Laurie Paige – A Kiss In The Moonlight (страница 2)

Air bags blossomed on each side of the front seat. Lyric spared a worry for her relative as the bag hit her face, smothering her for a few seconds and pressing her glasses painfully onto her nose.

Dizzy and frightened, Lyric remembered to turn the engine off, then she thrashed her way free of the collapsing air bag and turned to her aunt. After pushing the plastic aside, Lyric searched the older woman’s face for damage.

“Aunt Fay?” she said.

The other woman didn’t answer, didn’t move.

“Hey, are you okay in there?” a male voice asked.

“My aunt,” Lyric said. “I think she’s hurt.” She snapped open the seat belt and reached for her aunt’s wrist to check her pulse.

“Don’t move her,” the man ordered.

He went around the station wagon and opened the door. With a competence that was reassuring, he checked the unconscious woman after removing her glasses, which by some miracle weren’t broken, and sticking them in his pocket.

Lyric watched his hands run gently over Aunt Fay’s head, down her neck, where he paused to check her pulse, then continue over her shoulders and along her arms. His fingers were long and slender, the skin evenly tanned to where the white shirtsleeves were rolled up on his forearms. A hat hid most of his face. He bent farther into the car and examined her aunt’s knees and legs.

Lyric looked, too, and saw red marks indicating the bruises that would be forming soon.

He raised his head. “Ms. Gibson?” he said. “Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?”

Lyric’s heart stopped, then pounded with a fierce, staccato beat. She gasped like a heroine in a melodrama as she studied the man in disbelief.

“Trevor?”

He faced her then, his eyes, which she knew to be as blue as the summer sky, appearing dark as midnight in the fading glow of the sunset. “Yeah, it’s me.”

They stared at each other in silence, a thousand questions and memories wrapping around their frozen forms. One thing for sure—there was no welcome in his gaze.

Aunt Fay opened her eyes and focused on one, then the other of them. “Where are my glasses?”

“Here,” Trevor said. He slipped the thin gold frames gently onto the older woman’s face.

“Are you all right?” Lyric asked, searching her beloved relative’s face for signs of pain.

“I’ve felt better,” her aunt said, then gave the man a smile. “Hello, Trevor. How are you?”

“I’m okay…other than feeling like a heel. There isn’t usually much traffic out this way.”

“I’m sure,” her aunt agreed with dry humor.

“Let me check the damage to your car, then we’ll see if it’ll run. It’s only a couple of miles to the ranch.” He paused and looked at Lyric. “How did you get on this back road, anyway?”

“A seriously wrong turn, I think.”

He nodded, his face grim but otherwise without expression. After getting a flashlight from his truck, he looked over the front end of the station wagon. “A badly dinged bumper and a slightly crumpled nose, but otherwise it looks okay. The radiator seems intact. I don’t see any fluid leaking out. Crank it up and let’s see if she’ll run.”

Lyric turned on the key. The engine purred to life at once. Trevor returned to the front of the vehicle. He nodded in her direction, indicating everything looked fine.

“Back up,” he said, coming to her window. “Keep the wheels straight.”

She cautiously backed onto the road. Trevor gave the car a push when one tire slipped on the gravel and dirt in the shallow ditch.

“Okay,” he called when she was clear. “Follow me.”

After he turned his truck around, she fell into place behind him, far enough back that his dust didn’t choke them. In less than five minutes they pulled up before a horse rail in front of a sprawling ranch house, its center portion made of massive logs, the wings on either side more modern structures of stone and wood.

Trevor honked his horn, then climbed out of the truck and came to the passenger side of the station wagon. “Watch your step now,” he said to Aunt Fay. “Careful. Lean on me while we see if your legs are okay. You have pain anywhere?”

“I’m not sure,” the older woman said. “I seem to be numb at the moment.”

With the gentlest of care, he escorted her aunt toward the house. The door opened and an older man peered out. His hair gleamed silver in the light from the room behind him. He was as tall as Trevor and had the same lean, rangy frame.

A total stranger would have known they were kin at a glance. The man had to be Trevor’s uncle Nick.

“What happened?” Mr. Dalton asked, realizing something was wrong.

“Accident,” Trevor said. He quickly explained about taking the old logging road and cutting the station wagon off at the county road, causing her to run into the ditch.

The older man came out on the porch, then stepped down on a giant flat granite boulder that served as the step to the front porch that ran all the way across the log portion of the house.

“My God,” he said. “Fay, is that you?”

“Yes, Nick,” her aunt replied with a smile in his direction. She clasped Trevor’s arm and walked with a decided limp toward the porch.

“I’d given up on you for today.” The Dalton uncle, wearing only socks, rushed to her other side and wrapped a supporting arm around her waist. “Call Beau,” he ordered his nephew. “He’s a doctor,” he said to Lyric’s aunt.

“Let’s get the women in the house first,” Trevor suggested with a hint of impatience.

Lyric followed behind the three, rather like a stray pup who hoped the others would take her in. She was beginning to feel very apprehensive about being here. Trevor didn’t seem thrilled to see her.

In the house, after Aunt Fay was seated in an easy chair and checked over again, Lyric stood inside the door and wondered what to do.

Finally the older man noticed her. “Are you all right?”

Lyric nodded. She had to clear her throat in order to talk. “Yes. I think so,” she amended, suddenly aware of pain in her knees, as if her body had come back to life at that instant and now reminded her of aches she hadn’t known she had.

“Nicholas?”

The Dalton patriarch turned back to her aunt and took her hand. “Now don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll have you right as rain in no time. Trevor, have you called Beau yet?” he questioned with a stern glance at his nephew.

Lyric was aware of Trevor’s gaze on her, of the tight set of his mouth, of the unwelcoming stance in his strong, lithe body. She felt terribly confused and disoriented.

He turned away. “I’m doing it now.” He went into the kitchen. In a minute she heard his voice explaining the situation to the nephew who was a doctor.

Lyric hadn’t met any of the Dalton family except Trevor, but she knew them all. Her aunt Fay had been a cousin and best friend to Milly Dalton, who had been married to Trevor’s uncle Nick. Milly had died in an automobile accident many years ago. Their daughter, Tink, had been taken from the scene of the accident and never found again.

At least, that was what was assumed. The three-year-old had disappeared. She could have wandered away and died in the wilderness, but the sheriff had concluded the child had been abducted for some reason, because the child’s body had never been found.

A tremor rushed over Lyric at the thought. One time a stranger had tried to grab her while she was on her way home from school in Austin, Texas.

She’d screamed and kicked and bit the man as hard as she could, the way her father had taught her, and had gotten free. She’d been lucky. A schoolmate on the next block had been kidnapped later the same afternoon. A month went by before the body was found in a lonely section of woods. That summer Lyric’s parents had moved to the ranch her father had inherited from his dad.

Another tremor ran down her body and lodged in her legs. Alarmed, she realized her knees were about to give way. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but…”

The words were barely a whisper.

She tried again. “I’m sorry, but…”

“Catch her,” a voice said from far away as the room became dark and mysterious.

Lyric blinked rapidly as strong arms closed around her. She knew these arms, this embrace.

Pressing her face into the clean expanse of the white shirt, she inhaled deeply and was filled with the scent of masculine aftershave, fresh-as-the-outdoors laundry and something more—a faint aroma that she recognized somewhere deep inside her. Yes, she knew this man.

She relaxed as he lifted her. She looped her arms around his shoulders and closed her eyes. Safe. She was safe. And home. Home at last.

“Here,” Trevor said, putting Lyric on the leather sofa. “Lie still,” he ordered when she started to sit up. He removed the glasses from her face, then winced at the redness on each side of her nose and running down under her eyes. The air bag had hit her hard, he realized. He laid the glasses on the end table.

A memory wafted into his mind—him removing her glasses, her laughing protests about not being able to see, his suggestion that she close her eyes, then the kisses…the hotter-than-molten-steel kisses, the fireworks that had gone off in his brain, stunning him with the force of the passion between them…and the feelings, the found-my-other-half joy of holding her….

“Get some ice,” his uncle said. “Fay needs some on her face and knees.”