RaeAnne Thayne - A Cold Creek Christmas Surprise

“Oh, Mr. Bowman,” the flustered voice on the other end of the line exclaimed. “This is Terri McCall from Happy House Cleaners in Jackson. There’s been a terrible mix-up. I’m so sorry! You would not believe the day we’ve had here.”

He glanced at the woman sleeping on the bench seat beside him. “Mine hasn’t been exactly a walk in the park, either.”

“It’s been chaos from the moment I walked in this morning. Our power was knocked out in the night and we’re only just getting back up. Meantime, all the computers were down. I just saw your name on my caller ID and realized we had your dates wrong, so I’ve been scrambling to find someone else. I had you down for party cleanup tomorrow. I’m so sorry. I’m sending someone right now. She should be there within the hour, I promise, and we’ll have you sorted out.”

He gazed at the woman sleeping beside him. “Wait a minute. What about Sarah?”

He was met with a little awkward pause. “The woman I’m sending is Kelli Parker. She’ll do a fine job. I’m afraid I don’t know a Sarah.”

“Sarah. Sarah Whitmore. I left you a message about her. We’re just coming from the doctor. She broke her arm and had a concussion in the fall.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I haven’t had time to listen to my messages, with everything that’s been going on. Do you need us to clean her house, too?”

“No. She works for you! She showed up this morning to clean for me. In the process, she tripped and fell down my stairs.”

“This is all very strange.” The woman sounded baffled and a little concerned. “We don’t have anyone named Sarah working for us and, as I said, we had the dates switched.”

“You didn’t send someone.”

“Yes. Just now,” she said patiently. “Not earlier this morning. Kelli Parker. She’s very efficient. One of our very best, I promise you.”

“So if you didn’t send someone to clean my house, who the hell is this woman sitting next to me with the broken arm and the concussion?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. She’s not my employee, I can promise you that. Why would anybody want to pretend to be? Perhaps you had better call the police.”

He pulled up in front of the ranch house and sat in the truck for a moment, the phone still pressed to his ear. He didn’t want to call the police. In Pine Gulch, the police meant his brother Trace. Bad enough that Taft had to come out on the emergency call and find a strange woman crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Trace would never let him hear the end of this one.

“Okay. Thank you. I’ll watch for your actual employee.”

“I’m sorry again for the mix-up. I don’t want you to think we usually conduct our business in this scatterbrained way. The holidays have been crazy anyway, with everybody wanting sparkling houses for their parties and overnight guests, and six hours without electricity or computers didn’t help matters.”

“No problem. Thanks.”

He hung up and looked across the cab at Sarah. A strand of auburn hair had drifted across her cheek, accentuating the complexion that was still too pale for his liking.

He would sure like to figure out just what the hell was going on, but he wasn’t quite ready to call the police. Trace had an annoying tendency to take over in matters of an investigative nature, and Ridge was feeling oddly territorial about this woman.

He figured he could get her settled and then if she was still out of it, he could go through her purse and try to find out why a woman who claimed she taught first grade at Sunny View Elementary School decided to spend a little time cleaning up the party mess at a ranch house in some small backwater Idaho town.

She didn’t appear to wake even after he shut off the engine and walked around to the passenger door. “Here we are. Let’s get you inside. Can you walk, or do I have to carry you?”

She opened her eyes for just a moment before closing them again. That was apparently all the answer he was going to get. He sighed and scooped her into his arms, thinking again how slight and delicate she was. She hardly weighed more than Destry.

She was definitely a curvy little handful, though. He tried not to notice, tried to remind himself she was a mysterious stranger who had entered his home under false pretenses, tried not to remember how very long it had been since he’d held a sweet-smelling woman in his arms.

He carried her up the stairs to the mudroom and then through the kitchen to the hallway that led to Caidy’s downstairs bedroom.

In contrast to everything else about his hard-riding, horse-training, dog-loving sister, her bedroom was soft and feminine, with a lavender and brown quilt joining a flurry of pillows on the bed and lace curtains spilling from the window.

The room might have been made for Sarah. She had a kind of sweet, ethereal beauty that fit perfectly with all of Caidy’s frills.

She moaned a little when he lowered her to the bed and he quickly propped one of Caidy’s hundreds of throw pillows underneath her casted arm.

“There. Is that better?”

Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked around, still with that vaguely unfocused look.

“This isn’t my hotel room,” she said, her voice a husky rasp.

“No. You’re temporarily staying at the River Bow ranch.”

“I need to talk to the Bowman family,” she stated, still dreamily. “It’s really important.”

This whole thing was so strange. What was she doing here? What did she need to talk to his family about? He frowned as he eased away from her, but she had already closed her eyes again.

She didn’t look at all comfortable. After a pause, he reached down and slipped off her shoes, but that was about as far as he dared go.

He grabbed a soft fleece blanket from the foot of the bed and tucked it under her chin, then stood back and studied her.

What an odd day. Why couldn’t he shake the strange feeling that something momentous was happening? He didn’t like it, especially because he didn’t understand it.

After a moment, he gave her one more careful look then turned and walked from the bedroom. The sun went down early on a late-December afternoon. In another hour, it would be dark, which meant he needed to hustle out to take care of chores. He was a rancher, which meant he didn’t have all day to stand and look at his mysterious guest, no matter how lovely she might be.

Chapter Four

Sarah awoke to a mouth as dry as the Mojave in August and, conversely, a desperate need to use the bathroom.

She opened her eyes slowly and tried to make sense of where she was, why the room didn’t look familiar. A lamp glowed beside the bed, illuminating a comfortably feminine room. A plump armchair stood in one corner and just next to it, she could see an open doorway that looked like it contained the facilities she needed.

When she sat up, a grinding wave of pain washed over her. Her head and her left arm seemed to be the focus of most of the pain but the rest of her body felt as if she had just ridden out the permanent press cycle on a front-loading washing machine.

By the time she hobbled back out of the nicely decorated en suite bathroom, vague, rather unsettling memories were beginning to filter through.

She was at the Bowman family’s River Bow ranch—she could tell by the log walls and the general decor of the place. She had fallen down the stairs while she was cleaning the ranch house after Caidy Bowman’s wedding.

She remembered Ridge Bowman, suddenly—piercing green eyes, hard features, broad shoulders. He thought she was from a cleaning company, and she had been too much of a coward to tell him otherwise.

She remembered an ambulance ride with a man who had Ridge Bowman’s same handsome features and those stunning green eyes.