Riding the Storm (6 page)

Was it any wonder? But Nate nodded his agreement. Mitch had more than enough to handle today. Keeping Jolene out of trouble might be the best thing he could do to help her father. “That’s your call.”

“Yes, it is.” He glanced over at the sharp tone in her voice. But he suspected it had more to do with the worsening weather conditions than with him. The quick smile she spared him went a long way toward lightening his mood. “But thanks, anyway.”

He supposed keeping a secret was one small thing she’d let him do for her. “No problem.”

Jolene flipped the windshield wipers up to high and pressed on the accelerator, taking them along the soggy road at a saner speed. Though he could tell she was concentrating hard to steer the misaligned truck over the challenging terrain, nothing seemed able to stop her mouth. “I’m sorry if I hit a nerve,” she apologized. “I mean that figuratively, not literally. Unless I did hit a nerve, and that’s why your knee hurts—”

“Just drive.”

They jostled along for another half mile. “So what was it?” she asked.

“What was what?” Man, she liked to talk. About as fast as she liked to drive.

“What happened to your leg? You don’t look big enough for football. Was it a surfing accident? Skate-boarding? Tripping over a star in Hollywood?”

Actually it had been one son of a bitch bull that hadn’t taken a shine to rodeo life, being ridden, or Nate. Tossing his rider to the ground before his eight seconds were up hadn’t been enough payback. And though Nate’s memories were a little fuzzy after seeing a thousand plus pounds of angry bull charging him, when he woke up in the ambulance, he’d been quite clear about the fact his college rodeo scholarship and planned career as a professional bull rider were over.

Hollywood star? Yeah, right. “You’ve got some serious misconceptions about California.”

“I know all I need to about the Golden State.” Now there was a cryptic statement. “So what about your leg?”

They bounced over to the left side of the road to avoid a pool of water standing in a washout. As they eased back over the stubby weeds in the middle, he caught a glimpse of something cream-colored dashing into the road.

The inquisition was forgotten. Nate grabbed the dash and leaned forward. “What’s that?”

“I see it.”

Jolene slowed the truck. Despite the reflective wall of rain in front of them, she turned on the headlights to give them a better look.

Too big to be a coyote. Too small to be a horse. Dancing back and forth too quickly to be a vehicle of any kind.

Jolene slammed on the brakes the instant the object came into focus. “Oh, my God!”

“What the hell?”

Crazy Texans.

Arms waved as the figure jumped up and down, a long filmy cloth slapping against bare shoulders with every jump. Nate cracked open his window. He could hear the shouting now. A blonde woman in a wedding gown and veil was out in the middle of the road, flagging them down.

“Help! Stop! Please! Oh, thank God.” She glanced over her shoulder toward a stand of tall, dead brown grass in the ditch behind her. “Wes!”

She looked barely old enough to have graduated from high school. The would-be, runaway—or on her way to a costume party—bride hiked up her limp skirt and dashed toward the truck.

Nate glanced across the seat as she approached. “A friend of yours?”

He was thinking along the lines of impulsive soul mate, but Jolene shook her head. “I don’t recognize her. She’s not from Turning Point.”

The bedraggled bride ran straight for the driver’s side of the vehicle.
Hell.
Instead of just rolling down her window to talk, Jolene was already climbing out. With a resolute sigh, Nate pulled his cap low on his forehead and opened his door.

“Hey, you okay?” Jolene squeezed the young woman’s outstretched hand.

“I am now. Can you help us?” Though breathless with panic, the young woman didn’t show any obvious signs of injury.

As Nate rounded the hood of the truck, it was impossible to tell if the streaks of mascara running down her face were from tears or the weather. But one thing was clear. Spots of rain had already dappled the back of Jolene’s overalls. Another few minutes outside like this, and she’d be just as wet as the bride. He needed to assess the situation and get them out of there as quickly as possible.

“You guys lost?” he asked, including the equally young man in a mud-splattered tuxedo who was climbing out of the ditch to join them. The kid seemed to be moving fine, under his own power. He carried a tire iron.

Nate felt no threat, though. Without the glare from the windshield, he could get a look at the dinged-up compact turned sideways in the ditch, its front fender pointed up at the sky, its back tires mired in the mud. He could make out what was left of a skid trail, now a trough of mud and gravel.

A flat tire. A blowout, most likely. The kids were lucky they hadn’t rolled the vehicle.

The bride jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at her groom. “Ask Wes. This was his idea of a shortcut.”

“Now, Cindy, when you saw how backed-up the highway was, you agreed with me.”

“I didn’t agree to this!” Cindy crossed her arms and leaned toward Jolene, giving her a conspiratorial, only-a-woman-could-understand glare. “I’m supposed to be on my honeymoon in San Antonio right now.”

The kid named Wes reached out to touch her. She stiffened and he pulled away. “C’mon, honey. I said I was—”

“Either of you two hurt?” Nate asked, cutting them off before the argument really got started.

Though the kid was caked in mud and streaked with grease, when Wes held out his hand, Nate took it. “No, sir, Officer. We popped a tire and ran off the road. I was just trying to change it.”

He’d been trying for some time, by the look of things. Nate held on long enough to assess that the gold ring was real, and that the wrinkled, musky tux had been slept in or stayed up all night in even before he’d torn and stained it trying to fix the tire. These kids were newlyweds, all right, if not terribly bright ones.

Nate wiped his hand clean on the side of his leg. “First of all, I’m a paramedic, not a cop. You don’t have to call me
sir.
Secondly, we’re already on a call. If neither of you are seriously hurt, I suggest you wait in your car and we’ll call a tow truck to come help you out ASAP.”

“Sorry, sir. I mean…sorry.” Wes’s cheeks actually turned pink beneath the shaggy brown hair that mud and water had plastered to them.

“There’s only one tow truck in Turning Point,” Jolene informed him. “Riley Addams’s rig. And he’s one of the volunteer firefighters who works for Dad. Dad’s going to want to keep him on hand in case there’s a fire or injury emergency.”

“What about the sheriff’s department?”

Jolene shrugged. “You heard the dispatch. Most of them are busy directing traffic into town.”

Nate propped his hands on his hips.
Just dandy.
More screwball Texas organization. But if these two were old enough to get married, then they were mature enough
to accept some responsibility. He schooled his patience and offered a plausible alternative. “Maybe you could just sit tight, and we’ll pick you up on the way back—after we check Mrs. Browning’s condition.”

“I’m not spending another minute with this twerp!” Cindy argued.

“Honey, you agreed with me this morning—”

“That was three hours ago.” She whirled around and stamped her silver-sandaled foot in the mud. “Before the rain. Before my gown was ruined. Before your brother’s stupid car fell apart on us.”

“That wasn’t my fault!”

She spun back to face Jolene and Nate. So much for maturity. “We’ve been planning this wedding for two months. You’d think he’d at least have the sense to make sure his own car was running.”

“It
was
running last night.”

“First, my beautiful sunrise wedding gets ruined by this stupid weather. Then the car doesn’t work. And by the time we left Chapman Ranch, the highway was packed with people headed for Turning Point. So Wes took a detour. Now we’re stuck. No hotel. No hot tub.” She glared at her husband. “No honeymoon.”

Wes looked embarrassed and exhausted. Not to mention drenched to the skin. “We don’t have a cell phone or I would have called for help. We blew the right rear tire and spun out. I tried to fix it, but it’s too muddy for the jack to work. We tried to drive out, but obviously, that didn’t work, either.”

Cindy was on a roll. “Obviously. If you’d listened to me, we’d—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Nate held up his hands in a T
for time-out. “We’re on an emergency call.” But half of the
we
had already circled around the car to inspect the flat tire. “Jolene?”
Hell.
This just got better and better. Nate resisted the urge to shake his fist at these crazy fools. Somebody needed to be the sensible grown-up here. “I’ve got a woman in labor on the Rock-a-Bye ranch, so we can only spare a few minutes. If we can get you up and running in that time, we’ll do it. If not, we call it in and you stay put until that tow truck can get here.”

“But that could be—”

He cut off Cindy’s whine in his most decisive, do-not-mess-with-me voice. “You go sit in the truck. Warm yourself up for a few minutes while I see what I can do. Wes, you’re with me.”

Cindy wanted to speak, but closed her mouth, wisely thinking better of it. With a huffy sigh, she marched around to open the truck’s door while Wes shyly held out the tire iron. “You’ll need this, sir.”

“Don’t call…” Oh, hell. Let the kid be a little intimidated. Maybe it’d knock some sense into him. Nate took the tire iron and winked a bit of reassurance. “Come on.”

With the pouting bride safely tucked away inside the truck, Nate tipped his face to the sky, searching for a break among the clouds, challenging the warm rain to cleanse his skin and deeper inside. He needed to rid himself of his frustrations, stay calm and in charge.

Now he had more than Jolene and her baby to take care of.

Swiping the moisture from his face, Nate hiked around the car and found Jolene kneeling in the mud,
her red boot already heel-deep in ditch water. She had her shoulder wedged up against the wheel well of the car as she tried to pry the jack free.

“Are you crazy?” Nate dashed the last few feet. He grabbed her by the upper arm and pulled her away from the potential danger. He raised his voice to be heard over the sound of raindrops slapping against the earth. “That whole thing could come crashing down on you. Get back in the truck. Wes and I will handle this.”

Jolene jerked her arm from his grip, but not before his fingers memorized the sensations of delicate bone structure and sinewed muscle beneath her baggy sleeve. Not before his pulse leaped in response to the appealing combination of softness and strength.

“I know how to change a tire,” she insisted, slicking her hair behind her ear and leaving a blemish of mud on her cheek. “The car’s resting on the ground, not the jack. Once we get the jack unstuck, we could put some grass or gravel underneath it to keep it from sinking in again. Then we could lift the car, change the flat and get those two underway.”

“That’s your plan?” Actually it wasn’t a half bad one, given the circumstances. Nate tamped down his sarcasm. Time was a factor, and Jolene’s idea was as good as any. But he didn’t want her messing with the tire. The danger of the car shifting might be minimal, but it was a danger, all the same.

“All right,” he conceded. “Grab the hubcap while you’re at it. We can use it under the jack to get firmer footing, too.”

Hope or excitement or some other wonderful thing blazed in her eyes, making Nate feel like a prince for
half a moment. Basking in the fleeting glory, he couldn’t seem to stop himself from reaching out and flicking the smear of mud from her velvety cheek. A startled
oh
rounded her lips when he touched her, but she didn’t pull away. Still, he didn’t allow himself to linger. He was determined to be the prince of practicality. “I’ll work on the tire. You gather whatever you can find to give us traction.”

Jolene ran to the truck and came back with a hatchet and shovel. She handed the shovel to Wes and asked him to dig up gravel while she started hacking down handfuls of ground cover from either side of the ditch. Meanwhile, Nate flipped his cap around backward so the bill protected his neck, and he hunched down to inspect the tire for himself. The thing wasn’t just flat; it was shredded.

Wes had loosened the bolts, but hadn’t got much further. Ignoring the ache in his bum knee, Nate used the tire iron as a lever to free the jack from the mud. The next step was to lighten the back of the car.

Wading in up to his ankles, he took note that the water in the ditch was deep enough to form an eddy around his boots. The ground was too dry and hard to soak up the rain as quickly as it was falling. This had to be runoff from the flat cattle land. That meant the water would continue to rise—exponentially—in low-lying areas, even if the rain slowed or stopped, which Nate doubted was going to happen any time soon.

He had to work fast to get the honeymooners on their way. Faster, to pick up Lily Browning and get her back to Turning Point for the medical care she and her baby would need.

Nate hauled out two garment bags and a toiletry kit
from Wes and Cindy’s trunk and carted them up to the road.

“Those two don’t believe in traveling light, do they,” Jolene joked, cutting through a stubborn weed.

Nate set the items down beside her and headed back to retrieve two large suitcases.

“Joaquin and I never had a honeymoon. He was already sick when we got married. He used to promise that when—”

Her voice stopped abruptly and her wistful gaze sharpened and darted up to Nate’s, as if surprised that she’d said the words out loud. Or maybe just surprised that she’d said them to him.

He looked down at her over the corner of a suitcase. That long strand of hair had worked loose from her ponytail again, and the rain had glued it to her face. “Joaquin was your husband, right?”

She nodded, but offered no more. She pushed to her feet, carrying the pile of weeds with her. “I’ll go see if this is enough.”