Page 30 of The Baby
Instead, me being here, it had become an excuse for him to relax. Except when Rich said relax, he meant drink. If we weren’t careful, between his drinking and my lying about it, we were both going to get shit-canned.
That couldn’t happen. I needed this job. Rich needed this job even more, given he was looking at sixty in a few years. It wasn’t like there was a lot of work that paid as well in Montana. Not to mention the fact that it covered room andboard.
Which meant I needed to be back at the ranch, making sure he kept his drunk ass in the bunk house and didn’t do anything stupid like show up wasted at Ellie’sThanksgiving.
What I didn’t need was an obstacle to that. Except the broken-down car wasexactlythat.
I could have driven by I suppose, but it just wasn’t done in these parts. These roads were all but abandoned on a normal day. On a holiday, forget it. It was unlikely there would be anyone else passing this way today, which meant I was the only hope around formiles.
I pulled the truck in behind the car. I could see it was an old model Nissan. And based on the shape of it, it looked like it had seen some road. The hood was up, steam was pouring out. I hopped out of my truck andstopped.
I hadn’t seen her before. She must have been the driver, because she came around the hood of the car and when she saw me, she held her hands up as if to stop me in my tracks. She was young, maybe a few years younger than me. Long bleach-blond hair that fell aroundherface.
Wearing skin-tight jeans and a coat that wouldn’t keep her warm in Montana in spring, let alonewinter.
I glanced at her license plate. Washington State. Something told me she wasn’t from a rural part of that state either. Her pale skin, dyed hair, and clothes screamed city girl. Which meant she was hell and gone from there, being in Riverbend,Montana.
Shit. I thought again. Except she needed help and I was the only one todoit.
Something about her shivering in that coat too. I didn’tlikeit.
“I’m fine. I don’t need any help,” she said as soon as I got close enough tohearher.
“It doesn’t look that way from here,” I said, raising my chin in the direction ofhercar.
“It’s just a little overheated. Once it cools down it willbefine.”
A little overheated. The steam was coming off the engine in plumes ofsmoke.
“Miss, if you would like me to take a look,Ican.”
I could see she was torn. I suppose I understood. An attractive (okay, she was smoking hot, but I wasn’t about to let myself even think that) young woman alone on the side of the road, confronting a strange man. Sometimes I wondered when we all got so damn paranoid in the country. Used to be expected that folks would look out for each other, help each other whenneeded.
I was offering to check out her car, and she was debating what level on the serial killer spectrum Iranked.
I held up my hands. “I swear I only want to check out the car. I’m late as it is, so if you could figure out whether or not you’re going to trust me to do this, I would muchappreciateit.”
She stepped back and I took that as my sign to move forward. It was like she felt safe with the five feet between us when it wouldn’t take any time at all for me to close thatdistance.
Still, I had no interest in frightening some skittishcitygirl.
I rounded the hood of the car and waited for the steam to abate. I checked under the car and could see the drip of bluecoolant.
“Looks like you’ve got a leak in yourradiator.”
“I’ve been filling it with water when the engine light went on. That seemed to be working,” she said. “Except I drank the last of thewater.”
I tried not to do the man thing. The one where I rolled my eyes and asked her how she thought pouring water into a leaking radiator was going to solve anything. And what was she thinking, driving through a state like Montana where a person could go hours without seeing another vehicle on the road without having enoughwater?
“Where are you headed?” Iasked.
Shit. Because I was going to have to take her there. Because anything leaking that bad, it didn’t matter how much water I could give her, the car wasn’t going to go but another ten miles. Maybetwenty.
There was just more of a whole lot of nothing ten to twenty milesfromhere.
“Long Valley Ranch,”shesaid.
That surprised me. “You know Jake andEllie?”
