Chapter One
The road was dusty and potted and sure enough the bald tires on her Jeep Patriot weren’t up to the challenge. Ivy heard the pop before the steering wheel jerked in her hands and pulled the car left, into on-coming traffic—if there was any. But her luck was running in negative numbers lately. She was on a desolate stretch of state road, between islands of civilization, with a cell phone that had a weak battery.
She pumped the brakes and wrestled with the steering wheel. As the car slowed, the wind through the open windows calmed enough that she could hear the crunch of gravel under her tires. She coasted to a stop on the shoulder, then pried her fingers loose and flipped on the emergency flashers.
She had no spare. She’d loaned it to her neighbor, who was in thicker dire straits than Ivy.
But she had a can of Repair! that promised to re-inflate tires and keep them going fifty-plus miles; she had flares, a marker and cardboard she could rip off a box in the back and make into a distress sign if the ‘miracle in a can’ didn’t work.
This was not her first emergency; just the latest in what seemed like a lifetime of living
on the edge, waiting for the next round to begin.
She pulled her purse into her lap and rummaged through it for her cell phone, a Blackberry more than four years old and dropped so many times the red veneer had chipped off around the edges.
Cell phones were a luxury. As were movie rentals and pedicures, her morning frappuccinos and shoes priced over forty dollars. She’d given up a lot over the past nineteen months. She had no regrets about it. Not even now.
Although tires were not an excess, two repairs in a single month was more than her budget could sustain. She’d had to choose between those and a tune up. A fifty-fifty gamble she’d just lost.
She pressed her thumb to the ball on her phone and the screen lit up. Then faded. Before it went black, Ivy noted the red x over the tower icon and the complete absence of reception bars. Even if her phone was capable of a full charge, it would be of no use to her here.
She climbed out of the car and into a dry wind that plastered her cotton skirt to her bottom and legs. Long, supple legs. She’d given up her membership to a fancy gym and purchased a pair of running shoes. That was one of her better decisions. She felt stronger than ever, had shed the eight pounds she hadn’t been able to chisel away before hitting the pavement, and her mind was a lot clearer, too. She loved a landslide win. The thought of it made her smile, which instantly covered her teeth in grit.
The desert. August. Sand and wind and plenty of both. Ivy had trouble remembering that. She made this drive twice a month, without fail, but the sharp air and the unrelenting sun, which dried everything to tinder, was always on the outside. It was three hundred and thirty miles from San Diego to Las Vegas and Ivy did it in one long stretch, fueling up before departure, loading up on water and fresh fruit. She did the same for the trip back. There was nothing worth pausing over out here. Not a lick of green in the landscape. No scent of salt in the wind.
Ivy loved San Diego, even if living there meant a five hundred square foot studio apartment and street parking. All she had to do was throw open her windows and inhale. She was less than a block from the Bay and just a short sprint from the boardwalk and the beach. When she wasn’t working late or already outside running, she perched in one of the windows and watched the sun slip through its palette of colors before disappearing into the sea. Nothing beat that.
She walked around the car, stood at the hood and noted its unnatural leaning. The wind pulled her hair into long streamers, the sun catching the red highlights. She was dark where her sister was light. Ivy had taken her coloring from her father, who was born in Mexicali. She’d gotten her bone structure from him, too, with broad cheeks and full lips and a straight nose that flared slightly. Of course, she had only her mother’s word on that—Ivy’s father left long before she’d developed any meaningful memories of him.
She took a step back and bent slightly at the waist to examine the extent of the damage.
Front tire, driver’s side. She’d known that before getting out. But the tire was a goner. It had already started to shred, rubber peeling away from the rim. Not good news.
She didn’t panic. She was a pro, now, at handling crisis situations. At saving herself. She’d had to do it at thirteen, when her mother, in one of her drunken stupors, had set fire to their home, and again at twenty-two, when she’d walked away from an abusive marriage. A blown tire in the middle of nowhere was an inconvenience. It wasn’t life-threatening.
Ivy lifted her chin and propped her hands on her hips. The wind blew drifts of sand over the hood and roof of the car, coating the black paint and the windshield. She felt it in her hair and knew she probably had a fine dusting of pale over mahogany. She gazed beyond the car, but there was no traffic coming from the west. She turned and looked east, the way she’d come. Nothing.
She had taken this two lane interchange on purpose. Less traffic meant swifter travel. She worked Sunday evenings at a job doing what she loved—respiratory therapist. Nights on the pod, as they called it, were no less busy than her days on the acute care unit at Children’s Hospital, but there was a hushed quality to them that soothed her. She worked a twelve hour shift, seven to seven, checking ventilators and coaching children through coughing and breathing exercises.
It was rewarding. And it had given Ivy her first flush of personal value.
She didn’t want to be late. At ten after four in the afternoon, that gave her an hour to get help and get on her way and almost two hours to finish the drive.
So she would slip out of her sandals and into her running shoes and trek however many miles to a call box. In California, that could be as much as seven miles. She’d run five that morning.
Ivy opened the back hatch of the car and pulled the cardboard box toward her. She kept supplies in here—oil, coolant, jumper cables, a flashlight. She tore off a flap and then searched for a black Sharpie, which she found pushed to the back of the glove compartment. ‘Call police,’ she wrote in big block letters and then taped the sign to the back window. Next, she wrote a note on the back of a grocery receipt: ‘Walking west to call box.’ She slipped this on the dash, in front of the steering wheel, and then dug her running shoes out of her bag in the back seat.
Running was a privilege. Holly wasn’t able to, not yet. Her sister, who had run track in high school—mostly so that she had a reason to be out of the house—and then spent the past ten years competing in long distance races and always placed, was no longer able to run. She was still relearning to walk. Ivy blinked away the first sheen of tears before they could overwhelm her. Holly had worked relentlessly for the past nineteen months to get her mobility back, and yesterday the doctor had said that she was at the halfway point. He’d said that three months ago, too. He’d warned them from the beginning that Holly could hit a brick wall anywhere along the way. It was inevitable. And Ivy worried that maybe that time was now.
Ivy was in the car with Holly the night their lives had changed forever again. She remembered everything about the crash. How they had left the restaurant laughing and it had felt so good after such a long silence—Ivy’s fault for refusing to speak to her sister for nearly three years. They had gotten on the freeway, determined to catch the sunset while sitting on the beach sipping margaritas. A celebration and a promise not to let anything—or anyone—come between them again.
And then, in the gathering dusk, a car had come barreling toward them. The wrong way on the freeway. Ivy remembered seeing the flashing bar of police lights behind it. And how those colors had seemed to merge and shatter on impact. But she never lost consciousness. For a few moments, while her mind and body absorbed the shock of the crash, all had gone dark. But she was still able to hear—Holly’s gasps shuddering into a low groan and then into silence.
She had used her medical training to keep her sister alive while the police fluttered around her peripheral, offering help, following Ivy’s instructions. Then the wail of the siren as the paramedics arrived.
Ivy had broken her wrist. Her sister had lost her leg, above the knee, and had broken several bones including a vertebrae and femur.
They rode to the hospital together inside an ambulance that rocked through sharp turns and gathered darkness as the sun set and her sister’s conditioned worsened.
When they were kids, Ivy had been all about Holly. She was her big sister by two years and Ivy wanted to do everything she did. Holly had tolerated it well. As teens, the tables turned and it was Holly who spent much of her time looking out for Ivy. Nothing like a dysfunctional family life to pull siblings together—and then eventually tear them apart. Ivy had allowed all those insecurities that were planted by the experience of never being good enough to command their mother’s attention or to deserve the presence of a father, whittle away any shred of self-confidence or value.
After high school, Holly had tried to take Ivy with her. Her sister had received a scholarship to UC Berkeley. California. A fresh start, leaving a dripping Oregon behind and the damp, shadowed mobile home where they had lived with their sometimes sober mother. Her sister was willing to work nights—every night—waitressing, and attend school full time as well, if it meant Ivy was with her and safe.
But Ivy had other ideas, and they all revolved around Trace Patrick. She was in love and so sure of it, at the age of sixteen she’d accepted his proposal, declared herself emancipated and finished high school—because Trace’s parents had insisted—with an engagement ring on her finger. Instead of donning cap and gown, she and Trace had climbed into his shiny blue Ford 150 and shot over back streets and down the thin ribbon of highway all the way to the coast and gotten married, with two strangers as their witnesses.
Ivy had worn a pair of blue jeans, split at the knee, and a red t-shirt with their school mascot holding a baseball bat and with the number four printed on the back—Trace was the state’s top homerun hitter and a killer first baseman with only two steals his entire four years.
They had left the next morning for Arizona, where Trace had been placed by the San Diego Padres. He’d made it to their farm team. A place where he would bulk up and perfect his swing. Only that never happened. And Trace, who had been so full of dreams he’d seemed to float—the very trait that Ivy had needed in her life—came crashing down.
He’d taken Ivy with her. And the only swing he’d improved upon was his left hook. He brawled at the bars and he brought it home afterwards. It took Ivy four years to find her way out.
Ivy had made mistakes. More than a few. Some more serious than others. But she’d fixed what she could and put to rest what she couldn’t. And there was no looking back.
Holly insisted she didn’t. Not even now. Nineteen months after the crash, her sister was still using a cane. The doctors had expected much less of her. They had said that she would never recover full mobility. That she may never do more than sit upright. But they didn’t know Holly, or Ivy, or the circumstance in which they were raised.
The Warner girls were not quitters.
They didn’t run away from their problems—not anymore—they ran toward them.
Holly would walk again, under her own steam. She would run again, with a new
hydraulic leg crafted specially for her. And Ivy would be there with her. For now, it had to be every other weekend. But she hoped that would change. That Holly would finally agree to move west.
Ivy pulled a pair of socks out of the bag, along with a pair of shorts and her runner’s bra. If she ran to the call box, it would cut off a good chunk of time. She stood inside the open car door for a little modesty, dropped her sneakers on the blacktop, and slipped off her sandals. She shimmied into the shorts and then rolled her skirt down to her ankles and off in a single, economical movement. Ivy was a doer. She didn’t like feeling swamped by a problem and knew life was in the solution. She was living proof of that.
She sat down on the edge of the seat and pushed her feet into socks and then shoes and started lacing up. If the call box was close enough, she might even have time for a quick dinner before her shift started. A shower, too.
“Ma’am.”
She was so engrossed in carrying out her plan that she didn’t hear the approaching car. Later, she would blame it on the wind that clapped in her ears. On the zone that she always slipped into whenever she became a woman of action, which is how she liked to think of it—whether she was running or pulling herself out of one of life’s nose dives.
Ivy dropped her hands, which had been gathering the hem of her shirt in order to pull it over her head, and looked up. Way up.
Six feet, broad shoulders, buzz cut. Probably a Marine.
That ribbon of thought was immediately followed by: rugged, like the man was cut out of
the dry, craggy hills that surrounded them; intense—his mouth was firm, lips thin, eyes a startling, clear shade of green-blue and focused relentlessly on her face.
Blond. Ivy had a weakness for blonds built like a god.
Of course, with her current work schedule and her history of poor relationships, she indulged only from a distance now.
Ivy placed a hand on the open door, and realized that she still held her bra, as white as a flag of surrender. She tossed it into the backseat behind her and ignored the flush of heat that swept up her neck and settled in her cheeks.
But he had noticed and a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He was an imposing figure. Not just tall and broad, but cut. The muscles of his shoulders and pecs were clearly outlined by his t-shirt.
Her skin tingled and flushed with sensitivity. Even her nipples responded, puckering into beaded delight.
Ivy made herself blink—it was the only way to break the tension between them.
She wondered where it came from. The sudden awareness of him—his shape, his strength, the chiseled features—and her swift reaction to his everything male.
She never responded this way—so quickly and completely—especially to a stranger.
She thought: Wow. And it kept repeating, like ticker tape running through her head.
She stood and said, “It’s about time.” Thinking about all the scenarios in which she’d found herself over the years—wishing someone would send in the Marines—but with no one but herself to rely on, and not at all about the timing of his arrival. But her words irritated him. She could tell by the way his face tightened, his eyes became hooded.
He lifted his hands—strong, long, tapered fingers—and placed them on his hips. Narrow hips in snug denim. The move caused his biceps to bunch, the corded muscles in his forearms to ripple. And she noticed three things at once—a hot spear of need shot through her body; she was badly in need of some male attention; and them were fighting words.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he returned, sarcasm slicing and dicing his words.