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Well, it was over. A long time ago. Since then, he’d worked his butt off to save enough money to buy a place of his own, and this, it seemed, was it. So he’d better make good.
He locked up, then climbed into his old truck. With a flick of his wrist, he turned the key. Tomorrow he’d start by cleaning out each of the buildings and checking on the permits again—-just as soon as he’d done a little digging into the past. He figured it wouldn’t take long to discover the truth. If Dave Sorenson had fathered a kid eleven years ago, someone around a town as small as Bittersweet would know. It was just a matter of time before he found out.
* * *
“Don’t do this to me!” Katie cried.
She tromped on the accelerator of the convertible, pushing the pedal to the floor, but the car continued to slow. The engine had died, and she had no choice but to roll on to the shoulder of the road.
“Perfect,” she grumbled sarcastically. She was nearly three miles outside of town, the sun was about to set and she was wearing sandals that would cut her feet to ribbons before she could catch sight of the town limits of Bittersweet. “Just damned perfect.”
The car eased to a stop, tires crunching on the gravel.
Valiantly she twisted the ignition again.
Nothing.
“Come on, come on.” She tried over and over, but the convertible was as dead as a proverbial doornail and wasn’t about to budge. “Great. Just bloody terrific!” She thought of her half brother and his efforts under the hood a short while ago. “Nice try, Jarrod,” she grumbled, but couldn’t really blame him. He was a private investigator, an ex-cop, and never had been a mechanic. Just because he was male didn’t mean he knew anything about alternators or batteries or spark plugs or whatever it was that made a car run.
With a pained sigh she dropped her head on to the steering wheel and whispered, “A cell phone, a cell phone. My kingdom for a cell phone.” Sweat ran down the back of her neck, and within seconds a lazy bee buzzed and hovered near her head.
Katie drew in a long, deep breath, then gave herself a quick mental shake.
“Okay, okay, you’re a smart woman, Kinkaid. When Jarrod worked on this he might have messed up and didn’t reconnect a wire or hose properly. It’s probably no big deal.” She buoyed herself up as she slid from behind the steering wheel and looked under the hood. The same engine she’d stared at earlier in the day sat where it always had, ticking as it cooled in front of her. Everything appeared in order, but then she didn’t know up from sideways when it came to cars. Gingerly, hoping not to burn herself or smear oil a
ll over, she jiggled a few wires, poked at the hoses, checked the battery cables and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Not that she would recognize it if it was.
In the distance, beyond the last hill, the sound of an engine reached her ears. “Hallelujah!”
Ignoring all the warnings she’d been given as a schoolgirl, she stepped around the car and raised her hands. On this road she was most likely to come across a farmer or ranch hand, or a mother toting her kids into town.
A battered pickup crested the hill, and her heart nose-dived. She recognized Luke Gates’s truck before it ground to a stop.
“Great,” she muttered sarcastically. “Just…perfect.” She told herself she should be relieved rather than disgusted, angry or embarrassed. After all, he was a man she trusted. Well, sort of. At least, as far as she knew, he wasn’t a rapist or murderer or any other kind of criminal.
He parked just ahead of her car and opened the truck’s door. Long, jeans-clad legs unfolded from behind the wheel, and leather boots that had seen better days hit the ground. “Trouble?” he asked as he slammed the door shut.
“A little.” Katie’s heart drummed a bit faster, and she mentally berated herself for letting his innate sex appeal get to her. What did she care if he was tall and lean and irreverently intriguing? She’d met a lot of men in her lifetime—a lot—who were just as good-looking, rebelliously charming and sensual as this guy.
Hadn’t she?
“Looks like a lot of trouble to me.”
“I guess. It just died on me,” she said as he bent to look under the hood.
“And it was runnin’ fine before?”
“No, not really.” Standing next to him, her bare shoulder brushing against his forearm, she explained how the car had been giving her fits and starts over the past six months. “It zips along just fine, then something goes wrong. I have a mechanic or one of my brothers fiddle around with it, and it finally begins to run again. Or, worse yet, it stops on me, and with enough prayer and sweat I manage to get it going again, only to take it into the service station where it purrs like a kitten.” She slid the convertible a spiteful glance. “Then the mechanics can’t find anything wrong with it.” Frustration burned through her veins. “It’s what you might call ‘temperamental.’”
“Maybe it’s just old and worn-out. How many miles you got on her?”
“Two-hundred-and-twenty-some thousand, I think,” she said with a shrug.
He let out a long, low whistle. “As I said, she’s just tired. Think how you’d feel if you’d gone that far.”
“Sometimes it feels as if I have,” she grumbled, and frowned at the engine.
“Get inside and try and start it,” he suggested.
