Stranger At The Crossroads. Gena Dalton
in the rearview mirror. Wild green eyes stared back at her, unseeing, and her auburn curls whipped and tangled madly in the wind. She looked like an Orphan Annie doll scared half to death.
She didn’t care. She had to have the fresh air. With the window rolled up, she couldn’t even breathe.
It was almost cool this morning, with a nice October breeze blowing, but her cheeks felt burning hot. Well, then, they’d really feel hot in Mexico.
If she wound up in Mexico.
The sound and the rhythm of the tires against the pavement soothed her a little. She wouldn’t have to stop again for awhile, since she’d filled the truck with gasoline before she stopped at last night’s motel. She had no desire to eat, either.
Being on the move helped. It helped a lot. The dreams that had wakened her at 3:00 a.m. were fading again. Every mile seemed to put them farther away.
Not the sorrow, though. It was part of her now, as much as her stomach and her veins and her fingers and toes, since it filled them all with its cold cement.
She prayed her constant and only prayer.
Dear God, please give me the strength to bear it.
Then she added a postscript.
You can see by where I am this morning that I don’t have enough. More strength, Lord. More strength.
Never did she dare to pray for the sorrow to be taken away—then she would truly be alone.
The truck swerved on a narrow curve, and she set her gaze on the road again. She’d better be trying to hold it between the ditches if she didn’t want to end up in one.
Actually, she didn’t much care. Her life still wasn’t worth living. It had been a year. A year that had been a hundred times longer without her dear, dear Todd to hold her in his arms every night and her precious baby boy, Daniel, with his huge dark eyes to gaze into with her own.
Grief rushed into her heart, fresh as ever.
Time heals, they’d all told her. You’ll start looking to the future one of these days. Well, at this rate, since she’d made precious little progress in a year, she’d have to be the oldest woman on the planet before she lost even a little of her longing for the past. To get to that point, God would have to give her all His own strength.
At that instant, a cross appeared in the heavens. Up ahead, on the right. A white cross shining in the sun against the blue morning sky.
Darcy stared, not caring that the truck swerved into the opposite lane. Her eyes were glued to that cross. Could it be a visible answer to her prayer?
She blinked and looked again as she straightened her steering. No, the cross wasn’t floating in the sky. It rested atop an adobe building that vaguely reminded her of the Alamo. Ancient and small and run-down, it must be a church, or maybe even a private chapel, judging by the size. No miracles today.
Something flashed in the corner of her eye, something closer. A glint of silver, then she saw the shape of the horse trailer, and her focus came back to earth.
No one with a grain of sense would pull onto the side of a two-lane road with no shoulder like this one unless there was trouble. That spot was steep enough to tilt the trailer sideways.
The ramp was down, and the trailer door hung open, swaying a little over the deep ditch.
Maybe the driver was just checking on a horse that had been kicking the side or putting hay in the hay bag that he’d forgotten. It probably wasn’t an emergency at all. At least, not a medical one.
She prepared to pull over to give a wider berth as she drew closer to the rig.
It was a blowout on a trailer tire. The trailer sat tilted sideways not just because of the terrain. One wheel rested on the ground because the tire had disintegrated. Darcy glimpsed pieces of rubber scattered over the road, but she couldn’t look at anything but that open door. Was the horse hurt?
It surged into view at that moment, backing up fast and in a zigzag line. A man appeared, holding the lead rope, struggling to keep it from being jerked out of his hands, fighting to stay with the terrified animal as it plunged down the ramp.
A pregnant mare. Very pregnant. As she hit the ground with her hind feet, she lost purchase on the blacktop pavement and, scrabbling, half rearing, she slipped off the edge of the ditch and kept on sliding down the incline, reaching with her front legs for balance in the air.
The man held onto her, but it couldn’t have been easy. He had something badly wrong with one leg and could barely keep on his feet and stay with the desperate mare. She reared mightily as the fear rushed through her, hauling the rope through his gloved hands so fast that he came within a heartbeat of losing it. He had all he could do to stay out from under her raised forefeet, but he did it. Darcy pulled even with them.
The mare was huge with the foal that had obviously sapped every bit of her resources. It was a miracle she even had the strength to rush out of the trailer and try to get away, much less fight to stay out of the ditch. The red dun mare had spirit, that was for sure.
She wasn’t hurt, though. She didn’t appear to be hurt.
“Don’t stop,” Darcy said to herself out loud. “Do. Not. Stop.”
She stopped.
The trembling, sweating mare, her eyes rolling into the whites, stretched impossibly higher against the early morning sky, then threw herself backward into the bottom of the ditch.
“Hang on,” Darcy called, through the open passenger window. “I’ll help you.”
She pulled off the road in front of the man’s new Ford dually, killed the engine, leaped out and ran to him and the mare. He whirled on his heel and glared at her. He was furious. Absolutely furious.
And handsome as any man she’d ever seen. He had a strange intensity about him that held her eye, and it wasn’t just the anger. Blue eyes like flames in a fire and black hair. Weathered and tanned face, chiseled and lined some from wind and sun, but she doubted he was more than thirty-five.
Why was she even noticing anything about him? She’d stopped because of the horse.
“Get back on the road,” he said, before she’d reached him. “Get out of here.”
He barked the order in a tone hateful enough to drive anyone away. Anyone who cared.
“I’d love nothing more,” Darcy said.
It was true. She couldn’t handle her own affairs, and here she was meddling in somebody else’s. She didn’t want to be around anyone, especially not such a venomous someone, because what she wanted, what she needed, was to be alone to think about her own problems.
Stopping had been a stupid thing to do when she was supposed to be running away—from her profession as well as from the rest of her life. She looked into the ditch.
The little red dun was wedged on her left side in the narrow space, struggling to find her feet but unable to get up or even move her legs much at all. She was cast. It’d be impossible for her to get her feet under her and get up without help.
It wouldn’t be long, either, until the mare ran out of strength to help them help her.
Darcy heaved a huge sigh. She had taken an oath, after all.
“We’ve got to get her out of there pretty quick. I’ll help you. I’m Dr. Darcy Hart. I’m a veterinarian.”
“I saw the vet box,” he snapped.
“So,” she said, just as sharply. “Be grateful I happened along.”
“Go back to Oklahoma.”
“You’re pretty observant for a man with a sick, cast horse in a ditch on the side of the road.”
“It’s hard not to notice a bossy woman veterinarian hollering orders at a perfect stranger.”