably just some drunk cowboy. A bronc buster or bull rider who celebrated the rodeo’s end with one too many beers at a honky-tonk somewhere and now was simply trying to find his way back to his bed.

Maggie stared at the ceiling. Though she dearly wanted to stay here and hide in her bed—to pretend she hadn’t heard anything but the gathering storm—she knew she had to check out the commotion.

It was the responsible thing to do, and Margaret Elizabeth Rawlings Prescott always did the responsible thing.

She slipped from her bed and crept through the darkness to the window at the front of the trailer, underneath the loft where Nicky slept noisily, making sweet little huffing breaths in his sleep.

Although swollen black-edged clouds hid the moon, faroff lightning arced across the sky just long enough for her to make out a dark, hulking shape crouched by the passenger side of her pickup.

Great. The drunk cowboy was throwing up on her truck.

Again she had the completely childish urge to crawl into her bed and pull the covers over her head. But what if it wasn’t a drunk cowboy? What if it was somebody trying to break into her truck? She didn’t have much of value inside it, but she was damned if she would let somebody take what little they had left.

She needed a weapon, if only to scare the intruder away. A quick scan of the trailer turned up a cast-iron frying pan in the dish drainer. A frying pan. What a cliché. She only needed a headful of curlers to look just like Alice Kramden from The Honeymooners, taking on Ralph after he stayed out too late with the boys. Still, it would probably make any drunk cowboy think twice before tangling with her.

Before she could talk herself out of it, Maggie grabbed the pan by the handle, rummaged through a drawer for a flashlight, then opened the door quietly. She sidled along the length of the trailer until she reached the truck’s bumper.

“If you leave right now,” she called out softly, “I won’t phone the police.” She clicked the flashlight beam on and aimed it right into the would-be thief’s eyes, then gasped when Colt McKendrick’s baby blues blinked back at her. “You!”

“Yeah. Me.” He sounded disgruntled. “Who’d you think it was?”

“I don’t know. A drunk cowboy, maybe, being sick on my truck.” She squinted at him. “You’re not throwing up, are you?”

“Don’t think so. Thanks for asking, though.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“You mind moving the flashlight a little? 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.”