“How old are you?” Bridget gasped, the hot dry air searing her lungs as she trudged slowly upward.
“Five and a half. Going on six.” He turned to look up at her, squinting in the bright sunlight. “How ‘bout you?”
“Thirty-one.”
His blue eyes widened in amazement “You don’t look that old.”
“Thank you,” Bridget said with a reluctant smile.
“My dad’s older than you.”
“Really? Is he around, by any chance?”
The boy pointed to the hill behind the house. “Out riding.”
“What about your mom?”
He pointed up at the cloudless blue sky. “She’s in heaven.”
Bridget was stunned into momentary silence and her leaden feet stopped moving.
“Come on,” he urged, almost jerking her arm out of its socket.
She picked up her feet, wiped the perspiration off her forehead and forced herself to move. This was no time for gratuitous sympathy. Besides, she had no idea what to say to a boy whose mom is in heaven. This was a time to change the subject.
“Does your dad ride wild mustangs?” she asked, pausing to catch her breath.
“How’d you know?”
“If his name is Gentry, I’ve heard about him. That’s why I’m here. I want to talk to him.”
“‘Bout a horse?”
Bridget refrained from saying, No, it’s ‘bout a men’s cologne. This wasn’t the time or place to broach the subject of his father as a male model, so she just nodded. And thanked God the large, stone ranch house was now only steps away.
As the boy pushed the heavy, oak front door open, Bridget drew a deep breath and stepped into the quintessential Western living room with native rugs on the wide-planked floors and large leather chairs flanking a huge stone fireplace. Their footsteps echoed off the thick walls of the empty house.
She had a brief, fleeting view of a large, framed photograph of a woman on top of the mantel before the boy dragged her down a long hallway to a cool, tiled bathroom. Before she could stop him, he was kneeling on the sink, dripping blood all over the aqua porcelain and pawing frantically through the medicine chest, tossing bottles and jars and tubes to the floor where they landed in noisy confusion.
“Stop, whatever your name is, and let me clean you up,” Bridget demanded, setting her equipment on the edge of the tub. With a burst of energy, she lifted the boy off the sink, sat him firmly on the toilet seat and grabbed a washcloth from a towel rack. Miraculously he held still, hands clenched into fists, his face pale under a smattering of freckles while she carefully cleaned the wounds on his knees with soap and water then turned her attention to the laceration over his eye.
Boys, she thought with a flash of intuition—this is what they do. They take chances. They climb up too high. They ride too fast and they fall off their bikes. They skin their knees. And this is what their moms do. They clean them up and send them back out to play. But she was not his mom. She was nobody’s mom. And wasn’t likely to ever be. Not the way her life was going. That was okay. There were other things to do besides being a mother. And she was doing them. But for the first time in weeks the face of Scott Marsten flashed before her eyes. His cruel words rang in her ears.
“Face it, Bridget, you just don’t have what it takes to make a man happy. I thought it was because you put all your effort into your job, but now it turns out you haven’t got what it takes to make it in advertising, either.”
Blinking back a sudden rush of tears, Bridget peeled the adhesive off an extra-large-size Band-Aid when heavy footsteps resounded down the hall, and a loud, angry voice called, “Max, where are you?”
So that was his name. Max froze, his eyes wide with fright. Bridget slapped the bandage on the boy’s knee while she imagined an angry Paul Bunyan on his way to skin both their hides with his ax.
“What in the hell is going on here?” the man demanded, filling the doorway with his six-foot, three-inch frame, and pinning Bridget with his piercing blue eyes.
“It...it was an accident,” she stuttered, suddenly feeling five and a half, going on six, instead of a mature thirty-one, going on thirty-two.
His gaze shifted to his son, who was now standing, feet planted apart, staring up at his father. “Max?”
“I ran into this lady on my bike, and I gotta go get it. She came to see you ‘bout a horse,” he said edging around his father. Bridget’s wobbly legs wouldn’t hold her up another minute. She sank to the commode as she listened to Max’s footsteps racing back down the hall. When the front door slammed shut, she looked up into stormy blue eyes under a furrowed wide brow.
“I can explain,” she said weakly. This was not how she planned to meet the man destined to sell a million bottles of men’s cologne in the next year. Not sitting on a toilet seat with her leg gashed in six places, her forehead pounding, one eye almost swollen shut. But now that he was standing only a few feet away, she was more convinced than ever that he was the one. On his horse he was a magnificent figure of a man. Off his horse, he was...he was everything she’d ever dreamed of. For her men’s cologne campaign, of course. Tough, handsome, rugged, sexy— Suddenly she felt faint. She leaned forward and put her head between her knees.
“What’s wrong?” Leaning forward too, Josh Gentry braced his hands on her shoulders and lifted her head to face him. He’d been so worried about Max he hadn’t noticed the woman’s eye was black-and-blue and almost completely closed. Not only that but one leg was gashed in several places.
“Good God, you’re hurt. Did Max do this?”
She shook her head, which didn’t make it feel any better.
“It was nobody’s fault. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Josh grabbed a clean towel from the shelf, doused it with soap and water and gently cleaned the dirt from her wounds. He’d done it many times for horses, and often for Max, but never for a woman with spectacular legs in linen shorts. It had been so long since he’d noticed a woman’s legs or anything at all about them, he felt slightly dazed himself, as if he was the one who’d been run down by a bicycle.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, applying antiseptic cream and bandages, then helping her to her feet. “Where did you say it happened?”
She pointed in a general westerly direction. “On the dirt road, just outside your fence.”
He nodded, clamping his lips together to keep from exploding. Max was supposed to be at his grandparents’ ranch today, learning to groom horses. “Let’s get some ice for your eye,” he said grimly.
“I’m fine, really,” she protested, grabbing her camera case and binoculars before he walked her down the hall toward the kitchen, holding tightly to her arm in case she decided to bolt and then sue him later for negligence. She was gutsy, he’d give her that. She hadn’t even winced when he’d washed her wounds, and didn’t complain about her eye. On the other hand, she was a city woman no doubt, from her clothes and her manner, a tourist taking pictures, one who might walk out of here saying she was okay and then fall apart and have hysterics.
A vision of his late wife, Molly, drifted before his eyes. Calm, serene and capable in the face of emergency, be it a crop failure or an accident in the field or feeding twenty-five hungry men on a moment’s notice. If she were here, she’d have the woman wrapped in a quilt on the couch, treating her with an ice pack and some hot soup. The quintessential nurturer. So good at coping with emergencies he almost thought she went out looking for them. So busy taking care of everybody else, she didn’t seem to have time for him.
He forced those traitorous thoughts from his mind. Molly was a saint. Everyone said so. They said so even before she died from a deadly virus two years ago. Certainly his life had never been the same since. And never would be again. Just thinking of how his plans for the perfect life with the perfect wife had gone so wrong left a bitter taste in his mouth.
He reached into the freezer and grabbed a handful of ice cubes, put them in a plastic bag and pressed it against the woman’s eyelid, holding it tightly for her as she sat at his kitchen table.
“How does that feel?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, taking the ice bag from him and laying it on the table instead of against her eye. She was lying. She was too pale to be fine, but her smile was more determined than sincere.
“I’m Bridget McCloud,” she said extending her hand. “McCloud Advertising.” Automatically he took her hand and was struck by her firm grip. A woman used to getting what she wanted, he guessed.
It didn’t take long to find out what she wanted. Him.