Made For Each Other Read online

  Parris Afton Bonds

  Made For Each Other

  Published by Parris Afton, Inc.

  Copyright 2012 by Parris Afton, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover artwork by DigitalDonna.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away.

  For Janice Knight

  You sparkle like diamonds snd bubble like champagne

  Chapter One

  The last thing Julie recalled before her Volvo station wagon careened off New Mexico’s Roswell-Ruidoso highway and somersaulted across the snow-blanketed field was her friend Pam McKinney’s riotous laughter over one of the silly, inane remarks the two of them had been trading off during the course of their trip.

  Then there came the blinding headlights from the distant oncoming car, the first car they had passed on the long, desolate stretch over the high plains in almost an hour, and the station wagon began to slip-slide across a patch of ice. Eternal seconds of frantic weightlessness followed, and finally the sharp crack of pain. Fingers of vapor reached into the recesses of Julie’s stunned mind, and she slowly shook her head, trying to clear it.

  Gasoline! Quickly she scrambled to her knees. The jarring pain in her shoulder warned her something was broken. The car was a cave of blackness, and for a moment she was not certain which direction was up or in what direction the car doors and escape lay.

  “Pam?” she mumbled. “Are you all right?” A silence permeated the darkness, along with the cloying, bitter odor of the gasoline. They had to get out! Where was Pam? Panicky now, Julie felt along the dash panel and, locating the keys, switched off the motor. From the position of the steering wheel she realized the car lay tilted on its passenger side. She began to crawl through the debris of luggage, loose clothing, and packed food, groping in the darkness for Pam.

  Silent pleas that her friend was alive blended with the urgency to escape and the stabbing pain in her shoulder. “Pam!” she cried out. “Where are you?”

  Somewhere toward the rear of the car a soft moan answered her, and Julie felt relief mixed with helplessness at their plight. Apparently Pam was not fully conscious. And for Julie to even move her left arm sent waves of agony through her. Yet she had to pull Pam from the gas-soaked car. Immediately!

  Waves of dizziness generated by the gasoline fumes washed over Julie. Suddenly there came a bright flash of light and the icy blast of air from above as the driver’s door swung open. A low, husky voice etched with concern demanded, “Are you okay? Can you move?”

  Julie’s dazed eyes squinted against the glare of the flashlight. Somewhere beyond the glare a pair of eyes glittered startling blue against the night’s darkness. She nodded her head, then wished she had not as the slight movement produced another onslaught of pain. “I think so,” she managed. “My left shoulder—but my friend . . . can you get to her? I think she’s unconscious.”

  The flashlight’s beam left Julie’s small, pale face to sweep over the car’s interior, halting on the inert figure crumpled like a rag doll against the bottom door of the back seat. The light skittered away, and the man’s tall, lean figure was silhouetted in the frame of the door as he lowered himself inside the car.

  As he bent near her, she was aware of his strong scent of woodsmoke and tobacco, overpowering even that of the gasoline fumes, then the frightening touch of warm fingers sliding inside the V neck of her velour sweater. For a breathless moment she lay there, helpless against whatever he might choose to do; yet there was something reassuring about the gentle way his fingers searched along the area above her breast. . . and something tantalizingly unfamiliar.

  “You’ve a broken collarbone,” he said, the long, hard line of his mouth grim.

  “The gasoline ...” she murmured. Fear of an explosion stirred in her again.

  “Your tank’s full,” the man said, his flash¬light indicating the gas gauge. “There’s little risk of an explosion since the vapors haven’t had a chance to build up.”

  He withdrew his hand, and she was surprised to find she missed its comforting warmth as she watched him maneuver around the front seat and out of her sight. The hissing of the November wind rushing down off the Sacramento Mountains was the only sound in the long silence until Pam groaned. “My head,” the girl whimpered.

  “Your friend seems to have nothing broken,” the man told Julie. “Possibly a concussion, though.”

  Julie closed her eyes against the tears of relief, only to feel something warm draped over her. Her lids fluttered open to see the man kneeling above her again. His fleece-lined leather coat covered her upper torso. “Brace yourself,” he said. A roughness steeled his voice as his arms enfolded her against the width of his chest.

  A streak of pain engulfed her, so that the transfer to the warm shelter of the four-wheel Blazer was a haze of movement. It seemed only seconds before the man was back, letting in another gust of arctic wind as he deposited Pam on the rear seat.

  She bit her lower lip with worry as she glanced back at her friend’s motionless body. Was it only moments before that they had been laughing at something silly, Pam’s remark about Julie’s eyes? “They’re not tilted at the corners like Sophia Loren’s or gorgeously wide like Audrey Hepburn’s, but there is something definitely sexy about them—not your ordinary cow eyes, you understand.”

  Upon reflection the remark did not seem that funny to Julie, but after driving all day and half the night every word that came out of their mouths had seemed outrageously hilarious at the moment—even Pam’s quip about Julie’s five-foot Thumbelina frame.

  The man slid into the driver’s seat, and only then could Julie make out the phantom face of her rescuer. The dashboard lights illuminated high-planed cheeks and a hard cut of jaw and sharply squared chin covered with a dark, shaggy growth that was more than an unshaven stubble but not quite long enough for a beard. Beneath the aquiline nose the uncompromising curve of the generous lips stretched in a forbidding line.

  The heavy-lidded eyes flicked her a measured look, and she realized how awful she must appear. With an unconsciously feminine gesture her good hand came up to brush through the swath of cinnamon-colored hair that tumbled over her right temple. Another section of hair had slipped out of one of the pig tails she had fashioned, to tangle about one shoulder.

  “I’ve lost my ribbon,” she murmured. Her voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. She tried to still the trembling that began to shake her, wondering if she was suffering the aftereffects of shock.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t lose your life,” the man snapped. “What in the world were you doing driving on the roads? Didn’t you know there were travelers’ advisories out?”

  If the stranger meant to shake her out of the shock, he succeeded. She had to acknowledge that her car’s radio had warned them of the hazardous conditions as they left the last lights of Hobbs, New Mexico, but snowplows had already cleared the high-desert highway and the winter winds seemed to have dried the pavement by the time they passed through the small, isolated town of Roswell and began the steady climb that would turn into a tortuously twisting road once it reached the foothills of Ruidoso’s Sacramento Mountains.

  “What were you doing out on the road?” she shot back defensively.

  The man nodded to the gearshift protruding from the center of the car’s floor. “I have four-wheel drive,” he said impatiently. “And I don’t drive fast in this kind of weather—as, from the looks of the accident, you were.”

  She bristled under his accusing gaze. “If you hadn’t had your headlights on bright, I’d have seen that patch of ice. It’s your fault!”

  H
is mouth quirked in a sardonic smile. “At a distance of five miles you were blinded by my light beams?”

  Rendered defenseless by his logic, she dropped the argument. But the realization that she and Pam were isolated in a car with a strange man and virtually helpless swept over her like a Texas blue norther, causing her to shiver again. Her gaze went to the .30/.30 rifle mounted on a rack over one of the rear side windows. “Who are you?” she asked suspiciously.

  The man’s narrowed eyes never left the road. “Nick,” he said and volunteered no further information, which made her that much more apprehensive.

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Back to the Roswell hospital. Though it’s small, it’s the only hospital around for fifty miles or more.”

  Her lips clamped shut. She did not know how anything could look blacker. She had agreed to Pam’s suggestion of making a week-end vacation at Carlsbad Caverns near Hobbs out of a free-lance story she hoped to do on the proposed nuclear-waste site outside the city. But a burst radiator hose curtailed their two-day vacation and their money so that they had to plan a straight-through return drive to Santa Fe Saturday evening instead of an all-day leisurely trip on Sunday.

  She could just imagine her parents’ I-told- you-so expression, though they might never actually utter the words. Five years ago they had gently cautioned her that twenty was too young to strike out from Little Elm, Texas, on her own as a free-lance reporter—that she’d be better off going to the nearby women’s university at Denton and studying journalism.

  Now she and Pam would be detained in a small hospital in the middle of nowhere with no hope of having the station wagon repaired before Monday or Tuesday at the earliest. Thank goodness she had car insurance. She could only hope that Pam, like herself, had hospitalization.

  She gave that information, along with Pam’s address and her own data, to the middle-aged nurse on duty. All the while she was uncomfortably aware of the stranger’s hawklike scrutiny of her. For the first time, beneath the harsh bright glare of the emer-gency-room lights, her gaze met his intense blue eyes. There was something about them, about his rough-cast face with the dark brown hair that was long enough to curl about the open collar of his flannel shirt, that was vaguely familiar.

  A still dazed Pam was wheeled away on a bed to another room, while she suffered through the agony of having her shoulder maneuvered into different positions for X rays. After the technician finished with her, she was helped out of the room and passed Pam, who was now coming in. “Are you all right?” she asked her friend.

  Pam smiled wanly, her freckles pale in her round face. “This is just what I needed—an enforced rest.”

  She touched her shoulder reassuringly. “I’ll call Jim and tell him that his best secretary will be on an extended vacation.”

  Pam’s hazel eyes went to the shoulder that Julie was holding in an awkward position. “And tell him also that his favorite girl will be out of commission for a while,” she said with a hint of her old mischievousness

  Julie made a face at her. Jim Miller, her boss and the editor of the Santa Fe Sun, had for the first time asked her out the week before, and she felt Pam was making more out of the casual friendship than really existed.

  When Julie was helped back into the emergency room her gaze immediately flew to her rescuer. As barbarous and unsociable as he was, he still seemed to her a lifeline, her protector in the midst of the impersonal hospital treatment. He knew what had happened to her. He had seen the terrible accident. Surely it was as real for him as the pain was for her now.

  The doctor on duty reiterated the stranger’s assessment of the injuries as he and the nurse strapped Julie into a harnesslike apparatus that rigidified her upper torso. She obediently swallowed the pain pill the nurse gave her, only half listening to the bushy-haired doctor.

  “It’ll be a good six weeks before your clavicle heals, young lady. Your body’s taken quite a bruising, and you’ll be awfully sore for two or three days. I’d wear that brace for at least a month. Your friend’s fine, but we usually keep someone who has suffered a concussion like this under observation for a day or so to watch for possible contusion, bruising of the brain.”

  Her shoulders would have sagged with the terrible news had they not been pinned back by the uncomfortable brace. No car—besides, she couldn’t drive if she wanted to at that moment. No money in her purse—for either bus fare back to Santa Fe or a motel room while she waited for Pam to be discharged from observation. It seemed even Pam was better off than she, for at least her friend’s insurance would pick up her stayover in the hospital.

  Angrily her gaze switched back to the stranger, who now stood talking with a highway patrolman, making a report of the accident. She heard the patrolman say something about having the car towed in, but the bad news really didn’t bother her at that point. Pain, though now easing somewhat with the drug she had been given, occupied every part of her—pain, and irritation at the stranger who leaned so nonchalantly against the emergency station’s counter, his faded jeans molding the narrow hips and the worn boots making him look at least seven feet tall.

  It was all his fault!

  As if he sensed her gaze on him, he left the patrolman and crossed to her with a lithe, catlike grace. His blue eyes were as icy as the snow outside. “According to the patrolman’s report, you’re the scathing tongue of the Santa Fe Sun’s political column—Julie Dever.”

  Momentarily she was startled by the coldness behind the statement and the expression of contempt stamped on the harsh countenance. But the doctor’s next words brought her attention back in focus. “I’m discharging Miss Dever,” he told the man and handed him a vial of pills for pain relief. “You can take her home now—and be sure to tighten her brace every day,” he added as he turned to attend another patient entering the emergency room.

  The stranger’s eyebrows raked upward in surprise, but before he could say anything, she blurted, “None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for your bright lights! I’ve nowhere to go, no money, no car—you owe it to me to pay for my motel room until I can cash a check Monday!”

  The straight dark brows came together in a frown. The lazy-lidded gaze swept over her with disdain, and it was then she realized what was so familiar about him. He was the elusive, aloof state senator, Nicholas Raffer— at thirty-two the youngest senator in New Mexico—that every newspaper and magazine in the state was eager to do a story about!

  Oh, it was common knowledge that Nicholas’s father owned the enormous San Ramon ranch that was part of the legendary Spanish land grant south of Taos. And someone had dug up the fact that Nicholas had worked his way through law school by roughnecking on New Mexico’s oil wells. But other than that, not much was known about Nicholas, for he made it clear he wanted to keep a low profile on his born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth history and concentrate on his political accomplishments.

  She winced as she recalled she had crucified him twice within the month in her editorial column—the “Santa Fe Speculator”—for his favorable stand on nuclear energy. No wonder he disliked her!

  She would have recognized him earlier had it not been for the dire circumstances of their meeting as well as for his shaggy beard and rough clothing. She had had a few glimpses of him at the capitol building or at one of Santa Fe’s fashionable restaurants, always with a beautiful woman draped across his arm, and he was each time dressed in impeccably tailored suits that enhanced his whipcord leanness, and his sun-bronzed face had always been smoothly shaven to reveal the sharp line of jaw and mocking curve of lips.

  Half the women in town were after the young senator, but odds heavily favored Santa Pe’s patroness of the arts and daughter of New Mexico’s chief justice, Sheila Morrison, a strikingly beautiful woman whose divorce the year before had also left her wealthy—and free to pursue Nicholas.

  Now she looked at Nick’s chiseled face and felt a tremor of fear under the angry slash of his gaze that she had provoked with her accus
ation that the accident had been his fault. It must have been the reaction to the drug she had taken that made her snap rashly, “Well, are you going to get me a room—or do you want your constituents to find out their representative is not a friend of the people?”

  “If I weren’t a reasonable man,” he told her, in a low, tight voice, “I’d jerk you off that table and tie your waspish tongue in knots!”

  Suddenly she found herself in his arms once again as he edged his way past the nursing station and out the sliding glass doors that opened electronically at his approach.

  “The nearest motel will be fine,” she said breathlessly as the bitterly cold night air swept over her.

  When Nick wheeled the car out onto the main highway and bypassed several motels, she became concerned. As Roswell’s lights faded behind and the road began to climb and twist through the Sacramento foothills, she became frightened. “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

  “You said I owed you a place to stay,” Nick said, not taking his gaze off the darkened highway. “And in case you didn’t notice, the motels we passed had ‘No Vacancy’ signs. So you’re staying at my cabin in Ruidoso.”

  “But I can’t!” she gasped. “Besides, I couldn’t put you out of your own cabin.”

  Nick slammed on the brakes, and the vehicle slid to one side on the slick pavement before it came to a halt under his skillful control. “It’s either stay at my cabin,” he said, and she did not miss the triumph that gleamed in his eyes, “or find yourself a room— which, with the ski season, I doubt you will accomplish.”

  She looked away from the piercing blue eyes to the snow that had begun to swirl again outside. Already her lids felt drowsy. What could she do? She did not feel like making any decision right now. She huddled against the door. “All right,” she agreed miserably.

  She was determined she would stay awake, but involuntarily her lids closed, lying like spilt ink on her high cheekbones. She was only vaguely aware of the snakelike twists and hairpin turns the vehicle took as it made its way to the sleepy village of Ruidoso nestled in the snow-laced mountains. It seemed only minutes had passed, but the trip had to have taken at least an hour before the Blazer turned off onto a side road that wound up into Brady Canyon.