Rescue My Heart Read online

  “Look out, incoming!”

  At the warning, Brady deftly stepped out of the path of the bike barreling down at him.

  “Sorry!” the kid yelled back.

  Up until yesterday, a shout like that would have meant dropping to the ground, covering his head, and hoping for the best. Since there were no enemy insurgents, Brady merely raised the hand still gripping his coffee in a friendly salute. “No problem.”

  But the kid was already long gone, and Brady shook his head. The quiet was amazing, and he took in the oak tree–lined sidewalks, the clean and neat little shops, galleries and cafés—all designed to bring in some tourist money to subsidize the mining and ranching community. For someone who’d spent so much time in places where grime and suffering trumped hope and joy, it felt a little bit like landing in the Twilight Zone.

  “Easy now, Duchess.”

  At the soft, feminine voice, Brady turned and looked into the eyes of a woman walking a…hell, he had no idea. The thing pranced around like it had a stick up its ass.

  Okay, a dog. He was pretty sure.

  The woman smiled at Brady. “Hello, how are you?”

  “Fine, thanks,” he responded automatically, but she hadn’t slowed her pace.

  Just being polite, he thought, and tried to remember the concept. Culture shock, he decided. He was suffering from a hell of a culture shock. Probably he should have given himself some time to adjust before doing this, before coming here of all places, but it was too late now.

  Besides, he’d put it off long enough. He’d been asked to come, multiple times over the years. He’d employed every tactic at his disposal: avoiding, evading, ignoring, but nothing worked with the two people on the planet more stubborn than him.

  His brothers.

  Not blood brothers, but that didn’t appear to matter to Dell or Adam. The three of them had been in the same foster home for two years about a million years ago. Twenty-four months. A blink of an eye really. But to Dell and Adam, it’d been enough to bond the three of them for life.

  Brady stuffed in another bite of his second breakfast wrap, added coffee, and squinted in the bright June sunshine. Jerking his chin down, the sunglasses on top of his head obligingly slipped to his nose.

  Better.

  He headed to his truck parked at the corner but stopped short just in time to watch a woman in an old Jeep rear-end it.

  “Crap. Crap.” Lilah Young stared at the truck she’d just rear-ended and gave herself exactly two seconds to have a pity party. This is what her life had come to. She had to work in increments of seconds.

  A wet, warm tongue laved her hand and she looked over at the three wriggling little bodies in the box on the passenger’s seat of her Jeep.

  Two puppies and a potbellied pig.

  As the co-owner of the sole kennel in town, she was babysitting Mrs. Swanson’s “babies” again today, which included pickup and drop-off services. This was in part because Mrs. Swanson was married to the doctor who’d delivered Lilah twenty-eight years ago, but also because Mrs. Swanson was the mother of Lilah’s favorite ex-boyfriend.

  Not that Lilah had a lot of exes. Only two.

  Okay, three. But one of them didn’t count, the one who after four years she still hoped all of his good parts shriveled up and fell off. And he’d had good parts, too, damn him. She’d read somewhere that every woman got a freebie stupid mistake when it came to men. She liked that. She only wished it applied to everything in life.

  Because driving with Mrs. Swanson’s babies and—

  “Quack-quack!” said the mallard duck loose in the backseat.

  —A mallard duck loose in the backseat had been a doozy of a mistake.

  Resisting the urge to thunk her head against the steering wheel, Lilah hopped out of the Jeep to check the damage she’d caused to the truck, eyes squinted because everyone knew that helped.

  The truck’s bumper sported a sizable dent and crack, but thanks to the tow hitch, there was no real obvious frame damage. The realization brought a rush of relief so great her knees wobbled.

  That is until she caught sight of the front of her Jeep. It was so ancient that it was hard to tell if it had ever really been red once upon a time or if it was just one big friggin’ rust bucket, but that no longer seemed important given that her front end was mashed up.

  “Quack-quack.” In the backseat, Abigail was flapping her wings, getting enough lift to stick her head out the window.

  Lilah put her hand on the duck’s face and gently pressed her back inside. “Stay.”

  “Quack—”

  “Stay.” Wanting to make sure the Jeep would start before she began the task of either looking for the truck’s owner or leaving a note, Lilah hopped behind the wheel. She never should have turned off the engine because her starter had been trying to die for several weeks now. She’d be lucky to get it running again. Beside her, the puppies and piglet were wriggling like crazy, whimpering and panting as they scrambled to stand on each other, trying to escape their box. She took a minute to pat them all, soothing them, and then with her sole thought being Please start, she turned the ignition key.

  And got only an ominous click.

  “Come on, baby,” she coaxed, trying again. “There’s no New Transportation budget, so please come on…”

  Nothing.

  “Pretty sure you killed it.”

  With a gasp, she turned her head. A man stood there. Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark brown hair that was cut short and slightly spiky, like maybe he hadn’t bothered to do much with it after his last shower except run his fingers through it. His clothes were simple: cargoes and a plain shirt, both emphasizing a leanly muscled body so completely devoid of body fat that it would have made any woman sigh—if she hadn’t just rear-ended a truck.

  Probably his truck.

  Having clearly just come out of the convenience store, he held a large coffee and what smelled deliriously, deliciously like an egg and sausage and cheese breakfast wrap.

  Be still, her hungry heart…

  “Quack-quack.”

  “Hush, Abigail,” Lilah murmured, flicking the duck a glance in the rearview mirror before turning back to the man.

  His eyes were hidden behind reflective sunglasses, but she had no doubt they were on her. She could feel them, sharp and assessing. Everything about his carriage said military or cop. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. He was a stranger to her, and there weren’t that many of them in Sunshine. Or anywhere in Idaho for that matter. “Your truck?” she asked, fingers crossed that he’d say no.

  “Yep.” He popped the last of the breakfast wrap in his mouth and calmly tossed the wrapper into the trash can a good ten feet away. Chewing thoughtfully, he swallowed and then sucked down some coffee.

  Just the scent of it had her sighing in jealousy. Probably, she shouldn’t have skipped breakfast. And just as probably, she’d give a body part up for that coffee. Hell, she’d give up two for the candy bar sticking out of his shirt pocket. Just thinking about it had her stomach rumbling loud as thunder. She looked upward to see if she could blame the sound on an impending storm, but for the first time in two weeks there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. “I’m sorry,” she said. “About this.”

  He pushed the sunglasses to the top of his head, further disheveling his hair—not that he appeared to care.

  “Luckily the damage seems to be mostly to my Jeep,” she went on.

  Sharp blue eyes held hers. “Karma?”

  “Actually, I don’t believe in karma.” Nope, she believed in making one’s own fate—which she’d done by once again studying too late into the night, not getting enough sleep, and…crashing into his truck.

  “Hmm.” He sipped some more coffee, and she told herself that leaping out of the Jeep to snatch it from his hands would be bad form.

  “How about felony hit-and-run?” he asked conversationally. “You believe in that?”

  “I wasn’t running off.”

  “Because you ca