A Man of His Word. Merline Lovelace

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СКАЧАТЬ from the top of her dusty head to the toes of her dusty boots, performing their own assessment. Evidently he agreed with her diagnosis.

      “I saw the wreckage at the bottom of the gorge. What happened?”

      “There was a boulder in the road. With the rain, I didn’t see in time and swung too sharply. I got out of the Blazer before it went over, but the rim crumbled beneath me. I thought…I was sure…” She substituted a wobbly smile for the shudder she wanted to let rip. “The piñon broke my fall. How does that poem go, the one about never seeing anything as beautiful as a tree?”

      “Beats me.” He studied her from under the brim of that beat-up hat, his expression noticeably less comforting and reassuring now that they were back on solid ground. “You’re a lucky woman.”

      She started to point out that not everyone would classify someone who went over a cliff as lucky, but his next comment buried the thought.

      “And damned stupid.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “Most people would have more sense than to drive along a narrow canyon rim road late at night in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

      Sydney had come to the same conclusion herself just before she went bungee jumping without a bungee, but she didn’t particularly enjoy hearing it from someone else. Still, he’d plucked her out of her eagle’s nest. She owed him, big-time.

      Ordering her arms and legs to do their thing, she pushed herself to her feet. Her rescuer had to shoot out a hand and catch her before she whumped back down on her rear. Shaking off his hand, she tried to sound grateful.

      “Thanks. Again. I’m Sydney Scott, by the way.”

      “I know who you are.”

      She flushed at the drawled response, feeling even more stupid than he’d implied earlier. If he was part of a search party, of course he’d know who he’d come looking for.

      “And you are?”

      “Reece Henderson.”

      “Oh.” The straw Stetson that shaped his head as if made for it had led her to assume he was a local. “You’re the dam engineer.”

      From the way his eyes narrowed, she must have put a little too much emphasis on dam. Either that, or their exchange of terse faxes had annoyed him as much as it had her.

      “When you didn’t show for our meeting this morning,” he said curtly, “I called your assistant and woke him up.”

      So much for the massive search-and-rescue effort Sydney had assumed Zack set in motion!

      “The kid told me you’d driven out to the canyon. He seemed to think you might have fallen into an artistic trance and gotten lost.”

      “I don’t fall into artistic trances,” she said with another smile, slightly strained but still trying hard for grateful.

      One black brow lifted in patent disbelief.

      “All right,” she admitted grudgingly, “I did leave a pot of red beans and rice on the stove a couple of months ago while I was working a treatment, but the fire didn’t do any real damage.”

      When he only looked at her through those cool blue eyes, Sydney gave Zack a mental kick in the shins. How much had her assistant told this guy, anyway?

      “Maybe I did start out for San Diego last week and didn’t realize I was going in the wrong direction until I passed Santa Barbara,” she said defensively, “but I was outlining a script in my mind and sort of got caught up in it.”

      With a little snort that sounded suspiciously like disgust, her rescuer strolled back to the Jeep to untie the rope. “Is that what you were doing last night when you drove off a cliff?”

      “I was not in any kind of a trance last night.”

      Well, she amended silently, maybe she had let her imagination go for a while, particularly when the wind whistled eerily through the canyon and raised goose bumps all over her body. Henderson didn’t need to know that, though.

      “As I told you, there was a boulder in the road, a chunk of sandstone. I swerved to avoid it.”

      “If you say so, lady.”

      Gratitude was getting harder and harder to hang on to. Sydney folded her arms across her now-scruffy yellow T-shirt.

      “I do say so.”

      He straightened, the rope half-looped in his hand, his eyes as sharp and slicing as lasers. “Then maybe you’ll also tell me why you were driving around in a restricted area without a permit? A permit that I had intended to issue at our meeting this morning, by the way.”

      That “had intended” caught Sydney’s attention and shoved everything else out of her mind. The terror of sliding over a cliff, the long, frightening hours alone with only a piñon tree for company, the crab-walk up a sheer rock wall fell away. All that remained was her absolute determination to capture the magic of the ruins on videotape…for her dad, for herself, for the joys and tears they’d shared.

      Every inch a professional now, she cut right to the heart of the issue. “I apologize for going around you, Mr. Henderson. I arrived in Chalo Canyon earlier than planned yesterday afternoon. I tried to contact you for permission to drive out to the site, but you were out of town. At a wedding, or so they told me.”

      “So you drove out, anyway.”

      “After I talked to one of your engineers. He said he thought it would be okay. I believe his name was Patrick Something.”

      It would be Patrick, Reece thought in disgust. Young, breezy, overconfident of his brand-new civil engineering degree that hadn’t yet been tested by thousands of tons of wet concrete and millions of yards of rushing water. Reece finished looping the rope.

      “Apology accepted this time, Ms. Scott. Just don’t go around me again. I’m chief engineer on this project. The responsibility for the safety of everyone involved, including you and your crew, rests with me.”

      “It’s Sydney,” she returned, seething inside at the undeserved lecture, but determined to hammer out a working relationship with this bullheaded engineer.

      “Sydney,” he acknowledged with a little nod. “Now we’d better get you back to town so you can have those scrapes and dents checked out. In the meantime, I’ll get hold of the county sheriff and let him know about the accident.”

      “I’d prefer to conduct our planned discussion before I hitch a ride into town. If this sunlight holds and the rest of my crew arrives on time, I want to shoot some exterior footage this afternoon.”

      Reece stared at her across the Jeep’s hood. For God’s sake, was she for real? She’d just spent the night perched in a tree. Her baggy fatigue pants and yellow T-shirt looked like they’d been worn by someone on the losing side of the last war. Her tangled, dark brown mane hung in rats’ tails on either side of her face…a face, he admitted reluctantly, made remarkable by wide green eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth a man could weave some pretty lurid fantasies around.

      Not СКАЧАТЬ