It’s a long story.” She looked exhausted and broken.
“All? Like how many dozen are you talking?”
She laughed a little. “Just three. I’m one of triplets.”
Three of her. That was kind of a scary thought for a reason he didn’t want to contemplate. The baby was sleeping against his chest, snoring gently. He registered the warmth of her tiny body, the light shining in her curls, and braced himself, waiting for some new and unspeakable pain to hit him.
“I’ll call a road service for you,” he said, tight control in his voice, “But I wouldn’t count on anything happening right away. This isn’t Chicago.”
She looked at him, startled.
“License plates,” he said. “Parking sticker on the left-hand side of your windshield.”
“You really are a cop.”
“Not now,” he corrected her.
Still leaving him with the baby she began to fish through a bag nearly as big as she was. She came out finally, triumphant, with a piece of wrinkled paper.
She handed it to him.
He awkwardly shifted “Me-Belle” to the crook of his arm and took the piece of paper. He stared at it. Blinked rapidly. Looked again. His own address was written there in a firm, feminine hand.
“There’s some mistake,” he finally said.
“Why?”
“This house is number twenty-two, Harbor Way.”
She looked deflated. “I must have written it down wrong.”
“You must have.”
She slumped down on a chair, took off her ball cap, ran a hand through her straight hair. It was sticking up in the cutest way. “Now what? I have to go. Obviously.”
That was obvious all right. Her hair was tangled and damp, and her face was pale with weariness. And still, all he could think, was that she was damnably sexy. She was wearing jeans that were way too big for her, accentuating the fact she was as slender as a young willow. She couldn’t stay here. Obviously.
“Look, for what’s left of tonight, you can stay here,” he heard himself saying. “The house actually used to be two self-contained units. It also used to be a summer rental. It’s all furnished. There’s linens in the closets. I’ve never even used the bedrooms down here. They’re across the hall.”
“You’re a complete stranger!”
“I admit it. Stranger than some.”
She managed a small, tired smile.
“There’s a lock on the door. Not that I’m in the habit of attacking people. In my underwear.”
He could tell that clinched it. The lock. Not his reassurances. The lock and the fact that she was tired beyond words and probably close to collapse.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Whatever. In the morning, I’ll help you get your car straightened away, and find your house.”
“Shane?”
“Yeah?” He wished she wouldn’t have called him his first name. He didn’t want to be her friend. He didn’t even want to be her rescuer. He just didn’t have any choice.
“You’re making me very sorry I kicked you so hard.”
From behind the locked door, Abby listened to Shane go up the stairs, and wondered if she’d lost her mind. Not only had she packed every earthly possession that she cared about and trekked across a whole country with her baby, now she was under the same roof as a man she knew nothing about.
Well, not nothing exactly.
He had been a cop.
And she had never in her life seen eyes like that. It wasn’t the color, precisely, though the dark chocolatey brown was enormously attractive; it was the look in them. Intense, the gaze steady and strong and stripping.
It was those eyes that had kept panic from completely engulfing her when he had come up behind her as she tried to make her key fit in the front door. His front door.
While part of her had been screaming in pure panic—near-naked man lurking in the bushes at three in the morning—another part of her had registered those eyes and told her that the hard beating of her heart might not have a single thing to do with fear.
Naturally, she wasn’t going to listen to that part of herself. She was resigned to the fact that she was not a good judge of masculine character. Belle’s father being a case in point. Still, even when she’d been desperately trying to think of how to get by that formidable man who had trapped her there on that tiny porch, some traitorous little part of her had been staring at him in awe.
Registering every detail of him. His height, the width of his shoulders, the smooth unblemished skin, the clinging night mist showing off his impressive physique as surely as if he was a bodybuilder, oiled.
Because he had been tense, geared for action, he had seemed to be all enticing masculine hardness. Mounded pecs, the six-pack stomach, the ripple of sinew and muscle in his arms and legs.
She shouldn’t have been so surprised when he’d said he used to be a cop, because he had policeman hair—the cut short, neat and very conservative and the color of cherry wood. And there had been a certain authoritative hardness in his face, too. A look of readiness in the taut downturn of his mouth, the narrow squint of his eyes. He was a man who was prepared to do battle.
It was probably that strength, a core-deep thing, that had convinced her to take a chance and trust him. Her instincts told her that of all the places she could choose to stay tonight, admittedly limited, she would not find one safer than this.
Her adopted mother would, of course, be horrified. Poor Judy wanted life to be so neat and tidy. She had worked so hard to give Abby a decent home, even though she herself had been a single mother.
Judy had thought it was insane to go to the lawyer’s office, even more insane to accept the gift. What would she think of this latest twist?
The situation tonight, Abby reminded herself, had been desperate. What else was she going to do? Sleep in her car? If it was just herself, that might have been okay. But with Belle? It was a terrible night out there, damp and cold. Even her mother would understand why she had chosen to stay here. Wouldn’t she?
Abby went unseeingly through the plainly furnished apartment, found the first bedroom, lay her sleeping daughter in the center of the big double bed, and went to pull the drape. As she did, she realized she was facing the street. Miracle Harbor didn’t look at all like it had looked when she’d been here a month ago. It had looked so beautiful then, with its quaint, weathered houses lining steep, narrow avenues that all led to the ocean. The main street had redbrick shops, with colorful awnings, big picture windows looking out on the beach and the ocean they fronted.
Tonight, with the swirling mist, it looked more like a scene out of a horror movie, set in the fog-shrouded streets of Gothic London.
How could she have written down the address of the house she had inherited incorrectly? How could she?
And how could a town that had looked so cheery and welcoming in the light of day look so distinctly formidable at night?
And how could her traitorous car just give up like that? Of course, it was old, and she had asked a lot of it, carrying her across the country dragging all her earthly possessions along behind it. Maybe it was a miracle that it had made it this far before it had quietly quit.
Miracles, she thought, and turned from the window. She checked the corners and under the bed for spiders or webs, and finding none, tumbled into the bed beside her daughter, too tired to find the bedding. Miracles, she thought again with a sigh. Isn’t that why she had come here, really?
Some