Peggy Nicholson - Kelton's Rules

He’d warned her it would be rustic, Abby reminded herself, searching for something to say as she studied the sagging front porch, the weathered clapboard siding that suggested this twin hadn’t sprung for a paint job since the 1890s.

Still, whatever its appearance, the price had indeed been right for a week’s lodging. On the far side of Trueheart, Jack had left them in the Jeep while he’d negotiated with his landlady, Maudie Harris. He’d loped out of her house minutes later, wearing a triumphant grin while he twirled a key ring around his finger.

“That’s my place over—” Jack paused in the act of nodding to their right, across a picket fence hedged by an overgrown border of bushes and waist-high weeds. He scowled. “Over there.”

Through leafy branches, Abby could make out the glint of a pickup truck, parked in the shadows beyond an identical sagging porch that ran the width of Jack’s cottage. With lights glowing from the front-room windows, his house looked more inviting than hers.

“Very nice,” she said, although a twist of uneasiness coiled through her stomach. Bad enough to be so obliged to the man already. But to have him as her next-door neighbor—ready, willing and able to give his opinion on her every move from here on out… I don’t need this. “Well…” She swiveled in her seat.

“Hang on.” Jack bounded out of the Jeep and around to her side. “You shouldn’t put your weight on that ankle. Not till we’ve had a look at it.”

“I can manage.”

“I’m sure you can.” But his hand blocked her passage, leaving her the choice of shoving it aside—or accepting it.

Used to having his own way, for all his charm and goodwill, Abby decided, gritting her teeth behind a close-mouthed smile. She’d learned not to trust charm. She’d found that it was often a substitute for less polished but kinder, more genuine emotions.

“Thank you.” Her nerves skittered as those oven-warm fingers closed over hers. Then he took her other arm, supporting her weight as she slithered down from the high seat. They stood for an instant toe-to-toe, Abby looking up—quite a way up—and Jack holding on to her just a heartbeat too long, his fingers seeming to squeeze her a hairsbreadth too tightly.

Or maybe her alarm sprang from her rattled nerves, sensing danger where it didn’t exist. There was also the simple fact that she hadn’t stood this close to a man—a virile, ruggedly attractive man—in months. “Thanks,” she said again.

But he didn’t take that as dismissal. Instead Jack transferred her hand to his forearm, a support as hard and muscular as the rest of him obviously was. “We’ll get you settled and then…” His shaggy head swung back toward his own yard as they moved carefully across the grass. Abby could see one decisive eyebrow drawn down in a scowl. “Then I’ll just…”

What was bothering him over there?

But faced with the stairs to the porch, she abandoned speculation to concentrate on making it up the six steep steps, then limping across the warped decking to the unpainted front door.

While Jack fit the key into the lock, Sky joined them, frowning unhappily, his cat cradled on his shoulder. She could read his thoughts as if he’d shouted them out loud. Compared to a brand-new, suburban five-bedroom house back in New Jersey, this wasn’t much. Compared even to the Motel 6 room they’d slept in last night, this cottage was outclassed. And it’s all your fault, Mom!

“It seems very…comfortable,” she managed as Jack steered her inside and switched on the light. If your taste ran to plaid, broken-backed sleeper sofas. To a La-Z-Boy chair spilling foam stuffing across a dirt-gray braided rug, or fluorescent bulbs in a tacky cartwheel chandelier. A wall-mounted elk head that wore a red bandanna and probably had a case of fleas. A collection of beer cans and bottles, arranged artfully along the mantel over a small, ash-choked firebox. “And look, Sky, we have a fireplace!” Her words came out much too cheery.

“Hmm…” Jack led her to the couch and lowered her, oblivious to the fact that she’d stiffened her spine, signaling her resistance to the maneuver. “Haven’t been in here since last fall, when Maudie gave me a choice between her two places. Looks like those college kids who came here to ski over spring break were a little…rough on the decor.” He straightened to aim a forefinger at Skyler. “Now you, kid—you’re in charge of unloading your stuff from my Jeep while I’m gone. Don’t let your mom budge, okay?”

He turned to Abby as Sky set down DC and trooped out the door without a protest. “And you— Let me see if there’s ice in your freezer.” He strode off toward the rear of the house and returned in seconds. “Nope, no ice. So sit tight, let Sky do the work—I mean all the work, Abby—and I’ll be back soon as I can. There’s a few things I have to…”

He was gone before she could open her mouth to tell him thank-you, but from here they could manage alone.

BY THE TIME Sky returned with their sleeping bags, Abby had hobbled into the kitchen. Propped against the back of a wobbly kitchen chair, she surveyed the vinyl floor with its missing tiles; that had to be pre-World War II. The dingy cabinets, the ancient, grease-caked gas stove and narrow refrigerator with its rusty door, to which somebody had taped a poster of a snow-boarding ski bunny, wearing nothing but a bikini and a wet-lipped smile.

Lemons into lemonade, Abby chanted inwardly. You get lemons, you make lemonade. There was no reason to cry, no real reason at all. This dreadful kitchen wasn’t a preview of the rest of her life. Wasn’t the top of the slippery slide to poverty and despair and loneliness. This was only a temporary setback, something she’d be laughing about six months from now—even a week from now, when they reached Sedona.

Surely.

Tonight she was simply…tired.

“Mr. Kelton just put a guy in a truck,” Sky said, dropping his load on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

She rubbed her lashes and turned with a puzzled smile. “Put who, honey?”

“A guy with a cowboy hat. And boots. Into that truck over there. He sort of carried him by his belt and his collar and…threw him.”

“Ah… Oh…” Wonderful. “Well, he’s very helpful, sweetie, isn’t he?” And just who had Jack been helping out his door? His wife’s lover? Oh, we don’t need this at all!

“Then the guy drove off like a bat out of hell!”

So that was the roar and rumble of gravel she’d heard a moment ago. “Don’t swear, Skyler.”

“Dad says hell.”

“Your father’s a grown man.” Physically, if not emotionally or mentally. And now were they stranded next to another overgrown adolescent with his own amorous troubles? They ought to leave first thing in the morning, but how? Even if Maudie would refund their money, renting a car for even a week would deliver the coup de grâce to her tottering budget. “When you’re grown up—”

“I’m moving back to New Jersey.”

A brisk knock on the front door saved her from a retort she might have regretted. Jack strode into the kitchen, his hair no wilder than it had been before, his clothes untorn. He didn’t appear to have been brawling, though the color across his craggy cheekbones might be a bit higher. With the fluorescent lighting, Abby couldn’t be sure. Perhaps Sky had misinterpreted whatever he’d seen.

“Let’s check out that ankle.” Jack set a loaded tin soup pot on the counter, then swung out a chair for her. “And, Sky, hustle the rest of your gear out of my car, will you? I need to take off in a minute.”

The fastest way to get Jack out of their lives was to let him follow his own program, Abby concluded, giving up and sitting. When he’d gone, she could lock the door, reestablish control. By tomorrow, once she’d caught her breath, she’d be able to cope with him. Enforce her boundaries. Resist his plans without rudeness.

Tonight—for a few more minutes—she just needed not to scream.

She bit her bottom lip as he lifted her foot to another chair and then, with surprising gentleness, pulled her sock down over her—shockingly swollen ankle. Which was already turning a fine shade of mottled eggplant.

“That hurt?” He glanced up as she made a tiny sound of dismay.

“Not…much.”

“Hmm.” Frowning, he drew one fingertip from her ankle down the top of her foot to her toes.

A line of ice and then fire sizzled behind his touch. She blinked back tears, focusing fiercely on his big blunt fingertip with its well-tended nail. On work-roughened hands that were very clean. On the top of his down-bent head. He had thick, straight hair of that color men call dirty-blond and women call wheat or tawny. His eyes were gray, she noted, as he peered up at her from under bristly brows, two shades darker than his hair.

“I’m no doctor, but I’d guess it’s a sprain.” Idly, absently, his finger returned up her foot as he held her gaze.

For too long.

He looked into her too deeply.

Something leaped between them before she could lower her lashes. Awareness. It triggered an echoing flutter in her stomach, a flow of warmth. Between one breath and the next, Abby felt as if they were toppling toward each other. Gripping the sides of her chair, she fought down the urge to smack his hand aside. I don’t need this. Don’t want it. “I seem to be able to—oo-oh—move it. Sort of.”

“Your call, Abby. I’ll be happy to drive you into Durango if you want to go to the emergency room. Or I suppose I could ask Doc Kerner, our local vet, to come over, give us his opinion.”

Was he kidding?

He wasn’t. The town of Trueheart, what she’d seen of it, seemed to be less than a mile square. No motel. Apparently no real doctor. “Why don’t I give it till morning?” Forty miles to Durango and back again in Jack’s unnerving company was more than she could face at this point. He’d been coming on to her, hadn’t he?

“That’s what I’d do,” he agreed with a relief that assured her she must have been mistaken. Rising with an easy grace that belied his big-boned build, he reached into the pot. “I was a bit low on ice cubes myself, but I’ve got frozen peas and corn a-a-nd wild mountain blueberries.” He draped a plastic bag of each across her ankle as he spoke. “Give it half an hour, if you can sit still that long.”

He was a fine one to talk. Jack was halfway to the exit already, speaking as he moved backward. “I’ve got to drive this little, um, a baby-sitter home and then I have to find Kat. But after I’ve rounded her up, can we take you and Sky to supper? Nothing fancy—Michelle’s will be closed by then. But Mo’s Truckstop has the best steak-burgers in a hundred miles and Mo keeps the grill fired up all night.”

A baby-sitter. So Jack and his wife had a child or children. And the banished cowboy with the truck is the baby-sitter’s boyfriend, Abby hazarded a silent guess. That was a better scenario than her first one. Meanwhile Kat, Jack’s wife, must be out on the town. This was too many players to follow. “That’s awfully kind of you, but please don’t trouble yourself. We’ve got sandwich makings right here.” She nodded at Skyler, edging past the man with his arms full of a big plastic cooler. “I think we’ll eat in, then go straight to bed.”

“Probably just as well,” Jack said readily. “In that case, sleep tight, and don’t worry about the bus. Whitey and I will look after it first thing tomorrow.”

And he was out the door before she could make the man see that she’d rather handle her own problems.