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A chill that had nothing to do with wind or snow or cold danced down her spine.
“Hello?” she said. The word came out a croak. “Hello?” she said again, louder and stronger.
The cold of this graceful Montana spring had soaked through her jeans. Her feet were wet and numb inside her canvas sneakers.
“Dammit,” she said, but louder and stronger were no longer useful adverbs. Old, awful movies were flashing through her head, especially the one about the demon truck with no driver at the wheel.
Wrong.
There was a driver.
She knew that because now, the door was opening. A booted foot emerged. A denim-clad leg. Then a hand. A big hand, gloved in beat-up leather. An arm. A crutch.
A crutch?
It was definitely a crutch.
The gloved hand planted it firmly in the snow. A powerful-looking arm settled over the top.
A man swung down from the cab.
Her first impression was that he was big.
Really big.
Six two, maybe six three. Broad-shouldered. Long-legged.
In other words, big.
He was dressed in denim. Jeans faded and ripped. Jacket with a tear in the elbow. Beat-up boots. An equally beat-up Stetson pulled down so low that she couldn’t see his face.
He was, in a word, scruffy. Scruffy even to her, and she’d grown up on a ranch. A real one. Cowboys, ranch hands, were not Hollywood’s idea of the cool Western hero. They were often big men. They definitely wore denim and boots and Stetsons. They worked hard; you got dirty, working hard.
But this man was, well, scruffy.
And if he and his rusted truck were the duo responsible for meeting guests at the airstrip and driving them to the resort property…
Something didn’t feel right.
Guests often flew into El Sueño. Friends of her father, the general. Of the family. Her brothers ran charity events a couple of times a year.
Guests were met at the airstrip by well-groomed cowboys driving well-cared for vehicles.
They weren’t met like this.
The wind whipped a strand of pale blond hair across Lissa’s face. She grabbed it and shoved it behind her ear. Tried to, anyway, but her fingers were almost numb with cold. All of her was. She was minutes away from turning into Frosty the Snowman, and the guy sent to meet her had yet to say a word or reach for her suitcase. All he did was stand next to the truck, lean heavily on his crutch and stare at her. At least, she assumed he was staring. She couldn’t tell because of that hat.
No way was this right.
Why hadn’t she asked Marcia more questions? If she’d known the name of this place last night, she could have Googled it. She could have Googled the owner—and who, exactly, was the owner? She didn’t know that, either. All she knew was that she didn’t like the feel of things, didn’t like how they were going or not going, to be accurate, and—
“Who the hell are you?”
The cowboy’s voice was rough. Raw as gravel. It suited how he looked.
“I asked you a question, lady. Who are you?”
She was a woman who wanted to blink her eyes open and discover that this was just a bad dream, was who she was, but this was not a dream.
