That was the night he’d told her he loved her and wanted to marry her. She’d been so young and naive, she’d believed him, she thought now. And yet he’d been so tender, so loving—
As she came around a bend in the road, a vehicle came careening out of one of the fishing access roads. She saw the dust in her headlights an instant before she saw the vehicle.
The fool was driving without his headlights on.
She’d barely recognized that fact when the driver of the vehicle flashed on his headlights—and headed directly at her.
Chapter Seven
Luke couldn’t shake his uneasy feeling as he left his uncle’s barn and headed down the narrow, dirt river road. He caught glimpses of the moon through the tall cottonwoods. Clouds skimmed past overhead giving the night a surreal feel.
When he’d stopped by his uncle’s cabin for a moment, he’d thought he heard the sound of a vehicle in the distance. Buzz hardly ventured anywhere other than town occasionally and then only during the day. It seemed strange that he wasn’t home tonight.
Luke tried his uncle’s cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. He didn’t leave a message.
He’d waited for a few minutes, thinking Buzz would be home any minute, and then left, worried about what he’d discovered in the barn. He’d made a cast of the tire tracks but he hadn’t needed to compare it with the other casts he’d taken from poaching sites. The distinct tracks in the dust had matched the ones from the poachers’ vehicle. Someone was using Buzz’s truck to poach deer, and Luke had a pretty good idea who that person was. As for Eugene’s accomplice, it could be any one of his lowlife friends.
As Luke rounded a curve in the road, he saw headlights at an odd angle. His heart thundered in his chest as he recognized the pickup in the ditch. McCall?
Pulling over, he grabbed his flashlight and jumped out. The pickup’s front tires were on the road, headlights angled upward, the back tires buried in the dirt of the deep, narrow ditch.
From the dust still settling on the road, Luke guessed that the accident had just happened. All he could think was that it was a wonder she hadn’t rolled the truck as he rushed to the driver’s side and jerked open the door, the dome light coming on.
“McCall, are you—” He never got the words “all right” out.
She came out of the pickup swinging. He felt the sharp smack of her palm against the side of his face before he could restrain her.
“What in the hell?” he demanded as he looked into her eyes, saw the fear and the anger. But it was the fear that changed everything. He’d never seen her afraid before. He remembered the only other time he’d seen her vulnerable and, like now, she’d been in his arms.
She tried to take another swing, but he had her arms pinned down. Her mouth opened to say something, but her words were lost as his mouth dropped to hers. She struggled, but only for a moment.
He felt the fight go out of her as if, like him, she’d lost herself in the kiss—just the way she had all those years ago.
Then as if reason came back to her, she shoved him away. She was breathing hard, and he couldn’t tell if it was from the kiss or her earlier anger.
“You bastard,” she said on a ragged breath.
“It was just a kiss, McCall.” A lie. That powerful thing between them couldn’t have been more evident. For those amazing moments, she’d been kissing him back, but that could have been enough to make her even angrier.
She advanced on him. He could still feel the sting of her slap and thought for a moment she would try to hit him again.
“You ran me off the road!”
He stared at her in the glow of the lights coming from their headlights and the dome light inside her open pickup door. “Whoa. I found you in the ditch. Are you saying someone purposely ran you off the road?”
She narrowed her gaze at him. “Not someone. You. If you think you can scare me away from investigating your uncle—”
“Are you crazy? You can’t believe I would purposely try to run you off the road. Let alone that I would try to interfere in your investigation.” He saw her expression. “Yeah, I guess you can. Why should you believe me? You’ve never believed anything I’ve ever told you. Not ten years ago. Not now. My mistake for thinking you needed my help.”
She took a breath and let it out slowly before glancing down the dark road. “You didn’t just come flying out of that fishing access site directly at me?”
He shook his head, too angry with her and himself to speak. Why the hell had he kissed her? He’d only managed to make things worse. But once he had her in his arms, he hadn’t been able to help himself.
“Then where is the other pickup?” she demanded.
“I have no idea.”
“I thought...” She stared at him as if really seeing him. “The headlights came right at me, I swerved and lost control and when I looked up...”
“There I was,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I guess...”
If it had been anyone other than McCall, he might have thought the driver imagined another truck. Or had been unintentionally run off the road by someone.
But this was McCall.
“I saw dust as I came around the corner,” he said, trying to remember the scene before he’d realized it was McCall’s pickup and lost all reason. “I just assumed you’d made the dust when you crashed in the ditch.”
“A pickup came right at me.”
He felt himself start. “You saw that it was a pickup?”
“The headlights. They were high, so maybe I only
